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.