According to some talking heads, including Angela Merkel, “multiculturalism does not work” (as if it would be a machine, a recipe or a bomb).
It seems to me that Merkel and the rest of the talking heads did not read Herodotus’s description of the barbarians or are aware of antiquity's Roman laws prohibiting the use of pants because the Vandals who had moved into the suburbs (yes, there were suburbs back then in Rome as there were in Tenochtitlan) of the old imperial capital were wearing them (pants) and the Romans required those immigrants-invaders to be civilized and wear robes. Merkel and the monoculturalists should read Bartolomé de las Casas’ account of the Arawaks; Claude Levi Strauss’ description of how certain communities in the Amazon were being transformed by external forces in his book Tristes Tropiques; Phillipe Aries’s documentation and anlysis of how the perception of what is a child or an adolescent at different points in history and in different contexts is determined by particular cultural and economic forces in his book Centuries of Childhood; Carlo Ginsburg's study of how Pagan ideas influenced the thinking of a common man who was killed by the Inquisition, accused of heresy, for the same reason the Taíno eunuch Jabibonuco was killed in Spain in the novel of the same name by Torres Rivera (both of them were not even aware of what heresy was, much less that they were heretics); Rómulo Gallegos’ Doña Barbara and the clash between "la barbarie y la civilización”.
For further evidence as to how multiculturalism works, we can move into the world of Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican Afro-Antillean poets’s integration of Spanish and African melodies, rhythms and languages in their poetics or review the neo classics bards from Trinidad and Barbados. What about doing a "salto cualitativo" and read the Newyorican poets; and live the life of a suicidal roach in the housing projects; watch Pedro Pietri dressed up like a pentecostal reverend, reading poems written on condom wrappers. The list of authors where cultures, languages and literary expressions interact, clash, blend is much longer than what can be covered here, but if Frau Merkel contacts me, I give her a very good bibliography; including, since she is a practicing Christian, articles on how the Old Testament is an “appropriation" (post modern literary word a la Borges) of Babylonian stories, where the Hebrew scribes learned to write, hundreds of years after they began -led by Abraham- their diasporic trips. If these authors are too colored, there is also an European version of the "process" instead of a "product": Kundera”s Ignorance.
After all, the difference between an euro-centric education and the one we got in a colony in the Caribbean has to do with the multiple sources we have to read, and the multiple cultures we experience thru diverse religions, ancestries or the many languages and symbolic systems we learn on a day to day “bembé". She and her equals know nothing about papiamento, garifuna, and other creole languages, or even know what creole means or understand the influence of West African art's use of forms on Picasso and Giacommetti works; Melanesian colors on Gaugin’s paintings; 19th century's positivism taxonomies on Mexican “pinturas de castas”. Yes, castas paintings reflect both America’s new mestizaje and positivism as a school of thought. Castas like the ones still ruling the Americas.
Perhaps, they can begin with oral histories and read “cuentos de aparecidos”, one of the foundational sources of “lo real maravilloso”. This is why “cuentos de aparecidos” are read in Latin America elementary schools, and are not seen as a form of indoctrination led by fanatics bringing religion into the classroom, as, most probably, would happen in the USA (though, they read Harry Potter which, anyway, is not about aparecidos), or, maybe, Frau Merkel can attend an Afro-Carbbean religious ritual and go through a “despojo”, so she can shake off her body and experience herself beyond language and discourses. OK, that will never happen and she will not be able to let herself be free enough or be driven by those whose cultures are too alien, or too close to the inner “noble savage”.
Those of us who "resulted" from the recent coming together of different cultures and races (of course, it was not an easy trip), and are not doing that bad, can serve as evidence that cultural hybridism produces good stock. That’s right! But cultural hybridism results from multiculturalism, so what is so scary to the Merkels of the world? The mestizaje? Oh, dear!
Good and happy mestizos of the world, unite, before it is too late and Frau Merkel, Señor Trump and their neo Aryans erase us from history books.
The public discourse in this country and Europe on cultural blends, clashes and outputs is so frightening and inflammatory that it scares the hell out of anyone who looks or thinks outside of their limited version of what their countries and their peoples must be or should look like. And there are those who believe that if you are somewhat different, you are their enemy, and must be eliminated. Scary, indeed!
Luis Palés Matos wrote in reference to the talking heads, “Calabó y bambú, bambú y calabó, el gran cocorocó dice tocotó” ("Majestad Negra": Tuntún de pasa y grifería).
Once more: Good and happy genetic and cultural and racial and linguistic and esthetic mestizos of the world, unite, before it is too late and the monoculturalists erase us from history books.
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