African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts

Crossing the Strait

Debra Faszer-McMahon, Victoria L. Ketz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317184263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Around the turn of 21st Century, Spain welcomed more than six million foreigners, many of them from various parts of the African continent. How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing blogs, films, translations, and literary works by contemporary authors including Donato Ndongo (Ecquatorial Guinea), Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco), Chus Gutiérrez (Spain), Juan Bonilla (Spain), and Bahia Mahmud Awah (Western Sahara), the contributors interrogate how Spanish cultural texts represent, idealize, or sympathize with the plight of immigrants, as well as the ways in which immigrants themselves represent Spain and Spanish culture. At the same time, these works shed light on issues related to Spain's racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spain's economic crisis in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, the essays are a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of a society during times of change.

Chapter 1
Mediated Moralities of Immigration: Metaphysical Detection in Marta Sanz’s Black, black, black

Shanna Lino

With her first detective novel, Black, black, black, Marta Sanz (Madrid, 1967–) joins a growing group of authors who, since 2001, have addressed issues surrounding contemporary immigration to Spain within the well-established generic codes of crime fiction.¹ The novelas negras, dedicated to the phenomenon, range from the classic hardboiled and police procedural varieties to more experimental subgenres that engage the postmodern and postcolonial conceptions of truth and identity. As shall be seen, Sanz’s Black, black, black (2010) operates as a metaphysical detective novel as Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney have defined it; that is, the text functions with hermeneutic skepticism that subverts traditional conventions and asks questions about mysteries of “being” and “knowing” that transcend the mystery plot (2). In this antidetective novel, unlike its Spanish predecessors, immigrants are not placed front and center in order to address narrowly their respective victimization or guilt in terms of the crime being investigated. Instead, concerns over immigration and integration are interwoven with the questioning of broader economic issues including globalization and disparity of wealth, free trade and real estate bubbles, as well as social questions relating to gay rights, divorce, custody rights, (statutory) rape, religious plurality, and elder abuse. The novel is divided into three parts, each referring to one of the “blacks” in its title: “Black I” is narrated by the private investigator, Arturo Zarco; “Black II” is told by the neighbor, Luz, and includes portions from her fictional journal; and “Black III” is narrated by Paula, Zarco’s ex-wife and investigating sidekick.² Each of the text’s narrators is acutely aware of the intra- and intertextuality with which their stories function and of the prejudicial power that Western cultural references can have over perception and knowledge of self and other. In this way, Black, black, black is not only a novel that depicts immigrant characters’ difficulties as they resist acculturation and confront xenophobia in one of Madrid’s central, middle-class neighborhoods, it is also a text that is grounded in the postmodern tenet that any ultimate truth is not attainable and begs its readers to question the ways and degrees by which our understanding of ethics and justice are predetermined by our cultural mores.

Sanz’s novel demonstrates a maturation of Spanish detective fiction centered on immigration. Earlier novels such as Jorge Martínez Reverte’s Gálvez on the Border (2001) and Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s La reina del sur (The Queen of the South) (2002) focus their mystery-driven plots on issues relating to the voyage of illegal immigrants to the Iberian Peninsula, and the initial bidirectional culture shock experienced both by them and the receiving country’s autochthonous population.³ These texts were groundbreaking for addressing the growing millenarian concerns around undocumented immigration alongside investigations relating to money laundering and drug trafficking, both of which are processes intimately related to the illicit global movement of people. Other novels such as Antonio Lozano’s Harraga (2002) and Donde mueren los ríos (Where the Rivers Die) (2003) exemplify the genre’s adolescence as they portray immigrant characters not only as pawns of oppressive regimes, global trafficking, and labor exploitation but also as individuals with an increased sense of agency.⁴ In these novels, North and Sub-Saharan African women and men engage actively in all spheres as the texts’ investigators, informants, criminals, and narrators, as well as their victims. The narrative focus, however, remains primarily on the physical and emotional journey to arrive in Spain and the initial stages of adaptation in that country.

Moving beyond this phase, Black, black, black explores the more complex and multifaceted ripple effects of that movement of people on the receiving society years or even a decade or two after the first “waves” of undocumented African workers began to arrive on Andalusia’s coasts. In fact, no mention whatsoever is made of the voyage to Spain undertaken by the novel’s Maghrebian immigrant characters. Instead, the text highlights the unquestionable plurality of Spain’s twenty-first-century society. Issues surrounding the social, political, and economic integration of immigrants and their Spanish-born children are played out alongside other socio-political concerns of a country facing a serious economic meltdown that impinges upon several vulnerable groups including single parents, gays and lesbians, and the elderly.

Fewer Spanish women have written about immigration in their crime novels, and those who have enjoy relatively less critical success and readership than their male counterparts. This may be attributed in part to the fact that their texts—including Marta Sanz’s⌍are more often individually conceived narratives and standalone novels rather than serials that follow a particular sleuth over numerous texts, such as with Lorenzo Silva’s series about police detectives Bevilacqua and Chamorro or the infamous tales of Pepe Carvalho penned by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Alicia Giménez-Bartlett’s series starring Petra Delicado, however, is an obvious and important exception to this trend. One female-authored, immigration-themed precedent to Sanz’s novel is Yolanda Soler Onís’s 2003 Malpaís (Bad Country), a story set in the Canary Islands and whose primary importance lies in the attention it draws to the Spanish archipelago’s unique situation as a receiving territory of northern European retirees and vacationers on the one hand, and clandestine immigrants from western Africa on the other, all of whom converge on the Canarian sandy beaches forming graphic juxtapositions of wealth and poverty: relaxed and partying sunbathers lying side-by-side with cold, hungry, and frightened so-called wetbacks.⁵ Most recently, another female writer, Ángela Vallvey, published a text titled The Man with the Black Heart (2011) that, like the Catalan Maria-Antònia Oliver’s earlier crime novel Antipodes (1989), explores the multifarious and tragic world of trafficking sex workers, particularly girls. However, while Oliver’s text deals with young Majorcan women caught up in the sex trade in Australia, Vallvey’s novel portrays the more contemporary reality of Eastern European girls bought, sold, and enslaved in Spain for the same type of exploitation.⁶ What seems to characterize crime novels on immigration written by women is the broader perspective with which the topic is broached. While male authors have tended toward a testimonial approach that documents the immigrant’s plight and draws attention to the individual human faces and stories that one-by-one make up what is otherwise often treated in the mass media and in official discourse as a conglomerate mass, a worthy feat for writers of this politically committed genre to be sure—female crime fiction writers tend to personalize immigration in a different way for the Spanish reading public: their novels draw connections between the polemics around immigration and the intimate concerns of ordinary Spaniards, issues such as physical (dis)ability, environmental contamination, gentrification, private versus public health care, and (un)employment. As we shall see, Sanz’s Black, black, black is harmonious with her fellow female crime writers whose novels expose deeply grounded social anxieties about power and domination of various sorts.

Black, black, black begins with the Esquivel family hiring private detective Arturo Zarco (also the narrator of the book’s first section) in order to uncover evidence with which to charge their Moroccan-born son-in-law Yalal with the murder of their daughter Cristina. As with other crime texts on immigration, the guilt of the immigrant is assumed by the Spaniards from the beginning; the parents always knew that “[i]t couldn’t end up well. Marrying a Moor. Out of pig-headedness” (19).⁷ The prejudicial assumption of guilt until proven innocent inverts what should otherwise be Zarco’s task of open-ended inspection and questioning. While investigating the daughter’s murder is the initial impetus for Zarco’s penetration of the building in which the deceased lived, the novel quickly becomes multidimensional, moving beyond a critique of the popularly perceived cristiano–moro dichotomy that dominates earlier novelas negras. In the apartment complex, Zarco discovers a wide array of inhabitants: an intriguing mother-and-son team (she, the menopausal writer of a noteworthy journal, and he, a young, color-blind collector of butterflies); a female writer of romance and crime fiction; another single father of Moroccan descent whose mother is helping him raise his two sons since his wife mysteriously exited the picture; the elderly Peláez couple and their abusive son Clemente; and an older xenophobic woman, Leonor, who believes in strengthening the police’s power to eradicate all that is “rotten” in society (including immigrants). As the private investigator delves into this microcosm of Spain’s pluralistic society, he uncovers the roles that each of the neighbors might have played leading up to Cristina’s murder.

The second part of the book is narrated by Luz, the adolescent’s mother. Her perspective is brought forth in a journal that she claims to be writing in order to track her vanishing menstruation as per her therapist’s recommendation. In actuality, the diary is an exercise in creative writing and is a cooperative endeavor undertaken together with her neighbor and aspiring “social writer” Claudia, an unquestionably self-conscious and satirical allusion to Marta Sanz herself (262). The notebook plays with notions of fiction and reality and sets the stage for other metaliterary games throughout the text. As she writes, Luz hallucinates about murdering several of her neighbors—including the real murder victim, Cristina Esquivel—and thereby leaves open the question of her potential guilt. The act of writing further complicates the investigation because it establishes the possibility that one of Luz’s neighbors might have read the fictional journal and used it as inspiration for the homicidal act while framing Luz. The third and last section of the novel, “Black III,” is narrated by Paula, Zarco’s ex-wife and confidante. Hers is the most politically committed of the narrations and her solidarity with society’s most vulnerable and exploited is explicit throughout: “Peruvian weavers, elderly folks, physically unattractive men, embittered women writers, immigrants, children who cannot yet speak, paraplegics, crippled women like me, and youth with Down Syndrome. […] All of us lumped into the same bag” (223).⁸ As the last investigator and narrator, Paula is charged with the task of deciphering that which is true and that which is invention in the previous two accounts and when, ultimately, she solves the identity of the murderer, the reader is left with the sense that many fundamental questions remain unanswered.⁹

Metaphysical Detective Fiction

Several critics have produced definitions of the metaphysical subgenre that is most often associated with proto-postmodernist writers including Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Luis Borges but whose roots, it may be argued, actually reach as far back as Edgar Allan Poe, the father of detective fiction. For literary critic Michael Holquist, the metaphysical detective story is not concerned with achieving a “tidy” ending in which all questions are answered; rather, it functions as a blank sheet of paper on which the reader must express her/his own answers (170). Other critics associate the subgenre with surrealist painting, in which incongruous juxtapositions and self-reflexive pastiche indicate that “reality” is ultimately unknowable or ineffable (Merivale and Sweeney 4). In the introduction to a collection of essays on metaphysical crime fiction, critics Merivale and Sweeney usefully delineate six characteristic themes of the subgenre:

(1) the defeated sleuth, whether he be an armchair detective or a private eye; (2) the world, city, or text as labyrinth; (3) the purloined letter, embedded text, mise en abyme, textual constraint, or text as object; (4) the ambiguity, ubiquity, eerie meaningfulness, or sheer meaninglessness of clues and evidence; (5) the missing person, the “man of the crowd,” the double, and the lost, stolen, or exchanged identity; and (6) the absence, falseness, circularity, or self-defeating nature of any kind of closure to the investigation. (8)

As we shall see in this consideration of Black, black, black, Sanz employs a variation of each of these characteristics. In so doing, the treatment of immigration to Spain represents a shift from more Manichean frameworks that emphasize determinate notions of center/periphery, self/other, truth/fiction, and innocence/guilt to a rather more enriching multiperspectivism of narrative that parallels an increasingly complex view of society.¹⁰ The multiplicity of focus becomes essential for whoever seeks an understanding of postmodern identities that are themselves elaborate intersections of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and class. In contrast with crime texts on immigration published before Black, black, black that use more intimate and documentary narrations, this novel’s triple retelling of the investigation (by Zarco, Luz, and Paula) refocalizes the events in a way that mimics the social plurality that Sanz’s text intends for the Spanish reading public to accept as a given.¹¹

The Defeated Sleuth

The first aspect of this crime fiction novel about immigration that qualifies it as metaphysical is the defeated sleuth. While Arturo Zarco is the private investigator hired to solve Cristina Esquivel’s murder, and while he narrates the investigation that he undertakes in the first part of the novel, his ability to reach a solution is made impossible by a series of factors: first, he falls madly in love with the butterfly collector, Olmo, and since both the adolescent and his mother, Luz, are suspects for their neighbor’s murder, Zarco becomes paralyzed by the fear that either of their involvement might precipitate an end to his affair; second, Zarco is unable to see the relevant information that he has before him because his vision is literally and literarily obscured. Throughout “Black I,” the protagonist makes explicit references to the filters that inhibit or inform his act of gazing. For example, Zarco describes in detail the way in which his sunglasses alter the color of the city:

Today, protected by my glasses, I walk along a downtown street. I see the sky as gray, and the facades of the four-story buildings, and the clothing in the shop windows. Gray, the inside of my spectacle lenses and the phone shop windows, gray, the satellite dishes […] Gray, the shriveling cuts of meat for the kebab and the mini-tapas skewered with toothpicks, to eat along with a draft. […] The customers leaning on the bar and the beggars […] gray […] The newspapers, the graffiti, and the dives’ unlit neon signs […] I see everything gray. (22–3)¹²

The city painted gray is not merely a visual manipulation of Zarco’s shaded lenses. Rather, Sanz highlights the achromatic cityscape in order to comment on the human detachment felt by urbanites of a consumerist and globalized Madrid in which the lack of meaningful personal contact makes connecting with fellow citizens a tough twenty-first-century challenge.

As the novel’s title suggests, color (as well as the ability to see it or to ignore it as it relates to race) plays an important role both in the crime’s investigation and in the narrative’s more profound commentary on the challenges behind the integration of immigrants who are visible minorities. The deceased’s apartment building, for example, lies in opposition to the impersonal gray-colored cityscape that Zarco describes. In fact, the detective finds the residents of the edifice to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: Empathy, Ambivalence, and the Movement of Critique: A Prologue by Brad Epps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Representations of Africa in Twenty-First-Century Spain: Literatures and Cultures Crossing the Strait
• 1 Mediated Moralities of Immigration: Metaphysical Detection in Marta Sanz’s Black, black, black
• 2 What Happens on the Other Side of the Strai(gh)t? Clandestine Migrations and Queer Racialized Desire in Juan Bonilla’s Neopicaresque Novel Los príncipes nubios (2003)
• 3 Alienation in the “Promised Land”: Voices of Maghrebi Women in the Theater of Antonia Bueno
• 4 Searching for Justice in Return to Hansala by Chus Gutiérrez: Cultural Encounters between Africa and Europe
• 5 Celebrity, Diplomacy, Documentary: Javier Bardem and Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony
• 6 Tales of Two Shores: The Re-Establishment of Dialogue across the Strait of Gibraltar
• 7 Parejas Mixtas: African–Spanish Couples in Cyberspace
• 8 Oikos and the “Other”: Humanizing the Immigrant in Donato Ndongo’s El metro
• 9 Ekomo’s Interventions
• 10 Unveiling Spain: Representation of the Female Body as a Metaphor for Contesting Orientalist Ideology
• 11 Grave Politics: Fighting Ventriloquism in the Maghreb
• 12 African Poetics in Spain: Um Draiga and the Voices of Contemporary Saharawi Poetry
• 13 Abderrahman El Fathi: An Averroist Perspective of His Poetry
• Appendix: List of Works by Genre Addressed in This Volume
• Index