The Clockwork Chrysalis: Enslavement Poetry of Juan Francisco Manzano

Abstract

This chapter addresses the problematic translations by Irish Abolitionist physician Richard Madden of enslaved Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano. Manzano immerses his verse in otherworldly imagery that expresses African/Diaspora literary narratives of capture and liberation. Given that these narratives are a primary source of alien invasion/capture narratives in European and American science fiction (SF), Manzano’s poetry foreshadows these SF tropes; it further defamiliarizes the process of his dehumanization in a gadget-focused chattel enslavement society so that he becomes not so much one of its talking brute animals, as established by race-based colonial law, but as one of its functioning cogs, thereby specifically highlighting chattel enslavement’s Steampunk surrealism. However, Madden, in his professed effort to expose to the English-speaking world the inalienable humanity of supposed talking animal producers of colonial European/American wealth, translates Manzano’s searing Spanish blank verse with excessive deletion and singsong rhyme. Analysis of three of Manzano’s poems, published in 1837, in comparison to Madden’s translations, confronts the privileged assumptions inherent in Madden’s understatements and occlusions of Manzano’s texts. Madden erases the critique of slavery within Manzano’s poetry, stripping the poet’s proto-SF elements and sense of estrangement.