Last (W)rites

I hope the seminar papers proceed productively apace; I will certainly look forward to reading them. Given how many of our texts were fragmented, multi-perspectival, and creolized, I wonder nearly if there could have been some way of following suit in your final papers for the class. We danced around this possibility on one or two occasions, but maybe it's something we should have discussed more seriously! I remember chancing upon (and finding appealing) this description by Robert Root in his book The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction: "The segmented essay is like an oratorio or a concerto. The spaces are like intervals of silence between the separate elements. Sometimes the segments of prose in an essay can be recitative, aria, duet or trio, chorus; they can be allegro non troppo, allegro appasionato, andante, allegretto grazioso. This is what the spaces say: In this interval of silence hold onto what you have just heard; prepare yourself to hear something different; ponder the ways these separatenesses are part of a whole. Like musical compositions, nonfiction need not be one uninterrupted melody, one movement, but can also be the arrangement of distinct and discrete miniatures, changes of tempo, sonority, melody, separated by silences. This is what the spaces say" (86). I don't know how that could be made to fit the final seminar paper for a course like this, but it's beguiling nonetheless. Could you imagine a multigenre essay, too, that would involve each of us contributing 2-3 pages, with multiple segments, that we assembled into one piece that we then tried to get published as a multi-authored article in a literary journal? Had I achieved fuller buy-in with this blog maybe we would have found a good bit of the potential material right here. Maybe it's an idea for a future iteration of the class.

Well, the whale-oil has nearly been exhausted, and thus it may be time for me to conclude this bloggy yarn and depart The Quarterdeck! The foregoing, to quote Captain Josias Lockwood of the Star of the Sea, has been signed and written in my own hand, "and I attest it on my solemn honour a compleat and true account of the voyage," undertaken with my seafaring companions during the Fall 2015 semester. I am grateful to those nine for everything they contributed these many months, and for no small amount of patience and good cheer, and I wish them a restorative winter break on land and happy trails extending into their futures!

Redemption Songs

Putting the final PowerPoint show together for our last night (and listening to Marley's song in the process) made me realize that nearly every text we read this semester ultimately became a kind of redemption song. Given how dark and grim the historical contexts and the narratives themselves so often were, it's quite astonishing to find our writers time and again managing to find the hope, the redemption, even the elation; we intuit, as a result, the particular importance of literature and art in allowing for a passage through the tallies of grief into a kind of solace and joy. We had Robert Hayden's "voyage through death to life upon these shores"; history starting anew "in the salt chuckle of rocks" in Walcott's "The Sea is History"; Antoinette's reawakening and self-assertion in the very last sentences of Wide Sargasso Sea; Moses's "church" sessions with his mates and his discovery of the vocation of being a writer in The Lonely Londoners; Jose taking the memory of Ma Tine and his cultural roots with him, also as a writer in the making, in Black Shack Alley; the inclusivity of Maud's quilt of birds and the sea "still going on" at the close of Omeros; Clare's fusion with the landscape and the breaking of day at the end of No Telephone to Heaven; the swelling "many-tongued chorus" supplying collective solace in Crossing the River; Solibo's passage to the "countryless land" to experience "all joy all music all dance."

It's all really quite affirming and, well, quite beautiful, you know?! In our last novel, of course, we dance the "Carriacou Tramp" with Avey, a "shuffle designed to stay the course of history" (250) and to symbolize continuity bodily through the circle dance. Remembering Kincaid's anger in A Small Place and our own discomfort in reading about the degradations of tourism, wasn't it so wonderful, too, to see Avey escape from that banal, meaningless cruise on the Bianca Pride and finish our semester with a kind of conversion narrative that would probably make even Kincaid proud. When Avey ascends in the plane on her way back to New York, we learn that "to fix their image in mind she kept her eyes closed for a long minute after the plane was airborne" (253). How fitting, here, that Avey uses her mind's eye -- rather than the tourist's camera -- to ensure the durability of her place in her newfound "cultural confraternity." The island from which she departs is finally perhaps "more a mirage than an actual place. Something conjured up perhaps to satisfy a longing and a need," something that transcends its natural geographic reality and allows her to sanctify a collective and personal past and thus imagine a new future. As Avatarra and not merely Avey, and "rightfully restored to her proper axis" (254), she may now inherit the wisdom of her grandmother and the ability to unify space and time: "'Her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but her mind, her mind was long gong with the Ibos ...'" (254-5).

Redemption songs, indeed.

Booking Future Passages

Those repeated moments in Praisesong for the Widow when Avey feels the presence of the past (and of her ancestors) physically -- e.g., "And it seemed so real, the fight, that when I woke up the next morning I was actually hurting, physically hurting. And my wrist was sore from her holding it" (170) -- reminded me that I nearly included on our semester's reading list Octavia Butler's time-traveling, nearly sci-fi slavery novel, Kindred. Butler's protagonist is a contemporary African-American woman who, during her nightly dreams, finds herself, frightfully, suddenly immersed in the horrors of a nineteenth-century southern plantation; when she wakes up, her body is physically marked and bruised by the experience, thus physicalizing the notion of historical trauma.

I bring this up because this may be a good time to consolidate some additional texts that we might have read (and that we might still read on our own!). There's the relevance of a text like Melville's novella, Benito Cereno (which makes me think we could also have included the narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, and surely other texts from the American tradition). In addition to Kindred, I would recommend Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, which is a truly shattering novel (set in Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by a gifted writer; if you want to get a more modest sense of Danticat's work, check out the memorable short story "Children of the Sea," which you can find in the volume Krik? Krak?, and which I nearly put on our secondary reading schedule. Chamoiseau's novel Texaco, of course, comes to us with great acclaim. Charles Johnson's Middle Passage would have been a solid choice for the course (and it, too, was in the queue until the last moments of preparation), and would have allowed us to pull in some of the New Orleans/Mississippi Delta components of the world of Atlantic passages. A possible alternative to Star of the Sea (in terms of the Ireland/America transit) would be Colum McCann's TransAtlantic, one of 2013's great, great novels. I also considered More's Utopia for the early weeks of the class. And then how could we forget Toni Morrison?! Any others??

One more stray recommendation for you, as I scan my memory: in the April 18, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen has an interesting personal essay ("Farther Away") in which he combines an accounting of his period of solitude and isolation on an island in the South Pacific, a consideration of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (which also could have been a candidate for the course had we had world enough and time), and a reflection on the life and death of his good friend, David Foster Wallace.

Filling Stations

During the "nation dances" late in Praisesong for the Widow, Avey observes that "it was the essence of something rather than the thing itself she was witnessing ... All that was left were a few names of what they called nations which they could no longer even pronounce properly, the fragments of a dozen or so song, the shadowy forms of long-ago dances and rum kegs for drums. The bare bones. The burnt-out ends. And they clung to them with a tenacity she suddenly loved in them and longed for in herself. Thoughts -- new thoughts -- vague and half-formed slowly beginning to fill the emptiness" (240). This notion of "filling the emptiness" harkens back to at least a couple of earlier scenes -- e.g., when she's slumped forward and emptied out on the hotel room floor, "prostrate before the darkness" (143) and when she's on the wharf a second time and realizes that "there now seemed to be a small clear space in her mind" (187). Sensing this was an echo of Clare and a passage I had read in No Telephone to Heaven, though, I found this message from one of Kitty's last letters to Clare: "A reminder, daughter -- never forget who your people are. Your responsibilities lie beyond me, beyond yourself. There is a space between who you are and who you will become. Fill it" (103). The idea of being emptied out and refilled thus resonates on a number of levels in each novel, and maybe even adds still more mysterious beauty to the blank spaces between words in those last moments of Cliff's novel. Not only are we as readers asked to fill in the blank spaces of a fractured and fragmented narrative, but these empty spaces also symbolize the dissolution that is needed before something new can emerge (whether it's a new language, a new self, a new society).

How appropriate, too, that Marshall's novel ends so movingly with scenes of song and dance. These scenes both honor the novel's title (the "praisesong" is a celebratory poem/song that originated in African cultures) -- which prepared us for the fact we'd be experiencing a musical composition as much as we'd be reading a story -- and bring so many of our earlier texts into the same orbit (which we already talked about a little bit). It makes me think that a study of the body and the kinesthetic imagination in some of our texts could have been a great paper topic as well. In the quote I shared Wednesday night, from his poem "Tom" (from Rights of Passage, 1967), Edward Brathwaite writes "dance / and dare to remember." And then there's this from Sterling Stuckey, which perhaps I'll include on a handout in support of our brief time on Gilroy and music next week during our last class meeting: "Dance was the most difficult of all art forms to erase from the slave's memory in part because it could be practiced in the silence of aloneness where motor habits could be initiated with enough speed to be autonomous. In that lightning fast process, the body very nearly was memory and helped the mind recall the form of dance to come. For in dance, such is the speed with which the mind can work, and the body respond to it, that the time between thought and action all but disappears. In a sense, then, the body is mind, and is capable of inscribing in space the language of the human spirit. When the tempo slows, of course, the body configures what the mind more easily recalls."

The Carriacou Shuffle

Despite the harried nature of these final weeks of the semester, I hope you found some pleasures and some interpretive riches in Praisesong for the Widow, a novel that seems to be powerfully capable of re-staging the issues (and, really, all of the texts) we've traversed this semester. Some of what I'll assemble here will likely be a kind of recap of last night's class, but it helps me, I guess, to try to articulate it in this way.

Marshall's novel certainly reinforces the importance of storytelling that was so prominent in Solibo Magnificent and the importance of mythic memory that was so prominent in No Telephone to Heaven; it uses both to contest and disrupt traditional historiographic understanding (which we've seen in every text this semester, seemingly), and finally fulfills Walcott's desire that historical memory seek out elation rather than recrimination and despair. After the death of Jay (who is "Jerome" at that point) and up through her crisis on the Bianca Pride, Avey falls into an almost amnesiac silence (though there's that "colossal cry" (133) that forms in her throat that nearly summons Christopher's howl in Cliff's novel), recalling the zombified state of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, before gradually (through a series of minor awakenings and epiphanies) overcoming her North White Plains materialistic self by connecting with her Sea Islands self and the matrilineal inheritance that originated in her grandmother and then in her Aunt Cuney. It's a Clare Savage-like voyage of discovery -- at first unconscious but then finally self-aware (aided by that rum and coconut water in Lebert Joseph's church of a rum shop!); as it did for Clare, the voyage includes a reverse Middle Passage, an epic sickness, and the ministrations of the healing hands of maternal figures. Avey's increasingly dazed flight from the strip of the hotels as she wanders down the beach reminds us of Achille's sun-stroke induced passage into another time and place in Book 3 of Omeros; Avey's savior and guide, Lebert, joins Seven Seas, Medouze, and Solibo as carriers of a seemingly ancient wisdom (and how memorably Lebert is described, "the lines etched over his face like the scarification marks of a thousand tribes" (161)). Lebert's job, ultimately, is to make Avey aware of her connections to "the vast unknown lineage" (137), connections which are so strikingly metaphorized by "that myriad of shiny, silken, brightly colored threads [...] which were thin to the point of invisibility yet as strong as the ropes of Coney Island" (249); this sense of a global community, which finally unites the disparate geographical spaces of the novel (the northern United States, the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, the eastern Caribbean island of Carriacou, and Africa), makes us hear again the "many-tongued chorus" of Phillips's Crossing the River.

Early on, of course, we're reminded of Kincaid and A Small Place, especially as the Bianca Pride is described -- "huge, sleek, imperial, a glacial presence in the warm waters of the Caribbean" (16-7). When Avey becomes ill after eating that parfait, we realize, I think, that what she's sickened by is the gaudy excess of the tourism and Western materialism represented by that ship. It's interesting, too, to think about that skeletal tourist -- "the only thing to be seen on the deck chair was a skeleton in a pair of skimpy red-and-white striped trunks and a blue visored cap"; it's not until later, when Avey's transformation occurs via dance and movement, that we realize the symbolic import of that man's appeal to Avey to "have a seat. Take the load off your feet" (59) -- that advice represents the very opposite of what she needs. Somehow, as I noted last night, I can't help but juxtapose this tourist with that fleshy, impossibly irritating and condescending German tourist we saw in that film clip from Cannibal Tours; the latter, we suspect, is destined to become the former. Avey ultimately is physically reduced as well -- "she was as slow and clumsy as a two-year-old just learning how to undress herself" (151), but for her it's all a prelude to being re-filled and re-animated (remember Clare's "rebaptism" in NTTH); she awakens "like a slate that had been wiped clean, a tabula rasa upon which a whole new history could be written" (151). She becomes the opposite of that skeletal tourist, and thus makes even a Biblical reference freshly relevant: "Thus saith the Lord god unto these bones, Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live" (Ezekiel 37:5).

More to follow, I suspect, and, as always, I hope this post might induce a few of you to leave some of your own remainders, especially those of you who didn't get to weigh in much last night. In the meantime, continued good luck with your writing and with all of the pressures of the crazy endgame; I'll look forward to our last class meeting next week.

Under the Shade of the Tamarind

I recently chanced upon this line from Hugh Thomas's book, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870: "In some respects, the treatment of slaves was, Park thought, far from being harsh or cruel. They were led out in their fetters every morning to the shade of the tamarind tree, where they were encouraged to play games of chance, and asked to sing, to keep up their spirits" (384). This reference to the tamarind tree resonates so much more fully now after having read Solibo Magnificent. I wonder if we can think of the tree as providing another of those alternative spaces we've talked about from time to time this semester, spaces that allow for more enabling performances/realizations of identity (e.g., St. Pancras/Saltfish Hall in The Lonely Londoners, Medouze's hut in Black Shack Alley, the Halsey Street apartment for Avey and Jay in Praisesong for the Widow (which you are about to encounter), etc.). In Chamoiseau's novel, the tree stands as the center of community life, the center of communal solidarity and collective identity, the center of resistance. It suggests borders between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown, the physical and the spiritual, etc. It suggests ancestral knowledge (making it the perfect place for the wisdom and storytelling of Solibo). It exemplifies and symbolizes both rootedness and mobility ("roots and routes"). And with Thomas's quote, we gain the added significance of the tamarind tree as a place of refuge and protection for slaves; these trees supplied them with shade, medicine, food, and later must have played a role in helping slaves/maroons to escape.

In reading this novel again, too, I was reminded of how there are so many wonderfully evocative and poignant moments of writing in this novel, moments that are worth contemplating in isolation. An example: "That scene lasted forever -- and could have gone on and on: a tafia-soused audience, sitting in a circle at the crack of dawn, does not inscribe itself in the ephemeral. But then, after eons (exactly three hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-two seconds, says the coroner), a basaltic old man left the assembly and made toward Solibo. His name was Congo and he seemed to owe Death four centuries" (16). Or this one, on memory and grieving, and on storytelling's solace: "Sidonise, who had seemed for a few moments to be drowning in another world, starts to murmur an inaudible story. A strange smile transfigures her pain, her eyes follow the flight of internal visions. There is a prowling memory there, of those that death, in its tide, drains from our heads, our hearts, our dreams. Oh life plays hide-and-seek, never giving all of herself at once, but leaving to death's seasons the essence of her stems, her flowers' subtle perfume. There, through the small sherbet vendor, Solibo confronts our distress, dissipates it, as certain churches do the sadness of the devoted. Charlo' forgets his cheek and raises his inundated eyes" (78-9).

Perhaps you have other passages, other reflections to share?

On the Move

The aftermath of the Paris attacks and the coarsening of the political dialogue in our own country have me thinking about refugees again (Syrian and otherwise), which brings Clifford's essay back into my field of vision. We're reminded yet again, as Caren Kaplan writes, that "the ever-expanding numbers of displaced persons remains uneasy and unresolved," and of how marginal and imperiled refugees are (rhetorically and literally) relative to such other categories as exiles, migrants, transnationals, etc. The added spectre of terrorism (i.e., of terrorists using to their advantage the flow of refugees to western Europe) raises the stakes of Clifford's sense that diasporic cultural forms "encode practices of accommodation with, as well as resistance to, host countries and norms" (307).

For our purposes, we must remain mindful of the material histories and, often, the psychic trauma of bodies on the move (which may end up being the focus of final papers for some of you, in one way or another). Clifford proposes that "a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin" (306), or of any possibility of a return to that origin, and we think again, perhaps, of the various bodies on the move in our course texts this semester, seeking a better life, seeking communal affiliation, etc.: the spectral existence of Martha in Crossing the River and Mary Duane in Star of the Sea, the existential loneliness of Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, Travis's (CTR) and Bobby's (No Telephone to Heaven) wounded and symbolic odysseys, the difficult travails of Moses and his fellow immigrants in Selvon's London, even, at some level, Plunkett's displacement in Omeros ... among many others.

Gosh, did you notice that even the seagulls in The Lonely Londoners (the ones that end up on the window ledge of Cap's apartment) are exilic/diasporic? We learn that they "come up from the old Thames when things too hard for them by the sea," and that "sometimes they join the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and it have some of them does hang out by the Odeon in Marble Arch" (134). Creatures of the sea (just like the Caribbean immigrants) who have moved to urban areas for congress and survival -- how appropriate is that?! Lately, too, I tend to think of the poignant symbolism of Greer in Crossing the River (Joyce's and Travis's bi-racial son). Not only does he both challenge naive/purified notions of British national identity (as white, for example), but he also inflects that national identity with the history of slavery and racism (Bhabha's ideas of disjunctive temporalities would be useful here. And then, wow, we remember Joyce, on the novel's last page, thinking, with great irony and sadness, "I almost said make yourself at home." We're stunned, realizing that there can be no homecoming for Greer, realizing that his experience of dislocation and dispossession will be ongoing, and that he'll have to seek affirmation and solidarity in other (hybrid, intercultural) affiliations.