“Espirta” Frontera: The Maternal Body Under Siege in José Martí’s “Abdala”

• In Event: Legacies of Martí

Abstract

In José Martí’s earliest publication, a dramatic poem titled “Abdala,” the author of “Nuestra América” explores his first political visions. In this poem he presents a young, Nubian prince who watches as an enemy force invades his kingdom. The prince rushes out to meet the invader and defend the borders of his nation. He is mortally wounded. However, it is not the prince, but rather his mother who is most striking in this epic. She tries to dissuade her son from taking up the mantle of martyr. She entreats him to remain with her. She, the maternal, asks us to reconsider the crisis of borders, our fixation with the cut that occurs or fails to occur between the self and the other. Unlike the paternal logic of sovereignty and legitimacy, maternal logic is one of the porosity of borders and the slippage that occurs where two bodies meet. Through this largely unstudied drama, I will argue that Martí struggles with and against this porosity that he senses in the mother. I will read Martí through the lens of Bracha Ettinger’s concept of “the matrixial” as well as Guillermina de Ferrari’s “vulnerability.” Through an understanding of these two concepts, it becomes clear how the maternal body complicates notions of the national body and its borders. The maternal in Martí’s “Abdala” corrodes autonomy and forces the reader to face the self and the other who come into being together.

Author

• Sarah Skillen, University of Southern California