Juan Bobo, postcoloniality and Frantz Fanon's theory of violence

Abstract

In the postcolonial written adaptations of the oral tales and stories about Juan Bobo political violence is generated against the Jibaros by colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial discourses that are still perpetuated in Puerto Rico through unaltered colonial attitudes, political, socioeconomic structures, institutions and literatures that legitimize the negative perception of the Jibaros as the Other. After 1898, redactors of the written tales of Juan Bobo purged the tales of much of their overt anti-colonial, anti-elitist and subversive implications-the undisguised violence, lies, trickery and resistance to oppression that are so evident in the oral tales. With every subsequent version, Juan Bobo dwindles from trickster to mere tonto (“fool/noodlehead”), making Juan Bobo and the Jibaros he represents objects to laugh at or scorn. Colonial ideologies are evident and inscribed in the texts, in the fact that Juan Bobo seems to always be rescued, saved by a privileged and seemingly benevolent whiter, landowning, and more educated character. These redactions constitute a compromise and betrayal of the authentic Jibaro while deepening the split between Puerto Rico’s elite class and the rural peasantry. They play right into colonialism’s hands.

In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon argues that “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence” (86). In the children’s tales of Juan Bobo, postcolonial writers have distorted or omitted altogether the complex linkages between colonial violence, Juan Bobo’s use of lies and trickery as violent responses to it, and the violations of the rights of Jibaros in the postcolonial nation-state. In the modern versions of the tales, Juan Bobo as representative of the Jibaros, has been stripped of his crucial tools of violence, the lies and trickery he once used to fight the tyranny of the Spanish colonizers and the postcolonial, neocolonial injustices committed against him by the island’s socio-political and cultural elite. Postcolonial representation of Juan Bobo, and of the Jibaros in these modem texts is a form of epistemic violence to the extent that it involves immeasurable distortions and erasures of local cultural survival systems, such as the Jibaro’s use of jaiberia, natural Jibaro wisdom which included his use of trickery and other subversive strategies to better his life conditions. In the Tales of Juan Bobo, postcolonial representation aimed at the promotion of discourse about the Jibaro as Other and the suppression and omission of the Other’s counter-discourse to colonial ideologies of conquest and domination provide adequate grounds for Puerto Rico’s continued political, socio-economic violence against the Jibaros.