You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession. . . .
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
—T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
The travel narrative is a text of observation haunted by its Other, the imaginary.
—Michel de Certeau, “Travel Narratives of the French to Brazil”
The European encounter with the New World remains one of the decisive events of modern world history. The shocking discovery of this continent would soon make only death the final undiscovered country. And neither Europe nor this uncharted world would remain the same. The introduction of this territory into European consciousness would lead to a dramatic expansion and revolution in geographical, cultural, and theological worldviews. For Western observers, this event would come to represent the quintessential encounter with otherness. Travel to this newly discovered territory was like sailing away into unreality, into unimaginable and uncharted regions, into a world where truth was mixed with fantasy, and dreams with reality. And when the chroniclers of this strange new world sat down to articulate their experiences, facts and fictions were difficult to disentangle. Indeed, the accounts are a curious blend of the two, which is why so many writers have seen the colonial-era chronicles as the first attempts at magical realism. The explorers’ accounts give us fantastic and wild portraits of the New World, as if fantasy and dreams alone had been adequate in preparing the West for an event of this sort. In direct proportion to the degree and extent of the mystery, the accounts multiply the number of adjectives and metaphors to describe the wonder of these lands. As the mystery deepens, the language of wonder escalates and thickens. In finding ourselves on the shores of the New World, then, and in meditating on the significance and import of these historical events, we must notice this language of astonishment and amazement on the tongues of the first Europeans. It will be an important clue for us in assessing this encounter with radical otherness.
This chapter will consider the language of wonder in the New World and its relationship with wandering and exile. As suggested earlier, my concern in this book is with languages of dispossession: wonder as dispossession in the order of knowledge and exile, forced or voluntary, in history or location. Though they do not look alike, wonder and exile share this fate of dispossession and displacement, when both mind and body are threatened by an encounter with unknown and uncertain phenomena, when familiar and stable truths are suddenly interrupted by an appearance of something so peculiar and new that it introduces doubt and equivocation, when all confidences are quickly undone. When we speak of wonder, we are trying to name something that happens prior to or beyond the boundaries of knowledge, and this experience is fraught with the same baffling, disorienting, and bewildering feelings that accompany an exile in his new home away from home. In both cases, the homeland of belonging and truth is badly desired, but forever lost. No wonder, then, that wonder—like moments of awe or stupefaction—shares with exile the experience of loss: the loss of words, loss of clear and familiar truths, loss of absolute certainties. Wonder is closer to absence than presence, dispossession than possession. Wonder inhabits the gaps and dark corners of knowledge. It appears in stories of the impossible and among those who dream impossible dreams . . . like mystics. Mystics will always prefer the language of wonder to any other because it names so well their tireless attempts to reach the other side of words, somewhere beyond the boundaries of our familiar truths.
As we explore the sympathies between wonder and mystical language in this study, and their affiliation with dispossession and exile, we would do well to follow the lead of Michel de Certeau. In his reading of mystical literature, he found the resemblances between mystics and travelers particularly intriguing, seeing mystics as travelers of the human soul, travelers of the unfathomable and unknown. Regardless of whether they would ever leave the confines of their homeland, Certeau considered mystical language to be stirred by nomadic and restless desires, infinite and insatiable, and filled with an imagination that carried them on journeys to remote lands. In entering territories without a map or chart, mystics were a lot like explorers of new worlds, only now the purpose was an impossible theological one, like seeing the face of God, or naming the unnamable. The language of wonder came to mystics as frequently as travelers because it was the precise word to name this journey into foreign territories, an experience that can be freeing and exhilarating, or else terrifying and dreadful. Capable of these wild extremes, the one who wonders resembles a heavenly body that has suddenly been loosed from its fixed orbit. No longer tied and constrained by the familiar, one is suddenly unfettered and emancipated, now free to imagine the unimaginable, to consider new possibilities, to live differently. How terrifying yet thrilling this can be—and terrifying not only to one’s own psyche, but to all the defenders of sameness, to those who draw uncompromising borders and warn against trespassing beyond what we already know and trust.
For this exact reason, wonder is the verbal equivalent of trespassing borders and surpassing limits, and always moving deeper and deeper into the dark. Wonder is a common word in the vocabulary of mystics and wanderers because they are navigating territory that is cloaked in darkness. The travel route of wonder is like entering the cloud of darkness and finding one’s way through it with the stick of a blind man, trusting it to lead you with instinct and intuition through unfamiliar regions of knowledge. In this way, the via negativa of the mystics—the deconstructive strategy of dispossession and detachment from concepts and worldly desires—prepares one for travel into the unknown, and this journey is always wondrous. The mystical journey takes the route of ignorance and dispossession in order to arrive at what you do not know, at where you are not (“You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. . . . You must go by the way of dispossession”). And wonder is a key indicator and marker of this journey.
The figures that I will be considering in this chapter—especially Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas—were such travelers and wanderers, courageous men who ventured deep into unknown lands and who became voices of the dispossessed in the New World. In some ways, they adopted the via negativa of the mystics—especially the demand for detachment—but their own version of this strategy resembles closer the desert experiences of the biblical prophets. Their via negativa summons the negations and denunciations of the biblical prophets because only this kind of explosive language is relevant to them in a history that knew so many trials and tribulations, so much distress and agony. Only this kind of language—hostile, dissenting, anguished—proved adequate to the negations and catastrophes that they witnessed in their age.
In both cases, moreover, surprising insights and realizations came to them through their long sojourns—particularly tolerance, even affection, for the great variety of cultures that they encountered in the New World. Their passionate advocacy for tolerance and compassion seems to have arisen from the calamities of their lives, as if they were able to suck the marrow out of the dry bones of their travails and learn something in the process. They would achieve a wisdom born of suffering, that rare quality that sees the world through the eyes of other peoples and cultures, especially through the eyes of the downtrodden and brokenhearted. The discovery of the New World was for them a discovery of painful truths and beauties, a discovery that enabled them to see the strangers of the Americas as brothers and sisters to themselves. And, more than that, it allowed them to recognize the strangeness of their own selves. Their discovery of the New World, thus, also included their own agonizing discovery of a new, inscrutable world deep within their own soul, a discovery that revealed to them how alien and wondrous their own being actually was. They would come to notice the shadow of exile as the dark,
