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Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean.
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“In the Free”: The Work of Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean Historical Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2015
Abstract
The concluding words of Erna Brodber's The Rainmaker's Mistake, a novel prompted in part by the two-hundredth anniversary of the 1807 Act to Abolish the Slave Trade in Britain's Caribbean Colonies, affirm its engagement with history and historiography, emphasizing the need for Caribbean writers of the twenty-first century to search the past – uncover its traumas, its mysteries, and its treasures – in order to make sense of the present and project a future “in the free.” Brodber's work, of course, is part of a much larger and longer conversation among Caribbean novelists about what it means “to search and to reproduce and to cultivate,” literally and metaphorically. To explore the implications of this conversation, my essay focusses on this various and vexed cultural work as performed in three key Caribbean novels: E. L. Joseph's Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, published in 1838, the year that “full freedom” was granted by the British Parliament to the enslaved population of the British West Indies after a four-year apprenticeship period; Paule Marshall's 1969 The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, produced during a period of independence for many Anglo-Caribbean nations, including her parents' native Barbados in 1968; and, finally, Brodber's 2007 “Afrofuturistic” novel The Rainmaker's Mistake.
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References
1 Brodber, Erna, The Rainmaker's Mistake (London: New Beacon, 2007)Google Scholar, 150.
2 Britain's Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, effective as of 1 August 1834, at which time a proposed period of apprenticeship – four years for house slaves, six years for field slaves – began. By 1838, British administrators decided that it would be difficult to maintain order if only one group of apprentices were freed, so full emancipation was declared in 1838. Among the nations that declared their independence in the 1960s were Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, and Guyana and Barbados in 1968. For more on reading The Rainmaker's Mistake as an Afrofuturistic text see Josephs, Kelly Baker, “Beyond Geography, Past Time: Afrofuturism, The Rainmaker's Mistake, and Caribbean Studies,” small axe, 41 (2013), 123–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Dalleo, Raphael, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011)Google Scholar, vii.
4 “Historical periodization,” writes Hulme, remains one of “the most resistant categories of Eurocentrism” because of its tendency to narrate world history in terms of developmental stages. Quoted in Dalleo, vii.
5 I am mindful that my choice of these particular works, like acts of literary canonization and periodization, is “based on acts of selection, exclusion and preference.” Alison Donnell, quoted in Dalleo, vii.
6 Dalleo, 5.
7 de Piérola, José. “At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for the Historical Novel in Latin America,” Romance Studies, 26, 2 (2008), 151–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 152.
8 Ibid., 156. Defining the historical novel in this way, argues Piérola, paves the way for a theoretical frame that “does not define a ‘form’ with fixed and predictable effects on reality, but rather one that allows us to understand what the historical novel is, how it works, and how it relates to reality.” Ibid., 155.
9 Questioning the “why” and “how,” insists Piérola, is necessary if readings of historical fiction are to move beyond historicizing the work by revealing the underlying ideologies of its moment of production, important as that is. Ibid., 157.
10 Morrison, Toni, “The Site of Memory,” in Zinsser, William, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (New York: Mariner, 1998)Google Scholar, 183–200, 192. Sharpe, Jenny, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology and Black Women's Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)Google Scholar, esp. xi–xiii.
11 Baucom, Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 333.
12 See, e.g., A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection of the French Inhabitants in the Island of Grenada. By an Eye-Witness (Edinburgh, 1795)Google Scholar, and Hay, John, A Narrative of the Insurrection in the Island of Grenada, Which Took Place in 1795 (London, 1823)Google Scholar.
13 According to the unnamed “Military Man” and thirty-year resident of the West Indies who supplies Hay's Narrative with an introduction, Fédon was believed to have “perished at sea in a canoe, endeavouring to get to the Spanish Main.” Hay, 14. For more recent discussions of Fédon see Curtis M. Jacobs, “The Development of an Ideology of Collective Political Violence amongst Grenada's Revolutionaries, 1784–1795,” unpublished paper, n.d; and “The Fédons of Grenada, 1763–1814,” available at www.cavehill.uwi.edu/BNCCde/grenada/conference/papers/jacobsc.html, accessed 30 March 2014.
14 Joseph, E. L., Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, ed. Winer, Lise (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 27.
15 Ibid., 312.
16 Ibid., 352.
17 My reading here departs from that offered by Everson, Sally, “Redeeming the Specter of Slave Revolt: Warner Arundell, Colonial Modernity and the Woodford Era,” Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerty Rico, 11, 41–42 (2006)Google Scholar, 433–48, 440, who argues that Joseph's novel “rewrites the failed Grenadian Revolution as a success, such as that of Haiti, rejecting a racist basis for modern Creole Society.”
18 Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah, and Mitchell, Stanley (London: Merlin Press, 1962)Google Scholar, 29.
19 Watson, Tim, Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 74.
20 Ibid., 74.
21 Joseph, 406.
22 Everson, 440. Though I disagree with this (to me, overgenerous) assessment of Joseph's novel, I do agree with Everson that Warner Arundell and Joseph's History of Trinidad “can be read … as attempts to express a distinct Creole historical consciousness, differentiating it from England and Europe, yet placing it on the same path of socio-economic development,” a trajectory that posits “British culture as the apogee of European enlightenment.” Ibid., 438.
23 See Curtis Jacobs, “The Fédons of Grenada,” for a discussion of the loss of Fédon's coffee plantation, Belvidere, to the machinations of the English planter Alexander Campbell.
24 I am indebted to the reviewer of this essay for the reference to Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel and its characterization of the European historical novel.
25 Wynter, Sylvia, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou, 5 (1971), 95–102Google Scholar, 101; my emphasis.
26 Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 150. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin observe (ibid., 153), the implications of Harris's own critical reading and creative practices for literary modes and forms are “profound, indicating a surface realism creatively fractured by the intrusive irrational, by dream and madness.”
27 Marshall, Paule, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (New York: Vintage, 1969)Google Scholar, 402.
28 Ibid., 102.
29 Ibid., 102, 101.
30 Brathwaite, Edward [Kamau], review of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, by Marshall, Paule, Journal of Black Studies, 1, 2 (Dec. 1970), 225–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Marshall, 101.
32 Ibid., 101.
33 Ibid., 102.
34 Ibid., 122.
35 Ibid., 123.
36 It is interesting to read the debate between Ferguson and Stinger as Marshall's dramatization of contemporary theorizations on the impact of literacy – especially literacy as controlled by imperial power – on oral cultures, like that found in Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America (1974) and Abdul Jan Mohammed's Manichean Aesthetics (1983). See Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 79–83.
37 See, for example, Peters, Trevor, “The ‘Great Wrong’: The Collusion of Former Colonials and the Neo-colonials in Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People,” Calabash, 3, 1 (2004–5), 124–35Google Scholar.
38 Lamming, George, The Pleasures of Exile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992; first published 1960)Google Scholar, 38.
39 Ibid., 39.
40 Marshall, 134.
41 Ibid., 134.
42 Ibid., 402.
43 See Wood, Marcus, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 2.
44 Marshall, 160.
45 Ibid., 162.
46 Ibid., 121.
47 McD. Beckles, Hilary, “‘Slavery Was a Long, Long Time Ago’: Remembrance, Reconciliation and the Reparations Discourse of the Caribbean,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 38, 1 (2007), 9–26Google Scholar, 10. Beckles's mention of visa seekers in the same breath as agricultural labor is interesting in connection with Chosen Place's Vere, a young man who has traveled to the US on the “labor scheme” to cut cane in Florida. On his return he describes to his grandmother Leesy conditions that are even more brutal than those he endured in Bournehills's cane fields. For more on Caribbean “guest workers” and the special visa program like that described by Vere see Stephanie Black's 1990 documentary H-2 Workers.
48 Marshall, 284.
49 Ibid., 284.
50 Wynter, Sylvia, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou, 5 (1971), 95–102Google Scholar.
51 Marshall, 287.
52 Ibid., original emphasis. This mode of cultivation was also central to Fédon's rebellion, especially in the growing period before the actual fighting. This strategy is not mentioned, of course, in Joseph's retelling of events, and only in a few of the colonial histories. See e.g. Craton, Michael, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 189–90Google Scholar.
53 Quoted in Matthew Kopka, “Freedom in the Making: The Afro-Caribbean Peasant Inheritance in Grenada from Plantation to Neoliberalism and Beyond,” unpublished dissertation, Interdisciplinary Ecology, University of Florida, 2012.
54 Barnes, Natasha, Cultural Conundrums: Gender, Race, Nation, and the Making of the Caribbean Cultural Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 99.
55 Marhsall, 315.
56 Ibid., 69.
57 Ibid., 116.
58 Ibid., 130. Throughout the novel, Merle equates confronting history with a descent into madness – her first mention of Cuffee Ned and the Pyre Hill Revolt, described above, ends by acknowledging that the revolt is, for many “outsiders,” including middle-class and neocolonial members of Bourne Island society, “some old-time business everybody's done forgot” (283). But the people of Bournehills – who “don't ever forget anything,” even if it “happened donkeys' years ago and should have long been done with and forgotten” – go on about Cuffee and Pyre Hills because “we're an odd, half-mad people” (102). Similarly, Merle describes herself at the end of the book, when she is about to travel to Africa, as a “slightly daft, middle-aged woman with history on the brain” (467). As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back, 153, describe it, Harris's notion (articulated in The Womb of Space) of a surface realism creatively fractured by the intrusive irrational, by dream and madness, is useful here.
59 Marshall, 400–1.
60 Ibid., 401.
61 Ibid., 402.
62 Ibid., 402.
63 Ibid., 402.
64 Ibid., 472.
65 Marshall's sign-off, the last words of the novel, ties its composition to particular places and times: “Grenada, West Indies. New York. Yaddo. 1963–68.”
66 Hodge, Merle and Seale, Chris, “Is Freedom We Making”: The New Democracy in Grenada (St. George's: Government Information Service, [1981])Google Scholar, 36.
67 Josephs, “Beyond Geography, Past Time,” 123.
68 In the conclusion to her exhaustive and insightful discussion of Brodber's novel, DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, “Yams, Roots, Rot: Allegories of the Provision Ground,” small axe, 34 (2011), 58–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 73, describes “dirt”/“earth” as “ubiquitous in the novel,” a “submerged presence” vital to the “excavations of history” that can “lead diasporic communities ‘into naturalness.’”
69 Wynter, “Novel and History,” 99.
70 Marshall, 287; DeLoughrey, 64.
71 Jubbah's gravesite is not on Mr. Charlie's estate, but on land occupied in some post-Emancipation time and space by Woodville, discovered by one of Queenie's age-mates, Little Congo, on one of his expeditions off-island.
72 Brodber, Rainmaker's Mistake, 114.
73 DeLoughrey, 72.
74 Brodber, 126.
75 Among the critical comments provoked by Anderson's essay are those that rightly point out his almost exclusive attention to male writers.
76 Quoted in Anderson, Perry, “From Progress to Catastrophe: Perry Anderson on the Historical Novel,” London Review of Books, 33, 15 (2011), 24–28Google Scholar, available at www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n15/perry-anderson/from-progress-to-catastrophe, accessed 30 March 2014.
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