Chango, the Biggest Badass
Originally written in Spanish and published in 1983 (trans. Jonathan Tittler), Changó is the story of the African Diaspora. It begins with haunting poetry about the land of ancestors where tribal wars and the slave trade rend families and cause men to question the gods who cannot save them from being sent to the land of martyrdom. The story continues in a dreamlike narrative about the White Wolf who transports Africans across the sea, and the slave rebellions in the Caribbean that pit different races, black, mulato, mestizo and white, against each other. The latter part of the book highlights important figures in resistance such as Haitian leaders Mackandal and Toussaint L’Ouverture, South American liberators Simón Bolívar and José María Morelos, and activists from the United States such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.
William Luis’s introduction is helpful in understanding the style of Changó and its importance in Afro-Spanish-American literature. While I enjoyed the first poetic section, I found the rest of the book tough going. Olivella writes in his introduction, “Forget about academics, verb tenses, the boundaries between life and death, because in this saga there is no other trace than the one you leave behind: you are the prisoner, the discoverer, the founder, the liberator.” Olivella challenges the dominance of European narrative in the Americas, writing, “Sooner or later you had to confront this truth: the history of the black man in American is as much yours as that of the Indian or the white man.” While I agree with Olivella, I found Changó’s many narrators, its unfamiliar mythology, and its stream-of-consciousness style too burdensome. For understanding slavery from the slave’s viewpoint, this book is a treasure. However, the narrative’s sexism diminished my sympathy for the mostly male characters who, like their white captors, seemed to view women, especially Native American women, as possessions rather than humans who desired freedom as much as men.
