During my graduate school years I ironically discovered that American universities devoted more resources, space and publications to Venezuelan literature than our own universities. I decided then that it was probably the best chance for me to study my own literature. Thus, I ended up writing my Master’s Essay on “Tío Conejo, Venezuela’s Bre’er Rabbit’s Cousin,” I focused then only on highlighting what I saw as a consistent denial of the African nature of the trickster tales in Venezuelan publications, unlike the American versions popularized by Joel Chandler Harris. I tried to provide background material to establish that African connection, and discussed the ways in which the stories had been appropriated for political purposes.

In this post, part of a series devoted to Tío Conejo (Brother Rabbit), I expand on the “Africanness” of these stories, which in Venezuela took a particularly complex route, once authors, such as Arturo Uslar Pietri, Juan Liscano, and Antonio Arráiz, included them in their works. Even though some studies on Venezuelan folklore and literature do refer to the rabbit stories as inherited from Africa, all these works fail to analyze the Africanness (or lack thereof) of the stories in the context of Venezuela’s racist and classist discourse. The racial and social elements of the folktales are absent (whitened?) in children’s publication, but they impact powerfully when used in adult fiction, particularly in Rómulo Gallegos’ Pobre Negro (1937), Juan Pablo Sojo’s Nochebuena Negra (1943), and Ramón Diaz Sanchez’s Cumboto (1948). In all these fictionalized accounts of Venezuelan history and “the black experience” Tío Conejo stories—and their trickster discourse—are an integral part of the racial discourse and the overall tensions between the characters and their environment.

In the context of the history of slavery in Venezuela, slave revolts, independence, abolition of slavery, civil wars, and the integration of the non-white groups to mainstream society, the folk characters (from the supernatural to the bandits) provide interesting facets, not usually discussed, let alone analyzed, which speak of a complex dynamic of appropriation of the folkloric figures (trickster in general and Tío Conejo in particular). If studied in conjunction to mainstream Venezuelan literature, these trickster tales tell us of the characters’ complexities (as much as—and contingent to—the racial mixture and social positioning of those who tell the stories) and the ways in which they can be used to either preserve and propagate culture, or as instruments of social control. Far from a racially/nationally unifying figure, Tío Conejo (when analyzed from its multifaceted “performances”) epitomizes the complexities of the racial and socio-economic disparities Venezuela’s official history has tried to erase.

From Bolivar (“padre de la patria”) to Betancourt (“padre de la democracia”) a homogenizing concept of race in the name of independence movements and democratic revolutions gave birth to erroneous, if not utopian, ideas of democracia racial in Venezuela. Winthrop R. Wright, in Café con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela defines “racial democracy” basic premise: “black achieve great things in Venezuela only as they whiten themselves and their offspring” (115). Whitening is then “an inexact process which involved miscegenation, education, and social advancement” (112). Unlike the USA, where racial tensions have been clearly demarcated by centuries of institutionalized discrimination, segregation, terrorism against minorities, etc., in Latin America, a more subtle racism emerged after the Independence War (1810-1823)—Wright dates this movement a bit later: From the 1860s, with Aristides Rojas and later José Gil Fortoul in the 1890s, the idea that Venezuela constituted a predominantly mestizo nation, was developed. According to these thinkers, “mestizos looked more European than other non-whites” (54). Influenced by Spencerian positivism, “the nation’s elite [advocated] the whitening of the population […] Despite the pride they took in their mixed racial background, many Venezuelans wanted to dilute the café as much as possible with more leche” (2).

This subtle racism, under the motto of “mejorar la raza”, have permeated until present times. This racism has not been any different from the one practiced in the United State, for example, as far as notions of racial superiority is concerned. The main difference is that instead of terrorizing or segregating the non-white groups, Venezuela developed a progressive and “peaceful” program of democracia racial; the ultimate goals being the erasure of those traces of Africanness or Indianness that could make “the race” inferior and/or the progressive marginalization of those “cimarrones” who did not merge and persisted in preserving their ethnicity. By promoting social and biological amalgamation, Venezuela’s white elite were convinced that Venezuela’s raza mestiza would get a step closer to the ideal European model of civilization.

In light of this situation, it has traditionally been argued that Venezuela did not have a Negro literature (produced by black writers). As José Marcial Ramos Guedes put it, “in Venezuela there has not been a trend or school that would give us grounds to see the existence of a literary movement representative of the negritude similar to the one developed by Aime Cesaire (Martiniquan); León G. Damas (Guyanese); Leopold Sédar Senghor (Senegalese), etc.” (14). It is true that Venezuela did not develop (or at least none has been discovered) slave narratives, for instance; neither did Venezuela have an abolitionist movement like the one consolidated in the USA, which allowed the emergence of a Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, a Sojourner Truth, or a Harriet Jacobs, as literary and public figures. However, it is worth pointing out that Venezuelan letters have somehow developed a black literature, or at least a literature deeply concerned with racial discourses and the black aesthetics. The problem is that this literature was, for the most part, produced by writers who, under the Venezuelan version of “the one-drop rule,” did not qualify as “Negro writers.”

Winthrop R. Wright explains: “Venezuelan’s visual perception of race differs from that of white North America. The latter have argued that origin determines race and that, by definition, any Negroid features automatically makes an individual black…[Venezuelans] altered the perspective: they considered individuals with a drop of white blood superior to blacks” (Wright 3). Not only have Venezuelans “with a drop of white blood” been considered “superior to blacks” or Indians, but also there has been a conscious attempt to avoid hyphenated identities, such as Native-Venezuelan, African-Venezuelan, etc. (in the last couple of years there have been attempts to institutionalized the term afro-descendientes, to refer to people of black ancestry, but the term has not caught up and most people see as problematic that the government tries to establish affirmative-action-kind of racial differences); thus, unless the writer is unquestionably black or Indian, there will not be any association whatsoever with those particular ethnic groups. “According to historian José Gil Fortoul, writing in the late nineteenth century, the censuses purposefully lacked racial categories because the elites did not want to remind blacks of their painful experience as slaves […]For all intents and purposes, after emancipation took place the blacks simply disappeared from the official records of modern Venezuela” (Wright 4).

I am not sure that the elites were that concerned about soothing blacks’ painful experience. Whenever writers have addressed issues that somehow speak of their ethnicity, their work has been, for the most part, minimized in relation to higher standards of literary art. Julian Padrón said in 1944 that ‘the nation had not produced a major black poet or novelist.’ Most critics agreed that Juan Pablo Sojo, for instance, “failed to win an audience because [he] could not transform his knowledge of folklore into plausible fiction” (Wright 113).

But this colonial snobbism did not affect critics alone. Traditionally, as Wright rightly points out, “successful blacks lost their ties with the less fortunate blacks. They made no attempt to call attention to their race. Nor did they lead any efforts to establish black political or cultural movements” (6). Also, “unlike Argentina, where a black press came into existence during the nineteenth century, [in Venezuela] no newspaper served the interests of blacks” (87). Besides that, the official discourse would indicate that because of miscegenation, Venezuela is a cultura mestiza, therefore it would be preposterous to emphasize the African, Indian, or white nature of a given cultural artifact; instead we should be talking of hybrid cultural manifestations.

But, when we analyze the non-official discourses as represented in folklore and literature, we see that the racist discourse is ubiquitous. In the case of folktales, depending on the intention of the teller, the audience, the context, and the purpose of telling them, africanness, indianness, or whiteness does matter; yet, white discourse has always prevailed and non-white groups have always been misrepresented, at best.