William Well's Brown's Clotelle

My liberty is as of as much consequence to me as Mr. Wilson's is to him. I am as sensitive to feeling as he. If I mistake not, the day will come when the negro will learn that he can get his freedom by fighting for it; and should that time arrive, the whites will be sorry that they have hated us so shamefully. I am free to say that, could I live my life over again, I would use all the energies which God has given me to get up an insurrection.

William Wells Brown, prominent black abolitionist, novelist, playwright and historian, a self-taught genius who fled slavery, wrote the first published novel by an African-American writer. Clotelle, published in the 1850s while he was living in England, was published in 4 different versions. The version I read features a family of mulatto women named Agnes, Isabella, Marion, and Isabella's daughter, Clotelle, who endure the destruction of their family because of slavery and the massive internal slave trade that brought enslaved blacks to the Deep South from states like Virginia. Brown's novel dramatically reveals how slavery undermines and contradicts American democracy and Christianity with constant examples of slavery's dehumanizing blacks, breaking up families, and emphasizing the threat of sexual violence and exploitation of female slaves, in addition to revealing how blacks, such as the slave Sam, internalize racial oppression through color prejudice against darker-skinned blacks versus lighter-skinned blacks. Brown sounds like Frederick Douglass at many times throughout the book because of his appeals to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Christianity as reasons why slavery is immoral. Moreover, the tragic mulatto women in Brown's novel here are so light-skinned they could pass for white, but even they are not safe from racial slavery. Brown likely uses these light-skinned women who are still bought and sold at auctions like other slaves to reveal to whites how racial slavery even impacts people who could be perceived as Anglo-Saxon or white by most whites, which would appeal to sympathetic whites and abolitionists in Britain and the United States since those with predominantly European ancestry were treated as poorly and enslaved like dark-skinned, full-blooded "Negroes." Jerome, a dark-skinned slave, and Clotelle, fall in love and are reunited after both escape slavery for Canada and France, respectively. Their marriage, of a dark-skinned black, and a quadroon, and Clotelle and Jerome's meeting with her white, slaveholder father in France, symbolizes racial reconciliation brought by love.

Since Brown's short novel is such an abolitionist piece, it tends to have stereotypical characters who don't seem to reflect real human beings. Nonetheless, its an interesting novel that connects the fictional characters with real events of the antebellum South, such as Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in the 1830s, the movement of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, the widespread rape and sexual molestation of women at the hands of white men, white women's envy and anger toward black men for 'stealing' their husbands, steamboats to traverse across the river, Canada as a safe haven for runaway blacks, etc. So Brown's novel definitely succeeds in capturing, for what were too many slaves, the harsh realities of life in this period. However, Brown's treatment of racial prejudice in 19th century is very flawed, for he argued that racial prejudice is wrought by slavery, and since Europe had so few slaves, racial prejudice was rare. This is why Jerome, a runaway slave from Mississippi was able to travel in Britain and continental Europe, find respectable employment as a clerk and even win over Clotelle's racist, American father. Obviously =racial prejudice in Europe against blacks existed, and Brown lets Europeans get away too easily, likely due to his sojourn in Britain after fleeing the United States because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Regardless, Brown rightly calls out Christianity and American democracy for moral hypocrisy, which he does so well with Mr. Wilson, a Christian minister from Connecticut who moves to the South and establishes a plantation. Wilson's daughter, Gertrude, opposes slavery and alleviates some of the oppressive conditions of slavery on her father's 'property,' but Clotelle and Jerome are still forced to flee the dehumanizing conditions that would not allow their love.

Despite the novel's rather predictable and cliched ending, it's still a tragedy because Clotelle's mother, Isabel, her aunt Marion's children, and her grandmother all die enslaved. Her father, a Virginia slaveholder, who in different versions of the novel is Thomas Jefferson (who had sexual relations with Sally, a black slave), is convinced to free his slaves by his daughter and her dark-skinned husband, Jerome. Liberation for the rest of the African-American population has not been achieved, and Clotelle's own cousins were sold into slavery in New Orleans because their white father forgot to sign documents freeing his wife, Marion. Thus, even those light-skinned, house slave blacks who escape brutal, field hand slavery though marriage or sexual relationships with white men, are still subject to the law of white supremacy. Clotelle's mother, Isabella, a beautiful light-skinned woman, was freed by Linwood and bears his child, but due to his status as a wealthy planter in Virginia, never marries her or acknowledges his daughter publicly. This culminates in the discovery of Isabella and Clotelle by Linwood's mother-in-law, who has the child sold into slavery and separated from the mother, who is sold to someone else. Isabella escapes Southern slavery by disguising herself as a man in the company of a dark-skinned slave mechanic, which allows her to reach the North. Her love for Clotelle brings her back to Virginia, where she is eventually discovered to be a black woman and chooses death in the Potomac over slavery. Her life is truly tragic because she never realizes that Henry Linwood, the white man she loves so much, never stands up for her or protects their child. That is why I find it very hard to believe Clotelle and her father's reunion in Europe decades later is so positive, because surely Clotelle should have preferred to distance herself from this 'father' who allowed the separation of Isabella and her daughter, making him culpable in the death of Isabella as well.

Overall, this is an interesting example of 19th century African-American literature. The first 'novel,' and setting up standards and common themes such as the tragic mulatto, Brown influenced abolitionist and American literature generally. His own background as a biracial slave in Kentucky who was a house slave makes his narrative more believable, especially regarding tension between field hands and domestic slaves, who used skin color and occupation to create slave hierarchies. Furthermore, Brown also foresaw the violent end of slavery in the United States, with articulate characters such as Jerome predicting retribution on Anglo-Saxon America if slavery does not die. Unfortunately, however, Brown's uncritical praise of European race relations and his rather dehumanizing characterization of Africa and African-born slaves does undermine the text. Like most 19th century American writers, there is an assumption of African cultural inferiority. As a result, one of the African-born runaways who leads the Southampton revolt with Nat Turner is disparaged. Interesting fact: Isabella's escape from slavery by dressing as a white man was likely inspired by a historical slave couple, who did the same thing.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

So I've finally read Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention and I cannot help but comment on it. It was immediately controversial and hated by fans of the mythic Malcolm X and black nationalists for suggesting (assuming in the eyes of black nationalists) that Malcolm X engaged in homosexual activity with an older white man while living in Boston (his petty crime days before going to prison and joining the Nation of Islam due to pressure from his brothers and a series of letters from Elijah Muhammad), could not satisfy his wife, Betty, that Malcolm and Betty had a troubled marriage with cheating on both sides, and Malcolm exaggerated his criminal activity prior to joining the Nation of Islam to follow the hustler/trickster tradition in African-American folklore as well as demonstrating to Alex Haley (the writer of the Autobiography) how far he had come thanks to the Nation of Islam's rehabilitation of ex-convicts. He also suggests that 1 of Malcolm's assassins is still out there, and that due to the FBI and NYPD's refusals to share their decades-long illegal wiretapping and records on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, the government could have also had a role in the assassination, especially due to the police's mishandling of the murder case.

One thing Marable succeeds well in the book is explaining the historical, cultural and political contexts of Malcolm's reinventions. Thus, Marable takes us into the world of Harlem in the 1940s-1960s, the Nation of Islam, the long history of black nationalism dating back to Edward Wilmot Blyden and Marcus Garvey, the Pan-Africanist movement, Nasserite socialism, decolonization, Cuban Revolution, Civil Rights Movement, and Cold War bipolar structure of international relations that defined this period. He also explains why Harlem developed in Black America's urban capital, due to the large black churches selling their property in lower Manhattan and moving to what was then cheaper property uptown in Harlem. Blacks came to Harlem because black churches brought large congregations uptown with them, including some of the leading churches in Harlem, such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Marable also shows how Harlem was always a hotbed of black political activity and agency through the black vote in support of leaders like Adam Clayton Powell, black protests and mobilization against unemployment, lack of housing, and police brutality (Malcolm X organized 2 anti-police brutality demonstrations that drew thousands of Harlemites) and blacks resistance to evictions during the hard times brought by the Great Depression and Harlem becoming one of the leading examples of urban blight. Malcolm X could not help becoming drawn into political activities, despite the Nation of Islam's apolitical, conservative stance on civil rights and dealing with the issues facing Black America. Thus, as Marable traces in his book, Malcolm X's split with Elijah Muhammad and the NOI was inevitable since he had been leaning toward political mobilization and revolution for the majority of blacks beginning in 1950s Harlem, while the NOI was urging blacks to not vote, fight segregation, and establish black capitalist enterprises instead. Of course Malcolm would also split with the corrupt NOI for its obvious lack of orthodox Islamic theology and practice as well, since Malcolm's trips abroad forced him to open his eyes to orthodox Islam, which does not define whites as devils, nor does it proclaim Elijah Muhammad as a prophet since Muslims believe Muhammad of Arabia was the final prophet.

Marable also gives the reader the long context of Islam and black nationalism throughout African-American political thought dating back to the 19th century. Since Muslims came over with other enslaved Africans to the Americas, Islam has always been part of the African-American experience. Furthermore, black nationalist groups like the Moorish Science Temple, established in the early 20th century, identified Black Americans as "Moors" whose real religion is Islam, something adopted by the NOI which claimed blacks were "Asiatic" of the tribe of Shabazz. Clearly, Black America's fascination with Islam has been around for a long time, and black Muslim groups have been significant in black urban areas throughout the 20th century. Indeed, the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement also made thousands of converts from Black Americans, including the famous jazz musician Art Blakey. The other black nationalist mass movement that had a large influence on African-Americans, including Malcolm X's family and the Nation of Islam, was Garvey's UNIA, or Universal Negro Improvement Association. According to Marable, the UNIA had nearly a million members at its zenith in the 1920s, and both Malcolm's parents were involved Garveyites. His mother, a light-skinned woman from Grenada who had lived in Montreal before meeting Earl Little, Malcolm's father, traveled to different cities to establish UNIA groups with Little, who had abandoned his wife and children in Georgia due to white threats and a failing marriage. Raised by black nationalist Garveyites urging black self-sufficiency, pride, and politics inevitably shaped Malcolm's own developing ideology, as well as influencing the Nation of Islam.

Interestingly, Marable argues that there is no evidence of Malcolm's father being murdered by whites when living in Michigan. Their house was burned for purchasing a home in a white area (Michigan, like many Northern states, had racial covenants on housing), but Malcolm's father's was killed as a result of being hit by a streetcar at night. He could've been pushed, but too little is known. Marable also provides evidence of Malcolm's parents' abusive, violent relationship. Earl Little and his wife quarreled all the time, and he definitely hit her and the couple's fighting impacted their children. Malcolm himself (influenced by the NOI's patriarchal, sexist notions of proper black female comportment) had a troubled marriage with Betty, trying to control her strong, independent-minded actions and demonizing women in his private conversations and sermons. His marriage with Betty is covered well by Marable, but since he relies on gossip and hearsay for prove of their infidelity and Malcolm's inability to please her sexually, one must remain skeptical. I believe Malcolm was patriarchal (though by the end of his life he had placed educated women at high positions in the Organization of Afro-American Unity, much to the chagrin of his loyalists who left the NOI with him), and his relationship with his wife suffered from that because she was a fiercely independent woman who had to raise their children alone because Malcolm put his work for the NOI and later, his MMI and OAAU, ahead of his family. Part of the reason I say Marable's suggestions for the couple's marital woes is problematic is due to the lack confirming evidence beyond a few writings, statements from Betty and others, and problematic interviews with people like Louis Farrakhan, who believes that Malcolm X still harbored feelings for Evelyn Williams, a woman he had met in Boston who he proposed to before proposing to Betty. Anything Malcolm's rivals from the NOI say about him and his love life must be questioned since people like Farrakhan saw Malcolm's prominence in the NOI and prominence after leaving the NOI as a threat to the group. Furthermore, one must also question the possibilities of Malcolm X ever having engaged in any homosexual activity with Lennon, the white man in Boston who employed Malcolm during this period of petty crime (he was involved in a series of home burglaries with a black friend and 2 white women, who betrayed him at the trial and got off easy because of their whiteness). It's possible Malcolm did do some non-physical thing with Lennon that helped him get off (pouring talcum powder on his body, I believe), but there's no irrefutable evidence Malcolm did besides the deconstruction of the Autobiography that reveals Malcolm made up another person who did do that.

The deconstruction of Alex Haley's Autobiography is important and one of Marable's strengths. Recognizing that Haley was  a liberal Republican, and Malcolm X was fabricating and exaggerating aspects of his past, mainly the "Detroit Red" criminal/hustler, makes it clear that Haley's book overlooked factual details of Malcolm X's youth. The book also fails to highlight Malcolm's developing political ideology and religious beliefs (orthodox Islam) so we are deprived of the ever-changing, humanity of Malcolm X and his family relations. So the Autobiography lacks Malcolm's newer developments in the last 2 years of his life (1964-65) in addition to not providing a 'factual' account of his youth and criminal past as a burglar, drug dealer, and pimp. Unfortunately, Marable's reliance on unverifiable data from questionable sources weakens his book, and his own lack of objective lens becomes palpable. His disagreement with the NOI and its theology becomes very obvious, though it is understandable given the absurdity of aspects of NOI's theology, Elijah Muhammad's adultery and bastard children, in addition to the Fruit of Islam (the paramilitary wing of the NOI) acting thuggish and committing murders and physical violence. Moreover, Marable points out some of the inconsistencies and contradictions of Malcolm X's speeches, actions, and beliefs on the mainstream civil rights movement: Marable correctly insists Malcolm recognized the importance of voting and the power of the black vote in elections, but also urged blacks to defend themselves with arms, which distanced him from the mainstream civil rights movement and its "Uncle Tom" leaders like Rustin, MLK, etc. Malcolm X also continued to support black economic nationalism while critiquing capitalism and speaking with leftist/socialist organizations, which Marable finds contradictory. Malcolm publicly attacked capitalism and praised the socialistic systems adopted by many Asian and African nations after decolonization, but his belief in black economic well-being and independence is capitalism. Marable also loses his objective lens when attacking Malcolm X's inaccurate portrayal of African-American culture as completely destroyed by slavery, something he picked up in the NOI that saw blacks as the Original People who lost their religion and culture through slavery. Some of Marable's criticism is obviously valid and should be discussed to illumine the shortcomings of Malcolm X's beliefs and black nationalism more generally, but Marable, a black socialist progressive, ovesteps the boundaries of an objective biography by going into such precise detail the contradictions and weaknesses of Malcolm X's Pan-Africanism, black nationalism, etc. Because of his own political affiliations, it becomes clear to me that he would have wanted Malcolm to continue shifting more and more to the socialist left, as well as creating procedures for democratic decision making in the MMI and OAAU so that the organizations could operate without Malcolm. Marable criticizes Malcolm X for 'anti-Semitism' as well.

Overall, Marable's biography is a acceptable book. One could argue that is does not really offer anything new besides suggestions from questionable sources, but it does successfully dismantle the image of a 'heroic' Malcolm who symbolizes an ideal black masculinity. Malcolm was human, and like all humans, full of contradictions and flaws that none of us can escape. Malcolm's troubling relationship with his wife, his abandonment of his brother Reginald who was kicked out of the NOI, and his meeting with white supremacist groups under Elijah Muhammad's orders demonstrate this reality, which is overlooked by idealizing historical figures. Marable also does a good job elucidating changes his Malcolm's beliefs and problems with the NOI that forced him to leave, since Malcolm had already strayed with the NOI during his speeches and mobilizations against police brutality in Harlem, LA, and scathing criticisms of Kennedy, Johnson, and the American political system that is incapable of changing itself. Of course by endorsing voting and calling for voter drives and education training like SNCC and other civil rights groups, Malcolm was leaning toward the mainstream civil rights movement and contradicted his belief that the American two-party system is incapable of reform. This book is important for white people though, taught to see Malcolm as anti-white, racist, and violent, when Malcolm was about self-defense, humanity of black folks, internationalizing civil rights as human rights to connect it with Pan-Africanist goals and Third World liberation. White readers will come away from this book with a more nuanced understanding of Malcolm, who was not developing into an MLK by the end of his life, as some whites and blacks saw him, but remaining a black nationalist urging guerrilla warfare as a necessary tactic for decolonization/anti-imperialism in the Third World, black political organizations in the US and Africa collaborating to bring human rights violations against Black Americans to the United Nations, and, as Marable himself states, a fundamental restructuring of power and wealth in the United States with recognition of the importance of voting in speeches like "The Ballot or the Bullet." Malcolm remained wholly unique, and a great speaker whose rhetorical genius, influenced by his jazz-based riffing and ghetto background, made him the speaker for poor and working black Negroes. His legacy lives on in the Black Power Movement, hip-hop, the hustler/trickster traditions present in gangsta rap, and black nationalist organizations. There also exists a photograph of him and Billie Holiday, which was given to Alex Haley for the  Autobiography project Malcolm and Haley were working on. The confusing decisions made by Malcolm and his bodyguards at his last speech at the Audubon Ballroom, in addition to the police and FBI's lack of proper attention and care of the assassination, will forever complicate who was the guilty party in the murder. Finally, Malcolm's travels abroad in Africa and the Middle East introduced him to the ummah, African political elites, and African-American expatriates in Accra, Ghana, such as Shirley Du Bois and Maya Angelou. Surprisingly, Marable is not as critical of Malcolm's naivete on racism and color prejudice in the Muslim world, and the main reason Malcolm was treated so well in the Middle East and Egypt is because of his reputation as a black Muslim leader in the US. If he had known about the Muslim government of Sudan's civil war with the South, surely his understanding of Islam and its color-blind theology is contradicted in practice.

Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying

Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying, a book I first read in high school, is a powerful tale of the lives and deaths of Danticat's father and uncle. Raised in Haiti by Uncle Joseph until her mother and father returned to take Danticat and her brother to New York, Danticat's painful, depressing tale serves as a constant reminder of the problems in U.S. immigration and American foreign policy in regards to Haiti. Danticat's grandfather, Nozial, was a caco who fought against the U.S. occupation of Haiti, and Danticat's uncle and father inherited that opposition to the United States, which intervened in Haitian affairs to support dictators like Duvalier, to support the coup against Aristide in 1991 and 2004, and how the United Nations' MINUSTAH contributes to the destabilization of Haiti, supported by the U.S. as well. Thus, Danticat's family history/tribute to her 2 fathers serves as a constant reminder of the fact that immigrants don't want to leave their countries for the US. They are forced to do so under severe threats, poverty, political repression and violence. Indeed, for many Haitians, like Danticat's father's family, the US symbolizes an imperial, white power that aids in the oppression of Haitians, yet Haitians immigrate to the US to escape poverty and repression in their own homeland. As Uncle Joseph says, however, exile life is not for everyone, since someone has to stay behind to receive remittances, take care of relatives, and rebuild the nation.

Danticat's grandfather, Nozial, fought against American occupying forces that came from the Jim Crow South. In fact, Uncle Joseph told Edwidge that he once came upon American soldiers kicking the head of a dead Haitian man like a soccer ball to each other. Uncle Joseph was warned to never leave the small village near Leogane on main roads because American soldiers often conscripted Haitian peasants for forced-labor on public projects, such as roads, bridges, and dams. The use of violence by American troops, their racist treatment of peasants, and the new, US-trained Haitian military established on the US left Haiti in 1934 ensured a legacy of imperial, dehumanizing American policy toward Haiti. Danticat's family also focuses on the persistence of American imperialism and racism against Haitians in later periods, such as the chaotic fall of Baby Doc in 1986 and the American-backed military forces that ousted Aristide in 1991 and 2004. These two periods saw the notable decline in Uncle Joseph's Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Bel Air, which became a hotbed of gang activity and UN soldiers (MINUSTAH) shootouts that caught unarmed civilians in the crossfire. Indeed, MINUSTAH agents used Uncle Joseph's church in Bel Air to shoot 'gangs' but actually kill civilians as well. The Haitian police and MINUSTAH's inability to protect civilian life and property forces Uncle Joseph to leave Haiti in 2004, flying to Miami.

Once in Miami, Danticat criticizes immigration policy, especially in regards to Haitians, who are denied political asylum. Even though her uncle had legitimate reasons to fear for his life since gangsters in Bel Air promised to kill him, US immigration in Florida imprisoned Uncle Joseph and his son Maxo in Krome, where Uncle Joseph was deprived of some of his medication despite having a valid passport, visa and poor health. Her uncle dies as a result of deplorable and inhumane treatment at the Krome and hospital, where he didn't see a doctor until 24 hours after being sent to the emergency room. Like other Haitians placed in detention centers like Krome, her uncle is shackled like a slave, teeth are analyzed to determine age (like slave auctions) and her Uncle is unjustly imprisoned and treated like a lying criminal when he has a seizure. Immigration policy regarding Haitians undoubtedly follows a racist double standard of denying asylum to blacks, but Cubans and even Hondurans and Nicaraguans receive politcal asylum despite chaotic conditions in Haiti in 2004 and later years. Clearly, American policies regarding Haiti ultimately reinforce racist, dehumanization of Haitian people, such as Uncle Joseph, who had no intention of staying in the US permanently.

In the end, Danticat's novel is about the promise of  a better life that is illusory in the immigrant experience. Racism, low-wage jobs, deteriorating cities and schools, and the perpetuation of destructive American policies that further the destabilization of Haiti are the realities of immigrant experience. Though leaving Haiti, Haiti always remains in the hearts and minds of the immigrants, such as Danticat's father, Miracin. Haitians can love the United States with all their hearts, but the obvious role of the US in supporting the poverty and political chaos makes it highly ironic that the nation that represents 'liberty' and a safe haven continues to make their homelands unsafe, impoverished states. Danticat's father and uncle demonstrate this fact well, since her uncle is unable to leave Haiti permanently and her father's life is based on supporting his Haitian relatives trapped behind.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun

Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal one dead white person.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun is a powerful narrative of the Biafran War that surpasses the factual details of the case, as all great fiction does. Part history, part love story, Adichie proves her skills as a writer in crafting a book over 500 pages long but so addicting one cannot put it down. I finished the novel in 2 days due to my voracious appetite for more of her writing. Her style is simple, sweet, and effective. In many ways she is the 21st century Chinua Achebe, the famous Igbo writer of the 20th century, best known for Things Fall Apart. Her narrative, rooted in the 'facts' of the Biafran War, such as the corruption, ethnic conflict, colonial manipulation and starvation of the Biafran masses, tells me more about this war's impact on human lives than any history I could find. And believe me, I've read and seen the pictures of starving children, since the Biafran War of 1967-1970 was everywhere in the international press due to the blockades ordered by Gowon in Nigeria.

Unfortunately, I believe that many unfamiliar with Nigerian history and culture will be unfamiliar with some of the background to the conflict. Adichie wisely chose to begin the story in the early 1960s and avoided giving too much historical background, since the novel would have likely become boring and academic for those unfamiliar with the historical context. Likewise, Adichie's novel focuses on the Igbo perspective, and through the Englishman Richard Churchill, a white man's perspective on Nigeria. It would be nice to read about the Biafran conflict from the perspective of the Muslim North and the non-Igbo minorities within Biafra who worked with the Nigerian state to defeat Biafra, whose flag included half of a yellow sun, hence the title of the novel. The only northern, Muslim Hausa character to play a role in the novel is the wealthy prince, Mohammed, a former lover of Olanna, the Igbo daughter of a Chief who abused his position as a tax collector to amass wealth and purchased property in Lagos, where he and his wife live lavishly. Olanna's former beau still loves her, and helps her escape Kano when the Hausa begin to massacre Igbos after the Igbo led a coup against the Northern-controlled central Nigerian government. In response, the Igbos of southeastern Nigeria, under Colonel Ojukwu, secede from Nigeria, which had only been 'independent' of Britain since 1960. Although the Muslim North and South of Nigeria were never close prior to the unification of the two regions under British colonial rule in 1914, and even then the two regions remained distinct and separate as Southern elites received colonial education and prepared to take over civil administration in the central state, the Igbos had traveled to the North and Lagos to start businesses, purchase property, etc. Indeed, at one point in the novel, the Igbos are referred to as the Jews of Nigeria. 

After the Igbos declared independence, it was inevitable their little republic would face war with Nigeria because of Biafra's oil and the need to maintain colonial borders established by European powers. Indeed, Biafra was never recognized by the imperial powers, and Nigeria received aid and arms from Britain, the Soviet Union and some African countries to force Biafra into submission. It also helped that Biafra's military was corrupt and exploiting its own people in the name of Igbo nationalism and autonomy, commandeering cars, conscripting 'idle' men such as Ugwu, and lying to the people when they knew Nigerian forces were about to defeat their forces and take another Biafran town. The Biafran propaganda and misinformation to their people worked well, since so many people, including Olanna and her Igbo professor husband, Odenigbo, felt cheated when a ceasefire was declared. Ojukwu fled, lying to Biafra on the radio. Ugwu, who was conscripted later in the novel, initially desired, at least partially, to serve in the military to fight for Igbo independence. However, after serving, he experiences the military's corruption, dehumanization of its own soldiers, who are like sheep, and even participates in the rape of a Biafran woman working at a bar with his fellow soldiers. While serving as a soldier, Ugwu comes across Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The symbolism is so obvious, that the Biafran soldiers are akin to slaves, exploited and abused to carry out injustice while supposedly 'doing the right thing' by being patriotic. Ugwu decides to name his own story about the Biafran War after Douglass's Narrative.

Adichie's white character, Richard, is fully developed as one of the main characters (Ugwu, Olanna, and Richard are the main characters whose point of view is explained by the omniscient third person narrator). Richard Churchhill, though on the side of Biafra and in love with Kainene, Olanna's twin sister, remains a white man and part of the former colonial elite regardless of his ability to speak Igbo and serve Biafra with journalistic accounts of heroism, suffering and resilience of the Igbo peoples. His fellow white residents of Nigeria display astounding racism and pro-imperialist beliefs, including Susan, Richard's lover before Kainene. Susan sees Nigerians as violent, savages who are ungrateful despite all the 'civilization' the British brought to Nigeria. Two American journalists Richard shows around Biafra during the War are likewise racist, paternalistic fools who see Nigerians (and all Africans) as savage, starving peoples with the mind of children. Indeed, the Americans care more about dead whites than any of the thousands of dead and dying blacks. This unspoken rule of Western journalism taints all Western accounts of war and deaths in Africa, since any and all whites remaining in those African regions where people are dying are either rescued instantaneously or memorialized in Western newspapers and television news forever. The dying, malnourished Biafran children, suffering from kwashiokor and other deficiencies, become objects for Western journalists to achieve name recognition and become famous. The Red Cross and other relief agencies and churches, despite coming with the right intentions, also reinforce white supremacy and abuse their power. Father Marcel, a priest at the relief center in Orlu, run by Kainene, raped starving young girls until  Kainene discovers the truth and chases him out. 

Richard likes to see himself as Biafran, as African, not European. But his whiteness and the inherent privileges that confers upon him makes it impossible to escape his whiteness in Nigeria/Biafra. He can speak Igbo, study the Igbo-Ukwu civilization (and still express shock that these people had any civilization!), marry an Igbo woman, and endeavor to write about the story of Biafra, but it will never be his story. Ugwu ultimately must tell the tale, since Richard's whiteness makes him forever privileged. He came to Nigeria to find a home, and to write the one brilliant novel that will make him famous, but finds neither. Even when he 'helps' the Biafran cause by writing articles that will get international press, the only reason his stories get so much attention in the West is because he's a white man. Colonel Madu, who asks him to write in the first place, never saw him as anything but a white man who will never understand Igbos of Africans. Although life does not end well for him with the disappearance and presumed death of Kainene, Richard's whiteness will ensure him a life of privilege and comfort in Nigeria. As previously mentioned, his fascination with the Igbo-Ukwu art that dates back to the "time of the Vikings" is rooted in a disbelief, or shock that black Africans could produce magnificent pieces of art, practice long distance trade. Thus, despite his attempts to avoid paternalistic racism, Richard nevertheless succumbs to it. 

Adichie also criticizes those Nigerians/Biafrans, who in the name of nationalism, black power, and progress abuse their power to copy whites and mimic British styles in dress, 'culture' and taste. Olanna and Kainene's parents, for example, have to buy everything European, essentially buying into the material excess of European cultures. Other Nigerian/Biafran elites act similarly, endeavoring to be like the former and current British colonizers, who persist in their racist beliefs and treatment of blacks. The Western ways of Nigerian elites is also sharply contrasted with the lower-class population, who are domestics, peasants, and villagers whose traditions, ways of life, and even dietary patterns are vastly different. The new black elite, despite professing to support and come from the masses, turn their backs to the religious beliefs of Igbo peasants, for example, as Odenigbo does with Igbo beliefs he calls superstitions. The new elites are no more than black skins with white masks, blacks masquerading as whites because they ape European colonial domination, divide and rule tactics, and condescension if not outright hatred for the lower classes.

Adichie's novel here is a masterpiece. She explores issues of gender, love, colonialism, race, and national identity in Nigeria in deep, meaningful ways with a simple prose that is easy for anyone unfamiliar with Nigeria or West Africa to follow. Igbo phrases and words are used throughout the novel, reminding the reader that most of the dialogue is in fact in Igbo between different characters in southeastern Nigeria. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and multiple iconic events of the 1960s to put the Biafran war in a much larger context of decolonization, apartheid in South Africa and white-rule in Rhodesia, the civil rights movement in the United States, and a world in the process of taking the flood in the tide in the affairs of men. Nothing happens in isolation, thus, the Biafran War is part of human history, not solely Nigerian history. The universality of Adichie's novel is why it's so important to read literature from around the world, since all human 'nations' interact with others. Furthermore, one would hope this novel increases foreign knowledge and interest in Nigeria, one of African's most important economies, and the most populous nation in Africa. The effects of the Biafran war linger, and its causes are still replayed in the ethnic/regional conflict for control over the central goverment. People in the Niger Delta are still oppressed by a central, national government that colludes with foreign oil companies instead of providing for infrastructure and funding for government programs to battle poverty. Moreover, the conflict between the Muslim North and mostly Christian South continues to divide the regions. Nigeria currently has an agreement where the North and South switch off leaders of the central government, so the new leader is Christian, but the previous was a Muslim. 

Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker

"I'm sharing with you Voltaire's words," he said. I tell you that in Europe they eat sugar with our blood in it and you mock me with a colonial title."

Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker is a fascinating look on post-Duvalier Haiti's unforgettable ties to the Duvaliers across land and sea. Haitians and Haitian-American characters from East Flatbush, Brooklyn to Port-au-Prince find themselves irrevocably united by the shared repression caused by Papa Doc and Baby Doc. The 'dew breaker' in the novel, now an old man, was a fat macoute who now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Anne, and his daughter, Ka. Ka, from Egyptian mythology, is the life spirit for her parents, whose marriage resulted from great tragedy. Ka's father lives a life of deep remorse and shame, hiding his identity and past from Haitians he crosses path with to avoid recognition by former victims of his torture in 1960s Port-au-Prince. Danticat's novel lacks a singular framework and endeavors to demonstrate how one individual's life impacts everyone around him or her by switching between different Haitian characters in Miami, Leogane, Port-au-Prince, a small Haitian village in the mountains, and New York City.

One thing that struck me right away is the intertextuality between this novel and Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew. Masters is a classic in Haitian literature and Edwidge  Danticat is very familiar with Haitian literature, especially Jacques Stephen Alexis and Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Indeed, Danticat helped translate one of Alexis's novels and wrote the foreward to Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness. Roumain's novel obviously has dew in the title, with the dew symbolizing life, something Danticat uses in her own novel. Although Danticat's novel is not part of the peasant novel tradition in Haitian literature, she uses characters of peasant origin who suffer, triumph, and grow during and after the fall of the Duvalier. There's also a theme of universality and entwined fate in Danticat's novel that links it to Masters, which is essentially about the need for the peasants of a small Haitian village to overcome a feud between two families to establish a coumbite that will overcome petty differences between individuals to provide collective salvation by irrigating land and producing enough food to feed all stomachs. In addition, some names from Roumain's novel reappear in Danticat, such as Dormeus and Bienaime.

Danticat's The Dew Breaker also fuses elements of oral tradition, peasant culture, Vodou, and Egyptian mythology to create her Haitian world. It's a world full of references to funeral singers, Haitian folk music like "Brother Timonie," Haitian barbers and beauticians in Flatbush, Brooklyn who share their world with a myriad of other Caribbean and American people of African descent. Jamaicans, African-Americans, Colombians, and whites live in the heterogeneity of New York City while Haitians still retain their own ethnic community in churches, businesses, and newspapers. Ka, daughter of a former murderer and torturer, is an artist whose sculpture of her father instigates her father's confession. Her name's allusions to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Haitian Vodou also reinforce the notion of a mutual origin of ancient Egypt and Haitians, which also connects Haitians to other peoples of African descent. Danticat's recreation of Haiti in 1967 and 1986 also provides a portrait of a society in two vastly different states: compliant and submissive to the totalitarian Papa Doc and the jubilation and murder of macoutes by the Haitian people who recognized their collective power by forcing Baby Doc to flee the country. During the chaos that ensued, Haitians marched through the streets of Port-au-Prince, killed and burned their former torturers, and took over privately-owned water pipes.

By taking the reader back to Haiti in these previous decades and the present in their American lives, Danticat reminds the reader that Haitian immigrants will never sever their bonds to the island, even if their worst humanitarian crises forced them to flee to the United States. Everyone is connected perpetually to their own homeland, ancestors, and their neighbors. Thus, the novel's characters are forever tied to Haiti, even Ka, who does not know how her parents met and how they could love each other. Her father, who tortured and killed her mother's stepbrother, found her mother, Anne, in the streets of Port-au-Prince just before meeting him. Anne's stepbrother, a Baptist preacher urging the sleeping masses of Haiti to rise and remove Papa Doc's iron grip on their lives, is a thinly-veiled reference to the Aristide, a Catholic priest who led the resistance to Baby Doc and later become the first democratically elected president of Haiti to only be deposed twice, IN 1991 and 2004. Anne's stepbrother is also an allusion to Manuel, the peasant protagonist of Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew who succeeds in liberating his village through self-sacrifice to end the feud and convince them to use the coumbite to become masters of the dew, masters of their own lives in the present rather than wait for a paradisaical afterlife.

The Sexual Politics of Meat: 9 Feminist-Vegan Points from Carol J. Adams

 On Monday, I went with some friends to UW-Milwaukee to hear Carol J. Adams speak on the intersections of speciesism and sexism. It was a random, impromptu decision, but I enjoyed it. Here are the main points of her presentation:

1. Meat-eating is associated with virility, masculinity. Meat eating societies gain mail identification by their choice of food.

2. Animals are the absent referents in the consumption of meat. The function of the absent referent is to allow for the moral abandonment of a being.

3. A process of objectification/fragmentation/consumption connects women and animals in a patriarchal culture. The visual joke that substitutes one fragmented object for another can be found throughout our culture.

4. As an ecofeminist theory, it recognizes the environmental costs of animalizing protein. All protein is from plants; animalized protein requires that a living animal process the protein and then be killed. Meat production continues to water pollution, climate change, habit fragmentation and desertification of arable land.

5. Female animals are the absent referents in meat eating and in the consumption of dairy/eggs. There would be no meat eating if female animals weren't constantly made pregnant. Female animals are forced to produce feminized protein (plant protein produced through the abuse of the reproductive cycle of female animals i.e., dairy & eggs).

6. Women are animalized/animals are sexualized and feminized

7. Anthropornography naturalizes sexual traffficking in & use of women.

8. Carnophallogocentrism & the construction of the (male-identified) subject. A term coined by French theorist Derrida in an attempt to name the primary social, linguistic and material practices that go into becoming a subject within the West; Derrida was showing how explicit carnivorism lies at the heart of classical notions of male subjectivity.

9. Resistance through a feminist ethics of care. Feminist ethics of care is a political ethic: it understands that ideology influences how we choose whom to care about. It also helps us recognize how images/representations are working.

Toni Morrison's Tar Baby

He thought he was rescuing her from Valerian, meaning them, the aliens, the people who in a mere three hundred years had killed a world millions of years old. From Micronesia to Liverpool, from Kentucky to Dresden, they killed everything they touched including their own coastlines, their own hills, and forests. And even when some of them built something nice and human, they grew vicious protecting it from their own predatory children, let alone an outsider.

Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, like Song of Solomon, uses African American oral tradition to tell a modern story that, like oral traditions, is participatory in its final meaning. Tar Baby is also the first and only Toni Morrison novel that has white main characters, whose point of view and dilemmas are shown by the narrator. This is also the only Morrison novel with an international setting, in the French Caribbean, Paris, and the United States. The fact that an African American women writes about wealthy white Americans buying and building property in the Caribbean inevitably brings issues of race, colonialism, American imperialism, and slavery to the forefront of the novel, which also uses elements of the fictional Caribbean island of Dominique’s African-derived oral traditions in juxtaposition with the African American tar baby, a doll constructed out of tar by a farmer to prevent Br’er Rabbit from stealing vegetables from his farm. The novel is also a love story, a story of love uniting an educated, black model with ties in Paris and New York with a lower-class, beautiful black man from small-town Florida who rejects equating life with work. Their cultural and class clashes are seemingly transcended by their romantic relationship that culminates in flight from the ‘plantation’ of Valerian Street, a wealthy, elderly white man living in the Caribbean in a loveless marriage and his two black American servants whose niece, the model Jadine, was educated because of his financial support. The romantic clash between Jadine and Son, the black crewman who jumped ship and washes up outside the home of Valerian demonstrates the clash between the Western, educated capitalist system and a community-oriented, spiritual and earth-preserving philosophy that rejects unnecessary growth and identifying one’s work with one’s life.

            The novel’s Caribbean setting provides multiple opportunities for Morrison to critique colonialism and ways blacks from the Caribbean and the continental United States perceive each other. The white, elite couple leaves Philadelphia for this Caribbean isolation, but does so in such a way that destroys the ecosystem of the small island, Isle des Chevaliers, which is nearby the French Caribbean Dominique’s city, Queen of France. The ‘natives,’ whose names are never learned by Valerian, his wife Margaret, Jadine, or Jadine’s aunt and uncle, black servants who are hardly in a better standing than the Caribbean blacks, are paid a pittance and reduced to doing all the work considered beneath Sydney and Ondine. These Caribbean workers are also dehumanized by assumptions that all the women of the island are named Mary, and Gideon, who mostly works in the yard and maintaining the sumptuous Caribbean home, is referred to as Yardman by the Americans. The Caribbean blacks are thus a cheap source of labor for white capital, and considered disposable at all times. Now, the Caribbean workers resist by stealing apples from Valerian in order to subsist, but are unjustly fired by Valerian, who does not bother to tell Sydney and Ondine. His two black servants, his employees for several decades, are also dehumanized and objectified by the Streets, whose racism becomes quite apparent in their references to Ondine as a ‘nigger bitch’ for questioning the authority and decisions of their white patrons and employers. Thus, the African-American workers are considered just as lowly as the Caribbean natives, but due to ethnic differences their increased comfort and longtime service are not restricted to sleeping outside of the house or becoming nameless objects. The Valerian estate undoubtedly becomes a plantation, which, given the history of the Caribbean, has resonance with Afro-Caribbean and black Americans’ history of racial slavery. The whites still control Dominique, which remains part of France. Whites from Guadeloupe and the wealthy area of Queen of France control the political and economic system, and the only jobs for blacks are manual labor, service-oriented occupations, cleaners, domestics, cabdrivers, and even modern-day mammies for white families, such as Therese Foucault, aunt of Gideon. She, who has ‘magic breasts’ that still give milk, spent most of her life breastfeeding white babies, which unquestionably proves how slavery as a social system is perpetuated by the maintenance of white supremacy. Furthermore, black Americans also share this same oppression and relegation to the colonial peripheral of the United States economy, as Jadine’s aunt and uncle, or Son demonstrate in their low-paying occupations and exploitation in the military, shipping industry, or domestic service.

            Many of the blacks internalize this oppression and limit themselves according to white expectations of black achievement. Sydney and Ondine, for example, cannot respect the blacks of the Caribbean as equals due to their internalization of white American definitions of civilization and culture. They also internalize black self-hatred at times in their perception of Son, the dark-skinned black American who is found in the closet of their white woman, Margaret. Son becomes a dirty nigger to Margaret, Jadine, and her aunt and uncle. Gradually, each of the characters learns to see Son as a human being rather than a gorilla, as Margaret once refers to him. Nevertheless, despite Son’s contributions to Valerian’s greenhouse and Jadine’s happiness, slowly eroding her disdain for uneducated, darker blacks, Valerian only sees him as another black person indebted to him. To varying degrees the other black Americans accept this, except for Son, who attributes the destruction of the world and loss of respect for humanity to the expansion of white colonialism, which has destroyed large parts of the Caribbean. Jadine, on the other hand, is grateful to her aunt and uncle’s paternalistic boss for funding her education, and she even defends him against Sydney and Ondine though they were the ones who adopted her after her parents’ death. Therefore, Jadine’s assumptions of white cultural and epistemological superiority, expressed in rationalism, science, and endeavors to reduce reality to measurements and numbers, influences her own life because she cannot accept Son’s refusal to identify his life with an occupation or seek the white man’s education. Her relatives also become victimized by becoming dependent on their wealthy white boss, or slaveholder, who also becomes dependent on them for his basic survival, revealing the novel’s Hegelian master-slave dialect of human relations in Caribbean slave societies.

            The Caribbean provides a source of liberation to counter the destructive powers of post-Enlightenment Western hegemony. Since the Caribbean is one of the first sites of modernity, in which slavery, supported by capitalism, technological innovation, the birth of scientific racism, and regimented, exploited labor forces, becomes a product of Enlightenment Europe, it also represents one of the first regions of the world to resist the brutal system of racial slavery. Through the Haitian Revolution, slave resistance, black political movements demanding autonomy, and a counterculture of modernity rooted in African-derived religious systems and beliefs are one way of accepting the benefits of modernity while attempting to eliminate the negatives. In this novel, the Caribbean residents’ belief that the first African slaves who saw the island went blind and found their freedom, but roam the island at night to free other slaves becomes a powerful metaphor for self-liberation through discovery of one’s identity. These blind slaves’ spirits inhabit the remaining forests of the island, and like historical maroon societies, defiantly fight for their freedom by any means possible. The magic realism of the novel becomes apparent as well in the power of the natural world in addition to the spirits of blind slaves to protect and liberate those still shackled by Western European colonialism and racial slavery. For those unable to open their eyes to alternative modes of living and understanding the world, the magic does not manifest. Ultimately, Son must choose his own fate at the novel’s conclusion, either choosing the blind African spirits who will free him of his love for Jadine, who “has forgotten her ancient properties” (305) or running past them to the home of Valerian to discover the whereabouts of Jadine in Paris.

            Of course Morrison also has feminist critiques of patriarchal societal practices and views, but balances it with a powerful racial background that shows both are inseparable. Jadine may want to be transnational, educated, elite and black, but something in those aforementioned characteristics will clash unavoidably. Her refusal to accept the old ways of her aunt and uncle, to accept Son’s lack of interest in formal, regimented labor because of her whitewashed education prevents her from becoming a black woman connected to her roots. Morrison’s focus on the natural wonder of the world and her resistance to the phenomena she experiences, such as the trees that hug her on the island, and the power of dreams, she becomes reluctant to continue to make her relationship with Son work. When stuck in the hard, sticky place, she is unable to escape the white control and definition of intelligence and the meaning of life. Once again, this novel is quite nuanced and through the exotic locale and characters, Morrison connects the colonial and slavery experiences of black Americans with Caribbean blacks, and identifies mutual sources of liberation in oral traditions and histories. It is also the only Morrison novel with white characters, and beautiful prose to describe the very living natural world of the Caribbean.

Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada

 

The devil's country home. That's what the South is. It's where the devil goes to rest after he's been about the world wearying the hunted and the haunted. This is the land of the hunted and haunted. This is where he comes. The devil sits on the porch of his plantation; He's dressed up like a gentleman and sitting on a white porch between some white columns.

Flight to Canada is the most difficult Ishmael Reed novel I have read. It's a satire of 19th century America, slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Civil War, and the planter elites of the antebellum South. The novel also pokes fun at the assumptions of many that slaves who escaped the South for the North or Canada suddenly lived in paradise. As Raven Quickskill, the black poet and protagonist of the novel finds out, Canada ain't all it's cracked up to be. He finds racism everywhere, North, South and Canada. Thus, the slave narrative never ends with escaping Southern slavery, but continues in lives of turmoil and struggle against white racism around the 19th century world. Canada is far from a noble, safe haven for black runaways. Now, this novel also shares many similarities to other Reed novels, such as Yellow Back Radio Broke Down in that technology from the 20th century is present in 1860s United States, such as television, film, helicopters, yachts, and other wonders of 20th century technology. So the novel has a lot of anachronisms as well as several literary, historical, and political references pertaining to abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate states, Captain Kidd, the usurpation of Native American lands, and William Wells Brown, a famous black abolitionist and writer. So this novel is very dense, and for those unfamiliar with the history and literary allusions, it may be too avant-garde for some.

A large part of the novel is dedicated to satirical looks at Southern planter aristocracy through the white planter, Arthur Swille, and the ineptness and desire to recreate feudal Europe with black slaves/serfs and romanticized gallantries. Reed also pokes fun at Abraham Lincoln and his reasons for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and his own extreme racism towards blacks. Of course Harriet Beecher Stowe and the suffragettes, who were quite racist and exploitative of black slavery, are also attacked. Swille's wife is a lazy, Southern belle suffragette who lives off her husband's slaves. Stowe, who got the idea for Uncle Tom's Cabin from black writer Josiah Henson's autobiography, only wrote the novel to purchase a nice home and silk, refusing to share some of her profits with the blacks who gave her the material necessary for her writings. So once again, whites, even abolitionist alllies, perpetuate racism and the dehumanization of African-Americans. Thus, in many ways this novel is a tribute to those forgotten black voices of abolition such as Josiah Henson and William Wells Brown, who wrote the first novel ever penned by an African-American.

Flight to Canada's portrayal of Native Americans is also worth mentioning. Quaw Quaw, educated at Columbia University paid for by her pirate husband, who killed her father and brother, represents the Native American  whitewashed by Anglo-American values and civilization despite losing her own identity and family as a result. Reed also uses the stereotype of an Uncle Tom for Uncle Robin, who actually takes advantage of his privileged position to gradually poison Arthur Swille and change his will, leaving himself the Swille Castle and plantation after the Civil War. Indeed, as Uncle Robin himself notes near the novel's conclusion, he ultimately wins against Swille without direct confrontation whereas Nat Turner is dead and gone for his valiant effort. So the trickster motif in African-American literature is self-evident in Uncle Robin, who 'toms' for white folks but is the one ultimately playing a trick on them despite appearing servile. 

I suppose the most meaningful messages from Flight to Canada is to not distort American history into portraying whites as saviors of black slaves, to recognize the agency of blacks in dismantling slavery as a social, political and economic system, and that freedom is ultimately a state of mind, not a geographic locale. It's a short novel whose multifaceted allusions sometimes escape me, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. Three stars out of five.

Great Book to Read: Antenor Firmin's The Equality of the Races

19th century Haitian intellectual, lawyer, diplomat and anthropologist's The Equality of the Races, published in 1885, is a powerful rebuttal to Gobineau's scientific racism the dominant views on black racial inferiority which still influence the 21st century. Firmin treatise on racial equality includes an analysis of world history which gives numerous examples of contributions to human development and civilization by those designated as black, focusing on Egypt. Thus, his work is interesting for demonstrating once again the long history of blacks in the United States and Haiti correctly identifying Egypt as a product of African cultures of blacks. He also backs up his statements with evidence from Egypt, quotations from classical sources such as Herodotus, and French Egyptologists of the century who actually concurred on the black origins of Kemet. 

Although published in 1885, it may sound like quite a few contemporary Afrocentric tracts and surprisingly, at times like Martin Bernal's Black Athena. So the so-called lies and therapeutic history of modern Afrocentrists has a long history going back centuries. One of these days I'll have to get my hands on this book instead of just reading reviews and the google book preview.

Thoughts on Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent

“…despite his long stay in the land of Descartes, since he had been raised in this country like the rest of us with the same knowledge of zombies and various evil soucougnans, the Inspector’s scientific efforts and cold logic often skidded.”

            Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent translated from the French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov, the same duo that translated Chamoiseau’s Texaco, is a wonderful novel of short length on the battle between French and Creole in Martinican sociolinguistics. A meta-text in the form of a mystery, Chamoiseau inserts himself into his often humorous critique of Martinique turning its back on its Creole oral literature in favor of French. The oral tradition, represented by the titular character, Solibo Magnificent, is killed, “throat snickt by the word” in the middle of a story told to an audience in the evening during Carnival time in Fort-de-France. Solibo’s death becomes a police investigation to determine the cause of his death, or the death of Creole oral tradition as Martinique “modernizes” and adopts more of the French language and written literary tradition. Now, Chamoiseau, a pupil of Edouard Glissant and part of the reolite literary movement, sees Creole as the authentic language for Martinican (and other Caribbean writers of the French Caribbean) as best suited to represent Martinican reality and culture in the written literary forms because the language itself is a reflection of the totality of peoples and experiences of the Caribbean. A response to the weaknesses of the monolithic blackness assumed by the negritude movement, famously espoused by Aime Cesaire, creolite celebrates and embraces European, African, indigenous and Asian peoples and cultures that form the basis of the Caribbean sociolingustic reality. 

Chamoiseau, who inserts himself into the text as the author-narrator endeavoring to capture the oral Creole spoken by Solibo, experiments with fusions of French and Creole, oral and written literary traditions, and the inevitable loss of meaning and distortion that occurs through endeavoring to represent oral traditions in the written form. Thus, Chamoiseau’s character in the novel admits his own failure to fully capture the strength of oral traditions, but endeavors to embrace both the written and spoken word, a synthesis rooted in the creolite movement to embrace all cultures within Martinique. Indeed, that is most likely why the text is not entirely Creole either, since French, though part of the colonial heritage and legacy of racism and slavery, reinforced by the corrupt police department and its repression of lower-class residents of Fort-de-France, remains at the core of Martinique as the island remains an overseas department of France with whites in possession of most economic and political power. Chamoiseau’s character in the novel also represents his experimentation with the traditional novel form as known in the West. Here, the author’s character becomes a participant in the plot, allowing it to be read on many levels and include the reader, who must decipher the clever wordplay and multiple forms used in the text. Chamoiseau also divides the novel into 3 parts: an incident report, as typed by the police in the investigation, the “body” or chapters of the text written by Chamoiseau himself, with frequent changes in narration, the use of footnotes to explain and translate Creole phrases, Martinican cultural references, and lack of traditional grammatical structures, and finally, an “After the Word” that attempts to represent Solibo’s last words before his death. Chamoiseau’s text, a nuanced, multi-layered endeavor to embody Martinique’s contradictory and essentially Creole identity, also shows off the author’s writing ability because few could successfully write about the battle between French and Creole language and identity in a way that successfully fuses both irrevocably, with shortcomings and losses to both. Referring to himself as the “word scratcher,” as he later does in Texaco, Chamoiseau tries to represent the craft of writing as an alternative form of ‘drawing’ the world that must also incorporate Creole, oral, and lived experience in its depiction of the world to describe Caribbean societies, since the “oraliture” of Creole is the key component of Caribbean societies. 

In addition, Solibo Magnificent challenges the hegemony of French rationalism and European perception of the world. Like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Chamoiseau criticizes French (European) worship of reason, which leads to overlooking the personal, lived experiences and requires an often unnecessary division or measurement of the world, leading to dehumanization or oppressive unequal conditions through binary oppositional thinking. For Chamoiseau, both the real-life writer and the narrator of the text, embracing both the spoken and written word is a rejection of binary oppositional thinking, which is a perpetual result of western European worship of reason. Inspector Evariste Pilon, a Francophile black Martinican, perpetuates the hegemony of rationalist binary thinking throughout his investigation, which leads to false assumptions on who murdered Solibo because his rationalism (inherited from time spent in the land of Descartes, the French language which is always used by Pilon) cannot accept the fact that Solibo dies because of “internal strangulation” caused when speaking before the witnesses under the tamarind tree in La Savane of Fort-de-France. His investigation, which relies on police brutality and torture of the suspected witnesses, causes the death of two men because he cannot accept the scientifically impossible death, which also demonstrates magic realism, another writing technique Chamoiseau utilizes to illustrate the fantasy of the lived world and oral tradition. Indeed, Solibo’s death is not only impossible from a rational standpoint, but his body miraculously gains weight and becomes as light as a feather when the police remove the corpse, and shows no signs of poison or illness. Pilon’s rational epistemology, ignoring the highly personal and Creole realities of the witnesses, cannot accept what fourteen human beings saw with their own eyes because of his narrowly prescribed perceptions of the world. Moreover, Pilon’s interrogation of the witnesses ignores the multiple layers of meaning attached to time, occupation, age, and other qualifiers of human life that are measured or defined by measurements of time in hours, minutes and seconds. Indeed, when asking the witnesses their age, occupation, and address, the sadistic Chief Sergeant translates the questions into Creole as, “The Inspector asks you what hurricane you were born after, what do you do for the beke, and what side of town do you sleep at night?” Pilon’s French, rationalist outlook does not allow him to accept the nuances of time, occupation, and alternative approaches to understanding one’s life. For the witnesses, speakers of Creole, their lived experience determines the meaning of Pilon’s questions in personal ways based on local culture, geography, and economics, which means natural disasters play a strong role in how one records time, Martinican whites control the distribution of jobs, and transitory lives are common for lower-class Martinicans of the shantytowns of Fort-de-France. French rationalism, an inherent component of French (and European colonialism in general) power in the Caribbean therefore supports the persistence of white rule in Martinique. Due to language’s ties to power, the imposition of French and denigration of Creole by elites maintains the colonial social order in economic, linguistic, political arenas. 

Another avenue through which Chamoiseau proclaims creolite is the text’s numerous references to Martinican music, Creole, history, politics, the description of the urban shantytowns, and the plethora of footnotes and sectors of the Martinican population represented by the witnesses to Solibo’s death. The witnesses themselves represent light-skinned blacks, shantytown dwellers, street vendors, unemployed musicians, a writer (Chamoiseau himself), a “Syrian” bastard, an ancient former agricultural worker insultingly referred to as Congo for his way of speaking Creole and his very recent black African ancestry, coolies, a drummer who accompanies Solibo’s storytelling, and the radical nationalist desiring independence. This diverse array of the people of Martinique, separated by varying degrees of class, ethnicity, politics, and individual expression, all comprise the already heterogeneous social reality of the island. And these aforementioned individuals all share a Creole identity originating from their shared experiences of slavery, colonialism, economic exploitation, and an appreciation for the oral traditions of Creole, though by the time of Solibo’s death, fewer people were listening to his stories and he fulfilled his griot role less as the younger generation turned its back on its cultural origins. Chamoiseau’s espousal of creolite as the basis of Caribbean identity also manifests in the world he creates in the novel, a world filled with magic realism, musical and cultural practices of the island, the Carnival celebrations that storm through the capital, and the insertion of Creole expressions and using the written form to represent orally in the novel form. The novel’s constant allusions to politics and contemporary issues tearing Martinican society apart, such as the Martinican Progressive Party’s support for autonomy or independence from France, the continued police repression and corruption abusing the poor and black, and the cuisine, zouk and Haitian music (Nemours Jean-Baptiste) constitute a microcosm of the Caribbean, and by extension, the entire world. Martinique’s internal heterogeneity symbolizes the Creole reality of the entire Caribbean, which also marks its essential role in world history as one of the birthplaces of modernity. Creolite is the hallmark of real modern culture, if one defines modernity as something universal or capable of incorporation disparate traditions while embracing the contradictions. As a result, Martinique’s creolite designates the island as an important example of human progress by its capacity to include so many seemingly combative cultural forces, such as the African, indigenous, European and Asian influences developed into the wholly unique island Chamoiseau honors.

Solibo Magnificent unfortunately may not be for all. The novel loses a lot in translation since the reader no longer has the mixed Creole-French language of Chamoiseau-ese. Of course the novel’s focus on language and Martinican culture will be totally alien to most English readers, despite the aid of the translators’ footnotes and glossary of Creole terms that appear in the novel. The plot and the format of the novel that fuses oral and written word may initially confuse others or appear meaningless to those unfamiliar with Chamoiseau’s creolite. For those interested in learning about other cultures and willing to expand their knowledge of an important area in the world should read this novel, which is all about multiculturalism and the necessity to respect all cultural traditions of different races or ethnicities, a value that still remains underutilized by much of the world. In order to support his celebration of human totality and universality, Chamoiseau demonstrates the weaknesses of the fetishization of rationalism that reinforces French colonialism, racism, and the power of the French language over Creole. Chamoiseau also critiques complete rejection of the aforementioned characteristics of the French colonial legacy, since complete denial of reason and French will isolate Martinique from a much larger world and will not change the conditions of illiteracy, poverty, and technological advancements that made some of the novel’s characters, such as Solibo and Congo, almost obsolete in society. Hence, the death of Solibo while speaking to his audience while speaking the word, as a consequence of his rejection of the written word, symbolizes the death of oral tradition that remains opposed to the written tradition. Solibo’s total rejection of French and written traditions repeats French rejection of alternative expressions of language, literature, and philosophy, which contributes to Solibo’s increasingly less relevant words of wisdom to the people of Fort-de-France. Overall, this is a fascinating experimental novel on the power of language and its relation to cultural practices and identity. Lacking the historical depth and detail of Texaco, which explores the history and culture of Martinique through the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, Solibo Magnificent is a shorter novel and fast read.  

Billie Holiday - Body And Soul (Live @ The L.A. Philharmonic Auditorium)...

My jam

Maryse Conde's Segu

West African Trading Posts: The Advent of European Colonialism

West African trading posts along the coast were cosmopolitan in nature. These communities gradually evolved over centuries of slave trading with Europeans and included heterogeneous populations. In Maryse Condé’s novel, Segu, portrayals of Ouidah, Gorée, and the Cape Coast of modern Ghana illustrated their cosmopolitan nature through architecture, trade, interracial marriages and relationships, the presence of Christianity, and the increasing importance of the slave trade. Therefore, the above characteristics of coastal communities allowed them to facilitate imperialism since they provided initial zones of missionary activity and early colonial conquests by European powers in the 19^th century.

            Miscegenation, perhaps the most ostensible change reflected by these communities, was quite common. The mulatto offspring of interracial unions tended to adopt European racial theories to elevate themselves above darker-skinned Africans. For example, some biracial Africans, such as the half-French and half-Wolof Anne Pépin, owned land and slaves.^[1] Anne, who owned Naba, saw no problem with owning slaves and looked to her father’s French origin for her identity instead of her Wolof mother. For example, she dressed in a European style, with skirts, tunics, scarves, and a shawl.^[2] The mulatto class also resided in tall stone houses or flat-roofed wooden homes and lived from trade.^[3] As a mulatto landowner and slaveholder, Anne was more tied to the land than the French who only came to trade in slaves. Since her world revolved around the slave trade, she refused to recognize the possibility of abolition in the future, despite the growing antislavery movement in Britain and the Haitian Revolution.^[4] When her French lover Isidore informed her of the upcoming abolition of the slave trade by the British and the importance of establishing agricultural colonies in Cape Verde, she could not imagine the very idea of ending the slave trade.^[5] Instead Naba’s labor was used to beautify her home as a gardener and the slaves are not used for profit-making plantation agriculture within the French trading post. However, Anne would be willing to revive connections with her mother’s family in order to purchase land.^[6] Although she is no longer in contact with them, Anne and other biracial coastal people were able to take advantage of their family ties to Africans to access land and wealth. And through connections like hers, Europeans could move further inland.

Besides selling slaves to European and New World traders, African slaves were not being utilized for export agriculture by the French and mulatto landholders. In addition to Anne, biracial people in Ouidah, Lagos, and other coastal cities thought of themselves as better than black Africans since they occupied an intermediate position in European racial schema that dehumanized blacks. The biracial daughter of a Portuguese trader, Eugenia de Carvalho, and her brother shared this belief in color prejudice. Her brother even called Eucaristus a “Dirty nigger, cannibal…”^[7] Thus, they adopted European racial theories and distinguish themselves from Africans while at the same time they’re inextricably linked to Africa through blood and their dependence on slavery and the slave trade. Due to their acceptance of European racist discourse, they sided with Christian missionaries and colonial powers since they perceived themselves as racially distinct from black Africans.

Likewise, Creoles in Sierra Leone and other coastal cities believed that they would inherit positions of authority in the administration of the colonies and thought of themselves as civilizers.^[8] Their communities reflected the gradually increasing missionary zeal of European and African Christians. Creoles in Sierra Leone consisted of an assortment of recaptured slaves from all over West and West-Central Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. Obviously those from the Caribbean and the United States or Christianized recaptured slaves often promoted Western culture and Christianity.^[9] Unlike the mulattoes off the coast of Senegal, they were actively promoting European culture and Christianity in the interior and embraced the Society for the Civilization of Africa and similar groups. Although Naba was baptized and given a Christian name, neither Naba nor neighboring Africans were targets for missionary activity and Anne never endeavored to test the veracity of his conversion. In areas populated by Creoles, missionaries made more meaningful attempts to convert Africans. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba recaptive, converted to Anglicanism and became the first bishop of the Anglican Church, established an all-African Christian settlement on the Niger River, translated the Bible into Yoruba, and made an English-Yoruba dictionary. These aforementioned accomplishments obviously made missionary activity easier since whites were less inclined to live in the Nigerian interior because of diseases such as malaria. Creoles also accepted European culture and admired the technological superiority of Europe. For instance, Dr. J. Africanus B. Horton, son of an Ibo recaptive and intellectual who published on African affairs believed in the superiority of European civilization. Creoles were thoroughly prepared at Fourah Bay College in Freetown to become clergymen and Africans took advantage of the opportunities offered by Western education. In fact, a higher proportion of children went to school in Sierra Leone than England at the time since education was publicly funded.^[10] Other Creoles saw themselves as harbingers of civilization and Christianity, and believed they would gradually take leadership positions in their communities instead of whites from Europe.^[11] For example, Crowther believed in a form of European colonialism that deposed African kings and governments in order to spread Christianity.^[12] However, Creoles never envisioned the future form of colonialism that disempowered them. Like the mulattoes of Gorée, Creoles aided European colonialism. As cultural brokers and intermediaries between Western missionaries and Africans in the interior, they actively proselytized and spread aspects of Western civilization, which encouraged European imperialism in the region since the Creoles and other coastal peoples welcomed Europeans as traders. In spite of the general appreciation for the opportunities of European education and technology, some Creoles, such as Emma, the wife of Eucaristus and descendant of Jamaican Maroons, opposed the cultural and political imperialism of Britain.^[13] Some Creoles clearly disagreed with the total abandonment of non-Western traditions and religions, but they could not stop other Creoles from encouraging colonialism and opening up new areas for missions in the interior.

            Moreover, coastal communities reflected the growing importance of the Atlantic slave trade and African dependence on European manufactured goods. Conde demonstrates this dependence in the kingdoms of Dahomey and the Asante Empire. The increasing presence of European goods undermined local industries and gradually developed into dependence on Europeans for the types of goods Africans had produced before or received from trade within Africa. In Dahomey, white traders in Ouidah were also influential and European demand for palm oil led to Dahomean palm oil plantation labor. Indeed, the labor of enslaved peoples in Dahomey resembled New World slavery, and Europeans overlooked the use of slave labor to provide this “legitimate commerce.”^[14] This type of trade in which external demand induced Dahomean leaders to supply raw products for machine lubricants and soap in Europe shows the imbalance in trade and power and it gave European merchants and their respective nations too much power in the kingdom. Francisco da Souza, the slave trader in Ouidah provides evidence of this since he is respected and given a position of authority by the king of Dahomey, who also granted a Malobali the right to engage in palm oil cultivation. Furthermore, the only people who benefitted from legitimate commerce were the kings and slave traders who established plantations and relied on slave labor to supply the growing European demand.^[15] The Agoudas, or descendants of Catholic ex-slaves from Brazil also impacted Ouidah since they often identified with Christianity and served missionary interests. Romana exemplified this attitude since she was known as a devout Catholic who treated worked with missionaries. Unlike Dahomey, the Asante had a larger empire with trade connections to the north but its attempts to control the coast were challenged by Europeans, such as the English governor of the Cape Coast fortress. Indeed, the white governor actually desired British political control of the entire region to ensure uninterrupted trade.^[16] So while Malobali did not understand why the Asantehene refused to drive whites away from the coast, it’s apparent that the kingdom would not wish to go to war with the people who supplied their rivals with guns. Once again, coastal West Africa exposed and prepared the way for colonialism by allowing Europeans to directly govern forts and towns with more and more freedom from direct African supervision.

Clearly, trading posts along the West African coast facilitated European colonial expansion. Christianity, the increasing dependency of African kingdoms on Europe for guns and manufactured goods, and interracial peoples and Creole cultures became very common on the coast. These factors then impacted inland states more and more and aided European imperialism because coastal trading towns were the precursor to European rule. The coastal cities provided a launching pad for European militaries and alliances with groups like the Creoles or coastal Africans. Like the Fante and the British against the Asante kingdom, coastal regions provided knowledge of the interior, soldiers, and Westernized intellectuals and Christians who often identified with European powers and eventually served their interests as colonial outposts. Therefore, the coastal trading posts reflect the tensions between two vastly different worlds and the connections that arose to places as far away as Europe and the Americas.

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1.  Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 96.

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ibid. , 99.

4.  Ibid. , 107.

5.  Ibid. , 101.

6.  Ibid. , 103.

7.  Ibid. , 390.

7.  Neil Kodesh, “Abolition and Legitimate Trade,” 11/10/2010.

8.  Ibid.

9.  Ibid.

10.  Ibid.

11.  Ibid.

12. Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 397.

13. Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 404.

14. Neil Kodesh, “Abolition and Legitimate Trade,” 11/10/2010

15.  Ibid.

16. Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 235.