Juan Carlos Miguel de Paniagua. Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Translated and edited by Sue E. Houchins and Baltasar Fra-Molinero. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018. Illustrations. 324 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8265-2104-0.
Reviewed by Andrew E. Barnes (Arizona State University)
Published on H-Africa (January, 2021)
Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut (Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University School of Theology)
Double Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Spain
The book Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain offers two things. First, it provides an English translation of the Compendio de la vida ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo (first published in Salamanca in 1752), the “vida” or spiritual biography of Sister Teresa Chicaba, an African nun who lived in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Spain. Second, it offers a critical introduction to the vida that seeks to investigate the text for its viability as a variation of the slave narratives that were written by Anglophone individuals of African descent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At first glance, vidas and slave narratives seem to be disparate genres of biography, but the case advanced by Sue E. Houchins and Baltasar Fra-Molinero, the editors and translators of the vida as well as the authors of the introduction, is that the story of Chicaba, who came to Spain on a slave ship before ending her life as a revered holy woman, provides a syllogistic connection between the two genres. They argue that viewing the story of Chicaba from the perspective of the slavery she escaped via entry into religious life adds to the small corpus of texts that reveal to modern researchers the consciousness and experience of women of African descent who lived during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.
Vidas are written with the goal of promoting the candidacy of a Catholic Christian for sainthood. Vidas rarely offer a chronological or historical recitation of their protagonist’s life, presenting instead a narrative of the protagonist’s spiritual progress or maturation to a level of sanctity or holiness that left a discernible imprint on the people and society around them. Saints are intercessors, that is, go-betweens between humans and the celestial hierarchy in heaven. Vidas catalog the acts of intercessions performed by their protagonists, these intercessions serving as proof that the protagonist was among those chosen by the Christian God to connect heaven with earth. Slave narratives, on the other hand, tell the stories of their protagonists’ triumphs over the physical and mental shackles imposed on them by the mundane society in which they found themselves enslaved. Vidas celebrate submission and obedience (to God and the clerical hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church), while slave narratives celebrate resistance (to enslavement and enslavers).
Houchins and Fra-Molinero found commensurability between the two types of texts, however, in the way that race and gender are talked about in the vida. As detailed in the vida, Chicaba lived a life of comfort as the servant and spiritual companion of the Marchioness of Mancera, who freed Chicaba in her will and left money to pay for the entry of Chicaba into a nunnery. Yet, according to the authors, the obstacles that Chicaba faced both in her life in the Mancera household and in her life inside La Penitencia, the Dominican nunnery where she passed most of her days, reflected the same racial and gender dynamics described in the narratives of the lives of African women freed from slavery across the Atlantic in North America. Chicaba and her North American sisters fought the same battles. Houchins and Fra-Molinero call attention to the literary convention in early modern European discourse of using royalty or elevated social status as a counterbalance to race. Identification of an African individual as a king or queen or prince or princess made that individual an exception to the general rule about African inferiority. In a worthy-of-note early application of what became known later in Protestant circles as “providential design,” in the vida Chicaba is characterized as an African princess who through the intervention of the Virgin Mary and Christ, “the White Lady and her Child,” was captured and brought to Spain, where she was gifted to the king of Spain, who in turn gifted her to the Marquis and Marchioness of Mancera who in turn gifted her to La Penitencia, where her sanctity manifested itself. Her royal lineage is offered by her biographer as her claim to humanity, a claim that was constantly challenged by white racism, the most powerful illustrations being the rejection of her request for entry into a number of convents solely because she was a “Negress,” and the systematic discrimination she initially experienced at La Penitencia. As Houchins and Fra-Molinero read the vida, Chicaba’s effort to validate the association in the Spanish mind between elevated social status and sanctity was of the same cloth as the efforts of the African American freedwomen to assert racial equality between Africans and Europeans in the narratives about their lives.
Father Juan Carlos Miguel de Paniagua, a Theatine priest, wrote the vida of Chicaba, based on the eulogy he had preached at her funeral. The eulogy itself was based on interviews Paniagua conducted with Chicaba during the declining years of her life. In the early presentations of their project to American scholarly audiences, Houchins and Fra-Molinero seem to have encountered push back against their reading, especially from scholars of African American feminism, who questioned the assumption that the vida could articulate Chicaba’s mind and thoughts. Even granting the possibility that the words Paniagua had Chicaba utter in the work had some correlation with the sentiments Chicaba communicated during the interviews, Paniagua’s race and gender, as well as his clerical status, precluded his comprehension of what she was saying about her life and experiences. Paniagua could not hear how Chicaba resisted the racism she encountered, and even if he did, the parameters of the literary genre in which he was working would have caused him to discount this information. In their critical introduction, Houchins and Fra-Molinero counter with the argument that in the ways she told Paniagua of the events of her life, Chicaba in fact did exercise some agency. She was conscious of the restrictions the surrounding society sought to enforce over her search for spiritual perfection, and the ways she resisted these restrictions should be recognized as equivalent to the ways other women of African descent fought against their enslavement.
Because of their preoccupation with validating their project before skeptical American scholars, Houchins and Fra-Molinero overstate the affinity of Chicaba’s story to African American slave narratives to the detriment of situating her story in the context of African life in Europe. By the time that Chicaba lived, free Christians with some African ancestry had been battling for inclusion in Spanish society for over two centuries. Yet but for some nominal mention of the fact that by the eighteenth century the number of African slaves in Spain was on the decline, the authors offer no discussion of Spain’s black community and its impact on Chicaba. An assessment of how persuasive Houchins and Fra-Molinero’s argument is to Americanists is beyond the purview of this review, but it can be suggested that if they had given more attention to free black people living in eighteenth-century Europe, they may have made a stronger case for the vida of Chicaba offering some comparative insight into the lives of contemporary black people living across the Atlantic. Paniagua related Chicaba’s memory of the veiling ceremony that marked her reception into La Penitencia. Instead of being a day of complete joy, it was made bittersweet by her awareness of all the slights and acts of pettiness through which the Spaniards present communicated their racism. Yet instead of two parallel lines of nuns marking her path to the altar, Chicaba remembered before her four lines, the two extra lines composed of all the dead and departed sisters, who, unlike the living ones, welcomed her into the convent. In sum, quite literally, Chicaba arrived at a version of W. E. B. Du Bois’s veiled or “double” consciousness a century and a half before Du Bois wrote about it. Her battle against the effort of some Spaniards to exclude her from the identity she endeavored to embrace as a Christian holy woman, as a black Theresa of Avila, is the narrative worth digging out of Paniagua’s biography.
An English translation of Paniagua’s Compendio de la vida ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo is a welcome addition to the small body of literature written during the age about individuals of African descent in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Houchins and Fra-Molinero’s one-hundred-page-plus critical introduction does an impressive job of making Chicaba and her world accessible to American audiences. Scholars may take issue with the uses to which the authors seek to put their translation, but like the eighteenth-century Europeans touched by Chicaba, scholars can only say thank you to them for their gift.
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Citation:
Andrew E. Barnes. Review of de Paniagua, Juan Carlos Miguel, Black Bride of Christ: Chicaba, an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain.
H-Africa, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55417
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