『 노인과 바다 』와 쿠바

Abstract

Cuba is crucial to understand The Old Man and the Sea and the three terrains of ecopolitics, racial politics, and gender politics are necessary to discuss the Cuban aspects of the novel. As a part of supplementing and deepening those terrains, the perspective of tricontinentalism is proposed in this paper. Being suggested by Robert Young as a reformulation of postcolonialism, tricontinentalism calls us to explore the dynamic power latent in the non-western geographical spaces of Asia, Africa, and Latin America/the Caribbean and excavate the other epistemes and values sustained in the interconnected tricontinental cultures. To read The Old Man and the Sea through such tricontinental perspective means focusing on the African aspects embedded in the Latin American/the Caribbean. This Africanness has revived in the santéria. Maintaining Cuban indigenous culture and life, santéria is a syncretization of European Catholicism and African faith or myth of Yoruba. To Cuban indigenous mulatto people, the Gulf Stream is a blessed sea where male and female personifications of gods and goddesses exist and always protect them as well as their ancestors as when they sailed from Africa to Latin America/the Caribbean a very long time ago. In contrast, the protagonist Santiago generalizes the Gulf Stream as feminine, inconsistent, and precarious and regards it as a problematic object necessary to be rationally controlled and never asks the sea gods’ and goddesses’ favor. Even in Santiago’s ecological ethics of letting him speak to the fish as a friend or brother, the persistent human-centrism of a European white man is highlighted in his own strong will against sea creatures and sea gods. His dreaming of lions playing in a beach of Africa also exposes his ethnic nationalism by presenting Africa as a romanticized virgin land entirely separated from the violent colonial histories. This reading of The Old Man and the Sea, can make visible the other sentiments, epistemes, and values of Cuban indigenous or mulatto syncretic cultures compared with those of Santiago and/or the cosmopolitan Hemingway.