role as interpreter and messenger one that lives in two different worlds characterizes him as the metaphor for the intercultural encounter, in which the interlocutors autonomy makes the conversation effective. Different from both Ariel and Caliban, Esu does not turn his back to none of two worlds involved in the dialogue. He keeps oppression, submission and indifference outside the encounter. Besides, the oppressor-oppressed opposition, present in the intercultural experiences mediated by Ariel and Caliban, does not find space in the kind of intercultural mediation that Esu creates. Mediated by Esu, the interlocutors in the conversation keep their individual autonomy and independence intact.Originally, Esu is the metaphor for the encounter of the Africans with the New World peoples. When they Africans are enslaved the American countries, they manage to keep the characteristics of their culture. In slavery, they make their cultures to interact with the cultures of the countries where they are enslaved. For Gates (1988) these characteristics are the aspects of their cultures that were meaningful, that could not be obliterated, and that they chose, by acts of will, not to forget (GATES, 1988: p.4). These cultural elements, according to Gates, are:Their music, their myths, their expressive institutional structures, their metaphysical systems of order, and their forms of performance. If the Dixie Pike, as Jean Toomer put the matter in Cane, has grown from a goat path in Africa, then the black vernacular tradition stands as its signpost, at that liminal crossroads of culture contact and ensuing difference at which Africa meets Afro-America (GATES, 1988: p.4).Like Esu, who interprets the gods and the humans messages, and delivers them, the Africans slaves interpret the new environment within a received framework of meaning and belief (GATES, 1988: p. 4). For Gates slavery presents two aspects: (1) it brings separated Black African cultures together, because it did serve to create a dynamic of exchange and revision among numerous previously isolated Black African cultures on a scale unprecedented in African History (GATES, 1988: p. 4). As a result of these cultural fusion, occurs a truly Pan-African culture fashioned as a colorful weave of linguistic, institutional, metaphysical, and formal threads (GATES, 1988: p. 4); (2) slavery also allows for the building of an African-American culture, generated in the encounters that this Pan-African culture keeps with the European cultures. Gates explains that:What survived this fascinating process was the most useful and the most compelling of the fragments at hand. Afro-American culture is an African culture with a difference as signified by the catalysts of English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, or Spanish languages and cultures, which informed the precise structures that each discrete New World Pan-African culture assumed (GATES, 1988: p. 4).As an intercultural metaphoric phenomenon, Esu becomes a mediating force, having the potential ability to connect the two ways of the crossroads: he fuses the truth and the understanding, the sacred and the profane, the texts and the interpretation, the subject and the predicate. Mediation and combination of two opposing aspects of life lead to a third form of life. Esu brings complexity to the intercultural experience, thus allowing