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.

(Hi)stories

It was important to raise the issue of history and historiography in last week's class, as this reminds us yet again of questions that have been consistently present for us this semester, and that suggest very promising possibilities for papers and further inquiry. I think of Declan Kiberd's avowal (which was on the board) that “there can be no single History, only a plurality of self-interested histories, each composed at the mercy of its own moment of creation and at the mercy also of the literary form in which it is encased.” When, near the very end of Star of the Sea, we learn that Seamus Meadowes has reinvented himself many times over after reaching America, and even written an autobiography in which he casts himself as a justice-seeking advocate for the working man, we realize quite palpably how this novel shows us how stories, testimonies, and myths proliferate and then are dispersed; meanwhile, the truth gets harder to locate, and the dead become ever more lost and anonymous in the mists of time (remember Walcott, in "The Muse of History," proposing that "in time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention. The further the facts, the more history petrifies into myth"). As the narrating Dixon finally explains, "As for the rest -- the details, the emphases, certain devices of narration and structure, whole events which may never have occurred, or may have happened quite differently to how they are described -- those belong to the imagination" (394). It all sounds very poststructural, right: the actual past has gone, and it's only manifested in the historicized traces now, traces that signify an absent presence.

Our most direct encounter with historiography has been Walcott's essay, of course, but if you want to pursue this line of inquiry you'd do well to seek out Hayden White's work -- in particular the essay to which I referred in class some weeks ago, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (1980). In the three decades since White's work appeared, we've come to realize that the relations between literature and history must be rethought and that, indeed, there are two meanings of the word "history": (1) the events of the past, and (2) telling a story about the events of the past. White is interested in the constructedness of historical narrative, in the principles of selection, and in the desires that inhere in our need to have real events presented in such a way that they "display the formal coherency of a story," for "the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origins in wishes, daydreams, reveries." In what ways do our texts this semester (Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," for example, or Crossing the River, Omeros, Star of the Sea, etc.) formalize and thematize an opposition to "old historicism," which, according to White, has always wanted us to find in historical narratives "a structure that was in the events all along," and which, consequently, suggests "why the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as 'found' in the events rather than put there by narrative techniques"? When you realize how history was traditionally a matter of coherence, of structures, of order, of knowability, it begins to bring a whole new resonance to the fractured, gapped, multigenred, stitched-together texts we've encountered this semester ...

Sea Worthiness

We're at the point in the semester, of course, when connections and threads should be richly accumulating across our disparate texts (as I tried to indicate via our little exercise involving "names" on the whiteboard last night); I look forward to the final papers in this regard, as I'm sure some of you will be doing this kind of associational and comparative tracking. As another kind of exercise, and wondering about the connective tissue made available to us through the Irish Famine and emigration experience (after last night's productive discussion), I thought I'd try to identify at least one link between O'Connor's Star of the Sea and our various course texts this semester: (1) w/ Hayden's "Middle Passage": the two texts mostly clearly and directly involved with the onboard ship experience; the comparisons between the role of the captains in the two texts; the fragmented nature of the narratives and the multiple sources in play in each; (2) The Tempest: we might think about the connections between Caliban, Cliff's Christopher, and Pius Mulvey around the idea of "othering" and notions of the monster and the abject; there's also the possible comparison between Prospero and David Merridith in that each was in a sense exiled in their own land before experiencing the sea crossing and more overt exile; (3) Wide Sargasso Sea: there's a kind of echo between the post-emancipation changes to the social order in Rhys's Jamaica and the Famine-related upheavals that changed the fates and hierarchies (to some extent) of the landlords and tenant farmers in Ireland; the idealized expectations of Antoinette regarding England and of the emigrating Irish regarding the America that awaits them; (4) Crossing the River: there are probably too many to mention here, but there's the ship's log/diary comparisons between the two texts (and the two captains), "that terrifying ledger of human suffering" (O'Connor 186); there's the spectral, dispossessed western migrations of Phillips's Martha and O'Connor's Mary Duane (who is finally just "a shade moving slowly through a forest of black umbrellas" (389)); there are the similarities in the multi-voiced, fragmented form of the novels; (5) No Telephone to Heaven: the discourse of racism that appears in both texts; the sense of comparative traumas and experiences of racism that are opened up in both texts (e.g., Clare's experience juxtaposed with Bobby's African American experience in the former novel, and the Irish dispossession and sea passage juxtaposed with the Middle Passage in the latter); (6) Black Shack Alley: Merridith's alienated position relative to his father reminds us, perhaps, of that the treatment of fathers, sons, and inheritances -- and the way such relationships are affected by colonial dynamics -- are featured in each text; (7) Omeros: Maud's Irishness and the Poet-figure's journey to Ireland in Book 5 open up interesting points of convergence with O'Connor's novel: as Michael Malouf proposes, "Structurally, Ireland and Joyce move the poem away from its previous concerns with the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle Passage and lead to the more universalist, cosmopolitan themes of the later chapters in Book 5"; maybe we could even think of the Adamic sensibility and poetics being a relevant comparison (the emigrant Irish expect a kind of Adamic renewal in America, perhaps, and also experience the kind of ineffable void in their sense of history (because of the trauma of the Famine) that Walcott describes in "The Muse of History"); (8) The Lonely Londoners: the good, resourceful, creative side of Pius may remind us a little of "Selvon's boys" in London, but, more than that, the novels also focus searingly on material dispossession -- this fear of Pius Mulvey may remind us of the milk bottles passage in Selvon's novel: "More than poverty and hunger it began to claw at him: the picture of himself and his heartbreakingly courageous brother growing old and then dying in that mountainside cabin. Nobody to mourn them or even to notice they were gone" (87); there's also the juxtaposition between the great hopes of the emigrants upon leaving their native lands in each text and the harsh realities of what they encounter -- as we learn late in Star of the Sea, "anti-immigrant feeling was strong" (376) in New York when the Star's passengers are finally allowed to disembark.

Well, it's an interesting exercise, in any event! Before we move on, a couple more observations about Star of the Sea. First, there's the sheer poignance of the Captain's observations of the leavetaking (which, in a way, take us back to those memorable scenes in Book 3 of Omeros when the slaves are taken from their homes, their families, their occupations, or that moment in Crossing the River when, the ship heading to sea, Captain Hamilton observes that "they huddle together, and sing their melancholy lamentations" (124)): "What anguish, then, must be endured by those on board who will never again in this life see their loved ones who must remain behind? The man who will never more go walking in the evening in his home town with his brother, quietly reflecting together on the matters of the day. Or the girl who must bid farewell to respected parents whom she knows to be too poorly to countenance such an arduous voyage. The happy young couple who must part from one another and the father parted from his wife and children, to travel into America by himself where the means only exist to pay for one passage. To wander alone among strangers, they risk all" (275).

Consider this, too, as an overflow vestibule to last night's discussion. I know there are a good many observations still to be made about O'Connor's novel, the two poems, the Clifford essay, etc.

Of Shining Salted Faces

Well, I'm thinking we can & should still be in the business of isolating some stray striking passages in this space, and the grim encounter between the whale and the Star of the Sea in O'Connor's novel reminded me of that wonderful moment, late in Omeros, when Philoctete and Achille encounter (with a mixture of awe and terror) the sudden emergence of a whale right next to their fishing boat:



Exultant with terror, Philo kept ravelling


the line around his fist, and then both gasped as one whale --


"Baleine," said Achille -- lifted its tapering wedge



as a bouquet of spume hissed from its splitting pod,


as it slowly heightened the island of itself,


then sounded, the tail sliding, till it disappeared



into a white hole whose trough, as it came, lifted


In God We Troust with its two men high off the shelf


of the open sea, then set it back down under



a swell that swamped them, while the indifferent shoal


foamed northward. He has seen the shut face of thunder,


he has known the frightening trough dividing the soul

from this life and the other, he has seen the pod


burst into spray. The bilge was bailed out, the sail


turned home, their wet, salted faces shining with God.



This passage, with the radiant appearance of that whale at the end of a day's fishing, reveals that, among other things, Walcott is a great nature writer, too. One remembers Shakespeare's sense of the "solemn sympathy" of nature, perhaps, or, as I do, thinks of David Abram's discussion of animism in his great book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram hopes that the interpenetration of the human and animal/natural worlds is such that "the other forms of experience that we encounter -- whether ants, or willow trees, or clouds -- are never absolutely alien to ourselves" (16). This is increasingly rare, though, and Abram later laments, "How is it that these phenomena no longer address us, no longer compel our involvement or reciprocate our attention? .... To freeze the ongoing animation, to block the wild exchange between the senses and the things that engage them, would be tantamount to freezing the body itself, stopping it short in its tracks .... If we no longer experience the enveloping earth as expressive and alive, this can only mean that the animating interplay of the senses has been transferred to another medium, another locus of participation" (130-1). We should admire Philo and Achille here, their "salted faces shining with God," and this natural manifestation of their rediscovered wholeness. Someone (Briana, maybe?) had wondered about the significance of the ants in Omeros (and I think ants end up having an ambiguously important role in Solibo Magnificent, too, which is next up for us), so maybe this incident, along with the Abram quotes, help us a bit in that regard?