reportage
Left: Portrait of the artist – Milton Hatoum today.
W
hen speaking of Arab immigration to Latin America we should remember the presence in Spanish and Portuguese of vocabulary and linguistic expressions of Arabic origin, dating from the Age of Discovery. Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers used this vocabulary, which was incorporated into the transplanted languages Octavio Paz talks about. In contemporary European and Latin American literature, there are various significant examples of this heritage, the work of the Colombian Luis Fayad being just one. It is also enough to remember Gabriel García Márquez’s novella Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), and novels by the Colombian poet and writer Álvaro Mutis, in which various characters are the children of this immigration.
134 Alef magazine Summer 2008
In Brazil, such characters also appear in several novels by Jorge Amado, and particularly in the last book he published during his lifetime, A Descoberta da América pelos Turcos (The Discovery of America by the Turks). Also in Brazilian literature, an extraordinary novella by Raduan Nassar, Lavoura Arcaica (Ancient Plantation) or Amrik by Ana Miranda, amongst so many other books, evoke the presence of Arab immigrants. Alberto Mussa published O Enigma de Qaf (The Riddle of Qaf), a novel with a historical perspective situated in the early epoch of Islam, which effortlessly weaves a Borgesian web of narrative. In contemporary Spain, some of Juan
‘It is worth emphasising the coexistence of different ethnicities and origins in Brazil, even at the risk of appearing utopian.’
Goytisolo’s prose evokes North African culture, and in the magnificent novel Larva y otras noches de Babel (Larva: Midsummer Night’s Babel), by the Galician Julián Rios, a whole chapter titled ‘Algaravias’ (‘Alhambresque’) is written with words of Arabic origin. Unfortunately, some ‘intellectuals’ prefer to construct lazy and unfounded theories about the ‘clash of civilisations’, about the ‘evil’ roots of Islamic or Asiatic societies and, more recently, about social and cultural dysfunction caused by Mexican and Hispanic immigrants to the white, puritan society of New England. This is a cynical assertion, if not to say racist, to come from someone who belongs to a country that, in its very essence, is formed by expatriates and immigrants. ‘Purity’ and ‘superiority’ are dangerous arguments in racist discourse; they are the ideological weapons of empires. As Edward Said pointed out in his essay ‘The Clash of Definitions’ (from the book Reflections on Exile): ‘So strong and insistent is [Samuel] Huntington’s notion that other civili-
Photo: Adriana Vichi
Spanish, Germans, Moroccan Jews and others who populated the region where I was born. In Brazil, this type of coexistence seems to have been the rule, not the exception. I don’t want to idealise or mystify miscegenation in Brazilian society. In fact, blacks and Indians remained on the social margins as well as millions of other Brazilians of various origins, and this indignity is part of our inheritance from our colonial past, and from the brutal inequality of the country’s long republican history. But it is worth emphasising the coexistence of different ethnicities and origins in Brazil, even at the risk of appearing utopian. In any case, diverse ancestry and racial mixing are not attributes exclusive to Brazil or Latin America, but also form part of the European past. In Don Quixote, one of the monumental works of Western literature, Miguel de Cervantes attributes the original story to a wise Arab historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli. In the novel there are innumerable references to authors from Classical Antiquity and the Renaissance, but Cervantes understood the importance of Arab and Jewish cultures in Andalucía, without which Spain would have been much poorer.