Cristina Pérez Díaz, Columbia University
In Marcial Gala’s 2019 novel, Llámenme Casandra (Call me Cassandra), Rauli, the first-person narrator, though born male, identifies as a woman; more specifically, as a reincarnation of Cassandra. When she is sent by the Cuban post-revolutionary government as a soldier to Angola, she reads her arrival to Africa as a return to the ancient world, that of the African gods as well as the Greek. She repeatedly refers to Africa as “the border with the Old World” (424). Africa and Greece are both antiquities, without duality, influence, or triangulation (Goff and Simpson 2007): “You must return to the ancient world,” Athena tells Rauli in reference to Africa (301). Furthermore, the Greek and African gods are presented as the same (Athena is Obatalá, Apollo is Shango). These antiquities, I contend, represent a time before Spanish colonialism, an ancient time where Greece and Africa are collapsed, and the kind of cultural and racial hierarchies construed through the Middle Passage are not at play (cf. the idea of “Atlantis” in Rizo and Henry 2016). Yet as the novel inhabits different temporalities, race and the history of colonialism are present in other ways, complicating that apparently “direct” relationship between the Caribbean and Greece it also construes. This presentation argues that the “untimely” (Postclassicisms 2020) line that connects Rauli with Cassandra simultaneously passes and does not pass through modern colonialism, providing yet another form of classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Moyer et al. 2020).
I explore this untimeliness through the lens of the novel’s treatment of race and reflect on how it helps us understand the complexities of the postcolonial in the Americas. Rauli is a reincarnation of Cassandra in Cuba––there is no ideological/racial identification with the myths of “European” culture. Self-recognition comes from an epiphany of Athena, who bids her read the Iliad so that she can know that she is Cassandra. In that sense race does not matter, the link is direct. Yet race mediates: Rauli’s white features are emphasized, as it is equally emphasized that her mother is colored, turning Rauli into a mestizo. However, there is no staging of “double consciousness” (DuBois 2019) in Rauli. Furthermore, Rauli’s recognition of her Cassandra identity is mediated by the Iliad, and thus it is also implicated in the history of textual transmission from Europe to the Caribbean, arguably marked by the Middle Passage even in a postcolonial context like post-revolutionary Cuba (cf. Miranda 2003). Both Rauli’s racialized body and her access to the book that reveals her identity are inevitably the products of the histories of slavery and colonialism. Thus, temporality moves back and forth from Greek antiquity to 1960s-80s Cuba and Angola in a way that is simultaneously marked by the histories of modern colonialism and free from it. Reincarnation and the simultaneity of Greek and African gods open a realm of antiquities before Spanish colonialism and mestizaje, an “untimely” jump to a fictional time before the Middle Passage that enabled colonialism in the Caribbean, and triangularly connected it to the Greeks.