This chapter revisits one of the founding texts of the genre of testimonio, Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1994), the story of a 106-year-old former slave, Esteban Montejo, compiled by the Cuban ethnologist Miguel Barnet. The first section historicises the trope of the rebel slave through Fernández Retamar’s essay “Caliban” and establishes the affinity of this concept metaphor with the charge of resistance in the term Dalit, taking race and caste as analogous systems of oppression. The second section reads the text as a subaltern narrative that urges us to hear the “small voice of history,” that of Caliban/Montejo, disavowed by dominant historiography. The concluding section underlines the generic liminality of this text, which straddles the historical, the sociocultural, and the literary. It argues that the African slave, uprooted from their culture and geography, had no path to go back to their origins but only the promise of a new, universal identity, which cannot be the false universalism of a Europeanised white Ariel but rather of a Caliban seeking their place as an equal in a new emancipatory universality.
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