Breaking the chains: language and the bonds of slavery in María Rosa Gálvez's «Zinda» (1804)

Elizabeth Franklin Lewis

The tradition of anti-slavery literature in Hispanic letters has most often been traced to the 1841 novel Sab by Cuban-born female author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. This late appearance of abolitionist writings could in part explain Spain's slowness to end slavery in its colonies, a process which was not ultimately completed until 1886. Still, despite the notable Spanish absence from the great slavery debates that took place in eighteenth-century England, France, and North America, Spain did make a little-known but important contribution to anti-slavery literature with the publication of the drama Zinda in 1804 by María Rosa Gálvez.

María Rosa Gálvez de Cabrera exemplified Enlightenment ideals and Neoclassic sensibility in her work, while at the same time she subtly defied that tradition, prefiguring the Romantic age that was to come. She published some fourteen plays between 1801 and 1805, seven of them making it to the Madrid stage¹. María Rosa (1768-1806), who was adopted by Colonel Antonio Gálvez of Málaga, grew up in a family that had loose ties with the Court². She married a young captain in the militia, José Cabrera, but the marriage did not last, and the couple broke up shortly after moving to Madrid in 1790. Gálvez chose the unusual option of remaining on her own and tried to make a living out of her career as a playwright. Despite a limited yet remarkable success, Gálvez struggled throughout her career against financial difficulty and a slow-changing male power structure.

Gálvez was one of only a handful of female dramatists in the latter part of the Enlightenment period in Spain, and was by far the most prolific and most successful. While this period witnessed some changes in the literary view of women, as exemplified in Leandro Fernández de Moratín's famous comedy El sí de las niñas, none examined controversial gender issues such as rape, incest, and spousal abuse as did María Rosa Gálvez³. Her drama is distinguished from that of her male contemporaries by female characters that reflect these and other important feminine issues, something we see continued in her play Zinda, published in 1804 in volume three of her Obras poéticas⁴. It was never produced for the stage.

In Zinda Gálvez anticipates some of the themes and characteristics of later Romantic drama. The struggle for both individual and political liberty and autonomy shown in this play also was a major concern of the liberal Romantic movement in Spain in the 1830s and 1840s. Susan Kirkpatrick, in her book Las románticas, has shown that this emphasis by male authors on the liberation of the individual also encouraged women writers to seek their own «liberated» voice through a feminine poetic subject. Although Gálvez wrote some forty years earlier than the generation of «románticas» Kirkpatrick examines, she too expresses the same desire for liberty through her own strong female characters. Her dramatic works in many ways bridged the gap between the reform-minded yet still largely conservative Enlightenment that sought to maintain societal order, and the more revolutionary trends of Romanticism that sought to liberate the individual subject from social tyranny.

Zinda takes its title from the play's black heroine. It is set in the African Congo, where the Portuguese have set up a small colony in the region governed by Queen Zinda and her husband Nelzir. Although it is a purely fictional work, Gálvez's play highlights contemporary problems with slavery and colonialism and contains many details that parallel the history of the slave trade in the Spanish colonies. By the eighteenth century, slavery in the colonies was a well-entrenched institution, and was perceived as an economic necessity by colonists and politicians alike. The Portuguese and Dutch dominated the eighteenth-century slave trade, especially drawing from the peoples of the Congo area in Western Africa for their steady supply of exports to the New World (Curtin 205-217). While Spain itself carried few slaves to the colonies, it maintained its supply of fresh labor through asientos, special contracts granted to traders of other nations giving them permission to bring slaves to the Spanish colonies (Curtin 21). The eighteenth-century, however, also marked the beginning of a viable abolition movement in England and France. Montesquieu was one who questioned the morality of slavery, as is evidenced in his Esprit des Lois (1748):

Slavery in its proper sense is the establishment of a right which makes one man so much the owner of another man that he is the absolute master of his life and goods. It is not good by its nature; it is useful neither to the master nor to the slave: not to the slave, because he can do nothing from virtue; not to the master, because he contracts all sorts of bad habits from his slaves, because he imperceptibly grows accustomed to failing in all the moral virtues, because he grows proud, curt, harsh, angry, voluptuous and cruel.

(246)

The concept of virtue expressed in the above quote is found throughout the Esprit des lois. For Montesquieu, virtue characterizes democracy. It is individualistic and egalitarian, whereas monarchy (also valued by Montesquieu) is marked by the more hierarchical concept of honor⁵. These two ideas from the Esprit des lois -virtue and honor- together with a third and related concept, moderation, are essential to Gálvez's arguments against slavery and colonialism in her play, as we shall see.

Abolitionist literature was a genre that especially interested female writers⁶. European and North American white women saw in the slave a parallel to their own situation: they both were the «colonized other» of society subject to a white, male power structure. However, as Moira Ferguson has stated, this identification was more often symbolic than real:

Women mediated their own needs and desires, their unconscious sense of social invalidation, through representations of the colonial other, who in the process became more severely objectified and marginalized -a silent or silenced individual in need of protection and pity who must always remain «under control».

(4)

The questioning of slavery in the novel can be traced to seventeenth-century English female author Aphra Behn, whose 1696 Oroonoko or the Royal Slave was the first book to highlight the plight of the African slave in the New World. It was translated into French in 1745 by Pierre Antoine de la Place and quickly became one of the most widely read English novels in eighteenth-century France (Kadish and Massadier-Kenney 27-8). Perhaps having been influenced by Behn's impressive novel, several other women in France also published works that attacked slavery. In 1789, playwright and pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges, who was eventually guillotined for her outspoken views, presented her «drama» L'esclavage des noirs at the Comédie Française. Gouges's play tells the story of two slave lovers, Zamor and Mirza, who take refuge on a remote island after having killed a white man in defense of Mirza's honor, and their eventual pardon by the French governor:

My friends, I have just granted you your pardon. Would that I might also give liberty to all your fellow men, or at least temper their fate! Slaves, listen to me; if ever your destiny were to change, do not loose sight of the love of the public good, which until now has been unknown to you. Know that man, in his liberty, needs still to submit to wise and humane laws...

(119)

Despite this cautious ending, Gouges's play was quickly taken off the stage, supposedly for its failure to produce the required ticket receipts, although Kadish questions the possible involvement of colonist group Club Massiac (Kadish and Massadier-Kenney 67-79). The less threatening Germaine de Stäel published a short story in 1795, «Mirza, ou Lettres D'un Voyageur», which also criticized the practice of slavery. In this tragic story Stäel introduces a female slave heroine to abolitionist literature, through which the author «clearly links antislavery sentiments and women» (Kadish and Massadier-Kenney 141).

While in eighteenth-century France and England the anti-slavery movement was gaining momentum in both literary and political arenas, in Spain the subject did not seem to arouse much interest. In fact the Spanish slave trade actually increased during this time, with the ending of the practice of the asientos in 1789⁷. This lack of attention makes María Rosa Gálvez's play criticizing slavery all the more impressive. Gálvez, who read French and translated several French plays into Spanish, undoubtedly was familiar with the ideas of Montesquieu. She also probably knew the enormously popular French translation of Behn's novel, and perhaps even had read or at least heard of the works by Gouges and Stäel. Her Zinda, which has many similarities with these prior texts, becomes another important contribution to this tradition, which would continue on into the nineteenth-century through the aforementioned Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab (1841) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

Gálvez's play, which she calls a drama trágico, but which is more a comedia lacrimosa in the vein of her contemporary Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos's El delincuente honrado, departs from the strict Neoclassic rules for tragedy and comedy much like Gouges's L'esclavage des Noirs had done in 1789. In Zinda, a tribe in the African Congo, led by Queen Zinda, fights against the evil Dutchman Vinter. Vinter, in the absence of the Portuguese commander Pereyra, has seized the fort established in Zinda's kingdom, killed Pereyra's son, forced his daughter Ángela to agree to marry him, and has taken Zinda's young son Zelido prisoner. This «tearful comedy» form, with its use of extreme emotion to explore very serious topics⁸, becomes an effective tool for Gálvez in this play. In typical style of this type of bourgeois drama, the action of Zinda is complicated and full of melodrama. Yet underneath its somewhat convoluted plot, a systematic criticism of slavery and colonialism is evident. This contrast between serious subject matter and melodramatic style underscores an important theme in the play -the struggle between forces of passion and the forces of reason to combat evil.

The play opens to the light of a violent bonfire that is being prepared by Zinda's tribesman to burn the former Portuguese commander Pereyra at the stake. The black warrior Alcaypa is the first to speak:

La hoguera disponed, valientes Negros; Hoy nace el sol á ver nuestra venganza. La aborrecida sangre de este Blanco Avivará la abrasadora llama, Mientras su corazón abominable, Arrancado del pecho por la espalda, Se ofrece en sacrificio a nuestros dioses.

(I. i)

Gálvez's opening scene is reminiscent of the last scene of Behn's 1696 novel, which describes the violent execution of the novel's black hero:

And the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them into the fire; after that, with an ill-favored knife, they cut off his ears and his nose, and burned them... then they hacked off one of his arms... but at the cutting off of the other arm, his head sunk...

(80-81)

Yet Gálvez reverses the situation, beginning her text with the hate speech of black against white. This would have certainly grabbed the attention of an all-white Spanish public concerned with recent unrest in the colonies, especially with the successful slave revolution in Haiti in 1798 (Genovese 82-97). More importantly, however, this first scene sets up the debate between passion and reason that will continue throughout the play. Alcaypa's passionate words, reinforced by the image of the hoguera, is contrasted by Zinda's immediate squelching of those flames with her words of reason. As Zinda herself explains:

Pereyra me ha enseñado á ser piadosa; Quando llegó su nave á estas comarcas Por la primera vez, en nuestro suelo Reynaban las costumbres sanguinarias De la ferocidad; pero vosotros Al mirar sus virtudes, la tirana Fiereza despusisteis, y yo misma Imité la clemencia que enseñaba. Pues, ¿cómo os olvidais de estos exemplos?

(I. ii)

Zinda is a black African woman who has adopted white ways. Yet despite her appropriation of the language of hegemony (the white, male, European Enlightenment), the external struggle in which she acts as the voice of reason will also become her internal battle, when she is betrayed by the very culture she had adopted.

The warrior Alcaypa criticizes Zinda's collaboration with white colonists:

[...] tus piedades Abriéron a los Blancos de estas playas Los escondidos senos, y por ellos Hoy nuestra libertad se mira esclava.

(I. ii)

He and Zinda's husband, Nelzir, want to overthrow the white regime by force, while Zinda prefers negotiation and cooperation. When Vinter comes to negotiate for the release of her young son Zelido, Zinda keeps her husband Nelzir from killing him:

¡Qué! ¿Pretende Tu valor darle muerte con ventaja, Violando los derechos respetables De todas las naciones? No; su infamia No autoriza tu acción. Nelzir, recuerda Que antes que esposo y padre, eres Monarca: Cumple con tu deber, y no envilezcas Con un crimen la gloria de tu patria.

(I. vi)

But the African queen, who insists on maintaining virtue and honor in her monarchy (recalling ideas set forth by Montesquieu in his Esprit des lois), is betrayed by her trust that Vinter too will display the same honorable and virtuous behavior. She and her husband are eventually taken prisoner as Vinter, in his greed for wealth, tries to coerce them into revealing the location of their tribal gold mines. The third and last act opens like the first, with the image of fire -this time of the charred remains of her peoples' villages surrounding the Portuguese fort, the glowing embers mirroring Zinda's own sense of deception:

[...] yo vi teñidos De sangre sus hogares: y que el fuego Aumentando el horror de este conflicto Dexó abrasadas las sencillas chozas, Y en cenizas los pueblos convertidos; En tanto que los viles Europeos, Consumando tan bárbaro exterminio, Esclavos mis vasallos arrastraban A su infame pais, sin que los gritos De tantos infelices conmoviesen Su corazón feroz.

(III. i)

When Vinter threatens to send her young son to Portugal as a slave, Zinda's emotions take over:

Esclavo... nunca. No: perezca Antes una y mil veces. Si atrevidos Intentais arrancarlo de mis brazos, Al foso desde aquí lo precipito.

(III. v)

Zinda had made a similar threat in the previous act, vowing to kill herself along with her son in order to avoid enslavement: «Mi hijo Zelido y yo libres nacimos; infelices mas libres morirémos» (II. ii).

Moira Ferguson finds suicide a common theme in the anti-slave literature after the revolution in Haiti:

A serious intervention with bite in traditional master-slave power relationships, suicide is transformed into the final, autonomous act for laboring, remembering, myth-denouncing, suffering individuals.

(244)

Like other slave heroes created by white women writers, Zinda is also unwilling to submit her body (or the body of her son) to the will of her aggressor. Her threat of suicide underscores her defiance and shows Zinda to be an active subject, instead of the passive «other» the European slave system tried to make of her.

Finally, Alcaypa is able to penetrate the fort with his warriors to liberate the African monarchs and to restore the Portuguese commander to power. Yet while his forceful passion seems to triumph, it does so only to reestablish harmony and order. Reason prevails at the end when Zinda and Pereyra make a pact between their nations. Pereyra agrees to end colonization by pulling his troops out of the Congo and Zinda proposes the following:

Escucha. Si la fuerza Jamas sobre nosotros ha podido Mantener sus derechos, las virtudes Nuestros pechos conquistan: el antiguo Tratado de alianza y de comercio En nombre de mis pueblos ratifico Con Portugal, Pereyra; y si renuncias Al tráfico de esclavos, te permito Que de ese Dios que adoras, los preceptos Enseñen en mi Imperio sus ministros.

(III. vi)

While Queen Zinda's acceptance of religious colonization would seem to be at odds with her previous stance of resistance to European political domination, this «moderate» compromise does not necessarily indicate complicity with European imperialism. Rather, her peaceful resolution of the conflicts in this play advocates another idea from Montesquieu's Esprit des lois -the concept of «moderation». Tzvetan Todorov explains this concept as a «sharing of powers» that opposes the tyranny of unified power with plurality: «laws that translate the heterogeneity of society within institutions» (374). Through moderation, the fires of unbridled emotion from Zinda's opening are quenched with the calming waters of reason, and comforting order is reestablished at the play's close.

In Zinda, Gálvez chooses an alien to Enlightenment culture for her heroine. Not only is Zinda distinguished by her non-European nationality and her race, but also by her sex. While in many of the previous anti-slavery works the protagonists were black men, Gálvez (as Stäel had done nine years earlier) uses instead a black woman as her central character. She also adds another secondary woman, Ángela, to her story, who serves to support her heroine. This innocent, white, European woman -an «angel» as her name suggests- comes to the imprisoned Zinda's aid in Act II. She reunites the African queen with her young son, and keeps Zinda informed on the welfare of her husband, Nelzir. Ángela pleads with Vinter for the release of her African friends, appealing to the same Enlightenment sense of virtue espoused throughout the play:

Yo os suplico Que perdoneis las vidas desdichadas De Zinda, de Nelzir, y de su hijo, Y les deis libertad; que no se diga Que por vuestro rigor gimen cautivos Los Reyes de este Imperio; estos soldados Serán con esta acción evilecidos, Si acaso os obedecen, y algún día Detestarán en vos a su caudillo.

(III. v)

Ángela is also representative of true Christianity in the play, and inspires Zinda to accept Christian values. When Zinda doubts the benevolence of a god worshipped by men like Vinter, Ángela responds:

No te engañas; de Vinter la creencia A ese Dios de bondad tiene ofendido, Y niega los misterios más sagrados De nuestra religión.

(III. ii)

In the end, Zinda's acceptance of Christianity (inspired first by Pereyra, and then reinforced by Ángela) becomes the only form of «colonization» she will allow in her kingdom.

Ángela, like her friend Zinda, is faced with the loss of her freedom. Just as Vinter threatens to enslave Zinda and her people, so he wishes to trap Ángela in the bonds of marriage. At the beginning of Act II, Ángela describes herself as an innocent victim:

Qual víctima adornada, que previene Al sacrificio el inocente cuello, Así yo de estas galas mal vestida Me preparo también á ser el precio Del común alborozo...

(II. i)

Ángela is the typical woman of her day. Married against her will, she is a victim taken as «booty» in the struggle for political, military and economic power. While Zinda refuses to submit her body to slavery, Ángela is resigned to give hers up in marriage, explaining to her African friend: «Zinda, yo la entrego / Para salvar mi honor de una violencia» (II. iii). For the powerless Ángela, honor is more important than agency, especially in a society where sexual virtue was the only possession a woman was allowed. Although the physical result of rape and marriage would be the same for her, at least in the latter Ángela would not be shamed in the eyes of society.

Ángela's helpless yet virtuous character reinforces Zinda's feminine qualities while contrasting with the strength of this defiant black leader. Zinda, both woman and African, is the opposite of a male-dominated European Enlightenment culture, yet ironically she also becomes the main voice of Enlightenment discourse in this play. Through Zinda's character, Gálvez takes women and Africans out the sphere of pure emotion where they had been placed by a racist and sexist hegemony, and gives this «other» access to the language of power. A significant detail of the play is the silence of Zinda's son, Zelido. The list of characters describes him as: «niño de cinco años, que no habla». Much of the conflict in the play is over control of the boy, between Vinter, who wants to sell him into slavery, and Zinda, who wants to protect his right to freedom. This child, symbol of the future of the black race and valuable both to his people and to the colonists, is powerless -he cannot speak. Therefore, that his mother can speak for him, and in the language of the imperialist, is fundamental to his future, as well as to that of his race.

The imposition of language was one of the most effective tools of conquest, and has therefore been a focus of concern in many studies of colonial and post-colonial literature. The imposition of a new language on the colonized simultaneously incorporated (and destroyed) their culture into the world of the conqueror, while at the same time it excluded these conquered peoples from power by keeping them in the periphery. While many post-colonial authors and theorists have preferred resistance over complicity with the language of imperialism (see Spivak, Brydon and Katrak)⁹, appropriation of hegemonic language has been a significant strategy in the struggle for liberation on the part of oppressed groups. It is here that the struggles of the colonial other and that of the gendered other unite. In a world where both white women and black slaves were silenced, Gálvez gives both a voice by speaking through and for them. Seeing this connection between the plight of women and the plight of the slave, she criticizes through her play the institution of slavery and (quite surprisingly) the forced colonization of peoples, relating both to the predicament of women¹⁰.

While Gálvez, a white woman, most likely saw the black Zinda as a symbolic rather than a real character, she like other female artists before and after her, found in the plight of the African slave a parallel to the situation of women¹¹. Both were silenced by the same power structure that would try to relegate them to the helplessness of the speechless child. But the irony of the Enlightenment is that, in its emphasis on «inalienable rights», it encouraged the «other» to gain power by learning and using its own language against it. While Zinda ultimately advocates a measured and conservative reaction to the problems of slavery and imperialism, it is nonetheless an early example of Spanish discontent with the «colonization» of nations and of peoples. Although Gálvez's play seems to have fallen on deaf ears (Spain was the next to last of the European countries to abolish slavery in its colonies), the Enlightenment ideals of the rights of the individual that inspired her to write in 1804 were the same that would eventually defeat slavery in the Hispanic world some eighty years later.

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