Junot Diaz's Drown

The fact that I 

am writing to you

in English

already falsifies what I

wanted to tell you.

My subject:

how to explain to you that I don't belong to English

though I belong nowhere else

Gustavo Perez Firmat

Drown, Junot Diaz's collection of short stories published in the 1990s, about a decade before his The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is an interesting early sample of his writing style. Fusing humor, tales of the Dominican homeland and diaspora in the New York/New Jersey area, and introducing Yunior, the narrator in Oscar Wao, Diaz's work reveals a great writer in development. Several of the short stories revolve around Yunior and his family in the campo, in la Capital, and in New Jersey, as well as addressing issues of immigration, race, and assimilation for the Dominican diaspora.

Diaz also introduces No Face, a character who appears twice in Oscar Wao, though only a child in the short stories here who survives verbal and physical harassment from children in the campo. No Face, if I remember correctly, is a villain whose appearance in the novel foreshadows doom for Oscar and his mother, Belicia. The mongoose also appears in one of the short stories here, just as it does when it saves the life of Oscar and his mother, who would have died in the sugar-cane fields without the 'sly mongoose.'

It's also interesting to see how Yunior's youth compares to college-aged Yunior and postcollege Yunior in Oscar Wao. In the novel, Yunior behaves much like his brother Rafa, which is in accordance with typical and expected Dominican male bravado, misogyny, and violent machismo. Yunior clearly picked this up from his brother Rafa and his father, who cheated on his mother with a Puerto Rican woman in Jersey and was not above using violence with his wife and children. The young Yunior was a dark-skinned, innocent child subjected to abuse from his brother, mother, and father, and he internalizes this in the way he interacts with Oscar and his sister, Lola, in Oscar Wao.

One day I shall revisit these short stories and Oscar Wao. Perhaps I'll write some long boring essay that nobody will care to read. Anyway, any fan of Diaz should check out these short stories. One in particular, "How to Date a Browngirl..." is quite hilarious.

Jonah Zinn's Essay on The Haitian Revolution's Impact on Abolitionism

To what extent did the success of the Haitian Revolution impede efforts to end

Slavery in the Caribbean?

               

                The uprising of nearly 100,000 slaves in Saint-Domingue from 1791-1804 was the largest insurrection of slaves in history.  The Haitian Revolution resulted in the creation of the first successful independent freed slave state in the world, a fact that rocked the socio-political, economic, and moral foundations of the Caribbean.[1]  However, in the period following the Revolution, there is a noted increase of slavery in the Caribbean as a whole.  Did the success of the Haitian uprising merely serve as a lesson for Caribbean planters and reinforce the slave society?  To answer this question one must examine the factors that led to the Revolution’s success both externally, in the European metropoles, and internally, in the psychological and socio-political dynamics of Caribbean societies.  Therefore, the Haitian Revolution appeared to impede abolition in the Caribbean in the short term because it reinforced white stereotypes of African savagery and inferiority, convinced planters of the danger of liberal and abolitionist ideals, and created a large void in the coffee and sugar markets which other colonies quickly filled by introducing more slave labor.  While these effects should not be minimized, they were merely the logical aftershock of the tumultuous events in the established racial hierarchy.  Ultimately, the Haitian Revolution was a major turning point in abolitionist history because it restructured the balance of power in the Caribbean thereby allowing a political gap for British abolitionists, the first organized anti-slavery movement from a metropole, to enter and because it drastically altered the psyche of enslaved Africans throughout the Caribbean world by proving that the combination of external pressures and internal uprisings could result in emancipation.

                It was no coincidence that the Haitian Revolution occurred so soon after the French Revolution.  The ideologies of the French Revolution of 1789 permeated throughout the western world because they originated in a metropole and because their core was defined by the commitment to “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” radical ideas especially in the colonial Caribbean that also became the motto of Haiti.[2]  These ideals, which were embodied in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, angered the whites of Saint-Domingue, who refused to grant any liberties to the wealthy, educated Creole population of the colony in fear that the racial balance of power would shift.  The first clash between the planters and the metropole occurred when the Constituent Assembly granted citizenship to wealthy free people of color in 1791, which white planters also refused to accept.  This denial ignited the island and led to a slave insurrection which grew exponentially in a matter of weeks.  Internally, this revolt was preceded by one of the most hierarchical socio-racial structures in the Caribbean in which whites occupied an extreme minority (they were outnumbered almost eighteen-to-one).   While there had been maroon insurrections in the past (namely that led by Francois Mackandal from1751-1757) it was not until white elites were pressured by both the metropole and slave revolts that the revolution actually spread.  In a desperate attempt to appease revolting slaves, France formally abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794.  While appearing to support France initially, after the expulsion of Spanish and British forces Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leading general and a self-educated former slave, broke away and later declared Haitian independence in 1801[3].             

                To understand the true significance of the Revolution in the colonial Caribbean one must first understand the prevalence of entrenched socio-political divisions and constructs.  The emergence of a sugar culture in the Caribbean also meant the emergence of a planation structure because maximizing profits required a cheap source of labor that could be controlled by a minority.  In order to ensure dominance over slaves and to secure their power, whites developed a highly centralized social hegemony.  This was especially prevalent in French colonies, as evidenced by the refusal of Saint-Domingue planters to relinquish any power even to wealthy Creoles, many of which owned slaves themselves.  This social division was paired with a moral doctrine of domination that justified brutal slavery by citing white moral superiority to savage, subhuman Africans.  This social division and moral justification had been entrenched in Caribbean society for nearly three hundred years before the Haitian Revolution.[4]  Thus, not only was a successful slave rebellion unconscionable to whites, it also was morally revolting.

                 This viewpoint was well chronicled by Don Pedro Irisarri of nearby San Juan, who wrote the Informe communicating instructions to Puerto Rico’s representative in the Cádiz about the Saint-Domingue uprising.  Based on the history of racial division and subjugation in the Caribbean it is not surprising that Irisarri does not sympathize with the former slaves but instead notes that “just as it would be impossible to change their color from black to white it would be less possible that their corrupt and vicious hearts be innocent during their captivity.”   The lesson Irissari drew from the Revolution was that the slaves’ success was due to their “numerical superiority.”  Thus, he suggests a more careful use of slavery, not its abolition.  This same reaction was held by whites around the Caribbean.  Superficially, the Revolution strengthened slavery by giving other Caribbean planters an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the French and reinforced racial divisions.  However, the white response was merely a predictable reaction to the events, as it reflected the desire by whites to retain dominance that was molded by centuries of exploitation and mercantilism, and displays a superficial analysis that does not take into account the deeper social ramifications of the rebellion.[5]  In other words this view did not represent any fundamental change in how white colonialists viewed people of color.

                  There other planter response to the success at Saint-Domingue was not to blame slave labor, “on which the Caribbean colonies had always depended,” but instead to showcase the dangers of abolitionist ideals.[6]  Slaveholders became extremely suspicious of the spread of Haitian ideals and actively tried to suppress any information that contradicted the doctrine of racial hierarchy.  Again, while the suppression of information that opposed the socio-political hegemony would seem to be detrimental to abolitionism, it in fact had much deeper consequences that ultimately undermined slavery as an institution, especially in British colonies.  According to both Stinchcombe and Sheller, one of the main causes of slave emancipation was the autonomy of the planters’ government and the strength of its ‘channels’ with the metropole.[7]  Thus, by adopting policies that potentially contrasted with the metropolitan center, planters ran a higher risk of collapse by being pressured both from the constant threat of slave resistance and from the metropole.  This scenario proved true for British Jamaica, which was fearful of the spread of the nearby Revolution, because the rise of the abolition movement in Britain (discussed further below) ultimately forced the planters to accept emancipation or risk insurrection. 

Next, it is easy to overemphasize the rise of plantation cultures in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil after the Saint-Domingue uprising because while this was a negative consequence, the same time period also saw the decline of the British participation in the slave trade.  One reason why Saint-Domingue was so important to the French was because it produced half of the world’s coffee and nearly as much sugar as Jamaica at the time of the Revolution and was the most profitable Caribbean colony.[8]  The sudden elimination of this exporting center created a massive demand for sugar and coffee, which spawned huge increases in slave importation to Spanish and Portuguese colonies; the number of disembarked slaves in Cuba rose from 21,103 between 1796 and 1800 to 101,002 between 1816 and 1820.  However equating this escalation of the slave trade to the failure of the Haitian Revolution to positively affect abolition would be an oversight because of the exit of British colonies from the slave trade.  Indeed in the same time period the number of disembarked slaves in Jamaica dropped from 78,351 to 0 due to the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which ended British importation of slaves.[9]  The fact that this Act occurred in 1807 is significant because the British abolition movement made its first tangible gains in 1787 with the creation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and did not achieve success until after the Haitian Revolution.  To understand the connection between the abolition movement and the Revolution we must first examine the societal changes the Revolution catalyzed in Caribbean culture.

The adoption of the 1807 Slave Trade Act, which was preceded by more than twenty years of active abolitionist organizing and lobbying in Britain, could not have occurred if legislators were worried about French economic competition.  Indeed, the abolitionists had successfully organized millions of citizens around Britain to pressure legislators.  However, they were only able to achieve real success once France was not deemed as an economic threat.  The need to remove France was compounded by the fact that ending the slave trade was actually economic suicide for major parts of Britain economy.[10]  Thus, in order to keep its economic position in the balance of power the British economy needed to reduce competition.  By removing France from Saint-Domingue and ultimately thwarting its efforts to regain dominance in the Caribbean, the Haitian Revolution “facilitated Britain’s disengagement from slave-trading in 1807 and from slavery itself in 1833.”[11]

                Historian David Davis states that while “Haiti posed no direct military danger to foreign slaveholders” (with the possible exception of Louverture’s 1801 foray into Spanish Santo Domingo) its “very existence…challenged every slaveholding regime in the New World.”  This intangible threat was evidenced by Haitian inspired slave revolts in Barbados, Maracaibo in Venezuela, Cartagena in Colombia, Cuba, Louisiana, Charleston, etc.  Even in 1791, only one month after the revolt began, Jamaican slaves sang songs about the insurrection.[12]  Eugene Genovese points to the changed mindset in Caribbean slaves, who heard about the Revolution despite planters’ efforts to suppress the spread of information: he describes the French and Haitian Revolutions as critical turning points in the history of slave resistance because initial maroon uprisings were only acting against direct enslavement while after the revolutions slave revolts targeted the system of slavery through revolutionary, egalitarian ideology.[13]  In addition to egalitarian ideology the Haitian Revolution left the legacy of success, which proved to slaves that the white social hegemony could be reversed.  Frederick Douglass best summarizes this psychological effect in an 1893 speech where he calls Haiti “the original emancipator of the nineteenth century.”[14]  This follows the trajectory of many slave resistance efforts; in Haiti the early marronage uprisings did not lead to structural victories while the 1791 Revolution led to independence; in Jamaica the maroon wars were a constant thorn in the side of the British but they did not succeed until the revolts of the early 1830s which resulted in the abolition of slavery in 1833.[15]  Thus, I reject the totally Eurocentric theories of Anstey, Craton, and Drescher because they hold slave resistance as a constant and do not acknowledge the potential of changes in resistance capabilities and the possibility of self-liberation determining the success of emancipation.[16] 

                Therefore, the success of Haitian Revolution was determined by the tradition of subjugation and racial hierarchy within Saint-Domingue and by the spread of the ideals of the French Revolution.  Both factors forced the planter elite to either relinquish some power or risk a violent uprising.  This success led to some ostensibly negative impacts on emancipation efforts but was often outweighed by the positive ramifications.  I have used a combination of Eurocentric, slave agency, and colonial-metropole channel theories to demonstrate that the Haitian Revolution had catalyzing effects upon several arenas that contributed to the emancipation movement. 

Bibliography

Brown, Jonathan C. Latin America: a Social History of the Colonial Period. Fort Worth: Harcourt College, 2000.

Cooper, Anna Julia. Slavery and the French Revolutionists: 1788-1805. Lewiston: N. Y., 1988.

Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2006.

Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010.

Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina, 2004.

Geggus, David P. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Pres, 2002.

Geggus, David Patrick. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2001.

Genovese, Eugene Dominick. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. New York: Vintage, 1981.

Scarano, Francisco. "Sweet Malefactor: Sugar and Slavery for the First Time in the Americas." 23 Sept. 2010. Lecture.

Sheller, Mimi. Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2000.

Stinchcomb, Arthur L. "Freedom and Oppression of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean." American Sociological Review 59.6 (1994): 911-29.

"Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database." Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Emory University, 2009. Web. 07 Oct. 2010. <http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces>.

---

[1] Jonathan C. Brown, Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period (Forth Worth: Harcourt College Publishers, 2000) 369-385.

[2] Anna Julia Cooper, Slavery and the French Revolutionists (1788-1805) (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988) 100-101.

[3] Brown 376-381.

[4] Francisco Scarano lecture, “Sweet Malefactor: Sugar and Slavery for the First Time in the Americas” 9-23-10.

[5] David P. Geggus The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001)

[6] David Davis, Inhuman Bondage: the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 170.

[7] Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000) 27-31.

[8] Davis 158.

[9] “Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database,” 2009, Emory University, Oct. 7, 2010 <http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces>

[10] Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) 55-65.

[11] David P Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) 178.

[12] Davis 169.

[13] Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1981) 82-84.

[14] Davis 158.

[15] Davis 217-219.

[16] Sheller 20-29.

Patrick Chamoiseau's Strange Words

"One of these white folks had refused (as usual) to acknowledge the child he had fathered on his servant. Instead, he became the boy's godfather: a fancy way of washing his hands of him."

Patrick Chamoiseau's Strange Words, translated from French by Linda Coverdale, is his reinterpretation of Creole folktales of Martinique he heard as a child. It was also published in English as Creole Folktales. Writing down these orally-transmitted stories inherently changes the fundamental process through which these stories were told in Martinique, usually by a storyteller with an audience. Indeed, the storyteller also inserted him or herself into the tale, which Chamoiseau replicates in the written form, using several humorous self-referential statements regarding the storyteller's relation to characters in the story, for example.

Unfortunately, the tales themselves are quite short, and with only 12, the journey into the nighttime stories of Martinique ends just as its beginning. That said, these tales are often very dark and full of supernatural phenomena and magic, such as witches, zombi, demons, rainmakers, and tricksters. Indeed, this novel serves as a nice complementary reading to Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique, a short novel about the death of orality and the battle between the spoken Creole word and the colonial French written word. This collection of Creole folktales illustrates how these different languages and their respective worldviews fused to create them in the first place. Thus, Ti-Jean Horizon, the mulatto son of a slaveholder and a black slave, becomes a hero according to the trickster ideal in African-derived folklore, but uses his guile at the end of the tale to simply takeover the plantation of his beke father. If collective liberation were the ethos of this story, which was told in communal settings of slaves, how come an individual's escape from slavery would become more important than the liberation of all slaves on the plantation? Clearly, the individualism and rationalism of "the land of Descartes" clashes with African communalism and solidarity as well as clashing due to differing stances on supernatural occurrences.

Anyway, one should read this short collection of folktales to better understand the worldview and context of the lives of slaves and ex-slaves throughout Martinican history. The horrors of the slave trade, brutality and dehumanizing practices of white planters, poverty and hunger, and resilience of the people themselves become quite apparent. Moreover, women emerge as significant characters, often as female heads of their households. Now, this is not the place or time to discuss in depth gender dynamics in the colonial French Caribbean, but women in these stories run the gamut from helpless beauties to strong, independent heroines. Indeed, in many stories families are introduced with only a mother as the parent, and no mention of fathers appears, which, historically was related to lack of legitimacy in their unions with black men in the eyes of whites and the slave trade, but also related to rape and other factors. Beyond analyzing the stories for how they reveal the historical and cultural background of Martinique and the French Caribbean, these short stories are often fables with important morals against sins or defects like gluttony, or for simply explaining the origin of certain animals, the vegetation, etc. Overall, this was a fun, fast read that aroused the reader's hunger for more oral and written literature of the French Caribbean.

Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets

It was....interesting. Piri Thomas's account of his own life living as a dark-skinned Puerto Rican living in Spanish Harlem actually reminded me of Malcolm X's Autobiography. The language used in the book is very simple, and loaded with Spanish Harlem slang and a very simple vocabulary, which at times made Thomas hard to decipher. Still, I am willing to overlook that because the story of his life, from ghetto child to ex-convict reveal the full extent of racial discrimination within Latino communities as well as their relation to African and white Americans. Indeed, I was surprised by how the Puerto Rican self-image resembles that of Dominicans, with many of African descent preferring to identify as indigenous, Taino-descended rather than identify with blacks.

Anywho, the book was most interesting when Thomas is in prison after committing armed burglaries and shooting a 'paddy' cop. Piri, like Malcolm X, expands his knowledge and vocabulary in prison by reading the dictionary, and even converts to the Nation of Islam's brand of the religion while in prison. Who would've thought Puerto Ricans converted to the Nation of Islam?

Bill Withers' Use Me

A wonderful funky jam I first heard via The Wire.

Art Blakey's Indestructible

Perhaps my favorite of the Jazz Messengers, Indestructible is one of the last times Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter would record together with Blakey. Morgan, my Philadelphia Negro and funky trumpeter, contributes to this album with the latin-funk cut, "Calling Ms. Khadija," a danceable number that proves jazz music can groove, too. My Newark brother, Wayne Shorter, an amazing saxophonist, contributes with "Mr. Jin," a contemplative piece. Trombonist Curtis Fuller also adds two amazing songs, "The Egyptian" and "Sortie," which both feature powerful drumming by my boy Art Blakey and Middle-Eastern themes. The final track, "When Love Is New," is your standard ballad that is nice to listen to, but far from essential. 

"The Egyptian": Blakey's drums take us off, along with that repetitive vamp. Doesn't sound very Egyptian, but definitely leaning toward the modal jazz influenced by North African and Middle Eastern music that also impacted Coltrane and Miles Davis. There is something akin to a spiritual search here, and Fuller's trombone solo keeps digging deeper and deeper into the depths of the soul. Shorter's solo around 3:20 also shows Shorter sounding like Coltrane with the overblowing around 4:50s. Morgan's trumpet solo returns us to a more contemplative journey, as does Cedar Walton's piano solo, which does sound Middle Eastern-tinged at times. Of course one must not overlook that titling this piece after the Egyptian nation likely has resonance with Pan-Africanist and African-American reclamation of ancient Egyptian heritage. Interestingly, around 7 minutes into the song, pianist Walton quotes the melody "A Felicidade" from the famous film, Black Orpheus, a nice little tribute to Brazil and bossa nova!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV5EXrfs_Aw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6ParynStSU Hear the influence of bossa nova 

"Sortie": Blakey provides some Latin-influenced percussion, Morgan blows that trumpet in a typical hard bop, funky mould we all love, even if it gets monotonous on his later solo albums. Then our savior, Wayne Shorter, comes riding in on his saxophone around 3:45 into the song, sounding a lot like John Coltrane, whose playing began to influence Shorter and push him beyond the Blakey school of hard bop. This is beautiful and funky simultaneously, especially that piano riff Walton takes off with. Proof that trombonists are relevant in post-swing jazz and great composers. Walton's piano solo near the end may be the highlight for me, surprisingly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idq5XFN-FUQ

"Calling Ms. Khadija": With a name like Khadija, Morgan probably wrote this latin funk piece for a black woman. Blakey's aggressive Latin rhythms propel the piece, as well as the waltzy horns, primarily Morgan. Like "The Sidewinder," this is latin funky bop at its best. Blakey's waltz drum solo here too closely resembles his solo on "Koko's Waltz," another Morgan composition, but its still all good in the hood. It definitely illustrates how Blakey must have been an octopus to play the drums like that. Shorter shines here as well, playing that soulful solo around 2:15 or so. Interesting fact: one source I found claims that the Khadija in this song is actually the sister of McCoy Tyner's wife, Aisha. They're all from Philadelphia, my city.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1iYARikFJg

"When Love is New": a nice ballad, this is the sole cut from the album that lacks the aggressive, propulsive swing associated with Blakey. Nice horn work, especially on the part of Wayne Shorter, saves this ballad from developing into boredom. But that's hardly a surprise since Shorter always does well with any ballad (listen to Evil Eyes, from Speak No Evil.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhS-ZKxAtRg

"Mr. Jin": Mr. Shorter's sole piece sounds like the first two on the album, especially "The Egyptian." However, Shorter takes the piece into different directions during his time to shine, moving past the restrictive hard bop of the Blakey school of jazz. He calls and responds to himself in a way not limited to the blues form, but sounds like his own solo recordings. Lee Morgan's solo also shows off his ability to play in the same school as Shorter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyLY7FSd3WA

Overall, this is one of the strongest albums by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. As someone who loves Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter, it's always a pleasure to hear them together. This live version of "The Egyptian" with John Gilmore and Lee Morgan is also worth hearing. Gilmore, who was a member of Sun Ra's Arkestra, actually had a huge impact on Coltrane and is truly an unrecognized innovator of the saxophone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ4Wgu5L87E

Bring It On Home to Me

The Supremes, for their tribute album to Sam Cooke, do a great cover of my favorite Cooke song.
"Bring it on home to me, yeah."