| Chapter I: | Essay I: Aesthetic Blackness in the Creative Literature of the Latin/Hispanic Reality |
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life, as he points out in the autobiographical essay “Mi testimonio” (My Testimony), a negative incident that he unexpectedly experienced as a young student, and which he felt was unjustified, made him the victim of a crushing invective, replete with unwarranted racial epithets: “¡Negro sinvergüenza…Póngalo a trabajar, señora. ¡Esa porquería no va a servir para nada¡” (19). (“Shameless nigger…[Take him out of school] and send him to work, lady. That piece of garbage will never amount to anything!”)
The inference that one intuits from reading “Mi testimonio” suggests that Truque questions the social treatment meted out to a certain class of individuals without considerations of merit or justification. Evidently, Truque never recovered either from the episode or the hurtful remark, for as he candidly says in the same testimony: “Y fui desarrollando un crudo egoísmo que hubiera llegado a destrozarme, si no hubiera tenido la pasión de llenar cuartillas” [“I began to develop a somewhat crude form of egotism that might have destroyed me had I not had a passion for filling up notebooks”] (20).
Writing for Truque became a consolation, a catharsis, an escape from the bitterness that continued to consume him. The tenor of his “testimonio” belies his opening statement: “Quien lea esta líneas, creo, no podrá atribuirlas a la amargura o al resentimiento” [“Whoever reads these lines will not be able to attribute them, I think, to bitterness or resentment”] (17).
The world of the Afro Latin is always unstable when it comes to questions of color and race. Hence, for the creative artist, emphasis on pigmentation and physical features becomes a ready-made device to express subjective imagery of race or ethnicity, especially for the individual that understands the aesthetics of the Afro Latin space. When Zapata Olivella highlights the term “piel lechosa” it is a clear sign, for him, that this person's color is not within the normal range of the prescribed racial physiognomy of being genetically Caucasoid. Since Dominguito was born to a black mother in a black-oriented environment, the subjacent implication is the question of how this fact will control his self-identification in the Latin world. How will others in this atmosphere or beyond it