For a long time I felt called to visit the exact location where Christopher Columbus arrived on my native island of the Dominican Republic, but it was only this year when I finally took the opportunity to fulfill this calling. On a visit to my family in the DR this past January some of us took a weekend to visit the out-of- the-way, northern coastal village of La Isabella, where Columbus established the first colony in the new world, having first landed on the much smaller un-inhabited island of San Salvador off the coast of Cuba. What a satisfying visit it was, but what I discovered there is a topic for later consideration.
Here I wish to explore why my early curiosity took so long to be fulfilled, why the pull hadn’t been stronger all these years, enough to get me to this historic locale many years earlier.
I came to recognize that I lived with an internal battle between my feelings of sympathy for the idealized image of the indigenous called Tainos who lived a beautiful, peaceful natural life on my island and the exploring conquistadores from Europe who wiped out their culture, not to mention the pain I felt for all the Africans who were turned into slaves and brought to the Caribbean to replace the native workforce who were dying rapidly through diseases and the torture brought by the Spaniards.
I remember the stories about the indigenous that my nanny used to tell me, how many survived the Spaniards by hiding inside enormous caves that still exist to this day. The young women, she explained, had very long hair and every day their parents brushed their hair with combs made of gold. Vividly I carried this image in my head and I wanted to meet them, my favored ancestors. As a child I kept looking for them in the bushes, hoping that maybe one day I would find an entrance to the cave, which they inhabited.
On the other hand, for many years I denied my European heritage only wanting to embrace my native ancestors who were ripped-off of their land, submitted to a great degree of cruelty and eventually vanished from the land, or embrace my Africans forbearers who were kidnapped from their villages submitted to slavery, torn from their families, culture and heritage leaving them naked in a foreign land.
Making peace with this internal struggle has been a long journey. It clearly began, however, in 1992 on the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ landing and all the fuss going on in my country about celebrating this historic event and a call for creating a huge monument called the Faro a Colon. This brought about an intellectual battle between the defenders of the natives and the celebrators of the significant milestone of Columbus’ discovery of the new world.
At that moment in time the long struggle within between those apparent contradictory forces began to become conscious for me. I was forced to look into my own prejudices and obviously the moral connotations of the battle between – who was good and who was bad, who was right and who was wrong.
Waking up from my identification as a particular race or ethnicity allowed me to give peace within me a chance to emerge by recognizing how each one of these races, the native Tainos, and their African replacements and the European explorers were all a part of me, they formed my mixed-race heritage. Realizing that I would only become whole if I could embrace this dichotomy within me was the key. To embrace not only the idealized, beautiful natives and the innocent Africans but also the savage and bloody conquerors was my task.
Though warmly identifying internally with the indigenous peoples, the negative, repulsive feelings that I carried toward the “civilized” world, wherein it was (and is) acceptable to take over and destroy or dominate everything in its path, were also very strong in me. Yet I began to find within me the same arrogance that I so harshly condemned in them, for example, in the way that I had discriminated against people for their lack of education, or for being ignorant of their own prejudices. The fight that I put outside of myself and projected onto the Europeans or onto the “innocent” natives was actually happening within.
It isn’t a pleasant feeling to admit that I am both the victim and the victimizer, that both are part of the make up of what this incarnation is about: White, Black and Taino being unclear who really conquered who? Slowly I came to see the futility in denying my racial composition. I had to take responsibility for what my own ancestors had done. I couldn’t hide any longer behind the identification with only one side of my heritage, the side that I liked. For heaven’s sake, my native tongue is Spanish, not Arawak or some African language. How could I ever think that I could get away with that one, but I managed to fool myself for a long time. Obviously the idea behind that trick was to identify with the “good” the victimized innocents of a horrific historical massacre, but that had to come to an end if inner peace on this issue was to emerge.
I was born into it: My race is the byproduct of this fierce encounter of the old world and the new, opposites only when unexamined but as I came to see, actually complementary. My race is a fusion of those three forces ancient, primitive, savage, civilized, each one containing beauty and ugliness, good and bad, each one possessing profound cultures in their own right. I could no longer take sides! No longer could I consciously suppress and deny one aspect of my identity and highlight another without living in a constant battle.
I recognized that to be able to give peace a chance one has to be willing to reconcile the opposites within oneself. But at that time I wasn’t sure how. This process of embracing my heritage has forced me to give a chance to the opportunity to find a place within myself where I could be fully human. I had to give up the idea that I could be perfect by being one-sided believing that I am only a reasonable, good, intelligent, coherent, compassionate, kind and generous human being.
No human is perfect, no life is perfect, this striving to become more than human by believing that we can be perfect is the illusion that keeps us prisoners and enslaved. The humility that surfaces when one can no longer deny the aspects of oneself that are not so honorable can be the pathway to happiness, but even better than happiness the pathway to wholeness.
Giving ourselves a chance to live this life fully has for me involved keeping myself focused on bringing together the opposites within. It is challenging work and sometimes humiliating but ultimately liberating! The good image that we thought we needed to protect becomes unnecessary. Hopefully the pendulum that swings between the extreme of being only good, intelligent and worthy to the other extreme of only clumsiness, unawareness and feeling worthless begins to find a middle ground, a resting place. Every time we try to give a chance to anything, there is an opportunity to discover something new and maybe even something awesome.
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Editor's Note: December 5, 1492 is recognized on Hispaniola as the time that it was introduced to Christopher Columbus. Europeans and immigrants from Europe, have memorialized Columbus for a discovery that he was not the first to accomplish and for "civilization" of the native North Americans. The natives do not share this opinion as many were enslaved, murdered and their culture, resources and their homeland stolen.
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