3 - State Writers and Solidarity: Seghers and Carpentier

Summary

IN THE DECADES AFTER the dissolution of the Comintern and the end of World War II, new socialist cultural institutions emerged in the newly formed Communist states in Europe and in the formerly colonized world. Seghers, who returned from Mexican exile to Germany's Soviet-Occupied Zone, immediately became a leader in the GDR cultural sphere. Similarly, Alejo Carpentier, who returned to Cuba from Venezuelan exile in 1959, took up a leading role in a revolutionary Cuban literary scene. A key project for the states and the cultural institutions affiliated with them was to critique what they perceived to be exploitative imperialist relations across the globe, and to call for solidarity with people suffering as a result of those relations.

In the early 1960s, the East German Anna Seghers and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier obliquely took up this issue in historical narratives they published of the slave uprisings that had rocked French and British colonies in the Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Seghers's story “Das Licht auf dem Galgen” and Carpentier's novel El siglo de las luces, frame this Caribbean history in terms of the encounter of French revolutionary ideals with a New World context. In both texts, revolutionary agents who are charged by the French government with disseminating a message of emancipation and, at times, encouraging slave revolt, stand at the crux of this encounter.

Seghers's and Carpentier's protagonists are more than passive mouthpieces of the French state, however. Instead, they constantly negotiate their positions vis-à-vis the messages they are to deliver. That is, in both works, agents struggle to resolve the tension between their identification with the cause of liberation and France's shifting and ultimately reactionary policies toward its Caribbean territories, such as Napoleon's revocation in 1802 of the 1794 decree freeing slaves. Ultimately, the agents in these works are pushed to tell either one of two “stories” of emancipation: a version that subordinates the reality of disenfranchisement to the requirements of political expediency and the state's priorities, or one that insists on maintaining an affective and embodied connection of solidarity with the oppressed.