Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination 9780231540575

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C A LY P S O J E WS

LITERATURE NOW

LITERATURE NOW M AT T H E W H A RT, DAV I D J A M E S , A N D R E B ECC A L . WA L KOW I T Z , S E R I E S E D I TORS

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and earlytwenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision

SA RA H PH I LLIP S C ASTEEL

als Jes JEWISHNESS IN THE CARIBBEAN L I T E R A RY I M A G I N AT I O N

COLUMBIA UNIVER SITY PRESS

N E W YO R K

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Casteel, Sarah Phillips, 1974Calypso Jews : Jewishness in the Caribbean literary imagination / Sarah Phillips Casteel. pages cm. — (Literature now) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17440-4 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54057-5 (e-book) 1. Caribbean literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean literature (French)—History and criticism. 3. Jews in literature. 4. Jews—Caribbean Area—Identity. I. Title. PR9205.05.C39 2016 810.9'9729—dc23 2015017753

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover and book design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Isaac Mendes Belisario, “Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy,” plate 6, Belisario, I.M. Sketches of character, in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica. Kingston: published by the artist, 1837–[1838], lithograph, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon collection. References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For James, and in memory of Avie and Harry Phillips

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

INTRODUCTION

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PART 1: 1492 1. SEPHARDISM IN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE: DEREK WALCOTT’S PISSARRO 35 2. MARRANISM AND CREOLIZATION: MYRIAM CHANCY AND MICHELLE CLIFF 69 3. PORT JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION: MARYSE CONDÉ AND DAVID DABYDEEN 99 4. PLANTATION JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION: CYNTHIA MCLEOD’S JODENSAVANNE 135

PART 2: HOLOCAUSTS 5. CALYPSO JEWS: JOHN HEARNE AND JAMAICA KINCAID 6. BETWEEN CAMPS: M. NOURBESE PHILIP AND MICHÈLE MAILLET 203

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7. WRITING UNDER THE SIGN OF ANNE FRANK: MICHELLE CLIFF AND CARYL PHILLIPS 235 CONCLUSION

Notes 275 Works Cited Index 323

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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his project has brought me into contact with a truly wonderful group of scholars in North America, Europe, and the Caribbean whose work in related areas has greatly enriched my own. I am grateful to Dalia Kandiyoti for her steady encouragement and for her inspiring scholarship and to Rachel Rubinstein and Jennifer Glaser, who showed me how it was possible to do Jewish studies differently. In addition, a number of colleagues offered valuable insights and advice and shared work that helped me to advance the research, including Judah Cohen, Stef Craps, Natalie Zemon Davis, Audra Diptee, Christine Duff, Shai Fierst, Rachel Frankel, Ainsley Cohen Henriques, Aliesha Hosein, Heidi Kaufman, Bénédicte Ledent, Tony MacFarlane, Joanna Newman, Jessica Roitman, Allan Ryan, Winfried Siemerling, Hyacinth Simpson, Barry Stiefel, Patrick Taylor, and David Trotman. I also thank Sailaja Sastry, who patiently read parts of the manuscript with her keen editorial eye. I would like to express my gratitude to Janelle Duke at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Julie-Marthe Cohen at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and Michele Russel-Capriles, president of the Jewish Cultural Historical Museum of Curaçao, for their patient assistance with my queries. Also in Curaçao, Gigi Scheper offered an illuminating tour of Jewish heritage sites—thanks as well to Christine and Sarah for tagging along with me to all those cemeteries! In Suriname Cynthia McLeod graciously answered the questions that Ken Victor put

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to her on my behalf when family commitments prevented me from being there in person. Many thanks to Ken for all of his help. I owe additional thanks to Anna Ruth Henriques, Caryl Phillips, John Biggins, and NourbeSe Philip for generously allowing me to reproduce artwork, photography, and poetry. The poem “St. Claire Avenue West” from Salmon Courage by M. NourbeSe Philip is quoted by permission of the author. I also thank Valentine Mitchell for allowing me to reprint in revised form my article “Calypso Jews: Holocaust Refugees in the Caribbean Literary Imagination,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2013): 1–26. The calypsos “Jews in the West Indies,” “I Don’t Want Any Syrians Again,” and “The Persecuted Jews” are in the public domain. I am deeply grateful to Tony Kushner, Shirli Gilbert, and James Jordan at the University of Southampton for so warmly welcoming me into their discussions of postcoloniality and Jewishness in Cape Town and London. I also thank the members of the 2011 Posen summer seminar, and especially the organizers Rachel Rubinstein and Naomi Seidman, for their invaluable feedback. My thanks go as well to the participants in a workshop on Sephardic literary studies and comparative methodologies that I co-organized with Dalia Kandiyoti at CUNY in 2012 and to Jane Gerber for sponsoring the workshop. At a late stage in the project, crucial support and encouragement were offered by Bryan Cheyette, Jonathan Freedman, Michael Rothberg, and Rob Nixon, who continues to astonish me with his kindness and generosity. I was fortunate over the course of writing this book to have the help of several very talented research assistants, Ebony Magnus, Gabrielle Etcheverry, and Sarah Waisvisz, whose enthusiasm and diligence helped me to keep going with the project when my own energy was flagging. I am also grateful to Aliesha Hosein for her help with all matters Trinidadian and to Ebony for sharing with me the story of her Jamaican grandmother, Eleanor Ann Levy, who had difficulty finding an apartment in 1950s Toronto because of her Jewish-sounding surname. At Carleton I am blessed to be surrounded by warm and supportive colleagues, including Brian Johnson, Julie Murray, Franny Nudelman, and Jan Schroeder among many others. In particular, Ming Tiampo and Catherine Khordoc have offered a rare combination of friendship,

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intellectual companionship, and professional collaboration that has sustained me over the years. The Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and the Migration and Diaspora Studies Initiative at Carleton have provided a vital institutional context for my research. I also thank the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton, the Government of Ontario, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for research awards and other financial assistance that made the completion of this book possible. I am very grateful to the series editors, Rebecca Walkowitz and David James, for their support for the book; to Philip Leventhal, at Columbia University Press, for guiding the manuscript through the editorial process so expertly and so thoughtfully; and to Susan Pensak for her superb editing. I also owe a great debt to the two anonymous readers for the press, whose exceptionally astute and generous commentaries pushed me to refine a number of key points in my argument. Finally, I thank my husband James for his unfailing support, patience, understanding, and good humor, and my children Harry, Isaac, and Miriam, for giving me much needed perspective. I am also indebted to my parents, Ruth and Mark Phillips, for offering so many different forms of assistance that they are simply too numerous to list here. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents, Avie and Harry Phillips—colonial Jews and lovers of literature whose lives were shaped by the struggle against racism in their native South Africa.

C A LY P S O J E WS

INTRODUCTION

Why does it remain so difficult for so many people to accept the knotted intersection of histories . . . ? —Paul Gilroy, “Afterword,” Modernity, Culture and “the Jew”

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owards the end of Achy Obejas’s novel Days of Awe (2001), the narrator relates four theories regarding how the Jews first came to Cuba. The first theory speculates that New World Indigenous populations are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The second posits somewhat less fancifully that Sephardic Conversos arrived on Columbus’s ships, “hiding behind baptisms and crucifixes but Jews nonetheless” (333). The third points to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Finally, the fourth scene of Jewish relocation to the Americas invoked by Obejas’s narrator is that of “a great wave of more sophisticated European refugees from Nazism . . . who’d arrive with enough money to pay Cuban immigration officials’ exorbitant bribes” (334). Indeed, in the late 1930s, hundreds of European Jews sought refuge not only in Cuba but in other parts of the Caribbean including Trinidad, where they established a “calypso shtetl” and dubbed themselves the “Calypso Jews.” Although this moniker suggests an ironic juxtaposition of two very distinct worlds, Jews in fact had long been a part of Caribbean society. As Obejas signals in Days of Awe, the

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arrival of the Ashkenazi refugees from the Nazis was predated by several centuries by an older Jewish presence—that of the Sephardim who had resettled in the Caribbean in the aftermath of the 1490s expulsions from Spain and Portugal. This multilayered Caribbean Jewish story remains a largely unfamiliar one to many because of the tendency to focus on the Ashkenazi experience in Europe and the United States. Yet it has been a source of inspiration for Caribbean/diaspora novelists and poets,1 a number of whom have made significant use of the intersection of Black and Jewish cultures in their work. Postwar Caribbean writing recalls both the Iberian expulsion and the Holocaust, regularly invoking the second and fourth scenes of Jewish arrival in the islands identified by Obejas’s narrator. In Calypso Jews I examine how Caribbean/diaspora writers register this historical presence of Jews in the region and, in so doing, articulate a distinctive discourse on Black-Jewish relations that unsettles dominant narratives of slavery, empire, and race. I contextualize Caribbean literary representations of Jewishness with reference to the specific histories of contact and entanglement—both material and symbolic—between Black and Jewish diaspora cultures in the Atlantic world. These histories, which reflect two of the greatest traumas of Jewish experience, extend from the postexpulsion resettlement of early modern Sephardim in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century to the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis to Trinidad and other Caribbean island and mainland locales in the late 1930s. Accordingly, Calypso Jews identifies not only the Holocaust but also 1492 as nodes of interdiasporic comparison with Black historical experience and with the anguish of the Middle Passage in particular. Caribbean literary invocations of the Sephardic expulsion and the Holocaust merit consideration for what they can tell us not only about representations of Jewishness in postcolonial writing but also about the shifting preoccupations and vocabularies of Caribbean poetics. In particular, they reveal the centrality of analogical thought in the intellectual formation and self-definition of Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during World War II and in the decades immediately following. These writers, whose adolescences were shaped by an awareness of the war, invoke calamitous moments of Jewish history as part of a larger

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effort to confront slavery and its legacies. In so doing, they probe what Paul Gilroy describes as “the knotted intersection of histories,” deepening their investigation of Caribbean creolization in all its many iterations. While creolization theory has neglected the Jewish presence in the Caribbean, the fiction, drama, and poetry considered in this study recognize Jews as significant participants in historical processes of creolization. This recognition contributes to a Caribbean literary discourse on Black-Jewish relations that, while not without its tensions and ambivalences, favors an identificatory mode of comparing histories of trauma. As the texts examined in the first half of this study recall, the story of Caribbean Jewry dates back to the earliest moments of New World colonialism, when the expulsions from the Iberian peninsula in the 1490s propelled some Sephardic Jews and Conversos to resettle in the Americas. Jewish settlement in the Caribbean occurred over a period of more than three hundred years, establishing itself in the seventeenth century and peaking in the latter half of the eighteenth century. As a result, Dutch and British Caribbean colonies such as Curaçao, Suriname, Jamaica, and Barbados have had significant and long-standing Jewish populations. In cultural terms, it is noteworthy that both Jamaica’s “first national painter,” Isaac Mendes Belisario, and a founding father of impressionism, the St. Thomas-born Camille Pissarro, were the products of nineteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean communities. The dispersal of early modern Sephardim across Atlantic familial, trade and religious networks was followed by successive waves of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish emigration to the Caribbean. In Cuba, for example, the early modern Conversos who made their way to the island while the Inquisition still held sway were succeeded in the late nineteenth century by Jewish American expatriates and then at the turn of the twentieth century by Turkish Jews seeking to avoid conscription in the Turkish army. These were followed a couple of decades later by Eastern European Jews, especially Poles, with the result that Jews in Cuba became known as polacos (Behar 4–5; 7). In the 1930s, as I will discuss in the second half of this study, with most other doors closed to them, boatloads of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe arrived in Trinidad, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, Curaçao, and elsewhere. The postwar period saw still further migrations. In the 1970s, for

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example, Jews who left Algeria after the War of Liberation reinvigorated the dwindling Jewish community in Martinique, an island whose earliest settlers had included Jews (Miles 140, 145). One of the legacies of this lengthy and varied Jewish historical presence in the Caribbean is that one finds today small surviving Jewish communities, synagogues, and cemeteries scattered throughout the archipelago as well as on the Caribbean mainland. Further traces of this history are detectable in the Jewish surnames that are borne by some Afro-Caribbeans—the Jamaican British writer Andrea Levy is a prime example. Thus, in the aftermath of 1492 and the displacement of multiple populations that ensued, Black and Jewish diaspora histories became entangled with one another across the Caribbean region. In the early modern period in particular, Black and Jewish trajectories converged as the New World colonial economy circulated both African slaves and members of the Sephardic Jewish trading diaspora across its networks. With their

F IG U R E 0.1. Interior of Mikvé Emmanuel Synagogue, Willemstad, Curaçao showing the sand floor that is the architectural hallmark of Caribbean synagogues. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.

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linguistic, technical, and commercial skills, Sephardic Jews played a key role as cultural and economic brokers of empire. And yet, despite both the historical depth and geographical breadth of these diasporic encounters, the question of Black-Jewish relations and their literary representation has rarely been broached outside a twentieth-century U.S. framework. Discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics largely have been centered on the United States and have tended to be inflected by the persistent political tensions between African Americans and Jewish Americans. As a result, the larger terrain of Black-Jewish dynamics in the Americas and the purchase of Jewishness on the Caribbean literary imagination in particular have been neglected. Calypso Jews traces a postwar Caribbean intellectual tradition of engaging with Jewishness and Jewish history in order to identify and account for its distinctive character. It is my contention that this tradition cannot be interpreted through the lens of Black-Jewish relations in the United States, and especially not through a paradigm that Michael Rothberg calls “competitive memory.” Instead, I argue that it is informed by an awareness of the deep historical presence of Sephardic Jews in the Caribbean as well as more recent moments of Caribbean-Jewish encounter. In the texts that I discuss, this historical awareness complicates master narratives of race and empire and promotes the reconfiguration of literary genres that are underpinned by these same narratives. Relatedly, in many of these texts, the presence of the figure of the Jew signals a concern with the politics of representation. At first glance, depictions of Jews and Jewish history in postwar Caribbean literature may seem a rather obscure topic of investigation. Yet, just as the story of Caribbean Jewry has emerged in recent historiography as central, rather than peripheral, to the study of Jewish American history, so too in the literary field, the strikingly persistent presence of Jewishness in Caribbean writing merits attention.2 As the chapters that follow demonstrate, Jewish characters and themes figure prominently in the work of a number of major postwar Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora authors, surfacing repeatedly across the oeuvres of Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, and Derek Walcott among others. Additionally, Caribbean/diaspora theorists ranging from Edward Wilmot Blyden and Aimé Césaire to Paul Gilroy have drawn inspiration from Jewish

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intellectual traditions and encounters with modernity. It bears emphasizing that, in identifying this pattern of cross-cultural engagement, the purpose of my study is not to weigh the merits of the Black-Jewish (or slavery-Holocaust) analogy but rather to consider why Caribbean/ diaspora writers of a particular generation and historical moment introduce this analogy into their work. My strategy throughout Calypso Jews is to read the literary texts, many of which mimic genres of historical testimony such as the slave narrative and the Holocaust diary, against the historiography of the Jewish Atlantic. This strategy reveals the extent to which the Black-Jewish analogy in Caribbean literature draws on a long history of interdiasporic encounter to promote the reformulation of racial and literary discourses. In his powerful recent call for more analogical thinking “rather than less,” Bryan Cheyette is careful to acknowledge the attendant risk that “the objects of racial discourse, who were mere figurative beings in relation to this discourse, might once again descend into metaphor” (Diasporas xiv). The fear of being reduced to metaphor can produce what Cheyette calls an “anxiety of appropriation” (Diasporas xiv) on the part of Blacks and Jews alike. In Calypso Jews I remain attentive to these concerns and to the tendency of Holocaust analogies in particular to overwhelm their terms of comparison. Yet I show that for Caribbean writers Holocaust references are more often productive than they are anxiety inducing and that 1492 analogies are still less likely to engender such anxieties. I further demonstrate that, for its part, the Jew does not simply function in Caribbean literature as a deracinated figure of postmodern displacement or as a manifestation of “Jewish chic” (Cheng 107). Neither is Jewishness an empty metaphor in the texts I examine, a litmus test for the multicultural condition that relies on an ahistorical and superficial understanding of Jewish experience, as Sander Gilman has charged of some postcolonial and multicultural fiction that incorporates Jewish themes (Multiculturalism, chapter 9).3 Instead, I argue that Jewish references appear in Caribbean literature not only for allegorical reasons but also for important historical and biographical ones. More specifically, I suggest that Sephardic and Holocaust motifs are favored by Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during World War II and in the early postwar period. My argument thus is historically

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situated and most directly concerns the experience of a particular generation of writers who were able to access certain kinds of educational opportunities during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The presence of Jewish themes in the work of these writers reflects both the profound impact of the war and the deep immersion in European literary and artistic traditions required by their colonial or European educations. Accordingly, in the case of some of the writers I discuss, references to Jewish experience go hand in hand with an orientation toward European cultural influences that has led to a mixed critical reception. At the same time, I argue that the introduction of Jewish themes in Caribbean literature is also indicative of a historical awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past and of Jewishness as a constituent element of Caribbean creolization. For the most part, the Jewish-themed works of Caribbean literature that I discuss were published in the last two decades of the twentieth century, an important period in the public memorialization of both the Holocaust and the Middle Passage. Also commemorated during this period was the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s so-called discovery of the New World as well as the Iberian expulsion. Finally, the quincentenary celebrations coincided in the early 1990s with the height of Black-Jewish tensions in the United States. The body of literature considered in this study reflects the convergence of all these factors—factors that help to account for why, whereas African American sympathy toward Jews peaked in the early and mid twentieth century, Caribbean/ diaspora writers exhibit a rising interest in Jewish experience that carries through the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s.4 In broader terms, the emergence of this predominantly identificatory Caribbean literary discourse about Jewishness supports historian Jonathan Karp’s view that more study is needed of the neglected phenomenon of philosemitism both in general and within Black discourse.5

COMPARATIVE TURNS Diaspora studies is a framework that invites comparative approaches, encouraging us “to consider discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference” (Edwards 64). Indeed, to trace the

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evolution of the field of diaspora studies is to chart how the diaspora concept travels from Jewish to Black discourse and beyond. My examination of Jewishness in Caribbean literature draws inspiration from this “intercultural history of the diaspora concept” (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic 211) as well as from the broader comparative turn in ethnic and diaspora studies—a disciplinary reorientation that has helped to bring to light intersecting histories that were obscured by more traditional frameworks of analysis. Conventionally, as Françoise Lionnet and Shumei Shi observe, we have tended to read vertically rather than laterally, to “study the center and the margin” while neglecting “the relationships among different margins” (2).6 Rather than looking at diasporas in isolation or solely in terms of their interaction with the host culture, however, scholars are increasingly emphasizing the interethnic and relational dimensions of literary and cultural discourse.7 Departing from the more standard focus on relations between minoritized and dominant cultures, a comparative diasporas or comparative racializations approach trains its sights on interdiasporic contact zones in order to “brin[g] submerged or displaced relationalities into view and revea[l] these relationalities as the starting point for a fuller understanding of racialization as a comparative process” (Shih 1350). As Rothberg observes, new kinds of comparative endeavours such as these require both the construction of alternative archives and a reconceptualization of the act of comparison itself (18–19). In tandem with these broader methodological and disciplinary shifts, Jewish studies is beginning to open itself up to comparative approaches.8 Simultaneously, Jewish and Holocaust studies scholars including Rothberg, Cheyette, and Jonathan Boyarin have begun to seek a dialogue with postcolonial studies.9 A number of critics have lately lamented the lack of contact between postcolonial and Jewish studies, a state of affairs whose root cause Cheyette traces back to the reliance on a monolithic notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition in the work of one of the founders of postcolonial studies, Edward Said (Cheyette, “Neither Black Nor White” 31).10 Other critics have complained more specifically of postcolonial studies’ lack of engagement with the Holocaust—a resistance, it must be said, that until recently has been reinforced by Jewish studies’ own insularity and investment in exceptionalist arguments (see Craps,

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Postcolonial Witnessing 83). Indeed, postcolonial studies and Jewish studies as they have been institutionalized in the American academy have had little to say to one another. As the novels, drama, and poetry discussed in Calypso Jews attest, in making this recent turn toward the comparative, literary studies, sociology, and historiography have lagged behind imaginative works, which have more readily and consistently registered intersections between the histories of colonialism, antisemitism, and fascism. For as Max Silverman remarks, “Cultural practitioners  .  .  . are not bound by the same constraints as historians and sociologists” (“Interconnected Histories” 418). Instead, postwar artists continued to explore such relationalities well after theorists had abandoned the kind of analogical thinking that informs Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1955). Moreover, Silverman suggests that artistic works may be more suited than historical or sociological methods to making visible the complex interaction of times and sites at play in memory, as a fundamental feature of imaginative (poetic) works is to overlay meaning in intertextual space and blur the frontiers between the conscious and the unconscious, the present and past, and the personal and the collective. Correspondences, substitutions and transformations— the very substance of the literary imagination—open up an alternative history . . . which challenges the compartmentalized narratives that we habitually receive. (Palimpsestic Memory 29)

Silverman’s observations are borne out not only by the French and francophone films and fiction he discusses but also by the body of Caribbean literature that I consider in this study. Caribbean imaginative literature opens up a space for the exploration of historical and cultural relationalities that have been obscured by academic discourse, serving as a corrective to what Cheyette calls “disciplinary thinking” by bringing suppressed knowledge to the surface. Moreover, as theorists of diaspora have argued, figurative language is central to the articulation of diasporic subjectivities. For these reasons, it is important to give the subject of Caribbean Jewishness not only the historical and empiricist treatment

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that it has received thus far by scholars of the Jewish Atlantic but also a literary analysis. Among those few critics who have sought to identify connections between colonial racism and antisemitism, Gilroy, with his ongoing interest in “unexpected convergences” (“Afterword” 290), is one of the most inspirational for the present study. Gilroy’s well known (but largely unheeded) call toward the end of The Black Atlantic for a fuller acknowledgment of Black diasporic intellectual engagements with Jewish thought is not an isolated gesture but instead reverberates across his corpus. In his afterword to Cheyette’s and Marcus’ Modernity, Culture and ‘The Jew,’ for example, Gilroy remarks that there are barriers on all sides to comparative thinking: “This . . . approach to complex culture cannot be expected to please nationalists or apostles of purity whatever their ethnic backgrounds. . . . It may not fit straightforwardly into the settled, orthodox patterns that govern our cultural criticism and historiography” (287). And yet, in an elegant image, Gilroy insists on the necessity of such an undertaking: These narratives disturb the sediment over which the streams of modernity have flowed. What was transparent becomes murky. Previously unseen patterns of motion are revealed. It becomes possible to seek answers to what ought to have been obvious questions. What was the impact of Disraeli’s thought on the nineteenth-century African-American intellectuals who adapted his theories to their own needs? How many of the ordinary men and women who became Hitler’s willing executioners had previously served in the German colonial forces or had other experiences of Germany’s blood-soaked imperial adventures? What did Leopold Senghor . . . mean when he spoke of Nazism as having brought him to his senses? (288)

I want to suggest that it is not an accident that this call for comparative thinking about colonial racism and antisemitism should come from a British intellectual who is also one of the leading thinkers of the Caribbean diaspora. Neither is it a coincidence that Gilroy’s plea in The Black Atlantic for a greater recognition of the intercultural history of

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the diaspora paradigm has found its most prominent response to date in the work of another Black Briton of Caribbean descent, the novelist Caryl Phillips. Although both Gilroy’s and Phillips’ engagements with Jewishness have been much cited, neither has been located within a larger Caribbean/diaspora intellectual and literary tradition of reading Jewishness in identificatory terms. Instead, the Caribbean literary and cultural context has remained largely absent from discussions of Jewish/ postcolonial intersections. And yet, as Calypso Jews will show, the Caribbean offers a rich staging ground for an exercise in comparative diaspora and Black-Jewish analysis. At the same time, refocussing the Blacks-and-Jews discussion on the Caribbean rather than the United States also highlights the particularities of the European sites of Black-Jewish diasporic encounter that form the backdrop to several of the texts I examine. Gemma Romain notes of the British case, for example, that “the size of the Jewish and Black communities in the USA and Britain are considerably different, as was the nature of the struggles for equality between the groups in the two countries” (Connecting Histories 218). She suggests that while the dialogues in Britain are “broadly similar” to those in the U.S., “It is important to stress that many of these issues, particularly that relating to Farrakhan, have not been as significant in Britain as in the United States and that Black-Jewish relations are rarely at the forefront of peoples’ memories and everyday life experiences” (220). Indeed, I would argue that the predominantly noncompetitive orientation of the Caribbean/ diaspora (including Black British) writers considered here reflects their distance from cultural contestations between African Americans and Jewish Americans. Phillips comments in his essay “In the Ghetto” (1987) that “One of the aspects of black America that I have never been able to comprehend fully is the virulent anti-Semitism that seems to permeate much black thought. While still a student, I remember being surprised by Harold Cruse’s words: ‘The problem here is that the American Jew has a very thin skin, and believes that he is preternaturally free of all sin in his relationship with other peoples’” (The European Tribe 52–53). My intention in drawing attention to such comments is not to romanticize Caribbean race relations or to hold up the Caribbean as a racial utopia but rather to point to the way in which some Caribbean/diaspora writers

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of a particular generation and intellectual formation have defined their distinctive literary sensibility in part by rejecting divisive American race politics, including African American antisemitism. The tonal difference of Caribbean literary representations of Jewishness stems in part from the fact that they are based not only—or even primarily—on a sense of parallelism between histories of trauma but rather on an awareness of the intersecting character of these histories.11 Instead of treating Black and Jewish experience as discrete terms in an analogy between disparate historical experiences, the texts discussed in the chapters that follow foreground areas of overlap between these diasporic histories and the ways in which they converged in the Caribbean at a series of key moments. The first of these is 1492, a date that carries a double resonance in many of the texts I examine as marking not only the onset of European colonization but also the beginning of a wave of expulsions of Jews from the Iberian peninsula that propelled the relocation of many Sephardic Jews and Conversos to the New World. This double resonance of 1492 is signaled by the prayer book of the Kingston, Jamaica United Congregation of Israelites, which opens with a joint dedication to “the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, 1492–1992” (United Congregation of Israelites, dedication page). Accordingly, I argue for the value of bringing attention to 1492 alongside the Holocaust as a connective node between Black and Jewish histories. Discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics both within and beyond the U.S. context have focused overwhelmingly on Holocaust references. I am interested not only in the compelling question posed by some scholars of the relationship of Holocaust memory to slavery and colonialism but also in how the ground of comparison shifts when the postcolonial-Jewish analogy is not routed exclusively through the Holocaust. Rothberg’s distinction between “competitive” and “multidirectional” memory is a richly productive one for this study, and I want to suggest that taking some distance from the Holocaust frame of reference opens up still greater possibilities for multidirectional memory in Caribbean literature even as it also complicates notions of Black-Jewish affiliation. Although Holocaust analogies are a significant feature of postslavery writing, controversies such as that surrounding Toni Morrison’s

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dedication of Beloved “to Sixty Million and More” illustrate the difficulty of advancing comparative perspectives in a climate characterized by competitive memory. By identifying 1492 alongside the Holocaust as a node of interdiasporic comparison, Calypso Jews uncovers alternative modes of drawing Black and Jewish histories into relation. In particular, this approach reveals how Caribbean writers’ invocations of 1492 and the profoundly destabilizing figure of the “port Jew” encourage a pluralistic and connective perspective on histories of trauma that disrupts racial binaries and fractures linear narrative.

THE BLACK-JEWISH RELATIONS INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES In an essay dedicated to the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé, Jewish American critic Ronnie Scharfman stages a Black-Jewish dialogue, one that strikingly illustrates the disjuncture between U.S. and Caribbean readings of Black-Jewish relations. The essay opens with Scharfman taking Condé to Brooklyn to see the site of the Crown Heights riots, an excursion that is also an autobiographical voyage into Scharfman’s own childhood. Crown Heights proves to be the journey’s point of departure rather than its end point, for Scharfman’s reflections on her Brooklyn childhood eventually lead her to recall her father’s Southern roots as well her husband’s experience of the U.S. South during the 1960s. It is on a trip to the South that Scharfman makes a shocking discovery, one so disturbing that she can convey it only by shifting into the third-person voice and enclosing this portion of the narrative in quotation marks. While researching her husband’s family history in an archive in Woodville, Mississippi, Scharfman comes across a document detailing the transfer of ownership of a slave between two Jewish families. This revelation of Jewish slaveholding runs contrary to Scharfman’s understanding of Jewish American identity, so much so that she suffers a kind of trauma: “The shock and shame I felt on reading that statement of transfer, in all its lack of human affect, took the form of an unwanted, and unwonted, sense of complicity, then remorse, over a century after the fact” (460). Scharfman ultimately is able to recover and atone for

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the horrifying discovery only by relating the details of her husband’s civil rights activist past.12 Alongside these autobiographical reflections, Scharfman celebrates Condé’s resistance to “dogmatic essentialisms” (458), her valorization of métissage, reciprocity, and “surprising new alliances” (462) such as that which develops between the slave Tituba and the Sephardic merchant Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo in her novel Moi, Tituba, sorciére . . . noire de Salem. What Scharfman describes as Condé’s “poetics of shifting, freely chosen reidentifications” (464) and ability to “und[o] stifling dichotomies” (462) seems incompatible, however, with the strict victim/ perpetrator binary that structures Scharfman’s essay. It is because Scharfman, a self-described “liberal Northerner and a progressive Jew” (459), understands Jews as victims rather than victimizers that she is so profoundly shaken by the discovery of Jewish slaveholding.13 And yet this revelation can hardly be surprising for her Caribbean interlocutor, who comes from a region of the world in which Jews occupied an ambiguous position as “both agents and victims of empire” in historian Jonathan Israel’s phrase (Diasporas 1). By reading Condé’s cross-cultural poetics against a distinctively U.S. national narrative of Black-Jewish relations invested in notions of alliance and betrayal, Scharfman’s essay exposes the disconnect between these two perspectives. Scharfman’s essay, with its geographical movement between Crown Heights, Brooklyn and the U.S. South, and its thematic counterpoint between Jewish civil rights activism and Jewish slaveholding, incorporates several of the touchstones of what Daniel Itzkovitz has described as “the ‘Black Jewish relations’ industry” (“Race and Jews” 3). The U.S.based Blacks-and-Jews discussion is arguably the most prominent and long-standing example of comparative diasporas work. Yet as a model it is limited in several ways. It is framed in narrowly national terms, focusing on a series of key moments in the history of relations between African Americans and Jewish Americans, including the 1915 lynching of the Atlanta Jewish businessman Leo Frank, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Crown Heights riots in 1991, and the Nation of Islam’s publication of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, also in 1991. As these dates suggest, it is a framework that is confined temporally to the twentieth century. Finally, the Blacks-and-Jews discussion tends

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to couch its analysis in binary pairs such as “alliances and arguments,” “bridges and boundaries,” “coalition and conflict.” As Itzkovitz notes, the repeated invocation of these binaries reinforces the basic opposition of the categories of “Black” and “Jew” themselves, terms that are presented as stable and neatly separable (3). This rhetorical oppositionality of “Black” and “Jew” also signals the relationship of competition between rival ethnic groups that U.S.-based discussions of Black-Jewish relations frequently assume. Indeed, the Blacks-and-Jews discussion tends to follow a logic of competition in which “the interaction of different collective memories .  .  . takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence” (Rothberg 3). Emily Miller Budick, for example, portrays Black and Jewish writing in the United States as engaged in a “mutually self-constructing cultural competition” in which “each shadows the cultural strategies of the other, their defenses and rebuttals becoming displacements and appropriations of each other’s cultural materials” (57).14 It is such a climate of interethnic competition that informs cultural contestations surrounding the role of Jews in the slave trade as well as the United States Holocaust Museum’s fraught relationship to the National Museum of the American Indian. Scharfman’s essay illustrates how the mode of reading fostered by the Black-Jewish relations industry can be at odds with Caribbean approaches to Black-Jewish themes. So too does Jewish American writer Debra Spark’s work of popular fiction The Ghost of Bridgetown, which projects U.S. Black-Jewish dynamics onto a Caribbean setting. Spark’s novel revolves around a dispute between a Barbados museum and the Bridgetown synagogue regarding who has the right of ownership to a menorah that had been fashioned by a slave during the colonial era. The novel’s heroine is delegated with the task of repatriating the menorah to the island from a synagogue in Massachusetts and confronts the moral dilemma of “whether to give it to the blacks or give it to the Jews” (8). Published in 2001, The Ghost of Bridgetown responds more obviously to the Black-Jewish tensions of the 1990s U.S. than to the history of Barbadian Jewry—as is signaled by its references to Crown Heights and Louis Farrakhan and larger emphasis on ethnic competition. Barbados, an important site of Sephardic Jewish New World settlement, provides

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a convenient and exotic backdrop against which the author stages an imported U.S. Black-Jewish conflict. By contrast, a 1998 special issue of the Martinican journal Portulan advances a distinctively Caribbean perspective on Black-Jewish relations. After devoting the journal’s inaugural issue to the topic of “Négritude? Antillanité? Créolité?,” the editors of Portulan decided to give their second issue a comparative focus. Entitled “Mémoire juive, mémoire nègre: Deux figures du destin,” the issue addresses a number of points of contact between Black and Jewish histories and poetics, including the struggle for Black and Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century France, the relationship between Zionism and the pan-Africanist movement, and a comparison of the poetry of Aimé Césaire and Paul Celan as haunted by the collective tragedies of their peoples. In contrast to the U.S. discussion of Blacks and Jews, which has largely been “a story told by Jews about interracial relations” (Melnick 4), the contributors to the Portulan special issue are predominantly Martinican and Guadeloupean scholars. Moreover, while in the United States “contemporary literature has portrayed not the potential for a Black-Jewish alliance or, conversely, the tragic cost of its brutal conflicts but rather its implosion or strange irrelevance” (Sundquist 483), the Portulan issue suggests the continuing relevance and fertility of the Black-Jewish analogy. In his introduction to the issue, to “illustrate and justify the pertinence of the analogy” (11), Guadeloupean critic Roger Toumson quotes the Code noir of 1685, which simultaneously expelled Jews from the French colonies and established slavery’s legal framework. Thus the Portulan issue represents a specifically Antillean articulation, albeit one that is necessarily engaged with European and North American contexts. I would argue that, in what could be considered a “fourth wave” of Black-Jewish relations scholarship, the United States needs to be decentered in discussions of Black-Jewish literary dynamics.15 Accordingly, this study identifies anglophone and francophone Caribbean literature as key sites of analysis. The Dutch and Spanish Caribbean also figure significantly in my discussion, but for reasons of practicality and scope, I am unable to engage them as fully as they deserve and hope that other scholars will address these areas in greater depth, perhaps in conjunction with the growing body of scholarship on Jewish Latin American

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literature. Moreover, given the globally dispersed character of Caribbean literary production, the distinctive manifestations of Black-Jewish relations across a variety of diasporic sites (including Britain, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and other locations that are beyond the reach of this study) also need to be taken into account.16 To decenter the United States is not, however, to suggest that Caribbean writers are divorced from the American scene; to the contrary, some of the texts discussed here such as Condé’s Moi, Tituba and Cynthia McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? were directly inspired by diasporic encounters that took place in the U.S. Instead, such a reframing reveals Caribbean writers' complex relationship to the U.S. discourses about interracial relations that they both reference and challenge. For while these writers’ invocation of the Black-Jewish theme affiliates their writing with the U.S. context and engages a U.S. readership, their distinctive treatment of this theme simultaneously serves as a means of marking their distance from U.S. articulations of race.17

THE “CALLING OF THE BLOOD” The Caribbean setting helps us to take some distance from the BlackJewish relations industry in part by challenging the binary formulations of identity that tend to underpin it. Anthropologist Katya Azoulay observes that the U.S. Blacks-and-Jews discussion makes little space for thinking about mixed race subjects. In Black, Jewish and Interracial, she notes that “the significant body of literature on the interaction between and comparison of Jews and Blacks . . . in the United States focuses attention on either alliances or conflicts between the two groups. As a result, the dimension of personal relationships that crossed these boundaries has been obscured” (9). By contrast, the Caribbean/diaspora writing examined here registers the historical fact that as a consequence of their participation in the plantation economy, including in slaveholding and slave concubinage, Jews became part of the matrix of Caribbean creolization. Moreover, I argue that literary representations of the historical phenomenon of Jewish Caribbean creolization exert pressure on generic conventions that rely on these same racial binaries.

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Attesting to the pervasiveness of Jewish ancestry in some parts of the Caribbean, Surinamese writer Cynthia McLeod remarks that “every Surinamese has Jewish blood. .  .  . Shake a family tree, and a Jew falls out” (quoted in Rovner). The story of one Jamaican’s rediscovery of his Jewish roots, related by Jewish Jamaican community historians Marilyn Delavante and Anthony Alberga, illustrates this phenomenon: Tony MacFarlane was born in Jamaica in 1937. He grew up like the majority of country kids, attending school and visiting relatives. He writes, “I rarely heard the word “Jew” up to age nine years, but my grandmother Agatha Mendes, whom I heard was a Jewess, lived in Spanish Town where I visited her occasionally, and met my Andrade cousins who were also Jews.” . . . In 1958, while on a bus from New York to Hamilton, he happened to sit beside a man named Irwin Goldstein. “What kind of name is that?” he asked him. “He told me he was a Jew and I told him that I had two Jewish grandmothers, one named Miss Levy from the parish of St Mary, and the other was a Mendes.” They spoke about Judaism and this gave Tony the urge to explore his Jewish roots. (111)

MacFarlane subsequently traced his family tree back to David Pereira Mendes, a Sephardic Jew who arrived in Jamaica in 1786 and whose grandson fathered MacFarlane’s grandmother as an “outside child” (112). Following these discoveries, MacFarlane converted to Judaism and became a mohel (ritual circumciser). The experience that MacFarlane recounts is far from an isolated one. Rather, other Afro-Caribbeans similarly have described a “calling of the blood” that led them to reclaim their Jewish heritage.18 The biographies of a number of the authors that I discuss, including Phillips, McLeod, Obejas, Myriam Chancy, and Oscar Hijuelos, reflect this presence of submerged Jewish lineages throughout the Caribbean.19 Chancy, for example, explains in an interview how her family history inspired her to incorporate Jewish motifs into her novel The Loneliness of Angels:

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I’ve written several books about the Caribbean and about Haiti in particular; this is my third novel and my fifth book. It hasn’t changed me particularly but I sense from responses to the work that it has changed others’ perceptions of the Caribbean and of Haiti, especially with regard to finding commonality across difference. One reader . . . told me that he found that a truly original part of the novel had to do with delving into the Jewish legacies in Haiti, something I was interested in because my maternal grandfather’s family is said to have been descended partly from Spanish conversos (Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity after 1492). For the novel, I focused more so on the Syrian Jewish heritage still in evidence in Haiti, essentially to make the point that nothing is as it seems there and that the culture is more complex than might be assumed. I would imagine that most readers would find these inter-cultural aspects of Haiti, as depicted in the novel, worth discovering. (“Chancy Wins”)

In the Hispanic Caribbean context, Jewish lineage is particularly difficult to trace because the reach of the Spanish Inquisition extended into the Caribbean. Nonetheless, in an interview with the Jerusalem Report, Hijuelos recounts how shortly after deciding to fictionalize the life of the Cuban composer Moíses Simons, who was persecuted by the Nazis during World War II, he was told by a cousin that his own family “probably have Jewish ancestors going back”: “The name Hijuelos is a hard one to track down. And there’s a whole side of my family that looks very Semitic. I was intrigued by the idea [that] I could have some Sephardi blood, even if it’s centuries old. A converso, somewhere, generations back. My cousin got me thinking about identity and how one is defined by a name, by an appearance. As Carlos Fuentes once said, there’s not a Spaniard walking around without these roots” (quoted in Freedman, “With Truth on His Side” 46). My point in citing such interviews is not to fetishize these purported biographical details or to promote a biologist mode of interpretation but rather to illustrate the authors’ awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past and of the status of Jewishness as one constituent of Caribbean creolization. As is indicated in Chancy’s statement, it is also to signal

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the relationship of this awareness to their understanding of the complex sense of identity that characterizes Caribbean societies. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of Caribbean Jewishness is its elasticity and coexistence with other religious and ethnic identities. In his account of multiracial Jewishness, the Jamaican philosopher Lewis Gordon, founder of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University, describes his “Caribbean understanding of Judaism” (7) in which, against a background of profound mixture, “one’s family identity has much room for different religious affiliations. This attitude is a way of life on most of the islands with a strong black identity” (4). McLeod recalls of her own Surinamese childhood, for example, that it was considered normal to be raised Protestant while simultaneously observing the Passover ritual of asking the four questions (Personal interview). Similarly, anthropologist Ruth Behar describes how a flexible form of Jewishness developed among Cuba’s Jews, who “today loo[k] a lot like the rest of Cuba: a mix of white, black, and everything in between. Most members of the community are descendents of the uncounted Jews who married non-Jewish Cubans and were lost to the Jewish community in the period before the Revolution” (27). This biographical background of Caribbean Jewish creolization also has implications for how we delimit the categories of Black and Jewish writing. The persistence of an identitarian logic, a belief in the separability of identities, is exposed by a series of authorship controversies connected to Caribbean-Jewish intersections, including the charges of appropriation leveled at the Holocaust fiction of Phillips and Hijuelos, the mixed response to the awarding of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize to Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (2002), and the confusion surrounding the attribution of authorship to Simone and André Schwarz-Bart’s La mulâtresse Solitude (1972).20 This logic has little relevance to the material I examine in Calypso Jews, which tends to confound sharp distinctions between Black and Jewish literature. Indeed, while I initially conceived of this study as a dialogue between Jewish and non-Jewish authored texts, I quickly realized that such a structure would be ill-suited to the Caribbean context, where such an opposition is difficult to uphold. Similarly, the distinction between real Jews and metaphorical “jews” that organizes some analyses of Jewishness and

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postcolonial writing also is called into question by the Caribbean setting, which problematizes how we define who is a real Jew. Thus while I make reference in the chapters that follow to Jewish-identified Caribbean/diaspora artists and writers such as Anna Ruth Henriques and Aurora Levins Morales, Calypso Jews also challenges the Manichaean and identitarian logic that underpins some Blacks-and-Jews and comparative diasporas discussion. / / /

In the Caribbean/diaspora writing considered in this study, the invocation of Jewish historical experience helps to advance a larger project of rethinking master narratives of race and empire and the literary conventions these narratives support. This impetus is reflected in the texts’ formal construction and treatment of genre as well as in their metafictional concern with the politics of representation. While some of the texts reward formal analysis more than others, across the chapters I am concerned with the pressures placed on generic and narrative conventions by the polyphonic understanding of history that Caribbean Jewish motifs promote. The chapters that follow address a series of genres, including the neoslave narrative, the plantation family saga, and the Holocaust diary, in order to show how Caribbean Jewish themes help to unsettle these established literary forms. In the works I examine, the fragmented, multifaceted identities and memories that are emblematized by such historical formations as the Jewish Atlantic and the calypso shtetl encourage the splintering of narrative perspective. These texts’ thematic engagement with multiple diasporas tends to favor the elaboration of dialogic rather than monologic forms. In some cases Jewish Caribbean historical conjunctions inspire the emergence of new literary subgenres such as the Jewish plantation epic and Black Holocaust fiction; in others they foster a broader resistance to generic categorization. Finally, in a number of the texts the presence of the figure of the Jew signals a preoccupation with literary representation, canonicity, and authorship that is also announced through the incorporation of scenes of reading and writing. Thus if the historical phenomenon of Caribbean Jewishness is appealing to Caribbean/diaspora writers because of the way in which it

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disrupts dominant interpretive frameworks and racial binaries, their literary representations of this historical phenomenon amplify still further its disruptive power. Calypso Jews is divided into two halves, each of which addresses a traumatic moment in Jewish history that has become a key reference point for postwar Caribbean writers. The first half of the book considers Caribbean writers’ invocations of the 1492 expulsion and its aftermath as an instance of literary sephardism—a phenomenon that has been discussed in relation to Latin American and Latino writing but that has not previously been identified in the context of Caribbean literature. Chapter 1, “Sephardism in Caribbean Literature,” examines the allure of Sepharad (over the Ashkenazi colonial presence) for Caribbean/diaspora writers. In particular, I consider the identificatory impulse that propels the sephardism of Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound, a verse biography of the Sephardic Caribbean artist Camille Pissarro. Walcott’s long poem exemplifies the connective orientation and prismatic narrative structure that tend to accompany Sephardic motifs in Caribbean literature. In Tiepolo’s Hound and other instances of Caribbean literary sephardism, the double resonance of 1492 inspires the construction of multicentered narratives that express the connectedness of diverse histories. Chapter 2, “Marranism and Creolization,” continues this investigation of Caribbean sephardism and its relationship to literary form by examining the presentation of the Marrano or crypto-Jew in Myriam Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels and Michelle Cliff ’s Free Enterprise. Chancy’s and Cliff ’s novels locate Jewishness within the matrix of Caribbean creolization while advancing a romantic reading of the Marrano as a figure of religious fealty and cultural survival. In their novels, the pluralist reading of identity and history that is signaled by the Marrano’s presence requires a fragmentation of linear narrative. Drawing inspiration from recent efforts by historians to reframe Jewish history in Atlanticist terms, chapter 3, “Port Jews in Slavery Fiction,” highlights another instance of Caribbean sephardism, identifying a recurring plot about the figure of the Sephardic port Jew in Caribbean slavery literature. Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress follow a remarkably

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consistent script in which the port Jew functions as a conduit to the slave protagonist’s emancipation. In Condé’s and Dabydeen’s novels the slave narrative’s central opposition between white master and Black slave is disrupted by the ambivalent presence of the Jew, whose insertion into the genre encourages its broader reconfiguration. Moreover in these novels, the Jew as sign crucially draws attention to discursive regimes (both textual and visual) that govern representations of racialized Others. Chapter 4, “Plantation Jews in Slavery Fiction,” turns from the neoslave narrative to a contrasting genre of slavery literature: the plantation family saga. This chapter considers the figure of the plantation Jew as depicted in Hoe duur was de suiker?, Cynthia McLeod’s portrait of eighteenth-century Jewish planter society in Suriname. As is signaled by her choice of genre, McLeod’s historical novel complicates the largely sympathetic depictions of port Jews discussed in chapter 3 by more deeply implicating Jews in the plantation economy. At the same time, McLeod challenges the ideological underpinnings of the plantation epic by incorporating both Jewish and Black perspectives into her multicentered narrative. This chapter also compares McLeod’s Jewish plantation family saga to those of two U.S. writers, Matthew Lopez and Alan Cheuse. As with the references to Black Canadian writing that I introduce elsewhere in this study, here the examination of U.S. texts alongside the Caribbean material promotes a hemispheric perspective on Black-Jewish literary narrative while simultaneously underscoring the specificity of the Caribbean treatments. The second half of Calypso Jews addresses Holocaust memory, a more conventional focus of comparative diasporas scholarship. Yet, departing from other analyses of the relationship of the Holocaust and slavery, the texts that I discuss treat Black and Jewish experience, not as discrete terms in an analogy between historical traumas, but as contiguous and intersecting. Chapter 5, “Calypso Jews,” brings into focus a recurring motif in Caribbean writing: the Holocaust refugee. European Jewish refugees from the Nazis figure prominently in John Hearne’s Land of the Living and Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter, both of which recall the historical influx of these refugees into Trinidad, Jamaica, and other Caribbean locations in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but alternately foreground or

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elide the ambivalences that attended this little-known episode of Holocaust history. I argue that the troubling presence of Holocaust refugees in these novels is thematic of tensions surrounding the narration of the Black subjects who stand at the center of each text. In this chapter I contextualize Hearne’s and Kincaid’s novels by referencing calypsos of the period as well as memoirs of refugee Jews who found safe haven in the Caribbean. Chapter 6, “Between Camps,” considers Caribbean Holocaust narratives that unfold against European or North American rather than Caribbean backdrops. This chapter illustrates how the Holocaust not only functions as a surrogate for the memory of slavery in Caribbean writing, as in M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry and fiction, but also has become the focus of a new subgenre of Black Holocaust fiction. Paralleling the literary archaeologies undertaken by postslavery fiction, Michèle Maillet’s L’étoile noire and other works recover the lost histories of Black victims of the Nazis. Maillet’s novel demonstrates that not only slavery and Holocaust memory but also the literary genres that they have inspired can bear a palimpsestic relationship to one another. Finally, chapter 7, “Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank,” concludes my investigation of the creolization of Holocaust memory by considering intertextual references to Anne Frank in Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng and Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood. In Cliff ’s and Phillips’s novels, scenes of reading and writing and allusions to Frank’s Diary establish a crucial link between the Holocaust and the act of literary representation itself. Yet, bringing my discussion full circle, I suggest that Cliff ’s and Phillips’s identification with Frank as a writer figure is complicated by their awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past. A brief note on style and terminology. Throughout this book, I capitalize terms such as “Black,” “Jewish,” “Creole,” “Indigenous,” and “Marrano” that refer to groupings of human subjects. My intention in doing so is not to reify these categories but rather to rehabilitate and accord dignity to terms that carry with them a heavy history of discrimination and dehumanization. In addition, throughout this study I use the term “Caribbean/diaspora” as a shorthand to refer collectively to both those writers raised in the islands and Caribbean mainland and to those raised in the diaspora. My aim here is not to obscure important differences between Caribbean and diasporic cultural and intellectual formations

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but rather to suggest certain continuities between the responses to Jewishness that developed in each of these settings. By emphasizing Caribbean diaspora writers’ connections to more localized archipelagic intellectual traditions, Calypso Jews complements and provides a counterweight to studies that foreground metropolitan contexts of multicultural and postcolonial literary production.

art I 1492

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ew Caribbean islands have been untouched by a Jewish presence, despite official prohibitions on practicing Jews settling in the Spanish and French colonies. The case of Jamaica is particularly striking for the extent to which Jewish influences are threaded through the island’s history. The Kingston phone book, which contains columns of Jewish surnames such as Levy and Cohen, bears witness to the pronounced historical presence of Jews on the island as well as to the participation of colonial Jamaican Jewry in the practices of slaveholding and concubinage.1 Colonial-era Jamaicans of Jewish ancestry included the Marrano poet Daniel Israel Lopez Laguna (c. 1653– c. 1730) and the artist Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795–1849), as well as the novelist Herbert G. de Lisser (1878–1944), author of the popular gothic romance The White Witch of Rosehall (1929). The Jamaica Gleaner newspaper was founded in 1834 by two Jewish brothers, Joshua and Jacob de Cordova. Devon House, an architectural landmark of Kingston, was built by Jamaica’s “first Black millionaire,” George Stiebel (1820s–1896), the son of a German Jew and a Jamaican housekeeper. A notable educational institution in Kingston is the Hillel Academy, a multidenominational school that was founded by the Jewish community in 1969. Moreover, a rather remarkable list of prominent Jamaican/diaspora political and cultural figures including Jamaica’s third prime minister, Hugh Shearer (1923–2004) as well as Harry Belafonte,

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Bob Marley, Colin Powell, Elizabeth Alexander, Malcolm Gladwell, Stuart Hall, and Sean Paul, are reported to have Jewish ancestry. It is in this context that one can understand the claim made by some that “Jamaica is a Jewish island.”2 This pattern of Jewish historical and cultural influence, which recurs in other parts of the Caribbean with varying degrees of intensity, has been obscured by the methodological nationalism of historians of colonial Jewish America, who until recently tended to neglect the vital links among Jewish communities across the hemisphere and to underplay the significance of early modern Caribbean Jewish communities as centers of religious, cultural, and economic Jewish life in the New World. The general orientation of Jewish studies along Ashkenazi rather than Sephardic axes has further contributed to the marginalization of Caribbean Jewish history. And yet this history is crucial to understanding the appearance of Jewish characters and themes in postwar Caribbean literature. The four chapters that make up part 1 of this study suggest that a specific awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past underlies the persistent presence of Jews in Caribbean literature. The imaginary Jews in the texts that I examine in these chapters recall the members of historical Caribbean Jewish communities whose names they often carry.3 Accordingly, I read this body of Caribbean fiction, drama, and poetry not only in the literary contexts of postslavery writing and what John Docker calls “1492 literature” but also in relation to the emerging historiography of the Jewish Atlantic. This historical scholarship draws attention to the presence of Jews at the founding moments of a number of Caribbean colonies and to their role as “key participants in the effort to expand European empires into the western hemisphere and the broader Atlantic world” (Kagan and Morgan ix). More so than any of the other trading diasporas, Sephardic networks spanned both rival colonial powers and the Protestant/Catholic divide (Israel, “Jews and Crypto-Jews” 4). Atlantic Jewry drew upon their complex familial, religious, and economic networks in their work as traders and brokers of the colonial economy and, less frequently, landowners and slaveholders. Thus Edward Long wrote in his History of Jamaica (1774) that the Jews’ “knowledge of foreign languages and intercourse with their brethren, dispersed over the Spanish and West Indian colonies, have contributed

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greatly to extend trade and increase the wealth of the island” (quoted in Arbell, The Jewish Nation 232). The presence of Jews in the colonial Caribbean that Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Cynthia McLeod, and other contemporary Caribbean writers register was also linked to their expertise in technologies of sugar production. When, for example, some of the Dutch Jews who were forced to leave Brazil after the Portuguese reconquest in 1654 relocated to Martinique, they brought with them techniques for the crystallization and whitening of sugar cane (Miles 140).4 As a result of the varied roles that Sephardim played as brokers, merchants, and planters, they constituted a significant demographic in the colonial period, making up roughly one third of the European populations of Suriname and Curaçao (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 58–59). Ultimately, Jewish Atlantic scholarship reveals the Caribbean as a contradictory space of both unusual freedom and renewed oppression for early modern Sephardim. The Caribbean figures somewhat paradoxically in Jewish history both as a site of religious liberty that afforded a unique degree of cultural continuity and as one of exclusion in which Old World prejudicial practices were reproduced and sometimes intensified. Most famously, the 1685 Code noir of Louis XIV, the document that defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonies, expelled Jews from the French islands in its first article.5 Jews were also prohibited from the Spanish colonies, where the Inquisition established itself in 1570 to stem the tide of New Christian settlement. Inquisition records document that secret Jews were discovered and put on trial in Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and Jamaica (Ezratty 8). In the seventeenth century, the entrance of the Western European powers into the Caribbean colonial theater opened up the Caribbean to overtly practicing Jews. Yet the British islands, while more permissive of a Jewish presence, imposed special taxes on Jews and placed limitations on Jewish political participation, landownership, and slaveholding, and Jews struggled to obtain full enfranchisement and civil rights (Loker 34–38). In some cases, as historian Holly Snyder suggests with regard to Jamaica, Jews faced greater restrictions in the colony than in the metropole (151). By the same token, however, the Caribbean was also a space of privilege for Jews and at times of an unusual degree of Jewish territoriality. Most notably, in the eighteenth-century self-governed Jewish agricultural

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settlement of Jodensavanne in Suriname in which McLeod’s historical novel is set, Jews enjoyed significant autonomy and exceptional liberties under both British and Dutch rule. These liberties included religious freedom, landownership, and the freedom to trade and plant as well as to administer their own court of justice (Ben-Ur and Frankel 21). Yet, even in the relatively tolerant Dutch colony of Suriname, Jews saw the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment and the curtailment of their civil rights during an economic crisis in the late eighteenth century when it was proposed that they should be enclosed in a ghetto. The contradictions and ambivalences of Sephardic Caribbean history are neatly illustrated by two contrasting responses by contemporary Caribbean/diaspora intellectuals to the work of the nineteenth-century Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario. In his “Afterword” to Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds, a handsome volume published by the Yale Center for British Art to coincide with its 2007 exhibition of Belisario’s work, Stuart Hall questions

F IG U R E 0.2.

Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795–1849), View of Kelly’s Estate (c. 1840). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Jamaica.

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F IG U R E 0.3 . Isaac Mendes Belisario, “Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy,” plate 6 from Belisario, I.M. Sketches of character, in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica. Kingston: published by the artist, 1837–[1838], lithograph, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon collection.

whether Belisario’s representations of Jamaican subjects can be properly understood as diasporic. Hall concedes that “as a Jew in a British slave colony, Belisario must have known something of that de-centeredness, that double-consciousness, which constitutes the ground of the diasporic,” and he takes care to note that Belisario, a member of a minority population, did not form part of the plantocracy, but rather the merchant

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and professional class. Nevertheless, Hall laments that Belisario’s “unruffled, settled” picturesque plantation paintings do not fully engage “the critical process of dialogism” (179–80) that he associates with diasporic aesthetics. Even Belisario’s more convention-defying series Sketches of Character (1837–38) ultimately contains rather than explores the subversive power of the Jonkonnu carnival that it depicts and fails to directly reference the several centuries of slavery that informed the performance. Thus, in Hall’s analysis, at the heart of Belisario’s work lies an erasure: “the question of the African presence and the unspeakable institutional violence of a slave regime” (180). Hall’s reading of Belisario stands in marked contrast to that advanced by the eminent Jamaican scholar Rex Nettleford in his “Foreword” to another lavishly illustrated volume that was published in Jamaica a year after the Yale catalogue, Jackie Ranston’s Belisario. Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist (2008). While Hall worries about Belisario’s failure to address the injustices of slavery, Nettleford’s unequivocally celebratory essay portrays Belisario as choosing art over the “business pedigree of his forebears” (xiv). Indeed, Nettleford seems less troubled than Hall by the contradictions that inhere in Belisario’s biography and, more broadly, in Sephardic Caribbean history. Nettleford notes that Belisario’s parents and grandparents were involved in the slave trade, as “was considered normal in their time” (xv), but adds that “the story does not end there” (xiii), for Belisario’s father went to considerable efforts to draw attention to the abuses of slavery through the publication of his report on the trial of a Tortola planter accused of murdering his slave. Moreover, in Nettleford’s reading, Belisario’s Jewishness attunes him to the role of the creative imagination, for he “would have known about the great struggles of his own people to attain and guard their identity as a condition of survival” (xv). Nettleford endorses Ranston’s suggestion that Belisario’s interpretation of the slaves’ Jonkonnu masquerade may have been informed by his familiarity with the Jewish holiday of Purim, which celebrates the survival of an oppressed people. Most strikingly, Nettleford claims Belisario as a Jamaican national figure who emblematizes the creolized character of Jamaican society and its capacity to harness the power of the imagination: “That he was Jewish and not African or Christian European merely speaks to the textured

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reality of the Jamaican persona which is multi-layered, multi-faceted and multicultural but integrated in the subliminal unity manifested more than ever in the products of the collective and individual creative imagination. This makes Isaac Mendes Belisario’s story the story of all Jamaica, indeed of all the Caribbean and the Americas—indeed of all humankind” (xvi). Hall’s and Nettleford’s diverging readings of Belisario’s oeuvre speak to the ambiguous position that Caribbean Jews occupied in the colonial power structure between the Christian European plantocracy on the one hand and the slave, free Black, and free colored classes on the other. When we set the two essays side by side, what emerges are the contradictions that inhere in the history of Caribbean Jewry itself, contradictions Jewish historians have tended to downplay for reasons that Jonathan Schorsch in particular has examined (“American Jewish Historians”). I would argue that it is precisely these ambiguities that account for the appeal of Sephardic themes for Caribbean writers. In the texts that I discuss, the introduction of Sephardic Caribbean motifs destabilize racial binaries and disrupt linear, monovocal structures in favor of prismatic narrative forms that engage a broad spectrum of histories. Chapter 1 examines Walcott’s nuanced portrayal of the Sephardic Caribbean painter Camille Pissarro as a figure of both identification and betrayal, while chapter 2 considers Chancy’s and Cliff ’s more idealized presentations of crypto-Jews as emblems of cultural survival. In chapters 3 and 4, the introduction of port and plantation Jews unsettles the master/slave opposition, putting pressure on the generic conventions of the slave narrative and the plantation epic. Yet, while in the neoslave narratives discussed in chapter 3, Condé’s and Dabydeen’s port Jews serve as allies of the slave and as a conduit to emancipation, in chapter 4 McLeod’s plantation Jews prove a more ambivalent subject for literary representation.

1 SEPHARDISM IN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE D ER EK WA LCOT T ’ S P IS SAR RO

. . . fleeing the Inquisition a Sephardic merchant, bag locked in one elbow, crouched by a Lisbon dock, and in that position was reborn in the New World: Lima; Curaçao. —Derek Walcott, Omeros

There is a saying that when the Jews and the Moors were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, in the late fifteenth century, Spain lost its intellect and its imagination. That loss was the Caribbean’s gain since much of the cultural diversity that remains the source of great art, great architecture and great literature was, as it were, transferred to the Americas where diverse cultures encountered each other on foreign soil and became the germ of a new civilization which was to redound to the benefit of all of humankind over the past half a millennium. —Rex Nettleford, “Foreword”

I

n her essay “The Allure of Sepharad” Edna Aizenberg asks, what is “the recurring pull of Sephardic ancestry, language, and history? ‘Sepharad’ drips melodiously from the lips, while ‘Ashkenaz’ does not. Throughout the centuries, many have wanted to become Sephardized, attached to the legacy of Iberian Jewry. Nothing

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similar has happened in the Ashkenazi world” (157). In this essay and elsewhere, Aizenberg documents the appeal that Sephardic motifs have held for Ashkenazi Jewish writers in Latin America whose appropriations of Sephardic history generate a “neo-Sephardic” literary tradition. Noting that some Sephardic studies scholars have been unreceptive to what they view as her usurpation of the term sephardism, Aizenberg counters that such a usage is in keeping with the “openness and cross-fertilization” that have “always been at the heart of Jewish Iberia’s attraction” (160). It is in the same spirit of cross-fertilization that I seek to expand the borders of discussions of sephardism still further by identifying Sephardic motifs in contemporary Caribbean writing. In chapters 1 and 2 I suggest that a series of works of Caribbean fiction and poetry that appeared in the two decades following the 1992 quincentenary offer significant examples of what Aizenberg calls the “kaleidoscopic allure of Sepharad.” Indeed, all of the texts discussed in the first part of this study constitute examples of Caribbean sephardism to the extent that they include Jewish characters who are identified as Sephardic (Jews of Spain and Portugal and their descendants) and allude to the 1490s expulsions from the Iberian peninsula that propelled the rediasporization of Sephardim in the Americas. Some Caribbean literature, however, moves beyond merely rehearsing this potted history to engage more specific dimensions of Sephardic experience as well as that of the Marranos, Jews who were forcibly converted by the Catholic Church in the late 1490s but maintained secret ties to their faith. The present chapter traces the repeated invocation of Sephardic experience by Caribbean authors, in particular Derek Walcott, against the historical background of postexpulsion Sephardic Jewish immigration to the New World. I argue that Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), a verse biography of the Sephardic Caribbean painter Camille Pissarro, illustrates how sephardism can support a noncompetitive and antiassimilatory mode of Black-Jewish comparison. In Walcott’s long poem, as well as in other examples of Caribbean literary sephardism, this comparative mode is advanced through a kaleidoscopic narrative structure (to borrow Aizenberg’s metaphor). Throughout Walcott’s poem, the recurring image of the prism—also favored by Antonio Benítez-Rojo in his influential theorization of how diverse cultural influences interact in

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the Caribbean—suggests the refraction or dispersion not only of light waves but also of memories, histories, and identities.1 In Tiepolo’s Hound these dispersed, splintered histories are dynamically reassembled in a kaleidoscope-like motion that generates new relationalities and patterns of meaning.

THEORIZING SEPHARDISM In her introduction to Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, Yael Halevi-Wise identifies two major clusters of literary sephardism, the first following the French Revolution of 1789 and the second following the 1992 quincentennial celebrations.2 Published between 1993 and 2013, the Caribbean examples I consider here form part of this second wave of literary sephardism. Caribbean invocations of the Iberian expulsion illustrate what Halevi-Wise (following Susannah Heschel) terms sephardism as “counterhistory” (12), harnessing Sephardic motifs to contest normative cultural and historical narratives. At the same time, they also exemplify “1492 literature,” a body of writing characterized by an entwining of histories and a pluralistic conception of identity (Docker 216). According to John Docker, in such writing 1492 emerges as “a meeting point for diverse cultural histories and religions: a pivotal moment of world history” for Europe, the Americas and beyond as well as for contemporary understandings of multiculturalism (vii). Both Halevi-Wise’s and Docker’s insights contribute to my understanding of Caribbean sephardism as challenging master narratives through the construction of polyphonic literary forms. At different historical moments, literary sephardism has variously been deployed to promote both exclusionary and inclusionary views on the integration of Jews into the national body. Michael Ragussis explains, for example, that nineteenth-century English writers who were interested in defining the origins of the nation-state turned to fifteenth-century Spain as a model of a nation founded on racial and religious homogeneity in a manner that was potentially detrimental to the cause of Jewish emancipation (58). For the early twentieth-century “greenhorn” generation of Jewish Latin American writers, by contrast,

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a “deliberate and enthusiastic adoption of the Sephardic heritage” served “as an acculturative tool” (Aizenberg, Books 54). As Aizenberg shows, for Ashkenazi Jews in Latin America, references to the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, the glorification of Jewish intellectual achievement in this period, and the use of a pure Spanish were a means of asserting a sense of national belonging (Books 54).3 Yet while Aizenberg presents sephardism as an assimilationist strategy, Dalia Kandiyoti refocuses the term to identify Latino/a writing in the United States that works differently “not to collapse or create supposedly stable formations—like ‘Jews’ and ‘Hispanics’—but rather to posit Jewish, Sephardic, Latin American and diaspora Latina/o identities as historically connected” (“Sephardism” 236). Kandiyoti emphasizes that this mode of comparison does not privilege one term while reducing the other to empty metaphor. Rather, sephardism advances a “discourse of intersectionality” that foregrounds a relationship of “complicity” between the two terms being compared without voiding either one of its specificity (“Sephardism” 244). Kandiyoti’s theorization of sephardism as not only comparing but also connecting histories is particularly relevant to the Caribbean texts I examine over the next four chapters. These texts exhibit an awareness of the deep historical presence of Sephardim in the Caribbean region and the double resonance of 1492 as the moment not only of Columbus’ first voyage to the New World but also of the onset of the waves of expulsion that prompted Sephardic resettlement in the Americas. In so doing they highlight historical and ideological connections between the two 1492s, for, as Ella Shohat has argued, the relationship of European colonialism and the reconquista is not merely a matter of historical coincidence. Rather, “the reconquista’s policies of settling Christians in the newly (re)conquered areas of Spain, as well as the gradual institutionalization of expulsions, conversions, and killings of Muslims and Jews in Christian territories, prepared the grounds for similar conquista practices across the Atlantic” (“Taboo Memories” 136–37).4 As Shohat is careful to stress, to draw such an analogy is not to suggest an equivalence between Europe’s treatment of its internal and external Others. Indeed, the Spanish and Portuguese New World empires not only aligned but also divided Jewish Conversos, Afroiberians, and Amerindians, whom

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“the ethnically-oriented policy vision of the crown and local elites frequently arrayed . . . against each other” (Schorsch, Swimming 12). Moreover, the case of New World Sephardim is a decidedly ambivalent one, for at the same time as they were targets of Europe’s colonial enterprise, alongside other Converso populations, as one of the most prominent Atlantic trading diasporas they also helped to enable that enterprise.5 Nonetheless, what the examples of Caribbean sephardism that I consider here share is a connective outlook.6 Moreover, as Halevi-Wise notes, the mode of comparison generated by sephardism is both horizontal and vertical, bringing into relation not only different cultures but also different time periods (11). Accordingly, not only do the literary texts discussed in this chapter explore links between the roughly contemporaneous traumas of African slavery and the Sephardic expulsion but also between the Spanish Inquisition and modern-day repressive Caribbean regimes. Ultimately, the presence of Sephardic motifs in Caribbean writing draws attention to the act of comparison itself and to its productive possibilities. By the same token, sephardism also exposes the risk of reducing the Other to the same and of treating the Jew as an abstract metaphor. Indeed, if postcolonial and multicultural authors have been criticized for metaphorizing the Jew, this tendency may be still more acute in the case of Sepharad, which has been especially prone to mythologization and abstraction from its historical context.7 The question of comparison will therefore be central to my reading of the Caribbean texts over the next two chapters, in which Walcott’s triadic and slippery mode of drawing disparate cultures and historical moments into relation will contrast with the more assimilative analogical models favored by Chancy and Cliff. Before turning to Walcott’s sustained evocation of Sephardic experience in Tiepolo’s Hound, I will briefly examine two works from the late 1990s by Anna Ruth Henriques and Aurora Levins Morales that address the Sephardic presence in the Caribbean and exhibit the prismatic narrative form that tends to accompany Sephardic motifs in Caribbean literature. These and several other more condensed examples illustrate the broad appeal Sepharad holds for the Caribbean literary imagination and help us to locate Walcott’s poem within a larger discourse of Caribbean sephardism. More particularly, they identify connections between

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a Caribbean understanding of cultural belonging as plural and the sensibility of in-betweenness and cross-culturalism that often is associated with Sephardic experience.

THE ALLURE OF SEPHARAD: REMEDIOS AND THE BOOK OF MECHTILDE Caribbean literary sephardism is rooted in an understanding of the Sephardim as one of the founding peoples of the Caribbean—in an awareness of the overlapping historical trajectories of the African and Jewish diasporas and of the Caribbean as a space of contact and entanglement between these two displaced populations. This historical consciousness is exemplified by Puerto Rican American writer Aurora Levins Morales’s Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas (1998). Remedios is a wide-ranging and ambitious work of feminist revisionist history that, in the course of investigating Puerto Rico’s heritage, interweaves prose and poetry as well as narratives of the Sephardic expulsion and African slavery. Paralleling Shohat’s argument that the antisemitism and anti-infidelism directed against early modern Europe’s internal Others “provided a conceptual and disciplinary framework that . . . was then projected outward against Europe’s distant or external others” (“Taboo Memories” 136–37), Levins Morales prefaces her “curative history” by establishing connections between the reconquista and European colonialism.8 Levins Morales’s emphasis in Remedios on making linkages among events within and outside of Europe reflects her radical understanding of the role of the historian as restoring global context to histories that have been fragmented by colonialism, thereby “reveal[ing] relationships that have been ignored or denied” (xvii).9 In keeping with this relational framework, Levins Morales’s creative and critical retelling of the history of conquest explores the idea of 1492 as a meeting point of histories. Remedios unfolds an intricate narrative structure that crisscrosses continents and time periods as well as personal and collective histories. Moving forward temporally from the pre-Columbian history of Africa and the Americas in the chapter “Bisabuelas” (great-grandmothers) to the history of European conquest in

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“Huracán” (hurricane), Remedios builds toward the cataclysmic moment of 1492, where “many stories meet” (54). Among the myriad stories that intersect in 1492 is that of the Sephardim, who become an increasingly focal presence in the early chapters of Remedios. In “Abuelas” the subsection “900–1400: Juderías—Iberian Peninsula” recounts the history of the blood libel and the rise of medieval antisemitism alongside other “broken stories” of European, African, and New World peoples (33). In “Huracán” Levins Morales includes the Iberian expulsion in her catalogue of the devastations of colonialism alongside a variety of other examples of ethnic, gender, and class oppression, thereby suggesting the relationality of these broken histories. At the same time as invoking the expulsion, Remedios also documents the Sephardic and Converso presence in the Spanish colonies, tracing the extension of the Inquisition’s reach into Mexico and beyond in the sixteenth century. In Levins Morales’s recounting, colonial Puerto Rico is “an island haunted, in its early years, by memories of fire and smoke. The treasurer Blas de Villasante is the grandson of Medina the Jew, burned in Sevilla. Bailiff Miguel Diaz is the son of conversos from Aragon. Bartolomé de las Casas may be related to those other Casas and Cases whose names are inscribed in the rolls of the Inquisition. The islands are full of next of kin” (100). Levins Morales, who is described on Remedios’ book jacket as a “Jewish ‘red diaper baby’ from the mountains of Puerto Rico,” is the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Jewish American father of Ukrainian descent. While Remedios is a heavily autobiographical work that allots considerable space to Levins Morales’s maternal family history, her Ashkenazi Jewish lineage is largely absent from the work.10 Instead, the Sephardic story and the expulsion stand in for that of her Eastern European Ashkenazi relations and the fate they met during the Holocaust. It is only in the final chapter of Remedios, which chronicles her parents’ intercultural romance in New York City, that an Ashkenazi Jewish presence comes into focus. In that chapter the solidarity between Jewish and Puerto Rican garment workers in 1940s New York, where “the ghetto comes to the barrio” (191), is figured through the romantic trope of her communist parents’ marital union. Why does Levins Morales substitute a Sephardic past for that of her Ashkenazi lineage, even going so far as to suggest that her maternal

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surname, Morales, may be evidence of Sephardic ancestry (101)? I would argue that the Sephardic story appeals to Levins Morales—as well as to the other Caribbean/diaspora writers I will discuss—because it serves as a bridge between European and New World subaltern histories. Sephardic experience is foregrounded by Caribbean writers who seek to situate African slavery within the broader context of what Levins Morales describes as “a tidal wave of pillage [that] swept out over the planet” (xxvi) as well as to address the fractured and variegated identities that are the legacy of this history. Moreover, the Sephardic story as interpreted by Levins Morales resolves a problem she poses at the outset of Remedios: how do those of mixed descent acknowledge the European dimension of their ancestry and “love what is pale-skinned in us?” (10). Much like the enclosures of common lands in Europe or the fifteenth-century witch trials to which Levins Morales also refers, Sephardic Jewishness contributes a European story that is one of suffering and resistance rather than privilege and power. As Remedios illustrates, from the perspective of Iberian history, the expulsion connects Sephardic Jews to the New World, where some Sephardim fled and where the Inquisition also followed them. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising to find a Puerto Rican American writer such as Levins Morales and Cuban American writers such as Achy Obejas and Oscar Hijuelos invoking the expulsion and the Sephardic Caribbean presence that resulted. Yet Caribbean sephardism also extends beyond Hispanic Caribbean and Latino literature, just as the Sephardic diaspora itself spread to the Dutch, French, and British Caribbean colonies. One of the descendants of this larger Sephardic Caribbean diaspora is the Jewish Jamaican artist and writer Anna Ruth Henriques. Like Levins Morales, Henriques invokes Sephardic experience through the medium of a multilayered and genre-defying work that blends autobiographical and familial stories with collective history. While Levins Morales’s Remedios knits together continents and epochs, Henriques’s The Book of Mechtilde (1997) interweaves the textual and the visual as well as Christian, Jewish, and New World African iconography. The Book of Mechtilde, a memorial to Henriques’s mother that was exhibited in New York at the Jewish Museum in 1997, pairs passages of prose and poetry with illuminated manuscripts on the facing pages.

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Each of the beautifully and densely wrought illuminations encircles an image of Henriques’s mother, Sheila Mechtilde Henriques, and other figures within gold-lettered passages from the book of Job, whose travails are paralleled with Mechtilde’s ultimately unsuccessful battle against breast cancer. In the illuminated manuscript the Gothic and Byzantine stylizations through which Mechtilde’s figure is rendered blend with several other registers of visual imagery. In the margins of the manuscript, and within its central images, symbols drawn from Jewish and Sephardic iconography such as Stars of David, shofars, and hamsas mingle with the cross pattée of the Crusaders and tropical flora that evokes the Jamaican landscape. These visual references to multiple religious traditions and geographical settings reflect the mixture of cultures that resulted from the upheavals of 1492. Each of the illuminated manuscript pages is dated 1992, recalling the calamities of five centuries prior that brought Henriques’s Sephardic, Chinese, and African ancestors to the island of Jamaica. The visual confluence of postslavery, postindentureship, and postexpulsion identities in The Book of Mechtilde is echoed on the facing pages of text in lines of prose and poetry that track the course of Mechtilde’s illness against the background of Jamaica’s social and political history during the 1960s and 1970s. The newly independent Jamaican nation (here called Jah, the Rastafarian name for God, underscoring the links between Jewish and Black Jamaican spirituality) is presented as a land where myriad diasporas meet: “Jah had only recently become a nation separate from all other nations. The people had worked hard to gain the Land for their own. Most had been exiled from other lands, and knew no return. Bonded by exile, they grew to love Jah and claim Jah for their own” (16). The cancerous disease that plagues Mechtilde becomes associated with the political unrest that beset Jamaica in the 1970s and prompted the departure of many Jamaican Jews from the island. The prose and verse passages further convey how Henriques’s family history embodies the convergence of cultures and identities that typifies Jamaican society. We learn that Mechtilde’s “father had come from the East, bringing with him the blessings of harmony and balance. Her mother had come from a multitude of origins, bringing with her the blessings of tolerance and peace” (10). Toward the end of Mechtilde, a “Duppy Prayer” is included

F IG U R E 1.1.

Anna Ruth Henriques, The Book of Mechtilde (detail, c. 1995). Ink, gouache, and paint on paper. Courtesy of Anna Ruth Henriques and the Jewish Museum, New York. Photo the Jewish Museum, NY/Art Resource, NY.

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alongside the Jewish biblical references, the Afro-Caribbean obeah motif underscoring the multiplicity of Jamaican cultural identity. Throughout The Book of Mechtilde, Henriques creates a multivocal effect by braiding together Mechtilde’s and Job’s stories with that of the fledgling nation of Jamaica as well as through the inclusion of diverse religious and cultural motifs that reverberate across text and image, encircling and folding back on one another. Mechtilde’s formal and generic elasticity supports an inclusive perspective emphasizing the connections that emerge across diverse histories and cultural traditions.11 In The Book of Mechtilde, much as in Remedios, Sephardic motifs are introduced within a multilayered narrative form that addresses intertwined histories and memories as well as experiences of survival and loss. In both works the Columbus quincentenary occasions an exploration of this confluence of histories, as the Sephardic story flows into and becomes entangled with other Caribbean narratives and traditions. As The Book of Mechtilde attests, Caribbean sephardism extends beyond the literature of the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas. Perhaps still more strikingly, it also extends beyond the work of Jewish-identified Caribbean writers and artists such as Levins Morales and Henriques, for more mainstream Caribbean writing also presents a number of examples of the invocation of Sephardic history and the expulsion in particular. At the end of Cynthia McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker?, for instance, the post-1492 rediasporization of Sephardim is signaled by the porcelain service and tapestry the Sephardic Jewish heroine receives from her dying grandmother, heirlooms that had traveled with the family from Portugal via Brazil to the Caribbean. In Moi, Tituba, sorciére . . . noire de Salem, Maryse Condé introduces a Sephardic Jewish protagonist, Benjamin Cohen D’Azevedo, whose family fled Portugal for Holland and then Recife, Brazil, whereupon one branch settled in Curaçao and the other in the American colonies. Like Levins Morales, Condé advances an antiethnocentric, connective feminist critique that powerfully aligns witches, slaves, and Sephardic Jews as common victims of Euroamerican patriarchal regimes. Cognizant of the history of Sephardic Jewish settlement in the Caribbean referenced by McLeod’s and Condé’s historical novels, Derek Walcott

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includes the Sephardim among the founding peoples of the Antilles in his Nobel prize lecture: This is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle. (“The Antilles” 70–71)

Here, as in his early play Drums and Colours (1958) and poems such as “The Royal Palms” (1964) and Omeros (1990), Walcott eschews Afrocentric narratives, the Sephardic reference helping to promote a vision of the Caribbean as a profoundly creolized space.12 Much as in Remedios, Walcott’s allusion to a persecuted Sephardic population that makes its way to the islands allows for the inclusion of a sympathetic European presence and for reflection on the writer’s own mixed heritage. This identificatory pattern in Walcott’s drama and poetry anticipates the more sustained portrayal of Caribbean Sephardim that he will offer in Tieopolo’s Hound. At the opening of her first novel Abeng, Michelle Cliff similarly includes Sephardic Jews among the creolizing elements that make up Jamaican society: “The population of the island was primarily Black . . . , with gradations of shading reaching into the top strata of the society. Africans were mixed with Sephardic Jews, Chinese, Syrians, Lebanese, East Indians—but the large working class, and class of poor people, was Black” (5). As we will see in chapter 7, the more pronounced reference to Jewishness in Abeng relates to the Diary of Anne Frank and the Holocaust, but it is significant that the Anne Frank narrative is framed by an awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean.13 In some Caribbean fiction sephardism promotes a hemispheric perspective in which the Caribbean becomes a focal point on transamerican networks rather than remaining peripheral to major world

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historical events. In her novel Free Enterprise, Cliff connects U.S. and Caribbean spaces via Black and Jewish migratory circuits in order to decenter the United States and to recast the raid on Harpers Ferry, an episode of U.S. history, as part of a larger New World African diaspora story. Similarly, Condé’s hemispheric reframing of the Salem witch trials in Moi, Tituba is supported by the presence of a Sephardic merchant whose trade networks and diasporic family history echo the slave Tituba’s own movement from Barbados to the United States. With its transamerican reach, Sephardic Jewishness helps to advance a hemispheric understanding of historical interdependencies between the Caribbean and the American colonies. By the same token, focusing on the Sephardic presence also serves to decenter the United States as a locus of Black-Jewish relations. In Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), for example, the Jewish American anthropologist Saul Amron, who is doing fieldwork on a Caribbean island, recalls his mother’s family’s Sephardic Jewish exile in South America and Jamaica: She had been a Sephardi, a rarity in the almost exclusively Ashkenazic world of New York Jewry in which he had passed his childhood. But somewhere back in her line certain of her forebears had been Sephardim who, according to the few remaining threads of their story which she, with her flair for the dramatic, had filled in and enlarged upon, had somehow made their way to South America after the Inquisition and then, slowly, over the generations, journeyed north through the countries of the Americas and the Caribbean. There were, she would proudly boast without a shred of evidence to support her claim, tombstones bearing the family name on the island of Jamaica. (163–64)

Marshall’s account of Saul’s Sephardic heritage connects her Jewish American protagonist to the Caribbean while also alerting the reader to neglected spaces of Black-Jewish encounter in the Americas.14 The examples of Caribbean literary sephardism that I have surveyed here move beyond the more familiar Black-Jewish analogies, the “identification with Hebraic suffering, the migration, the hope of deliverance

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from bondage” that Walcott places at the origin of the “epic poetry of the tribe” in his classic 1974 essay “The Muse of History” (44). For even as they occasionally reference the biblical narrative of Jewish exodus, they anchor such references in specific Caribbean spaces by recalling the Iberian expulsion and the double resonance of 1492, thereby identifying the Caribbean as a crossroads of the African and Jewish diasporas. A hallmark of Caribbean sephardism, which emphasizes the trauma of the Inquisition over the multicultural paradise of the convivencia (the supposedly peaceful coexistence of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Spain before the Christian reconquista in the late fifteenth century), is the invocation of this history of persecution, expulsion, and dispersion. But while the narrative of Jewish exile and victimhood is a dominant element in Caribbean sephardism, Sephardic motifs also expose more disquieting dimensions of Atlantic Jewish history. In Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott explores both the identificatory possibilities the Sephardic story presents and the limits of the Black-Jewish analogy.

SEPHARDISM AND RELATIONAL POETICS IN TIEPOLO’S HOUND Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott’s verse biography of the St. Thomas-born artist Camille Pissarro, represents a significant example of sephardism in Caribbean writing, specifying its engagement with Jewishness with reference to the Iberian expulsion as well as the history of Sephardic settlement in the Caribbean. Walcott’s book-length poem associates the divided consciousness of the contemporary Afro-Caribbean writer with that of the nineteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean painter, whose straddling of multiple identities and cultures produces a distressing and unstable yet dynamic creativity. In Walcott’s portrait of the Impressionist master, it is the unfixed and interstitial character of Sephardic Caribbean identity, in particular its bridging of Old and New World cultures, that accounts for its appeal as a literary topos. Yet while the poem pursues an analogy between post–Middle Passage and postexpulsion conditions of displacement, it also signals the ambivalent positioning of Sephardim in the colonial history of the Caribbean.

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Divided into four books, Tieopolo’s Hound is a long poem in which Walcott, for the first time, inserts his own watercolors and oils in between the pages of verse. The hallmark technique of the poem is its cross-mapping of the visual and the verbal, the Caribbean and the European, in what one critic calls its rejection of “the logic of hierarchies or false dichotomies” (Handley, New World Poetics 321). The vehicle for Walcott’s cross-mapping technique is an innovative verse form in which quatrains are broken into paired couplets, thereby “invest[ing] traditional literary form with a sensibility of crossing and fluidity that characterizes the Caribbean” (Hannan 559). Although Walcott’s formal as well as thematic pursuit in Tiepolo’s Hound of what the poet-narrator will term “triangulation” has been richly explored, little notice has been taken of the extent to which it is supported by the Sephardic Jewish material; instead the poem’s Sephardic content, which features most prominently in book 1, has been treated as tangential to its central concerns.15 Yet, as I will show, the poem’s sephardism is closely linked to its practice of triangulation as well as to the divided life of the Caribbean artist that has long preoccupied Walcott.

ISLAND BOYS: A DUAL PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

In Tiepolo’s Hound, in a powerful example of Caribbean identification with Sephardic Jewishness, the painter Camille Pissarro serves as a double for the poet-narrator Walcott. Born in St. Thomas in 1830 as Jacob Abraham Pizarro to Sephardic Jewish parents, Pisarro became a founding father of the Impressionist movement in France, where he moved in 1855. Pissarro thus shares both Walcott’s island upbringing and artistic vocation. As Walcott emphasizes, he and the painter also have in common the experience of diaspora: “Our tribes were shaken like seeds from a sieve. / Our dialects, rooted, forced their own utterance” (157). As a Jew of Portuguese ancestry and Caribbean birth who journeys to Paris to satisfy his “longing for the centre” (24), Walcott’s Pissarro, much like other colonized subjects, experiences multiple forms of marginalization and alienation. Despite taking his place among the Impressionists, Pissarro remains an outsider even among “the Academy’s outcasts” (45).

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Descended from a Marrano family that had hidden its religious allegiance for generations, Walcott’s Pissarro derives little comfort from his faith, instead suffering from religious doubt.16 Throughout Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott associates the painter with doubt, which the narrator notes is also the patron saint of St. Thomas into whose Sephardic community Pissarro is born: A restlessness estranged him from each parent, sullen and difficult, despite the beauty of bays and flowering hills, a discontent in ticking off lined ledgers, his family duty, like going to synagogue. He only went to keep up appearances, the ceremonial lie darkened his doubt; doubt was the patron saint for whom they named the island . . . (22–23)

In an inversion of the romantic image of the Marrano who remains steadfastly devoted to his Jewish identity beneath a surface disguise of assimilation, Pissarro’s outwardly dutiful observance of Jewish ritual masks his internal misgivings. His Sephardic Jewishness is defined by its vacillations and accommodations, its doubts and anxieties: “He wasn’t much of a Jew. He did not observe, / as he had on the island, the tribal sorrow” (101). Pissarro pursues the path of assimilation, marrying a Gentile and even internalizing antisemitic views. In Tiepolo’s Hound what has been described as Pissarro’s “diasporic double-consciousness” (Mirzoeff 65) does not readily resolve itself into an affirmation of difference and ancestral Jewish memory. Instead, it produces a profound sense of uncertainty, one that in Walcott’s reading aligns Pissarro with his native island. Although Walcott’s Pissarro abandons the faith of his forefathers along with his bourgeois colonial family’s life of commerce, Sephardic Jewishness remains a dominant theme of the poem. With its repeated

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references to the Inquisition, the Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, and the Portuguese city of Braganza from which the Pissarro family hailed, Tiepolo’s Hound foregrounds Pissarro’s family background as part of a broader history of Sephardic Jewish resettlement in the Caribbean: the horizon underlines their origins— Pissarros from the ghetto of Braganza who fled the white hoods of the Inquisition for the bay’s whitecaps, for the folding cross of a white herring gull over the Mission droning its passages from Exodus. (3)

The poet’s quest to locate a hound that he had once glimpsed in a painting also draws attention to Pissarro’s Sephardic lineage, for the painting in question may be The Feast in the House of Levi by Paolo Veronese, who was accused by the Inquisition of heresy: . . . Paolo Caliari Veronese, a sculptor’s son, was for Feast in the House of Levi charged by the Inquisition for irreverence. Too Semitic in his symmetry? Who knows? . . . (122)

At the same time as recalling the Inquisition, Pissarro’s Sephardic Caribbean story is also read against the legacies of the Middle Passage that continue to haunt the poet-narrator, a stand-in for Walcott, who is as much the focus of the poem as is Pissarro. Indeed, while ostensibly a verse biography of Pissarro, Tiepolo’s Hound in fact intertwines the biographies of two subjects whose artistic formations it charts: the nineteenth-century Jewish painter and the twentieth-century St. Lucian poet.

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At one point, Walcott describes a double portrait that his father Warwick painted in oil of himself and Walcott’s mother. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott too offers a double portrait. In so doing he stages a Black-Jewish dialogue, one that is informed by a strongly empathetic perspective as well as a poetics of reciprocity. The poem thus exhibits characteristic features of Caribbean sephardism, citing the Inquisition as a context for Sephardic migration to the Caribbean and returning to the scene of the expulsion while simultaneously situating these Sephardic motifs within a broader comparative and connective framework. In formal terms, much like Remedios and The Book of Mechtilde, Tiepolo’s Hound elaborates a capacious and intricately webbed structure that challenges the perspective of linear historical narrative in the course of invoking 1492 as the meeting point of diverse histories. As a dual portrait of the artist, Tiepolo’s Hound weaves together the lives of the Impressionist painter and the St. Lucian poet, who are born exactly a century apart (in 1830 and 1930) but who share an island birth as well as a vocation: “Our characters are blent / not by talent but by climate and calling” (135). In a strongly identificatory move, Walcott presents Pissarro as an “island artist” (24), countering traditional art historical readings that neglect both his Caribbean upbringing and his Jewishness.17 The two men are twinned in Tiepolo’s Hound, as is underscored toward the end of the poem when the poet gazes at a portrait of Pissarro in old age so that they “stand doubled in each other’s eyes” (159). In particular, Pissarro’s departure for the metropole and decision to remain in Europe are paralleled with the mid-twentieth century experience of journeying to the mother country that shaped Walcott’s generation of Caribbean writers. Retrospectively, Walcott projects onto Pissarro the “pain of being provincial” (105), the dilemmas of the island artist who longs for the center but who, once arrived there, suffers a crisis of confidence. In Paris Pissarro, “a backward, colonised Jew” (60), finds that “Museums demean him. Island boy” and that “marbles turn their heads away from him, // from ancient texts in his Sephardic eyes” (34–35).18 For the struggling young artist, Success at home meant nothing, this was the centre of opinion; for a Danish colonial Jew

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from a dirty, backward island to enter the museum’s bronzed doors, that would never do. (61)

Separated from Walcott by a full century, Pissarro’s condition as a Jew in the era of the Dreyfus affair bears a closer resemblance to that of the twentieth-century Caribbean writer than would have been the case had the two protagonists been contemporaries. Jonathan Boyarin has argued that Jews, whose travails as Europe’s internal Others significantly predate the age of imperialism, have been neglected by postcolonial studies, which tends to privilege spatial over temporal axes of analysis (80–81). Walcott, by contrast, introduces temporal depth into his poem by recalling the rising antisemitism of late nineteenth-century France. If Pissarro as a “non-citizen” in France feels himself an outsider among the Impressionists, the Dreyfus affair only heightens his sense of estrangement and “tribal sorrow,” leading him to wonder whether “his tribe was cursed, / a nation separate in its treachery?” (101).19 In this charged climate Pissarro’s paintings themselves come to symbolize a purported Jewish mimicry and disloyalty: Examined closely, his foliage could be read as Hebrew script; each vowel, each ampersand. Had he not copied with Sephardic eyes those fields, those sillons where the workers bled with that exact delight with which a spy’s hypocrisy reported truth, the faith he shared with that vile captain of artillery (102–3)

Pissarro’s alien status in France is anticipated by the sense of marginality that he had previously experienced as a colonial Jew in St. Thomas, where he had grown up surrounded by “Gentile mountains” (3) and “Christian bells” (4). Beardedness is an emblem that marks Jewish

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difference in these early St. Thomas passages as well as later in the poem, as in Walcott’s description of the Sephardic-descended Caribbean writer John Figueroa: “pate and beard like Pissarro’s, / Sephardic Jamaica” (108).20 Another recurring emblem of Jewish otherness is the homeless mongrel that trails after the Pissarro family at the opening of the poem (4, cf. 46), the dog’s wandering echoing that of the Jew. It is, above all, this experience of displacement and exclusion in both St. Thomas and France that allows Pissarro to stand in for the twentiethcentury Caribbean artist. Walcott draws into relation the lives of the painter and the poet across the temporal divide of a century, not by collapsing one biography into the other but by generating resonances between their overlapping experiences of artistic formation, marginalization, and diasporic consciousness. Walcott’s speculative biography of “my island Pissarro” (135) imaginatively recreates the painter’s tribulations in order to illuminate his own, thereby designating Pissarro as his surrogate. Seeing through Pissarro’s eyes so that “his gaze is yours” (154; 159), Walcott meditates on the condition of the island artist who straddles “the two / coupling worlds” (127) and who seeks to claim a European cultural legacy for himself. In Tiepolo’s Hound Jewishness—in particular Sephardic Jewishness, with its deep historical ties to the Caribbean—serves as a vehicle to explore Caribbean concerns and the Caribbean self.

“COLONIAL HAUT BOURGEOIS”

In some respects Walcott’s identification with Pissarro in Tiepolo’s Hound echoes the philosemitism of the nineteenth-century pan-Africanist Edward Wilmot Blyden, a contemporary and compatriot of Pissarro’s who drew inspiration from Zionist thinkers such as Theodor Herzl. Blyden’s biography, like that of Pissarro, illustrates how the Caribbean served as a meeting ground for the two diasporas. In his 1898 pamphlet “The Jewish Question,” Blyden recalls his childhood contact with the Sephardic Jewish community to which the Pissarros belonged: “I was born in the midst of Jews in the Danish island of St Thomas, West Indies. For years, the next-door neighbours of my parents were Jews. I played with Jewish

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boys and looked forward as eagerly as they did to the annual festivals and feasts of their Church. I always went to the Synagogue on the solemn Day of Atonement—not inside” (209). Blyden relates how he would stand outside the synagogue listening to the Yom Kippur service “with an awe and reverence which have followed me all the days of this life” (209).21 Partway through Tiepolo’s Hound, however, tensions emerge around the kind of Black-Jewish analogy favored by Blyden, as Walcott begins to back away from the comparison between himself and Pissarro. Acknowledging his own manipulation of the details of Pissarro’s biography, Walcott confesses that he “shifts [Pissarro’s] biography as he shifted houses in his landscapes” (70) so that what he offers the reader is an “inexact and blurred biography” (101). These and other self-reflexive moments raise questions about the limits of comparisons between AfroCaribbean and Sephardic Jewish experience and ultimately call attention to the risks of analogical thinking itself. Such questions become still more pressing in a passage at the end of the poem in which Walcott imagines himself and the artist working side by side, writing and drawing one another. The poet then transposes himself into the Black subject of one of Pissarro’s early drawings of St. Thomas: I was bent, writing, he was bent as well, but in nineteenth-century St. Thomas my body filled his pencilled silhouette in arched Dronningens Gade, my trousers rolled to the calves, in a sisal hat at the market which I now tip in my acknowledgment to him and Mr Melbye. I’ll be born a hundred years later, but we’re both bent over this paper; I am being drawn anonymous as my own ancestor (137–38)

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No longer identifying with Pissarro as a fellow artist, the poet now casts himself in the role of one of Pissarro’s unnamed Black subjects. Whereas, earlier in the poem, the analogy between painter and poet had tended to align the two men on an equal plane, here the imbalance between artist and subject foregrounds the power differential between Sephardic Jews and Afro-Caribbeans in colonial St. Thomas: “I and my kind move and not move; your drawing is edged with a kindness my own lines contain, but yours may just be love of your own calling and not for us, since sunshine softens pain, and we seem painless here . . . (141)

The tension that emerges in these lines, as the poet finds himself shrunken into the posture dictated by the Jewish artist’s colonial picturesque vision, exposes asymmetries between the artist and his newly emancipated subjects. These asymmetries remain despite the exclusions that Pissarro himself experienced as a nineteenth-century colonial Jew. Earlier in the poem, crossing paths with some ex-slaves, Pissarro and his mentor Fritz Melbye had “ignored their cries,” “their silent appeals” (28). Similarly, in the later passage Pissarro fails to answer Walcott’s charge that he has shown a lack of concern for the ex-slaves who plead with him to stay in St. Thomas: . . . but do not leave us here, for cities where our voices have no words.” Our figures muttered, but he could not hear, and to this day they still receive no answer, even while I scolded his fast-shadowed hand.

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“We lost our roots as yours were far Braganza, but this is our new world, of reeds and sand.” (141)

At the end of the poem the homage and affection that Walcott expresses toward Pissarro are mitigated by critique as well as a sense of disappointment at Pissarro’s failure to become a painter of the Caribbean: “‘you could have been our pioneer. // Yours could have been his archipelago” (142). Rejecting Pissarro’s exilic path, Walcott brings the poem to a close by affirming the Caribbean as his home: “This is my peace, my salt, exulting acre: / there is no more Exodus, this is my Zion” (162). Thus while strongly identificatory in its twinning of the poet and the painter and its reading of Pissarro as emblematic of the Caribbean artist, Tiepolo’s Hound also incorporates a critique of Pissarro’s colonial gaze, which abandons the Caribbean in favor of Europe and is limited by its failure to fully engage the historical condition of slavery. Moreover, Walcott makes repeated reference to the Pissarro family’s financial enterprise, to “the monotony / of their grooved life: temple, store, and house” (26). The Pissarros are bourgeois colonials, part of the machinery of empire, focused on commerce. In one passage Pissarro gazes at the photographs of his relatives that adorn the family sitting room: Sundays meant heat and songs from their sepulchral piano, mahogany aunts stiff with palmetto fans, doilies and dessert and, marshalled on the mantel, the postcard cousins of a fading France. . . . His gaze travels the shelves who now, by rote, recite their stories from shell-bordered frames, the wretched passage on the immigrant boat, their soft eyes warm him. They whisper dates and names.

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They quietly catalogue their origins: the beards in oval light, next to them are their spouses’ paler ovals, hidden pins holding their hair high, colonial haut bourgeois. (21)

This passage recalls Walcott’s earlier poem “Jean Rhys” (1981) in which photographs display bone-collared gentlemen with spiked moustaches and their wives embayed in the wickerwork armchairs, all looking coloured (10–13)

Walcott’s depiction of Rhys’s white Creole Dominican family—“Sundays! Their furnace / of boredom after church” (“Jean Rhys” 34–35)—evokes a correspondingly oppressive bourgeois colonial atmosphere to that which he attributes to Pissarro’s “starched Sephardic family” (Tiepolo 4). The tonal similarity between Walcott’s portraits of Pissarro’s and Rhys’s families suggests the relatively privileged position that Sephardic Jews enjoyed in colonial St. Thomas. As Judah Cohen explains in his history of the St. Thomas Jewish community, Jews prospered in the tolerant early nineteenth-century colony where they “played a considerable role in island trade, and took a substantial part in St. Thomas’ nineteenth-century rise to prominence in the northern Caribbean” (xvi). Accordingly, the opening stanzas of Tiepolo’s Hound pan across “the bank and the small island shops” that populate Dronningens Street, where the Pissarro family resides above their dry goods store.22 The Pissarro family’s involvement in the colonial economy is also signaled by the more ominous image of chains: “Before the family warehouse, near the Customs, / his uncle jerks the locks, rattling their chains” (3). In these lines, which follow a passage about sin and deliverance, Pissarro’s uncle controls the metal fastenings that evoke the shackles of slavery, which had only been abolished in the Danish colony shortly before Pissarro

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composed his St. Thomas sketches.23 Thus the conventional emphasis in biographies of Pissarro on the artist’s rejection of his family’s bourgeois existence—“the same hand that totalled bills learning to draw” (26)— here serves to highlight the role that Sephardic Jews played as brokers of the colonial economy. In his discussion of Pissarro’s 1856 painting Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St Thomas, Nicholas Mirzoeff suggests that Pissarro’s artistic gaze is governed by an ethical (and therefore Jewish) sensibility and traces Pissarro’s liberal politics back to a Jewish Caribbean “radical tradition” founded on a belief in “the similarities between the colonial conditions of Africans and Jews” (58–59).24 The presumption of a natural sympathy between Blacks and Jews in the colonial Caribbean and of a higher Jewish moral conscience has been called into question, however, by historical scholarship that suggests that Jews largely conformed to the norms of the plantation societies in which they settled. This revisionary scholarship supports Walcott’s emphasis on the asymmetrical relationship

F IG U R E 1.2.

Camille Pissarro, Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas (1856). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

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F IG U R E 1.3 .

Isaac Mendes Belisario, “Milkwoman,” plate 10 from Belisario, I.M. Sketches of character, in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica. Kingston: published by the artist, 1837–[1838], lithograph. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon collection.

between the Jewish artist and his Black subjects, as do recent analyses of Pissarro’s fellow nineteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean artist, Isaac Mendes Belisario, whom I discussed in the introduction to part 1. Like Pissarro, Belisario broke with convention by portraying Blacks as individualized subjects rather than merely as part of the landscape of the

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plantation. Yet Kay Dian Kriz suggests that Belisario’s groundbreaking portraits of Jonkonnu performers in his Sketches of Character (1837–38) simultaneously sought to erase the racialized image of the Jewish hawker and thereby to appeal to “wealthy Jamaican Jews seeking to confirm a cultural identity that was ‘white’ and ‘elite’” (168).25 Kriz offers a nuanced reading of the dynamics of the colonial Jewish artistic gaze as informed by the doubled position of Caribbean Sephardim as both victims and agents of European colonialism. Similarly, Walcott presents Pissarro as both estranged from and yet still implicated in the economic and cultural operations of empire, his colonial pastorals rendering the world of the plantation troublingly picturesque: “complicit time, the torpor of ex-slaves // and benign planters, suffering made quaint” (16).

TRIANGULATION AND SEPHARDISM

While Walcott recognizes Pissarro’s privileged position within the colonial economy, this awareness does not detract from the role that sephardism plays in Tiepolo’s Hound in helping to reframe European art historical narratives and to explore the psychic condition of the Caribbean artist. To the contrary, Pissarro’s Sephardic Caribbean story affords Walcott an important opportunity to lay claim to a European artistic inheritance on behalf of the Caribbean, a project in which the St. Lucian poet has been engaged throughout his career. Walcott emphasizes that despite Pissarro’s Jewish colonial pedigree, Europe’s cultural traditions are his rightful heritage, “his to claim” (42). More significantly, in contrast to mainstream art historical scholarship, Walcott argues that Pissarro’s way of seeing—and by extension his contribution to Impressionism—derives from his Caribbean upbringing:26 He paints in dialect, like an islander, in a fresh France; when his swayed poplars tilt you catch an accent in their leaves, or under his formal clouds a hill’s melodic lilt. (53)

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Walcott’s Pissarro counsels his friend Cézanne to change his dingy palette to colours brightened by his tutor’s tropical eyes, a different language for a different light, more crystalline, more broken like the sea on island afternoons, scorchingly bright and built in prisms. He should learn to see. (56)

In such passages, by suggesting that Pissarro injected a Caribbean sensibility and aesthetic into his depictions of Louveciennes and Pontoise and the school of painting that they helped to establish, Walcott reverses standard assumptions about colonial-metropolitan lines of influence and draws attention to the colonial origins of European modernity. Tiepolo’s Hound advances this reinterpretation of the relationship between metropolitan and colonial cultural production not only by tracing Impressionism’s Caribbean roots but also through an emphasis on Pissarro’s Sephardic heritage, which promotes an aesthetics of reciprocity, intersectionality, and triangulation.27 The term triangulation appears in Tiepolo’s Hound in a passage about Turner’s 1838 painting The Fighting Téméraire that Pissarro and Monet view in London and which is later copied by Walcott’s father in an act that is “more than mimicry” (11). Turner’s painting connects Warwick Walcott to Monet and Pissarro, who like him “revere // the crusted barge, its funnel bannering fire” (76). In this way, as George Handley observes, “triangulation grants a spatial plasticity to the otherwise chronological relationship between the European masters and the Caribbean acolyte” (“Triangulation” 237). Moreover, much as in Henriques’s The Book of Mechtilde, in Tiepolo’s Hound the triangulation of word and image reinforces the poem’s challenge to the priority of chronological narrative, and particularly Eurocentric art historical narratives that purport to explain the origins of Impressionism (Handley, New World Poetics 340). We might add to Handley’s valuable commentary that in the Fighting Téméraire passage, Pissarro, by virtue of his Sephardic in-betweenness,

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provides a crucial bridge between Walcott’s St. Lucian father and the French Impressionist painter Monet. With his Portuguese roots, Sephardic Caribbean upbringing, and French career, Pissarro connects the twentieth-century St. Lucia of Warwick Walcott to the nineteenthcentury European artistic legacy of Monet and Turner. The principle of triangulation embodied by Pissarro suggests, not the unidirectional influence of the Old World on the New as in conventional models of colonial mimicry, but rather an unstable and dynamic reciprocity between Europe and the Caribbean that finds expression in the Caribbean topography itself: Out of the Antillean crater, every ridge looks at both seas, both worlds: Pontoise—St. Thomas, and sees both sides, both tenses, like that bridge formed by a causeway of olive casuarinas. (87)

As this image of a bridge that emerges organically from the Antillean landscape is elaborated, it comes to signal not only the zone of contact between European and colonial cultural traditions but also the Middle Passage itself: When, from subsiding water, the bank appears firm as an axiom, the Antillean isthmus with draining sand bridges both hemispheres, balancing, like a scale, both images. That middle passage, that bridge the bank provides, is one the submerged memory must negotiate between the worlds it finds on both its sides, the Caribbean, the Atlantic with its reeking freight, the archipelago’s bridge. . . . (88)

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In these lines, bridges mark the spaces of crossing that destabilize the hierarchical oppositions of Old World and New, metropole and colony, original and copy, while also invoking the “submerged memory” of slavery. The relational poetics of bridging and triangulation also manifests itself in Tiepolo’s Hound through the poem’s attention to the interstitial spaces between couplets. As Jim Hannan demonstrates in his illuminating formal analysis of the poem, the innovative verse structure Walcott develops in Tiepolo’s Hound, with its broken quatrains and cross-rhyme scheme, leads the reader across the blank space between the couplets. Thus Walcott “makes form function according to a Caribbean logic—a logic of mobility, crossing, and multiplicity” (Hannan 576). I would suggest that the interstitial space created by the broken quatrains corresponds on a thematic level to the quality of in-betweenness—of traveling between identities and places, of being neither one thing nor the other—that sephardism introduces into the poem. In Tiepolo’s Hound the hyphenated zones between continents and cultures that European colonialism produced are signaled by the border-crossing figure of Pissarro and the Sephardic Caribbean story of displacement, fragmentation, and cross-culturalism that his family history embodies. Pissarro’s Sephardic Jewishness triangulates the Caribbean with his adoptive home of France as well as his ancestral home of Portugal, the poem’s transatlantic traversal of Spain, Italy, France, England, St. Thomas, and Trinidad mirroring the postexpulsion dispersal of Sephardic Jews. The long history of European antisemitism that Pissarro’s Sephardic background evokes also supports the poem’s hallmark method of triangulation. In keeping with the spatial plasticity and challenge to chronology that Handley associates with triangulation, the poem draws into relation not only the poet’s twentieth-century present and Pissarro’s nineteenth-century past but also the cataclysms of 1492 that set the course of Pissarro's Sephardic family’s history as well as those of other disempowered African and Indigenous populations. For example, when the poet recalls Jews “who fled the white hoods of the Inquisition” (3), the multivalent image of the white hoods links the plight of early modern Sephardic Jews in Spain and Portugal to that of African Americans in the South of the Ku Klux Klan (Levin and Van Sickle 108). Sephardic Jewishness again serves as a channel for this kind of geographical and

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temporal cross-mapping in a passage in which a bell signaling the arrival of a cart full of Jewish corpses in a Portuguese city fades into first a church bell on Dronningens Gade in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas and later the bell of a slave auction: “Slaves huddled on hot sand // and the names of his family being called out / by the ragged bellman, ‘Peste!’” (103). Thus the poem’s sephardism introduces a temporal axis of comparison that advances its larger practice of triangulation. As I have shown, sephardism in Tiepolo’s Hound promotes a strongly identificatory perspective that highlights points of contact and overlap between the African and Jewish diasporas, drawing these fragmented histories together and reconfiguring them in a kaleidscopelike motion that generates new patterns of meaning. As the poem tracks how Jacob Abraham Pizzarro becomes transformed into Camille Pissarro, the Impressionist master comes to embody the divided consciousness of the colonized Caribbean subject. The uncanny hybrid space that is opened up by sephardism, with its straddling of multiple cultures, identities, and geographies as well as memories and historical epochs, enables Walcott’s challenge to Eurocentric narratives of art history and the origins of modernity. In this sense, Pissarro’s Sephardic background is neither secondary nor incidental to Walcott’s relational poetics but rather is fundamental to the poem’s project of seaming together the European and Caribbean landscapes. Pissarro is not merely a convenient reference point whose biography occasions Walcott’s reflections on his own artistic formation but instead is integral to the poem’s reciprocal vision. Yet, as I have also demonstrated, this identification with the Sephardic Caribbean artist is not without complication or ambiguity. To the contrary, Walcott’s attention to the Pissarro family’s bourgeois colonial affluence and to the artist’s complicity in the colonial gaze generates a slippery and unstable form of comparison. What is not broached in Tiepolo’s Hound, however, is the more direct participation of colonial Jewry in the plantation economy and plantation agriculture. / / /

Drawing attention to the presence of sephardism in Caribbean writing opens up a new window onto constructions of Jewishness in postcolonial literature that departs from the more standard emphasis on Holocaust

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analogies in discussions of Black-Jewish relations. Although Sephardic motifs in Caribbean literature are occasionally accompanied by proleptic Holocaust references,28 they primarily lead back to 1492 and the unique juncture of diverse histories—African, Indigenous, Sephardic, Moorish—that converged around this fateful date. Indeed, the examples of Caribbean sephardism discussed in this chapter—and Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound in particular—suggest that 1492 holds certain advantages over the Holocaust as a literary topos. Rather than immediately necessitating a reply to exceptionalist objections to Holocaust analogies, the framework of 1492 inherently draws apparently disparate histories of Jewish and Black displacement into profound and complex relation by virtue of its double resonance as the year of both the Sephardic expulsion and Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. Calling attention to the overlapping trajectories of Jewish and Black diasporic histories, 1492 offers a way out of the impasse created by competitive memory. Moreover, the relative marginality of Sephardic history renders it more open to comparison than the Holocaust, whose memory and literary representation are at this point much more overdetermined than that of the expulsion.29 Thus, while elsewhere in his poetry Walcott foregrounds Holocaust motifs, in Tiepolo’s Hound an emphasis on Sephardic rather than Holocaust history supports a self-reflexive and antihierarchical approach to comparison. Kandiyoti associates sephardism with a mode of comparison that does not privilege one term over the other while reducing Jewishness to empty metaphor but instead allows the complexity of Jewishness to remain in view. This antiassimilatory form of analogical thought coincides with Walcott’s method of triangulation in Tiepolo’s Hound. Sephardism as an overarching framework of the poem fundamentally shifts our understanding of the relations among histories and the meaning of the gesture of comparison. What we see unfolding in Tiepolo’s Hound and other examples of Caribbean sephardism is a distinctive form of Black-Jewish dialogue that reflects a Caribbean understanding of African and Jewish diasporic histories as overlapping and intersecting. Sephardism features in the work of postslavery writers who, in confronting the legacies of 1492, seek to make connections among multiple histories of dislocation.

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By the same token, Walcott remains attuned in Tiepolo’s Hound to the risks of comparison. At a number of key moments he casts doubt on the poem’s organizing analogy between the poet and the Impressionist artist and suggests how analogical thinking can distort as much as it can reveal. While the Black-Jewish dialogue Walcott stages in the poem advances a largely sympathetic reading of Sephardic Jewishness, it also leads the reader to question whether the poet has overidentified with the Sephardic artist with whom he is twinned in the poem. This self-reflexive approach allows for areas of difference and tension to emerge among the terms being compared, thereby registering the ambivalences of Sephardic Caribbean history even as Pissarro’s experience as an island artist is correlated with that of the St. Lucian poet.

2 MARRANISM AND CREOLIZATION M Y R I A M C HAN C Y AN D MIC HE LLE CL IF F

In actuality, there is no such thing as pure Jewish blood. Jews are a creolized people. —Lewis Gordon, “Out of Egypt”

I

n Caribbean literature that addresses Sephardic experience, the figure of the tropical synagogue frequently appears as a trace of an absent Jewish presence. At the same time, Caribbean synagogues become emblematic in these texts of an interest in forgotten histories more broadly. Derek Walcott, for example, identifies the Caribbean synagogue with vanished histories when he makes reference in his Nobel speech to “the rites of that Sephardic Jewish synagogue that was once on Something Street” (“The Antilles” 69). This line presages passages in Tiepolo’s Hound about “the lost shul of Charlotte Amalie” in St. Thomas (140) and the now disappeared synagogue of Port of Spain, Trinidad (5). In her novel Hoe duur was de suiker?, Cynthia McLeod exhibits the Sephardic Caribbean past by documenting in quasi-museological detail the design of the Beracha Ve Shalom synagogue in Jodensavanne, the eighteenth-century Jewish settlement in Suriname that at the time the novel is set is already in decline. Similarly in Days of Awe, Achy Obejas memorializes the architectural history of the Jewish Caribbean in a scene in which her heroine visits the dilapidated building in

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Old Havana that had once housed Chevet Achim, the oldest synagogue in Cuba.1 Often highlighted in such descriptions are the sand floors that are the architectural hallmark of Caribbean synagogues. Anna Ruth Henriques’s The Book of Mechtilde alliteratively associates the sand floors with loss and mourning: “Sorrow spoke / The sands on the floor / whispered / what they heard” (42). Henriques’s elegiac work commemorates not only the personal loss of her mother but also the collective loss of Sephardic Caribbean memory by evoking “the desert / stretched across the floor” of the synagogue, the “fast-receding / sand” (46), in an image that is simultaneously localizing and biblical. Alongside other recurring figures such as the Zong and Nanny of the Maroons, the sand-floored synagogue is a leitmotif of Michelle Cliff ’s writing. In an interview, Cliff comments on the sand floors, whose origins and purpose have been the subject of considerable speculation: “It’s interesting to me that the Caribbean has some very old synagogues in it. Jamaica has the second oldest synagogue in the western hemisphere. All the Caribbean synagogues have sand on the floor. And I don’t think it’s because they’re in the tropics” (“The Art” 63). Here Cliff advances the view—as she will in her novel Free Enterprise—that the sand floors were a survival tactic imported from the Old World: “Because the Jews in Spain had secret gathering places, and they used the sand to muffle the sound of the services” (63). In Cliff ’s writing the sand-floored synagogue thus becomes associated not only with memory and loss but also with the strategies of secrecy and coversion that oppressed populations have adopted at various historical moments in an effort to preserve their cultural identity. As the tropical synagogue motif illustrates, part of the appeal of the little-known story of Caribbean Sephardim is that it resonates with a central theme in postslavery writing: the lost or obscured histories that lie buried in the slavery archive, awaiting recovery. In particular, in the fiction of Haitian Canadian writer Myriam Chancy and Jamaican American writer Michelle Cliff, Marranos—secret or crypto-Jews who preserved a connection with Judaism after their forced conversion to Christianity—become identified with practices of concealment for the purposes of survival that also were cultivated among New World Africans. Kandiyoti has argued that Marranos are popular figures in

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historical fiction that seeks to recover buried histories because the Marrano himself suggests the project of recovering a concealed past (“Contemporary Literary Sephardism”). This is the case in Cliff ’s novel Free Enterprise (1993), a work that is engaged in what Toni Morrison calls a “literary archaeology” of slavery (quoted in Sharpe xi). Marrano motifs also feature in novels such as Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels (2010) and Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody (2002), both of which probe the secret lives of those who endured repressive twentieth-century Caribbean regimes. While the Marrano metaphor appearing in Caribbean writing is preoccupied with personal and collective pasts that have been concealed or buried, it is also introduced by writers who seek to explore the creolized character of Caribbean identity. Creolization theory has tended to focus on African, Indigenous, and, more recently, South and East Asian constituents of Caribbean societies. The imaginative literature considered in this chapter, by contrast, identifies Sephardic Jewishness as a significant contributor to Caribbean creolization. Both Chancy in The Loneliness of Angels and Cliff in Free Enterprise position the Caribbean within an interamerican and global context. Like Levins Morales’s Remedios, their multiperspectival, kaleidoscopic narratives reconfigure fragmented histories and identities in order to generate a new understanding of the relationships among them. This relational project is supported by the presence of Marrano characters in Chancy’s and Cliff ’s novels. Although significant, Marrano protagonists do not dominate either The Loneliness of Angels or Free Enterprise. Instead, they are part of the connective tissue of each novel, helping to relate the diverse characters to one another and, in so doing, to link up the Caribbean to a global landscape. At the same time, with their histories of dislocation, cross-culturalism, and split consciousness, Marranos also serve as emblems in these novels of suppressed and hybridized Caribbean identities. Ultimately, what Chancy’s and Cliff ’s fiction suggests is the compatibility of sephardism and its subset marranism with the Caribbean paradigm of creolization. This affinity is signaled by the analogy between Caribbean and Jewish spirituality that Chancy develops and by Cliff ’s exploration of resonances between the uncanny figures of the Marrano and the light-skinned Creole.

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SEPHARDISM, MARRANISM AND CREOLIZATION The Mexican Jewish critic Ilan Stavans observes that “the Sephardic condition is one of fracture and displacement. Obviously, these ingredients also characterize the last two thousand years of Jewish history as a whole, but the dispersion from the Iberian Peninsula is a particularly dense branch of it, with multiple ramifications” (xvii). Stavans explains that this condition was the product of the practice of forced conversion, which “had been the law of the land during the century that preceded the expulsion. It resulted in a duplicity that marked Sephardic civilization forever: a self at home, another in public. The age of conversos was thus established, coinciding with the colonial enterprise. Scores of New Christians traveled across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a refuge from the Inquisition, only to find an almost equally oppressive atmosphere on the other side. Some Sephardim did manage to survive in the Caribbean basin, in Brazil, and in the other South American countries” (xviii). Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels and Cliff ’s Free Enterprise, which draw inspiration from the historical presence of Conversos and Marranos in the islands and on the Caribbean mainland, invoke a variety of aspects of Sephardic experience including persecution under the Inquisition and expulsion as well as cross-culturalism, conversion, disguise, and double consciousness. Conversos and Marranos become associated in these novels with suppressed and closeted identities and with a variety of forms of racial, religious, and sexual masquerade. This brand of Caribbean sephardism—or marranism, to be more precise—foregrounds tensions between assimilation and the preservation of original identities that Yirmiyahu Yovel has identified as fundamental to the Marrano phenomenon (The Other Within 78). By the same token, the presence of Sephardic and Marrano motifs in Chancy’s and Cliff ’s fiction also reflects their shared preoccupation with creolized identities. With its cross-cultural orientation, marranism supports an exploration of what Cliff describes in an interview as the distinctive “feeling of the Caribbean”: “But that’s part of living in the Caribbean. It’s such a confusing place. . . . There are so many cultural influences. It’s not just the English and the African influence. There’s Indian, Jewish, many forms of European, Middle Eastern; there are very old Arab

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communities in the Caribbean, as well as Jewish, Chinese, East Indian . . . Everybody comes from someplace else” (“The Art” 63). The plural, variegated, and slippery quality of Sephardic identity, which Stavans likens to “a hall of mirrors” (xviii), resonates with models of creolization that emphasize the dynamic, entangled multiplicity of Caribbeanness and its defiance of neat categorization. In this regard, just as Kandiyoti suggests that sephardism complements established paradigms in Latina/o studies such as mestizaje, so, too, sephardism is potentially compatible with Caribbean conceptions of creolization. Unlike the related term hybridity, creolization has a distinctly Caribbean genealogy and focus.2 At the same time, the Caribbean has emerged as a “master metaphor” (Cohen and Toninato 5) to describe the phenomenon of cultural creolization as it extends beyond the Caribbean region.3 This trend has been met with concern by a number of Caribbeanists, who worry that appropriations of creolization by scholars of globalization dilute the concept in what Mimi Sheller identifies as an act of “theoretical piracy” (195).4 Still others have challenged utopian applications of the term and the celebratory embrace of creolization by cultural theorists in the 1990s by emphasizing that creolization necessarily entails not only cultural entanglement but also colonial subjugation, trauma, violence, and asymmetrical relationships of power (Hall, “Créolité” 35). In drawing creolization, sephardism, and marranism into relation, I remain attentive to such concerns. At the same time, I also heed the equal and opposite worry voiced by Jewish studies scholars that Jewish—and especially Sephardic—experience is too often appropriated as an empty and deracinated metaphor. It is neither my intention here to annex creolization on behalf of sephardism nor sephardism on behalf of creolization. Rather, I seek to draw attention to the overlapping presence of these two frameworks within Caribbean literature and to the affinity between creolization and sephardism that the texts themselves identify. It is also worth noting that sephardism and creolization do not simply exhibit a certain structural or syntactic resemblance to one another; rather, they intersect in historical and material terms. The origins of creolization have been traced back to fifteenth-century Cape Verde in what was both one of the earliest “thick” encounters between Europeans

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and Africans and a prelude to New World colonization (Cohen and Toninato 3). In Cape Verde, intermarriage and sexual relations between Africans and Europeans produced the first population described as Creole. Present in this community were creolized Sephardim who converted Africans to Judaism while themselves becoming acculturated to local faiths (Cohen and Toninato 3, 161). Jewish Conversos, then, contributed to one of the earliest major instances of creolization. Moreover, as one of the most prominent Atlantic trading diasporas, Sephardim also participated in more specifically Caribbean forms of creolization. In colonial Curaçao, for example, Sephardic Jews were instrumental to the consolidation and development of the Creole language Papiamentu, whose earliest known written example is a 1775 letter between two Sephardim (Rupert 109). For historian Linda M. Rupert, the example of Papiamentu raises the question of the role of Sephardim in the creolization of the Atlantic world more broadly (116). In postemancipation Trinidad and Jamaica, as another scholar observes, Jews “followed a trajectory of incorporation into Creole society” alongside other white and near-white trading minorities including Lebanese, Syrians, and post-indenture Chinese (Hintzen 97). The relationship between Sephardic experience and Caribbean creolization, then, is not one of abstract or purely theoretical parallelism but rather of a historical intersectionality.5 Caribbean writers’ use of Sephardic and Marrano motifs reflects their awareness of this historical background of Sephardic Caribbean creolization and their interest in exploring the identities of those who “are neither one thing nor the other” (Cliff, No Telephone 131). According to Halevi-Wise, “among the creators of sephardism, we find many figures of in-betweenness” (7). This is the case for the writers considered here, who stage Black-Jewish encounters both to thematize the intercultural dynamics of Caribbean societies and to explore their own interracial identities. Because of what Jonathan Freedman describes as its foregrounding of the “insistently multiple structure of identity and being” (248) and the extent to which identity is forever “shuttling between locations and sources of origination” (250), marranism has a particular resonance in creolized societies such as those of the Caribbean. Stuart Hall has described the Caribbean as a “translated” culture that “always bear[s] the traces of the original, but in such a way that the original is impossible

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to restore” (“Créolité” 31). Similarly, marranism, which shrouds original identities in secrecy to the point where they become untraceable and forgotten, casts doubt on the fantasy of a return to origins.6

“NOU TOUT SÉ JWIF”: CRYPTO-JUDAISM IN THE LONELINESS OF ANGELS One of the central tropes in Caribbean texts that invoke a Sephardic presence is that of a Jewish bloodstrain that runs through the Caribbean population. This motif references the history of Sephardic Jews who arrived in the islands fleeing the Inquisition and who continued to conceal their faith throughout the sixteenth century after the Inquisition followed them to the New World.7 Against this historical background of forced conversion and suppressed identities, the Caribbean protagonists of the novels discussed in this chapter are not always conscious of their Sephardic lineage. Yet their Jewishness manifests itself in the habits of secrecy that they exhibit and in their tendency to keep a part of themselves hidden from view. In Obejas’s Days of Awe, which I discussed in the introduction, when the father of the heroine Alejandra is questioned as to whether he is Jewish, he replies: “‘All people of Spanish descent have some Jewish blood in them’” (37). Correspondingly, in Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody, the Cuban composer Israel Levis, a devout Catholic, may be of Jewish descent, for “what Spaniard did not have a descendant somewhere with Jewish or Arab blood?” (50). Levis’s Sephardic appearance and Semitic surname would seem to support the possibility of Jewish ancestry, as would his mother’s dream that his father was a Jew. And yet his purported Jewish lineage remains profoundly unverifiable: “The family name, Levis, originated with some distant Catalan ancestor, who may or may not have had some Jewish blood, but nothing was made of that, for, going back centuries to postmedieval Spain, as his father once explained, the peasants often derived their names from their masters— and there had been many prosperous Jews living in Spain before the inquisitions of Isabella forced them either to convert, to die or to flee her sacred kingdoms” (49).

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In Cliff ’s novel Into the Interior (2010), the great-grandmother’s hooked nose similarly is cited as evidence of a possible but unverifiable Jewish heritage: “The watery silk of her chaise makes the blue of my great-grandmother’s eyes almost unbearable, each lighting the hook of her nose, evoking a Carib ancestor, Sephardic fugitive: who is to say?” (9).8 So too, the speaker of Walcott’s poem “North and South” (1981) speculates on the basis of his aunt’s physiognomy that his family may have Jewish forebears: The ghosts of white-robed horsemen float through the trees, the galloping hysterical abhorrence of my race— like any child of the Diaspora, I remember this even as the flakes whiten Sheridan’s shoulders, and I remember once looking at my aunt’s face, the wintry blue eyes, the rusty hair, and thinking maybe we are part Jewish, and felt a vein run through this earth and clench itself like a fist around an ancient root, and wanted the privilege to be yet another of the races they fear and hate instead of one of the haters and the afraid. (99–109)

Such passages present the Caribbean protagonists’ possible Jewish lineage as highly indeterminate, albeit not implausible given the historical presence of Jews in the region. At the same time, by aligning Jews with other “feared and hated” populations, these writers express a desire to claim such a lineage. The notion of a dormant Jewish bloodstream that runs through the Caribbean populace, escaping detection is one of the organizing motifs of Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels. An investigation of Caribbean spiritual life, Chancy’s novel reaches beyond the more expected African and European reference points to situate Haiti within a larger network of ethnic and cultural geographies. Chancy’s nonlinear narrative ranges across multiple geographical sites (Haiti, France, Canada, the United States, Ireland) and time periods (from the mid-nineteenth century to

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the 2000s). A multiperspectival novel, it is organized around a series of centers of consciousness, shifting between the voices and points of view of five figures: Ruth, a piano teacher and mystic who is murdered at the outset of the novel; her niece Catherine, a pianist living in Paris who returns to Haiti for her aunt’s funeral; Catherine’s mother Rose, who dies in exile from Duvalier in Canada; Ruth’s adoptive son Romulus, a former Konpa singer who travels to Miami after he is released from prison; and Elsie, an Irish seer and ancestor of Rose who emigrates to Haiti in 1847. The first two of these perspectives, Ruth’s and Catherine’s, are significantly informed by the Jewish lineage that each woman traces. Although, as a result of the Code noir’s expulsion of Jews from the French islands, the colony of Saint Domingue did not have as prominent a Jewish population as Jamaica, Barbados, or some of the Dutch islands, Chancy’s novel reminds us that the Jewish diaspora reached most corners of the Caribbean, and Haiti was no exception. Accordingly, The Loneliness of Angels references the early twentieth-century emigration of Middle Eastern Jews to Haiti while also implicitly alluding to an older Sephardic and Marrano presence in Haiti dating back to the arrival of Dutch Jews from Brazil in the early seventeenth century.9 Crypto-Judaism figures significantly in the opening two chapters of The Loneliness of Angels, where it serves to announce several of the novel’s key concerns, including spirituality and mysticism, memories suppressed and recovered, kinship and its ambiguities, masked identities, and cultural endurance. The crypto-Jewish motif resonates with the novel’s larger themes of survival and deception as well as with its cosmopolitan geography.10 Sephardism is, I argue, the central mechanism through which the novel advances its inclusive vision of Haitian society as a crossroads of multiple diasporas and faiths. In The Loneliness of Angels, Sephardic themes support the elaboration of a multivocal and labyrinthine narrative structure that foregrounds connections among the intertwined histories that meet in the Caribbean. Early on in The Loneliness of Angels, the narrator hints at the exotic lineage and religious affiliations of Ruth, the mystic with skin the color of roasted almonds who stands at the center of the novel: “She is of Haiti and not of it, following the threads of practices that seem imprinted in

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her cells that bear no resemblance to the Catholic rites with which she was raised nor the vodou of the people whom she supports” (15). The narrator then proceeds to relate the story of how, as a child growing up in 1940s Haiti, Ruth discovered the truth about her linen merchant father’s mysterious origins. During Easter week the young Ruth is pressured by friends to participate in a Haitian ritual in which a straw figure is abused and called “Judas.”11 Ruth is distressed by the experience, in part because the straw man bears a certain resemblance to her father, and she runs home crying. Ruth’s mother responds by explaining that the straw man is a Jwif, like her Syrian Jewish grandfather: When your father’s people were made to leave their place of birth, they had to abandon their gods and their altars and build a new life. Some of them took on new names, new religions, new identities. Some of the people they had to leave behind called them traitors but they had no choice. They had to flee to make a life for themselves and for their children. If your grandfather had not left Syria when he did, your father would not be the man he is today. . . . “Does this mean that I’m a ‘Jwif?’” Ruth asked. “Yes,” her mother had said, “Nou tout sé Jwif. Even those of us who kick ourselves, not knowing any better, and set ourselves on fire as if we might consume the past by repeating its offences.” (42)

This scene serves to establish Ruth’s Sephardic Jewish origins. At the same time, with the declaration “Nou tout sé Jwif” (we are all Jewish), Chancy signals that the revelation of Ruth’s crypto-Jewish heritage will also illuminate the character of the broader Haitian population. In an interview, Chancy explains that her incorporation into the novel of Syrian Jewish characters was inspired by the Spanish Converso ancestors of her own maternal grandfather (“Chancy Wins”). Accordingly, Chancy’s presentation of the Syrian Jewish material is inflected by an emphasis on hidden identities and the preservation of secret rituals that is strongly reminiscent of Converso and Marrano narratives. For instance, in a passage describing how Ruth “surreptitiously” teaches her niece Catherine a Jewish prayer that she had learned from her father

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“for protection,” the narrator explains that Ruth’s father would hide his eccentric religious practices from the church: No, she hadn’t told Catherine about her origins, Fritz’s origins. She hadn’t revealed the source of the prayer except to say that it was her father, Catherine’s grandfather, who had passed it down to them. She didn’t tell Catherine what her own mother had finally revealed to her one Easter that was to alter her forever when she had been hardly eleven years of age. Her mother had revealed that her father’s father came from far away over the ocean, not from Europe, but from the East where the earth was covered with sand dunes and olives hung from the trees like quenêpes here, plentiful and plump, ready for the picking. This was supposed to explain, somehow, why Father didn’t go to Church with them on Sunday mornings. As far as Ruth could tell, Father wasn’t a religious type at all. But he kept an altar in a dark corner of his office with an effigy on it of Moses holding the two stones etched with the ten commandments. Next to Moses was Papa Legba, god of the crossroads, in the guise of St. Peter. These were his gods. . . . When the Church people came to check on the family’s progress with Bible study, Father covered the altar with a white cloth and argued that he was hiding a mess of papers under it, and everyone laughed and pretended to believe him. (37–38)

This account of Ruth’s father’s covert observance of a syncretic Jewish ritual evokes stories of religious rites preserved in secret by Marrano families. Thus Chancy layers Ruth’s family history of early twentiethcentury Middle Eastern Jewish immigration to Haiti over an older postexpulsion narrative of Marrano exile and cultural survival in the New World. Ruth’s father’s altar strikingly pairs Moses with Papa Legba, the vodou god of the crossroads who serves as an intermediary between the loas (spirits) and humans. Ruth, who inherits not only her father’s house but also his faith and memories, herself spends much of her life learning “how to be a crossroads” (17). Accordingly, Ruth’s function in the novel is a connective one. As the adoptive mother of Catherine, Lucas, and Romulus, she links together Chancy’s dispersed cast of characters.

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Through her gift as a seer and as the caretaker of a “memory table” on which are displayed photographs of her family as well as the students she has taught over a period of three decades, Ruth also connects the past, present, and future. Finally, as the daughter of a Sephardic father and an African-descended mother, Ruth joins together Jewish and AfroCaribbean histories and spiritual traditions. The dispersed histories and voices that the novel assembles thus gain a certain cohesion through Ruth’s connective presence. The Loneliness of Angels situates Haiti at the nexus of a variety of interrelated histories, geographies, and peoples that are bound together by “the great chain of trade that links them all on the island” (59). This network includes not only Ruth’s Sephardic ancestors but also the Irishwoman Elsie. Yet notably it is Ruth who intuits this truth about the composite character of Haitian society: “Ruth could look at Rose and see the girl’s famed, notoriously crazed, great-grandmother Elsie as if the woman existed in the mirror of the girl’s eyes. She could see that Rose was just one pearl on a string that led all the way back to distant lands, all the way back to Nigeria and Ireland, to the wandering geography of her father’s people, her people” (54). I would suggest that Ruth’s cryptoJewish background, with its double vision and quality of in-betweenness, makes her uniquely suited to articulate the connective perspective that is also fundamental to the novel’s formal construction. Just as Papa Legba translates the requests of humans into the language of the spirits, bridging different worlds, Chancy’s Sephardic characters are cultural brokers and interpreters who display gifts of communication and negotiate diverse traditions. Ruth’s Sephardic father is not only a merchant but also a literary translator who writes poetry in Creole, while for her part Ruth, too, mediates among cultures, serving as a portal for people, goods, and memories.12 The crypto-Jewish motifs that are introduced at the outset of The Loneliness of Angels anticipate the theme of entangled genealogies that runs through the novel. In the second chapter, Ruth’s niece Catherine, while studying music in Iowa, meets a Jewish American history student, Sam. Sam is attempting “to trace the links between different groups of Jews, people from varying genetic trees, you might say, from North Africa to Palestine, from Russia to Iowa” (86) and approaches Catherine because

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he detects in her physiognomy a resemblance to Ethiopian Jewry. When asked whether she has any Jewish ancestry, Catherine acknowledges that Jewish blood is said to be present on her father’s side.13 Seemingly confirming these rumors of her Jewish descent, Catherine remarks that the photographs Sam shows her of Ethiopian Jewish women look like “mirrors” of her aunt Ruth (86). Thus The Loneliness of Angels taps into the contemporary interest in multicultural Jewishness and in tracing Jewish communities in far corners of the globe. At the same time, however, Chancy also calls into question the current fashion for genetic testing as a vehicle of diasporic affiliation. As Catherine explains to Sam, there is some doubt regarding her paternity. Although she has been raised as the daughter of Catherine’s brother Fritz, many suspect that she is in fact the biological daughter of Fritz’s romantic rival, Jérémie. In this regard, Jewishness comes to signal a larger sense of ambiguity about Caribbean origins as well as the indeterminacy of identity itself. At one point Catherine remarks of her relationship with her father that “it’s the ambiguity that binds us, the invisible cartilage of pain that connects us more closely than shared DNA” (208). Thus Ruth’s mother’s comment, “Nou tout sé Jwif” (42), while on one level drawing attention to the Jewish bloodlines that run through the Caribbean population, simultaneously conveys the broader insight that all Caribbean identities are variegated, mixed, and to some extent mysterious.14 In this second and more potent sense, Jewishness becomes a metaphor for the idea of impure blood and untraceability. In his provocative discussion of Latino literature and crypto-Jewish narratives, Freedman argues that marranism represents “a new form of Jewishness,” “something much more resembling our modern (or even postmodern) notions of ethnic identity: of a people within a people who believe themselves to have a separate identity but whose identity as such is available to them only through improvised, often invented cultural practices and constructed (and often fictitious) narratives” (216). In this regard marranism offers an alternative to the models of identity put forward both by “ethnic enthusiasts” and by those “for whom ethnicity is a ruse at best, a pernicious snare at worst” (249). Freedman’s account illuminates not only the Latino fiction he discusses but also Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels, in which Jewishness serves to

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highlight the fundamentally unstable and unfixable character of Caribbean identities—the extent to which, as Chancy puts it, in the Caribbean “nothing is as it seems” and “the culture is more complex than might be assumed” (“Chancy Wins”).15 The Loneliness of Angels’ emphasis on crypto-Jewishness reflects its larger interest in a Caribbean creolization that is even more tangled and labyrinthine than it appears on the surface. It is significant that the remark “Nou tout sé Jwif” is uttered in Creole, for, as I have been suggesting, through its prismatic narrative structure and wide-ranging geography the novel advances an expansive understanding of Caribbean creolization that extends beyond the spectrum of African, Asian, and Christian European elements more typically associated with Creole identities. Departing from an Afrocentric approach to advance a more eclectic understanding of Caribbean creolization, The Loneliness of Angels is bookended by chapters that trace Haitian family histories back to non-African roots: the Syrian Jewish ancestry of Ruth and the Irish ancestry of Catherine’s mother Rose.16 Like the Syrian Jewish characters, Elsie undergoes a process of indigenization when she immigrates to Haiti, her “English-Irish bastard” son (333) eventually marrying an Afro-Haitian girl: “Pregnant [Elsie] became, on the journey over the sea. And later her child had a child and so on until they became one with the island people, brown like you and Irish too” (313). The novel suggests the importance of recovering these disparate family memories alongside African genealogies. By the same token, the novel’s crypto-Jewish motifs also serve to remind us of the profoundly fragmented character of such memories. Ruth is the inheritor and caretaker of her family’s past, which is preserved through the photographs of a “kaleidoscope of multi-hued faces” that are displayed on her “memory table” (15–16). The Jewish ancestral memories that she inherits from her father are, however, highly incomplete: “It would take her many years to find out [what the word Jwif meant] and when she was old enough to learn, her father told her very little of his family’s past. It took her even longer to realize that what her father had to pass on was very little because very little had survived before him. Her father lived in a world made up of fragments of broken lives. He gathered the bits and pieces of those who had been made to travel far from their mother’s bosoms and made it all his own. It was in this way

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that he kept the memory of his father’s faith alive” (42). To some extent, then, knowledge of the past and of family lineage remains inaccessible. In this respect, the postexpulsion loss of memory suffered by Sephardim resonates with a post–Middle Passage experience of partial amnesia in which significant details of the slavery and preslavery past remain forever irretrievable, lost to the Door of No Return. The elliptical and fragmented narrative structure of The Loneliness of Angels signals this broken quality of both crypto-Jewish and African diaspora memory.17 In her presentation of Ruth as a humanitarian, a compassionate advocate of the Haitian underclass and author of radical journalism that she publishes under the name of “Erzili Le Flambo,” Chancy also associates marranism with resistance to modern-day Caribbean dictatorships. While the crypto-Jewish theme recedes after the first two chapters of The Loneliness of Angels, it sets the stage for subsequent sections of the novel in which the survival strategies that the Haitians developed while living under the Duvalier regime are reminiscent of crypto-Jewish practices. Chancy’s Ruth is notably defined by “her uncommon strength, the kind needed to weather regimes and coups, dictators and pundits, shortages and starvation” (47). Her niece Catherine exhibits another family trait: the tendency to cultivate secrecy and to “kee[p] some part of [oneself] vaulted away” (211). Both attributes prove valuable in the context of Duvalier’s Haiti. Ruth’s niece Catherine explains that in Haiti, we had been raised in a world in which to reveal one’s self was dangerous. All we had were our stories, what we passed from mouth to mouth in person and over telephone wires, seeking the morsels of truth lodged in the pauses of breath as minds wandered and stories took on lives of their own. It wasn’t easy to speak about what one knew since much of it came secondhand, information that would never stand up in a court of law. It would be dismissed with one word: hearsay. But here, hearsay was all we had, along with gossip and innuendo, which amounted to much the same thing. Between each nuanced variation in a story lay worlds of truth. I had been raised to sieve through sounds to seek the nugget of gold that would ensure our safe passage through a minefield of lies and deception. How else could the Duvalier years have been survived?18 (260)

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The analogy between inquisitorial and Duvalier-era practices that Chancy implicitly develops in The Loneliness of Angels bears comparison with Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody, which parallels the repressive regime of the Cuban dictator Machado with Nazi-occupied Paris. More subtly, by suggesting that his protagonist Israel Levis may be of Sephardic descent, Hijuelos associates Machado’s regime, with its practices of surveillance and violent intimidation, with the operations of the Inquisition that extended into the Iberian New World colonies. If both Machado’s Cuba and Hitler’s Europe force Levis and his friends to adopt secret lives and to undertake various forms of exile, Levis’s habit of concealment and of suppressing his true identity and desires also evokes the background of marranism from which he may be descended.19 In The Loneliness of Angels, however, the analogy between marranism and resistance to Caribbean repressive regimes is also articulated in religious terms. Chancy presents both kabbalah and vodou as suppressed religious practices that have to go underground to survive migration, assimilation, and Catholic repression. Ruth’s father teaches her about the Shekinah or female spirit of wisdom, which holds a special significance in kabbalah, while simultaneously attending a church that holds secret vodou rituals. Indeed, he becomes convinced that kabbalah and vodou are “all the same” (44): “They’ll have you believing that my father’s people were sorcerers, but look .  .  . they called your mother’s people sorcerers and devils too when they rose up and poisoned their masters’ wells. . . . Remember this Ruth: whatever they’re afraid of, they’ll call it the devil. Whatever stands in their way, they’ll call primitive and backward” (42–43). Similarly Catherine’s boyfriend Sam, who wants to trace the “thread of forbidden mystical practices through the cultural and spiritual beliefs of Jewry,” is “fascinated” to learn of “the divination practices in vodou, certain that there lay a connection there, somehow, between disparate peoples and the lands they were forced to flee to as their own sacred lands were taken over or desecrated in the name of foreign gods” (88). As the daughter of an Afro-Caribbean mother and a crypto-Jewish father, and as a seer who earns the honorific mambo (vodou priestess) while also reciting at bedtime a Jewish prayer for protection, Ruth affirms Sam’s belief in a connection between the two spiritual traditions. At the same time, by aligning Jewish and Afro-Caribbean

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mysticism, Chancy advances a larger analogy between Jewish and Black diasporic experience: Never mind that [Ruth] had a memory that paired the wanderings of her father’s people with the rolls of the drums of her mother’s people in their native land where the earth was dark and black like freshly mined coal. Never mind that her father’s people had been forced to handle money because in a previous age, their faith and money had been seen as soiling, unclean. Never mind that her mother’s people had been treated like cattle, branded and sold. Never mind that both her father’s people and her mother’s people had been thrown to the wolves by the same zealous mass. (57)

Chancy’s presentation of kabbalah as a counterhegemonic faith (like vodou) to which its oppressed followers remain devoted contrasts strikingly with Walcott’s emphasis on Pissarro’s religious doubt in Tiepolo’s Hound. Instead, it is more akin to Obejas’ exploration of the relationship between Jewish and Afro-Caribbean spirituality in Days of Awe. Like The Loneliness of Angels, Days of Awe, which follows its Cuban American heroine Alejandra’s journey to recover her family’s crypto-Jewish roots, associates marranism with Afro-Caribbean religious observance, which also must go underground to survive. Much like their AfroCuban neighbors, Alejandra’s crypto-Jewish grandparents Luis and Sima observe their faith in a doubled fashion, in tandem with Catholic ritual. Outwardly Catholic, both crypto-Jews and Afro-Cubans privately practice their own rituals. Moreover, Santería provides a kind of cover for crypto-Judaism, as when the Jewish naming ceremony for Sima passes as a form of orisha worship (147). In The Loneliness of Angels crypto-Jewish motifs are introduced in order to underscore the syncretic quality of Caribbean faith. Because marranism implies a doubled form of religious observance as well as a public-private divide, it comes in Chancy’s novel to signal the multiplicity of Caribbean spirituality itself. Ruth and her father blend together Jewish and vodou belief, just as in Obejas’s Days of Awe Alejandra’s parents join together Catholicism, Judaism, and Santería. In Obejas’s novel Alejandra’s mother’s altar to the Virgin, which holds glasses of water,

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flowers, fruit, and candies in keeping with Santería belief, is situated in the basement next to the office in which her father keeps Jewish ritual objects including a tallis, tefillin, and a siddur. Similarly as we saw earlier, in The Loneliness of Angels Moses and Papa Legba keep company in Ruth’s father’s altar, which is hurriedly covered up when emissaries from the church visit. The father’s secret altar thus becomes emblematic of the creolized and counterhegemonic character of Haitian spirituality.

SEPHARDIC MAROONS IN FREE ENTERPRISE In her first novel Abeng, Cliff calls attention to the conjunction of the Sephardic expulsion with the onset of the era of exploration and slavery: “The series of [Columbus’] voyages began in 1492, the year he sighted Cuba and made a landfall on the island which became known as Hispaniola . . . the year the Jews were officially driven out of Spain, following centuries of persecution. Los Reyes Catolicos are credited with unifying the Spanish realm on the Iberian peninsula, financing the discovery of America, enforcing the expulsion of the Jews, and soon after, the Moors, and initiating the slave trade between Africa and the Americas” (66).20 The narrator then proceeds to speculate that “Christopher Columbus . . . may well have been a Jew himself ” (66). Indeed, as historians have documented, Sephardic Jews and Conversos were both Columbus’s patrons and his shipmates on voyages that were themselves financed in part with funds confiscated from defeated Muslims and dispossessed Jews (Sarna 39). Most intriguing from Cliff ’s perspective is the theory that Columbus may have been descended from Marranos or Conversos. Accordingly Abeng references the “Sephardi thesis” that was advanced by Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga in his 1940 biography of the explorer but that has since been largely discredited by Columbus scholars.21 Cliff ’s allusion to Columbus’ possible Marrano origins in Abeng functions similarly to the more sustained considerations of the Sephardi thesis that we find in two Native American novels, Michael Dorris’s and Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus (1991) and Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991). As I have discussed elsewhere, these novels

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distinguish themselves from the mainstream of Native American commentaries on the 1492 quincentenary by advancing an identificatory reading of Columbus, one that is made possible by their presentation of the explorer as a crypto-Jew (“Sephardism”). By drawing attention to the Sephardic expulsion, Dorris’s and Erdrich’s, and Vizenor’s retellings of 1492 resituate the landfall and its aftermath for Indigenous peoples in the context of Europe’s relations with its internal Others. Similarly, Cliff ’s more condensed reading of Columbus as a crypto-Jew in Abeng unsettles official history, laying the groundwork for the Anne Frank motif and its challenge to received narratives that I will discuss in chapter 7.22 This nascent marranism in Abeng also presages the fuller development of crypto-Jewish motifs in Cliff ’s third novel Free Enterprise. At the same time, Cliff ’s reluctance in Abeng to explore the more ambivalent implications of the father of New World colonialism’s possibly crypto-Jewish origins exposes tensions surrounding the application of the Marrano metaphor in a postslavery context. In Free Enterprise Cliff employs marranism as a key trope through which to explore several dimensions of Caribbean and African diaspora experience including displacement, concealment, survival, and the retention of identity and memory. The central project of Free Enterprise is to imaginatively recover the lost history of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant, who likely funded John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. In Cliff ’s retelling, Mary Ellen meets in 1858 with a Jamaican comrade and fellow abolitionist, Annie Christmas, to plan the uprising. After the failure of the raid, Annie retreats to a Mississippi riverbank near a leper colony inhabited by a host of fellow outsiders who hail from all corners of the globe. Cliff ’s account of the raid on Harpers Ferry thus moves beyond a narrowly national U.S. setting by introducing a fictional Caribbean collaborator of Pleasant’s. In so doing, Cliff, like Chancy, also reaches beyond the African diaspora itself, resituating African diaspora women’s experience in the context of global dynamics of subjugation and resistance. Cliff advances this antiethnocentric, global perspective on the struggle for Black emancipation in part by invoking the Sephardic Caribbean. Two key passages, one at the opening of Free Enterprise and the other at its conclusion, draw attention to the novel’s narrative design. In the

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opening chapter we are told that in front of Annie Christmas’s house stand trees adorned with a variety of empty bottles whose “babel of scents” linger despite her efforts to scrub them clean (5). The residual scents that commingle suggest a host of disparate memories that persist and come into contact with one another despite their suppression by larger historical forces. As Erica Johnson observes, the bottle tree is emblematic of the novel’s decentered narrative structure and polyphonic reading of history (58). This polyphonic approach is further underscored in a later passage in which Annie recalls a South Carolinian house slave who collected scraps of cloth with the aim of piecing them together into a tapestry: “In the end, of course, it did not happen. No. Our historical moment was lost, so our tapestry dissembled. Oh, it exists piece by piece. Some pieces have been buried with those who have passed on. Some are forgotten, misplaced” (192). The image of the unfinished tapestry announces the novel’s project of piecing together fragmented memories while simultaneously suggesting the inevitable incompleteness of this project. If as Johnson argues, Free Enterprise’s “composition by way of fragments, of the cross-contamination of histories . . . gives rise to an entire mode of addressing history” (74), my reading of the novel reveals how this strategy of quilting together remnant histories is advanced through the figure of the Marrano. Cliff ’s Free Enterprise, like other examples of Caribbean sephardism, identifies Jews as one of the founding peoples of the Caribbean. At the opening of the novel, the Caribbean is described as a “whirlwind” of cultures and languages that collide. Among Caribbean languages, “Hebrew and Chinese and Arabic, oriental and surreptitious, kept mostly to themselves, for reasons of safekeeping, of the language and the people and their varied strangeness—to the European gaze of course. The sand on the floor of the synagogue muffled the sounds of the services. The clatter of the abacus in the shop was kept as low as possible, and as shortlived, as the beads sang up and down the columns” (8). In this early passage, Cliff ’s characterization of Hebrew as a “surreptitious” language and reference to the sand-floored synagogue signal the particular interest that the novel will take in marranism, secrecy, and survival. Yet, in pursuing this nexus of associations, Cliff resists exploring more ambivalent dimensions of Sephardic Caribbean history, instead casting her Jewish

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protagonist as a fellow victim of the patriarchal and racist regimes that oppress the Black characters as part of her larger connective vision. A key device through which Cliff advances a global perspective on the struggle for emancipation is the leper colony near New Orleans that Annie frequents when she retreats into the Louisiana swamplands after the failure of the raid on Harper’s Ferry.23 The colony is built on the site of a former Indian village as well as a plantation, its layered, buried histories linking the lepers’ suffering to other stories of displacement and strife.24 At the leper colony a storytelling circle forms that is comprised of a global cast of oppressed and displaced peoples, including a Hawaiian, a Tahitian, a poor white Kentuckian, and a Surinamese descendant of Marranos. Together, they forge an alternative community on the basis of political solidarity rather than blood that is not unlike the adoptive family Ruth fosters in The Loneliness of Angels. Like the bottle tree and tapestry metaphors, the storytelling circle emblematizes the novel’s formal strategy of piecing together diverse histories of resistance. Yet, if the leper colony advances a perspective of historical adjacency in Free Enterprise,25 the Sephardic presence in the colony of the Surinamese Jew Rachel de Souza, which becomes more pronounced toward the novel’s conclusion, most profoundly signals the pluralistic orientation of the novel. Rachel de Souza makes two noteworthy appearances in Free Enterprise that help to frame the novel’s retelling of Harpers Ferry. In her first appearance, Rachel joins the storytelling circle and relates her story of resistance and survival in an example of what Levins Morales calls “medicinal history.” When it is Rachel’s turn to speak, she recalls the trauma of the expulsion and the ships that trailed after Columbus: “Soon enough we had to leave Spain, under decree from Los Reyes Católicos, and as Colón set out at the behest of the same pair, so did we . . . “They crossed in late summer, the time of sudden storms. Imagine the procession of little ships, coming along behind, some in terror, seasick, homesick, caught in the inexorable currents of the Atlantic. Of course, I want to know how many went down, how many survived; where did the survivors make landfall?

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“That ocean floor must be something else again. Where the sand covers centuries.” (60)

Rachel’s tale is abruptly cut off, however, when she runs out of time, and she concludes by recounting somewhat obscurely how after detecting the arrival of “another procession of ships” she “took to the hills, a cimarrón” (61). This lack of closure creates a sense of anticipation for Rachel’s second appearance at the end of the novel, when she escapes the leper colony to visit Annie, who is living in a maroonlike state in the Louisiana swamp. While, in her first appearance, Rachel is simply one of the various members of the storytelling circle, in the later chapter, “Company,” she is privileged from among the other occupants of the leper colony as “the only colonist Annie knew outside the fences” (182). “Company” stages a Black-Jewish dialogue about memory and suffering, one that elaborates a Caribbean perspective on the relationality of Annie and Rachel’s respective histories of displacement. In Free Enterprise Rachel is a bridging figure who contributes to the theme of interethnic solidarity that is also developed elsewhere in the novel. Yet Rachel’s Sephardic story is not simply another example of a history of oppression to be read alongside that of the Middle Passage but instead occupies the same geographical and—in Cliff ’s rendering— ideological space. The most striking aspect of Cliff ’s presentation of Rachel is her historically implausible conceit that Rachel is not only a descendant of Marranos but also an honorary Maroon—a fugitive slave who flees to a remote area to escape the reach of the plantation. The intersectionality of Black and Jewish histories is established through Rachel’s membership in a community of Maroons in the Surinamese jungle. As a “Sephardic Maroon” who joins a “company of like-minded rebels” in Suriname (182), Rachel actualizes the larger analogy between marranism and maroonage that the novel advances by occupying both narratives simultaneously. In fact, Marrano and Maroon experience are so little differentiated in Free Enterprise that the former tends to be subsumed within the latter. With their strategies of concealment and survival, Marranos are described in Free Enterprise as engaging in a form of maroonage. For

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example, as we have seen, the sand floors that typify Caribbean synagogues are interpreted as a “survival tactic.” Rachel explains that when we were in Spain, under the Inquisition, during the reign of Torquemada, we worshiped in hidden rooms, some underground, some at the ends of tunnels at the backs of houses. We worshiped in secret to save our lives, and used sand on the floor to muffle the sounds of the services. Sound waves again. A wooden or tile floor and we would have been sitting ducks. But the sand quelled the sound, and we carried this tradition with us into the New World. Some people think we needed a reminder of our exile in the desert. Others think, first came the tropics, then the sand. Not at all. It was a survival tactic, as usual. (59)

As in Cliff ’s No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Maroon motifs figure prominently in Free Enterprise. The Maroon narrative is underscored through references to the folk hero Nanny of the Maroons as well as by the Kentuckian leper’s stories about rebels hiding in swamps, caves, and other spaces of concealment. Yet Free Enterprise uniquely overlays maroonage and marranism, which are linked by the themes of secrecy, the retention of difference, and resistance: “The marranos, from whom [Rachel] descended, had at least each other; company again. Company in their hiding places, guerrilla bands, in the prisons, in the processions, on the ships of Colon and Magellan, across the seven seas, contradicting the flatness of the earth—were it round, would Jews be safer?—in the thick undergrowth of the New World” (183). Much as Chancy associates kabbalah and vodou as counterhegemonic forms of spirituality, Cliff aligns Marranos and Maroons as participating in common resistant strategies of concealment and survival. The Marrano/Maroon analogy is most vividly expressed through the disease of leprosy that afflicts Rachel and that normally plagues only “the darker races” (40). The narrator explains that the disease developed a “Surinamese strain [that] flourished especially among Jews and Maroons” and that it was through Rachel’s “long association with the Surinamese Maroons” that she “incubated her particular form of plague” (182). The historical intersectionality of African and Jewish diasporic histories is

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thus manifested in the disease of leprosy, which both populations carry. Notably, Rachel’s distinctive form of leprosy is characterized by its invisibility: “Her version of plague was especially dangerous, the doctors said, because it was silent. That is, no outward signs were apparent: no toe drops, or finger drops, no flat place where a nose should have been, no missing lips. The damage raged, the scientists told her, on the inside” (182). In this way, the divide between the Marrano’s outwardly Christian appearance and inwardly Jewish identity is displaced onto the disease. In broader terms, the novel’s conceit that Rachel’s Jewish form of leprosy is undetectable evokes modern and postmodern perceptions of Jewish difference as defined by its indefinability.26 Yet Cliff deftly converts this negative association of Jewishness with racial chameleonism into a positive value in the context of Marrano-Maroon resistance. In one of her conversations with Rachel, Annie associates the tactics of disguise adopted by Mary Ellen Pleasant and the other Black women rebels with the resistant strategies of the Marranos: “Mary Ellen passed herself off as a blacksmith. She was truly something. She dressed as a house servant in San Francisco, came to the convention in Chatham dressed as a jockey, went South as a blacksmith, finally escaped as a middle-aged woman of African-American descent, which she was. Disguise was something she knew well. We all did. It was practically my birthright; you know that. Disguise. Masks. Never give out what you’re thinking. . . . How to pass through the nets. Like your own people. In search of a New World” (194). In Free Enterprise Cliff offers an inventive reinterpretation of the Jew’s body as a diseased carrier of the plague, recoding leprosy as a positive marker of Rachel’s powers of concealment.27 I want to suggest that behind this governing analogy between the Marrano and the Maroon, which is based in part on their common ability to escape detection, lies another, more slippery and ambivalent analogy in Cliff ’s writing: that between the Marrano and the lightskinned Creole. Cliff is not unique in pursuing this analogy. Jews are associated with racial mixture by Paule Marshall and other Caribbean/ diaspora writers, and the light-skinned Creole in particular is linked to the figure of the Jew in the work of Jean Rhys, a writer with whom Cliff is often compared.28 In Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939), for example, Sasha Jansen visits a refugee Jewish artist, Serge Rubin, in his

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Paris studio. Serge shows Sasha some African masks “straight from the Congo” that he has in fact made himself and then proceeds to perform a primitive dance to Martinican music (414). Although Rhys’s Creole heroine does not join in the Jew’s primitivist performance, the dance prompts her to envision a tropical landscape, perhaps the landscape of her birth. Serge then tells Sasha the sad tale of a downtrodden Martinican Mulatta whom he had befriended in London. In Good Morning, Midnight the Jewish artist is marked by a racial and national indeterminacy analogous to that of Sasha herself.29 Rhys’s writing thus establishes a nexus of associations between the figures of the light-skinned Creole and the racially indeterminate Jew that would resurface in Cliff ’s work. In her well-known 1983 autobiographical essay “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire,” which examines the condition of the light-skinned middle-class Jamaican Creole, Cliff makes reference to Marranos in a passage that is worth quoting at length: Then:

It was never a question of passing. It was a question of hiding. Behind Black and white perceptions of who we were—who they thought we were. Tropics. Plantations. Calypso. Cricket. We were the people with the musical voices and the coronation mugs on our parlor tables. I would be whatever figure these foreign imaginations cared for me to be. It would be so simple to let others fill in for me. . . . It could become a life lived within myself. A life cut off. I know who I am but you will never know who I am. I may in fact lose touch with who I am. I hid from my real sources. But my real sources were also hidden from me.

Now:

It is not a question of relinquishing privilege. It is a question of grasping more of myself. I have found that in the real sources are concealed my survival. My speech. My voice. To be colonized is to be rendered insensitive. To have those parts necessary to sustain life numbed. . . .

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Sometimes I used to think we were like the Marranos—the Sephardic Jews forced to pretend they were Christians. The name was given to them by the Christians, and meant “pigs.” But once out of Spain and Portugal, they became Jews openly again. Some settled in Jamaica. They knew who the enemy was and acted for their own survival. But they remained Jews always. (71–72, emphasis added)

In these lines Cliff extends the analogy that Rhys earlier had developed between the Jew and the light-skinned Creole by associating marranism with the Creole’s racial instability. Here marranism, which shares with creoleness the potential for disguise, passing, and double vision, offers Cliff a crucial means of recasting the Creole as a figure not of collaboration but of resistance. Conventionally, the Creole and the Mulatta have been viewed as degenerative, frail, and disloyal. The challenge for Cliff, as well as for other mixed-race writers such as Rebecca Walker in her memoir White, Black and Jewish (2001), is to overcome the tragic Mulatta narrative that is encapsulated in Langston Hughes’s 1925 poem “Cross” as well as in Rhys’s modernist fiction. For Cliff, in “If I Could Write This in Fire,” marranism offers just such an alternative. While in Cliff ’s novel No Telephone to Heaven the father of the heroine Clare Savage instructs her in the art of camouflage as part of his pursuit of an ideology of colorism, marranism suggests that the act of passing can also contain elements of counterhegemonic subversion. Most importantly in “If I Could Write This in Fire,” the Marrano analogy signals the possibility of recovering one’s “real sources,” of returning to origins. In Cliff ’s reading of Sephardic history, Marranos adopted the temporary disguise of conversion that enabled their survival while retaining a core Jewish identity that remained uncorrupted beneath their disguise. The implication in “If I Could Write This in Fire” is that the light-skinned Creole, too, retains an essential Blackness that awaits recovery. Similarly in Free Enterprise marranism offers a salve for Annie’s troubled condition as a descendant of the gens inconnu who have forgotten the African gods and yet whose hair sometimes “snakes” as though “it was going back to Africa” (23). Annie’s response to her mixed-race

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heritage is to blacken rather than whiten herself, for, according to Mary Ellen Pleasant, “you are who you are underneath all that. Skin is beside the point” (26). This perspective is given crucial support in the novel by the Marrano Rachel de Souza, who maintains absolute fealty to her origins. What enables Rachel to retain her Jewish identity is her powerful sense of the past. Much like other Sephardic protagonists in Caribbean literature, Rachel’s defining characteristics are her proclivity for silence, her solidarity with the oppressed, and her keen memory.30 The intensity of Rachel’s postmemory of the expulsion is such that it transports her back to 1492. She witnesses in her dreams the trauma of the expulsion and has “this extraordinary memory of running. Running and running, and being chased. A common enough thing, I suppose, but I am running down a steep hill, toward a ship about to set sail. The ship raises the flag of Los Reyes Catolicos. I must decide whether to board. I have no choice” (202). When Rachel recounts her inherited memories, Annie responds, “I think we carry more within us than we can ever imagine. If bone structure is passed on, why not memory?” (202). For her part, Rachel urges Annie not to throw away her box of keepsakes: “Don’t be rash, old friend. I for one know about lost things. Don’t discard memory, or that which instigates it” (186). Cliff ’s portrayal of Rachel in Free Enterprise thus echoes her earlier presentation in “If I Could Write This in Fire” of the Marrano as remaining “Jewish always.” I would argue that Cliff ’s interpretation of the Marrano can be understood as part of the larger impulse “to make the creole text black” (78) that Belinda Edmondson has identified in her work. Seeking to restore the light-skinned Creole to Blackness, Cliff advances a romantic interpretation of marranism in which “their Christianity was merely a superficial mask, while in their minds and hearts, they were purely and untaintedly Jewish” (Yovel, The Other Within x). Yet marranism can also be read in very different terms that cast the Creole condition in a more ambivalent light. This alternative reading of the Marrano as exhibiting an anxiety-producing “resistance to classification” (Zivin 122) and as “a mixed or divided self, in which the Other is preserved within the Self and partly constitutes it” (Yovel, The Other Within 78) is also pertinent to the light-skinned Creole, who struggles to integrate an irreparably fissured self.31 The Marrano’s condition of being “doubly

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estranged” (Yovel, The Other Within 79) resonates with that of the lightskinned Creole, who also “exist[s] on the cusp of dual belonging or dual alienation” (Bost 675). Cliff, however, does not pursue these more radical dimensions of the Marrano metaphor and of the chameleonic and performative character of Jewishness more broadly. Instead, in her reading, the Marrano retains an essential Jewishness that remains uncompromised by the disguise she adopts—a disguise that is easily shed once it is no longer required. For Cliff, the Marrano’s performance of Christianity represents the possibility of a return to origins rather than a more ambiguous and unstable state in which multiple identities coexist and interpenetrate one another. As I have suggested, Cliff ’s presentation of marranism as a positive model of retaining difference points to the pull of Blackness in her work. Ultimately, Cliff ’s interpretation of marranism speaks to a key tension in her writing between this desire to reclaim Blackness and an affirmation of mixed identities. While Cliff ’s characters exhibit a striking fluidity of racial and gender identities, they also tend to feel “split in two parts” (Abeng 119) and must choose between white and Black, as Clare does in No Telephone to Heaven when she joins the rebel group. This somewhat uneasy combination of impulses in Cliff ’s writing has inspired conflicting interpretations. While some critics argue that her writing embodies the fluidity of identity, others identify it as engaging in a “project of racial recovery” (Edmondson, “The Black Mother” 98).32 The romantic reading of marranism that Cliff advances in both “If I Could Write This in Fire” and Free Enterprise is symptomatic of this unresolved tension in her work. Cliff ’s insistence in “If I Could Write This in Fire” that Caribbean Marranos remained “Jews always” is largely contradicted by the historical and sociological scholarship on Caribbean Sephardim, whose descendants, as Josette Capriles Goldish notes in her popular history Once Jews: Stories of Caribbean Sephardim, “are today mostly Roman Catholics” (xv).33 Moreover as Schorsch has shown, early modern Sephardim suffered from significant racial anxiety, leading them to attempt to establish their whiteness by defining themselves against Blacks.34 Accordingly, a greater complication of the Marrano motif that remains unexplored in Cliff ’s writing relates to the historically asymmetrical

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access to power of Jewish and Black Caribbeans. Cliff presumably chose to make Rachel Surinamese because of Suriname’s history of Maroon rebellion as well as the pronounced Jewish presence in the Dutch colony. Yet Suriname is notable not only as the site of the largest surviving population of Maroons in the Americas (Price, Maroon Societies xxiv) but also as home during the colonial period to a Jewish community that enjoyed a uniquely privileged status. We are told in Free Enterprise that Rachel comes from the Surinamese village of Jodensavanne but not that Jodensavanne was surrounded by Jewish-owned plantations. Historically, the Jewish settlers of Jodensavanne were not allies but antagonists of the Maroons, whose insurgencies they helped to suppress.35 / / /

This chapter and the preceding one have shown that sephardism and marranism hold particular appeal for Caribbean writers who are interested in engaging their multiple cultural inheritances and in situating the Caribbean within an interamerican or global context. Sephardism in the work of Walcott, Chancy, and Cliff supports a connective perspective that advances an inclusive vision of Caribbean society. This relational poetics is expressed through a kaleidoscopic narrative structure that recombines fragmented, broken histories in order to generate new resonances and patterns of meaning. Moreover, in many of the texts sephardism and marranism become emblematic of Caribbean interculturality itself. All three writers employ sephardism to explore aspects of Caribbean creolization. They do so by alluding to the historical presence of Sephardim in the various parts of the Caribbean about which they write: St. Thomas, Haiti, Jamaica, and Suriname. Moreover, Chancy’s and Cliff ’s writing as well as novels by Obejas and Hijuelos reveal a particular fascination with Marranos, whose historical presence in the Caribbean they unearth as part of a larger project of postslavery literary archaeology. While Sephardic motifs yield somewhat different inferences in Walcott’s poetry than they do in Chancy’s and Cliff ’s fiction, their presence in these texts consistently signals an investment in a noncompetitive project of comparison that highlights the intersectionality and porousness

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of apparently distinct histories. At the same time, these texts also expose the potential liabilities of analogical methods. In particular, Chancy and Cliff engage in what Erin Graff Zivin terms “textual conversions” in which “the converso serves as a body upon which the broader values and preoccupations of the writer and his culture can be inscribed” (120). Employing sephardism as counterhistory, Chancy perhaps too neatly aligns kabbalah and vodou, while Cliff conflates the historical figures of the Marrano and the Maroon in order to celebrate survival, resistance, and the preservation of difference. Cliff ’s treatment of marranism as a surrogate for maroonage is especially at risk of reducing Marrano experience to the status of metaphor. In this regard, Walcott’s more self-reflexive invocation of Sephardic Jewish history charts a different path, for his practice of triangulation resists a one-to-one mode of comparison, thereby avoiding the assimilation of the Other to the self. Moreover, while Walcott, too, offers a sympathetic and identificatory reading of Caribbean Jewishness, it is one registering tensions that surround the act of comparison as well as a history of imperial expansion in which Sephardic Jews were active participants. The neoslave narratives to which I will now turn, while continuing to advance a predominantly philosemitic perspective, will bring this ambivalent history of colonial Caribbean Jewry into even sharper focus.

3 PORT JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION M A RYS E CON DÉ AN D DAVID DABYDEEN

It is clear to anyone who has more than a cursory understanding of the period of time of the African slave trade that every group was involved in the African slave trade. There is blood on everyone’s hands: Christian, Jew, Muslim and African—Black and white alike. Even Native people bought, owned and sold slaves. As a descendant of survivors of the Middle Passage, and the atrocity of slavery, I am pissed to hell with all of them. —M. NourbeSe Philip, Showing Grit

W

hen Toni Morrison dedicated her landmark work of slavery fiction Beloved (1987) to “Sixty Million and more,” her apparent reference to the Nazi genocide sparked a debate that has larger implications for the literary representation of Blacks and Jews. Beloved’s dedication and the surrounding controversy are underpinned by a logic of ethnic competition.1 This logic, which pervades discussions of Black-Jewish relations in the United States, contrasts strikingly with the stress placed on correspondences and mutualities between Black and Jewish histories by Caribbean/diaspora intellectuals. Gilroy, for example, vigorously defends Morrison against the accusation that Beloved is “a blackface Holocaust novel” (Crouch 67) on the grounds that this view fails to consider “the possibility that there might be something useful to be gained from setting these histories

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[of slavery and the Holocaust] closer to each other not so as to compare them, but as precious resources from which we might learn something valuable about the way that modernity operates” (The Black Atlantic 217). One contributor to the debate suggests that, in advancing this defense of Morrison, “Gilroy may not be fully taking into account either the actual language of Morrison’s novel or the [U.S.] cultural context in which this fiction is being written” (Budick 165). Looked at from a different angle, however, what Gilroy’s comments reveal is not so much an insensitivity to the U.S. context as the alternative modes of drawing Black and Jewish histories into relation that become available when we widen our lens to encompass a broader African diaspora cultural landscape.2 As Beloved’s dedication attests, an association between slavery and the Holocaust is a feature of contemporary slavery fiction as well as of the public memorialization of slavery more broadly. Both Beloved and another seminal slavery novel, Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), take up historian Stanley Elkins’s thesis that slavery was an American holocaust.3 This view also informs public memorials and institutions such as the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.4 However, instead of pursuing the Holocaust analogies invoked by Morrison and other African American writers as well as by some public institutions, the Caribbean slavery fiction and drama that I discuss here recalls an earlier traumatic moment in Jewish history in which Sephardic Jews sought opportunities in the New World in the aftermath of the 1492 expulsion from Spain. In this chapter I show how adopting a transnational and hemispheric approach to Black-Jewish literary dynamics brings to light a recurring script about the Sephardic port Jew in Caribbean slavery literature. I argue that this script cannot be adequately interpreted through the competitive memory paradigm. Instead, it requires alternative frameworks such as those proposed by Gilroy and Rothberg in which memory is understood not as competitive but as “multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 3). In his study of slavery fiction, Tim A. Ryan remarks that the challenge for the contemporary novelist “is to engage with slavery’s historical actuality and its discursive traditions without becoming dependent upon conventional literary formulas for representing the institution and

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its subjects” (191). For this reason, the generic patterns established in the classic slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, and others are continually being reconfigured by contemporary writers, who have increasingly eschewed a protest literature mode in favor of a more theoretical approach that explores the nature of slave subjectivity, treats history as a discursive field, and problematizes the idea of resistance. Ryan singles out as an example of such innovation Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), which introduces the figure of the Black slaveholder to disrupt the binary of Black slave and white master.5 Similarly, the novels I consider in this chapter, Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress, defamiliarize the institution of slavery and destabilize the racial binary that typically structures the slave narrative by featuring the port Jew.6 Moreover, in Condé’s and Dabydeen’s postmodern slavery novels, the presence of the Jew signals a metafictional concern with literary and art historical traditions of representing racialized Others. Condé’s and Dabydeen’s inclusion of Jewish protagonists underscores the degree to which their parodic, highly self-conscious interpretations of the slave narrative ultimately are less concerned with filling in gaps in the slavery archive than they are with reflecting on its discursive conditions. The slavery fiction and drama examined here unfolds a surprisingly consistent plot in which a male Sephardic Jew purchases a Black slave, rescuing him or her from a worse fate at the hands of a brutal Christian master and facilitating the slave’s eventual emancipation. In what follows, I preface my discussion of Condé’s and Dabydeen’s variations on this plot by briefly considering a Derek Walcott play, Drums and Colours, which offers an early example of a work of Caribbean slavery literature that incorporates the port Jew. Another key reference point in this chapter is Black Canadian author Lawrence Hill’s neoslave narrative The Book of Negroes, which advances a similar script about the port Jew but whose treatment of this figure is more ambivalent. In chapter 4 I turn to McLeod’s novel Hoe duur was de suiker?, which employs an alternative generic framing that resituates this script within a more extensive treatment of Jewish plantation life. These late twentieth- and early twenty-first century texts vary in their settings, encompassing both Caribbean and European locales. They also vary in the degree to which

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they reflect on the discursive traditions that surround the linked figures of the slave and the Jew as well as in the extent to which they associate Jewishness with ethics. Each of them, however, largely eschews the competitive memory model, approaching Black and Jewish experience, not as discrete histories of victimization to be measured against one another, but as intersecting and mutually imbricated. The slavery literature that I consider advances a predominantly identificatory reading of the port Jew and thus is distinguished by its multidirectional rather than competitive engagement with the slavery past. At the same time, the historical phenomenon of Sephardic Jewish slaveholding that this literature evokes also requires us to take some distance from narratives of Jewish victimhood, reminding us that colonial New World Jewry were both the targets of continuing discrimination and the beneficiaries of some of the privileges of whiteness that certain Caribbean colonies made available in “a historically unique dismantling of Jewish powerlessness” (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 303). In these works the ambivalent position that Jews occupied between Black slaves and the Christian plantocracy—their doubled role as both brokers and victims of the colonial project—proves fertile ground for a reframing of the slave narrative genre.

WRITING THE JEWISH ATLANTIC The fiction and drama that I discuss in this chapter identifies a series of sites of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Black-Jewish interdiasporic encounter in both Europe and the Americas, sites that extended Old World patterns of contact between Africans and Jews in the Ottoman Empire and in the Sephardic enclaves of North Africa and the Senegambian Coast.7 They unearth stories not only of slaves’ experiences but also of the early modern Jewish merchants and planters whose traces may be found in the sand-floored synagogues and decaying Jewish cemeteries that are scattered across the Caribbean, as well as the small but active Jewish congregations that survive in islands such as Curaçao and Jamaica. For, as Israel explains, “Of the various trading diasporas that played a significant part in the commerce and maritime links of the Atlantic world

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during the early modern era, the Sephardic Jewish variant . . . surely was the widest-ranging in its operations and the longest-lasting in its general impact, on both culture and society and on the international trade system” (“Jews” 3). Historians have proposed the rubric “port Jew” to describe the early modern Jewish merchants who circulated across cultural, linguistic, political, and geographical borders in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.8 In a recent critique, one scholar complains that this “social types” approach is overly restrictive given “the difficulties of maintaining the legitimacy of any single, uniform type, especially within a transnational, Atlantic world context” (Monaco 139). Yet if the social type model has limitations as a historical methodology, it proves well suited to the literary texts under discussion, which tend to adopt a typological strategy in which an isolated Jewish protagonist stands in for the larger presence of Jewish trade networks in the Americas. In so doing this fiction and drama charts not only the history of the Black Atlantic but also of the Jewish Atlantic, a paradigm that has not yet gained much currency among literary critics but that is the focus of an emergent historical discussion against which I will read the literary texts.9 The conception of a Jewish Atlantic brings to light transnational networks of exchange that developed among Sephardic communities in Europe and the Americas and documents the ambivalent categorization of Jews in colonial power structures. From its inception, Jews were positioned in the colonial enterprise as “the international ‘cross-cultural brokers’ par excellence” (Sutcliffe 19), serving as navigators, translators, and traders who facilitated the conquest of the New World where they also introduced agricultural techniques that helped to develop the plantation economy. As not quite white, socially inferior members of New World colonial societies, Jews faced limitations on property rights (including slave ownership), yet at the same time benefited from the plantation economy. Robert Cohen describes the contradictory positioning of Jews in eighteenth-century Suriname as follows: Jews, being white, undoubtedly belonged to the small apex of the societal model. They had more in common with the ruling elite than just their color. They were but a small group of the population, whose

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socio-economic position had little to do with their numerical strength. But in spite of their color, Jews did not enjoy full political and social acceptance in white society. As whites, they could not and did not belong to the lower strata. As Jews, they could not belong to the white apex. (157)

These contradictions are also manifest in the quest of Jamaican Jews for enfranchisement, a struggle that Snyder shows was linked to that of free people of color as well as the broader trend toward the abolition of slavery. In Jamaica, Jews gained full citizenship only in 1831 when it was also granted to free people of color. The profound irony of this chapter of Jewish history in the Americas, then, is that the disproportionate presence of Jews in the colonial enterprise was a reflection of their own persecution and marginalization—a pattern that continued in the New World. The emerging scholarship on the Jewish Atlantic serves as a corrective to two opposing trends. On the one hand, it continues the work begun by Eli Faber, Saul Friedman, and others of rebutting spurious charges made by the Nation of Islam regarding the extent of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, affirming the conclusions of such scholars that Jews in fact played a relatively minor role in the trade. By the same token, this scholarship also challenges apologist Jewish historiography by insisting that “Jews cannot be neatly extricated from the wider colonial projects of which they were among the agents and beneficiaries” (Sutcliffe 20). Histories of Caribbean Jewry tend to contain only limited acknowledgment of Jewish slave ownership or to treat it as anomalous. In her historical study of the Jamaican Jewish Lindo family, for example, Ranston notes that in the first two months of 1793 the slave-trading firm of Alexandre Lindo—whose surname is shared by the Jewish protagonist of Hill’s novel—“advertised the largest number of slaves for sale by any one firm among Kingston factoring enterprises, exceeding one-third of the total” (49). Yet Ranston also maintains that “while the Jews were owners and dealers in slaves, Jewish codes of conduct clearly stated that the slave must not be treated unfairly or illtreated. One interpretation is that the Jews should never forget what it had been like for them in Egypt” (44). As Schorsch has shown, leading

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Jewish historians have pursued similar arguments, tending to overstate claims about Jewish manumission and to write from the basic premise that “the behavior of Jews toward blacks . . . was not Jewish” (“American Jewish Historians” 120). In Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World, Schorsch presents a more nuanced picture, demonstrating that Jews participated in anti-Black discourse and in the slave economy, but not in an exceptional way, and that their limited involvement in abolitionism was a reflection in part of their own tenuous position. Schorsch dispells the myth of Jewish moral superiority, suggesting that factors of class, geography, and occupation were more determinative of behavior and attitude than was religion.10 By the same token, he is careful not to exaggerate the extent of Jewish anti-Black sentiment, which he suggests did not have the intensity or vehemence of its Christian counterpart. Interestingly, according to Schorsch none of the authors of eighteenthcentury slave narratives references Jews in relation to slavery, a fact that he attributes to “the unremarkable nature of Jewish conduct within the slave economy” (Jews and Blacks 299). On this point postslavery writing diverges significantly from the classic slave narratives, for, as we will see, Sephardic Jews make noteworthy appearances in several works of Caribbean slavery fiction and drama. Moreover, while Schorsch’s research calls into question the view that “Jews . . . behaved toward their slaves like Jews when for the better, but like non-Jews when for the worse,” the belief in “an intuited higher Jewish moral sensitivity” (298) will prove central to postwar and contemporary slavery literature.

DRUMS AND COLOURS: “OUTCASTS TOGETHER IN ONE SORROW ” Before turning to Condé’s and Dabydeen’s fiction, it is worthwhile considering an early, more concentrated instance of a Caribbean narrative of slavery that introduces the figure of the port Jew and invests him with moral authority. Walcott’s 1958 play Drums and Colours, which was the first production by his Trinidad Theatre Workshop, introduces a pattern of engagement with Jewishness that (as we saw in chapter 1) would recur across the St. Lucian writer’s corpus. At the same time, the play also

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establishes a basic plot and typological strategy that would be reworked by a subsequent generation of Caribbean and postslavery writers. Commissioned for the inauguration of the short-lived West Indian Federation, Drums and Colours covers a broad swath of Caribbean history, offering up a series of emblematic scenes including Columbus’s voyages of discovery, Raleigh’s search for El Dorado, Toussaint’s revolution in Haiti, and the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. In the Middle Passage section of the play, the figure of the Jew emerges to occupy an intermediary space between the slaves on the one hand and the slave traders and sailors on the other. Identified as a key forebear of contemporary Caribbean society and as a protector of the slave, the Jew helps to promote Walcott’s synthetic vision of Caribbean culture. In Drums and Colours we find ourselves squarely in the territory of the port Jew, who is presented as a notable participant in the drama of empire but as a victim rather than agent of colonialism. The setting of scene 2 of Walcott’s pageant of Caribbean history is a wharf in the port city of Cadíz, where the Cristobal Colon, a ship carrying a cargo of slaves, is being readied for departure to the Indies. An unnamed Jew—described in the dramatis personae simply as “A JEW, emigrant to the New World” (116)—appears with his belongings and requisite papers seeking permission to board the ship. The Spanish setting and year (1510) are significant in determining the tone of Walcott’s portrayal of the Jew, for they immediately evoke the Iberian expulsion, thereby casting the Jew as a victim of the same forces that are responsible for the slaves’ fate. One of the slave brokers surmises that the Jew must be “fleeing the persecutions,” to which the sailor García anachronistically replies, “I thought he was a kike” (155). While preparing to board the ship, the kindly Jew becomes aligned with Paco, a Taino boy to whom he refers as “my friend” and “my son” and of whom he anxiously inquires whether the Indies are “a place a Jew can live in peace?” (155). The Jew’s uncomprehending reaction to the sight of the slaves being loaded onto the ship underscores both his own ethical nature and the inhumanity of the trade: JEW What are these people?

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BROKER (Wryly) They will be travelling with you, Excellency. JEW (Softly) The stranger that dwelleth with you, saith the prophet, Shall be unto you as one born among you, And thou shalt love him as thyself. (157)

Upon encountering the slaves and learning of their fate, the Jew immediately sympathizes with them and embraces them as fellow exiles, for the slaves’ uprooted condition resonates with his own.11 JEW Because they have wrenched my people from the roots, I am like a shattered timber cast adrift. O God, The shores of the new lands will soon be known. Preserve my faith, O Lord, comfort Thy people. (167)

The Jew’s exilic lament serves as a poignant counterpoint to the sailors’ coarse exchanges, his benevolent behavior and solicitous manner throwing into relief their brutality. The Jew’s defining action in Walcott’s play is to rescue the enslaved son of the ailing African king who dies after the sailors force him to dance and then beat him. When the sailors wrest the king’s son from him, the Jew intervenes, depleting his savings to purchase the slave boy from his Spanish captors. Not content to stand by, he feels a moral obligation to intercede and to treat the Other as his own kin: “I have to save the boy,” he insists (176). Notably, the Jew’s transformation from refugee to slave owner is not a source of tension in the play. Rather than associating the Jew with the colonial economy in which he is poised to play a role, Walcott unequivocally aligns Jews and slaves as uprooted peoples who in the aftermath of 1492 are engaged in a common struggle to survive the voyage. They share a deep sorrow of exile and join each other in the search for a new homeland:

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JEW (With CHILD) . . . Come stand by me; perhaps we shall be taken, But we shall find roots in the new land together. Come, move out of this danger of the battle. I will take care of thee, as my own son, For we are outcasts together in one sorrow. (176)

As we learn later in the play, the Jew will be remembered by the slave’s great-great-grandson, Mano, who is the leader of a Jamaican band of Maroons. As one critic notes, the character’s full name, Emmanuel Mano, inscribes a dual Jewish/African ancestry, so that Mano represents a symbolic fusion of Jew and African (Kraus 71). By incorporating this Jewish lineage, Walcott acknowledges the European component of Caribbean genealogies while casting this legacy in a sympathetic light. In Drums and Colours Walcott introduces a Jewish protagonist in order to advance a pluralistic vision of Caribbean society at the moment of the creation of the West Indian Federation. The Jew’s presence is thematic of the multiethnic composition of the Caribbean more broadly, which is also signaled by the chorus of Indian, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean carnival revelers whose commentary frames the action of the play. Echoing the political project of the West Indian Federation, the play knits together the Caribbean’s various cultural elements.12 Accordingly, Drums and Colours concludes by affirming the Caribbean’s creolized condition: That web Columbus shuttled took its weave Skein over skein to knit this various race Through warring elements of the past compounded To coin our brotherhood in this little place. (292)

A running metaphor in the play is that of the weaver’s shuttle intertwining disparate histories to produce contemporary Caribbean society. The Jew’s fate and that of the African slaves with whom he makes the ocean

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crossing are presented as imbricated in keeping with the play’s overarching project of connecting histories. In its connective orientation, Drums and Colours anticipates the more fully articulated examples of Caribbean literary sephardism that I examined in chapters 1 and 2, including Walcott’s own Tiepolo’s Hound. At the same time as it contributes to Walcott’s synthetic vision of unity in diversity, the Sephardic motif in Drums and Colours also introduces an emphasis on ethics. As the Jew’s quasi-biblical rhetoric underscores, his function is to provide moral commentary on the actions of the European slavers. True to the pageant form, with his archaic speech and lack of a proper name, Walcott’s Jew is not an individuated character but a type who embodies an ethical principle of compassion borne out of the suffering of exile. Accordingly, instead of identifying the Jew with the colonial economy or the plantation, Walcott situates him in Europe (suggesting persecution and expulsion) and on the ship (suggesting displacement and the search for a new home). This association of the Jew with sea voyage foregrounds the anguish of displacement that Blacks and Jews share in the wake of 1492. Walcott’s depiction of the Jew as a figure of pathos and moral authority is made possible in part by the early postwar context of Drums and Colours. It was in this period, before arguments about the uniqueness of the Holocaust had taken hold, that Rothberg suggests there was a particular openness to comparing colonial and Jewish histories of trauma. Yet, as we will see, Walcott’s presentation of Blacks and Jews as fellow sufferers and his identification of Jewishness with an ethical critique of slavery is not exclusive to the early postwar years but instead is echoed by more recent Caribbean slavery fiction.

BLACK-JEWISH ROMANCE IN MOI, TITUBA, SORCIÉRE . . . NOIRE DE SALEM Thirty years after Walcott’s Drums and Colours, Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 1986) similarly affiliates Blacks and Jews on the basis of their common experience of persecution and identifies Jewishness

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with a higher moral sensitivity. Moi, Tituba is distinctive, however, in depicting a phenomenon that is currently of considerable interest to scholars of the Jewish Atlantic: Jews’ relationships with their slave concubines. Historians read between the lines of wills, manumission, and conversion records to glean hints of affective bonds between Jews and their concubines as well as to challenge apologist historiography stressing Jewish humanitarianism. In the absence of more complete archival records documenting affective and sexual relationships between slaves and their masters, however, such scholars have little choice but to engage in a form of speculative historiography. Novelists are at an advantage in this regard, for they can redress gaps in the historical record through an imaginative archaeology of the slavery past. In her fictional reimagining of the life of Tituba Indian, a Barbadian woman who was one of the first to be accused in the Salem witch trials, Condé takes full advantage of her literary license to give Tituba several love interests, the second of which is the Sephardic Jewish tobacco merchant Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo. The presence of the port Jew in Condé’s neoslave narrative reflects her broader interest in the politics of representation and in exploring the tension between historicity and invention. For at the same time as engaging in a literary archaeology of slavery, Condé’s highly self-conscious treatment of the slave narrative genre also calls such an endeavor into question. As Caroline Rody observes, while at first glance Moi, Tituba appears designed to satisfy the reader’s desire for historical fiction that restores the voices of the silenced, in fact the novel also undercuts this project (The Daughter’s Return 187). Condé famously cautions the reader in an interview that is included in the novel’s English language edition not to “take Tituba too seriously,” emphasizing “that the element of parody is very important if you wish to fully comprehend Tituba” (212). Several critics have confessed to an initially naive encounter with the novel that overlooked the ironization of the recuperative impulse signaled by its rejection of realism, its jarring use of anachronisms and intertextuality, its exploration of performative identities, and its problematization of the relationship between author and subject. In my reading this ironic stance is signaled by Condé’s highly parodic portrayal of the port Jew. Paradoxically, Moi, Tituba also exhibits a countervailing tendency to unself-consciously identify the Jew as a figure of

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moral righteousness. This doubleness in Condé’s treatment of the Jew corresponds to what Rody describes as the novel’s “ambivalent historiographic desire,” which simultaneously parodies and pursues the recuperative project (The Daughter’s Return 188). Moi, Tituba makes several important interventions into the slave narrative genre. Preeminently, the novel recasts the relationship of white mistress and Black slave woman by exploring the possibility of crosscultural friendships and alliances that transcend racial boundaries. Moreover, the novel notably reinscribes the female slave as a sexually desiring subject. Finally, as critics have remarked, Condé’s retelling of the Salem witch trials decenters the United States by foregrounding its historical relationship with the Caribbean, from which Tituba is said to have originated. I argue that Condé’s introduction of the port Jew into her novel is critical to all three interventions, helping to undermine racial binaries as well as standard depictions of slave women as genderless chattel while also contributing to a hemispheric reframing of this chapter of U.S. history. Condé’s Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo is a Sephardic Jewish merchant who lives in the port town of Salem where Tituba is imprisoned after the witch trials. Benjamin’s family’s migratory history echoes Tituba’s own transamerican journey from Barbados to Massachussetts: “Benjamin’s family had come from Portugal, where religious persecution had forced them to flee to Holland. From there, one branch of the family had tried for Brazil, Recife to be exact, but had to flee once again when the town was recaptured by the Portuguese. They then split into two clans, one settling in Curaçao, the other trying its luck in the American colonies” (123). By incorporating this potted history of Sephardic rediasporization in the Americas, including their movement via Recife into the Caribbean after the Portuguese reconquest of Brazil in 1654, Condé calls attention to the overlapping trajectories of the African and Jewish diasporas. Benjamin’s Atlantic Jewish trade network, with whom he “was in constant touch by letter and trade” (124), mirrors the transatlantic circulation of slaves such as Tituba. Benjamin’s ties to the Caribbean are indeed the initial source of his appeal for Tituba. “A merchant? Probably trading with the West Indies? With Barbados?” she wonders with excitement upon first meeting him

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F IG U R E 3 .1.

Gravestone in the Nidhe Israel synagogue cemetery, Bridgetown, Barbados. The name on the gravestone, Benjamin C. d’Azevedo, is the same as that of Maryse Condé’s Jewish protagonist in her novel Moi, Tituba, sorcière . . . noire de Salem. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.

(120). Tituba tells Benjamin her hope that she will one day “take a berth on one of your ships and set sail immediately for my Barbados” (128), and, in fact, it is Benjamin who ultimately makes possible Tituba’s return to Barbados, where he urges her to contact a Jewish business connection of his, one David da Costa. With such plot details, Condé demonstrates her awareness of Barbados’s historical status as a center of Jewish life in the early modern Atlantic world, Caribbeanizing Jewish American history just as she foregrounds the Barbadian dimension of the Salem witch trials. Barbados and New England are linked in the novel by a colonial

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economy that circulates both slaves such as Tituba and port Jews such as Benjamin and David da Costa across its networks; neither these characters nor the Salem witch trials themselves, Condé suggests, is entirely legible within a national framework. In Condé’s retelling, Tituba becomes a slave as a result of her passion for John Indian, which in turn results in her relocation from Barbados to Salem where she falls victim to the hysteria of the witch trials and is imprisoned. Two thirds of the way through the novel, after a lengthy ordeal in which she suffers all matter of indignity and deprivation, relief finally comes in the unexpected form of Benjamin, a hunchback Jewish widower who brings her to his home in the town of Salem. When Benjamin buys Tituba from the prison superintendent, her chains are smashed in a vivid scene in which she is figuratively reborn; thus, in keeping with the basic script that we have been following, the Jew, who is physically, linguistically, and behaviorally marked as different from the Puritan majority, is a conduit of emancipation for the slave protagonist. Benjamin’s treatment of Tituba proves utterly distinct from that of her previous owner, the Puritan minister Samuel Parris, in whose service Tituba was brutalized and dehumanized. Benjamin shows Tituba “little acts of kindness, little services, and little signs of recognition” (124) that restore her dignity. When Benjamin and Tituba embark on a passionate love affair, she recovers her sexuality as well and begins to acculturate to her adoptive Jewish family, learning Portuguese as well as the Shema. Their romance is strained, however, by Benjamin’s refusal to grant Tituba’s request for freedom. Later, after a terrible fire set by an antisemitic mob kills all nine of Benjamin’s children, he interprets their deaths as God’s punishment for his failure to manumit Tituba. He frees Tituba and purchases her passage back to Barbados, disregarding her protests that she would rather remain with him. Although tensions emerge in Moi, Tituba surrounding Benjamin’s initial refusal of Tituba’s request for manumission as well as the feasibility of her conversion to Judaism, they tend to be transcended by the novel’s overriding emphasis on an alliance between Blacks and Jews as persecuted peoples.13 Condé explains that she “combined Jews and Blacks to establish a link between the Black and the Jewish Diasporas, and to show that the Black community has not been the only one to suffer racism and

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prejudice in the United States” (“Return to the West Indies” 62). Accordingly, after first meeting Benjamin, Tituba prays: “May their combined powers make me fall into the hands of that merchant whose look told me that he, too, was from the land of the suffering and that in some undefinable way, we were, or we could be, on the same side” (121). Later, when Tituba confronts the mob that sets fire to Benjamin’s house, one man shouts: “‘Did we leave England for this? To see Jews and niggers multiply in our midst?’” (132). In Moi, Tituba, Blacks and Jews are also aligned against the Puritan majority through their openness to the occult and a positive view of sexuality. In keeping with this essentially philosemitic and identificatory reading of Jewishness, in Moi, Tituba Benjamin embodies the experience of tragedy, suffering, and exile. Moreover as in Walcott’s play, in Condé’s novel Jewishness is identified with an ethical stance. Condé depicts the Jewish slave owner as a benevolent (if imperfect) master who is eventually compelled by his ethical principles to liberate his slave. Benjamin contrasts in this regard with the tyrannical Reverend Parris as well as the rapacious Barbadian planter Darnell who had been responsible for Tituba’s mother’s death. Benjamin’s narrative is framed in religious terms of sin and redemption; his failure to grant Tituba her liberty is punished by God through the deaths of his children and the loss of his ships, for which he atones by freeing Tituba, thereby restoring his moral standing and in effect, his Jewishness itself. While Condé echoes Walcott’s presentation in Drums and Colours of the Jew as morally upstanding and as sharing the slave’s condition of displacement, she also pushes the theme of Black-Jewish empathy further by positing a consensual sexual relationship between the Jewish slave owner and his slave. Although this relationship may seem anachronistic to some readers, it corresponds to historical evidence indicating that Jews conformed to the conventions of the plantation societies in which they lived, including the practice of concubinage. 14 Condé’s emphasis on female sexuality and desire in Moi, Tituba revises classic slave narratives such as that of Mary Prince, whose abolitionist editors feared that any acknowledgment of her sexual history would taint her moral character and undermine the effectiveness of her narrative as propaganda for the antislavery cause (Sharpe 134–35).

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Neoslave narratives such as Moi, Tituba that foreground female sexuality a redress this lacuna and restore the slave woman’s humanity as well as agency.15 At the same time, the novel’s celebration of female sexuality also fulfills the more specific purpose of advancing a critique of Puritan society. The romance narrative in Moi, Tituba not only humanizes the slave protagonist but also serves as a way of reclaiming the Black female body from racializing discourses. In this regard as well, the Jew is an important presence. When Tituba initially meets Benjamin in the prison, her perception of him is overdetermined by anti-Jewish physical caricatures of the period: One afternoon I found grace in the eyes of a man. But my God, what a man! He was small and hunchbacked, with a complexion the color of eggplant and large, ginger-colored side-whiskers that merged into a pointed beard. Noyes whispered contemptuously: “He’s a Jew, a merchant. They say he’s very rich. He could afford a whole cargo of slaves and here he is haggling over a jailbird!” (120)

Here, Condé’s exaggerated, parodic portrayal of the Jewish body once again aligns Black and Jew, but this time with respect to the racializing regimes that target both populations. Condé’s Benjamin, a misshapen, almost grotesque figure, is marked as physically Other in a manner that mirrors Tituba’s own experience of being made to feel “ugly, coarse, and inferior” (24). Condé’s depiction of Benjamin specifically invokes representations of the Jew’s body as devilish and diseased. His red hair conforms to medieval images of the Jew as demonic, while his limping physical movements reference a discursive tradition that associates the Jew with effeminacy.16 Yet after Tituba meets Benjamin and learns of his connections to the Caribbean, he becomes an object of attraction rather than repulsion: “Suddenly I looked at the Jew with new eyes, as if his downright ugliness had become the most appealing of assets” (120–21). This abrupt shift signals the discursive rather than empirical character of Tituba’s original appraisal of Benjamin. Thus Condé deploys tropes of

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sexuality and cross-cultural romance to contest representational regimes that denigrate both Jewish and Black bodies. Although Benjamin’s body becomes an object of sexual attraction for Tituba, he is neither virile nor potent in the manner of her other lovers. Instead, he exhibits an effeminacy that is once again in keeping with conventional views of Jewish masculinity as incomplete. Even this apparent deficiency, however, serves a positive function in advancing Condé’s critique of masculinist modes of resistance. Benjamin represents an alternative model of masculinity and intercultural relations that conforms neither to John Indian’s accommodationist minstrelsy nor to the Maroon leader Christopher’s hypermasculine racial separatism. Instead of the celebration of the heroic figure of the Maroon that typifies some Caribbean fiction, Condé pursues what has been described as a “female” mode of resistance, one that works through métissage and establishing links with the Other.17 As much as Tituba’s cross-cultural friendships with Hester Prynne and other white female characters upon which the critical discussion has focused, the romance narrative with Benjamin supports Condé’s hallmark rejection of essentialism and simplistic models of resistance. Condé’s strategy in Tituba is to present interconnected histories in a manner that underscores her basic belief “that especially we as writers, we should try to produce a communication between people not based only on color but maybe on ethics, knowledge, sympathy” (“An Interview” 353). The romance narrative’s promise of intercultural sympathy is called into question, however, in a key scene during which Tituba and Benjamin weigh the comparative misfortunes of their people. In the intimacy of their lovers’ bed, Benjamin reels off a catalog of Jewish suffering, easily winning the contest because of the greater availability of Jewish recorded memory: “Tituba, do you know what it is to be a Jew? In 629 the Merovingians expelled us from their kindgom in France. Pope Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council ordered all Jews to wear a circular mark on their clothes and to cover their heads. Before leaving for the Crusades, Richard the Lion Hearted ordered a general attack against the Jews. Do you know how many of us lost our lives under the Inquisition?”

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I retorted by interrupting him: “And what about us? Do you know how many of us have been bled from the coast of Africa?” But he went on. “In 1298 the Jews of Rottingen were put to the sword and the wave of murders spread to Bavaria and Austria. In 1336 our blood was shed from the Rhine to Bohemia and Moravia.” He outdid me very time. (127)

In keeping with the novel’s broader strategy of introducing anachronisms to disrupt the realist conventions of the historical novel, this passage channels contemporary contestations between Jewish and African Americans that would come to a head in the years following the novel’s publication.18 The limits of intercultural sympathy are further suggested by Benjamin’s failure to impregnate Tituba.19 Tituba’s relationship with Benjamin is on some level unproductive and is characterized by a peculiar mix of attraction and revulsion: “I must confess that when he undressed, revealing his crooked, pasty body, I couldn’t help thinking of the darkbrown muscles of John Indian. A lump would rise up in my throat and I would choke back the sobs. But that didn’t last and I pitched and heaved just as well on the sea of delight with my misshapen lover. The sweetest moments, however, were those when he talked. About us. And only about us” (127). Benjamin proves deficient in other ways as well, as for example when he naively insists that Tituba can find full acceptance as a Jew despite evidence to the contrary. Accordingly, at the height of Tituba’s assimilation to Jewish life, an encounter with another Black slave from Salem Village sows seeds of doubt. After Tituba’s return to Barbados, her identification with a Jewish perspective dissipates; while before she had embraced a Jewish worldview and way of life, she now struggles to explain to her young lover Iphigene the nature of the Jews’ conflicts with the Gentiles. Although the alliance of Tituba and Benjamin is presented as having certain limitations, the novel nonetheless insists on the romantic— rather than exploitative—nature of their relationship. Indeed, while Benjamin repents for his behavior toward Tituba in failing to grant her her freedom, he does not atone for his sexual exploitation of his slave.

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Instead, concubinage is presented (albeit parodically) as licensed by Jewish tradition: “It’s God who is punishing me. Not so much because of my passion for you. The Jews have always had a strong sexual instinct. Our father Moses in his great age had erections. Deuteronomy says so: ‘Nor was his natural force abated.’ Abraham, Jacob, and David had concubines. . . . No, He is punishing me because I refused you the only thing you desired, your freedom!” (134). While the loss of Benjamin’s ships suggests that his participation in the colonial economy is a sin for which he must atone, the affair between Benjamin and Tituba is depicted as unequivocally consensual, reflecting the novel’s broader philosemitic tendency to align slaves and Jews as fellow victims of the Puritans.20 In this regard, a question that confronts the reader is how to interpret the blend of romance and concubinage that characterizes Benjamin’s relationship with Tituba. I would argue that the romance plot between Tituba and Benjamin is susceptible to Jenny Sharpe’s charge that depictions of consensual romances between slaves and their masters attribute choice where there was none and thereby “creat[e] a new ‘mystique of reciprocity’ . . . for a postcolonial, multicultural era like our own” (102).21 In her provocative reading of the figure of the concubine, Sharpe identifies the paradoxical position of slave women who “achiev[ed] a degree of mobility through sexual subjugation,” exhibiting a complex blend of agency and victimization (xx).22 Thus the figure of the concubine, who has traditionally been read in negative terms as accommodating to the slavery system, complicates our understanding of resistance and is not easily interpreted within the frameworks through which we have conventionally approached the slavery past. Condé accordingly calls attention to Tituba’s indeterminate status in Benjamin’s household, where she finds herself in “that odd situation of being both mistress and servant” (127). Moreover, by casting Tituba’s master as a Jew, Condé heightens the sense of ambivalence that attends the motif of concubinage as well as relations between men and women more generally in the novel. Yet Condé’s larger emphasis on Benjamin’s deeply held ethical convictions and on the consensual nature of his relationship with Tituba—which is such that he has difficulty persuading her to leave him and return to Barbados—tends to shut down questions surrounding his collusion in her oppression in favor of a romance narrative

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that allies the Jewish slave owner and his Black slave as joint victims of seventeenth-century Puritan society.23 In their analysis of archival records such as slave owners’ wills, historians suggest that concubinage among Jewish men was characterized by a complex mix of coercion and consent. They note some evidence of affective bonds but also counterevidence such as records of the sale of slave offspring and an apparent resistance to recognizing these relationships in legal documents. In Moi, Tituba, however, Condé’s reliance on the romance narrative flattens out such tensions. Favoring tropes of sympathy and reciprocity, the novel instead stages an emblematic alliance of Black and Jewish Others. By the same token, Condé’s philosemitic reading of the port Jew in Moi, Tituba also constrains her reflections on “the Jew” as a sign. For while Condé calls attention to stereotypical images of the Jew’s body, she appears less self-conscious with regard to discursive conventions surrounding the Jew’s moral character. Moi, Tituba’s presentation of the relationship between Jewishness and ethics can be further illuminated through a comparison with Black Canadian writer Lawrence Hill’s treatment of the port Jew in his neoslave narrative The Book of Negroes (2007). The heroine and narrator of Hill’s novel is a West African woman, Aminata Diallo, who after surviving the Middle Passage and plantation slavery in South Carolina joins the Black Loyalists in their journey from New York to Nova Scotia. Toward the middle of the novel, Aminata encounters the Sephardic indigo inspector Solomon Lindo on the plantation of her brutal master Robinson Appleby. After inadvertently saving Aminata from being raped by a slave trader, Solomon decides to purchase her, explaining: “I saw the intelligence in your eyes and I wanted to lift you up” (201). Like Condé’s Benjamin, Hill’s Solomon appears to be an enlightened and sympathetic master. While in the indigo inspector’s service, Aminata is taught to write and becomes more mobile, gaining exposure to emancipating ideas as Solomon moves her out of the lowlands of Carolina to Charleston and later to the metropolis of New York, where she finally absconds. On one level, then, The Book of Negroes rolls out the by now familiar script in which the Jew is a conduit toward the slave’s emancipation. Strikingly similar to Moi, Tituba in particular, The Book of Negroes

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introduces a wealthy Jewish broker figure who at some point suffers the loss of both his wife and children, purchases a female slave from an abusive Christian master, treats the slave respectfully and facilitates her rise, and finally in a prise de conscience grants her her freedom. Yet, unlike in Drums and Colours and Moi, Tituba, in The Book of Negroes the Jew quickly becomes a figure of suspicion. When Solomon discovers that Aminata is a Muslim, he tells her, “You see, we are not so very far apart at all,” noting that their “religions come from similar books” (201). Although intrigued by connections between Jews and Muslims such as the practice of circumcision, Aminata is from the first skeptical of Solomon’s overtures and repeatedly exposes the hypocrisy that underlies them. In a proleptic imaging of twentieth-century race relations, where Solomon claims affinity and moral imperative, Aminata detects utility and self-interest. Accordingly their relationship rapidly deteriorates as Solomon’s Pygmalion-style experiments with her education prove to be motivated by his desire to “collect a return on [his] investment” (204). In The Book of Negroes Hill destabilizes the categories of perpetrator and victim by drawing attention to less obvious stakeholders in the slavery economy who become compromised by their very presence within an inhumane system. Solomon is only one of a series of complicating figures that the novel introduces, among whom are an African boy who abets Aminata’s capture at the beginning of the novel. What is striking, however, is the extent to which Hill’s Jewish protagonist comes to signal this approach. When asked by an interviewer about the character of Solomon, Hill responded: “I feel that so many people suffered as a result of their encounters with [the slave trade], not just those who were enslaved but also those who did the enslaving. I think that many of them must have felt that their humanity was diminished. . . . That is a much more interesting thing to explore than someone who is an outright monster, such as a Robinson Appleby, who really doesn’t have any redeeming qualities and who is simply an awful slave owner and that’s it. So I was interested in exploring Solomon Lindo. Who better to select in that role than a Jew?” (“A Conversation” 22, emphasis added). Hill is explicit here that the symbolic function of the Jew is to highlight ambiguities that were inherent in the relationships engendered by the plantation. This complicating presence of the port Jew as both victim

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and beneficiary of the plantation economy becomes most acute in the trial scene. The hearing’s ostensible purpose is to ascertain whether Aminata has the right to depart for Nova Scotia with the Black Loyalists, but it also puts the Jew on trial for his role in the crimes of slavery. The scene establishes that it was not Solomon but Appleby who had attempted to prevent Aminata’s departure. It further affords the penitent Solomon the opportunity to “correct the record” regarding his motivation for arranging the sale of Aminata’s son and to “mak[e] peace with [the] past” by manumitting Aminata (309–10). Yet Aminata’s final judgment of Solomon is that although he is a “better class of man than Robinson Appleby,” he is “tainted by the very world in which he lived, and from which he too richly profited” (311), and she refuses to hear his apology. Hill’s ambivalent presentation of the port Jew bespeaks in part the decidedly American inflection of his work. The son of an African American father and American mother, Hill is strongly influenced by the African American literary tradition. By the same token, he remains something of an outsider to this tradition by virtue of his Canadian positioning, as is illustrated by the fact that he was forced to change the title of his novel for the U.S. market, where it was judged that the use of the term “Negro” would offend readers’ sensibilities (Hill, “Why I’m Not Allowed My Book Title”). On the one hand, then, much as in Caribbean portrayals of the port Jew, Hill’s Canadian vantage point enables him to introduce the figure of the Jew into his neoslave narrative unburdened by the cultural and political weight that such a gesture would carry in the United States. Yet, at the same time, Solomon’s condescension and hypocrisy and the undertone of competitive memory that characterizes some of his exchanges with Aminata ventriloquizes contemporary contestations between Jewish and African Americans. The arc of Aminata’s and Solomon’s relationship, in which an initial sense of alliance tinged by doubt is followed by the collapse of the alliance, recriminations, and the rebuffing of efforts to “repair the damage” (229), closely parallels the trajectory of Black-Jewish relations in the twentieth-century U.S. Moreover, the novel’s portrayal of Solomon’s relationship to whiteness speaks more to a contemporary interest in the processes of “whitening” that Jews underwent in post–World War II North America than to the racial anxieties of early modern Sephardim. In the novel Solomon asserts his

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non-whiteness in order to affiliate himself with Aminata, in contrast to early modern Sephardim who actively sought to establish and shore up their whiteness.24 Hill’s neoslave narrative thus invokes the competitive discourse of U.S. Black-Jewish relations in a much more pronounced and sustained fashion than does Condé’s novel. Relatedly, while only hinted at in Moi, Tituba, the port Jew’s complicity in the plantation economy becomes a focal point of The Book of Negroes. For if both Condé and Hill introduce the figure of the Jew to challenge the dichotomy of Black and white that traditionally underpins the slave narrative genre, their depictions of the Jew are motivated by opposite impulses: while Condé emphasizes that Blacks were not the only victims of colonial racism, Hill’s aim is to explore the responsibility borne by those historical actors who facilitated the workings of the machinery of slavery without being its primary operators. What Condé’s and Hill’s portrayals of the port Jew have in common, however, is an unself-conscious, highly conventional identification of Jewishness with a moral posture that is alternately upheld or betrayed by their Jewish protagonists.

THE INVENTED JEW IN A HARLOT ’S PROGRESS Among the central themes of both Condé’s Moi, Tituba and Hill’s The Book of Negroes are the discursive regimes that contributed to the oppression of slaves and the need to contest such regimes, as Hill’s heroine does when she refuses to allow the abolitionists to write her life story for her. Just as Condé’s novel redirects the neoslave narrative from an emphasis on protest to an interest in the politics of representation, Hill repeatedly draws attention to the limitations of the historical archive as a representation of the slavery past by illustrating how the language employed in various kinds of registries effaces the slaves’ subjectivity. Notably, however, Hill does not extend this critique to include representations of the Jew. Instead, he presents Solomon as colluding in a discursive violence that deprives Aminata of her identity. Although Solomon is shown to have suffered some material forms of exclusion in Charleston society, he is not depicted as the target of discursive oppression, only as its agent.25

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The Book of Negroes is thus acutely sensitive to the representational regimes of slavery but largely unself-conscious in its isolated depiction of the Jew as a figure of moral compromise. For her part, although Condé’s more parodic treatment draws attention to antisemitic discourses surrounding the Jew’s body, as we have seen, she preserves the imaginative tradition of investing the Jew with ethical value. In this respect, both novels stand in contrast to Guyanese British author David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999). Like The Book of Negroes, A Harlot’s Progress introduces a morally ambiguous Jewish protagonist as part of a larger schema in which the ethical status of all players in the slavery economy is cast into doubt. And, like Moi, Tituba, Dabydeen’s more formally experimental interpretation of the neoslave narrative foregrounds the representational instability and invented quality of “the Jew” as a sign. Whereas both Condé and Dabydeen approach the slave narrative genre with a postmodern playfulness that thematizes and unmoors its organizing conventions, however, the destabilizing power of the Jew with respect to these conventions becomes more sharply apparent in Dabydeen’s novel, which disassociates Jewishness from ethics. Dabydeen’s intricately plotted and often bewildering postmodern slavery novel produces a vertiginous reading experience in which the reader encounters a proliferation of contradictory representations that ultimately expose the discursive status of the slave narrative genre. Like Moi, Tituba and The Book of Negroes, A Harlot’s Progress gives significant attention to the discursive regimes and historiographic traditions that shaped the perception of Blacks and contributed to their enslavement and dehumanization.26 A Harlot’s Progress takes this critique still further, however, frustrating the reader’s desire to locate a stable truth in the narrative by introducing multiple conflicting accounts of the events that it relates. Moreover, in A Harlot’s Progress the very idea of character becomes problematized so that instead of revealing the true nature and humanity of the slave, the protagonist Mungo—who is variously named Noah and Perseus at different points in the novel and who can remember neither his original name nor his geographical origin— emerges not as an individuated character but as a compilation of signs. If Condé’s novel simultaneously pursues and undermines a literary archaeology of the slavery past, Dabydeen dispenses more resolutely with the

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project of historical reclamation as well as with the conventions of realism. His slavery fiction uncovers, not an authentic slave voice that has been lost from the archive, but rather the inescapably contradictory and obfuscating nature of the archive itself. Moreover, Dabydeen applies his discursive critique not only to the figure of the slave but also to that of the Jew. His antimimetic emphasis on representational schemes is notably supported in the novel by the presence of the Jewish quack doctor Sampson Gideon, a sympathetic but also highly performative figure who exhibits what Cheyette identifies as the “slipperiness and indeterminacy of ‘the Jew’” (Constructions of “the Jew” 11). As is suggested by the novel’s title, which alludes to Hogarth’s eponymous 1732 series of engravings, Dabydeen’s fictional commentary on the codes of signification that regulated depictions of slaves engages not only textual traditions but also visual ones. Each section of the novel opens with a detail from Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress that foregrounds a particular figure or visual element; at the same time, the novel also incorporates references to Joshua Reynolds and other eighteenth-century artists who depicted Black slaves as well as a host of historical and literary allusions. A Harlot’s Progress’ primary intertext, however, is Hogarth’s series, various aspects of which the novel reworks. Among these is the encounter of the Jewish merchant and the Black slave boy depicted in plate 2 of Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, a scene that is restaged in book 7 of Dabydeen’s novel as well as in his more recent work of slavery fiction Johnson’s Dictionary (2013).27 In plate 2 of Hogarth’s original series, the harlot Moll has become the mistress of a Jewish merchant, whom she is deceiving with a secret lover who escapes in the background of the engraving. Moll is situated in between the figure of the cuckolded Jewish merchant and a turbanned slave boy. The Jew and the slave boy, who stare at each other across a table and tea service that is in the midst of being overturned, wear matching expressions of surprise that are echoed in the monkey’s visage in the bottom left corner of the engraving. The Jew’s presence in Dabydeen’s novel thus is inspired by Hogarth’s print, which presents the Jew as an incompletely anglicized figure who is associated with social disorder, mimicry of Englishness, and a sexual appetite for Christian girls. Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress takes up both the figure of the slave boy and that of the Jewish merchant, reinterpreting them in a manner

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F IG U R E 3 .2.

William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, plate 2 (1732). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

that highlights the discursive traditions that govern Hogarth’s caricatures. In the novel, the slave boy from Hogarth’s engraving becomes the protagonist Mungo, the author of an eighteenth-century slave narrative who narrates the story of his enslavement to the abolitionist Thomas Pringle (a character based on the editor of Mary Prince’s narrative). Meanwhile, Hogarth’s Jewish merchant becomes Sampson Gideon, a name that Dabydeen borrows from the prominent eighteenth-century Sephardic English banker who may have inspired Hogarth’s caricature. The historical Sampson Gideon was the son of Rowland Gideon (originally Abundiente), a West India merchant of Portuguese descent who lived, in classic port Jew fashion, in Barbados, Boston, Nevis, and London. In Dabydeen’s rendering, Sampson is not a financier but a quack doctor who encounters Mungo at the house of his master Lord Montague where he is tending the ailing Lady Montague, to whom he

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administers his “Amazing Eastern Cordial” (227). Before Sampson’s relatively late arrival in the novel, however, we meet the figure of the Jew through the anti-Jewish invective of the washerwoman Betty and the abolitionist Pringle. From the outset, Dabydeen’s Jew is a highly unstable figure who is subject to invention and caricature, as is signaled by Betty’s extreme unreliability as a narrator as well as Pringle’s distortive editorial presence. When Mungo first arrives in England in part 5 of the novel, Betty is entrusted by Captain Thistlewood with the task of fattening him up for the slave auction. While in her care, Mungo becomes the audience for Betty’s hysterical stories about a foreign Jew whom she claims is responsible for the death of her friend Mary (Hogarth’s Moll Hackabout). Betty’s orientalist narrative reproduces the anti-Jewish fantasy of Hogarth’s original engraving, depicting the Jew as decadent figure who seduces the innocent country girl Mary. Betty begs Mary not to “trust Jews, they’d come at night and try to steal the very stone they rolled at our Lord’s tomb to sell it at some other funeral. O let the Jews do what they want with the rich, rob them blind and wreck their lives, but not my Mary’s!” (129). Betty’s Jew conforms to Hogarth’s depiction of the Jewish merchant as preying on young Christian girls: “Mary was pretty. Pretty curled blonde locks. Pretty eyes. The ideal servant girl to wait upon a Master. The Jew sensed her youth. Instantly he calculated what it would take to get her” (145). The truth value of Betty’s narrative, however, is cast into doubt when she confesses that Mary was hanged after Betty falsely accused her of stealing some soap. This revelation is followed by a proliferation of other possible accounts of what may have taken place so that ultimately it becomes unclear whether Mary in fact ever existed.28 A second and equally questionable source of images of the Jew is the abolitionist Thomas Pringle, whose paranoid anti-Jewish fantasies are interwoven with Betty’s in part 5 of the novel. Pringle’s problematic role as editor and mediator of Mungo’s slave narrative is illustrated in part through his bigotry toward Jews, whom he considers a threat to the moral health of the nation. In Pringle’s view the Jews’ morally degrading presence is a punishment for England’s sin of slavery.29 He relates Betty’s theft and libel to the larger contaminating presence of the

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Jew: “The ruination they cause by speculation in stock, or in creating false Bubble schemes, is a grander version of Betty’s crime. They’re all thieves together, great and small, their joint actions eroding the foundation of the country. True, the Jew is worse, his money-making being part of a conspiracy with Papists and Jacobites to create chaos . . . The Jew will profit from England’s demise” (143). As editor of Mungo’s narrative, Pringle omits some details of the story while inventing others. At one point he concocts a vengeful Jew to insert into the slave narrative: “Mr Pringle will invent a Jew who wears a skull-cap over his black hair, like a moon fastened in spiteful clouds. Just before Mungo is to board the ship the Jew comes up to Captain Thistlewood and offers money for him.” Thistlewood refuses, humiliating the Jew, “who glares at Mungo and in his mind promises to gain revenge against the boy for his humiliation—the greatest shame suffered by a Jew being failure to seal a contract with the finality of the round stone sealing Jesus’s tomb” (124). Thus in A Harlot’s Progress misrepresentations of Jewishness becomes linked to the abolitionist’s interfering editorial presence.30 When an actual Jew finally appears in the novel in the form of the quack doctor Sampson Gideon, Dabydeen’s staging of the scene foregrounds the disparity between this real Jew and invented images of “the Jew” promoted by the larger society. In a passage that reinterprets the surprised expressions worn by Hogarth’s Jew and slaveboy and the exchange of gazes between the two figures, Mungo (here called Perseus) answers the Montagues’ door to Sampson. Each is profoundly startled by what he encounters in the other: Perseus opens the door expecting to find a crooked-back and bearded Jew, hook-nosed, darkly complexioned, his hands worn by a lifetime of counting money, like one of the Magi in Galdi’s Adoration that came in the coach with Perseus .  .  . Instead, he is confronted by a fresh-faced man, dark-haired, handsome, in his mid-twenties. He beholds Perseus with momentary alarm, as if the door had opened to an inevitable fate. Recovering his composure, he attempts a benign smile and announces himself modestly as Mr Sampson Gideon. He waits politely for Perseus to stop gaping. (227)

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Mungo’s surprise stems from the fact that he himself has absorbed stereotypical images of the Jew from Pringle and Betty, who in an earlier passage had forecasted Sampson’s arrival: “So the Jew came. Dark, fineboned, exotic in manner. He spoke with a musical foreign lilt” (145). Upon meeting one another, Mungo and Sampson immediately feel a sense of a kinship, so much so that when Sampson is expelled from the Montagues’ house, he invites Mungo to leave with him. Mungo hesitates, but later follows Sampson to London, where the Jewish doctor shelters him. Although there is a strong rapport between Mungo and Sampson, their camaraderie is diminished somewhat by Mungo’s discovery that in London Sampson is running an asylum for diseased harlots whom he treats by administering poison. Mungo works as Sampson’s assistant in the asylum before Sampson finally departs at Mungo’s urging to serve as a doctor on a slave ship, leaving behind money with which Mungo is to purchase his freedom from the Montagues. Once again, then, we encounter the familiar plot in which the Jew enables the slave’s emancipation and escape from oppressive circumstances. Through the figure of Sampson Gideon, Dabydeen references an eighteenth-century English discourse about Jews as sexually and morally corrupt. Sampson parodically inhabits many of the traits identified with Jewishness in the English popular imagination: his obscene ministrations to Lady Montague evoke the association of the Jew with a perverted sexuality, while the Jew’s connection to disease and criminality is suggested by Sampson’s work with the syphilitic prostitutes.31 The mysterious stench that pervades the Montagues’ home during and after her illness also recalls the conventional trope of the Jew’s smell. As this section of the novel continues, Sampson’s ministrations become increasingly invasive and perverted, his degenerate and tainting presence symbolized by the stain left on the carpet by the feces that he has collected from Lady Montague’s body. Both Sampson and Mungo are viewed by Lady Montague as foreign parasites on the body of England: “The Jew and the Negro who attend to her are two who have emerged from the fractures; strange dirty creatures spawned by the passage of time; creatures that thrive in the creases between floorboards, in nooks and chinks, in the cracks that cheapen the richest porcelain. They witness her decay, they feed on her decay, but she will finally withstand their designs, out of

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inherited strength” (231). Yet Dabydeen also distances Sampson from the archetype of the lecherous, wealthy Jewish merchant by altering his profession to that of a doctor (thereby conflating Hogarth’s Jewish merchant with the quack doctors who attempt to cure Moll in plate 5) and by revising Hogarth’s depiction of Moll as a concubine of the Jew.32 But why give so much attention to constructions of the Jew in a novel whose principal project is to critique the textual and visual portrayal of slaves? I would suggest that Dabydeen indexes these images of the Jew, and especially the view of the Jew as a chameleonic performer of other identities, in order to call attention to the constructedness and performativity of the slave narrator himself. In A Harlot’s Progress Sampson contributes to the theme of the invention of the Other and foregrounds the unreliability of such constructions; the Jew is an invented figure just as the slave is. This narrative function of the Jew is underscored by the fact that he is a quack doctor, a plot detail that builds on and reinterprets the association between Jews and performativity that we find in Hogarth’s original engraving. In his academic study Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985), Dabydeen notes that plate 2 “is deeply concerned with the way people cover over their true natures, play roles, adopt disguises, and imitate the fashions and the behaviour of their aristocratic superiors, both black and monkey are present as emblems of mimicry” (128–29).33 In a second academic work, Dabydeen observes that the mask lying on the dressing table in the bottom left corner of plate 2 further signals the theme of mimicry, as does the Jew himself, whose metropolitan clothes and clean-shaven face attest to his acculturation to English society, but whose ill-fitting wig suggests an imperfect performance of Englishness (Hogarth, Walpole 110–11). As Heidi Kaufman explains, Hogarth’s depiction of the Jew as a poor mimic of Englishness speaks to contemporary anxieties surrounding not only Jewish assimilation and economic power but also “the racial implications of extending citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants” (12–13). Revisiting Hogarth’s series, Dabydeen’s reinterpretation of the theme of the Jew’s performativity advances a larger commentary on the impossibility of gleaning a stable truth from representations of figures such as the slave and the Jew—representations that are overdetermined by racialist and colonialist discourses about England’s internal and external

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Others. The slave narrative genre as depicted by Dabydeen purports to be an authentic representation of its slave author, but instead supplies a highly constructed tale carefully tailored to appeal to the tastes of its abolitionist audience. Just as Sampson is a quack doctor who trades in invention and dissimulation, Mungo manipulates and deceives his readers: “[Sampson] makes his cures like I make my book but of what use? My book lies. The whores die” (257). Thus, while Hogarth’s presentation of the Jew as an unsuccessful mimic of Englishness engaged eighteenthcentury debates about Jewish naturalization, Dabydeen’s reinterpretation of the Jew’s performativity helps to expose from a postcolonial perspective the dominant textual and visual codes that govern representations of the slave. What Dabydeen’s rereading of Hogarth’s engraving ultimately highlights is the extent to which images of the Jew are linked to other racializing discourses. In Hogarth’s engraving the Black slave boy, like Moll, is a victim of the Jew’s corrupting presence.34 By contrast, in his novel Dabydeen significantly rewrites the relationship of Black and Jew by aligning them as common targets of English discourse about its racialized Others. The emphasis on discursive regimes in Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress correlates Blacks and Jews as fellow victims of empire; in Dabydeen’s rendering, much as in Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Jews are subject to pictorial and narrative misrepresentation just as Blacks are. Notably, Dabydeen locates his Jewish protagonist in England rather than in a colonial setting in which the Jew’s ambivalent role as both agent and victim of empire would be more apparent. At the end of the narrative, Sampson abandons his practice in London to serve as a doctor on a slave ship, a profession that in Hill’s novel is viewed as complicitous in the slave trade but one that in A Harlot’s Progress is couched in terms of Christian self-sacrifice. Referencing the notorious case of the captain of the Zong who was tried for throwing 132 living slaves overboard in 1781, the novel posits that the ship’s Jewish doctor is a victim of forcible drowning alongside the slaves.35 Although Dabydeen tends to align Blacks and Jews as fellow victims, his portrayal of the Jew is not without tension. First appearing in the guise of a quack doctor as a trickster figure who operates through deception, Sampson later emerges as a murderer who treats the prostitutes

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under his care by poisoning them. At the same time, he is a Christlike figure who refuses his fee for treating Lady Montague and abandons his interest in financial profit, repenting of his “trickery” with the cordial by devoting himself to the care of prostitutes and later slaves (259). Mungo himself entertains some doubts about the Jewish doctor: Why I seek out the Jew? I can’t tell. Is it that he once say to me, “Come follow me”? Is it that from the time I land in England all I hear is curse, but after a while I too believe: vile Jew, rich Jew, rob—and—cheat Jew, Jew carpenter who shave and plane the wood into Christ’s Cross, then charge extra for the nails? Everybody scorn him, is that why I go to meet him, to find a soulmate, two tribes in the same craft and storm that bring us to the same soil, soiling? All I think I am sure of is that the very time I set eyes on him the scales drop, I seem to know right away that I will become his slave. (250–51)

The possibility of a Black-Jewish alliance is undermined at the end of this passage by Mungo’s assumption that he is destined to become Sampson’s slave. And yet Mungo has nowhere else to go: “I am uncertain of his character, but there is no alternative to slavery in the West Indies, my certain fate by Lord Montague’s determination. My plan is to make some compact and alliance with him, the only alien I am familiar with in the realm, the only address known to me” (253). Arriving in London, Mungo is surprised to find Sampson living in extremely humble conditions in a stable, and he comes to the conclusion that Sampson is no charlatan: “The truth is that he gave up all his worldly ambition so as to wait upon the most despised of women” (259). Sampson’s relationship with Mungo is certainly benevolent; Mungo notes that “he looks upon me not as a foreigner but as a fellow man” (261). Ultimately, however, unlike Condé or Hill, Dabydeen is less interested in the Jew’s ethical status than he is in discursive traditions that portray the Jew as criminal, corrupt, and duplicitous and in the fundamentally deceptive character of representation itself.36 Indeed, the very possibility of passing ethical judgments is forestalled in the novel by the indeterminacy of the narrative and Dabydeen’s insistence on the necessary incompleteness of

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the tale.37 Dabydeen is not so much concerned, then, with implicating the Jew in the crime of slavery or with ethical questions in their conventional form as he is with questions of representation in a world in which “truth itself was hostage to the designs of stockjobbers, another commodity changing hands at a price” (199). / / /

In Condé’s and Dabydeen’s neoslave narratives, the predominantly identificatory and sympathetic presentations of port Jews resist dichotomous formulations by presenting Black and Jewish histories as intersecting, porous, and overlapping. By introducing the figure of the port Jew, these novels confound racial binaries and deepen the neoslave narrative’s engagement with the politics of representation, thereby reinvigorating the genre. At the same time, the narrative function to which these slavery novels consign their Jewish protagonists introduces certain tensions into this revisionary project. In her discussion of Dickens’s depiction of Fagin in Oliver Twist, Juliet Steyn observes that “Jew in mid-nineteenth century Britain is a category available and ripe for exploitation . . . Both Dickens and [his illustrator] Cruikshank called upon a rich repertoire of signs, attributes, and references through which to identify Fagin and represent and typify the Jew. Physiognomy and other external signs such as clothes, language, and social and hygienic codes (odor) were used to mean Jew” (45–46). It is upon this same semiotic tradition that the slavery fiction and drama considered in this chapter draws. In the case of Condé and Dabydeen, they do so deliberately and parodically. Instead of being a fully fledged character, Condé’s Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo, with his misshapen physique and pointed red beard, is the embodiment of the demonic Jew. Condé playfully converts Benjamin’s negative Jewish physical features into attributes in order to call attention to the discursive character of Tituba’s own purported ugliness. Where Condé appears less self-reflexive is in associating Benjamin with an ethical principle that serves to expose the inhumanity of the Christian plantocracy and further the slave protagonist’s emancipation. Her persistent association of Jewishness with a higher moral sensibility—an association that we find

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in Walcott’s Drums and Colours and Hill’s The Book of Negroes as well— evinces a philosemitism that exerts its own constraints on the narrative while echoing apologist historiography of the Jewish Atlantic. Like Moi, Tituba, Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress aligns Blacks and Jews as fellow victims of the discursive regimes of empire, indexing images of both the slave and the Jew in order to highlight the invented status of these figures. Dabydeen presents us with a compendium of conflicting visual and textual signs that defy our desire to locate the slave’s—or the Jew’s—authentic truth. What Dabydeen’s novel reveals is not character per se but rather the dominant textual and visual structures of signification through which England’s anxieties about itself are projected onto its internal and external Others. In A Harlot’s Progress the highly performative figure of “the Jew” becomes emblematic of the discursive rather than mimetic character of slave narratives and the profound unreliability of representations of the Other. Condé and especially Dabydeen thus demonstrate how the neoslave narrative’s analysis of the representational regimes of slavery can be enriched through an engagement with historical constructions of Jewish as well as Black Others. Yet, as a result of this strategy, their isolated presentations of the figure of the Jew remain firmly within the bounds of well-established discourses about Jewishness, referencing a series of highly conventional images of Jews as persecuted and wandering, wealthy and materialistic, sexually voracious and perverted, duplicitous and criminal. Indeed, as we have seen, their Jewish protagonists are essentially compilations of these stereotypes. Moreover, the purpose of the emblematic Jewish figures that they incorporate is to advance the slavery plot rather than to occasion an investigation of Jewish subjectivity. The peculiarity of these works of slavery literature, then, is that some of the most deeply familiar and reductive tropes about Jewishness are what enable their innovative reconfigurations of the slave narrative genre.

4 PLANTATION JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION C Y N T H I A M C LEO D’ S JO DE N SAVANNE

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lantation Jews, while a less common focus of slavery literature than port Jews for reasons both historical and political, feature significantly in several works of contemporary fiction and drama. The appearance of Sephardic planters in postslavery writing, and especially in Cynthia McLeod’s novel Hoe duur was de suiker? (The Cost of Sugar, 1987), signals the authors’ awareness of a more territorialized dimension of Jewish experience in the colonial Americas. This literary trend coincides with the increasing attention that is being devoted to Jewish plantation life by historians of the Jewish Atlantic, who have begun to investigate the biographies of plantation Jews alongside those of port Jews and to point to the porousness of these two categories. Generic and thematic shifts in contemporary slavery writing may be read productively in relation to new perspectives on slavery that are emerging in the historical scholarship and, more broadly, to “the overriding impulse of historiography since the 1970s to avoid depicting slavery as a monolith” (Ryan, Calls and Responses 19).1 At the same time, the Jewish plantation fiction and drama that I discuss here also bears out Elizabeth Russ’s understanding of literary representations of the plantation as “not primarily a physical location but rather an insidious ideological and psychological trope through which intersecting histories of the New World are told and retold” (3). As this chapter will show, Surinamese author Cynthia McLeod’s portrayal of plantation Jews diverges from port Jews narratives in both thematic and formal terms. The depictions of port Jews that I discussed in

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chapter 3 followed a strikingly consistent script in which the Jew functioned as a mechanism of the slave’s emancipation. In each text, we encounter a male Sephardic broker figure whose appearance part way through the narrative changes the course of the slave protagonist’s trajectory by introducing new possibilities for mobility and freedom. The Jew helps to move the narrative forward by effecting changes in the slave’s physical environment and by opening up access to literacy, money, and even romance.2 Simultaneously, the destabilizing presence of the Jew unsettles the conventions of the slave narrative and encourages reflection on its discursive status. Yet, with the exception of Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress, these texts appear less self-conscious in ascribing a moral function to the Jew. Whether they present their Jewish protagonists in a sympathetic or more ambivalent light, they tend to identify Jewishness with an ethical principle that alternately exposes the inhumanity of the Christian plantocracy or the Jew’s own hypocrisy. In so doing they echo apologist narratives that attribute a greater moral sensitivity to Jews and interpret any contravening behavior as a deviation from Jewishness itself. McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? challenges this apologist narrative and the association of Jewishness with ethics that underpins it by eschewing the typological strategy upon which the slavery literature discussed in chapter 3 relied. Instead of presenting an isolated Jewish protagonist whose actions reflect on his people as a whole, Hoe duur was de suiker? portrays a fully fledged eighteenth-century Sephardic Caribbean community that exhibits a wide range of human behaviors and ethical perspectives available within the confines of its time. Moreover, rather than following the conventions of the slave narrative thematized by Condé and Dabydeen, McLeod takes up another influential form in postslavery literature, the plantation family saga. Hoe duur was de suiker? is governed by the trope not of individual testimony but of family history, which one critic identifies as “the thematic and structural sine qua non of postslavery narrative” (Handley, Postslavery Literatures 3). While, in the other slavery fiction that we have considered, the Jew enters the scene relatively late as an outsider who is at odds with his surroundings (I use the masculine pronoun deliberately), in Hoe duur was de suiker? we are from the outset fully immersed in the world of the colonial Jewish family in which the passing of time is marked by Jewish

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holidays such as Sukkot and rituals such as brit milah and bar mitzvah. With this transition from the isolated figure of the port Jew to the Jewish planter family and community comes an emphasis on female Jewish characters. Jewish women, who remain in the background or are absent from the texts discussed in chapter 3, take center stage in McLeod’s novel in keeping with the conventions of the plantation melodrama. McLeod’s focus on family history, which reflects the preoccupation of postslavery writing with genealogy, also recalls the “foundational fictions” of nineteenth-century Latin American literature discussed by Doris Sommer in which the family unit stands in for the nation. Yet in McLeod’s novel the nation in question is not only the Surinamese nation but also the Spanish Portuguese Jewish Nation of the Caribbean, a New World diasporic branch of the early modern Iberian Jewish nación of Sephardim and Marranos that dispersed across the Netherlands, Italy, England, and beyond after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. The thematic shift in Hoe duur was de suiker? from port Jew to plantation Jew and the generic shift from neoslave narrative to plantation family saga bespeak the unique historical conditions of Surinamese Jewry, who by the end of the seventeenth century made up one third of the Dutch colony’s European population and in the early eighteenth century owned almost 30 percent of the colony’s plantations (Ben-Ur and Frankel 31, 33). Accordingly, while the port Jews we met in chapter 3 are pariah figures who are perpetually on a quest for home, McLeod’s plantation Jews have achieved a sense of community and belonging in their adoptive Caribbean setting, albeit a tenuous one. Organized around the tropes of family, romance, and genealogy, McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? is modeled not on the fugitive slave narrative but on Margaret Mitchell’s plantation epic Gone with the Wind (1936). Paradoxically, this more conservative generic choice liberates McLeod from some of the constraints that the neoslave narrative’s testimonial form imposed on the novels considered in chapter 3. McLeod’s depiction of a fully developed Jewish community rather than an isolated Jewish protagonist enables an alternative commentary on Jewishness and its relationship to African slavery to emerge, one that anticipates recent directions in the historiography of the Jewish Atlantic. Moreover, in contrast to the neoslave narratives that we examined, while Hoe duur

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was de suiker? maintains a dual focus on its Jewish and slave protagonists, in keeping with the plantation epic’s emphasis on the planter’s perspective, the novel’s narrative center is the Sephardic community. As I will suggest, McLeod’s adoption of the plantation epic genre and recentering of the Caribbean narrative of slavery on Jewish rather than Black subjects carry tensions that are thematic of Surinamese Jewish history more broadly. Although Hoe duur was de suiker? became the best-selling Surinamese novel, was highly successful in the Netherlands (Smith, “Diasporic Slavery Memorials” 84, 91), and has recently been made into a feature film, it has received little attention among anglophone readers and critics. This disparity may reflect not only the novel’s limited availability in English translation but also the difficulty that McLeod suggests a Jewish American readership has in confronting the history of Jewish involvement in slavery, including their participation in the practice of concubinage. In an interview with the Jewish Daily Forward, McLeod explains that Jewish plantation owners kept slave mistresses with whom they had children: “There is a responsibility to acknowledge this history of slavery. . . . American Jews don’t want to speak of this, but [Jews] did [have slaves] in Suriname” (Rovner, “Shake a Family Tree”). McLeod’s observation about Jewish American responses to the history of Jewish slaveholding is borne out by the account of Shai Fierst, a Jewish American Peace Corps worker who was posted to Suriname in 2007. Fierst describes the cognitive dissonance he experienced when he encountered a chapter of Jewish history that contradicted the narrative about Jewishness upon which he was raised: “While still in the States, I did some basic research. Additional surprises greeted me. I found out that many Jews were successful landowners and read conflicting texts about slave labor on Jewish plantations. After I arrived, a lecturer on local Suriname history described the Jews of Suriname as slave owners. I assumed that it was just a few isolated families. The information did not resonate with me. Historically, I was taught that we Jews were the persecuted, not the persecutors” (par. 4). As noted in the introduction, this same sense of unease permeates Jewish American critic Ronnie Scharfman’s description of her unsettling discovery during a trip to the U.S. South that Jews had owned slaves: “I felt ashamed, enraged, and,

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especially, confused. Coming from such a tradition I subscribe to as one with a passion for social justice dating back to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, sympathizing, from the transmitted memory of the Israelite slaves in Egypt, with the wretched of the earth and what I like to think of as the moral high ground of that position, I wanted no part of this symbolic genealogy” (461). Because, as Henry Bial observes, “narratives that portray the Jews as outsiders and underdogs are more easily interjected into scholarly conversations about race, ethnicity, and performance in the United States” (11), it is perhaps not surprising that it is primarily in contemporary narratives of slavery written from outside the U.S. that port and plantation Jews make an appearance. Moreover, in the U.S. context especially, the Nation of Islam’s 1991 publication of the antisemitic tract The Secret Relationship of Blacks and Jews and the consequent imperative to refute spurious charges regarding the incidence and scope of Jewish slaveholding has rendered the subject matter particularly thorny. Despite the charged nature of the topic, however, American writers Matthew Lopez and Alan Cheuse have addressed Jewish plantation ownership in two recent works. Although the focus of this chapter will be on McLeod’s novel, brief discussions of Lopez’s play The Whipping Man and Cheuse’s novel Song of Slaves in the Desert will throw into sharper relief McLeod’s Caribbean perspective on the history of Jewish plantation life. While all three works are plantation family sagas, McLeod’s novel’s diverging approach to the genre’s central tropes of genealogy and romance reflects the specific historical circumstances of the Surinamese Jewish past that it recovers.

PLANTATION JEWS IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD McLeod, a prominent Surinamese writer of mixed descent who herself traces Jewish ancestry, is not the only author considered thus far in this study to introduce the figure of the plantation Jew.3 Late in Hill’s The Book of Negroes, the port Jew briefly merges with the plantation Jew when Solomon reveals at the slave Aminata’s trial that he owns an indigo plantation, a plot detail that would seem to confirm Aminata’s indictment of

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him by further implicating him in the slavery economy. Yet in McLeod’s novel Jewish plantation life is explored in much more depth, as bespeaks the greater access to land that Jews historically enjoyed in Suriname. While the port Jew is invested in the writing of Walcott and Condé with ethical value as a fellow sufferer, McLeod’s plantation family saga challenges this narrative of Jewish victimhood by drawing attention to the foundational role Sephardic Jews played in the colonial history of Suriname, where they were some of the earliest settlers. The land- and slave-owning Jews portrayed by McLeod illustrate that Sephardic Jewish experience in the colonial Americas was not only one of displacement but also of reterritorialization and rerooting. Schorsch has observed that, in the Jewish Atlantic context, Jewish (Sephardic, really) landedness deserves more attention. Unlike many colonists, Sephardim rarely become farmers. They became plantation owners. In the eighteenth century, wealthy Dutch, English and French Sephardim lived off of income from investments, bought estates, often in the American colonies. While one can find Jewish foremen on plantations, I have argued that the Sephardim were attracted to land and slaveowning precisely because of the status it gave them, a status first really available to them in the Americas, not only for economic reasons, . . . but also because in so much of Europe Jews were by law prohibited from such ownership. (“Sephardic Business” 501)

Acknowledging this territorialized dimension of Jewish Atlantic life, Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan revise the port Jews discussion by proposing a second category: the “plantation Jew.” Kagan and Morgan’s intervention recognizes that not all New World Jews were rootless urban dwellers. Instead, some became tied to the land; in particular in Curaçao and Suriname where Jews owned a significant number of plantations, some Jews were landowners and slaveholders who led “more settled and exploitative lives” (Kagan and Morgan x).4 Moreover, as one historian of Southern Jewry points out, the division between port and plantation Jews was not a stable one; instead, they were sometimes one and the same, as in the case of a Jewish Haitian planter who became a

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Charleston trader after the Haitian Revolution (Rosengarten, “Port and Plantation Jews”). McLeod, who is not only a novelist but also a leading historian of Suriname, brings this landed dimension of Sephardic Caribbean experience into focus in her meticulously researched Jewish plantation epic Hoe duur was de suiker? In McLeod’s historical novel we encounter a more rooted and privileged form of Sephardic Caribbean life than we have seen in other postslavery writing, one that reflects the distinctive conditions of the eighteenth-century Jewish agricultural settlement of Jodensavanne (“the Jews’ savannah”) in Suriname. While few Jews owned plantations in Barbados and Jamaica (two other major centers of Caribbean Jewish life), the majority of elite Surinamese Sephardim were planters, so that at their height in the 1760s, they were the proprietors of 115 of Suriname’s 591 plantations (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 62). Jodensavanne, located on the Suriname River three hours by boat from Paramaribo and founded in the mid-seventeenth century by Sephardic Jews who had migrated both directly from Europe and via other New World colonies including Brazil and Cayenne, was one of the most autonomous and privileged Jewish communities in the Western hemisphere in the eighteenth century.5 As early colonists who mixed with the local slave population, Sephardic Jews had a significant impact on the creole language Sranan Tongo in Suriname, much as they did on Papiamentu in Curaçao (Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter” 167; Rupert 115). The language spoken by the slaves on Surinamese plantations became known as “Dju-tongo” or the Jewish tongue (Davis, “Creole Languages” 4). When slaves escaped the plantations, they carried this Creole with them, which accounts for the usage of the word treef in relation to food taboos in the Saramaka Maroon language. A Jewish influence may also be seen in Maroon clan names that derive from the Jewish plantations from which they escaped (including “Nasís” from Nassy, “Biítus” from Britto, and “Matjáu” from Machado [Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 229]). Together with syncretic practices such as the use of mezuzahs by colored people in Paramaribo (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 229–30), these linguistic traces testify to the intensive contact between slaves and Jewish planters in colonial Suriname and to the participation of Sephardic Jews in the process of Surinamese creolization.

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Indeed, Aviva Ben-Ur argues that because of the size of its Jewish population and the extent of Black-Jewish contact, in colonial Suriname “creolization meant the fusion of European Jewish and black cultures and peoples” (“A Matriarchal Matter” 168–69).6 The unique historical character of the Surinamese Jewish community is perhaps best illustrated by the case of the Mulatto Jews who formed a society called the Path of the Righteous (Darhe Jesarim) in 1759.7 In contrast to the practice of Jewish communities elsewhere in the Western hemisphere, some Surinamese Mulatto Jews were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Jodensavanne, so that “among the many Jewish communities in the Americas in which slaves were owned, only in Surinam did some slaves become Jewish enough to merit a burial official enough for scholars to recognize” (Schorsch, Jews and Blacks 238). While the Mulatto Jews of Suriname gained an unusual degree of recognition and were admitted into Jewish society as congreganten, a second-tier social class made up of both Eurafrican Jews and full members who had married women of African descent, the congreganten were only allowed to sit on the bench of the mourners in the synagogue and were buried in a separate area of the cemetery.8 When the Darhe Jesarim challenged some of these religious restrictions and attempted to gain independence from the Mahamad (Jewish governing body) by petitioning the colonial authorities, the Mahamad tried to shut down the society, and in 1800 the Mulatto Jews’ synagogue was demolished in what according to one historian “was above all a struggle to maintain social control” (Cohen, Jews in Another Environment 172). The story of the Mulatto Jews illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions of Jewish life in the Dutch colony in the eighteenth century that provide the rich materials for McLeod’s Jewish plantation saga.

HOE DUUR WAS DE SUIKER? AS PLANTATION FAMILY SAGA In Hoe duur was de suiker?, McLeod chooses as a vehicle for her investigation of Jewish Surinamese creolization one of the dominant genres of slavery fiction: the plantation family saga. More specifically, McLeod

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models her novel on Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which she read at the age of fourteen and which has exerted a profound influence on historical fiction about slavery by Black and white authors alike.9 Hoe duur was de suiker? betrays the influence of Mitchell’s plantation melodrama in its multigenerational, epoch-spanning narrative structure and in its thematic emphasis on genealogy and romance. Also in keeping with the plantation epic, McLeod’s historical novel focuses on figures who are neither at the top of the power structure nor at the bottom—in particular the daughters of the planter patriarch and the house slaves who care for them.10 As I will suggest, the influence of the plantation epic is further evident in the commemorative and elegiac tone of the novel, which honors the forgotten contributions of Jews to the history of the colony. At the same time, Hoe duur was de suiker? deviates significantly from Mitchell’s model by recentering it on Jewish experience, a repositioning of the genre that ultimately also opens it up to an engagement with Black female subjectivity and to a celebration of Maroon resistance. Set in the 1760s and 1770s, Hoe duur was de suiker? tells the story of two Surinamese step-sisters of Portuguese Jewish descent against the backdrop of the renewed Maroon conflicts that followed the hundred years Maroon War. The seventeen-year-old Elza Fernandez is raised on Hébron Plantation by her widowed father Levi and the slave woman Ashana, Elza’s Gentile mother having died in childbirth. Eventually Levi remarries, this time to a Jewish woman, who comes to live at Hébron with her daughters Sarith, Esther, and Rebecca.11 Elza and Sarith become rivals when they vie for the affections of Rutger Le Chasseur, the recently arrived and highly placed agent of an Amsterdam merchant company. Although Rutger chooses Elza to be his wife, he engages in an extended affair with Sarith that drives a deep wedge between the two sisters. Alongside the stories of these white characters—in contrast to Hill’s Solomon Lindo, McLeod’s Surinamese Jews insist that they are unambiguously white12—the novel also addresses the lives of their slaves, in particular those of Ashana, who becomes a mother figure to Elza after Levi is widowed; Ashana’s daughter Maisa, who moves with Elza to Paramaribo when she marries Rutger; Sarith’s slave Mini-mini, who will eventually become the concubine of Sarith’s husband Julius; and Rutger’s slave and receptionist Alex. In addition, two non-Jewish characters, the

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Dutch mercenary soldier Jan and Sarith’s lover Lieutenant Andersma, are introduced later in the novel, further diversifying its portrait of eighteenth-century Surinamese society and contributing to the theme of Maroon resistance that dominates the novel’s later chapters. The central device of Hoe duur was de suiker? is the twinning of Elza and Sarith, between whose stories and perspectives the novel alternates. The half-sisters bear little resemblance to one another other. While Elza is homely, modest, and self-sacrificing, Sarith is pretty, arrogant, and self-indulgent and exemplifies the moral corruption and decadence of the colony. The divergent comportment of the two sisters thematizes the doubled positioning of Sephardic Jews in colonial Suriname who participated in the exploitation of the slaves and yet at the same time experienced their own forms of exclusion. Drawing attention to this fundamental ambiguity of Jewish Surinamese history, the novel differentiates Sarith and Elza most markedly with regard to their treatment of their slaves. Sarith “regarded slaves just as creatures who must serve her and always be there for her, never taking into account that they were people, too, and people with feelings” (126). Over the course of the novel, the spiteful Sarith has Ashana whipped to death and sells the pregnant Mini-mini to a lascivious trader. With her abusive behavior toward her slaves and sexual promiscuity, Sarith functions as a foil to the retiring and gentle Elza, who is unfailingly kind to her slaves. Upon first meeting Elza, Rutger notes that “she was a marked exception to the women and girls he had met until then. Not once had she belittled a slave-girl, but to the contrary had said that, apart from her father, brother and stepsister, the two slave-women who had brought her up were the most important people in her life. He had noticed that she never spoke to a slave in a commanding tone of voice, but was always pleasant and friendly” (37). Significantly, while Sarith is a full member of the Jewish community, Elza is an outcast by virtue of her mixed birth, as is underscored by an early scene in which she must wait outside the synagogue while her relatives attend a service. In a second, mirror-image episode, the Jewish guests at Elza’s wedding are not able to attend the Lutheran ceremony. Thus, in contrast to the slavery fiction that I discussed in chapter 3, instead of juxtaposing the behavior of a benevolent Jew with that of an archetypally brutal Christian planter or slaver, McLeod inverts this

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pattern so that the half-breed Jew Elza exposes the callousness of her fully Jewish stepsister Sarith. Although Hoe duur was de suiker? uncovers the relationships of dependency and exploitation between the Surinamese Jewish planters and their slaves, it does not do so by harnessing the conventions of the slave narrative. Unlike other works of slavery fiction I have considered, McLeod does not employ the first-person testimonial voice that is a hallmark of the classic slave narrative and is also fundamental to the neoslave narrative as defined by Ashraf Rushdy. Instead, eschewing the first person altogether, McLeod adopts the third-person voice but uses free indirect discourse to focalize the viewpoints of the various protagonists among whom the novel continually moves. The family saga framing initially foregrounds the Jewish planter family’s perspectives and struggles, particularly those of Elza and Sarith, to the exclusion of those of their slaves in a manner that uncomfortably mirrors the suppression of slaves’ voices from the official historical record. As the novel progresses, however, McLeod casts her net wider, interpolating the perspectives of a number of non-Jewish characters who occupy a variety of stations within the colonial power structure, from the newly arrived colonial administrator Rutger to the lowly Dutch soldier Jan who attempts to escape poverty in Holland by enlisting to fight the Maroons. Finally, a little over one hundred pages into the novel, Elza’s slave Maisa is briefly given the narrative focus, followed some pages later by Sarith’s slave Mini-mini and then Rutger’s slave Alex.13 This withholding of the slave testimony that is fundamental to the slave narrative genre would appear to reinscribe the excision of slaves’ voices from the colonial archive in keeping with the novel’s conservative generic framing—a feature that may be perturbing to the reader accustomed to slavery literature that works to recover the lost voices of slaves. (Accordingly, the film adaptation of Hoe duur was de suiker?, which premiered in the Netherlands in September 2013, revises this aspect of the novel by making the slavegirl Mini-mini’s perspective the governing one.) Scenes in Hoe duur was de suiker? such as that depicting the slaves’ ritual dance at Elza’s wedding, which are filtered through a white gaze that perceives the slaves not as individuals but as “dark, half-naked bodies” (50), also generate unease. I would argue that this sense of unease is

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thematic of a larger discomfort with the history of Jewish slaveholding that the novel asks us to confront. The novel gives voice to marginalized Jewish historical subjects, but only at the cost of suppressing the voices of their slaves, echoing a historical pattern in which Jews obtained opportunities in the colonies that were denied to them in Europe, but only by participating in a system that negated the humanity of slaves. Hoe duur was de suiker?’s framing as a plantation saga, a genre that tends to emphasize the ruling class’s experience of slavery over that of its victims, underscores these tensions and contradictions of Sephardic Surinamese history. Yet ultimately, Hoe duur was de suiker? unites the two literary traditions of the plantation epic and the fugitive slave narrative. For, after muting the slaves’ voices for the first third of the novel, McLeod gradually foregrounds their perspectives as well as the themes of slave emancipation and Maroon resistance. The classic arc of the slave narrative is incorporated in condensed form in the trajectory of Rutger’s slave Alex: the most assimilated of the slaves, Alex speaks Dutch, becomes literate under Rutger’s tutelage, and eventually saves enough money to buy his freedom. For her part, Mini-mini’s path to literacy and freedom proves to be her romance with Sarith’s husband Julius Robles de Medina. Alex’s and Mini-mini’s journeys to freedom unfold against the background of the intensifying conflict between the colonial authorities and the Maroons, who establish alternative communities in the jungle and carry out persistent raids against the plantations. This growing emphasis in the second half of the novel on slave resistance and emancipation reflects a late eighteenth-century context in which, having signed treaties in 1760 and 1762 with the Ndjuka and Saramaka Maroons, the Dutch colony struggled to suppress a new wave of Maroon revolts. At the same time, this thematic shift also reflects McLeod’s postcolonial revisionist approach to the plantation epic genre. If Hoe duur was de suiker? is distinguished from mainstream slavery fiction by an unusually sustained focus on Jewish colonial experience and Jewish Caribbean creolization, it diversifies our perspective on slavery still further by adopting the polyphonic narrative structure that, as I showed in chapters 1 and 2, typifies Caribbean literary sephardism. While the novel opens with a tight focus on the two sisters Elza and Sarith, it increasingly offsets their stories by introducing a variety

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of other viewpoints including those of the French Hugenot-descended Dutch administrator Rutger Le Chasseur and the African-descended slaves. Situating Elza’s and Sarith’s stories within a broader landscape of contiguous and intersecting experiences, McLeod employs a cinematic technique, tracking across a series of topographical sites that stage a variety of forms of intercultural encounter. These include the Jewish plantations of Hébron and Klein Paradijs, which bring Jews and slaves into intimate contact but where the Jews remain somewhat isolated from the Dutch colonial elite; the self-governing Jewish village of Jodensavanne, “a new Jerusalem on the river,” whose fame spreads across the Jewish diaspora but which is already in decline at the present time of the novel; the town of Paramaribo, where Jews come into more extensive contact with Christians; and finally the jungle that is occupied by the Maroons who are being hunted by the colonial soldiers. Much as in other examples of Caribbean sephardism, Hoe duur was de suiker?’s multicentered, connective structure allows for resonances and parallels to emerge across racial, cultural, and master/slave divides. The desire to escape from poverty symbolized by the dream of acquiring shoes that is shared by the slave Alex and by the soldier Jan’s sister is depicted as common to both Surinamese slaves and poor Dutch. The misery caused by a lover’s infidelity is suffered by Jewish and Black women alike, and both sectors of the population find themselves spatially confined, their freedom of movement limited.14 The soldiers suffer abusive behavior that resonates with the maltreatment of slaves, and we learn that the soldiers are pawns of those in power, much like the slaves, so that the soldiers’ deaths, too, make up part of the “cost of sugar”: Hundreds of innocent soldiers met their death in the jungles of Suriname, and not particularly at the hands of the Maroons. They died from disease, starvation and exhaustion, or from drowning in the swamps. Their fighting wasn’t motivated. They were in fact playthings in the hands of a group of whites who misused them: the planters, the colonial government, the directors of the Society in the Netherlands. . . . They needed the slaves. Everything must be sacrificed for the production of the things that would bring them a pile of money: cotton, coffee and sugar.15 (220)

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In another example of the novel’s strategy of generating parallels and resonances across racial divides, the paternity of both Mini-mini and Sarith’s daughter Eva proves indeterminate. Similarly, when Elza seeks comfort from Ashana after suffering Rutger’s infidelity, we are told that there was “no question here of mistress and slave, just a child who was sad and who sought love and security in the arms of she who, she knew, had always provided that: the most trusted, the most cherished, her Ashana. Here was simply a mother who wanted to watch over her most adored child and protect her, who wanted to banish all sadness and all perils from this child’s life” (95). Yet while tropes of motherhood and gender oppression encourage cross-cultural alliances and gender solidarities, the viability of such alliances also is called into question in a scene in which Maisa rejects Elza’s assertion that womanhood trumps race: “And when Elza complained that most slaves were up and around with their babies after only three days; what was the difference—a woman was a woman, surely—Maisa had asserted brusquely, ‘Negroes are negroes’” (106).

ACTS OF COMMEMORATION In Hoe duur was de suiker? McLeod joins together two literary genres, the plantation epic and the fugitive slave narrative, in a strategy that enables her to honor the Sephardic Surinamese and slave pasts simultaneously. As Ineke Phaf-Rheineger comments, McLeod’s interest in recovering and revalorizing slave and Maroon histories combines with an attention to the religious and ethnic diversity of Suriname and in particular to the Sephardic contribution to the history of the colony, which becomes intertwined in the novel with the project of reafricanizing Suriname’s heritage. By foregrounding the Sephardic historical presence in the Dutch colony, McLeod’s novel fosters a “recognition of the Sephardic role in the beginnings of creole discourse in Suriname” (“Creole tori” 414). McLeod explains in an interview that the novel was written in appreciation of the Jews as “the first real Surinamers,” who, unlike other European colonists, came to stay and to make Suriname their homeland rather than merely to reap a profit (“Personal interview”).16 McLeod’s

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desire in Hoe duur was de suiker? to “let the Jews see how much we appreciate and we value them” (“Personal interview”) leads her to document the struggle of Surinamese Sephardim against Dutch colonial prejudice, economic strife, and Maroon uprisings and at times imbues the novel with a nostalgic and elegiac tone. This tone, which reflects the novel’s orientation toward the Jewish landowning elite’s point of view, is reminiscent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century plantation fiction in which the pastoral and archaic world of the plantation is threatened by economic or agricultural collapse. However, McLeod’s commemoration of Jewish Surinamese history is balanced against her simultaneous interest in celebrating the Maroon struggle and documenting the travails of female slaves. In this regard, the novel’s unconventional focus on Jewish experience supports a larger reworking of the plantation family saga by encouraging a less monolithic approach to the representation of slavery. Hoe duur was de suiker? challenges plantation fiction’s ideological underpinnings, falsifying its idealized presentation of benign planters and happy slaves by depicting eighteenth-century Surinamese Jews as enjoying a privileged lifestyle that is founded on slave labor and by portraying the Sephardic Caribbean community as exclusionary and conservative in its politics. At the same time, McLeod also nuances this critique by thematizing the anti-Jewish attitudes that impinged upon the Jews’ freedoms and sense of security in colonial Suriname. Despite their wealth and status, McLeod’s Surinamese Jews remain subject to the prejudices of the Dutch elite, as is suggested by a reference early in the novel to the parents of Sarith’s Christian boyfriend who are so horrified by his relationship with a Jewess that they send him to Holland. McLeod’s plantation Jews enjoy only partial acceptance in the colonial society and power structure. Sarith complains that “many well-to-do Christian plantation owners wanted as little as possible to do with Jews, as if they were an inferior type of person. Ridiculous: they were all whites, after all!” (18). Although they were among Suriname’s first settlers, Jews are viewed as “second-rate citizens” (163) of the society and complain that their contributions to the colony go unrecognized by more recent Dutch arrivals. The Jewish Fernandez family is included among the “high and white society” (37) and are “naturally invited” to a ball given by the governor, where a separate kosher meal is provided for the Jewish guests (39).

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Yet when Elza attends a dinner party at the home of Rutger’s employer, Mr. Van Omhoog, her family is not included in the invitation because, unlike her, they are Jewish. The Dutch theater that opens in Paramaribo in 1775 prohibits Jews from attending and the Jewish community is forced to build its own theater. When economic conditions in the colony worsen, the Jews find they cannot get loans from the banks. Most chilling is the novel’s reference to a scheme that was proposed in the 1760s to enclose the Jews of Suriname in a ghetto in Paramaribo: They formed such a closed, individual circle, and in recent years there had arisen considerable “anti” feelings among the Christians with respect to the Jewish community. Rutger did not really understand this. Had it not been the Jews who had been the founders of this colony and had set a good example with the plantations and so forth? Why, then, all the antagonism? Administrator Van Omhoog did not know this, either, but those feelings did exist, even to the extent that there was talk of housing the Jews in a separate part of the town. A kind of ghetto, so to speak. (35)

Thus McLeod reminds the reader that even during this most unusually rooted and territorialized episode of their history, Jews found themselves facing the threat of enclosure. McLeod introduces further ambiguity and complexity into her portrait of Surinamese Sephardim by portraying a wide range of relations between Jewish planters and their Black slaves. At one end of the spectrum is the familial-like sense of kinship that develops between Levi and Elza and their house slaves Ashana and Maisa. McLeod also incorporates the story of a white Christian master who buys the freedom of his slave concubine, presaging Julius’s similarly benevolent treatment of Mini-mini and their children toward the end of the novel. At the other end of the spectrum are the horrific instances of sexual abuse and torture endured by the slaves of Jewish and Christian planters alike. Discussing the maltreatment of slaves, for example, Elza recounts that a Susanna Duplessis “has had a child drowned before its mother’s eyes” (45), an incident that recalls a similar story included in Richard Price’s Maroon ethnography involving a plantation owned by the Sephardic

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Jew Imanuël Machado (Price, Alabi’s World 6). Maroon oral history is invoked in a second scene in the novel in which Alex tells Rutger the story of the half-Jewish Maroon leader Boni. Alex explains that Boni was born to a slave woman who had been raped by a lecherous Jewish planter. When the planter’s cruel wife discovers the pregnancy, she cuts off one of the slave woman’s breasts as well as the genitals of her manfriend. The man dies and the slave woman retreats into the forest, where she gives birth to twin boys who are brown-skinned and have red curly hair, marking their mixed Black-Jewish origins. The theme of Jewish abuse of slaves also is introduced through the figure of the indolent Jewish planter Daniel Jeremiah, a drunkard and a gambler who brutally mistreats and starves his slaves and who argues that the exploitation of slaves is dictated in the Torah: “If only that black rabble would work a bit harder. They were quite capable of this. They were strong, and after all, God had created the negro race solely for the purpose of working as slaves for the whites. When Rutger asked the men how they knew this so surely, Jeremiah replied, ‘Come, come, young man: It is written at length in the Torah” (84). In contrast to other works of Caribbean slavery fiction, here Jewish religious tradition is invoked to justify slavery rather than to condemn it. Sarith herself echoes Jeremiah when she insists that “everyone knew that negroes were put on this earth to be slaves, and you must well and truly punish slaves to keep them on the straight and narrow” (102). Thus McLeod unflinchingly debunks apologist claims regarding the benevolence of Jewish slaveholders while also challenging the conventional view of the Jew as a figure of moral authority. The novel’s critique of Jewish plantation society is moderated by its positioning of Hébron as the “good plantation” that stands in opposition to the rampant physical and sexual abuse carried out at Jeremiah’s plantation. Yet the more enlightened perspective of Hébron’s proprietor, Levi Fernandez, appears to be tied to his eccentric positioning within the Jewish community that results from his rebellious first marriage to a non-Jew and his mother’s subsequent repudiation of him. Indeed, Levi’s views on slavery are depicted as atypical of the Jewish (and Gentile) planter society. When the newly arrived Rutger, who fervently believes in improvement, suggests at a Sukkot dinner held in Jodensavanne that

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slave uprisings could be prevented if the planters treated their slaves better, Levi is alone among the other Jewish guests to agree. Similarly, Elza’s more tolerant and enlightened viewpoint appears to stem from her outsider position with respect to the Jewish community.17 Moreover, even the benevolent Elza and Levi are shown to exploit the slaves’ labor, on which they are utterly reliant, as Levi comes to recognize only after Ashana’s death: Could he ever have explained to someone else what this slave had meant to him throughout his life? How she had loved his children, cared for his wife; how she, despite her own sorrow, had consoled him when his wife died; how she had cared for his children with all the love that was within her, and how she was always there for them, from early morning to deep in the night? . . . Had he ever let her know how much he valued her? No, of course not: she was just a slave! All slave labour was simply taken for granted. . . . But all that love, that warmth, that consolation, Levi wondered: was that work, too? Was that to be taken for granted? (131–32)

Equally, it is only after Maisa’s death that Elza fully acknowledges her own dependency on her slaves. At the same time as questioning apologist narratives of Jewish colonial history, Hoe duur was de suiker? also challenges the failure of the Dutch to confront their colonial past. Just as Toni Morrison’s Beloved has been credited with sparking interest in slavery memorials, Hoe duur was de suiker? has been identified as “piercing through a profound cultural amnesia in the Netherlands regarding colonialism” (Smith, “Diasporic Slavery Memorials” 83) and as catalysing the creation of the Dutch national slavery monument, which was commemorated in 2002.18 Indeed, Hoe duur was de suiker? is itself a literary memorial that commemorates Maroon resistance through a detailed recounting of Maroon military tactics while also documenting in an ethnohistorical fashion Maroon and slave rituals and social organization.19 Alex hears stories of the Maroons from his friend Caesar, who has been forced to join the Zwarte Jagers, the corps of slave soldiers used to suppress the Maroon resistance. Also fighting the Maroons is the Dutch soldier Jan, whose

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perception of Blacks alters radically after he is injured and brought to a Maroon village where he is nursed back to health: “Were these the dangerous negroes who had to be hunted and shot dead? Were these the people whose food crops had to be destroyed and burnt so that hunger would finally force them to surrender? Why, in fact? Because they had chosen for this life instead of slavery? There were no better or kinder people on earth, of that Jan was now convinced” (213–14). During Jan’s primitivist idyll in the jungle, the Maroons are portrayed as egalitarian and resourceful, their village as a communal paradise. At the same time, in keeping with her complex understanding of the nature of resistance, McLeod also incorporates a critique of the brutality of the Maroons in a scene in which their leader Agosu terrorizes Sarith and her son.20 As we have seen, however, McLeod employs the archival and archaeological strategies of postslavery fiction not only to exhibit slavery and Maroon resistance but also to memorialize the Caribbean Jewish past. While McLeod does not shy away from confronting the more troubling aspects of this chapter of Jewish history, her novel ultimately calls for a recognition of the foundational role that Sephardic Jews played in establishing the colony of Suriname. Hoe duur was de suiker? surveys a series of sites of Sephardic Caribbean memory, generating what Vivian Nun Halloran in her study of Caribbean slavery fiction calls a “museum effect.”21 At the novel’s opening, we find the Surinamese Jewish community gathered in Jodensavanne to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the Beracha Ve Shalom Synagogue, which was consecrated in 1685, making it one of the oldest synagogues in the Western hemisphere. Later in the novel, Elza travels once again to Jodensavanne to celebrate the synagogue’s eighty-fifth anniversary. Hoe duur was de suiker? details the layout and design of the village of Jodensavanne and the town of Paramaribo while also mapping the location of various Jewish plantations and incorporating descriptions of the synagogue and other colonial architecture. This attention to architectural and topographical detail constitutes a literary counterpart to current efforts by scholars and by the International Survey of Jewish Monuments to document and preserve Jewish cemeteries in the Caribbean.22 In another example of the museum effect, in the epilogue Elza’s dying grandmother passes on to her heirlooms, including a set of porcelain

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and a tapestry, that had traveled with the family from Portugal via Brazil to Suriname.23 The novel’s exhibiting of these artifacts registers the particular sequence of geographical displacements that produced the Surinamese Jewish community and helps to establish its importance to Suriname’s colonial history: “The whites who had more recently arrived in Suriname appeared not to realize that it was precisely the Jews who had been the driving force behind the blossoming of this colony. They were the first substantial group to come here. They had settled here, mostly in the upper reaches of the rivers. They had started plantations, and with the money earned had paid huge sums to the government to provide for the colony’s upkeep. Now things were going less well for the Jews .  .  .” (163). This complaint that the Jews’ contribution to the colony is being forgotten recalls an earlier act of commemorative historiography, the 1788 Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam that was authored by David de Isaac Cohen Nassy and the regents of the Jewish community.24 The Essai historique, which McLeod cites as a source in the novel’s bibliography, seeks to correct the oversights of Dutch historians of the period and in particular their depiction of the Sephardim’s involvement in military activities against the Maroons. In order to contest official narratives of the colony’s history, the authors of the Essai historique harness the Enlightenment language of emancipation and assemble their own archive, documenting both Jewish contributions to the colony and the forms of discrimination that afflicted Surinamese Jewry. The Essai historique begins by emphasizing that the story of Surinamese Jewry is inextricably bound up with that of the colony itself, so much so that one cannot be told without the other. The authors build their case by portraying the Jewish planters as benevolent and as contributing significantly to the war against the Maroons so that they “equal the Christians in courage, in discipline, and in their burning zeal to serve the colony” (66). Couching their argument in the terms of the dominant morality of their time, the authors of the Essai historique malign Blacks and do not question the treatment of the Jewish Mulattos by the Jewish community, instead downplaying the conflict between the Jewish Mulattos and the Mahamad.25 If the Essai historique contested a colonial historiography that neglected the contribution of Surinamese Jews and denied their rights,

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McLeod continues this project, but does so from a postcolonial perspective that simultaneously emphasizes the Jews’ utter dependency on slavery and their complicity in the plantation system. McLeod’s novel advances a specifically Caribbean perspective on Black-Jewish relations in the colonial Americas, combining these commemorative and critical functions without any sense of contradiction. Hoe duur was de suiker? is neither governed by a U.S.-style tabulation of suffering and competing claims to victimhood, nor does it subscribe to apologist narratives of Jewish Atlantic history. Instead, it is characterized by a matter-of-fact attitude toward the history of Jewish slaveholding and concubinage. Hoe duur was de suiker? concludes with the colonial economy in crisis and Jodensavanne in decline. When Julius abandons his coffee plantation Klein Paradijs and Sarith to make a life with Mini-mini in town, the fate of his plantation presages that of the Jewish plantations and Jodensavanne as a whole: “the plantation, which in time would be empty—empty and deserted. Where only the buildings would remain until they were completely engulfed by vegetation and collapsed. Nature would reclaim what was hers. Bushes and trees would grow there, and after thirty, maybe fifty years there would be nothing to distinguish the spot from the rest of the jungle. Klein Paradijs on the Voben-Commewijne would be forever history” (284). In this passage McLeod employs the classic Caribbean literary trope of a plantation becoming ruinate and being reclaimed by nature to suggest the ultimately unsustainable character of the plantation system, including its Sephardic Jewish variant. The deaths of the governor and Elza’s grandmother, which follow numerous other deaths resulting from yellow fever, further signal the failure of the dream of a new Jerusalem in Jodensavanne and the end of a chapter of Sephardic Caribbean history. The novel’s epilogue once again combines critique and commemoration while explicitly establishing the family as metonym for the colony in keeping with Sommer’s analysis of foundational fictions. Elza finally comes to recognize the true value of the slave population as those upon whom the whites are utterly reliant: It now occurred to Elza that her family was in fact a model for all Suriname society. Wasn’t everyone and everything totally dependent on the

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slaves? Just as she felt so completely lost without Maisa, so the colony would be totally lost without its slaves. They did everything and knew everything, and the whites knew nothing and were incapable of anything. The whites needed the negroes, but the negroes didn’t need a single white person: look how the Maroons had managed to create a complete society in the jungle, knowing how to put everything to good use. (286)

Simultaneously, in the epilogue the commemoration of the Jewish presence in Suriname is reasserted through the motif of the Kaddish that is recited in the cemetery over the grave of Elza’s grandmother: “The murmur of voices greeted them. They were the voices of the men who were saying the Kaddish, standing there in the cemetery among the graves of their ancestors: the Portuguese Jews, the first colonists, who, after the British, had dared make Suriname their fatherland” (290). This final, elegiac scene, which takes place in a Jewish cemetery that is among the oldest in the hemisphere, once again exhibits an important site of Jewish Caribbean memory. Grandmother Fernandez’s birthdate is October 12, 1700, the fifteenth anniversary of the Beracha Ve Shalom Synagogue’s founding. Sharing a birthday with the synagogue, the grandmother’s life spans that of an epoch in the life of the Surinamese Jewish community. Thus the Kaddish that the community recites over her grave is also a Kaddish for a neglected chapter of Caribbean Jewish history.

GENEALOGY AND ROMANCE IN U.S. JEWISH PLANTATION NARRATIVES McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? inaugurates a distinctive subgenre of contemporary slavery fiction: the novel of Jewish plantation life. Given the historically small number of Jewish plantation owners in the colonial Americas as well as the contentious contemporary politics surrounding the question of Jewish involvement in the slave trade, it is not surprising that literary depictions of plantation Jews are scarcer in slavery fiction than are depictions of port Jews. Nonetheless, recent U.S. literature offers two noteworthy portrayals of Jewish planters that

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bear comparison with McLeod’s: Matthew Lopez’s play The Whipping Man (2011) and Alan Cheuse’s Song of Slaves in the Desert: A Novel of Slavery and the Southern Wild (2011). A brief discussion of these U.S. examples will illustrate how the theme of Jewish plantation life carries across New World writing, just as early modern Sephardim themselves dispersed across the hemisphere. At the same time, Lopez’s and Cheuse’s Civil War narratives will illuminate the distinctive character of McLeod’s Caribbean perspective on the historical phenomenon of plantation Jews. This difference is illustrated by Lopez’s and Cheuse’s diverging approach to the tropes of genealogy and master/slave romance and by their heavy reliance on the device of dramatic revelation. Lopez’s widely produced Civil War drama The Whipping Man, which was first staged in 2006, treats a number of the same themes that I have traced in other works of slavery literature, including the presence of Jews in the colonial economy, resonances between Jewish and African diaspora cultural narratives, and Jewish slaveholding.26 The Whipping Man, which takes place in April 1865 on the plantation of the DeLeon family, explores the themes of bondage and freedom, sin and atonement against the backdrop of the post–Civil War U.S. South. The play’s pared-down cast consists of three men: the former slaves Simon and John and the Confederate captain Caleb DeLeon, the scion of a Richmond, Virginia planter family. At the play’s opening, Caleb, who is plagued by a gangrenous leg, returns home to the family plantation in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to encounter his newly liberated slaves. What lends interest to this otherwise not particularly original dramatic premise is the fact that the DeLeon family is Jewish. Like the slavery literature examined in chapter 3, in Lopez’s The Whipping Man, a singular Jewish figure stands in for a larger Jewish population—in this case, that of the antebellum South. As in other slavery narratives, this typological approach contributes to an emphasis on the Jew’s moral accountability for his role in the crimes of slavery. Caleb’s gangrenous leg, which is graphically amputated at the end of the first scene, suggests the moral rot engendered by the DeLeons’—and by extension other Southern Jews’—involvement in the slavery system. As Simon proclaims toward the end of the play, Caleb has been psychologically scarred by his participation in the institution of slavery: “How ’bout

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your leg, there? You’re forever branded, just like a slave. You a slave to your old ideas. How deeply those enslavements have scarred the world!” (68). The dilapidated DeLeon plantation house in which the action of the play unfolds further suggests the ruined character of the Southern Jewish moral landscape. In The Whipping Man, this association of Jewishness with ethics is advanced through quotations from Jewish liturgy offered by the ex-slaves Simon and John, to whom the DeLeons have imparted their faith, as well as through Simon’s religious devotion. Simon, the most senior and devout of the three men, represents the moral center of the play. Over the course of The Whipping Man, Simon and John, both of whom are well versed in Jewish ritual, recite Shabbat blessings and engage in a debate over whether it is permissible in their malnourished state to eat unkosher horse meat. Both former slaves also chide Caleb for abandoning his faith out of despair at what he has witnessed in battle. Caleb’s failure to join with Simon and John in reciting the blessings constitutes another sign of his moral decline along with the revelation that he has deserted his regiment. Above all, the ethical framing of the drama is advanced through the motif of the Passover seder. Capitalizing on the historical detail that Passover began the day after Lee surrendered at Appomatox, Lopez offers the seder as a neat device for exploring questions of freedom and slavery as well as Jewish and African American modes of memorializing the past. In keeping with modern interpretations of Passover as an occasion for reflecting on the broader social relevance of the Jewish festival, the impromptu seder that the three men hastily assemble in act 2 becomes a vehicle to explore the relationship between Jewish and African American cultural narratives of slavery and freedom. An illiterate, Simon has memorized the Haggadah given to him by Caleb’s grandfather and prizes it as his sole possession. Simon leads the seder from memory but periodically breaks away from the text of the Haggadah to sing verses of “Go Down Moses.” Lopez’s clever interweaving of the Haggadah with the African American spiritual—his juxtaposition of the two cultures’ rhetorical traditions—highlights resonances between Jewish and African American historical experience and reminds the audience of the inspiration that African Americans drew from the Old Testament in

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narrating their own traumatic history. Yet this dialogue between Jewish and African American oratory and tradition also generates tensions in the play. Read against the backdrop of the Civil War, the Haggadah’s themes of freedom and slavery take on a new urgency, rendering more immediate the meaning of the Passover ritual. Scrounging for materials to complete the seder plate, Simon substitutes an actual brick for the charoset that traditionally stands in for the bricks and mortar used by the Israelites when they were enslaved in ancient Egypt. In Lopez’s seder the metaphor is returned to its literal origin, while the African American slaves become the rightful inheritors and interpreters of the Chosen People’s ritual traditions.27 The Exodus narrative is invoked in The Whipping Man not only to identify points of connection between Black and Jewish experience but also to call Jews to moral account and to expose their religious hypocrisy. Quoting a passage from Leviticus that prohibits Jews from owning their fellow Jews while allowing the enslavement of heathens, John asks: “Were we Jews or were we slaves?” (42). Lopez explains in an interview that his discovery of the fact of Jewish slaveholding “illustrated for me how pernicious and unavoidable slavery was: that Jews, with their own history of enslavement could own slaves themselves. It seemed to me the most regrettable of hypocrisies and one that might resonate with a modern audience, both Jewish and non-Jewish. We are all the result of the mistakes and the hypocrisies of our American forebears” (“Interview”). Thus in Lopez’s play Jewish religious hypocrisy stands in for a larger American moral failing. At the same time, however, the play draws its dramatic charge from the belief that the Jewish planters’ hypocrisy is more acute than is that of the larger society because of Jews’ historical memory of their own enslavement. The notion that Jewish slaveholders were more benevolent than their Christian counterparts at first receives some support from Simon, who insists to John: “You know we had it a world better than [other slaves] did. Coming here after your mamma died was the best thing that could have happened to you. You could have been sold to a plantation. You could have been sold to a Christian home” (42). In keeping with other depictions in postslavery writing of female Jewish characters as kindhearted, altruistic figures, Mrs. DeLeon had attempted to teach Simon

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to read. but had been prevented from continuing in this endeavor by her husband. Simon also reports that Mr. DeLeon has promised him money upon his emancipation. Yet the more cynical John advances a different perspective, one that is intent on unearthing the truth about his Jewish master. When John first appears in act 1, he comes before Caleb in the guise of an executioner, foretelling the disclosure of the DeLeons’ crimes that is to come. The play then proceeds to unfold a series of revelations that build progressively to expose the unsavory truth about the DeLeon family. Beginning with Caleb’s admission that he had whipped John when they were both children, the play subsequently discloses that Mr. DeLeon has sold Simon’s wife Elizabeth and daughter Sarah upon learning that Sarah was pregnant by Caleb. It is later revealed that both Mr. DeLeon and his father had had Simon whipped despite Caleb’s claim to the contrary that his father abhorred the practice. Finally, we learn that Mr. DeLeon, like Caleb, had fathered a child (presumably John) by one of his slaves. The Whipping Man thus centers on a Jewish crime that is unveiled through a series of dramatic revelations, relying, as Charles Isherwood noted in his New York Times review, “on suddenly sprung revelations to stoke its dramatic fires.” Initially, the play’s unconventional focus on Jewish rather than Gentile planters and on Black slaves’ Jewish ritual practice appears to challenge the master/slave polarity that traditionally undergirds slavery literature. In the second act, however, the sharp opposition between Simon’s moral righteousness and Caleb’s and John’s moral failings tends to flatten out these areas of ambiguity. For example, absent from the play is any exploration of the experience of Jews as a religious minority in the antebellum South. Instead, Lopez’s play is centered on the master-slave relationship and insists that, in the final analysis, the exploitative character of this relationship is absolute. Refusing to accept Caleb’s repeated apologies, Simon states at the end of the play that Caleb’s true birthright are the scars on Simon’s back: “You see this? From the Whipping Man. Your father sent me. And your grandfather, too. I got your family tree right here on my back. You see? This is what this was. This is your legacy. This is your family’s legacy” (73). This more absolutist perspective becomes particularly apparent in the play’s presentation of the relationship between Caleb and Simon’s

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daughter Sarah. At the opening of act 2, Caleb reads a love letter to Sarah composed in the trenches outside Petersburg. Although the letter appears heartfelt, its saccharine rhetoric is deflated by John, who dismisses it as “pretty flowery stuff ” (59). Caleb’s references to the slave girl as “my Sarah” suggest the dynamic of ownership that underpins their relationship. Simon later insists that Caleb does not understand the true nature of his bond with Sarah: CALEB: I loved her. SIMON: YOU OWNED HER! You loved her? How did you love her Caleb? Like you love a dog. . . . You might have thought you loved Sarah but you also owned her. And if this hadn’t all just happened, you would have owned your baby too. You would have owned your own child, Caleb. CALEB: No, that’s not how it was. SIMON: You don’t know how it was. You don’t know what this was. You don’t have any idea. (73)

In contrast, then, to Condé’s Moi, Tituba and McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker?, in Lopez’s The Whipping Man there can be no consensual romance between Jewish master and Black slave. The romance plot between a Jewish master and a Black slave girl also features prominently in Cheuse’s novel Song of Slaves in the Desert. So, too, does the Exodus narrative, which, as in Lopez’s play, is ironized in order to highlight Jewish hypocrisy and to condemn Southern Jews’ collusion in the plantation system. Yet, where The Whipping Man favors a kind of hard realism, Song of Slaves indulges in melodrama and exoticism, in keeping with the plantation romance genre that it emulates. Cheuse’s novel centers on the twenty-one-year-old Nate Pereira, the grandson of a Dutch Jew and the son of a Curaçao-born Jew who is involved in import/export. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the Pereira family is split between New York City and Charleston, where Nate is sent by his father to determine whether to invest in his uncle’s Carolina rice plantation. Song of Slaves thus incorporates both the figures of the port Jew and the plantation Jew, here distributed

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across North and South. The novel tracks the innocent young Yankee’s initiation into the world of Southern Jewry, whose moral degeneracy is embodied in Nate’s uncle’s girth and liberal consumption of spirits. In the South Nate encounters an unfamiliar breed of Jew: “I had never known a Jew who drank like this, or, for a fact, owned a plantation with slaves, either” (64). Nate’s initiation into the world of the plantation is much like that of Rutger Le Chasseur in Hoe duur was de suiker?, who upon his arrival in Suriname finds himself continually astonished by the indolence of the colonists and by their unenlightened treatment of their slaves. Both novels to some extent follow the conventions of the travel narrative in which the local, Southern scene is viewed through the eyes of a Northern outsider.28 Yet, in contrast to McLeod, Cheuse associates the degeneracy of the plantation society with a betrayal of Jewishness itself. Jewish religious observance in Charleston is more relaxed than is its Northern counterpart. Nathan observes that his Charleston relatives drive on the Sabbath and have abandoned Hebrew so that they have come to “sound like Gentiles” (85). He is surprised to discover that the Charleston congregation, Beth Elohim, has discontinued separate seating for the two sexes, uses English liberally, and is led by an “Officiating Minister” rather than a rabbi. Nate concludes that “these Reformed Jews certainly seemed to me to be further along in the dissolution of our religion than most of us who did nothing but pay lip-service at ceremonies such as this only a few times a year” (162). As these plot details illustrate, Cheuse’s novel is organized around a sharp opposition between North and South, civilization and barbarism, healthy and degenerate Judaism. Nate, a righteous and “a good man” (446), stands in contrast to his Southern cousin Jonathan, who has been so thoroughly corrupted by the ways of the plantation that, after being exposed as a murderer and a rapist, he must be killed off at the end of the novel. Like Lopez, Cheuse puts forward and then debunks the notion that Jewish planters observe a higher moral standard than their Gentile counterparts. Also echoing The Whipping Man, late in Cheuse’s novel a closely guarded family secret is revealed: the slave Isaac is in fact the son of Nate’s uncle and a cousin to Nate. When Jonathan discovers that his father has named Isaac as an heir in his will, he murders his half-brother.

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An even darker secret, also revealed toward the end of the novel, is that the slave girl Liza is both Jonathan’s daughter and the victim of his incestuous sexual exploitation. Yet the crime that the novel uncovers is not so much miscegenation or incest as it is the fact of Jewish slaveholding itself. Nonetheless, Cheuse ultimately seeks redemption for his nineteenth-century American Jews. The idealized ending of the novel, in which Ishmael, the son of Liza and Nate, reunites with Nate’s family and is warmly welcomed by them, reaffirms Northern Jews as the “good” Jews and reincorporates the Black line into the Jewish family in what could be read as a reworking of a more recent civil rights past. Somewhat peculiarly, Cheuse employs the trope of the distorted, repressed genealogy of the planter’s family to assert the affiliation of Blacks and Jews whose kinship in the novel is made literal.29 Much like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Lopez’s and Cheuse’ Civil War narratives elaborate a family structure distorted by miscegenation, rape, and incest and hinge on the revelation of impure genealogies whose denial sows the seeds of the planter family’s destruction. In The Whipping Man and Song of Slaves the primary effect of such revelations is to debunk the myth of benevolent Jewish slaveholding. While initially appearing to explore the ambivalences and nuances that surround Jewish plantation life, Lopez and Cheuse ultimately revert to a polarized reading of this historical phenomenon, one that is reinforced by a moral structure that condemns slaveholding as “un-Jewish.” I would suggest that this pattern reflects the extent to which U.S. representations of plantation Jews such as Lopez’s and Cheuse’s are overdetermined by the larger controversy surrounding Jews and the slave trade that unfolded in the early 1990s. Indeed, in an interview with NPR, Cheuse explained that he wrote Song of Slaves in direct response to the assertion made in the 1990s by Len Jeffries, a professor at the City College of New York, that “the Jews had bankrolled the trans-Atlantic slave trade” (Cheuse, “Alan Cheuse”). The difficulty of literary responses such as Cheuse’s to this controversy is that, by centering the slavery novel on the figure of the Jewish planter, they cannot help but make Jewish slaveholding appear disproportionate in its historical significance. Moreover, U.S. Jewish plantation narratives tend to hold the Jewish characters to a higher moral standard and to expose their religious hypocrisy as people who

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should “know better” because of their own historical memory of slavery. As we saw in chapter 3, Caribbean slavery fiction and drama exhibits the inverse tendency, introducing the Jew’s higher moral perspective to underscore the ethical failings of Christian planters and slave masters. Instead of the divide between good and bad Jews that we see in Cheuse, in Caribbean neoslave narratives we tend more often to encounter good Jews and bad Gentiles. McLeod’s Hoe duur was de suiker? departs from both models, refusing to read Jewishness in moral terms. McLeod references a different cultural and historical context in which Jewish plantations are a wellknown fact of colonial history rather than a scandalous secret to be unearthed. She portrays early modern Caribbean Sephardim as for the most part unquestioningly accepting the norms of the colony. They justify slavery as ordained by God, revile the Maroons, and engage freely in the sexual exploitation of their slaves as well as concubinage or “Suriname-style marriage.”30 As a result, McLeod’s Sephardic Jewish planter families contain within them Black lines of descent. Sarith’s slave Minimini, for example, is the daughter of a slave woman and either Sarith’s father Jacob or her brother Ishaak, so that “no-one seeing [Sarith and Mini-mini] together could avoid the impression that there was a striking resemblance in face and figure” (15). In McLeod’s novel, such evidence of Jewish-Black miscegenation is not suppressed and then ultimately exposed as part of a crime story narrative structure. Instead, it is offered in passing early on in the novel as part of a larger portrait of a society in which concubinage between Jewish planters and their Black slave women was considered an accepted part of the social order.31 McLeod’s treatment of concubinage and the romance plot contrasts both with the sense of moral condemnation that we find in Lopez and with the exoticism of Cheuse. In Hoe duur was de suiker?, Julius and Mini-mini enter into a Suriname-style marriage after Julius’s discovery of Sarith’s betrayal of him with Lieutenant Andersma. Notably, McLeod portrays the relationship between Julius and Mini-mini as consensual and as transcending the roles of master and slave: “Those were no glances between master and slave, but between two lovers” (255). Julius does not want to abuse his position as master: “It would have been easy for him to have taken her in his desire. He was, after all, her master. But

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that was something he didn’t want. His feelings for her were too deep, too sincere for him to misuse her in that way. . . . No, she would have to give herself in love or not at all” (250–51). After rescuing Mini-mini from a slave trader who has raped her, Julius installs her as his concubine and then finally abandons the Klein Paradijs plantation altogether, going to live with Mini-mini in town and telling Sarith that he plans to give Mini-mini’s sons his name—a significant gesture that represents an acknowledgment of the miscegenated character of the Jewish planter’s family line.32 McLeod’s idealized presentation of the romance between planter and concubine risks mystifying the sexual exploitation of female slaves, raising similar issues to those I considered in chapter 3 in relation to Condé’s Moi, Tituba. However, McLeod militates against this critique by juxtaposing Mini-mini’s and Julius’ courtship with less romanticized examples of concubinage—such as that which produced Mini-mini herself—as well as numerous scenes that illustrate the vulnerability of slave girls to sexual exploitation. Moreover, in Hoe duur was de suiker? the themes of miscegenation and genealogy are not introduced for the purpose of generating the sense of shock on which Lopez’s play and Cheuse’s novel pivot. Instead, while reflecting its generic framing as a plantation melodrama, Hoe duur was de suiker?’s genealogical emphasis is directed toward an interest in tracing the multiethnic lineages of the colony. As we have seen, echoing Latin American foundational fictions in which eroticism is a figure for national reconciliation and consolidation, the crossing of racial, cultural, and class boundaries is advanced in Hoe duur was de suiker? through a series of romance narratives that establish the nation’s creolized origins. The novel’s central marriage and romance plots between the half-Jewish Elza and the French Hugenot Rutger, and between the Jewish planter Julius and the slavegirl Minimini, signal the ethnic and religious multiplicity of the Surinamese population. Thus they contribute to a postcolonial nation-building project, as befits a novel written by the daughter of Suriname’s first president after independence.33 McLeod’s romance plots contrast not only with those of Lopez and Cheuse but also with a nineteenth-century precursor to the genre of Jewish plantation fiction, Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867). Isaacs, the son of

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a Jamaican Jew who converted to Catholicism, was a Colombian journalist and politician whose only novel is one of the founding works of Latin American literature. In her influential reading of Isaacs’s novel, Sommer argues that the suppressed Jewishness of María and her suitor Efraín, both of whom are descended from Jewish converts, represents both the racially unassimilable Blacks and a declining, enfeebled plantocracy. Accordingly, while other nineteenth-century Latin American novels stage unions between protagonists of different backgrounds in order to effect a reconciliation, María’s relationship with Efraín fails when she dies of a mysterious illness. In Hoe duur was de suiker?, by contrast, both Jews and Blacks are assimilated into the national family. The mixed unions of Elza and Rutger and Mini-mini and Julius stage reconciliations between three of Suriname’s founding peoples, inscribing the African and Jewish as well as Christian European origins of the nation. Through their cross-cultural romances, McLeod’s Surinamese Jews become indigenized, Africanized, and integrated into the history of the colony. At the same time, the Fernandez family tree, with its hybrid and miscegenated structure, becomes a metonym for the colony of Suriname as a whole. / / /

In the plantation sagas examined in this chapter, Black genealogical lines are incorporated into the Jewish family structure. The affiliation between Blacks and Jews is not merely symbolic but instead is converted through the space of the plantation into a more concrete and historically informed understanding of Black-Jewish kinship as biological. The texts’ generic framing as plantation family sagas draws attention to Jewish participation in the practices of slaveholding and concubinage and to the miscegenated lineages that result. Lopez’s and Cheuse’s reliance on the crime story structure and the device of dramatic revelation to relate this history suggests the difficulty of confronting the fact of Jewish slave ownership in a contemporary U.S. cultural setting inflected by the Nation of Islam polemic. McLeod’s novel, by contrast, adopts a more a matter-of-fact tone with regard to Jewish slaveholding and colonial Jews’ conformism to the dominant morality of their time. When asked in an

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interview whether Surinamese Jews supported emancipation, McLeod responded perhaps, “but not relatively more than others” (“Personal interview”).34 This perspective, which is in line with recent findings of historians of the Jewish Atlantic, complicates narratives of Jewish victimhood and challenges notions of Jewish exceptionalism, disrupting the identification of Jewishness with ethics that persists elsewhere in Caribbean slavery literature. McLeod’s adherence to the plantation saga, a more conservative genre of slavery fiction that prevailed until the 1980s, exerts certain constraints upon her novel. Despite its diversification of perspectives on the slavery past, Hoe duur was de suiker? is not concerned with questions of narrative authority. Instead, the novel’s orderly structure is stabilized by an omniscient consciousness that unifies the various perspectives it interpolates. Hoe duur was de suiker? is both less conscious of slavery as a discursive field than the novels that I examined in chapter 3 and less formally experimental. And yet, paradoxically, this generic conservatism liberates McLeod from the typological strategy that the neoslave narratives discussed in chapter 3 adopted. The neoslave narrative’s emphasis on the slave’s testimonial voice affords little space for a nuanced portrayal of Jewish subjectivity and historical experience. Similarly, the film adaptation of Hoe duur was de suiker? flattens McLeod’s complex portrayal of the ambivalences of Surinamese Jewish history by reframing the narrative as a slave testimony and by recentering it on the relatively marginal character of the slave-girl Mini-mini, who becomes the author and narrator of the story.35 By contrast, alongside and in tandem with the experiences of slaves and Dutch mercenary soldiers, McLeod’s capacious, multicentered novel explores the Surinamese Jews’ struggle to establish a secure homeland in the Caribbean colony and portrays them as exhibiting a broad spectrum of behavior toward their slaves ranging from barbarous cruelty and abuse to benevolence, sympathy, familial affection, and even romantic love. Neither are McLeod’s Jews archetypes or invented figures who have no existence independent of dominant discourses about the Other. Instead of being employed as emblems or devices that advance the slave protagonist’s storyline, in Hoe duur was de suiker? Jews—for better or for worse—become the primary subjects of the slavery narrative.

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n an interview about her novel Hoe duur was de suiker? and the participation of Sephardic Jews in the colonial settlement of Suriname, Cynthia McLeod refers several times to a more recent history of Jewish emigration to the Caribbean. McLeod explains that one of the inspirations for her novel was a Dutch Jewish childhood friend whose family arrived in Suriname just before the outbreak of World War II. Although the interviewer’s questions address the Sephardic Caribbean colonial past, McLeod repeatedly redirects the conversation to World War II, proudly noting the Surinamese protest in December 1942 against the treatment of European Jewry as well as the decision of the Surinamese parliament to open the country’s doors to Jewish refugees during the war (“Personal interview”). Layered together in McLeod’s consciousness and literary imagination, then, are two Jewish Caribbean stories: that of early modern Sephardic Jews’ attempt to make a homeland in Suriname in the aftermath of the Iberian expulsion and that of the Jewish refugees from the Nazis who fled to Suriname. This interpenetration of Caribbean Sephardic and Holocaust memory is neither unique to McLeod nor to the Surinamese context. Instead, it can be identified in the work of a number of the writers considered in this study and is part of what gives Caribbean literary engagements with the Holocaust their distinctive character.

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Stef Craps has observed that Holocaust comparisons can be as much harmful as beneficial, especially when claims to the universalism of the Holocaust are being made.1 Rather than fostering cross-cultural alliances, the Eurocentric prioritization of Holocaust memory over the memories of colonial and Indigenous atrocities can serve to reinscribe a form of cultural imperialism (Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing 80). Indeed, it is precisely because Holocaust analogies are so often freighted with exceptionalist arguments, competitive memory, and a perception of the Holocaust as a litmus test for other atrocities that I argued in the first half of this book that 1492 holds certain advantages over the Holocaust as a gateway to interdiasporic comparison. Nonetheless, as the next three chapters will demonstrate, Holocaust memory also significantly informs postwar Caribbean/diaspora writing and claims our attention alongside the related phenomenon of Caribbean literary sephardism. Particularly prevalent in the work of Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during World War II or in the early postwar period, the Holocaust is read in Caribbean literature against the legacies of the Middle Passage. Until recently, there has been little dialogue between postcolonial and Holocaust studies. Now, however, as part of a larger move to examine the transnational and global circulation of memory and especially Holocaust memory, scholars such as Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman are seeking to overcome the institutional silos between the two disciplines. With particular reference to the French colonial context, they recover an early postwar moment in which analysts of fascism such as Hannah Arendt and anticolonial thinkers such as Césaire and Fanon drew parallels between antisemitism and colonialism. In Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1955) and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), such analogies animate a powerful critique of European imperial formations. Césaire explains in Discourse on Colonialism that he “talk[s] a good deal about Hitler” because “he makes it possible to see things on a large scale” (15). For Césaire, Nazism is colonialism redirected inward at white victims; wartime Europe finds itself suffering “a terrific reverse shock” of its colonial enterprise (14). For his part, Fanon resists his teacher Césaire’s conflation of colonial racism and antisemitism by focusing attention on the particularities of Black and Jewish bodies. Nonetheless Fanon continues to rely heavily on Césaire’s organizing analogy: “Anti-Semitism

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hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother” (88–89). Both Césaire and Fanon thus participate in a tradition of anticolonial thought that understood Nazism as, in Amílcar Cabral’s words, “the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination” (39). This early postwar tradition of comparative thinking about the Holocaust and colonial racism subsequently was disavowed by both Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies as they became institutionalized in the academy. A notable exception is Paul Gilroy, who in the final chapter of The Black Atlantic calls for a fuller acknowledgment of the impact of Jewish thought on Black Atlantic intellectuals such as himself and for a recognition of “the longevity of the overt and covert conversations between black and Jewish thinkers,” one that could help to repair the political divisions between Blacks and Jews (206). In his more recent work Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (2000, published in the U.S. as Against Race), Gilroy continues to pursue what he describes as an unfashionable interest in fascism and its relationship to colonial racism. While The Black Atlantic concludes by introducing the rather taboo subject of Black thinkers’ indebtedness to Jewish intellectual traditions, Between Camps opens with this theme, giving it still greater prominence. In Between Camps Gilroy’s attention to the history of antisemitism advances his central project of denaturing race. As is signaled by the volume’s title, for Gilroy, this cross-cultural focus contributes to the development of a relational (in the Glissantian sense) approach that militates against “all currently fashionable obligations to celebrate incommensurability and cheerlead for absolute identity” (6–7). Gilroy, then, can be read as Césaire’s and Fanon’s heir to the extent that his project is one of thinking the histories of racism and fascism together. Indeed, Gilroy opens Between Camps with an epigraph from Black Skin, White Masks (also cited by Phillips in The European Tribe) in which Fanon describes how his Antillean philosophy professor warned him: “‘Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you’” (1). Gilroy then proceeds to locate the origins of his critique of the modern idea of race and his advocacy of a “planetary humanism” in his

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childhood contact with World War II and its Jewish survivors. He urges his readers to consider the understudied question of “what impact the war against fascism and Nazi race-thinking had upon the way that black intellectuals understood themselves, their predicament, and the fate of Western culture and civilization” (5).2 Bryan Cheyette has identified several reasons for postcolonial studies’ reluctance to engage in the kind of dialogue with Jewish studies that Gilroy pursues. According to Cheyette, the obstacles on postcolonial studies’ side include “a strand of postcolonial theory which is unable to perceive Jews as anything other than as part of the majoritarian tradition” (“Venetian Spaces” 54), Jews’ historical participation in colonial projects, and Zionism’s status as itself a form of colonialism. An additional factor cited by Cheyette that has particular relevance for the present study is the fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States. By recentering discussions of Black-Jewish relations on the Caribbean, I seek to take some distance from this U.S. setting in which Holocaust memory competes for real estate on the Washington Mall with the memories of Black and Native American atrocities and where “the Americanisation of the Holocaust . . . allows the United States to forget or play down its policies of genocide and racial oppression on its own back door” (Cheyette, “Venetian Spaces” 58). Discussions of Holocaust memory and its relationship to Black culture in the United States often take for granted a logic of competition and appropriation while also assuming the fundamentally discrete character of Jewish and Black histories of trauma.3 As I will show, moving beyond the U.S. national frame and challenging the Americanization of the Holocaust as well as of Black-Jewish relations encourages us to rethink such expectations. The Caribbean literary invocations of the Holocaust that I examine here are predominantly identificatory rather than competitive in character. At the same time, they are also informed by a complicating awareness of the entangled nature of Jewish and Caribbean diasporic histories— an awareness that challenges both an identitarian logic of appropriation and an automatic association of Jewishness with victimhood. While Césaire’s and Fanon’s early postwar practice of linking colonial racism to fascism in their anticolonial theory has been helpfully mapped by Rothberg and Cheyette, the pattern of Holocaust imagery

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and intertextual allusions to Holocaust narratives that we find in postwar Caribbean literature remains less well understood. Although several cultural critics have begun the work of opening up a conversation between postcolonial and Holocaust studies, often with reference to individual Caribbean intellectuals and writers, missing thus far from these discussions has been an examination of a Caribbean literary tradition of cross-cultural identification with Jewish experience that extends beyond the 1950s and beyond the context of francophone anticolonial theory. Where contemporary Caribbean/diaspora writers (in particular Caryl Phillips) have figured in these discussions, they have largely been examined in isolation from such a tradition. My aim in tracing this tradition is not to impose a universalizing or Eurocentric framework onto Caribbean literature but rather to identify the relevance of the Holocaust to Caribbean literature first as a historical phenomenon that spanned European and Caribbean geographies, second as a symbolic site of surrogate memory and identification, and finally in terms of the genres of writing that it engendered. Chapter 5 illustrates how Caribbean literary invocations of the Holocaust recover the little known episode of Holocaust history to which McLeod refers in her interview of Jewish refugees from the Nazis who fled to the Caribbean in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Chapter 6 examines Black Holocaust fiction and the phenomenon of surrogate memory, demonstrating that an identification with the Holocaust represents a generational phenomenon in Caribbean/diaspora intellectual and literary history. Finally, chapter 7 explores this pattern of cross-cultural identification with specific reference to the diary genre and intertextual allusions to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl while also considering how the Sephardic Caribbean past informs and complicates Caribbean Holocaust narratives. Taken together, these discussions of a variety of facets of Caribbean Holocaust memory contribute to broader efforts to bridge the gap between postcolonial studies and Holocaust studies. More specifically, they illuminate the relationship between Caribbean Holocaust memory and literary representation. The tendency of the texts I discuss to incorporate scenes of writing and reading reveals how the historical phenomenon of Caribbean Holocaust memory becomes entangled with questions of authorship and canonicity.

5 CALYPSO JEWS J O H N H EA R N E AN D JAMAIC A K IN CAID

Tell me what you think of a dictator Trampling the Jews like Adolph Hitler Tumbling them out of Germany Some running for refuge in the West Indies Some land in Demerara and Grenada They land in Trinidad very regular The way they are coming all of them Will make Trinidad a new Jerusalem Since Jews coming to this Colony They are marrying and raising a family In a couple of years, believe it’s true Trinidad children will be only Jews —Gorilla, “Jews in the West Indies” (1938)

In Germany I was the “Jew boy”; in Brussels I was the “dirty German”; in France I was “undesirable”; in Portugal I was the refugee; in Jamaica I was simply a non-entity. —Fred Mann, A Drastic Turn of Destiny

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iscussions of the relationship of the Holocaust to Black experience tend to understand the analogy as an abstract one between disparate historical traumas. Yet, in the Caribbean context, Holocaust memory and the postslavery landscape intersect in a more concrete and historically grounded fashion. In the late 1930s hundreds of European Jewish refugees arrived in Trinidad, where they formed a “calypso shtetl” and dubbed themselves the “Calypso Jews.” Moreover, not only Trinidad but a number of other sites across the Caribbean region, including Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and Curaçao, served as havens for Jewish refugees from the Nazis.1 This little-known chapter of Holocaust refugee history, which has recently drawn the attention of Holocaust scholars, is a recurring motif in postwar Caribbean/diaspora fiction. Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun (1952), for example, opens with the following lines: “On New Year’s Day, 1939,

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Gravestones of the Calypso Jews in the Bet Olam section of the Mucurapo Cemetery, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.

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Gravestone of Walter Julius Hahn in the Bet Olam section of the Mucurapo Cemetery, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.

while Trinidadians who had money or hopes of winning money were attending the races in the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain, a number of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe landed on the island” (3). Refugee Jews make a more sustained appearance in Cuban American writer Margarita Engle’s more recent work Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (2009). Engle’s book-length poem for young adults tells the story of Daniel, a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy who arrives in Cuba in 1939 fleeing Nazi Germany: My parents chose to save me instead of saving themselves, so now, here I am, alone on a German ship stranded in Havana Harbor, halfway around the huge world.

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Thousands of other Jewish refugees stand all around me on the deck of the ship, waiting for refuge. (6)

Engle’s poignant poem is punctuated by the ships that continually arrive and depart, recalling the tragic journey of the SS St. Louis, the ship carrying refugees from the Nazis that was denied entry into Cuba when it arrived there in 1939. In Achy Obejas’s novel Days of Awe, which I discussed in part 1 and that also invokes the journey of the St. Louis, the Holocaust refugee narrative is intertwined with a Sephardic Caribbean plotline. In Days of Awe Enrique, a crypto-Jew of Sephardic ancestry, works in the Havana flower shop of Gregor Olinsky, an elderly Polish Jewish refugee and Auschwitz survivor who had made his way to Cuba on a Spanish freighter during World War II. Much to their misfortune, Enrique and his father Ytzak decide to openly profess their Jewishness for the first time after five hundred years of suppression at the very moment in which modern antisemitism is peaking in 1930s Cuba. Strikingly, the central mystery in Days of Awe ultimately surrounds not Enrique’s crypto-Jewish origins, but a photograph of a passenger on the St. Louis whom Enrique met in 1939 in Havana harbor. Toward the end of the novel, the reader learns of Enrique’s connection to the tragic history of the St. Louis: “When the ship was docked here—it was out on the bay for almost a week—your father was helping with mail and taking papers out there and stuff. He’d row a boat out and, with the passengers’ relatives who were already here, he’d toss up cans of food, that sort of thing. One day he managed to get about a half dozen pineapples up to the ship, a real delicacy for the Europeans. He was very proud of himself. The girl was someone he saw there, someone, I think, who noticed him, someone he had a fantasy about.” (350)

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When the St. Louis is forced to return to Europe, an embittered Enrique begins to dissociate himself from his newly recovered Jewish identity and, in a moment of weakness and fear, he is swept up in an anti-semitic mob demonstration and joins in the mob’s chorus of “Heil Hitler!” (353). Thus in Days of Awe, the Ashkenazi and Sephardic diasporas— Holocaust and inquisitorial narratives—intersect and commingle with one another. Jewish doctors are perhaps the most commonly occurring variation of this figure of the Jewish escapee from the Nazis, briefly appearing in such Caribbean classics as V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and Michelle Cliff ’s Abeng (1984). In A House for Mr. Biswas Mrs. Tulsi is treated by a Jewish refugee doctor who “came once a week and listened. The house was always specially prepared for him, and Mrs. Tulsi treated him with love. He resurrected all that remained of her softness and humour” (519). In Abeng the narrator recounts that “the doctor who had delivered [Clare] had escaped from Germany himself. He stopped in Jamaica for five years waiting for a visa from America, and left to find the remainder of his family there” (69). Cliff revisits this same figure in her more recent novel Into the Interior: “The doctor who delivered me had escaped from Austria through a pipeline that flushed him into Turkey, India, Ceylon, where he stowed away (for a price) on a British freighter servicing colonial ports of call. The doctor paid dearly for his flight. His mother and father were infirm, and he was forced to leave them behind” (12–13). The figure of the Jewish refugee doctor also appears in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Mr. Potter (2002), which alongside John Hearne’s Land of the Living (1961), offers a more sustained Caribbean literary treatment of the Holocaust refugee theme. Although neither Mr. Potter nor Land of the Living details the Jewish refugee experience in the colonies as extensively as Indian novelist Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Hearne’s and Kincaid’s Jewish protagonists are defined by their refugee status, and their presence in the novels is understandable only in these terms. In this chapter I will preface my reading of Hearne’s and Kincaid’s fiction by briefly discussing calypsos of the period as well as refugee memoirs that illustrate the contradictory status of refugee

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Jews in the Caribbean. I will then argue that both Hearne and Kincaid introduce Holocaust refugee characters in order to negotiate difficulties surrounding the narration of the Black working-class figures who stand at the center of their novels: the back-to-Africa leader Marcus Heneky in Land of the Living and the narrator’s estranged father in Mr. Potter. While Hearne meets this challenge by employing a Jewish narrator who has privileged access to the Black subject, Kincaid incorporates a Jewish refugee presence to underscore the inscrutability of her central protagonist. And while Hearne promotes an identificatory model of cross-cultural empathy, Kincaid resists this expectation. Ultimately, Hearne’s and Kincaid’s stagings of the Black-Jewish encounter signal their ambivalent authorial positionings while also illustrating their diverging approaches to the project of connecting diasporas and histories of trauma.

CALYPSO SHTETLS With its lack of visa restrictions and refundable landing fee, Trinidad was one of the last doors that remained open to Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II. Yet, while providing a safe haven, Trinidad and other Caribbean sanctuaries were contradictory spaces where the refugees met with an ambivalent reception, including internment in the case of those who were classified as “enemy aliens.” One Jew who took refuge in Trinidad in the 1930s recalls that “Trinidadians were sympathetic and supportive. They loved the Jewish doctors, they found the traders likable” (Strasberg, “Forward” to Strasberg and Yufe). However, as discussed by Gordon Rohlehr in Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, calypsos from the late 1930s that were censored by the Colonial Secretary’s Office for their criticism of the policy of admitting refugee Jews into Trinidad point to a more mixed response to the refugees, whose presence led to debates surrounding Jewish immigration that ultimately resulted in the closure of Trinidad’s doors in January 1939.2 Originating in the nineteenth century, the calypso served as an important vehicle of social and political protest. Patricia Mohammed

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emphasizes that the calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s in particular must be understood against the background of rising unemployment, urbanization, and internal migration as well as the heightened visibility during this period of the “distinctive features in the migrant groups that comprised [Trinidadian] society” (131). It was in this context that Gorilla’s “Jews in the West Indies” (1938) voiced public anxiety about the economic competition that an influx of Jewish refugees would bring at a time of labor riots and strikes. Another calypsonian, Growler, declared in “I Don’t Want Any Syrians Again” (1939) that although he preferred “the poor Jews” to Syrian or Chinese immigrants, the Jews “should be in Jerusalem or Palestine / Instead of in this country of mine.” Growler’s calypso is not unsympathetic to the displaced Jews’ plight: That Mr. Hitler and Mussolini Have no feeling for humanity But the voice of the people is the voice of God, How he treat the poor Jews like dog.

Yet it nonetheless conveys the concern that Jewish immigration might negatively affect the condition of local Blacks: They can take a rest on this here shore But remember pay respect to the poor, A man is a man in this colony, Don’t matter how black he may be.

Letters to the editor that appeared in the Trinidad Guardian in the late 1930s similarly voiced apprehension, and in some cases outright opposition, to the Jewish refugee presence. An editorial entitled “The Fifth Column” that appeared after the outbreak of the war went so far as to call for mass internment (Siegel 31–36). Arguments against Jewish immigration were made by other colonies such as the Bahamas, whose governor insisted that the tourism industry would be adversely impacted by an increased Jewish presence (Newman, “Nearly the New World” 240).3 Elsewhere, however, the Trinidad Guardian expressed compassion for the refugees (Newman, “Nearly the New World” 245),

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as did calypsonians such as Atilla, who in “The Persecuted Jews” (1938) identified a common history of suffering that Trinidadians descended from slavery shared with the Jewish refugees: Let’s give serious contemplation To the question of Jewish immigration Just like our forefathers in slavery From the brutality of tyrants they have to flee So it’s nothing but Christian charity To give these oppressed people sanctuary Negroes, our slave fathers long ago Suffered all kinds of tribulation and woe With yokes round their necks beaten day and night Their only salvation remained in flight So in remembrance of their agony And gratitude to those who showed them sympathy We shall extend to the Jews hospitality As a monument to our ancestors’ memory.

Thus in her study of Jewish refugees and the British West Indies, Joanna Newman concludes that “Sympathy at the plight of the Jews, and an empathy based on a shared experience of racism and persecution, went alongside fears at the impact the refugees would have on Caribbean islands” (“Nearly the New World” 261–2). For their part, the Jewish refugees also exhibited mixed feelings about their Caribbean havens, as is evidenced by their high rate of outmigration after the war. Most refugee Jewish settlers abandoned the Dominican colony of Sosúa in 1945, for example, so that, as historian Marion Kaplan remarks, Sosúa was “not a story about diasporic assimilation or integration” but instead “served as a ‘waiting room’ for some and remained a European village for most” (5). In the case of Trinidad, the community was longer lasting but was eventually diminished by its members’ desire to secure postsecondary educational opportunities for their children, as well as by the rise of Black Power (Siegel 296–303). One Trinidadian Jew remembered of Black Power, “It was very unsettling. . . . There were

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marches (and) a lot of anti-white sentiment. Having gone through racial discrimination and persecution once, one didn’t want to have to go through it again. A lot of people got fed up and wandered off, to the US and elsewhere” (McDonald 18). In the self-published memoir collection Our Calypso Shtetl (Strasberg and Yufe, 1998), surviving members of the Trinidadian Jewish community paint an overwhelmingly positive picture of their Trinidadian childhoods, but they also identify some of the cultural tensions generated by their island upbringing. Esther Zaks Adler writes that the nuns at the convent where she was educated “were friendly, except for the ones who would say, ‘When are you going to Jerusalem?’” (Strasberg and Yufe). Another contributor, Arthur Siegel, recalls in his essay: “My personal life in Trinidad was filled with contradictions. Our home was as Jewish as it could be: I went to weekly Hebrew lessons with Dr. Ottensozor (a refugee from Germany) and my father made me study Pirker [sic] Avot with him every Saturday afternoon. My schooling was at St. Mary’s College— the College of the Immaculate Conception—run by the Holy Ghost fathers, mostly from Ireland. Their influence was so pronounced that for some years, after I left Trinidad, I would be asked if I was from Ireland” (Strasberg and Yufe). The contributor to the collection who most strikingly embraces these contradictions is Louis Strasberg, who, in an indigenizing gesture, composes his memoir in the form of a calypso: Ah was a happy boy in the Calypso Shtetel; Ah play sports, ah play mas; ah ha good friends, and ah go to Maracas; Ah used to fete all night and sleep all day; drink coconut water, eat roti and never worry how to pay Buh lemme tell you, with priests trying to convert meh; and the sweet life of this Jewish boy, Ah still enh know how I enh become a goy; But then again, you had to have a little sechel; to survive dem days in the Calypso Shtetel. (Strasberg and Yufe)

Seamlessly blending Yiddish (e.g., sechel or common sense) with Trinidadian Creole (e.g., play mas or to masquerade during Carnival; fete or

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to party, make merry), Strasberg capitalizes on the signature versatility and dynamism of calypso as an art form—its ability to accommodate “differences in music, dances, and lyrical experimentation, as the society develops” (Mohammed 162). Strasberg’s adaptation of a distinctively local Caribbean musical tradition offers an optimistic vision of the compatibility of Jewish and Trinidadian identities even as it thematizes the challenges that this cultural mix presented. One of the primary sources of the Jewish refugees’ ambivalence about their Caribbean havens was the experience of internment. In Curaçao refugee Jews were sent to the island of Bonaire and interned on the grounds of former or existing plantations that were converted into prison camps or farms (Lansen 442). In Trinidad the reception center on Nelson Island that had originally housed indentured Indians was used for male refugees; later, it served as a prison for Black Power leaders (Newman, “Exiled to Paradise”). One former internee of Nelson Island recalled that the elders “could not help but feel bitterness and resentment at being thus mistreated, of being deprived of their newly found freedom and having just sent out new roots, being so abruptly and rudely uprooted once more. The stigma of being branded ‘enemy alien’ was almost intolerable to us” (quoted in Newman, “Nearly the New World” 198). In Jamaica Jewish refugees were confined for the duration of the war to Gibraltar Camp (so named because it was built to house large numbers of Gibraltan evacuees who never arrived in the expected numbers). Between 1941 and 1943 the British government transported roughly four hundred Jewish refugees from Lisbon to Gibraltar Camp, which later became part of the University of the West Indies campus. In what is perhaps the most famous account of Jewish refugee internment in the Caribbean, in Tristes Tropiques (1955) Claude Lévi-Strauss describes the hostile reception that greeted the boatload of refugees with whom he escaped from France to Martinique in 1941. Lévi-Strauss recalls that the soldiers treated the refugees as scapegoats upon whom they could blame the defeat of France and vent their pent-up aggression: “The non-French passengers found themselves classed as enemies; those who were French were rudely denied this distinction, at the same time as they were accused of having abandoned their country in a

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cowardly fashion” (28).4 This historical episode is retold in Christophe Petit’s 2011 play Vichy aux Antilles (Vichy in the Antilles), which portrays Lévi-Strauss’s arrival in Martinique and encounter with Admiral Robert, the repressive Vichy loyalist commissioner of the French Antilles. Petit’s play reminds us that the same ship that brought Claude Lévi-Strauss to Martinique in 1941 also carried the surrealist poet André Breton, who met Aimé Césaire while on the island and subsequently became a champion of his work. A more extended account of refugee internment in the Caribbean is contained in A Drastic Turn of Destiny (2009), the memoir of Fred Mann, a German Jew who made his way through Belgium, France, Spain, and Portugal to Jamaica. Mann describes the shock of fleeing Europe for Jamaica only to discover that the Jewish refugees were to be housed in a camp for the duration of the war.5 Another source of distress, however, was the response (or lack thereof) of the local Jamaican Jewish community, who according to Mann “did nothing to assist us and, at worst, ignored our existence” (196). Mann also recalls in his memoir that the refugees were surprised to encounter racial segregation between Blacks and whites in Jamaica: “We didn’t suffer from those prejudices and we were astounded to discover this phenomenon” (198). He relates one incident in which a Dutch girl from Gibraltar Camp was mistaken for a Mulatta and was prevented from swimming in a hotel pool: “I suddenly understood what was happening. Elly was quite tanned and had crinkled hair. I went up front and talked to the cashier who knew me, explaining that Elly was in fact a white Dutch girl” (214).6 This episode offers a striking illustration of how some Jews who had been racialized in Europe as non-white once arrived in the Caribbean were able to claim the privileges of whiteness with relative ease.7 Yet, while such episodes are riddled with contradictions, Newman observes that in the present-day Caribbean, “The story of Jewish immigration has been integrated into a history of the West Indies which emphasises tolerance and acceptance, and the role of the West Indies as a haven.” In this narrative, “the complex responses made up of elements of antipathy, ambivalence and sympathy is flattened in order to fulfill the celebratory needs of heritage nostalgia” (“Nearly the New World” 259–60). If, in the contemporary Caribbean, the Jewish refugee

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story has been assimilated to a narrative of Caribbean tolerance, what purpose does its invocation serve in postwar Caribbean fiction? I will argue that while Hearne suppresses the contradictions that adhere to the figure of the Holocaust refugee, Kincaid embraces them as part of her ambivalent poetics.

LAND OF THE LIVING: “BORROWED SUFFERING”? In critical responses to Land of the Living that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the white Jamaican writer John Hearne came under attack for his use of a Holocaust refugee as narrator, a strategy that some judged to be escapist and inauthentic in keeping with his Eurocentric view of the Caribbean and more general failure to confront the racial inequities of Caribbean society. Rather than dismissing Hearne’s employment of a Jewish narrator as symptomatic of his compromised politics, I will suggest that this feature of the novel merits further consideration for what it can tell us about the resonance of the Holocaust in the Caribbean literary imagination. Revisited from a perspective that is less deeply invested in notions of authenticity, Hearne’s neglected 1961 novel proves to be limited not so much by its adoption of a Jewish narrator as by its uncritical reliance on a narrative of Jewish victimhood. The narrator of Land of the Living is Stefan Mahler, a German Jew who in 1940 flees Germany for England. After obtaining his academic credentials at a Midlands university, Stefan moves to the fictionalized Caribbean island of Cayuna (modeled on Hearne’s native Jamaica) to take up a post teaching zoology at the university. Stefan is an enigmatic figure who divulges few details about his background. It is only when he is questioned by the police at the very end of the novel that we are finally given a schematic narrative of his life: “Stefan Mahler . . . born Brunauam-Rhein, 1925. . . . Refugee in Paris, Bordeaux, Lisbon, 1939. . . . London, 1940” (256). Referencing Stefan’s European past only sporadically, the novel instead details his postwar experience of resettlement in Cayuna, where he befriends the middle-class coloreds who are the primary focus of Hearne’s fiction. Simultaneously, he also forms a relationship with

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Bernice Heneky, a Black barmaid at a local tavern. Bernice introduces Stefan to her father Marcus, a visionary preacher in the Pure Church of Africa Triumphant with whom Stefan strikes up a friendship. Marcus eventually repudiates Stefan, however, as political tensions escalate, culminating in Marcus’s flight from the police and the violent deaths of Marcus and Bernice. When we first meet Stefan at the opening of the novel, he has married one of the middle-class set, the troubled divorcée Joan Culpeper, and, after several years on the island, is rapidly acculturating to Cayuna. After escaping the concentration camps to which his parents and sister had fallen victim, Stefan had found it “difficult to believe that a real I had survived.” “But now in Cayuna,” he tells the reader, “I feel that some sort of obscure, powerful resurrection of myself has begun to stir. The island has claimed me” (13). Yet, even at this moment in which Stefan appears to have achieved a sense of belonging, he has the sense that he may be “thrown out” of this world (21). Later in the novel, when he receives a summons to appear at the police station, he is beset by a “tawdry, vague anxiety” (251) and carefully checks his passport and residence visa to make sure that they bear the correct stamps. Stefan’s sense of insecurity stems from a traumatic past that is only obscurely alluded to in the novel, but manifests itself in the mysterious illness that occasionally overcomes him as well as in his insomnia and sexual impotence. But why employ a Holocaust refugee as narrator of a novel that is primarily a portrait of early postwar Caribbean society? I would suggest that Stefan’s Jewish presence signals Land of the Living’s preoccupation with the problem of representation. Repeatedly throughout Hearne’s novel, the characters struggle to describe one another both pictorially and verbally. Sybil, the wife of Stefan’s friend Oliver, seeks to draw a good portrait of Joan but gets her “all wrong” (147), while another member of their set, the planter politician Andrew Fabricus, also finds that Joan “had a quality that’s hard to describe. . . . How d’you put these things into words, eh?” (143). Most critically, Oliver, a journalist, attempts to capture the essence of the back-to-Africa leader Marcus Heneky, but, while getting all the facts in the right order, feels that “there’s something missing” and that he hasn’t “placed him” (17). Instead, Oliver suggests

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that it is Stefan who may be best able to offer insight into Marcus. Stefan is puzzled by this notion: “Why d’you think I should be able to tell you? . . . I’m not even a Cayunan. I couldn’t begin to see him in a context the way you can.” “Balls,” Oliver said amiably. “You’re a Cayunan now if you’re anything at all, you damn Jew. And you’ve got a nose for these things. Besides, you knew him.” (17)

In fact, it is Stefan’s alien status in Cayuna that qualifies him to serve as narrator of the novel and in particular as the interlocutor of Marcus Heneky. As the exchange with Oliver illustrates, Stefan occupies an ambiguous space in between national and racial identities. Oliver insists that Stefan is a Cayunan, but his description of Stefan as a “damn Jew” and racializing reference to his nose simultaneously undercut this assertion. Stefan’s in-betweenness is also suggested by the fact that he is darker-skinned than Bernice’s own mother, while Bernice is described as having “an almost Semitic bridge” to her nose (79). Stefan’s perpetual shuttling between the different social classes of Cayuna that are represented by his two lovers, Bernice and Joan, enables the novel itself to bridge these worlds. Stefan is affiliated with the middleclass set and yet is not fully of them, as is signaled by his “Old Testament” beard, his accent, his relationship with Bernice, and above all his sympathy for Marcus Heneky and his vision. Stefan is both friendly with Oliver and Andrew and at the same time critical of their limitations. He is distressed, for example, by the “superficial brutality” that Oliver displays toward Bernice (78). Similarly, Stefan disputes Oliver and Andrew’s assessment of Marcus, who is imprisoned for six months on the cooked-up charge of preaching without a license. While Oliver and the party organizers dismiss the Black leader as “a poor old lunatic” (108) and as “trouble” (207), Stefan identifies a deeper value in Marcus’ message: “He wasn’t just a common little fanatic. . . . Perhaps he didn’t even know what moved him or what he was really trying to do, but it was there all the same: the necessity to erase another bit of the lie that makes slaves of us.”

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“I’ve lost you,” Andrew said. “What lie?” “It all depends,” I said. “It varies from time to time and place to place. In Heneky’s case the lie was that the black man was faceless. What he had to do was try to change that, to give the black man the sort of vision of himself that would make him free. And make the whites and the browns free, because they were shackled to the lie too.” (109)

Stefan thus serves as a skillful interpreter of Marcus, his outsider status enabling him to move beyond the status quo perception of the colored middle-class. The novel strongly suggests a commonality between the Holocaust refugee and the disenfranchised Black underclass of which Marcus is a spokesman. Stefan has a rapport with a series of characters who share this background: Ruddy, the man whom Stefan hires to take him and his biology students out to sea; Bernice, with whom he has a tender affair; and finally Marcus, whose ideology is one for which Stefan alone among the middle-class characters has any sympathy. In chapter 2 Stefan has a tense encounter with a Rastafarian (here called Sons of Sheba) while leading his students on one of their specimen-gathering expeditions. When the Son of Sheba tampers with their equipment, Stefan prevents one of his students from attacking the man and instead seeks to defuse the situation. In this scene Stefan’s own experience of suffering (symbolized by the illness that overcomes him just prior to the incident) enables him to recognize in the man a “wild and enigmatic dignity” and “to acknowledge something pure, austere and dedicated: as if he were the solitary, indomitable witness to a persecuted but enduring truth” (48). Stefan’s sympathetic response to the Son of Sheba forecasts his role as Marcus’s privileged interlocutor later in the novel. After Bernice seeks out Stefan’s help when Marcus falls ill with typhoid, Marcus makes an exception to his general mistrust of whites and invites Stefan, who understands him “a little bit” (158), to visit him. The two men’s sense of mutual understanding is based on a notion of shared experience. In a conversation with Bernice that immediately precedes his first meeting with Marcus, Stefan remarks in typically oblique fashion to Bernice: “A lot of people tried to make me ashamed once,

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but the inoculation never took” (105). This obscure reference to Stefan’s traumatic past sets the stage for his first encounter with Marcus and the moment of identification that accompanies it: “In the nearly imperceptible hesitation before his hand was slowly extended to join with mine, in the sudden doubtful flicker across his steady gaze, I thought: so that’s it, old man; we’ve both been wounded in the same accident; just as you’ll never completely believe that a white man can call you ‘sir’ without patronage, so I’ll never be quite sure that any Gentile of my world doesn’t make a reservation when he meets me; we both demand proof; and that’s silly dangerous; it’s an invitation to the world to hurt you again” (114). Stefan’s response to Marcus is not so much one of “sympathy or affection, but of wry recognition; the fact that in each other we detected the same ailment and hurt of the psyche: we saluted each other with the distant yet intimate understanding of two veterans determined to survive the same campaign” (152). This sense of recognition is reinforced by the Rastafarian imagery that punctuates the novel. On the wall of the room in which Stefan first meets Marcus there hangs “a loudly coloured relief map of Africa on which Addis Ababa was symbolized by a huge, gilt Star of David” (106–7). The Old Testament references in Marcus’s and the Sons of Sheba’s commentary about “Israel’s children of Africa” (56) returning to their land underscore the analogy between Black and Jew, while the novel’s bipartite division into sections entitled “Exile” and “Return” further suggests correspondences between African and Jewish diasporic narratives. Hearne’s alignment of Black and Jew is premised on his identification of Jewishness with an ethical perspective. Stefan, whom Bernice calls a “good man” (121), displays his compassionate nature by driving Marcus to the hospital to be treated for typhoid and later by hiring a lawyer to defend Marcus when he is arrested. When Andrew speaks of past injustice in Cayuna, Stefan is quick to correct him that injustice on the island continues in the present. After his release from prison, Marcus repudiates Stefan, telling him, “This is we place. Black man’s place.  .  .  . Leave we now, an’ go back to your friends an’ your country, an’ don’t try to come into ours” (248). Yet Stefan remains loyal, refusing to inform on Marcus to the police. Notably, Stefan’s ethical character is presented as stemming directly from his victimization during the Holocaust, in contrast to

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the local West Indian Jews who have lost their ethical sensitivity: “‘You breast-beating, impossible Jews. I don’t mean the detribalized, trading post trash who are born out here, but the real Mosaic element like you, Stefan. You have this ancestral capacity for making an enormous moral drama out of the most ordinary material, don’t you? Of course, it’s the only art you have so I suppose you make the most of it” (181). Stefan himself concurs with Oliver’s assessment of Jewish character: “our conviction of identity must depend on this ‘capacity’, as he calls it, for believing that our every action is weighed” (181). Thus Jewishness is defined in the novel not as a religious or racial category but as an ethical one. Hearne’s uncritical identification of Jewishness with a higher moral sensibility bears further examination in light of the contradictions that emerge in the calypsos and memoirs already discussed, both of which point to the significant access to the privileges of whiteness enjoyed by some refugee Jews in the Caribbean—particularly those of Western European background such as Stefan. In Mann’s memoir the refugee Jewish girl who is mistaken for a Mulatta gains entry to the hotel swimming pool as soon as it is established that she is in fact “a white Dutch girl.” Similarly, in Land of the Living, as Sylvia Wynter observes, once arrived in Cayuna Stefan easily “takes his top place in the system, a place accorded to him by his whiteness of skin; he is now the Aryan and the black Henneky [sic], the exiled Jew” (37). More specifically, Hearne’s positioning of Stefan at the moral center of the novel is at odds with the novel’s conclusion in which Stefan achieves a sense of belonging at the cost of Bernice and Marcus, both of whom are murdered by a renegade member of Marcus’s sect during a standoff with the police. If the novel charts a movement from exile to return, the figure who enjoys a return to home and self is Stefan rather than Bernice or Marcus. Moreover, Stefan’s “resurrection” is predicated on Bernice’s replacement as his romantic partner by the more eligible Joan and ultimately on both Bernice’s and Marcus’s excision from the narrative altogether. The ethical critique of Andrew and the others of his set that Stefan advances militates against the accusation often lodged against Hearne that he romanticizes the middle class. Yet, by identifying Stefan as the locus of the novel’s ethical perspective, Hearne elides Stefan’s own morally ambiguous positioning within Cayuna’s power structure.

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In a 1969 essay, Wynter, who judged Land of the Living to be Hearne’s “most alienated” novel, charged that Hearne needed to learn “how to see the white Mahler through the black Henneky’s eyes. . . . This new kind of eye . . . will mean that Hearne, having paid his dues, will have learnt how to really sing the blues for a Henneky [sic]; he would then have no need of a borrowed suffering” (39). By contrast, another contemporary critique maintained that the problem with the novel was not that its perspective was insufficiently local, but that it was excessively so. For Frank Birbalsingh, the character of Stefan Mahler, who appeared “less a German Jew than a Caribbean insider,” was nothing more than an “‘escapist’ subterfuge” that typified Hearne’s evasion of the problem of racial inequity in the Caribbean (Birbalsingh 35). Yet, as we have seen, Stefan’s Jewishness is not simply a “guise” (35) or an “intellectual exercise” in “borrowed suffering” (Wynter 39), but rather reflects a particular historical experience of Jewish refugee emigration to the Caribbean. Moreover, far from being an insider, Stefan is a figure of exile and in-betweenness whose experience of racialization during the Holocaust is what enables him to serve as Marcus Heneky’s interlocutor and chronicler. Because of his Jewish distance from the middle-class set, Stefan is able to advance a critique of them, even if this critique is neither as radical nor as sustained as Hearne’s critics would have liked. Instead, the greater tension in the novel stems from its evasion of the political and moral contradictions that attend Stefan’s position as a Holocaust survivor who finds sanctuary in a racially stratified Caribbean island.

MR. POTTER: BLACK AND JEW “FACE-TO-FACE” In such works as The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and My Brother (1997), Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid fictionalizes both her own autobiography and the biographies of various of her family members. In her 2002 novel Mr. Potter, Kincaid turns to the subject of her birth father, an illiterate chauffeur in Antigua from whom her mother separated while still pregnant with Kincaid. Mr. Potter is a challenging, poetic novel that, while ostensibly a biography of the narrator’s father, increasingly draws attention to the narrator herself as she seeks to redress

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the marginal place she occupied in her father’s life. Thus, as Jana Evans Braziel observes, Mr. Potter is an example of “autobiography as biography” (193). Strikingly, this auto/biographical project is advanced in Kincaid’s novel through the introduction of a Jewish character, the Czech refugee Dr. Weizenger, whose meeting with Potter occupies the whole of the opening chapter. In Mr. Potter, Kincaid’s staging of the encounter between these two men calls into question the uncritical identification of Jewishness with ethics and the presumption of a natural rapport between Black and Jew that undergird Hearne’s novel. Yet ultimately Mr. Potter suggests that there is a place for what Wynter calls “borrowed suffering” in the Caribbean novel. One of the most curious—and for some critics, perplexing—aspects of Kincaid’s provocative novel is the opacity of its eponymous subject. The narrator provides us with only the barest outlines of Potter’s life: his abandonment by his father, the suicide of his mother when he was a young boy, the loveless household of his adoptive family, and, finally, his promiscuity in later life and abandonment in turn of his own children. Moreover, the novel gives us almost no entry into Mr. Potter’s consciousness. We learn little of his thoughts, and his few utterances are mostly made up of nonsense syllables such as “Eh” or of songs and ditties. Because Potter is illiterate, no written record of his voice is available either. His physiognomy, in particular his nose, which is his sole legacy to his daughters, is equally unrevealing of his character: “And all these daughters looked like him, they all bore his nose . . . and his nose was itself, just his nose, and could reveal nothing about him, not his temperament, not his inadequacies, not all that made up his character, his moral character, his nose revealed nothing about him, only that all his children, girls, bore his nose, their noses were exact replicas of his” (120). Instead we find that Potter is peculiarly absent from his own biography. I will suggest that Potter’s impenetrability, which has been the cause of significant discomfort to some reviewers, is both fundamental to Kincaid’s portrayal of the father-daughter relationship and accounts for the troubling presence of the refugee Jew Dr. Weizenger in the novel.8 In Mr. Potter’s opening chapter, Kincaid introduces the novel’s eponymous protagonist by tracing his “face to face” (24) encounter with

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Weizenger, whose steamship he has been sent to meet.9 Dr. Zoltan Weizenger is a refugee from Prague whose escape route has taken him to Greece, Singapore, Shanghai, and Sydney before finally depositing him in Antigua. The chapter is devoted in its entirety to the encounter between Potter and Weizenger: we see Potter drive to the jetty; collect Weizenger and his English wife May; drive the couple to the house in which they will be staying; and then finally drive away. The focus of the narrative is not, however, on actions or events, or even on dialogue, but rather on what the narrator calls “moment[s] held in a tight grip” (12). The first chapter details the attenuated moment of Potter’s and Weizenger’s encounter, circling around it in order to view it from different angles. Yet, after the middle of the second chapter, Weizenger virtually disappears from the novel for roughly a hundred pages, reappearing as a significant presence only in the final chapters. Why does Kincaid open her novel with this meeting of the Black chauffeur and the Holocaust refugee, one that delays the delivery of information about Potter’s birth and upbringing until the second chapter? According to one reviewer, the opening chapter sets up false expectations since the encounter between Potter and Weizenger “is not as crucial as one might expect of a meeting placed so prominently in the early pages of a novel” (Rhodes-Pitts 11). As I will show, however, the meeting is in fact central, not so much to the unfolding of Potter’s life, but to the novel’s associative narrative structure and anti-mimetic approach to making meaning. Weizenger’s significance is not confined to his role as a conduit between Kincaid’s parents, as another critic suggests (Matos 94), but instead needs to be understood in terms of the novel’s formal as well as thematic imperatives. Mr. Potter is an imagistic novel in which causal connections are withheld and meaning is generated associatively as well as through rhetorical techniques such as repetition, chiasmus, and parataxis.10 As biographical subject, Potter is fundamentally opaque and inaccessible to both the narrator and the reader. It is largely by setting Potter alongside other figures of displacement, in particular Dr. Weizenger and the Lebanese entrepreneur Mr. Shoul, that the novel yields insight into its subject. This juxtapositional technique offers crucial perspective on Potter while at the same time thematizing his fundamental disconnection from others

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and suggesting the narrator’s own problematic relationship to her subject. In this regard, Kincaid’s associative strategy functions on the level of emplotment much like the parataxis that she employs on the level of sentence structure. If, as Nicole Matos suggests, Kincaid’s stylistic parataxis, which places clauses side by side without indicating their relation to one another, signals her characters’ “inability to connect meaningfully” with each other (84), so too does the novel’s paratactic narrative structure, which juxtaposes Potter, Weizenger and Shoul without directly stating the significance of their relationships. In Mr. Potter meaning is consistently deferred and denied. Passages that appear to be heading in one direction go off on unexpected and seemingly inexplicable tangents, only to circle back eventually to their original subject and then digress once again. In the opening pages of the novel, we witness Potter walking to Shoul’s garage and taking in sights along the way such as that of a dog. “But,” we are told, Potter “did not think that this dog, pregnant and weary from carrying her pups, seeking shelter from that sun, was a reflection of any part of him, not even in the smallest way” (4). Next he sees a blind beggar, but again “Mr. Potter did not think that any part of him was reflected in this sight before him” (5). These passages set the stage for Potter’s encounter with Weizenger, which follows shortly thereafter and in which a sense of relation similarly will be denied. Whereas, in Hearne’s Land of the Living, Stefan and Marcus recognize one another as being “two veterans determined to survive the same campaign” (152), the relationship between Weizenger and Potter is characterized by misrecognition. Throughout the opening chapter the two men fail to comprehend and relate to one another: “Such a dead man, thought Mr. Potter to himself when he saw Dr. Weizenger (‘E dead, ‘e dead). Such stupidity, thought Dr. Weizenger to himself when he met Mr. Potter, so much ignorance” (10). Weizenger finds Potter repulsive and appears incapable of empathizing with him. Because Weizenger understands the Holocaust to be a unique event in world history, he is unable to detect the five hundred years of suffering that resonate in Potter’s voice. For his part, Potter’s attitude toward Weizenger is one of disdain: “people like that—Dr. Weizenger—cannot even speak properly, so said Mr. Potter to himself ” (15). After they arrive at the house in which the Weizengers

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will stay, Dr. Weizenger asks Potter’s name, but Potter’s response does not register: “the sound of Mr. Potter’s voice, so full of all that had gone wrong in the world for almost five hundred years that it could break the heart of an ordinary stone, meant not a thing to Dr. Weizenger, for he had been only recently inhabiting the world as if it were composed only of extinction, as if it were devoted to his very own extinction” (23). Potter, who in a resonant gesture repeatedly names himself to Weizenger, remains unheard and unacknowledged by Weizenger in what is a missed opportunity for mutual recognition. For a brief moment a space of potential connection opens up when Mr. Potter “made a gesture  .  .  . as if to say, Here! All this in front of me is mine and I want to share it with you, let us live in it together” (21–22). But this sense of possibility quickly dissipates: “Dr. Weizenger, so recently placed on the very edge of extinction, did not want to share anything with Mr. Potter, a man so long alive in a cauldron of terror” (22). In marked contrast to Hearne’s and other Caribbean writers’ depiction of Jews and Blacks as sharing a common experience of persecution and displacement, in Mr. Potter Kincaid presents Weizenger’s suffering as an obstacle to empathy. Indeed, the narrator suggests that Weizenger’s anguish is the very cause of his racism toward the Antiguans among whom he now finds himself: Dr. Weizenger was in a new place, but for so many years now Dr. Weizenger was constantly in a new place. For three hundred years he and all that he came from lived in that place once called Czechoslovakia, he and all that he came from lived in its villages, its towns, its cities, its capital, its provinces, and then, without notice, he and all he came from could not live in Czechoslovakia or its environs anymore. And so Dr. Weizenger had been here, there, and everywhere, and now he was in front of Mr. Potter and this would be his final place, his place of rest, which might account for his hatred and lack of sympathy for Mr. Potter (and all who looked like Mr. Potter). (8)

At his medical practice, Weizenger expresses his racial phobia when he insists that his nurse Annie (the narrator’s mother) scrub his patients

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before he attends to them. Accordingly, when Weizenger dies at the end of the novel, his Antiguan patients do not mourn his loss. It is important to note that, although Potter’s and Weizenger’s relationship is characterized by misrecognition and failed connection, the novel itself works to bring the two men, as well as Black and Jewish experiences, into relation. It is in large part by juxtaposing Potter, Weizenger, and a third displaced and even less sympathetic figure, Potter’s Middle Eastern employer Mr. Shoul, that the novel generates insight into Potter’s condition. Through such juxtapositions, Kincaid implies that Potter’s behavior reflects a deep historical background of trauma and displacement that is only obliquely referenced in the novel. For example, the description of Weizenger’s arrival employs repetition to suggest a relationship between the historical traumas that underlie each man’s condition: And on that day Mr. Potter drove Mr. Shoul’s car to the jetty to await a large steamer coming from some benighted place in the world, someplace far away where there had been upheavals and displacements and murder and terror. Mr. Potter was not unfamiliar with upheavals and displacements and murder and terror; his very existence in the world in which he lived had been made possible by such things, but he did not dwell on them and he could not dwell on them any more than he could dwell on breathing. And so Mr. Potter met Dr. Weizenger. (7, emphasis added)

This key early passage establishes a loose parallel between the Holocaust and slavery through the incantatory repetition of the phrase “upheavals and displacements and murder and terror” while at the same time alerting the reader that historical trauma is not something that preoccupies Potter. Weizenger’s presence thus becomes a means of introducing that which remains unspoken, unreflected upon by Potter, and perhaps by Antiguan society at large. Much like the opening passage in which Potter rejects any possible relation between himself and the pregnant dog and blind beggar he encounters en route to Shoul’s garage, Potter and Weizenger reject the notion that their conditions may be related; yet this is precisely what the novel implies. Shoul’s displaced condition is also suggestive of

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Potter’s: “and Mr. Shoul then entered into his world of the transient, the immigrant, the person without a real home, and he was on ships and the ships were tossed about on the ocean and the seas and when inside the ships he was tossed about” (110). Shoul, however, is a more monolithic and exploitative figure than Weizenger, his sense of a traumatic past not as acute, his exile being “deliberate” (155) rather than forced. Mr. Potter works, then, not by building understanding or mutual recognition between Black and Jew but by setting Potter and Weizenger alongside one another in a manner that reveals how both men are psychologically damaged as a result of their traumatic pasts. Both Potter and Weizenger are shown to be unable to fully reflect on their identities. Both are displaced and incapable of connecting with others, instead withholding themselves from the world. Indeed, their very inability to relate to one another is a symptom of the traumatized condition that they share.11 These commonalities are established not directly or through causal logic but associatively as well as through rhetorical strategies such as repetition, restatement, and chiasmus. Chiastic sentences such as “And Mr. Potter saw Dr. Weizenger and Dr. Weizenger saw Mr. Potter” (9) double back on themselves, generating a slippery, tensive relationality: “And Mr. Potter and Dr. Weizenger were standing face-to-face and Dr. Weizenger and Mr. Potter were standing opposite each other” (24). The opening chapter is organized around a series of densely resonant images that also convey relationality without suggesting neat correspondence. These images draw Potter and Weizenger into association while simultaneously disassociating them. For example, the two men are connected throughout the chapter by their joint preoccupation with the sunlight, but are also differentiated through their diverging responses to it. For Potter, the tropical sunlight is merely familiar; for Weizenger, on the other hand, it is “radiant” while also connoting the furnaces of the death camps. Notably, the scene of their encounter takes place against the backdrop of the sea, an image that connects the two men still more insistently: “The sea, the sea, the sea that was so vast, so vast, and vast again, lay in front of them, Mr. Potter and Dr. Weizenger, and for both of them it held such peril, such dark memories. On Dr. Weizenger’s suitcase were the words ‘Singapore’ and ‘Shanghai’ and ‘Sydney,’ but Mr. Potter could not read and so did not know what they meant. And on

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Mr. Potter’s face was written ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe,’ but Dr. Weizenger had never had to and would never be able (as it turned out) to read the language in which these words were written” (10–11). In this passage Potter’s illiteracy is emblematic of his and Weizenger’s lack of mutual understanding: he cannot read the place names on Weizenger’s suitcase, just as Weizenger lacks the ability to decipher Potter’s face. Yet through the multivalent image of the sea, which is also associated in the novel with “wails, screams, cries . . . grief, remorse despair” (12) and later with the suicide of Potter’s mother, Kincaid encourages the reader to recognize a relationship between the two men’s conditions of displacement that goes unacknowledged by the characters themselves. A second organizing image, the cathedral’s clock tower, takes on a different resonance according to each man’s experience: “And time was Dr. Weizenger’s enemy: the past certainly; the future he did not know how that would turn out. And Mr. Potter’s lifetime began in the year fourteen hundred and ninety-two but he was born on the seventh day of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-two” (177). As in the opening chapter, here Kincaid introduces a densely loaded image that freezes the moment in order to establish connection and disconnection between the two men simultaneously. Like Virginia Woolf ’s “moments of being,” Kincaid’s “moments held in a tight grip” allow meaning to proliferate unbounded by the narrative constraints of realism.12 Kincaid’s imagism, while in some respects reminiscent of modernist fiction, also can be compared to what Walcott refers to as “triangulation.” As I discussed in chapter 1, in his long poem Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott triangulates the artists Pissarro, Monet, and his own father, each of whom gazes at the same Turner painting. Just as Walcott’s method of triangulation forms connections without collapsing differences, Kincaid’s imagistic technique establishes the relationality of Black and Jew while at the same time resisting a straightforward identification between them. Throughout Kincaid’s novel, Potter remains an inscrutable figure, his interior life largely inaccessible to both narrator and reader. However perplexing his opacity may be to Kincaid’s readers, it is necessary because it illustrates the troubled nature of his relationship to his daughter. As the narrator of Potter’s life, the daughter is cut off from access to his consciousness just as she was cut off from the father who refused

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to acknowledge her—whose legacy to her is that she has a “line drawn through the space where the name of the father ought to be” (101). Moreover, not only is Potter always at a remove from the narrator, but so too is the historical trauma of slavery. Slavery is referenced through the metonym of 1492, which the novel suggests lies at the root of the ruptured parent/child relationship, but the slavery past remains oblique, alluded to only in passing in such lines as the “whole history of evil directed at [Potter] and at all who looked like him” (84). With both Potter and slavery so remote, the novel needs the mediating presence of the Holocaust refugee Dr. Weizenger, with his more immediate and better documented traumatic past, to shed light on Potter’s condition. By the same token, Weizenger’s and Potter’s inability to relate to one another and their asymmetrical power relationship also are emblematic of the problematic status of the daughter as biographer of the father. When Weizenger first appears in the novel, the narrator remarks that “this sentence should begin with Dr. Weizenger emerging, getting off the launch that has brought him from his ship which is lying in the deep part of the harbor, but this is Mr. Potter’s life and so Dr. Weizenger must never begin a sentence; I am not making an authorial decision, or a narrative decision, I only say this because it is so true: Mr. Potter’s life is his own and no one else should take precedence” (8–9). And yet it is the narrator herself who increasingly comes to “take precedence” over Mr. Potter and displace him as the subject of his own biography. In Mr. Potter the failure of connection between Black and Jew—between survivors of the Middle Passage and the Holocaust—underscores the failure of connection between parent and child, subject and narrator. / / /

It is not an accident that the figure of the Holocaust refugee should make an appearance in two novels that have met with mixed critical receptions. In both novels the Jewish refugee’s ambivalent presence becomes thematic of the author’s own uneasy relationship to Caribbean collectivities. In Land of the Living Stefan’s in-betweenness, which is presented in both racial and national terms, is suggestive of Hearne’s standing as, after Naipaul, “quite possibly the most controversial and enigmatic of

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[Caribbean] authors” (Márquez 240). In The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming famously complained that Hearne’s “key obsession is with an agricultural middle class in Jamaica. . . . He is not an example of that instinct and root impulse which return the better West Indian writers back to the soil” (45–46). In a more measured contemporary commentary, John Figueroa identified in Hearne “that special predicament of West Indians of a certain background, upbringing and experience: the predicament of being ‘caught between’: between the Old World and the New, between Africa and Europe, gradualism and revolution” (72). In Land of the Living this condition of in-betweenness is signaled by Stefan’s ambivalent Jewish presence. Although Kincaid is more readily integrated into Caribbean literary canons, she, too, is a polarizing figure. Because her writing is characterized by a focus on individual experience rather than on the Caribbean collective (Bouson 2), some critics have found it to be excessively self-absorbed. Mr. Potter in particular has been deemed “sour and self-regarding” (Jaggi par. 7) because of the extent to which the daughter/narrator’s presence overwhelms that of the father, upon whom she takes revenge by supplanting him as narrative subject. Just as Kincaid provocatively recasts the father-daughter (or subject-narrator) relationship in Mr. Potter, so she restages the Black-Jewish encounter as one of disconnection rather than meaningful exchange. Emphasizing estrangement over empathy, Kincaid eschews the straightforwardly identificatory model that had seemed more natural in the mid-century context of Hearne’s writing. Despite important critiques of this model, this kind of identificatory impulse remains strong today, making Kincaid’s intervention all the more powerful.13 At the same time, Kincaid also departs from narratives of Black-Jewish relations that are couched in terms of competing claims to victimhood. Mr. Potter neither advances an uncomplicated identification of Black and Jewish histories of suffering nor pursues a discourse of ethnic competition. Instead, the novel adopts an imagistic and associative strategy in which Jewish refugee experience allusively illuminates the impact of the slavery past on the twentieth-century Caribbean psyche. In so doing, Mr. Potter demonstrates how the Holocaust and slavery can be brought into relation without relying on neat parallels, presumptions

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of cross-cultural empathy, or an identification of Jewishness with ethical conscience. Rather than resolving the incongruities that inhere in the figure of the refugee Jew, Kincaid’s taut, challenging novel works to heighten these tensions. Walcott has said of Kincaid’s prose style that each of her sentences “heads toward its own contradiction” (quoted in Garis 42). In Mr. Potter this poetics of contradiction enables Kincaid to engage with and capitalize on the ambiguities of Holocaust refugee experience in the Caribbean and, more broadly, to call into question dominant understandings of the relationship between slavery and the Holocaust.

6 BETWEEN CAMPS M . N O U R B E S E P HILIP AN D MIC HÈ LE MAIL L ET

The world of my childhood included the incomprehensible mystery of the Nazi genocide. I returned to it compulsively like a painful wobbly tooth. It appeared to be the core of the war, and its survivors were all around us. Their tattoos intrigued me. —Paul Gilroy, Between Camps

Blacks—African Caribbean people whom I know best—have had a long history of resisting these systems [of humiliation]. We understood what the fight against Hitler meant, and many Black men joined up and fought overseas on behalf of the Allied powers to prevent the culmination of an obscene racist ideology that had fingered everyone who wasn’t “white.” As a matter of course, many of us have taken the Jewish experience in World War II into our lives as I did as a teenager. We have had to. —M. NourbeSe Philip, Showing Grit

The deepest question of the 20th century has to be the question of the Holocaust. I still think that there is no historical event equal to it. —Derek Walcott, “An Interview”

A

s chapter 5 demonstrated, Holocaust history is not fundamentally divorced from the postslavery landscape of the Caribbean. Instead, the Holocaust’s reach extended into the Caribbean in the form of Jewish refugees from the Nazis who sought safe haven in the islands and Caribbean mainland, where some were also interned as enemy aliens.1 Moreover as M. NourbeSe Philip notes in the epigraph to this chapter, this influx of Jewish refugees from the Nazis coincided with an inverse movement of Caribbean soldiers into the European theater of war—among them Frantz Fanon, who fought in the Free French Army. Not only soldiers, however, but other Black emigrants to Europe, including students and musicians, also found themselves caught up in the events that were unfolding in Europe. Accordingly, the present chapter moves outward from the Caribbean archipelago to address European landscapes of African diaspora Holocaust memory. In particular, this chapter examines the Holocaust as a site of surrogate memory for Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during the war or in the decades immediately following. Drawing on Rothberg’s and Silverman’s discussions of multidirectional and palimpsestic memory to elucidate NourbeSe Philip’s Holocaust fiction and poetry, I suggest that not only early postwar anticolonial theory but also late twentieth and early twenty-first century Caribbean literature exhibits a predominantly identificatory rather than competitive orientation toward the Holocaust. I further argue that this cross-cultural identification between slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust finds expression at the level of genre. A series of texts that I describe as Black Holocaust narratives adopts the strategies of both postslavery and Holocaust fiction to recover a lost chapter of Holocaust history—that of Black victims of the camps.2 In these Black Holocaust narratives, and particularly in Michèle Maillet’s novel L’étoile noire, connective tropes such as tattoos and modes of address such as testimony serve as a bridge between slavery and Holocaust fiction. Black Holocaust narratives not only expose historical intersections between slavery and the Holocaust but also illustrate how postslavery and Holocaust genres of writing interact with and overlay one another in the Caribbean literary imagination.

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THE HOLOCAUST AS A “SURROGATE ISSUE” IN POSTWAR CARIBBEAN THOUGHT Critical discussions of individual Caribbean/diaspora texts that invoke the Holocaust often treat these instances of cross-cultural identification as unique and exceptional.3 In this chapter I want to suggest that, rather than being isolated cases, such texts represent a broader phenomenon of adolescent crosscultural identification with the Holocaust that emerges among Caribbean/diaspora writers and intellectuals who came of age during World War II or in the several decades following. Compare the following passages from British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe and a lesser-known essay by Caribbean Canadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip: As a child, in what seemed to me a hostile country, the Jews were the only minority group discussed with reference to exploitation and racialism, and for that reason, I naturally identified with them. At that time, I was staunchly indignant about everything from the Holocaust to the Soviet persecution of Jewry. The bloody excesses of colonialism, the pillage and rape of modern Africa, the transportation of 11 million black people to the Americas, and their subsequent bondage were not on the curriculum, and certainly not on the television screen. As a result I vicariously channelled a part of my hurt and frustration through the Jewish experience. (Phillips, “In the Ghetto” 54)

At twelve, possibly, thirteen, I was outraged and upset at what had happened to the Jews. In the silence surrounding my own history and my own memory, I took to myself the pain of what had happened to Jewish people in Europe. Perhaps—I am sure that at some deeper level I knew what had happened to my own people (this knowledge, even if not spoken, is passed on, sometimes infinitely nuanced from one generation to another), and that I was on the journey to my own past albeit through a surrogate issue. It matters not how we come to understand oppression, provided we take the lessons to heart and apply them to our lives. (Philip, Showing Grit 84)

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In these two strikingly similar accounts, the Holocaust enables the adolescent Caribbean/diaspora subject to explore the slavery past in societies—both metropolitan and colonial—that disallowed such discussions. Caryl Phillips, born in 1958 in St. Kitts and raised in the north of England, and NourbeSe Philip, born in 1947 in Tobago and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, came of age in a postwar moment in which the Holocaust had become an accepted topic of discussion but slavery had not yet been afforded the same recognition. Philip recalls that as a child she “was not exposed, either in school or imaginatively through library books, to the horror that was the Middle Passage and African life under slavery in the New World,” and she did not study Caribbean history until the age of sixteen (Showing Grit 84). Instead, in the absence of books such as The Souls of Black Folk and Up from Slavery from her local library, her first contact with the subject of genocide came through Leon Uris’s novel Exodus.4 Similarly, as we will see in chapter 7, for the adolescent Caryl Phillips, viewing a television documentary entitled The World at War served as his initiation into questions of historical trauma and displacement. Accordingly, both writers turned to the Holocaust as a “surrogate issue” (in Philip’s phrase) through which they could gain access to a suppressed slavery past. The lines from Caryl Phillips’s essay “In the Ghetto” from his collection The European Tribe are frequently cited, but, set alongside this lesser-known passage from NourbeSe Philip’s essay “Black/Jewish Relations,” they point to a pattern of cross-cultural identification and of linking the histories of fascism and racism that extends well beyond Phillips’ oeuvre.5 Indeed, a number of other Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora examples are available.6 Phillips’s contemporary Paul Gilroy, born in 1956 in London to a Guyanese mother (the author Beryl Gilroy) and raised like Phillips in Britain, describes in his introduction to Between Camps how he was compelled as a child by the Holocaust like a “painful wobbly tooth” to which he “returned .  .  . compulsively” (4). Like Cliff ’s Clare Savage in her novel Abeng, the young Gilroy secretly and obsessively pursued a study of the war out of a sense of “an obligation to know” (Gilroy, Between Camps 3). And, just as the youthful protagonists of the Caribbean Holocaust fiction that I examine in this and the following chapter come to a critical understanding of racism and colorism

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through the Holocaust, so as a boy Gilroy began to make connections between British fascism and Nazism. In Between Camps Gilroy recalls his early awareness that West Indians such as his uncle “had participated bravely in the anti-Nazi war” (2). He also writes of his youthful friendships with the children of Holocaust survivors, recounting how he “struggled with the realization that their suffering was somehow connected with the ideas of ‘race’ that bounded [his] own world with the threat of violence” (4). Gilroy thus identifies both his Caribbean heritage and his postwar British childhood landscape as foundational to his critique of race and discomfort with the “attachment to racial identity” that shapes contemporary African American cultural politics (xiii). Caribbean scholars and writers of the generation preceding that of Gilroy and Phillips have also described the impact of the Holocaust on their intellectual formation. We have already seen how large the Holocaust looms in the consciousness of Cynthia McLeod, who was born in 1936, and whose literary career was partly inspired by her childhood contact with European Jews in Suriname during the war. Equally for McLeod’s contemporary Derek Walcott (b. 1930, St. Lucia), the Holocaust is unrivaled as “the deepest question of the 20th century” (“An Interview” 154). The pervasiveness of Holocaust imagery in Walcott’s poetry reflects the extent to which his adolescence was shaped by World War II and reports of the concentration camps, which came to symbolize for him the horrors of slavery.7 The impact of the war was perhaps still more keenly felt by those who left the Caribbean to pursue their studies in Europe. When asked about his interest in the Jewish political theorist Isaiah Berlin, the Jamaican scholar Rex Nettleford (b. 1933) recalled: I was so concerned about race discrimination, and I had a particular interest in the Jews with all they had suffered with the Holocaust. Because from early I had this concept that our Holocaust was the Middle Passage. And of course you use the word diaspora now liberally. I remember as a student traveling on the train from Paris to Amsterdam, which I did a number of times, and I would go talk to people who might have been in the war, to hear their stories about the war. The Second World War interested me a great deal; the suffering of the Jews interested me a lot. (“To Be Liberated” 149)

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While the life experiences of Caribbean intellectuals born in the 1930s such as Nettleford and Walcott necessarily diverge significantly from those born in the 1950s and raised in Britain such as Phillips and Gilroy, both generations describe the Holocaust as having significantly shaped their understanding of racial and colonial violence.8 Moreover, as not only the well-known examples of Césaire and Fanon but also the fiction of Simone Schwarz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, Maillet, and other francophone writers attests, this pattern of cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust and Jewish experience also extends beyond the anglophone Caribbean context.9 For example, Martinican psychologist Simone Henry-Valmore relates how Césaire had once explained to her that a tree in the Place Abbé-Grégoire in Fort-de-France is called “Oreilles de Juif, oreilles de Noir”—a name that suggested to her the suspicion to which both Blacks and Jews have historically been subject (21). Henry-Valmore then proceeds to recall studying under an Italian Jew while living in Paris in the 1960s: “Once my initiation into the Yiddish alphabet and Hebrew grammar began, I heard echoes of my own history, that of Black people subjected to the same misery: deportation— diaspora—ghetto” (22).10 Henry-Valmore’s autobiographical reflections, while participating in a postwar francophone intellectual tradition of drawing connections between fascism and colonial violence, also exhibit significant parallels with the responses to the Holocaust of Nettleford and other anglophone Caribbean intellectuals. Such accounts of the Holocaust and of Jewish experience more broadly as a surrogate issue through which Caribbean/diaspora writers could explore their own postslavery histories exemplify the phenomenon of multidirectional memory theorized by Rothberg. Revisiting Freud’s writings, Rothberg rejects some critics’ conception of screen memory as the silencing of one memory by another memory with which it is in competition. Instead, he understands it as a displacement of one memory by another that “functions as much to open up lines of communication with the past as to close them off ” (12).11 Rothberg’s multidirectional memory resembles Freud’s screen memory in its substitutive function but operates at a collective rather than an individual level. Moreover, “while screen memory replaces a disturbing memory with a more comforting, everyday scene, the multidirectional memory

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explored here frequently juxtaposes two or more disturbing memories and disrupts everyday settings” (14). Most important for Rothberg’s theorization of multidirectional memory is the insight that “the content of a memory has no intrinsic meaning but takes on meaning precisely in relationship to other memories in a network of associations” (16). Rothberg’s conceptualization of multidirectional memory sheds light on the instances of identification with the Holocaust that appear in the Caribbean/diaspora autobiographical reflections I have surveyed. At the same time, it also helps to account for the presence of Holocaust imagery in Caribbean fiction and poetry. Holocaust motifs appear predominantly in the work of Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during or in the decades immediately following World War II in the Caribbean or in the European metropoles. (Indeed it is not by chance that the works that I discuss in chapters 6 and 7 tend to be set either during the war or in the early postwar period and feature youthful protagonists who hearken back to the writers’ own adolescences.) Moreover, it is worth noting that the majority of the Caribbean Holocaust narratives that I examine were published in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that was characterized by public commemorations of the Holocaust and that saw the peak of the Holocaust novel as a genre (Sicher xi, xvii). At the same time, these publication dates also suggest the authors’ desire to respond to and challenge the rising Black antisemitism in the United States during that same period. Now that the history of slavery has become a more established and accepted part of public discourse, the need for a surrogate form of memory is far less acute, and I would speculate that Holocaust imagery will diminish in importance in the work of younger Caribbean/diaspora writers.12 The fiction and poetry that I discuss in this chapter and the next needs to be understood, then, as tied to a particular historical moment and generation of Caribbean writing.

SURROGATE MEMORY IN M. NOURBESE PHILIP ’S HOLOCAUST NARRATIVES Poet and novelist M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay “Black/Jewish Relations,” which was published in 1993 in her book Showing Grit at the height of

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Black-Jewish tensions in the United States, forcefully argues against competitive memory as a ruse that only serves to illustrate “how systems of power work to pit us against each other” (93). In the essay, which responds to the controversy that surrounded an early 1990s Toronto production of the musical Show Boat, Philip calls for interethnic cooperation between Blacks and Jews as well as other minorities. Citing her own experience of coming to an awareness of injustice and genocide through her adolescent encounter with the Holocaust, Philip observes that the impact of her early exposure to the Holocaust is evidenced by the presence of Holocaust motifs in her fiction and poetry. A case in point is Philip’s short story “Stop Frame” (1993), which is set in 1958 on an unnamed island in the British Caribbean.13 In “Stop Frame” the twelve-year-old heroine and “war baby” (62) Miranda resists Nazism as a means of indirectly engaging the slavery past. The story is fundamentally concerned with the workings of memory: its unreliability, its gaps, its disjunctive character. For Philip’s young protagonist, the Holocaust functions as a surrogate issue through which she can explore a deeper, unnamed pain that afflicts those around her. Anticipating Gilroy’s “wobbly tooth” metaphor, this pain is symbolized in the story by the rotten tooth that plagues Miranda: “Stop frame! you von’t feel ze pain, just ze pressure—the weight of memories—a tooth impacted, pushing, pressing against gum against bone—the hard white bone of history, and I remembering the tooth black and rotting—the white memory eating and eating away at the creeping black which making the hard white soft, crumbly, and Ma packing it again and again with the dark brown powder she making from cloves, and it stopping the aching—the memory—” (71). Refusing to allow her tooth to be extracted by the émigré dentist Dr. Ratzinger, whom she suspects of being a Nazi, Miranda resists the forgetting of painful memories through their excision.14 Yet neither, the story suggests, can these memories be approached directly. Although her mother maintains that she is too young to remember the war, Miranda insists that at night she hears “the bombs dropping on London over the wireless” (63). The War looms large for this “young girl on a tiny Caribbean island—far away from events like ‘the final solution,’ panzer divisions, and the Desert Fox” (63). Moreover, just as Miranda

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inherits a postmemory of the war, she inherits a postmemory of slavery as well. Slavery and colonialism are never mentioned in the story, but are only alluded to through references to their legacies: miscegenation, colorism, and Hollywood depictions of Africa. Instead, Miranda and her friends pass the time launching their own “war effort” (64), which consists of speculating about and playing pranks on Dr. Ratzinger, whom they imagine as an incarnation of the Hollywood image of the evil Nazi dentist (Sanders 137). Although the young Miranda has little understanding of the true meaning of “Nazi,” she senses from the manner in which her mother utters the word that it “holding in it everything that evil” (70). Just as slavery is not explicitly addressed in the story, colonial racism is only alluded to indirectly through references to antisemitism. Miranda’s father, for example, draws attention to anti-Black racism through its relationship to antisemitism when he refuses to believe that Dr. Ratzinger could be having an affair with his dark-skinned nurse: “‘Me don’t care how mix-up she is—as far as those Nazis go she is a member of an inferior race. Me read about it—they even killing Jews and they have white skins!” (68). For the adolescent protagonist of “Stop Frame,” living on a Caribbean island in the late 1950s, the Holocaust is the most readily available means of accessing the memory of a deeper historical trauma that remains unspoken, but that is represented by the aching tooth. Miranda’s preoccupation with Nazis and the war substitutes for a more direct engagement with the slavery past. Yet as Leslie Sanders observes in a sensitive commentary, in “Stop Frame” Holocaust memory does not block or compete with the inherited memory of slavery. Instead, “in Philip’s work, [the Holocaust and slavery] are deeply connected, the Holocaust providing access to a documented trauma, even perhaps, a model of public acknowledgement and mourning, that the Middle Passage demands and requires. In ‘Stop Frame,’ the one recalls the other, rather than masking it” (139–40). The most arresting moment in the story comes in its final pages, in which there is a sudden temporal shift thirty years forward to 1988. Mimicking the stop-frame animation technique used in the King Kong film that Miranda and her friends had watched as children, the story now unfolds as a series of stills. The narrative moves disjunctively and

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associatively from the World War II theme, and the question of whether Miranda’s Jewish friend Sara knew anything about the Nazis, to Hollywood’s depiction of Africa in Tarzan and Miranda’s ignorance of African history, to pause finally on the image of Miranda’s mother lying on the floor after a suicide attempt. The adult narrator questions her mother in the present time of the story about the reasons for her distress, but her mother resists answering, remarking: “‘You know what I always saying, chile, a memory just like a rotten tooth—if it hurting too bad, you must be taking it out’” (71). Miranda, however, refuses to accept her mother’s solution of forgetting. Instead, her tongue runs over the space where her tooth had ached, “exploring old areas of pain” (72). This final section of “Stop Frame” is illuminated by Silverman’s theorization of palimpsestic memory in which “one element is seen through and transformed by another” (Palimpsestic Memory 4). Silverman prefers the figure of the palimpsest to such alternatives as analogy, metaphor, and allegory because it better captures memory’s overlaying of past and present and straddling of multiple temporal moments. The figure of the palimpsest is apposite to Philip’s story, which layers different histories and temporal moments to suggest the nonlinear workings of memory and the extent to which “the present is . . . shadowed or haunted by a past which is not immediately visible but is progressively brought into view” (3). In Philip’s popular young adult novel Harriet’s Daughter (1988), which is set against the more contemporary backdrop of 1980s Toronto, Holocaust memory similarly catalyzes an adolescent protagonist’s reconnection with her Caribbean heritage and the history of slavery. Much like the protagonists of several other Caribbean Holocaust narratives considered in this study, Philip’s Margaret Cruikshank is a young girl struggling to find an alternative to her Barbadian father’s oppressive, colorist patriarchal values and her Jamaican mother’s passive acquiescence to those values. Early in the novel Margaret discovers that her mother’s former employer, a Holocaust survivor named Harriet Blewchamp, has left her a monetary inheritance as well as her papers and books. In Showing Grit Philip glosses this motif of inheritance: “What Mrs. Blewchamp has left for Margaret is still unknown to me, but it does have to do with the ‘gift’ of understanding another’s pain that was given to another young girl many years ago on a Caribbean island. I was also conscious of laying the

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groundwork for a sequel that would explore the possible links between a Jewish survivor of the Nazi holocaust and the descendant of survivors of the African holocaust” (86). The presence of Mrs. Blewchamp in the novel thus reflects Philip’s own childhood awareness of the Holocaust and the silences surrounding the legacy of slavery that this awareness helped to redress. In Harriet’s Daughter Margaret is inspired by the discovery of Mrs. Blewchamp’s bequeathal to her to change her name to Harriet, for “Mrs. Blewchamp had really lived, she was in the war, in a concentration camp, and had escaped and she wanted me to have her name. I mean, like who was Margaret? My father’s mother, whom I didn’t really know, and didn’t like, because HE was always threatening to send me to her for some Good West Indian Discipline” (25). The name Harriet takes on another layer of significance when Margaret comes across the story of the runaway slave and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman. Rebelling against her restrictive upbringing, Margaret seeks to affiliate herself with Harriet Blewchamp and Harriet Tubman rather than accept the patriarchal values imposed on her by the name Margaret. Mrs. Blewchamp, alongside Harriet Tubman and the African American Mrs. B, are mentors who guide Margaret toward an emancipatory path of self-determination. Particularly noteworthy is the novel’s overlaying of Holocaust memory and the memory of slavery that is emblematized in the name Harriet: “Harriet, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Blewchamp, again I thought of changing my name to one that meant something—like Harriet. Harriet Tubman was brave and strong and she was black like me. I think it was the first time I thought of wanting to be called Harriet—I wanted to be Harriet” (37). Philip offers a sympathetic portrait of the Holocaust survivor Harriet Blewchamp, who shares with Harriet Tubman eyes that “looked like they had seen things” (31). As the novel proceeds, Mrs. Blewchamp becomes less focal as Margaret reconnects with the history of slavery through the Underground Railway game that she devises, as well as with the Caribbean itself through her efforts to help her friend Zulma return to Tobago. Notably, however, the first rule of the Underground Railway game upon which they agree is that “anyone can be a slave” (64), signaling the novel’s resistance to a logic of racial particularism.

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At the end of the novel, in another palimpsestic scene, Mrs. Blewchamp resurfaces in Margaret’s dream during a flight back to the Caribbean: I had lots of dreams that night; I don’t remember much about them, except for the one in which I am carrying old Mrs. Blewchamp on my back, and running after Harriet Tubman. The old lady got heavier and heavier in the dream, then suddenly we were underground, in caves, and I could hear the slave-owners and dogs above us. Mrs. Blewchamp smiled at me and brought her twisted fingers up to her lips and motioned for me to be silent, then she showed me the numbers on her wrist—they glowed red in the dark cave. I reached out to touch the numbers and suddenly there I was in my bed wide awake, hearing my heart beating. (147–48)

While elsewhere in the novel the Holocaust and slavery are drawn into association through the double resonance of the name Harriet and motifs of suffering and escape, in Margaret’s dream the two historical traumas are folded together, with Margaret saving the concentration camp victim from the slave owners. Mrs. Blewchamp’s appearance in the dream serves to superimpose the space of the concentration camp over that of the Underground Railway cave. Notably, then, Margaret’s reclamation of her Caribbean roots at the end of the novel does not require a rejection of Mrs. Blewchamps’s legacy but instead is accompanied by a reaffirmation of Margaret’s affiliation with her Jewish benefactor. The evocative dream scene illustrates how, in Philip’s writing, rather than competing with one another, Holocaust memory and the memory of slavery interact in a fluid and reciprocal fashion. While Philip’s corpus offers rich examples of the multidirectional and palimpsestic workings of memory, it also points to the limits of this model. Her poem “St. Clair Avenue West” (1983) stages a Black-Jewish encounter against an urban Toronto background that anticipates the Holocaust focus of both “Stop Frame” and Harriet’s Daughter. Yet in “St. Clair Avenue West” the encounter is a less productive one that calls into question the possibility of connecting disparate experiences of suffering. In the poem an elderly Jewish merchant and a Black female customer

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meet in a dingy fabric store. As they haggle over the price of the fabric, the speaker contemplates the relationship between her own postslavery history and the other history of trauma that is signaled by the number tattooed on the old man’s wrist: I fingered the fabric that lay between us, “Can you do a good job for me?” The dust settled slowly on the sparse words, the creviced silences, the folds of fabric; on all that forced us together the so called common suffering snapped us rusted links apart. Broken ends of conversation dangled in the dusty air, silence flayed the shaft ridden sunlight . . . (lines 21–32)

Here the space between the speaker and the Jewish merchant is not one of communication or empathy. Instead, the pair are artificially “forced . . . together” by “so called common suffering” and their interaction is confined to “sparse words” and silences—“branded memories that balk at talk” (line 66). The Black-Jewish encounter Philip stages in the poem entails an economic rather than mnemonic or empathetic transaction. Although slavery and the Holocaust are associated in lines such as “Aunt Jemimah stilled / made pancakes for the goosestepping soldiers” (lines 31–32), this connective gesture is undermined by what the speaker refers to as “the mathematics of it all”: Careful you measured the chair, “In two weeks time.” I looked behind, a latter day Janus, saw them put down the whips, take up the guns. “You can have it before.” I looked ahead,

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they turned off the ovens, and set up the homelands. “And how much would it cost?” I was thinking to trade one Roots for a Holocaust. (lines 35–44)

Tension is generated in “St. Clair Avenue West” by the jarring juxtaposition of the language of monetary exchange with the theme of historical trauma. The motif of measurement that runs through the poem suggests a calculus of suffering characteristic of competitive memory, while the “trade” that the speaker considers making—“one Roots for a Holocaust”—signals the substitution of one trauma for another rather than the reciprocal and productive interaction of Black and Jewish traumatic memories that we see elsewhere in Philip’s writing.

BLACK HOLOCAUST NARRATIVES In some Caribbean/diaspora writing such as NourbeSe Philip’s, the Holocaust is only briefly and intermittently invoked, serving as a gateway to the memory of a different historical trauma. In a second group of texts to which I will now turn, the Holocaust becomes the primary focus of the narrative while continuing to function as a site of identification between Black and Jewish memories of suffering. These works of Black Holocaust fiction concretize analogies between slavery and the Holocaust by positioning their Black protagonists as both descendants of the Middle Passage and victims of the concentration camps. In so doing they contribute to recent efforts to expand our understanding of the Holocaust by drawing attention to the experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, and African Americans under the Nazis. Although, unlike Jews, Blacks were not systematically targeted by the Nazis with elimination, they suffered a variety of forms of persecution during the war, including sterilization, incarceration, and death, so that according to one historian “genocidal intent [was] clear in everyday police and medical practice” (Rosenhaft 164).

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In the context of the present study, a particularly noteworthy case of Black victimization under the Nazis is that of the Surinamese artist Josef Nassy. Nassy was born in Paramaribo in 1904 and later moved to Belgium, where he married a Belgian woman in 1939. He was arrested in 1942 as an enemy national and was imprisoned in the Beverloo transit camp in Belgium and then in the Laufen internment camp and in its subcamp Tittmoning in Bavaria. During his three-year internment, Nassy created a substantial visual record of his experience that survived the war and is now held in the United States Holocaust Museum. At Laufen and Tittmoning roughly a dozen other Blacks were interned alongside Nassy.15 What makes Nassy’s story unique is that, as his surname suggests, he was of Sephardic Jewish descent. Thus, as Clarence Lusane comments in Hitler’s Black Victims, “Here you had, in one individual, the embodiment of two of the most despised and hated groups the Nazi racial hierarchy could possibly conceive. The very existence of Nassy disrupted the racial boundaries established by the Nazis, some of whom believed that Jews were the ‘bastard’ offsprings of Negroes and Asians” (149). Imaginatively recovering the lost stories of Black victims of the Nazis such as Josef Nassy, the Black Holocaust narratives I will discuss do not merely allude to the Holocaust, but are themselves works of Holocaust fiction that engage with and rework the conventions of the genre. At the same time, they also harness the strategies of postslavery fiction, thereby hybridizing Holocaust and postslavery narrative and exposing the areas of overlap between them. Before turning to Maillet’s L’étoile noire and its dual negotiation of Holocaust and slavery memory, I will briefly examine several other Caribbean and African diaspora Holocaust narratives in order to provide a fuller understanding of this subgenre of Holocaust fiction. In Michelle Cliff ’s short story “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet” (1990), an African American female trumpet player travels to Paris to escape the racism and gender inequality of 1930s America. Initially, the trumpeter finds in Paris a welcome reprieve from the more pronounced racism that afflicts her American homeland: “No strange fruit hanging in the Tuileries” (127). Yet in 1940 the Latin Quarter club in which she is

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employed shuts down and she is forced to find a new gig in Copenhagen. While working in the Danish capital, she is arrested in 1942 along with a group of Jews. The tragic irony that her flight from American racism has resulted in an even worse fate now confronts her: “Fool of a girl, she told herself. To have thought she had seen it all. Left it—the worst piece of it—behind her. The body burning—ignited by the tar. The laughter and the fire” (128). Here Cliff employs incendiary imagery that links European fascist violence with the anti-Black racism of American lynchings.16 Cliff ’s “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet” as well as John Edgar Wideman’s “Valaida” (1989) were inspired by the story of Valaida Snow, an African American jazz musician who performed in Denmark throughout 1940 and was arrested by the Nazis after they occupied the country.17 In its reference to the history of Caribbean and African diaspora musicians who were detained while living in Europe during the war, Cliff ’s story bears comparison with Hijuelos’s novel A Simple Habana Melody, which I discuss in chapter 2. Although it does not center on a Black protagonist, A Simple Habana Melody similarly enlarges and complicates our understanding of the Holocaust by portraying the internment of a Caribbean composer in Nazi-occupied France. Arrested because of his semitic-sounding name, Hijuelos’s Israel Levis is subject to a case of mistaken identity much like a number of other protagonists of Caribbean and Black Holocaust narratives. Hijuelos based his character Israel Levis on the Tin Pan Alley composer Moisés Simons, explaining in the novel’s afterword that “it was Simons’ life as a Cuban exile in the Paris of the 1930s and his eventual persecution by the Germans during the Second World War that became the basis for this novel’s convergence with the Holocaust” (343). Thus while Hijuelos’s incorporation of Holocaust themes has been controversial, it is grounded in the historical experience of Caribbean expatriates in Nazi-occupied Europe.18 Hijuelos’s and Cliff ’s texts carry out an archival function by rescuing the lost histories of Caribbean and Black musicians who were persecuted in Europe during World War II. Yet if Cliff ’s archival method resembles that of Hijuelos, her story more directly anticipates Ghanaian Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s novel Half-Blood Blues (2011). Like “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet,” Half-Blood Blues relates the Holocaust to American

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racism and adopts jazz music as a device that simultaneously brings into focus a marginalized dimension of Holocaust history and links together disparate members of the African diaspora. In Cliff ’s story, when the African American trumpeter jams with a Senegalese steward and drummer on board the French ship that is carrying her to Europe in a “reverse middle passage” (125), their music taps into a shared postslavery legacy: “The horn is brass. The drum, silver. Metal beaten into memory, history” (125). For Cliff ’s Black musicians, Europe is transformed by the war from a space of relative freedom to one of increased vulnerability. Similarly, in Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues, which also traces the journey of African diaspora musicians from one European capital to another in search of safety and professional opportunity, the musical careers that initially bring greater mobility in late 1930s and early 1940s Europe ultimately raise the risk of arrest and deportation to the camps. Although Edugyan writes from an African Canadian rather than Caribbean vantage point, much like her compatriot Lawrence Hill she displays a correspondingly angular relationship to U.S. race politics— one that opens up her fiction to a multidirectional engagement with Holocaust memory. Half-Blood Blues tells the story of a group of young American and European jazz musicians who come together to form the band Hot-Time Swingers in interwar Berlin. The most talented member of the band is the trumpet player Hieronymous (Hiero) Falk, an AfroGerman mischling and “Rhineland Bastard” whose father was one of the Senegalese soldiers sent by France to occupy the Rhineland in the aftermath of World War I. The novel details the attempts several decades later of Hiero’s former bandmates as well as of musicologists, journalists, and filmmakers to recover the elusive facts of Hiero’s origins and apparent death in the concentration camp Mauthausen (the same camp in which Maillet’s heroine will die). This quest, which generates the narrative suspense of the novel, allegorizes Edugyan’s own authorial search for a forgotten chapter of Holocaust history. The mystery surrounding Hiero’s purported death is analogous to that surrounding the collective history of Black victims of the Nazis.19 The past haunts the present in Half-Blood Blues, much as it does in postslavery fiction, which “stag[es] how a lost or forgotten past continues to exert its influence, active yet unseen” (Sharpe xii). Indeed, Half-Blood

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Blues deploys characteristic strategies of postslavery fiction, engaging in a literary archaeology of an obscured past. What is distinctive about Edugyan’s novel is that it directs these strategies toward an investigation of the Holocaust rather than slavery. As a scholar interviewed in a documentary about Edugyan’s Afro-German protagonist Hiero explains toward the beginning of the novel, “Of course, it’s hard to get a sense of how many blacks actually went to the camps, because so many records were destroyed. . . . These people are lost in the dark maw of history” (49–50). Taking full advantage of her literary license, Edugyan’s novel imaginatively recovers these destroyed and missing archival records. At the same time, Half-Blood Blues displays an awareness of history as a discursive field that, as we saw in chapter 3, increasingly typifies postslavery fiction. For example, a scene in which the novel’s African American narrator Sid attends the premiere of the documentary foregrounds the narrative devices and strategies the filmmaker employs, thereby signaling the film’s discursive rather than mimetic character: “Caspars’ documentary wasn’t told in no straight line. Seemed like one person was still talking when another one shown up onscreen, and then they was both talking over some photograph of someone else” (46). Half-Blood Blues’ metafictional reflections on modes of narrating the past suggest not only the suspicion with which some postslavery fiction regards the recuperative project but also Holocaust fiction’s concern with the problems of historical misrepresentation and inauthenticity. As Barbara Foley observes, “the very urgency of relating the truth of the Holocaust throws into sharp relief that borderline region between imitation and fraudulence and leads us to scrutinize the difference between artistic license and historical distortion” (345). By foregrounding modes of representation in the scene in which the documentary is screened, Edugyan calls attention to the lacunae of dominant narratives of the Holocaust that neglect its Black victims. Simultaneously, she problematizes Half-Blood Blues’ status as itself a possibly distortive or exploitative representation of the past.20 Visiting Berlin to attend the premiere of the documentary, Sid observes how the city has erased its past: “All that was gone like it ain’t never been” (39). The documentary, made by a rather unsavory Scandinavian director and screened at a festival in Berlin honoring Hiero, serves the

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interests of the new Germany more than those of historical accuracy. Sid is deeply upset by the film’s distortions, in particular its allegation that he bore responsibility for Hiero’s arrest by the Gestapo. Sid’s discomfort with the documentary points to a tension, relevant to both postslavery and Holocaust writing, between the experiences of individual witnesses to historical atrocities and the way in which the larger society remembers and records these events. As a Black Canadian Holocaust novel, Half-Blood Blues displays a multidirectionality and rejection of racial particularism that also distinguish Caribbean Holocaust narratives. But while identificatory rather than competitive in its approach to the Holocaust, unlike the Caribbean texts examined in this study, Half-Blood Blues does not present the Holocaust as a site of surrogate memory or as a catalyst for decolonization. Moreover, Edugyan’s novel is notable for the sense of caution, one might even say hesitation, with which it approaches the narration of the Holocaust. Its achronological, disjunctive narrative is replete with distancing devices, strategies of deferral, and motifs that problematize historical representation. At the novel’s end, Hiero as Holocaust victim remains an elusive figure, his camp testimony withheld from both Sid and the reader. The Holocaust itself remains a largely unnarratable and untouchable event for Edugyan. Maillet’s L’étoile noire, by contrast, fully inhabits the genre of Holocaust fiction, offering a detailed portrayal of the deportation and internment of Black victims of the camps.

TESTIMONY IN L’ÉTOILE NOIRE At first glance, Maillet’s L’étoile noire (The Black Star, 1990) has much in common with Cliff ’s “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet” and Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Like these other Black Holocaust narratives, L’étoile noire performs an archival function, imaginatively recovering forgotten histories of Black victims of the Holocaust. Just as Cliff ’s story is dedicated to the memory of the African American trumpeter Valaida Snow, Maillet cites as sources for her novel a variety of documentary materials including interviews with Black survivors of the camps. The engagement with the historical archive is as much central to Black Holocaust fiction

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as it is to the neoslave narrative, as Cliff ’s dedication of her story to Snow and the bibliographies that Maillet and Edugyan append to their novels attest. Moreover, all three works employ the Black Holocaust genre to make connections between Nazism, colonialism, and anti-Black racism. In so doing, however, Maillet’s novel powerfully and explicitly stages the operations of surrogate memory by directly invoking the history of the Middle Passage within the frame of a concentration camp narrative. Thus Maillet, like NourbeSe Philip, participates in a specifically Caribbean tradition in which the Holocaust unlocks the memory of slavery and performs a decolonizing function. At the same time, Maillet’s presentation of Jewish victims of the Nazis is ultimately more ambivalent than either Philip’s, Cliff ’s, or Edugyan’s. L’étoile noire at once advances and undermines an association between Black and Jewish traumatic memory by thematizing the persistence of racism and racial hierarchies among the deportees and by specifying the historical difference of Black experience within the camps. While Cliff ’s and Edugyan’s presentations of Black Holocaust stories recover this history in a noncompetitive fashion, Maillet’s intervention into French national debates about the legacies of colonialism and her more insistently Afrocentric interpretation of the Black Holocaust genre presses in a different direction. Maillet’s L’étoile noire simultaneously provides one of the fullest examples of the operation of multidirectional memory in Caribbean literature and points to its limits. Maillet’s novel tells the story of a Martinican woman living in Bordeaux who is deported along with her two children to Auschwitz in December 1943. Sidonie Hellénon is a light-skinned Martinican working as a domestic for Mme Dubreuil, a French Jew who had previously employed Sidonie’s mother while resident in Martinique. Although Sidonie has begun training to become a nurse with the encouragement of the kindly Dubreuils, her studies are interrupted when she becomes pregnant with twins and is abandoned by her French lover Jean. When the Dubreuils are arrested and deported, Sidonie and her five-year old twins Nicaise and Désiré are seized along with them, mistaken for Jews. After becoming separated from Désiré at Auschwitz and losing Nicaise to illness, Sidonie is moved to Ravensbrück and then finally to Mauthausen, where she dies from tuberculosis.

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Throughout her ordeal Sidonie manages to hold onto a moleskin notebook in which she assiduously documents her experience and testifies to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has observed that “clandestine literary efforts .  .  . served as a primary spiritual resource for the prisoners in the ghettos and camps” (16). Accordingly, during Sidonie’s incarceration, the act of writing is a means of self-actualization and survival. At the same time, Sidonie’s first-person diary, which is presented as the text of the novel, also suggests the importance of art as a mode of defiance. For, as another scholar notes, during the Holocaust, writing “was produced in vast quantities in the ghettos, in hideouts, and in the camps themselves, where every available means of writing and drawing were used to meet the urgency of recording what was happening. The victims knew they must beat the Nazi objective of wiping out the remembrance of the Jews without any trace” (Sicher 5–6). The need to combat the danger that history will be erased is signaled by the editorial note that concludes Maillet’s novel, which indicates that although Sidonie’s diary survived the war and was returned to her mother, the writing was so faint that it had become almost illegible. Maillet’s generic framing of L’étoile noire as a camp diary reflects the priority of testimony in Holocaust writing as a means of staving off the erasure of memory. Yet, if testimony is “a special inheritance of the Holocaust” (Foley 334), Maillet’s deployment of the testimonial voice at the same time is indicative of the novel’s concern with a Caribbean collective amnesia about the slavery past that Sidonie must challenge through the act of writing. In a compelling image for the multidirectionality of memory, Sidonie writes her diary in two directions simultaneously, both forward into the present of her internment and backward into her Antillean and slavery past, whose memories she attempts to reconstruct. Renée Larrier observes that “this double écriture (double writing) records not only [Sidonie’s] story but also represents that of her African ancestors who were also captured, relocated, and enslaved, but whose story was silenced and erased from official records. By implication, Sidonie’s notebook functions as another archive, providing previously undocumented evidence on the Middle Passage, slavery, as well as the Holocaust” (81). Testimony thus has a double resonance in L’étoile noire, as it wards against the forgetting of two historical traumas

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as well as the story of Black victims of the camps in particular.21 Testimony posthumously restores the stories and humanity of victims of regimes such as the concentration camps and the plantation complex that reduced the meaning of individual lives to their membership in a racial category. In L’étoile noire the testimonial voice forms a bridge between Holocaust and postslavery fiction. Sidonie’s notebook is situated at the intersection of Holocaust and slavery memory and voices the experiences of victims of both atrocities. In generic terms, then, the novel represents the meeting of the Holocaust diary and the fugitive slave narrative. As a fictionalized Holocaust diary that mediates between testimony and the literary imagination, L’étoile noire is an example of what Foley terms the “pseudofactual” Holocaust novel in which “the object of representation is not an imagined configuration of characters and events, but a putative historical document that records such a configuration” (351). Simultaneously, the novel’s fictionalized autobiographical form corresponds to the neoslave narrative, which mimics the first-person voice and other generic conventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives. In chapter 7 I will discuss in greater detail the significance of the diary form for Caribbean Holocaust fiction. What I want to emphasize here is the way in which Maillet’s Black Holocaust novel not only exhibits the palimpsestic operations of memory but also specifically overlays the genres of the Holocaust diary and the slave narrative through its use of first-person testimony. In an inversion of André and Simone Schwarz-Bart’s La mulâtresse Solitude, a novel of Caribbean slavery that invokes the Holocaust in its concluding lines through an anachronistic reference to the Warsaw Ghetto, Maillet unfolds a Holocaust narrative that leads back to the slavery past. Set pieces of Holocaust literature, including the abrupt awakening by the Gestapo in the middle of the night, the cattle car deportation, and the shaving and tattooing of inmates, are here refracted through a postslavery lens that infuses them with additional resonances. In keeping with the dual directionality and temporality of her diary, Sidonie’s deportation provokes a sustained exploration of the slavery past. The novel continually crosscuts between the present time of Sidonie’s internment and residual memories of her Antillean childhood and deeply

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repressed slavery past that her camp experience brings to the surface. Much like Philip’s “Stop Frame,” L’étoile noire elaborates a palimpsestic structure that straddles different moments in time. While on the train that is transporting her to the camps, Sidonie experiences a series of flashbacks that supply the reader with information about her Martinican upbringing and relationship with her lover Jean. In this scene the narrative works associatively: the appearance of a couple who resemble Jean’s parents provokes a lengthy flashback about her romance with the French pharmacist, while another deportee who resembles the nineteenth-century French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher prompts reflections on her Martinican childhood. Yet, in conjuring up the past and the Martinican landscape, Sidonie also reaches into a deeper ancestral past that helps her to negotiate her present circumstances. The dual and discontinuous temporality of Sidonie’s diary recalls the cotemporality that Lawrence Langer identifies as a structuring principle of Holocaust testimonies, in which “deep memory” (the traumatic reliving of the past) and “common memory” (the more detached reflection on the past from the perspective of the present) interact (5–6). In Holocaust testimonies, “deep memory  .  .  . suspects and depends on common memory, knowing what common memory cannot know but tries nonetheless to express,” with the result that “the two kinds of memory intrude on each other, disrupting the smooth flow of their narratives” (Langer 6). Correspondingly, Sidonie’s diary is structured by the disruptive doubling and interpenetration of memory. Yet in Sidonie’s case, the “surge of deep memory that constantly threatens to erupt” (6) is that of an ancestral slavery past. Moreover, inverting Langer’s model, in Sidonie’s Holocaust testimony, the deep memory of slavery is a source of inspiration, identity, and strength rather than a memory from which she must protectively try to dissociate herself. Whereas before her deportation Sidonie had given little thought to her Blackness, it now becomes primary. As with the protagonists of other Caribbean Holocaust novels, Sidonie’s contact with Jewishness and the Holocaust has a decolonizing effect, prompting her to reconsider her parents’ colorist and assimilationist ideology and reconnecting her with a deeply repressed slavery past. Sidonie remarks that “schoolbooks did not address slavery. Why not? My father spoke very

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little of it, and my mother always turned the conversation in a different direction. There were only my maternal grandparents to tell me in Creole about this era of Antillean history” (38).22 Against the backdrop of the radically dehumanizing and disorienting experience of deportation and internment in the camps, however, Sidonie looks increasingly to the slavery past to make sense of and survive her ordeal. For in the camps she feels that she has come full circle, returning to the slavery of several centuries prior: “Three centuries after my ancestors, I am back at the point of departure: slavery” (102).23 Throughout the novel, motifs that standardly figure in Holocaust narratives such as tattoos, shoes, and the shaving of hair function associatively and imagistically to link the two histories of trauma. When, on the eleventh day of Sidonie’s internment at Ravensbrück, a triangle and number are tattooed on her body, the gesture proves to be a familiar one: “Tattooing, that’s for today. A return to slavery. No more name, no more first name, no more surname: a number. A new baptism. A baptism already experienced in the Caribbean” (155).24 Signaling the longer history of this practice, Sidonie remarks that the whites know by instinct and the Blacks by memory the fact that tattooing is an entry into slavery. Similarly, when another inmate at Auschwitz offers to trade drinking water for Sidonie’s shoes, the threat of having to go barefoot recalls for her the condition of slavery, and she refuses. In Maillet’s rendering, the emblematic scene of shaving the camp inmates’ hair is defamiliarized when it transitions seamlessly into reflections on the meaning of hair texture in the Caribbean. Correspondingly, the dogs used by the camp guards evoke for Sidonie an ancestral slave terror of dogs. Sidonie’s experience in the boxcar and later in the camps encourages her to engage for the first time with her slavery roots, as she begins to consider the cultural and spiritual resources that enabled her ancestors to survive the Middle Passage. At the end of a chapter entitled “La mort,” the death of one of the deportees on the train that is transporting her to Auschwitz prompts her to hear “another song, another moan, an echo of my consciousness, a painful and resounding surge that swells and makes my blood beat and my pulse throb like a sob. Is this what they heard, those whom we called ‘the black slaves’ [le bois d’ébène], from deep in

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the cargo holds of the slaving ships transporting them to the Americas?” (77).25 At the outset of the following chapter, the cattle car morphs into a slave ship as Sidonie journeys to a different space in which the other deportees cannot join her. Recognizing the slavery-like conditions on the train as already familiar, she begins to recover her inherited memory not only of slavery but also of Africa: “For the first time in my life, I feel reborn in me the memory of Africa, my ancestors, not the Gauls, not the Antilleans, but, still further back, the Africans. . . . For the first time I think of Africa, I dream of Africa, Africa unfurls in me” (79).26 The chapter includes an epiphanic moment in which Sidonie invents an African god, Agénor, from whom she derives strength, determining that a white God is no longer sufficient. In this scene, Maillet recasts in Afrocentric terms the motif of the death of God that appears in such classic Holocaust narratives as Elie Wiesel’s Night (1972). Instead of experiencing the death of faith like Wiesel’s narrator, who after witnessing the hanging execution of a fellow camp inmate declares that God, too, hangs from the gallows, Sidonie exchanges her old faith for a new, more syncretic one that draws on African spirituality. L’étoile noire offers a particularly sustained and powerful instance of the pattern that I have been tracing throughout this chapter in which the Holocaust functions as a surrogate memory for the Caribbean/diaspora protagonist to whom knowledge of the slavery past has been denied. At the same time, as some of the passages quoted earlier attest, in a contravening impulse, the Afrocentric perspective that emerges from this new understanding of slavery resists a multidirectional framework. In her authenticating preface to the 2006 edition of Maillet’s novel, Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, lauds Maillet for rejecting the logic of competitive memory. Veil argues that Maillet’s novel reveals how “the experience of suffering brings together much more than it alienates those who are its victims” (15).27 Veil’s emphasis in her preface is on the commonality of Black and Jewish victims of the Holocaust: “Sidonie resembles us and we resemble her” (14).28 Yet Veil’s universalist interpretation does not entirely stand up to a closer reading of Maillet’s novel, which from the outset raises questions about the possibilities for such cross-cultural solidarity.

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In Half-Blood Blues Edugyan aligns and identifies Blacks and Jews as common targets of Nazi violence, as coproducers of jazz music, and as engaged in a shared practice of racial masquerade. In the concluding scene of “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet,” in which the African American trumpeter is processed alongside other deportees, Cliff positions her African American heroine somewhat more ambiguously as both apart from and at the same time affiliated with Jewish victims of the Nazis: “She found herself in a line of women. And girls. And little children. The women spoke in languages she did not understand. Spoke them quietly. From the tone she knew they were encouraging their children. She knows—she who has studied the nuance of sound” (127). Cliff ’s protagonist is at once alien to the group and a member of it, surrounded by “women and girls and little children—from which she is apart, yet of ” (128). Maillet’s L’étoile noire insists still more firmly on the distance between Black and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. At the outset of the novel, Sidonie recognizes a fellow deportee among those on the truck that is transporting them to a horse-training grounds where they will await a train. Yet the woman refuses to acknowledge Sidonie, denying her the gesture of recognition she craves at that moment of profound uncertainty. The woman’s response angers Sidonie, who insists that she is simply French like the other deportees, the granddaughter of a World War I veteran. Once arrived at the horse-riding ring, where she is made to wait for several hours, Sidonie suffers the racializing gaze of the Jewish deportees: “For my companions in misery, I am not one of them. An intruder, an anomaly, an error. The solidarity of misery, of grief, of suffering? Even here, in this riding school where we are treated, not like male and female enemies, suspects, Jews, Black or I don’t know what, but like animals—the barriers, distinctions, suspicions arise again, arise more than ever. I am an Antillean, a Martinican, a woman of the colonies, a Negress, a daughter of slaves” (28–29).29 Later, on the crowded train that is carrying her north, despite the stifling heat Sidonie is loathe to remove her children’s clothes because she does not want to expose their brown skin to the scrutiny of the other deportees. Her fears are confirmed when, after being moved to a windowless freight train, a

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Jewish deportee implores Sidonie in a racializing gesture to use her “sorcery” to heal her sick daughter (82). There is a recurring tension in Maillet’s novel between the leveling effect of the deportation and internment on the one hand and the persistence of racial hierarchies that differentiate Sidonie from other victims of the Nazis on the other. Repeatedly, Sidonie remarks on the equalizing effect of a Nazi racial discourse that places all racial Others into a common category: “I feel that I am part of the same category of humanity as all those who are here. I belong from now on to an indistinct group in which Hitler has classified Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and blacks” (27).30 The dehumanizing camp experience also puts the diverse victims of the Nazis onto a common plane: “We are all different and yet similar. We are no longer anyone. No longer anything. Not even animals” (121).31 The degradation that the inmates endure is such that they come to physically resemble one another: “With this thin grey day, we are all the same color, no one would be able to discern that I am Black” (108).32 However, the novel, at the same time, specifies the experience of Black victims of the camps and questions whether the Black deportees can find acceptance among their fellow inmates. This emphasis recalls Fanon’s shift in Black Skin, White Masks from a universalist argument that aligns antisemitism and anti-Black racism to a more ambivalent reading of the Jew as having the potential to be “unknown in his Jewishness” (115)—a possibility unavailable to the Black man, who cannot pass as white. In the opening scene of L’étoile noire, in which Sidonie is arrested, she is mistaken for a Black Jew but insists: “Nicht Jude. Catholique” (18).33 The German officers’ reply—“Jude, Negerin, tut nichts, selbe Schweinerei!” (18)—indicates that, from the perspective of Nazi racial ideology, the distinction matters little. However, as the novel progresses, it increasingly suggests that the distinction is in fact an important one. Sidonie’s status in relation to the Jewish deportees is always in question, as is signaled by the fluctuating pronouns that she employs: “How many are they? How many are we, now that I am part of this herd?” (26).34 The deportees gathered at the riding school are all like “exhausted horses,” except that Sidonie and her children are the only Blacks in the crowd: “Never have I been obsessed by the colour of my skin, but since that night I think

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only of this” (26–27).35 In the camp, despite the horrors to which all the inmates are subject, racism and national divisions persists, so that “none of the other Black women feels accepted” (176–77).36 Two contravening movements may be seen within L’étoile noire, then, as the camp experience at once makes its victims resemble each other and at the same time further entrenches distinctions and hierarchies among them. This pattern is in keeping with the governing logic of the camps, which, as Primo Levi explained, subdivided and pitted its inmates against one another in order to “shatte[r] the adversaries’ capacity to resist” (38).37 While at the outset of L’étoile noire Sidonie had sought to claim her French citizenship, her diary increasingly adopts an Afrocentric discourse. By the end of the novel, Sidonie has formed a community with other African diaspora inmates, in sharp contrast to her unwillingness to fraternize with her African and Caribbean fellow students while at nursing school before the war. The camp brings her into contact with a group of women of color that includes a fellow Martinican, a Senegalese, and an African American. These women are united and empowered by their common ancestral memory of slavery.38 Negritude is a term that, befitting the period in which L’étoile noire is set, appears in Maillet’s novel, which also bears an epigraph from Léon Damas, one of Negritude’s founders.39 In order to survive the camps, Sidonie calls on her African heritage and adopts a primitivist rhetoric: “A Black and wild [sauvage] resistance lives in me: Mother Africa” (163).40 The Creole language, forbidden to Sidonie in Martinique, proves to be another resource for her survival as she draws on a Maroon tradition of resistance, organizing a secret meeting of the women of color at Ravensbrück. In L’étoile noire the Holocaust catalyzes Sidonie’s journey from racial alienation and assimilation to an embrace of Blackness. Encounters with the Holocaust have a similar impact on the young female protagonists of Philip’s Harriet’s Daughter and, as we will see in chapter 7, Cliff ’s Abeng. Yet Maillet’s novel differs from these other examples in that Sidonie’s decolonization and reafricanization, although prompted by her Holocaust experience, ultimately lead her away from a cross-cultural identification with Jewish experience.41 Indeed, in L’étoile noire the narration of Black Holocaust history tends to overwhelm that of Jewish suffering. Toward the end of the novel, the Antillean context comes

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to overshadow that of the Holocaust, especially in the later chapters in which a struggle arises between a Béké (white Creole) inmate and Sidonie as well as another Caribbean Mulatta in a rehearsal of the slavery past. In these scenes, which recall the dream in Harriet’s Daughter in which the Underground Railway cave and concentration camp are overlaid, Ravensbrück becomes a space in which the contest between slave and master is restaged.42 I do not entirely agree with one critic’s view, then, that Maillet “succeeds in stepping beyond the competitive discourse of victimization” (Oppel 89), a sentiment echoed in Veil’s preface. Instead, as Mireille Rosello observes, Sidonie’s diary continually “sway[s] between the discourse of ‘differences’ and the discourse of ‘common denominators’ without being aware that neither theory is inherently enabling or disabling and that dominant voices can use both constructions to oppress minority groups” (199).43 As is evidenced by the appendixes and bibliographies found at the back of L’étoile noire as well as by its earnest (rather than ironic) approach to the recuperative project, the novel is propelled by a strong pedagogical and historiographical agenda. This agenda—to tell the untold history of Black victims of the Nazis and to intervene in French national debates surrounding the legacies of colonialism and slavery— proves somewhat at odds with the model of multidirectional memory theorized by Rothberg. For while Maillet’s novel participates in a larger Caribbean tradition of cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust, it at the same time needs to be understood against the background of the French “memory laws” of the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2001, the loi Taubira, which followed on earlier French legislation mandating the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, declared that slavery was a crime against humanity. Subsequently, a national Committee for the Remembrance of Slavery, headed by Maryse Condé, was charged with promoting the commemoration and popular understanding of slavery and its heritage. Its report led to the creation in 2006 of a national day of remembrance for slavery’s victims. As Veil notes in her preface to L’étoile noire, Maillet’s novel was reissued in 2006 at a key moment in which the legacies of slavery and colonialism were being debated in France.44 Accordingly, while the Holocaust functions as a conduit to the slavery past in L’étoile noire, Maillet’s recuperation of

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this traumatic memory ultimately serves to recenter the Holocaust novel on a different set of victims. Maillet’s narrative works as much through disidentification as it does through identification, asserting difference alongside sameness in its effort to diversify and complicate our understanding of Holocaust experience. / / /

In the Black Holocaust fiction discussed in this chapter, not only do memories of the Holocaust and slavery interact with one another but so, too, do the genres and modes of writing that they inspired. The appearance of linking tropes such as testimony and motifs such as tattoos reflects the overlapping concerns and imperatives of postslavery and Holocaust literature. Caribbean Holocaust narratives thus illustrate the multidirectional and palimpsestic operations not only of memory but also of genre. At the same time, texts such as Philip’s “St. Clair Avenue West” and especially Maillet’s L’étoile noire point to the limits of the multidirectional model. Such tensions also attend another francophone Caribbean novel from the 1990s that invokes Holocaust testimony and focuses on an alienated Caribbean diaspora female protagonist living in France, French-born Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau’s L’exil selon Julia (Exile According to Julia, 1996). The adolescent heroine of Pineau’s partially autobiographical novel, whose Guadeloupean father fought with the Resistance before settling in France, copes with the racism of early postwar French society by composing a diary that is modeled on that of Anne Frank.45 In excerpts of the diary that are includes in the chapter “Lettres de France,” Pineau’s heroine describes how her encounter with Frank’s text has altered her perspective on French society. Yet a subsequent letter notably calls into question the usefulness of focusing on other children’s suffering. Pineau’s heroine comes to the realization that she is merely une copieuse, an imitator of Frank: “Today, I would like to tell you that I really have compassion for children who are dying of hunger, who live in countries at war. But I can put all the suffering in the world end to end, force my mind to imagine the horror in all its dimensions, and that still does not prevent me from feeling very unhappy, here in France” (117). Pineau casts doubt in this passage

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on the universalist model of identification and cross-cultural empathy that her reading of Frank’s Diary initially inspires. Ultimately, although Pineau’s heroine still cares about the suffering of the world’s children, the “invisible threads” that connect her to these other children, and the practice of diary writing that she learns from Frank, appear to be of limited use in negotiating her own colonial anguish. Moreover, the illiteracy of the girl’s Guadeloupean grandmother Man Ya, who takes the place of Frank’s Kitty as the addressee of the diary, casts doubt on the suitability of Frank’s diaristic and textual model to the Guadeloupean context. Although Frank was, of course, not the only diarist of the Holocaust, her Diary of a Young Girl is undoubtedly the most famous example of this genre. The presence of the diary motif in Maillet’s L’étoile noire and Pineau’s L’exil selon Julia is suggestive of the way in which diaries such as Frank’s become emblematic of Holocaust memory in Caribbean writing. At the same time, these novels’ thematization and intertextual invocation of Holocaust diaries signals their metafictional preoccupation with the act of writing itself. This nexus of associations between Anne Frank’s Diary, literary representation, and Caribbean authorship will be central to the two final examples of Caribbean Holocaust fiction to which I will turn in the next chapter.

7 WRITING UNDER THE SIGN OF ANNE FRANK M I C H E L L E C L I F F A N D C A RY L P H I L L I P S

For just over two months Anne wrote her diary, depicting her inner fears about the occupation, her future life, her Jewishness, and her burgeoning sexuality. Her clarity of expression, her humility and courage make it one of the most important books of the century. —Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe

[Peter] told me that he wanted to go to the Dutch East Indies and live on a plantation later on. He talked about his home life, about the black market, and then he said that he felt so useless. . . . He would have found it much easier if he’d been a Christian and if he could be one after the war. —Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“W

hy would a writer from the Caribbean want to write about the Holocaust?” This is the question with which Caryl Phillips opens his essay “On ‘The Nature of Blood’ and the Ghost of Anne Frank,” published in 1998 in the now defunct CommonQuest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relations. In an accompanying photograph, Phillips sits at his desk with a poster of the Jewish diarist hanging prominently behind him. I am reminded of Phillips’s essay while visiting the Mikve-Emanuel Synagogue Museum in

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Willemstad, Curaçao. In the museum, amidst a wealth of ritual objects documenting the Curaçao Jewish community’s 350-year history, stands a small exhibit about the Holocaust. On display are an edition of The Diary of a Young Girl in the Dutch Antillean patois Papiamentu and an exhibition pamphlet whose cover features a photograph of an AfroCaribbean girl cradling a portrait of Frank.1 Caribbean invocations of Anne Frank such as these suggestively illustrate what has been called the “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust memory. In The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider describe Frank as a “Holocaust icon” whose “status as the most important symbol of the Holocaust” has only grown over time (188–89). Indeed, as another critic notes, the global reach of Anne Frank is undeniable: “The book has been translated into dozens of languages; tens of millions of copies are in print. The extent to which the figure of Anne Frank has permeated world culture can perhaps be seen in the fact that, in Japan (where the book was an enormous success, selling 116,000 copies in its first five months in print), to have one’s ‘Anne Frank day’ became a euphemism for menstruation, a subject Anne mentioned in her journal. A variety of rose named after Anne Frank now grows all over Japan” (Prose 20). Other instances of the global appeal of Anne Frank abound. The late Nelson Mandela described how he drew inspiration from the Diary while imprisoned on Robben Island. In one of his portraits of Anne Frank, Ojibway artist Carl Beam employed an ancient technique of narrative pottery to reposition the Nazi genocide within the context of First Nations history (Ryan, The Trickster Shift 258). The Willemstad Holocaust exhibit not only attests to the global circulation of Frank’s diary but also to its heterogeneous reception.2 For, as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler emphasize, “Within its global reach, the Anne Frank phenomenon responds to the particulars of place” (13). How, then, has Frank’s memory been localized in a Caribbean/diaspora setting? To what extent, for example, are Caribbean articulations of Holocaust memory inflected by the deep historical presence of Sephardic Jews in the region that I traced in the first half of this study? How do the colonial ties between the Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles link Frank’s history of oppression to that of the Caribbean? Finally, how can we reconcile some Caribbean writers’

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F IG U R E 7.1. The author Caryl Phillips at work, with a poster of Anne Frank behind him. Photo John Biggins.

intense identification with Frank with Peter van Daan’s colonial fantasy, recounted in the excerpt from the Diary in the second epigraph to this chapter, of living on a plantation in the Dutch East Indies—a fantasy that, as we have seen, was fulfilled in the colonial era by Jewish settlers of Dutch Antillean colonies such as Curaçao and Suriname? In chapter 5, I examined how the Holocaust enters the Caribbean literary imagination in the form of refugee Jewish characters who find safe haven in the Caribbean—a historical trajectory that would have been the Frank family’s as well had their Cuban visa not been cancelled in 1941 (Prose 41). In chapter 6, I considered works of Caribbean fiction that more directly engage with the Holocaust both as a historical event

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and as the object of literary representation and, in so doing, illustrate the palimpsestic operations of genres as well as traumatic memories. In the present chapter, I turn to the writing of Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips to deepen this examination of how the Holocaust functions in Caribbean literature as a surrogate for the memory of slavery and as a catalyst for decolonization as well as for the act of writing itself. As we have seen, while some Caribbean/diaspora writers look back to the Sephardic expulsion, others invoke the more recent trauma of the Holocaust. Each of these calamitous moments of Jewish history figures in the oeuvres and biographies of Cliff and Phillips, but what links their writing in particular is their intertextual reference to Frank’s Diary. Both authors situate Frank’s text within long-standing European historical and literary discourses about Black and Jewish Others and suggest that their writing careers are indebted to the Jewish diarist. I argue that Cliff ’s and Phillips’s identificatory readings of the Diary are informed by an awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past combined with their educational formation in postwar Britain. Allowing for biographical differences, Cliff ’s and Phillips’s responses to the Holocaust ultimately reflect a Caribbean/ diaspora sensibility that privileges multiple and complex forms of identification over the dyads of Black-white and victim-perpetrator. For those critics seeking to break down barriers between Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies, Phillips’s novel The Nature of Blood (1997) has become a kind of touchstone, so much so that it overshadows other examples of cross-cultural identification with Jewishness that are available in the literature of the Caribbean and its diasporas.3 Phillips’s engagement with the Holocaust tends to be presented as exceptional, particularly when read against American literature and its more polarizing approach to Black-Jewish relations.4 Rothberg, by contrast, productively locates Phillips in relation to a predominantly francophone anticolonial tradition of multidirectional thinking about imperialism and the Holocaust. More specifically, he identifies Phillips as heir to French Jewish writer André Schwarz-Bart and, to a lesser extent, W. E. B. Du Bois.5 Another important context, however, is the postwar Black British setting in which Phillips’s identification with the Holocaust developed. By pairing Phillips with Cliff, a writer who shares his Caribbean heritage and British education, I seek to recontextualize Phillips’s

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much discussed Holocaust novel as part of the specifically Caribbean/ diaspora tradition of engagement with Jewish historical experience that I have been tracing throughout this study. In his landmark study of Blacks and Jews in U.S. literature, Eric Sundquist contends that the paucity of African American responses to Frank’s Diary “suggests not their inattention or lack of sympathy but their reasonable preoccupation with their own murdered children. Anne’s brief comparison of the Jews being rounded up for transport in Holland to the ‘slave hunts of olden times’ . . . does not provide sufficient basis for analogical thought” (233–34). Sundquist’s commentary implies that such responses would detract from African Americans’ focus on their particular condition. By contrast, Cliff ’s and Phillips’s invocations of Frank illustrate an alternative phenomenon of surrogate or multidirectional memory, discussed in chapter 6 and compellingly theorized by Rothberg, in which attention to the Other’s history opens up, rather than impedes, access to one’s own past. A signature feature of Phillips’s formally experimental novel The Nature of Blood, which interweaves the story of a Holocaust survivor with that of Shakespeare’s Othello, is its self-conscious intertextuality. While critical discussion has tended to focus on the novel’s reworking of Othello, I consider its other major intertext, Frank’s Diary, and identify formal as well as thematic links between the two texts.6 The Diary is equally important to Cliff ’s 1984 novel Abeng, the coming-of-age story of a light-skinned Jamaican girl who, in the years preceding independence, begins to question the racial and imperialist ideology under which she has been raised. Abeng stages the scene of the colonized subject’s encounter with The Diary of a Young Girl, recalling not only Cliff ’s own early contact with Frank’s diary but other Caribbean fictional treatments of this motif such as Pineau’s L’exil selon Julia (see chapter 6).7 Two full chapters situated at the heart of Cliff ’s novel are devoted to its heroine’s fascination with Frank and her quest to come to terms with the Holocaust. Although Abeng constitutes what is perhaps the most vivid portrayal in Caribbean literature of adolescent cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust, this aspect of the novel has received scant attention, dismissed as inconsequential or treated, like The Nature of Blood, as an isolated case.8 In contrast, I understand Cliff ’s and Phillips’s novels as two

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of the most prominent examples of a larger pattern of engagement with the Holocaust in postwar Caribbean/diaspora literature and thought.

SITES OF MEMORY In his 1952 Jewish Life magazine article “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” W. E. B. Du Bois recounted how his travels to Poland led him to revise his theory of double consciousness so that he came to see the Negro problem no longer as a “separate and unique thing” and “not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics” (472). Du Bois explains that he emerged from his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto with a “broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become” (472). Much as Du Bois’s article had done some decades earlier, Cliff ’s and Phillips’s European travel essays depict journeys across a post-Holocaust landscape that bring the histories of antisemitism and anti-Black racism into relation. In “Sites of Memory” (2008), Cliff describes her six-week stint as a guest lecturer at the University of Mainz in Mainz, Germany. Much like the Turkish German students she teaches as well as another guest lecturer at the university, an elderly émigré rabbi who had left Germany in the 1930s, Cliff finds herself an exotic, an outsider. In a rather unflattering portrait of German academia, Cliff complains that her hosts obsess over African American sites of memory while ignoring their own landscapes of trauma. One such local site is the Jewish cemetery to which Cliff is repeatedly drawn during her stay in Mainz. The essay contains a profoundly identificatory moment in which the Jamaican writer sees herself reflected in the gravestones of German Jews: I take a walk to the smaller section [of the cemetery]. Inside its gates is a small building, of Moorish design. On its walls, every now and then, is a Star of David and under the star a passage from Psalms. Behind this building are the graves, monuments. This is the judenfriedhof. On one monument are the names of the Family Blatt, with their dates, and: opfer Auschwitz opfer Riga I touch the etched letters, feel the coldness of

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black stone, see myself in the polished granite. Next to a bench in the center of the judenfriedhof someone has left a plastic bag of empty beer cans and other garbage. I pick it up and take it to a trash can. (56)

In Phillips’s The European Tribe (1987), which I will be discussing in greater detail, the sense of identification with the Holocaust is equally strong. In one essay, Phillips describes how as an adolescent in Britain, in the absence of a public discourse on slavery and colonialism, he “naturally identified” with Jews and “vicariously channelled a part of [his] hurt and frustration through the Jewish experience” (54). Thus as with the Caribbean writers discussed in chapter 6, the Holocaust functions for Cliff and Phillips as a site of cross-cultural identification. In Cliff ’s and Phillips’s case, however, the primary conduit for the operation of surrogate memory is Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, which occupies a central place in both writers’ literary imaginations. Cliff ’s poem “A Visit to the Secret Annex” (1985) and Phillips’s essay “Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” (1987) each describe visits to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, leading the reader through the rooms of the museum like a tour guide. For both Cliff and Phillips the Anne Frank House is a site of trauma as well as illumination that reveals the interconnectedness of Black and Jewish histories of oppression. In both texts the museum is approached with difficulty. Cliff ’s speaker first deliberately walks past the Anne Frank House and then doubles back to make the arduous ascent up the stairs that “stretch up / into perpendicular flights” (9–10). Phillips leaves the museum and then returns only to find it closed; as he recalls in a later essay, on this first visit to the museum he focused on the exterior architecture of the house as an “elaborate way of avoiding the emotional train that I was sure was about to run me down” (“On ‘The Nature’” 7). The hesitancy with which Cliff ’s speaker and Phillips enter the space of the museum bespeaks the powerful emotional response that it provokes. While in the museum, Phillips finds himself “torn between feelings of anger and despair,” so much so that after a while he “could not look any more” and must “move away” from a group of American tourists whose callous reaction upsets him (“Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” 67).9

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Upon entering the Anne Frank House, Cliff ’s speaker in “A Visit to the Secret Annex” similarly finds herself overcome by emotion: Here in these rooms alone I am terrified of tears (and what follows? shame? embarrassment?) and feel an onslaught coming if I give in. (24–26)

The speaker shuts her eyes in order to stave off her tears, which resurface as sweat: I lock my eyes. Sweat pours out instead tidal salt. Redirected by my bitten lips and tongue from the pinpoints at the corners of my eyes to the entire surface of my body. My skin. (27–30)

Here, European and Caribbean landscapes of racism—the Holocaust and the Middle Passage—become associated with one another through the oceanic motif of the tidal, salty sweat that covers the speaker’s body. The sweat that the speaker secretes uncontrollably darkens her body in a visceral image that connects fascist violence with other racializing regimes: Cold sweat pours out of my head and through the cloth of my burgundy shirt. The back of my shirt sticks flat. I can feel it darkening. (14–16)

Cliff ’s speaker “was born later” (1) than Frank but inherits the memory of Frank’s trauma, one that resonates with the traumatic contours of her own landscape: “The horrors not exact—but similar” (4). This sense of relationality becomes the basis for the speaker’s identification with Frank: “Here is the heroine / you once had and wondered about. // The girl you loved” (31–34).

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Cliff ’s “A Visit to the Secret Annex” is the first poem in a series entitled “A Pilgrimage, a History Lesson, Two Satires, and a Vision”. If, for Cliff, the Anne Frank House is the object of a pilgrimage, so too, for Phillips, the museum visit pays homage to The Diary of a Young Girl, which he declares to be “one of the most important books of the century” ( “Anne Frank's Amsterdam” 68). Like Cliff, Phillips guides the reader through the physical space of the museum, drawing into relation Black and Jewish experience along the way. As an essayist, Phillips speaks more explicitly to the continuity of antisemitism and anti-Black racism: “In many ways, the black man, while not replacing the Jew as an object of abuse, is more visible, an equally vulnerable target for Fascist propaganda. In the Europe of the 1980s racist graffiti continue to smear synagogues, but are now also daubed on mosques” (70). As in Cliff ’s poem, Black and Jewish experiences of racialization are presented as to some extent interchangeable. Looking at a photograph in the museum of an antisemitic banner from a 1924 Berlin demonstration, Phillips comments: “I have seen banners carrying such messages in London, but for ‘Jew’ read ‘black.’ Very little seems to have changed in the heart of Europe” (69). In his later essay, “On ‘The Nature of Blood,’” Phillips describes returning to the Anne Frank House twenty years after the initial visit recounted in The European Tribe. This time the museum visit yields a “strangely serene” feeling as he experiences “a moment of clarity” (7). The insight that Phillips gains is a bleak one, however: “I understood that man has an infinite capacity to inflict cruelty on his fellow man and willfully learns nothing from the malign nature of his actions. In short, man learns little from history. Not a pleasant conclusion, but one that helped me to deal with the emotional trauma of being once more in Anne Frank’s house” (7). Phillips arrives at this realization while sitting in a Caribbean bar that neighbors the museum. The spatial adjacency of the Anne Frank House and the Caribbean bar is key to his reading of Amsterdam, a city where Jewish and Black diasporic presences intersect much as they will do in the early modern Venice that he depicts in The Nature of Blood. Such intersections are also evoked by the Antilleans Phillips encounters in Amsterdam whose presence recalls the Dutch colonial enterprise

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in which early modern Jews played a significant role. As we saw in part 1, in the aftermath of the expulsions from Spain and Portugal Sephardic Jews seeking refuge and opportunity served as traders and brokers of Dutch Caribbean colonial economies, drawing on their linguistic and technical skills as well as their extensive commercial networks. In colonial Suriname Jews also became the proprietors of a number of plantations, establishing the agricultural settlement of Jodensavanne, which flourished until an economic crisis in the late eighteenth century prompted most of the Jewish planters to resettle in the urban center of Paramaribo. In contrast to writers such as Cynthia McLeod and Maryse Condé, however, Phillips leaves this Jewish connection to the colonial history of the Caribbean untapped; instead, what his essays on Frank reveal is the link between The Diary of a Young Girl and his writing career.

ANNE FRANK AND THE “PERMISSION TO WRITE” Cliff ’s and Phillips’s responses to Anne Frank suggest that the value of the Diary for them lies not only in its subject matter but also in the literary ambition that it embodied on the part of someone who, by her own account, made for an unlikely candidate for literary immortality. Phillips opens his essay “Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” with an epigraph from the Diary in which the inhabitants of the secret annex contemplate burning Frank’s diary for fear the police will find it. “Not my diary, if my diary goes, I go with it!” is Frank’s response to this terrible prospect (“Anne Frank's Amsterdam” 66). Phillips’s choice of epigraph foregrounds Frank’s sense of herself as a writer and the intensity of her commitment to her writing. This is a dimension of the Diary that both Rachel Feldhay Brenner and Francine Prose emphasize in their revisionary studies. As an antidote to the saccharine image of Frank popularized by the Broadway and Hollywood adaptations of the Diary, as well as to those critics who have dismissed the Diary as having little literary merit, their discussions draw attention to the artistry of the work. Returning to the Diary as an adult, Prose “appreciated, as I did not when I was a girl, her technical proficiency, the novelistic qualities of her diary, her ability to turn living people into characters, her observational powers, her eye

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for detail, her ear for dialogue and monologue, and the sense of pacing that guides her as she intersperses sections of reflection with dramatized scenes” (5). Challenging the view that the Diary represents the spontaneous outpouring of a young girl who found herself in extraordinary circumstances, such readings take particular note of the fact that Frank reworked the Diary in its entirety during the period of her hiding with a view to its publication, an act that testified to Frank’s literary aspirations as well as to the artfulness of the Diary’s construction. Although Frank had initially conceived of the diary in more personal terms, her understanding of the purpose of her diary changed after hearing a March 1944 broadcast of an exiled member of the Dutch government who called for eyewitness accounts of the occupation to be collected after the war.10 Shortly thereafter on April 4, 1944, Frank contemplates her prospects of a literary career: For a long time I haven’t had any idea of what I was working for any more; the end of the war is so terribly far away, so unreal, like a fairy tale. . . . And now it’s all over. I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on, to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the “Secret Annexe” are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but—whether I have real talent remains to be seen. . . . I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn’t write doesn’t know how wonderful it is; I used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw at all, but now I am more than happy that I can at least write. (176–77)

As the entry continues, Frank declares that she can’t imagine following the path of her mother and Mrs. Van Daan “and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten. I must have something besides a husband and children, something I can devote myself to!” (177). The key question for Frank is will she “ever be able to write anything great . . . ?” (177). Earlier entries in the diary about her conflict with Mr. Dussel over access to the work space that they shared (July 13, 1943) and her devotion

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to her fountain pen (November 11, 1943) also attest to her self-conception as a writer.11 Thus competing with and increasingly displacing the romance with Peter on which the Broadway/Hollywood adaptations focused is the narrative of Frank’s rising literary ambition, which sustains her during her period of hiding: “My greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer. . . . In any case, I want to publish a book entitled Het Achterhuis after the war” (210). Yet, while expressing this ambition, Frank simultaneously recognizes that “it’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary” (2). I would argue that it is in the context of such statements that we can best understand how Frank’s example gave both Phillips and Cliff what Cliff describes as “permission to write.” In broad terms, the invocations of Frank in Cliff ’s poem and Phillips’s essays participate in the tradition of Caribbean cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust that I traced in chapter 6. In this tradition the lack of a space in which to address the history of slavery and its aftermath encourages the Caribbean/diaspora subject to turn to the Holocaust as a site of identification and surrogate memory. As noted earlier, Phillips explains that he came to develop an interest in the Holocaust because Jews were the only group discussed in the context of racism in the 1960s and early 1970s Britain of his childhood (“In the Ghetto” 54). Indeed, Phillips came of age in a period that, against the background of the Eichmann trial, the Six-Day War, and the Yom Kippur War, saw a marked increase in the publication of Holocaust memoirs and the emergence of the Holocaust as an issue of public concern (Waxman 116–17). Like Gilroy, he was also influenced by direct contact with Jewish refugees while growing up in Britain. In an interview, Phillips recalls the impact of European émigrés such as his history teacher, a Mr. Stern from Berlin, during his grammar school years: “So I began to understand issues of class and other forms of group solidarity, for these guys with weird names, who weren’t English, seemed to be on my side. They were white, but they were on my side, so I didn’t really believe that race was the thing” (“Other Voices” 119–20).12 Cliff, who was born in Jamaica in 1946, has described her own encounters with Jewish émigrés in Britain in roughly this same period. While attending graduate school at the Warburg Institute in London

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in the early 1970s, where she studied Renaissance art history under the Austrian Jew Ernst Gombrich, Cliff found her émigré professors congenial: “it was a very good place for me to be because some of the faculty that I had then . . . were survivors of the Holocaust. . . . They weren’t like the English intellectuals who tend to be very specialized and narrow. But they were also people who had survived something pretty awful and were very warm and welcoming” (“The Art” 62). Cliff ’s contact with Holocaust survivors in Britain followed on a childhood divided between New York and Jamaica, an island that is home to a long-standing Sephardic Caribbean community whose members were among her classmates (“The Art” 68). While Phillips’s awareness of a Jewish Caribbean past would come later in life, both Phillips’s and Cliff ’s relationships to Holocaust memory can be read against this deeper historical background of the Sephardic Caribbean, one that complicates the naively substitutive form of identification with the Holocaust that each writer favored in adolescence. Characteristic of the phenomenon of surrogate memory that I traced in the previous chapter is a youthful identification with victims of the Holocaust. This pattern of adolescent identification is also evident in Phillips’s and Cliff ’s biographies. In his essays Phillips writes repeatedly of the experience of viewing a World at War episode one day after school: “I have a vague recollection of some footage of Dutch Jews in Amsterdam, and it is certainly possible that some reference was made to Anne Frank. But the overwhelming impression that the program made upon me was shock. Utter numbing shock” (“On ‘The Nature’” 6). For Phillips, viewing the episode was a formative experience: “I watched the library footage of the camps and realized both the enormity of the crime that was being perpetrated, and the precariousness of my own position in Europe. The many adolescent thoughts that worried my head can be reduced to one line: ‘If white people could do that to white people, then what the hell would they do to me?’” (“Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” 66–67).13 Cliff ’s interviews similarly point to the role of mass media in the global circulation of Holocaust memory. She recalls seeing the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank as a child in Jamaica: “I cut school to see the movie. I then read her diary and started to keep my own, the one my parents read—which was based on Anne Frank’s diary. I would never

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have thought to keep a diary without having read her. She gave me permission to write, and to use writing as a way of survival. My diary kept me separate from my family, just as hers helped her to maintain her identity in a very claustrophobic situation” (“The Art” 68, italics mine). Cliff ’s description of her contact with the Anne Frank diary and film, which she would later fictionalize in Abeng, corresponds closely to the larger pattern of cross-cultural identification and surrogate memory that I have been tracing. What Cliff ’s interviews also expose, however, is the particular link between her early contact with Frank’s diary and the onset of her writing career. The central traumatic incident of Cliff ’s childhood was her parents’ discovery of her diary, which she had begun to keep after reading Frank’s book. Cliff recalls: “I always wanted to write. Actually there was a terrible incident. I don’t know if I should tell you, but I will. When I was at Saint Andrews, I was keeping a diary. I had been very influenced by The Diary of Anne Frank, and as a result of seeing the movie and reading her diary, I got a diary of my own. . . . [My parents] went into my room, broke open my drawer, took out and broke the lock on my diary, and read it” (“Journey Into Speech” 273). Cliff ’s parents publicly humiliated her by reading her diary out loud to the family—a silencing that prevented her from writing until the mid-1970s.14 For Phillips, too, writing proves to be deeply connected to his early contact with images of the Holocaust and the figure of Frank. Phillips describes in his essays how he wrote his first story directly following his viewing of the World at War episode in what was for him “a private, annealing act” (“On ‘The Nature’” 7). The subject of Phillips’s first story was a fifteen-year-old Dutch Jewish boy who is rescued by a farmer after managing to escape from a boxcar that is transporting him to a camp. In an arresting example of the operation of surrogate memory, Phillips remarks that “the Dutch boy was, of course, me. A fourteenyear-old black boy, born in St. Kitts in the Eastern Caribbean, now growing up in working-class Yorkshire in the north of England” (“On ‘The Nature’” 6).15 In “On ‘The Nature of Blood,’ ” Phillips also explicitly links his writing career to Frank: “I imagine that a tangible legacy of that episode of ‘The World at War’ and the story that it gave rise to is that for the past ten years or so I have worked with a large poster of Anne Frank above

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my desk. In some strange way she was partly responsible for my beginning to write, and as long as I continue to write her presence is a comforting one” (7). For Phillips, as for Cliff, early acquaintance with mass media images of the Holocaust and with Frank’s memory was generative of writing itself. Fittingly, then, the Jewish diarist figures prominently in both Cliff ’s and Phillips’s fiction, in which the naive identifications that characterized their youthful encounters with the Holocaust make way for a more nuanced—and at times more ambivalent—approach to Holocaust memory. Whereas Cliff stages the scene of reading the Diary, however, Phillips incorporates the Diary more fully into the texture of his novel—into its very form.

THE HOLOCAUST AND DECOLONIZATION IN ABENG Cliff ’s first novel Abeng is set at the end of the 1950s, the decade in which Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks appeared. Yet Abeng troubles the analogy between colonial and Jewish victims of European fascism favored by some anticolonial thinkers in order to foreground the collaboration of the light-skinned Creole in systems of racial oppression. As previously noted, Phillips’s youthful literary treatment of the Holocaust embraced a substitutive form of identification: “The Dutch boy was, of course, me.” The adolescent protagonist of Abeng, by contrast, does not identify with Frank straightforwardly as victim to victim. Instead, Clare Savage’s encounter with the Diary leads her to consider the complicity of bystanders. Frank’s Diary has a decolonizing impact on Cliff ’s Creole protagonist, representing not so much the content of an experience with which Clare identifies but rather a critical minoritarian stance from which it becomes possible to challenge the status quo narrative of History. Abeng is the first of two novels about the Savages, a middle-class, lightskinned Jamaican family. Clare, the elder of two daughters, has been thoroughly inducted into the ideology of colorism to which her father, Boy, subscribes. Clare’s mother, Kitty, favors Clare’s darker-skinned sister and has a deep affinity with the African elements of Jamaican society, but fails to challenge her husband’s worldview. Cliff ’s bildungsroman

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depicts Clare’s growing awareness of the inequities in Jamaica as well as her burgeoning sense of her own sexuality. The thematic links with Frank’s Diary are readily apparent: Cliff ’s attention to family dynamics, a remote mother figure, adolescence, menstruation, sexuality, and rebellion all resonate strongly with the Diary, which is directly invoked in the novel.16 Yet the significance of the Diary as an intertext extends beyond these kinds of thematic resonances, only fully coming to light when we approach Abeng as a novel of decolonization. Abeng is fundamentally preoccupied with historiographical questions. From the outset, the novel disturbs conventional modes of narrating Jamaica’s colonial past by crosscutting between individual and collective histories—between the story of Clare’s upbringing in preindependence Jamaica and episodes of anticolonial resistance such as that of Nanny of the Maroons. In the first half of the novel especially, such counterdiscourses do not penetrate Clare’s consciousness. Instead, Clare is characterized by her “naivete” (121), for she “was a colonized child, and she lived within certain parameters—which clouded her judgement” (77). As her rural, darker-skinned friend Zoe recognizes, Clare is “limited” by her class and color status (119). She is a good girl, deferential to her teachers, her father and other authority figures and passively accepting of her society’s dominant narratives and power structures. This compliant disposition is particularly dangerous given the Savage family’s proclivity for self-mythologization. The Savages maintain the fiction of their whiteness and excise undesirable episodes of the family history such as the suicide of Clare’s homosexual uncle. The novel suggests that the Savages’ distortion of their family history is symptomatic of Jamaica’s broader condition as an “island intent on erasing the past” (128). Midway through Abeng, however, Clare has a transformative experience that begins to alter her relationship to narratives of familial and collective history. She buys herself a copy of Frank’s Diary, experiencing a sense of recognition when she gazes at the photograph on its cover: “Clare recognized the sweetness in that face, although she never named it as such, and often when reading the diary she would shut the book, her forefinger marking the place, to stare at the face of the writer of the diary and wonder about her and what if she had lived, had survived, and why did they kill her?” (68).17 Then, just as Cliff herself had done,

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Clare cuts class to see the film adaptation of the Diary—an act that literally disrupts her colonial schooling.18 This episode catalyzes a process whereby Clare begins to question the dominant beliefs of her society: This twelve-year-old Christian mulatto girl, up to this point walking through her life according to what she had been told—not knowing very much about herself or her past—for example, that her great-great-grandfather had once set fire to a hundred Africans; that her grandmother Miss Mattie was once a cane-cutter with a cloth bag of salt in her skirt pocket—this child became compelled by the life and death of Anne Frank. She was reaching, without knowing it, for an explanation of her own life. (71)

After viewing the film, Clare undertakes an intensive study of the Holocaust against her father’s wishes, secreting library books under her mattress. Her self-directed study of the Holocaust is a form of adolescent rebellion, for “to find out why Anne Frank had died had become connected to a forbidden act” (76). “Clare had been so quiet, so girlish, so ‘demure,’” her father remarks, “and except for her strangely sympathetic interest in the Jews . . . she had been until now an exemplary child, an intelligent child. A reader. A winner of prizes. A girl who could recite all the monarchs of England in consecutive order when she was ten years old” (149). Now, however, Clare begins to emulate Frank’s self-described “talkative and unruly” nature (Diary 162). Clare’s interest in the Holocaust and Frank represents a nascent critical, interrogatory mode of thought that begins to emerge in her adolescent consciousness. In this regard, the impact of the Diary in catalyzing Clare’s coming to consciousness closely parallels that of the Holocaust survivor Mrs. Blewchamp on Margaret in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Harriet’s Daughter and of the camp experience on Sidonie in Michèle Maillet’s L’étoile noire. Clare’s frustration with her teachers’ emphasis on British war heroism over Jewish suffering also resonates with Gilroy’s recollection in Between Camps of a Jewish school friend who was ridiculed for wearing a tallis. Gilroy remembers that his friend “was especially acute at diagnosing the casual anti-semitism of some of our teachers who had, of course, all distinguished themselves in the real manly business of war

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against the evil Germans” (4). In Between Camps Gilroy identifies this contradiction as the origin point of his critique of race-thinking. Similarly in Abeng, Clare’s contact with the Diary, alongside other influences such as her failed friendship with the darker-skinned Zoe and her meeting with the supposedly mad Mrs. Stevens, has a radicalizing impact on her colonized Caribbean consciousness.19 In anglophone Caribbean literature, scenes of reading and recitation are often introduced to illustrate the colonial education system’s deployment of the English book as a means of social control. At the same time, such scenes attest to the destabilizing and contestatory potential that is inherent in the colonized subject’s reception of the English literary canon. Although Abeng follows this pattern in its intertextual reference to Scott’s Ivanhoe (discussed further on in this chapter), the sections of the novel dealing with Frank’s diary adopt an alternative strategy by staging a scene of reading in which the colonized subject engages with a book that is not sanctioned by the colonial authorities. Clare’s subversive choice of texts and disruptive reading practice challenges the idea of the colonized subject as a passive consumer of an approved European literary canon. Moreover, Clare’s reading of Frank’s diary encourages her to become a diarist herself in an empowering shift from passive reader to active writer. It is through Clare’s unauthorized reading of the Diary that she begins to question and resist the structures of thought and power into which she has been so thoroughly inducted. After poring over the Diary and other Holocaust memoirs, Clare projects scenes from these texts onto the shantytowns that populate her local surroundings in a variation on V. S. Naipaul’s childhood practice of superimposing Dickens’s novels onto his childhood Trinidadian environs.20 Although Clare’s understanding of the relationship of the Caribbean shantytown to the European death camp remains incomplete, this process of melding together two landscapes signals the operation of a relational logic that is beginning to alter her way of seeing. In Abeng this relational logic is also expressed through landscape imagery in a resonant passage that employs tropes commonly associated with Holocaust narratives to assert the interconnectedness of European and New World histories of suffering:

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The smoke from six million bodies burning had passed across the surfaces of continents and the slopes and peaks of mountain ranges and moved over bodies of water. The bones of six million people had been bleached stark white by the same sun that traveled overhead day after day, its circuits telling time. And when the bones started to crumble in their dryness, some of the dust had also been carried across land masses and bodies of water—while the rest seeped under the ground to fertilize the earth. (70)

The passage insists on the global reach of the Holocaust through the image of the smoke and dust that disperse across continents and waterways. Moreover, the Holocaust becomes associated with slavery through the bones of its victims that fertilize the earth, an image that echoes earlier passages in the novel in which slaves’ bones render the Caribbean landscape fertile. The crematory imagery similarly links Holocaust and slavery memory, recalling Clare’s ancestor Judge Savage’s act of burning his plantation and many of his slaves on the eve of emancipation.21 Although these kinds of connections are not fully articulated in Clare’s consciousness, it is the encounter with the Holocaust that enables a new understanding of the slavery past to begin to emerge. At the same time, Abeng does not reductively equate the Holocaust and slavery but instead aligns them as “unspeakable” events (to use Naomi Mandel’s term [5]) that suggest forms of knowledge that are occluded by the idea of History that both Clare’s teachers and her father promote. Clare is made uneasy by the manner in which her teacher assimilates the two traumas: “Out of all this came the crystallization that the Jews embraced suffering. They were born to it. . . . The suffering of the Jews was similar, one teacher went on to say, to the primitive religiosity of Africans, which had brought Black people into slavery . . . That is, both types of people were flawed in irreversible ways” (71). In the teacher’s reading of both the Holocaust and slavery, the victims bring their fate upon themselves, while the perpetrators and bystanders to their oppression are exonerated from blame. Abeng, by contrast, foregrounds the complicity of bystanders. Rather than establishing a direct analogy between the colonized subject and the Holocaust victim,

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Cliff introduces a third term, the light-skinned Creole bystander, that significantly complicates the opposition of victim and perpetrator as well as facile comparisons of histories of oppression.22 Cliff ’s novel thus participates in what one historian identifies as a “recent and dramatic shift in the construction of responsibility for crimes against humanity, in particular away from the perpetrator-victim dyad to a special emphasis on prospective or potential ‘bystanders’” (Dean 77). After reading the Diary, Clare asks her father whether, had they had Jewish neighbors, he would have turned them in. Throughout Abeng Clare wrestles with the issue of bystanders, provoked not only by her study of the Holocaust but also by local cases such as a man whose sexual abuse of his daughter is tolerated by his community. Above all the question of collaboration arises in relation to the privilege that Clare enjoys as a light-skinned Jamaican who capitalizes on her wavy chestnut hair and green eyes. After an incident in which Clare accidentally shoots her grandmother’s bull, causing her to lose Zoe’s friendship, she comes to feel that she herself “had switched to the other side without meaning to” and is no longer worthy of having Frank as her heroine (146). I would suggest that this vacillating identification with Frank reflects Clare’s incomplete decolonization and split Creole self. In Cliff ’s poem “A Visit to the Annex,” the speaker wonders with regard to Frank: “Would I have changed places / were that the only choice?” (38–39). Correspondingly in Abeng, when Clare palimpsestically projects scenes from the camps onto local Jamaican shantytowns, she imagines herself and her mother as Holocaust victims while ignoring the actual inhabitants of the shantytowns. By contrast, Clare’s hypothetical question to her father later in the novel regarding whether he would have betrayed a Jewish neighbor notably positions the Savages in the potential role of Miep Gies, one of the Franks’s Gentile saviors, rather than that of Jewish victim. This pattern also applies to a second major intertext of the novel that raises the question of Jewish literary Others, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). In one scene, unsatisfied by her father’s responses to her questions regarding the Holocaust, Clare changes tack and turns to Scott’s medieval romance, debating with her father how to interpret the relationship between Ivanhoe and Scott’s Jewish heroine Rebecca. According to the ideology of colorism that her

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father espouses, Rebecca cannot marry Ivanhoe, for to do so would be racially contaminating: “But it’s obvious that he really loves Rebecca; isn’t it?” “Yes, he loves her, but Sir Walter Scott is showing that a Christian knight cannot be serious about his love for a Jew. She is an infidel in Ivanhoe’s eyes. She is dark and Rowena is a lady—a Saxon. The purest-blooded people in the world. . . . ” “Why does Ivanhoe save her?” “Because it is his duty as a Christian knight. But their love is doomed because they can never marry. They would be outcasts.” “What if I married a Jew?” “Then you would be an outcast also.” (72–73)

Here, in keeping with other scenes of reading in Caribbean literature that foreground the subversive potential embedded in the colonized subject’s reception of the European text, Ivanhoe provides a framework through which Clare can begin to challenge her father’s colorist ideology. Boy Savage insists that racial categories are fixed, that “a Jew is a Jew” (73) no matter whether he is of full or mixed Jewish parentage; and yet he simultaneously maintains that Clare is white despite having a colored mother.23 Clare’s reading of Ivanhoe in conjunction with Frank’s Diary enables her to pose questions about her historical condition as a light-skinned Creole, about Jamaica's rigidly defined class- and colorsystem, and about the category of race itself. Jewishness proves particularly useful in this regard, for as Sander Gilman, Daniel Itzkovitz, and others have discussed, by virtue of its racial mobility, Jewishness exposes the instability of racial designations such as white and Black.24 Moreover, just as the novel’s intertextual invocation of the Diary links the Holocaust and slavery, the Ivanhoe episode suggests parallels between England’s internal (Jewish) and external (Black) Others as objects of literary representation. Notably, however, in the discussion of Ivanhoe Clare is (once again against the reader’s expectations) identified with the Saxon hero rather than his Jewish lover: “She knew, that when the time came, should she choose a husband darker than herself,

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it would be just as if she were Ivanhoe choosing Rebecca rather than Rowena” (99). Thus while Clare, as a reader of Frank’s Diary, becomes what one critic calls the “internal witness of the Jew in his/her darkest moment” (Zayzafoon 73), she does so not so much as a fellow sufferer but as one who is complicit in the oppression of racialized Others. This self-critique of the Creole subject recalls Cliff ’s own statement in an interview that “I think when you contend with your own racism and work towards ridding yourself of it, then you’re able to feel with another human being. I felt with Anne Frank” (“The Art” 68). Cast as Miep Gies or Ivanhoe rather than Anne Frank or Rebecca, Clare is positioned in Abeng not as a fellow sufferer but as a bystander. While this schema serves to advance Cliff ’s critique of the Creole’s collaboration in racist ideology, it also relies on an understanding of Jewishness as morally unassailable. Accordingly, while the question of collaboration arises in Abeng in relation to the light-skinned Creole, it is not raised with regard to the Jamaican Jewish colonial presence that the novel also registers. And yet, as we saw in chapters 3 and 4, in an early modern Atlantic world context in which Jews were both the agents and the objects of imperial power, Jewishness also potentially undermines the opposition of oppressor and victim. As members of a nearwhite trading diaspora, Jews occupied an ambiguous position within the colonial power structure, facing limitations on property and civil rights while at the same time benefiting from the plantation economy. Accordingly, just before the Anne Frank motif is introduced in Abeng, the narrator calls attention to the double resonance of 1492, the conjunction of the Sephardic expulsion with the onset of the era of exploration and slavery. As I discussed in chapter 2, the narrator then proceeds to invoke the theory that Columbus himself may have been Jewish. Cliff ’s allusion in Abeng to Columbus’s possibly crypto-Jewish origins invites a more ambivalent reading of Jews as themselves complicit in the colonial project, a perspective that potentially would align Jewish and lightskinned Creole subjects. So, too, does the novel’s reference to a Jewish overseer who is employed on the Savage family’s ancestral plantation. Yet Cliff portrays the Jewish overseer as a scapegoat and victim of the Savages: “The family’s loss of wealth was put on the reputation of one individual—Mr. Levi, a Jew who was hired as an estate manager in 1845,

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eleven years after these events were set in motion. The Savages saw themselves as blameless for any downward turn in their fortunes” (29). Thus, although Cliff complicates the slavery/Holocaust analogy by triangulating it with the intermediary figure of the bystander, she preserves the narrative of Jewish victimhood, reserving a more complex, layered treatment for her investigation of the light-skinned Creole.

THE NATURE OF BLOOD AND THE HOLOCAUST DIARY In a striking moment in his nonfiction work A New World Order (2001), Phillips relates how, a few years after leaving university, he came to discover that he was descended from a Sephardic Caribbean Jew: Back then I knew very little about my own Caribbean heritage. Some years later I saw a photograph of my father’s mother and was shocked to discern traces of East Indian in her face. Soon after I was sitting in a bar in St Kitts with my brother and a friend told us that our grandfather had just walked in and taken a seat in the corner. My brother and I looked quizzically at each other, for we “knew” that our grandfather, our mother’s father, was dead. We had grown up in England with this “knowledge.” But sure enough, seated in the corner was Emmanuel de Fraites, a Jewish trader with Portuguese roots that reached back to the island of Madeira. I now understood that the cultural hybridity that is the quintessential Caribbean condition had certainly marked my person, and the quality of the blood that flowed through my veins was doggedly “impure.” (130)

At the opening of his essay “On ‘The Nature of Blood,’” Phillips considers the possibility that his Sephardic heritage may account for his desire to write about the Holocaust. Still more intriguingly, he wonders whether his Jewish grandfather’s failure to acknowledge him may be the painful source of his interest. Phillips expresses a skepticism about this explanation that would seem to be borne out by the absence of Caribbean Jewish themes from The Nature of Blood. Yet I would argue that most salient in this passage is not the revelation of Phillips’s Sephardic Caribbean

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ancestry so much as the link that Phillips makes between this late-discovered Jewishness and his broader awareness of a Caribbean condition of creolization, one that confounds notions of purity and linear modes of filiation and identification.25 In The Nature of Blood Phillips creolizes the memory of Frank by elaborating a multivocal narrative structure and by pursuing what Édouard Glissant (following Deleuze and Guattari) would term a rhizomatic approach to intertextuality and identification (see Glissant, Poetics of Relation 11). A multiperspectival text that weaves together several temporally and geographically disparate stories, the novel opens in the voice of Dr. Stephan Stern, a volunteer who is helping to prepare Jewish refugees for life in Palestine. It then shifts to the first-person narration of his niece Eva at the moment of her liberation from a concentration camp. Roughly one quarter of the way through the novel, the narrative voice moves to the third person to chronicle a blood libel that is leveled against a Jewish community in fifteenthcentury Portobuffole, near Venice. At its halfway point, after returning to Eva’s voice and then back to the Portobuffole story, the novel introduces a new first-person narrative, that of Shakespeare’s Othello. The remainder of the novel alternates among these four narratives while also incorporating brief interjections from the psychiatrist who tends to Eva after her arrival in London and an Afrocentric figure who attacks Othello’s assimilationist ways. One of the hallmarks of Phillips’s The Nature of Blood is its self-conscious intertextuality. The texts that it alludes to and reworks include Shakespeare’s Othello and Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl. I want to focus, however, on what is alongside Othello the novel’s most prominent intertext, Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. While the Diary shadows Phillips’s earlier novel Higher Ground (1989), one of whose protagonists is a Polish Jewish refugee sent to England on the Kindertransport (see Ledent, Caryl Phillips 68), the reference becomes much more pronounced in The Nature of Blood. Indeed, whereas Cliff ’s Abeng thematizes the colonial subject’s reception of the Diary, Phillips’s The Nature of Blood incorporates the Diary much more thoroughly in both thematic and formal terms. Moreover, while Cliff withholds Clare’s diary entries from the reader, Phillips supplies the first-person voice that is absent from Abeng.

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In so doing, Phillips echoes not just the content but also the form of Frank’s Diary. Like Maillet’s L’étoile noire, The Nature of Blood fully and unapologetically inhabits the genre of Holocaust fiction, incorporating four elements that standardly pattern Holocaust narratives: innocence, initiation, endurance, and escape (Foley 339). The Nature of Blood also displays many of Holocaust fiction’s characteristic features, including intertextuality, the fracturing of time, a hallucinatory atmosphere, and crematory imagery. Above all, it engages the testimonial mode and in particular the diary genre. In The Nature of Blood Phillips attempts to imagine what Frank’s diary would have looked like had she been able to continue its writing after her deportation to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The novel portrays Frank’s life beyond the limits of the Diary, which necessarily ends at the moment of her arrest and deportation. Some critics have attributed the popularity of The Diary of a Young Girl to the fact that it allows readers to consider the Holocaust without confronting the concentration camps. Sundquist summarizes this view that “with the death by starvation and illness awaiting Anne at Bergen-Belsen placed beyond the boundaries of the narrative, the voice recorded in the Diary never entirely surrenders its girlish charm” (232–33). Phillips, by contrast, does not shield the reader from the horror of the Holocaust, but instead shows us what the Diary cannot: the boxcar deportation to the camp, the camp experience itself and its aftermath. He does so by supplying the missing diary entries that Frank was unable to compose after her arrest and deportation.26 A number of biographical correspondences link Phillips’s Eva to Frank, including an older sister named Margot, the imperfect marriage of Eva’s parents, and Mrs. Stern’s remoteness from her daughters. The resonances with the Diary are particularly strong in the second section of Eva’s narrative, which looks back to the period before her deportation. Here we find her living in a small apartment in a “voluntary captivity” (60) that recalls the Frank family’s living entombment in the secret annex: I lived for nearly two years in that small apartment, abandoning my books, making daily visits to the high window in the tiny kitchen, and staring at the world which my parents had forbidden me to re-enter.

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They feared that, should I venture out, they would lose their remaining daughter, and so I was to remain hidden inside. I understood that we were fortunate, that most were living ten or more to an apartment, and that Papa’s money, and what little influence Mama still had, had bought us the luxury of space. But still, I was unhappy and frustrated, and sixteen. (61)

In this passage, Eva’s isolation from the outside world strongly echoes Frank’s account. When Eva’s parents decide to allow her more mobility in the apartment she exclaims, “Finally, they were treating me as an adult” (63), recalling Frank’s adolescent frustration at being seen as a child by Dussel and the other inhabitants of the secret annex. Yet, as critics have noted, The Nature of Blood effects a curious displacement whereby many of Frank’s characteristics are attributed not to Eva but to her sister. In Phillips’s novel it is Margot rather than Eva who has a boyfriend named Peter, Margot rather than Eva who is obsessed with Hollywood: “Margot loved the movies. Her room was plastered with pin-ups of the stars, but Mama did not like this, for she was concerned that both of her daughters should succeed at school” (23). Phillips inverts the personalities of the Frank sisters so that in his version Eva is “the more studious and determined, and Margot the more fanciful” (88). Moreover, the story of Margot’s hiding and eventual discovery also strongly evokes Frank’s narrative while at the same time departing from it. In Phillips’s version, Margot goes into hiding separately from the rest of the family, rendering her more vulnerable both psychologically and physically: “They encouraged Margot to practice how to hold her nose so that she might sneeze quietly. Quiet, like a cat. Eventually Margot discovered an imaginary friend named Siggi, who never spoke. And from behind closed doors, Margot listened to her country change, while inside she, too, was changing. To experience loneliness at any age is painful, but so young . . . It marks a person” (174). One night, Margot is raped by her “hiding father” and decides to come out of hiding and face deportation rather than endure further abuse. Phillips thus redistributes Frank’s personality traits and biographical details across the two sisters while also making significant alterations to her family’s history.

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Like Dabydeen’s reworking of Hogarth’s Jew in A Harlot’s Progress, Phillips does not construct a one-to-one relationship between Eva Stern and the historical Anne Frank, but instead adopts a more dynamic and allusive approach. This slippery and dissonant mode of intertextuality is in keeping with Phillips’s broader analogical method in The Nature of Blood, which operates according to a metonymic rather than metaphoric logic, working through asymmetry and (dis)association rather than the assertion of direct correspondences between Black and Jewish experience.27 Accordingly, Phillips resists the trope of interracial romance that governs his earlier novel Higher Ground, in which a Jewish refugee has a brief, abortive affair with a Caribbean immigrant. As Craps notes, Phillips also abandons the metaphorical mode of his first short story, whose Dutch Jewish protagonist substituted directly for Phillips himself (“Linking Legacies” 199). Instead in The Nature of Blood Phillips holds his Jewish and Black protagonists at a remove from one another by situating them in separate temporal and geographical planes—Eva in postwar Germany and London and Othello in early modern Venice. Just as this approach undermines the charge of appropriation infamously leveled by Hilary Mantel in her review of the novel, so does Phillips’s loosely allusive reworking of Frank’s Diary. His fiction generates complex analogical structures that enable him to draw different terms into relation without collapsing the differences among them. In her illuminating discussion of The Nature of Blood, Anne Whitehead suggests that Phillips’s deeply self-conscious form of trauma fiction signals its mediated relationship to the Holocaust. Through his intertextual technique, “Phillips distances his text from the reality of the Holocaust, providing a space for reflections on the ethics of representation involved in his writing” (Whitehead 106). Yet I would add that the choice of Frank’s Diary as intertext is not incidental to the self-conscious character of the novel.28 As noted earlier, Phillips suggests that Frank bears some responsibility for his literary career. In fact, he goes so far in “On ‘The Nature of Blood’” as to describe his novel as a repayment of “a small part of the personal debt that I owed to the remarkable young girl who used to live next door to what is now the Caribbean Rum Runners Bar and Restaurant” (7). Several years later, in A New World Order

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(2001), Phillips again invokes Frank in a passage in which he muses on his career as a reader and writer: A life lived along the twin rails of reading and writing. The one act informing the other. And all the while a particular interest in the work of those who have been dealt the same ambiguous hand. Who am I? How do I explain who I am? How do I come to be here? Frantz Fanon lying in the shallow stony soil of Algeria. Ignatius Sancho standing behind the counter of his Mayfair grocer’s shop. On a hot summer’s day in St Paul de Vence, a grinning James Baldwin threads his way through the Frenchmen playing petanque and sits as “his” table outside the café. The puzzled anxiety on the brow of a young John Coetzee in “white” South Africa. All of them writing about their condition. Reading about their condition and then writing about my own. Developing a passion for literature. Developing a passion for transgression. A confused fifteen-year-old boy is confronted with the reality of Anne Frank and realises that he is not alone. He begins to recognise the laborious certainties of the old order. A life lived along the twin rails of reading and writing. The one informing the other. A passion for literature. Travelling furiously across borders and boundaries. (A New World Order 5)

Here Frank occupies a privileged position in Phillips’s pantheon of literary heroes. While in Abeng Frank’s Diary jostles for space on Clare Savage’s bookshelf alongside classic works of British literature by Scott and Stevenson, in A New World Order Frank finds her place in an alternative canon of what Phillips elsewhere calls “Extravagant Strangers.”29 The Diary emerges in Phillips’s nonfiction essays not simply as a source text but as a text that licenses the act of writing itself. Thus it is not only (as Whitehead argues) that Phillips’s relationship to the Holocaust is mediated by existing narratives such as Frank’s but also, conversely, that his relationship to writing is mediated by the Holocaust. Read from this vantage point, The Nature of Blood expresses a desire to repay the debt and to come to terms with the experience of cross-cultural identification that launched his literary career.30

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In The Nature of Blood Phillips acknowledges his debt to Frank not only in thematic terms but also by referencing the diary genre. Through its multiple narrative strands, the novel catalogues different kinds of chronicles, personal and public. Included among these is the Holocaust diary. Like Frank, Phillips’s Eva bears witness to everyday life as it is radically transformed and deformed by the war. She is frequently described in the act of observing; the first line of her narrative is “I watch as the trucks come roaring into the camp, dust and mud flying up behind their wheels” (12). Moreover, like Cliff ’s Clare and Maillet’s Sidonie, Eva is not only an observer but also a chronicler of the events she witnesses. While the diary is one of the most prominent genres of Holocaust writing, few diaries were written by camp inmates, who lacked the opportunity, means, and energy to engage in such an activity and who feared reprisals should their writing be discovered. Instead, diaries were more prevalent among those who lived in Nazi-enforced ghettos or in hiding.31 It is appropriate, then, that Eva keeps a diary only before her deportation. Moreover, she quickly abandons it in another dissonant displacement of the Diary: “I sobbed all night. And then, in the morning, I began to keep a journal, but within a week I gave it up, for I could no longer summon the energy to maintain the daily pretense that I was writing to my sister” (67). Yet although Eva discards her diary, her narrative remains haunted by the diary form. As a nonteleological mode that “takes on special importance at times when subjectivity is perceived to be under threat” (Stewart 418), the diary proves well suited not only to Frank’s chronicle of her seclusion in the secret annex but also to Phillips’s portrait of the camp survivor. In The Diary of a Young Girl, Frank recorded her descent from the relative normalcy of her prewar childhood to the deprivations and distortions of her living entombment: “I can’t imagine that the world will ever be normal for us again,” she wrote on November 8, 1943. “I do talk about ‘after the war,’ but then it is only a castle in the air, something that will never really happen. If I think back to our old house, my girl friends, the fun at school, it is just as if another person lived it all, not me” (103). Bookending Frank’s Diary, which breaks off three days before her arrest, Eva’s narration in The Nature of Blood begins at the moment of the camp’s liberation to convey in a painfully immediate fashion her

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(ultimately unsuccessful) struggle to recover the sense of self and vision of a postwar future that the war has irreparably ruptured.32 In the first portion of Eva’s story, which details the period immediately following her liberation, her first-person narrative adopts an episodic, diarylike structure with entries separated by ellipses. Providing a close-up view of the texture of daily life in the newly liberated camp, Eva’s narration obliquely invokes the diary entries that her material and psychological condition prevent her from composing. In taking up the genre of the Holocaust diary, however, Phillips once again effects a series of displacements, omitting the dates that structured Frank’s original narrative, blurring dream and reality, and at times confusing the first and third person. Unlike The Diary of a Young Girl, Eva’s testimony is lacking in authorial control. While the diary is a genre that promises to bring the subject into being, Eva’s chaotic and uneven diaristic reflections register the fragmented sense of self that results from the depersonalizing effect of the camps. These alterations to the diary form convey the mental confusion brought on by the camp and the extreme difficulty of returning to what Eva describes as “strange visions of normal life” (44). The disorderliness of Eva’s narrative is in keeping with the mental deterioration and loss of the ability to concentrate that camp inmates experienced (see Waxman 79). After Eva’s narrative breaks off briefly to make way for the Portobuffole story, it returns in a more distanced and retrospective mode that bears a stronger formal and thematic resemblance to Frank’s Diary. In this section of the novel, Eva’s memories of her voluntary captivity before her arrest reassert themselves, unreeling progressively backward from her confinement in the small apartment, to the family’s move from their house into the apartment, to the period before this move. These memories are ordered according to seasonal markers, such as “It was almost December” and “Spring arrived” (64–65), that replace the diurnal markers of sunrise and sunset that punctuate the opening portion of her narrative. Yet this temporal order, too, is threatened by the disintegration of Eva’s living conditions. In a passage that echoes the malfunction of the Westertoren clock in Frank’s Diary, time is arrested at the moment of Eva’s deportation: “I gazed up at the church clock. It read five o’clock. . . . For almost two years, it had read five o’clock. Here, among these houses

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which had become our prisons and our tombs, there was no midnight, there were no bells, there was no time” (70). The cohesion of the second portion of Eva’s account is profoundly disrupted by the events that follow. After breaking away again to follow the Othello and Portobuffole stories, Eva’s narrative resumes to detail her deportation. In the boxcar scene the narrative notably shifts to the third person, heralding the loss of voice that her incarceration in the camp will bring.33 Here Eva’s and her family’s identities begin to erode as the markers of their individuality break down: “Humiliation had descended upon their lives, and they sat huddled and indistinguishable from the others” (156). Once arrived at the camp, the inmates’ shorn hair transforms them into grotesque beings who “all look the same” (164). Eva’s first-person narration subsequently returns, but now abandons paragraphing and shifts to short, disjunctive sentences, becoming virtually unreadable in the face of the loss of meaningful reference points in the campscape that surrounds her. The staccato rhythm of this section recalls Frank’s June 5, 1944 entry, two months before her arrest, in which, during a period of increasing despair, she discarded her normally fluid prose in favor of point form. Ultimately what Phillips stages here is the collapse of the diary as a mode of self-realization, as Eva finally fails to recover a sense of identity and reality. Eva’s inability to overcome the trauma of the camps is expressed through her departure from realist modes of narration. At the outset of the novel she hallucinates that her mother has returned from the dead; by the end of the novel she is no longer able to “stop dreaming” because she lacks the mental control (184). For Eva, the dreamworld is preferable to an unbearable reality: “She prayed that she might be left undisturbed, for everybody knew that one should never wake anybody having a nightmare. Reality was much worse. Nightmares were acceptable” (166). This turn to the surreal is characteristic both of the “irrealistic tendency” of Holocaust fiction (Foley 349) and of camp diaries, which conveyed the otherworldly quality of what Holocaust victims witnessed through science fiction and horror movie analogies.34 Brenner suggests that Frank’s Diary is best understood as undertaking “a quest for a ‘new narrative form’ which would make it possible to ‘share an experience’ to which a parallel cannot be found” (109). She argues that,

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while the stage and screen adaptations attempted to confine the Diary within standard literary categories, the Diary itself strains against the limits of language and form to convey a reality that Frank was aware would seem unreal to most readers (110). Frank’s quest for a new literary form is shared by Phillips, who in The Nature of Blood elaborates a highly innovative narrative structure. While imitating the Holocaust diary, Phillips also creolizes this narrative form by intertwining Eva’s testimony with other private and public chronicles, including Othello’s memoir of his initiation into Venetian society and a more impersonal, scholarly-sounding account of the Portobuffole blood libel.35 In affiliating his novel with Frank’s diaristic practice, Phillips constructs a relationship, not of Bloomian anxiety of influence or competition, but of homage. This relationship between author and literary precursor is thematized in The Nature of Blood in a scene that takes place in the Venetian ghetto. Here, instead of the Black writer serving as amanuensis of the Jew, we find the inverse scenario. While wandering the city of Venice, Othello ventures for a second time into the Jewish ghetto, a powerful spatial signifier in Phillips’s work of linkages between Jewish and Black experience.36 In the Venetian ghetto Othello seeks out a Jewish scribe who can help him to decipher Desdemona’s letter: Once inside [the synagogue], I encountered a weather-beaten, warp-faced Jew toiling over a book in the semi-darkness. . . . I offered up the letter to the Jew and he immediately understood what I expected of him. While he scanned the letter, he gestured to me that I should sit. Then, having examined it, he looked up at me. He did not betray any emotion, but simply began to recite to me the contents of the letter. As he began, I almost asked him to stop in order that I might press upon him the knowledge that I could read, and inform him that it was only this dense and unclear script that had defeated me. But it was too late. Once he had begun, I was intoxicated. The lady stopped short of professing a love for me, but her desire to see me again, and as soon as possible, was clearly articulated. (141–42)

As the passage continues, the Jewish scribe agrees to draft Othello’s reply to Desdemona: “The scholar handed back the unfolded letter. I paid him,

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adding some extra for the good news he conveyed, and our transaction was complete. It was then, after a moment’s thought, that I asked if I might dictate to him a letter of reply set down in his finest hand, but he had already anticipated my request. The Jew looked at me with pen poised” (142). Othello concludes that the Jew “felt a certain sympathy for my predicament. Indeed, as I left, I am sure that I noticed a smile play around his thin lips” (142). What is the meaning of this transaction between Othello and the Jew? While the scene has been understood in negative terms as exposing Othello’s inability to make connections between his condition and that of the Venetian Jews (Whitehead 102), I read it as an allegory of the relationship of the Black writer to his Jewish literary antecedents. In this scene, Othello is aided in his quest to access “the heart of society” (144) by a fellow outsider who has greater familiarity with the “dense and unclear script” of European culture. As he avows, the Moor is a reader himself, but he nonetheless requires the Jew’s help to decode the European text. In the Venetian ghetto scene the Jew and the Moor are sympathetic allies who conduct a transaction that is not so much financial (indeed the Jew refuses additional payment for delivering the letter to Desdemona) as it is textual and scribal. The Jew as an interpreter of European texts and as a writer assists the Moor in articulating his own literary missive, recalling some of the neoslave narratives examined in chapter 3 in which the port Jew facilitates the slave’s acquisition of literacy and serves as broker of the dominant culture. The Venetian ghetto scene thus recalls Phillips’s account of how his early contact with Jewish experience and the Holocaust served as a midwife to his literary career.37 In The Nature of Blood the relationship between Jewishness and textuality is further highlighted by a second Shakespearean reference. When Othello first arrives in Venice, he is aided by a retired merchant who informs him about the Jewish ghetto. The Venetian ghetto scenes necessarily allude not only to Shakespeare’s Othello but also to Shylock, who emerges alongside Frank as another member of Phillips’s literary pantheon. “Shylock has always been my hero,” Phillips avers (“In the Ghetto” 55).38 Much as Cliff cites Frank’s Diary alongside Scott’s Ivanhoe, Phillips pairs the Diary with The Merchant of Venice. These choices of secondary intertexts are significant, for through them Abeng and

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The Nature of Blood engage what are arguably the two most prominent and influential treatments of Jewishness in the English literary canon.39 Cliff and Phillips thus not only invoke Anne Frank but also foreground “the Jew” more broadly as a figure of otherness in English literature through an intertextual strategy that underscores the association of Jewishness in both authors’ work with questions of literary representation, canonicity, and authorship. As secondary intertexts, Ivanhoe and The Merchant of Venice reveal how the Caribbean/diaspora subject’s reception of the English literary canon simultaneously entails an encounter with the constructions of Jewishness that are embedded in that canon. / / /

I have argued that Cliff ’s and Phillips’s cross-cultural engagements with the Holocaust are not isolated quirks of the literary imagination. Rather, they may be understood as part of a larger Caribbean/diaspora intellectual tradition, one that extends beyond the early postwar francophone anticolonial context that has thus far been the focus of critical attention. I have further suggested that Cliff ’s and Phillips’ articulations of Holocaust memory need to be read against an additional frame of reference: that of the deep historical presence of Sephardic Jews in the Dutch and British Caribbean. This historical consciousness, most dramatically embodied in Phillips’s chance meeting with his Sephardic grandfather in a St. Kitts bar, at once supports and complicates the identification with the Holocaust in Abeng and The Nature of Blood. Situating Abeng and The Nature of Blood within the broader historical and cultural landscape of the Sephardic Caribbean lends insight into the modes of comparison Cliff and Phillips pursue. In their novels, both writers eschew the naively substitutive form of identification they had favored in their adolescent encounters with the Holocaust. Yet, as we have seen, although Cliff resists a direct identification between Clare and her Jewish heroine, her reluctance to allow Jewishness any of the contradictions that she discerns in Creole subjectivity flattens the Jewish term of her analogy. In Abeng Cliff relies heavily on a narrative of Jewish victimhood despite her awareness of the historical participation of Jews in the plantation economy. Cliff ’s later fiction similarly privileges Jewish

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victimhood, countering the Black-Jewish tensions that came to a head in the early 1990s in her adoptive home of the United States.40 In The Nature of Blood, by contrast, Phillips presents his Jewish heroine as a morally ambivalent figure, a member of Primo Levi’s “gray zone” in which “the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge” (Levi 42). A rhizomatic logic governs Phillips’s approach to intertextuality in the novel, which entangles Frank’s story with those of several other figures. As critics have discussed, a complex network of resonances and dissonances emerges among these narratives that simultaneously invites and discourages the association of Black and Jewish experience. The desire for identification with the Holocaust victim is further challenged by the revelation late in the novel that Eva had been a member of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners who were forced to dispose of corpses from the gas chambers, making them unwilling auxiliaries in the murder of their own people.41 Thus, instead of pursuing what Levi terms a “Manichaean” reading of history, one that “shuns half-tints and complexities,” Phillips affirms Levi’s observation that in the Lagers “human relations . . . could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors” (Levi 37). Ambivalence also enters Phillips’s novel through the figure of Malka, the Ethiopian immigrant to Israel with whom Eva’s Uncle Stephan has an encounter that calls into question the project of Israeli nationhood. Phillips’s attention to the intraJewish racism that oppresses Malka and other Ethiopian Jews signals a nuanced, critical reading of Jewishness and its relationship to dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Although Phillips is less invested than Cliff in a narrative of Jewish victimhood, he does not take up the opportunity to explore such tensions in a more directly Caribbean context—this despite his own Sephardic Caribbean heritage. In his essays on Frank, Phillips remarks on the presence of Surinamese, Arubans, and Curaçaoans in Amsterdam. As already noted, he makes much of the fact that next to the Anne Frank House is a Caribbean bar, an adjacency that suggests a relationality between Black and Jewish histories of trauma. But in fact, as an emerging body of historical scholarship on the Jewish Atlantic is exploring, the links between the Dutch empire and Jewishness go much deeper than analogies between imperialism and the Holocaust convey. Ironically,

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Amsterdam, the site of Frank’s victimization, was also the center of a colonial empire that made possible one of the greatest examples of Jewish privilege in early modern history: the self-governing Jewish agricultural settlement of Jodensavanne in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Suriname. This conjunction of histories is evoked in Frank’s Diary by Peter van Daan’s colonialist fantasy (expressed in one of the epigraphs to this chapter) of living on a plantation in his version of an attempt to imagine a future beyond the war. The 2011 erection of a statue of Anne Frank in Aruba and the Papiamentu edition of Frank’s Diary that is displayed in the Curaçao Jewish museum give further testament to these complicating linkages between Anne Frank’s Amsterdam and the colonial Netherlands Antilles. Such linkages, while submerged in Abeng and The Nature of Blood, come to the fore when we situate Cliff ’s and Phillips’s Holocaust fiction in relation to a larger Caribbean literary tradition of invoking Jewish historical experience, including that of the Sephardic Caribbean.

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he central argument of this book has been that looking beyond the U.S. context of Black-Jewish literary relations reveals a distinctive discourse about Jewishness that carries across a range of postwar Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora texts. The literary works that I have examined, while diverse, have in common several broad features. First, they favor a pluralistic and relational perspective rather than a separatist ethnoracial stance, thereby resisting what Paul Gilroy calls the “dangers of race thinking” (Between Camps 8). Advancing an inclusive poetics, they largely eschew Afrocentric or ethnocentric models of Caribbean identity. Instead, they tend to privilege the creolized condition of the Caribbean and in some cases present Jewishness as itself emblematic of that condition. The presence of Jewish characters in these texts thus signals what Maryse Condé describes in a 1998 essay as “a widening of horizons” in Caribbean writing: “What we notice through [second- and third-generation Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora] writing is first of all a widening of horizons as the setting of their novels shuttles between different world locations. Secondly, the characters that they portray are as diverse as the settings of their novels. Sometimes they are not even black. In The Nature of Blood (1996), Caryl Phillips’s main character is a Jew. Thus, under the pen of a Caribbean writer, the Holocaust is equated with the Middle Passage” (“O Brave New World” 5). Engagements with Jewish history mark a new direction in Caribbean literary discourse as it moves to embrace what Glissant calls the “tout-monde” as well as to deepen its investigation of Caribbean

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creolization. While creolization theory has tended to focus on African, Indigenous, and South and East Asian cultural influences, the writers discussed in this study recognize Jewishness as a significant historical component of Caribbean societies. Second, this body of writing tends to favor an identificatory and multidirectional mode of comparing diasporic histories rather than a competitive one. Accordingly, it advances a largely sympathetic reading of Jewish history, highlighting two major traumatic moments that link Jewish and Black experience: 1492 and the Holocaust. In part 1 I discussed this identificatory orientation with reference to instances of literary sephardism that may be found in postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry. Part 2 traced this affiliative mode across a series of Caribbean readings of the Holocaust not only as a surrogate for the memory of slavery but also as a historical trauma that brought Blacks and Jews into contact both in the Caribbean and in Europe. Throughout I have argued that Caribbean treatments of Black-Jewish relations are not characterized by the same sense of betrayal and disillusionment that features in their U.S. counterparts. In marked contrast to the decline of Black-Jewish alliance and sympathy in the U.S. from mid-century, in the case of Caribbean literature we see a rising interest in Jewish themes through the latter decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The majority of the literary texts discussed in this study were published in the 1980s and 1990s, publication dates that reflect the convergence of a variety of factors and conditions. These two decades saw an increase in public commemorations of the Holocaust as well as the peak of Holocaust fiction as a genre. Although some earlier examples are available, the neoslave narrative also established itself as a significant literary genre in the last quarter of the twentieth century, helping to catalyze broader efforts to memorialize slavery such as the French loi Taubira and the Dutch national slavery monument. Another decisive moment during this same period was the 1992 quincentenary, which gave rise to public discourse about the legacies of both colonialism and the Iberian expulsion while simultaneously failing, as Ella Shohat has argued, to draw connections between these two cataclysms. Equally important for our purposes, it was also the early 1990s that saw Black-Jewish tensions in the United States come to a boiling point with the Crown Heights riots and the Nation of Islam’s publication of The Secret Relationship of

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Blacks and Jews. I have argued that the emergence of Caribbean literary narratives about Jewishness in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century can be understood as a response to these literary and social currents on the part of a generation of writers whose consciousnesses were profoundly shaped by World War II. Their identificatory readings of Jewishness and the Holocaust mark their distance from the U.S. discourses of ethnic competition that their texts occasionally ventriloquize. Indeed, for Caryl Phillips, Gilroy, and other Caribbean/diaspora writers and critics, a cross-cultural identification with Jewish experience becomes a means of defining their difference from American Blackness. Although the reading of Jewish history that emerges in this body of Caribbean literature tends to be sympathetic, it is not monolithic. Rather, a significant ambivalence runs through these texts alongside identification. Neither are the forms of cross-cultural affiliation that Caribbean/diaspora writers articulate based on a naive assumption of similarity or neat correspondence. Instead, the more complex analogical modes that scholars have identified in Phillips’s Holocaust fiction also characterize Caribbean/diaspora writers’ treatments of Jewish themes more broadly. As we saw especially with the examples of Caribbean sephardism examined in the first half of this study, the less polarized reading of Black-Jewish relations that Caribbean literature advances tends to be articulated through prismatic, polyphonic narrative forms. This approach is exemplified by Anna Ruth Henriques’s densely layered illuminated manuscripts, which I discussed in chapter 1. Rather than adopting binary formulations or making sharp, bifurcated distinctions between Black and Jewish identities, works such as Henriques’s The Book of Mechtilde favor triadic or labyrinthine structures in which Jewishness serves as a third term that mediates between African and European cultural formations and highlights their relationality. Relatedly, while some of the Caribbean texts treat Jewishness as an ethical principle that throws the immorality and racial inequity of (post) plantation societies into relief, others challenge an automatic association of Jewishness with victimhood. Destabilizing binary formulations, they present Jews as figures of in-betweenness and moral ambiguity who upset easy oppositions between victim and perpetrator. This quality of in-betweenness is especially highlighted by Caribbean literary sephardism, which exposes the doubleness of colonial Sephardic Jewry as

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both agents and victims of empire. In some Caribbean Holocaust fiction as well, however, a more complex understanding of the relationship between victimization and collaboration emerges in keeping with a broader shift in recent public discourse from a focus on victimhood to an emphasis on bystanders. Indeed, whether colonial merchants, planters, refugees, or Holocaust survivors, Jewish protagonists in Caribbean literature tend to inhabit an ambiguous gray zone between master and slave, perpetrator and victim. Their ambivalent presence has an unsettling effect that disturbs—and thereby encourages reflection on—master narratives of slavery, empire, and race as well as the generic conventions these narratives support. At the same time, the presence of Jewish protagonists in these texts reflects their metafictional preoccupation with the textual and visual regimes that have governed the construction of racialized Others. In Caribbean literature the introduction of Jewish protagonists contributes to a self-conscious reworking of literary genres and to an understanding of discursive practices as conditioned by colonial hierarchies and structures of power. Finally, it is important to note that the ambivalences of the Caribbean Jewish histories these texts evoke are echoed by the ambivalent critical reception with which some of the authors considered in this study have met. It is no accident that Jewishness is a persistent trope in the work of writers such as Hearne, Walcott, and Cliff, who have on occasion been accused of inauthenticity, conservatism, and of an insufficiently Afrocentric perspective. Indeed, in a number of the texts that I have discussed, Jewishness appears as a motif in tandem with the authors’ concern with European literary and artistic canons and with Europe’s construction of both its internal and external Others. The presence of Jewish themes in these authors’ writing reflects the exposure to European literary and artistic traditions that their class backgrounds and colonial educations afforded them. In such works Jewishness is an intermediary term, a channel through which to incorporate the European into the African or to consider the ambiguous status of those light-skinned Creole subjects who are both European and not, white and not white. Jewishness, which is itself defined by its racial indefinability, proves especially useful to Caribbean writers who have an interest in exploring mixed-race identities and acknowledging the European components of their ancestry alongside their New World African heritage.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Throughout this study I use Caribbean/diaspora to refer to both those writers raised in the Caribbean and those raised in the diaspora. See the note on style and terminology at the end of the introduction. 2. See Gerber on how the rise of Atlantic studies has encouraged historians of early modern Jewry to reevaluate the significance of the Caribbean case and to challenge traditional understandings of center and periphery (1–2). For two recent exemplary studies of this kind, see Stiefel’s architectural history Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World and Leibman’s Messianism, Secrecy, and Mysticism, an investigation of the material culture of the Jewish Atlantic. By contrast, literary critics largely have neglected the recurring presence of Jewish characters and the invocation of Jewish Atlantic history in Caribbean writing. Exceptions are Greene, who in a 1986 article argues that Caribbean novelists are not interested in depicting Jewish characters per se, but instead introduce Jewishness strictly as a means of elucidating aspects of Caribbean identity. More recently, Ledent has revised Greene’s assessment, observing that in anglophone Caribbean writing “there is in many cases sincere sympathy, empathy even, on the part of post-war Caribbean writers—not only with Jewish people’s experience of displacement but also of oppression and extermination” (“Caribbean Writers” 2). For discussions of the francophone Caribbean context, see Britton and also Gyssels’s study of the Schwarz-Barts, Maranne et marronne. 3. The authors of one recent study contend that “postcolonial discourse has tended to erase real Jews from the mental and cultural landscape or to deny particularity to Jews as Jews” (Sicher and Weinhouse xxii). On the question of why Jewishness has become a “marketable identity option” (Meinig 65) in the field of multicultural literature, see Meinig and Harrison-Kahan. 4. Dabydeen’s 2013 novel Johnson’s Dictionary is perhaps the most recent example of this phenomenon. 5. See Karp and Sutcliffe’s introduction to Philosemitism in History as well as Karp’s chapter in that volume on African American philosemitism.

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6. Jewish minorities, for example, have been examined primarily in terms of their relationship to the dominant society. See Melamed, who notes that “only in the last generation have researchers begun to look at the obverse question: Jews’ relationships to their own others both within Judaism . . . and outside the ethnic-religious group, especially blacks, Arabs, and non-Jewish women” (6). 7. See Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination. See also Shohat and Stam, who theorize what they call “ethnicities in relation,” noting that because “ethnic image studies have often pitted isolated minorities against a fixed and hegemonic Euro-American power structure,” it has been “easy to overlook the interethnic and international contradictions, syncretisms, and hybridities among the diverse ‘margins’” (Unthinking Eurocentrism 220–21). Relatedly, Cheyette questions “whether histories of victimization can be thought of in isolation” (“Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas” 1–2). 8. In a 2012 special issue to mark the relaunching of Studies in American Jewish Literature, Franco calls on scholars to “situat[e] Jewish literature in a broad account of race and ethnicity, through comparative studies” (12). This new direction in Jewish studies is exemplified by such works as Freedman’s Klezmer America, Rubinstein’s Members of the Tribe, and Gilman’s Multiculturalism and the Jews as well as Franco’s own Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing. 9. See Boyarin’s The Unconverted Self and Cheyette’s Diasporas of the Mind. See also Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory, which unearths a countertradition among francophone anticolonial intellectuals of productive engagement with the Holocaust in the early postwar period. Rothberg’s work is complemented by Silverman’s Palimpsestic Memory and Cheyette’s account of the influence of Sartre on Fanon (“Frantz Fanon”). In such studies, a key tradition emerges centering on such figures as Arendt, Sartre, Césaire, Fanon, and Du Bois, each of whom identifies crucial links between colonial racism and antisemitism. Other significant attempts to bring postcolonial studies and Jewish studies into dialogue include Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony, Guttman’s Writing Indians and Jews, and Plapp’s Zionism and Revolution. See also the somewhat earlier example of Cheyette’s and Marcus’s Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” which notably includes a foreword by Bhabha and an afterword by Gilroy. In their introduction, Cheyette and Marcus complain that, “most perniciously, ‘political correctness’ has distinguished between victims of antisemitism and racism as if they exist in two hermetically sealed historical settings. Instead of bringing together post-colonial and post-Holocaust revisions of the West, the academy, usually for narrow institutional reasons, has largely excluded Jews from current definitions of ethnicity” (2). 10. Although Boyarin similarly takes issue with Said for neglecting Europe’s internal Jewish Others, he finds in Said’s discussion of the common roots of Orientalism and antisemitism a starting point for the project of “comparing Jewish and postcolonial difference” (Storm from Paradise 78–79). 11. In identifying this intersectional aspect of the literary texts, I draw inspiration from Kandiyoti’s discussion of sephardism in Latina literature as a mode that not only compares but also connects (see chapter 1).

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12. Interestingly, Scharfman fails to connect this Jewish presence in the antebellum South to the larger Jewish Atlantic world that Condé invokes in Moi, Tituba, which depicts its Jewish protagonist as part of a network of port Jews that extends from New England to Barbados. 13. Scharfman’s response to this revelation bears a striking similarity to that of Shai Fierst, a Jewish American who traveled to Suriname with the Peace Corps (see chapter 4). 14. Moreover as Rubinstein observes, the competition between Black and Jewish writers “to stand at the center of American culture” (397) has only been intensified by recent complaints about the exclusion of Jewish writing from multicultural canons (401). 15. In a valuable review essay, Rubinstein identifies three waves of Black-Jewish relations scholarship: a first set of studies that took as a given the shared suffering of Blacks and Jews, a second set that expressed a marked cynicism regarding the purported naturalness of a Black-Jewish alliance, and a third wave that “seek[s] to incorporate a more mutually constructive model into their versions of a blackJewish literary dialogue” (394). In my view, moving beyond the U.S. national frame and approaching Caribbean authors, not as footnotes to the U.S. discussion but as writing out of their own particular cultural and historical context, constitutes an important next stage in the evolution of Black-Jewish studies. 16. The French context and particularly the cross-fertilization between anticolonial and antifascist thought has been richly explored by Rothberg and Silverman, while the particularities of the British case have been identified by Romain (Connecting Histories). 17. I am grateful to Bryan Cheyette for drawing to my attention the way in which Phillips and other Caribbean writers invoke the Black-Jewish theme in part in order to establish their transatlantic credentials. 18. At a 2010 conference in Kingston, Jamaica entitled “The Jewish Diaspora of the Caribbean,” a number of Afro-Caribbean attendees spoke of a “calling of the blood” that propelled them to explore their Jewish roots. See also the story recounted by Delavante and Alberga of Winston Mendes-Davidson, who was not raised as a Jew. Like MacFarlane, a chance meeting with a Jew while traveling outside the Caribbean sparked Mendes-Davidson’s interest in reconnecting with his Jewish heritage; he subsequently became the cantor of the synagogue (112). Similarly Ezratty describes how Puerto Rican colleagues he had known for many years would suddenly tell him “that they had been told by grandparents and great-grandparents that they were Jewish, or that a Jewish thread ran through their lineage” (x). 19. Other Caribbean writers who recognize Jewish ancestry but who do not figure prominently in the present study include Olive Senior and Andrea Levy. 20. See Mantel’s review of The Nature of Blood, in which she chastises Phillips for “lay[ing] claim to other people’s suffering” (39). For an overview of the controversy surrounding Hijuelos’s treatment of the Holocaust, see Kevane (133n14). On Smith, see Tonkin. Finally, on the Schwarz-Barts, see Plapp’s critique of some critics’ belief that Simone was the sole author of La mulâtresse Solitude, an interpretation that bespeaks their “apparent discomfort with the coalition between European Jews and blacks of the Caribbean” (144). On the Schwarz-Barts, see also Gyssels’s “A Shoah Classic Resurfacing” and Marrane et marronne.

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PART 1: 1492 1. According to Schorsch, in the Caribbean context it is often unclear whether Jewish surnames indicate Jewish lineage or Jewish ownership. He observes that “many of the slaves received the exact surname of their master. Still, the overwhelming majority of colored people bearing Sephardic family names had decidedly Christian first names. Like many of their Sephardic owners, these ‘mixed-race’ slaves often bore a multiple identity” (Jews and Blacks 246). 2. Jewish ancestry was ascribed to a number of these figures at a 2010 conference on “The Jewish Diaspora of the Caribbean” hosted by the Jewish community of Kingston, Jamaica, where several Jamaican attendees also asserted that “Jamaica is a Jewish island.” I am grateful to Ainsley Cohen Henriques for his assistance in confirming the Jewish or presumed Jewish ancestry of Shearer (Lindo family), Belafonte (Belinfante family), Alexander (Alexander family), Gladwell (da Costa family), and Paul (Henriques family) (e-mail communication). On Marley’s rumored Syrian Jewish roots, see Chandler. On Powell’s Jamaican family background, see his autobiography (8). Hall notes his own Jewish ancestry in a 2003 essay (“Créolité and the Process of Creolization” 187). In citing this list of names, however, I am less interested in the verifiability of such genealogical claims than in the way in which the list suggests a pervasive Jewish historical presence in Jamaica. 3. See Zivin’s discussion of ethical issues surrounding the need to recognize “real Jews” as well as symbolic ones (21). 4. Arbell observes that “sugar expertise, considered at the time as almost exclusively Jewish, was linked to the history of the Jewish settlements in Martinique, Cayenne, Pomeroon, Surinam, and Barbados as well as to the positive attitude of the British and the Dutch to the Jewish settlements in their colonies in the West Indies and the various decrees of rights and privileges to the Jews taking up residence in them” (The Jewish Nation 13). Loker argues, however, that, although Jews helped to boost colonial prosperity, their contribution remained marginal (29). 5. Accordingly, the eighteenth-century French priest, the Abbé Grégoire, was a staunch advocate of both Jewish emancipation and the abolition of slavery.

1. SEPHARDISM IN CARIBBEAN LITERATURE 1. References to prisms appear on pages 36, 43, 54, 56, and 154 of Tiepolo’s Hound. In the poem the speaker emphasizes that Pissarro’s artistic “vision was not the concentrated gaze / that took in every detail at a glance.” Rather, “sunlight is splintered and even shade is entered / as part of the prism” (43). See also Benítez-Rojo’s remark that “in the Caribbean, the ‘foreign’ interacts with the ‘traditional’ like a ray of light with a prism; that is, they produce phenomena of reflection, refraction, and decomposition” (21). Relevant here as well is Glissant’s emphasis on diffraction (rather than concentration) in his theorization of creolization: “creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, its elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts, whereas certain forms of métissage can concentrate one more time” (Poetics of Relation 34).

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2. The essays collected in Halevi-Wise’s volume chronicle literary appropriations of Sephardic history from the nineteenth century to the present, beginning with Germany, England, and France and then branching outward to Latin America and Israel. The volume also engages several postcolonial contexts, including that of Jewish North African writing, but does not address Caribbean sephardism. 3. More recent Jewish Latin American writing, while eschewing this assimilationist stance, continues to incorporate Sephardic motifs but emphasizes the darker, more traumatic side of Sephardic history in order to explore contemporary concerns with nationalism and totalitarianism. “These intellectuals,” Aizenberg writes, “use literary sephardism as a bridge from the Latin American toward the Jewish, reversing the direction traveled by their forerunners. For the new generations sephardism serves as an instrument to reconnect with submerged or fragmented Jewish identities” (Books 55–56). 4. In her discussion of the Columbus quincentenary commemorations, Shohat considers how “European Christian demonology prefigured colonialist racism,” explaining that “the campaigns against Muslims and Jews as well as against other ‘agents of Satan,’ heretics and witches, made available a mammoth apparatus of racism and sexism for recycling in the ‘new’ continents” (“Taboo Memories” 136–37). 5. As Yovel points out, Sephardim also contributed to the colonial enterprise through their work in the sciences of astronomy, cartography, and geography as well in oriental languages (The Other Within 189). 6. Kandiyoti suggests that “many, if not most, recent fictional works that have recreated medieval and postexpulsion Sephardic history draw analogies to other catastrophes, including the Holocaust and the torments of Latin American repressions and dictatorships” (“Sephardism” 241). 7. I am grateful to Monique Balbuena for bringing this point to my attention. 8. Levins Morales writes, The Crusades and long-standing economic competition with the Islamic world had set up a racist frame of reference for conquest. In Spain, the Christian re-conquest of the peninsula from Islamic rule gave rise to the extreme nationalism of a newly assembled country, with all of its accompanying bigotry and religious intolerance. Jews and Muslims were expelled, forced to convert or die, barred from practicing their crafts and trades, and had their belongings confiscated. Out of this world of famines, epidemics, evictions, and multiplying numbers of landless beggars, a tidal wave of pillage swept out over the planet. The rise of European merchants, companies and transnational corporations into dominance has been disastrous for all the world’s people. (Remedios xxvi–xxvii).

9. In her essay “The Historian as Curandera,” Levins Morales observes that “as a discipline, history is taught by regions and time periods, in ways that often make it difficult to focus on linkages. Medicinal history can restore a sense of the global to fragmented colonial histories. The arrival of the Spanish in the Caribbean is closely connected with the expulsions of Jews and Moslems from Spain, linking the history of San Juan with that of Constantinople and Marrakech. . . . Re-establishing a sense of the connectedness of world events is a critical piece of the work of the activist historian” (36).

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10. Levins Morales’s Ashkenazi heritage figures more prominently in Getting Home Alive (1986), which she coauthored with her mother Rosario Morales. 11. As Schama remarks, The Book of Mechtilde “is far removed from defensive brandishings of ethnic identity. It is, rather, a celebration of the many converging lines of blood, culture, and confession that flow through [Henriques’] mother’s and her own history.” 12. In “The Royal Palms,” Walcott describes the Caribbean as A bastard composition like the race, Conquistador, redleg, Sephardic Jew, Cromwellian heretics, helots reeking gin, With disinherited dukes drawn to the womb Of weary Africa who had to let them in, The bronze hue of her bastards is their tomb. (20–25)

See also the reference to a Sephardic merchant in book 3 of Omeros (155). 13. For example, when Cliff ’s young protagonist presses her teachers for information about the Holocaust, they evade her question by instead “talk[ing] about Jamaica as a haven for Jews suffering under the Spanish Inquisition” (70). 14. Sundquist notes that, in The Chosen Place, “the entanglement of Inquisition and Middle Passage, Jewish exile and African slavery, leads not to scapegoating but to kinship—but kinship in which empathy and conflict have equal shares” (285). 15. Handley, for example, suggests that, rather than his Jewishness or Caribbean upbringing, it is Pissarro’s aesthetics of the ordinary that leads Walcott to choose him as the subject of his poem (New World Poetics 335). In its treatment of this aspect of the poem, the literary criticism echoes the tendency in art historical scholarship to downplay the significance of Pissarro’s Jewishness. 16. The art historian Joachim Pissarro, himself a descendant of the Impressionist master, notes that a “duality in religious allegiances was clearly still alive with Pissarro’s father” (Camille Pissarro 13). Frédéric Pissarro, the son of a Marrano from Braganza, Portugal, emigrated in 1824 from Bordeaux to St. Thomas, where he made a controversial marriage to a Creole Jew from Dominica. Joachim Pissarro suggests that Frédéric’s Marrano background may have been responsible for Camille Pissarro’s rejection of organized religion as well as his marriage to a Catholic woman (13). See also Pissarro, “Pissarro’s Memory,” for a detailed discussion of how the scandal surrounding Pissarro’s parents’ marriage and Pissarro’s subsequent education in a Moravian rather than Jewish school in St. Thomas may have contributed to his atheism and anarchism. 17. For a revisionist reading of Pissarro’s work that emphasizes the influence of his Caribbean and Latin American formation, see Manthorne. On the significance of his Jewish background, see Mirzoeff. 18. Similarly, Walcott ascribes to his Sephardic protagonist exilic experiences, such as being ignorant of the names of European flora (36), that are characteristic of Caribbean writers’ of Walcott’s generation. 19. During the Dreyfus affair, Pissarro is haunted by an inherited memory from his family’s Portuguese Jewish past in a passage on 103 that may be compared with the

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after-images of the Inquisition that plague Cliff ’s Sephardic protagonist in Free Enterprise (see chapter 2). King notes that “while conscious of his partly Jewish origins, Figueroa was strongly Roman Catholic” (69). In fact in the Caribbean, Catholicism is often a sign of Sephardic or Marrano origins. This scene of intercultural contact recalls the biographical detail that Pissarro himself attended a Moravian school in St. Thomas in which the other students were predominantly the children of ex-slaves. See Pissarro, “Pissarro’s Memory.” The Pissarros owned a dry goods shop near the docks. Manthorne notes that “trade flourished in St. Thomas during these years, and with it the fortune of the Pissarro family, which enabled them to send the young Pissarro to France for his studies” (31). Slavery was abolished in the Danish colony in 1848, and Pissarro composed his sketches in the early 1850s. Mirzoeff argues that “it is this focus on the necessity of ethics that gives a consistently Jewish dimension to Pissarro’s work” (63) and suggests that Caribbean Jews’ struggle for emancipation led to a degree of sympathy with enslaved Africans. Kriz’s discussion of Belisario complicates this account somewhat, however, noting that “in an environment where the prospect of slave emancipation also profoundly affected the political status of Jews, free blacks, and free colored people, it is not surprising that sociopolitical alliances and conflicts would be rife among and also within these various communities sharing a common bond: they had all been largely excluded from ‘elite’ (nominally white and Christian) society” (166). The Jewish hawker was a traditional subject of the London Cries genre, which Belisario adapted to the Jamaican context. Kriz observes that “the choice of subject (the ‘rude negro’), and genre/subject matter (the street vendor and performer) also could be seen to serve the interests of those Jews eager to enhance their status. Since the function of the stereotype of the poor, unscrupulous Jewish hawker was to degrade and discredit all Jews engaged in commercial exchange, the erasure of this figure from the Kingston streets can be seen as an advantageous representational strategy” (168). Walcott’s perspective is supported by Manthorne, who argues that if the events are recounted, not from the vantage point of Paris, but from St. Thomas and Caracas, where they truly began, one then discovers that the foundations of Pissarro’s unique approach to life and art were laid far from France. Under the tropical sky, Pissarro began to study the fleeting effects of light and color that led to Impressionism. Renowned for his sympathetic treatment of the French peasantry, he found his earliest models among the black and Indian laborers of St. Thomas and Caracas. Thus the later achievements of Camille Pissarro are inseparable from his Caribbean beginnings. (31)

27. Discussing Tiepolo’s Hound, Handley helpfully glosses the concept of triangulation: “triangulation is a spatial order used in surveying to delimit a location by means of measuring its distance from two distinct spots. Triangulation not only confirms the distance by means of two witnesses, but it also implicitly and relationally places the

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three locations on a similar plane, allowing us to use any two of the points to determine the location of the third. No single location, then, exists without relation to the other two, and hence there is no center or margin, only relation” (New World Poetics 322). 28. Tiepolo’s Hound itself alludes to the Holocaust on page 104. 29. I am grateful to Jennifer Glaser for suggesting this point to me.

2. MARRANISM AND CREOLIZATION 1. McLeod’s and Obejas’s novels thus in a sense anticipate Stiefel’s architectural history of the Jewish Atlantic, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World. 2. Offering an alternative to linear models of acculturation, creolization implies not just the assimilation of European forms but also the creative restructuring and reinvention of these forms by subject populations. Originally a linguistic term that emerged in the late 1950s, creolization as an analytical framework was reconceptualized in the 1970s to emphasize the social and cultural context in which creole languages developed. The seminal articulation of creolization theory remains Kamau Brathwaite’s The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, which identified a two-way (albeit asymmetrical) process of intercultural change and indigenization. The field of creole studies that developed in the wake of Brathwaite’s work has further refined the concept of creolization, which has become “the dominant intellectual construct in the fields of Caribbean and Atlantic World history” (Shepherd and Richards xii). 3. Rahim and Lalla explain that an intensive meeting of people of African, Asian, Amerindian and European origin establishes the [Caribbean] region as a prime example of what Stuart Hall calls a “diasporic aesthetic” that operates according to a “creolising or transcultural ethic.” In a world searching for ways to deal with the complex tensions and sometimes violent outcomes of poorly negotiated responses to difference, the Caribbean’s multiethnic social orders and hybrid cultural expressions exist as original examples of the reformative possibilities of confluence. More importantly, they provide a necessary awakening from the tyrannical myopias inherent in purist and hierarchical myths of origin. (3)

4. Accordingly, many of the essays in the collection Questioning Creole “war[n] against the generalised application and homogenised interpretation of these terms” (Shepherd and Richards xvi). 5. I am indebted here to Kandiyoti’s emphasis on intersectionality in her theorization of sephardism. 6. I recognize that in aligning marranism with creolization here, I am going somewhat against the grain of Hall’s desire to distance his theorization of diaspora from Jewish roots narratives in his well-known essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” 7. In the New World, Conversos were not free of the Inquisition, whose records show that secret Jews were put on trial in Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and Jamaica (Ezratty 8).

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8. Later in the novel, the protagonist is asked whether she is a Jew but does not reply (81). 9. The presence of Jews on the island included a Converso presence during the early colonial period, followed by Ashkenazi immigration in the late nineteenth century. Subsequently, Middle Eastern Jews settled in the early twentieth century and “became known as Siryen (Syrian) regardless of their nationalities as Syrian, Lebanese, or Palestinian” (McAlister 132). The final wave of Jewish immigration to Haiti was of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. See also Arbell (“Jewish Settlements” 301). 10. These thematic preoccupations of the novel are underscored by its tripartite division into sections entitled “Fallen Angels,” “Survival Strategies,” and “Illusions.” 11. This scene appears to draw heavily on McAlister’s fascinating research on the presence of medieval European images of the Jew in Haitian vodou and Rara. 12. Ruth thus displays what Freedman in his discussion of marranism terms the “gift of syncretism” (248). 13. Catherine’s relationship with Sam functions much like Israel Levis’s romance with the Jewish dance teacher Sarah Rubinstein in A Simple Habana Melody or Alejandra’s affairs with her Jewish American lovers in Days of Awe: to reconnect the crypto-Jewish protagonist with a suppressed Jewish identity while also defining Sephardic Caribbeanness against a more familiar Ashkenazi North American variant. 14. This belief in the pervasiveness of Jewish blood strains also figures more broadly in postcolonial literature. For example, in South African writer Achmat Dangor’s Kafka’s Curse (1997) the protagonist’s apparently blue-blooded father-in-law tells him: “Of course, we’re mixed too. Some Jewish blood in our distant pasts, but that’s okay, everyone has Jewish blood in them” (14–15). 15. Freedman’s account is also supported by Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody, in which the certitudes of Nazi racial science are belied by the fundamental indeterminacy of the Cuban composer Israel Levis’s identity. Arrested as a Jew during the Nazi occupation of France, Levis’s “Jewishness” is established not by any documentable Jewish lineage but by the corporeal transformation that he undergoes from gargantuan to gaunt during his internment in Buchenwald. It is ultimately Levis’s physical and sexual changeability, rather than any fixed trait, that establish him as “Jewish.” 16. In the novel’s final chapter, we learn how Rose’s nineteenth-century Irish ancestor Elsie was subjected to the sexual advances of her English master while working as a cook in the Big House in a scene of colonial exploitation that links Ireland’s colonial history to that of the Caribbean. Irishness also features in Free Enterprise, in which a speech by Frederick Douglass identifies a “natural alliance” between Blacks and the Irish (177). Indeed, references to Jewishness and Irishness go hand in hand in these novels, reflecting their desire to make connections across histories of subjugation and to move beyond an Afrocentric or Black Atlantic framework. 17. Kevane makes a similar point in her discussion of Days of Awe (108). 18. Catherine’s description of the strategies of survival that develop under repressive regimes—and particularly her emphasis on stories, hearsay, and gossip—chimes with Freedman’s account of marranism as privileging narrative over empirical truths. Surveying debates surrounding claims to Jewish descent in the Southwest of the United States, Freedman argues that regardless of the facticity of such claims, marranism points to “ways of defining and negotiating a sense of belonging that are mobile, hybrid,

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polyvalent, and potentially recombinant with other identity categories. Indeed . . . the repeated claims by people for their status as descendants of Jews who have kept that identity as a family secret, and specifically the source of those claims in family stories, opens up the possibility that narrative itself can serve as a source for this rooted yet flexible construction of social identification and cultural meaning” (226). In Cuba Levis is “being watched constantly—so many eyes peeking out at him from behind the arcade columns, from behind the market stalls, through a cluster of bushes” (190). Later, after moving to Paris, he is interrogated by the Gestapo regarding his true identity in a scene that recalls the trials of purported Judaizers carried out by the Inquisition (275). As the inheritor of this legacy of concealment and surveillance, Levis remains throughout his life “timid about revealing the portliness of his ample body (or for that matter his inner thoughts)” (227). Throughout his long friendship with Rita Valladeras, Levis is unable to confess his love for the octoroon singer. Equally, even in the relatively libertine 1930s Paris, he remains unable to act on his homosexual desires, so that, as in Obejas’s Days of Awe, in A Simple Habana Melody bisexuality becomes associated with the doubled and closeted identity of the Marrano. In Free Enterprise Cliff similarly invokes the double resonance of 1492 (60), as does Obejas in Days of Awe (32–34) and Levins Morales in Remedios (see chapter 1). In an interview Cliff recalls a classroom debate regarding Columbus’s possible Jewishness that took place during her graduate study at the Warburg Institute in London (“The Art of History” 62–63). One of the most important proponents of the “Sephardi thesis” was Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga. In spite of eminent Columbus scholar Samuel Eliot Morison’s attack on the Sephardi thesis as “unsupported by anything so vulgar as fact” (9), several popular studies have continued to pursue such claims, including Simon Wiesenthal’s Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus (1972) and Jane Frances Amler’s Christopher Columbus’ Jewish Roots (1991). However, Cliff gives her retelling of the Columbus myth a different emphasis by alluding to Black crew members who were aboard Columbus’s and other explorers’ vessel (67). As Tiphanie Yanique’s story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony (2010) attests, leprosy is a rich metaphor in Caribbean literature. In Abeng Cliff draws a connection between leprosy and the figure of the outsider when Clare wonders if the purportedly mad Mrs. Stevens might be a leper (161). In Free Enterprise she develops the metaphor more fully, associating leprosy with the instability of historical knowledge and with the power of storytelling to combat the erasure of subjugated histories. In a Jewish Caribbean context, it is also noteworthy that the camp in Trinidad where Jewish “enemy aliens” were interned during World War II was on the site of a former leper colony. The coal dust from the barges that are burned after transporting the lepers to the new site of the colony (39) also evokes images of incineration associated with the Holocaust and recall similar imagery in Abeng of smoke from burned bodies of Holocaust victims that disperses across the landscape. Johnson notes that Cliff approaches an iconic episode of American history both through its “adjacencies with Caribbean history” and its “global adjacencies” (46). While Johnson references the character of Rachel only briefly (72), in my analysis

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Rachel is central to the principle of adjacency that Johnson helpfully identifies. Moreover, I prefer the term intersectionality to the term adjacency, which implies that the histories being brought into relation remain nonetheless separate. See Itzkovitz’s definition of Jewish difference as “a difference with no content, or, more exactly, with a fluid and ever-shifting content that cannot mark Jewishness as distinct” (“Secret Temples” 179–80). Ben-Ur argues that Itzkovitz’s observation, although relevant to Ashkenazi Jewishness, applies even more profoundly to Levantine Sephardic Jews, who manifest an “elasticity” of identity (“Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish!” 16). On the Jew as diseased and as a carrier of skin diseases including leprosy, see Gilman (The Jew’s Body 100–1). Cliff is often described as inheriting and revising Rhys’s creole literary tradition. Indeed in Abeng Cliff rewrites the rock-throwing scene from Wide Sargasso Sea, while in No Telephone to Heaven she includes an epigraph from Walcott’s poem “Jean Rhys.” For examples of the broader association of Jewishness with racial mixture in Caribbean writing, see Dabydeen’s Johnson’s Dictionary, in which the Jew Theodore is likened to an octoroon (117), and Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, in which the Jewish American anthropologist Saul Amron is repeatedly compared to the “red people” from the Caribbean village of Canterbury who are “more white than black” (85; see also 430). According to Linett, Serge’s primitivist performance and admission that he has made the African masks “play upon racialist classifications that aligned and sometimes conflated Jews and blacks, undermining notions of authenticity in artistic discourses and of nativeness in nationalist discourses. The uncertainty implicit in Serge’s description of his masks echoes for the novel as a whole, questioning Sasha’s national identities and personal authenticity and signaling the deep divisions within her” (165). Notably, Jewishness is also associated with racial indeterminacy in Rhys’s earlier novel Voyage in the Dark (1934), in which the Creole heroine Anna Morgan becomes curious about the possible Jewishness of a racially ambiguous American, Carl Redman. Indeed, not only Cliff ’s Rachel and Chancy’s Ruth and Catherine but also other Marrano-descended Caribbean protagonists, including those of Hijuelos and Obejas, inherit their reserved natures and habits of secrecy from their Marrano forebears. Kevane notes of Obejas’s Enrique, for example, that he embodies “survival strategies that appeared almost genetically encoded into his family history” (112). See also Marks’s account of marranism as a both/and condition “in which Jewish and Christian cultures mingle, in which both are recognized as being present albeit in different degrees, and neither is denied, although crossing over from one to the other is considered a transgression by strict Jews and official Christians. Marranism .  .  . implies multiple languages, countries, and cultural traditions, a refusal of separatism, a going beyond the discourses of history” (141). Edmondson argues that “for Cliff, blackness is the goal, creoleness is the obstacle. If the novels depict a Jamaica that is a natural paradox, a place made up of racial and social categories that appear to be mutually exclusive yet are fundamentally embedded in the meaning of Jamaicanness, then the creole as an historical paradox would seem to be the best symbol of Jamaicanness. Yet, for Cliff, the paradox cannot inhere; ultimately the creole must choose blackness if she is to be Jamaican. She must dissolve her white heritage into this fundamentally black identity” (“Black Mother” 78).

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33. Relatedly, Zivin observes that “while small numbers of descendants of New Christian settlers from the colonial period remain in some Latin American countries (like Brazil), these have survived principally as Catholics” (15). 34. Schorsch writes that “numerous early modern travelers noted the blackness of Jews, especially Sephardim” and examines how Sephardim as a consequence “actively attempted to prove their whiteness” (“Early Modern Sephardim” 246). See also Melamed, who argues that “because Jewish and Muslim scholars had complexions somewhere between light and dark, not truly white, they found it more necessary to distinguish themselves from the blacks, defining them as totally other and excluding them entirely” (4). 35. Indeed, a very different picture of the relationship of Sephardic Jews and Maroons emerges when we consult the 1788 Essai historique authored by the leaders of the Surinamese Jewish community, who were eager to document their participation in the military effort to suppress the Maroons. They note, for example, that “Jewish frontier rangers at the head of their own militia invaded the forests in pursuit of the marauding Maroons or Bush Negroes. One Jewish captain led more than thirty punitive expeditions into the bush against the Maroons. . . . ” The authors of the Essai emphasize that “if their [Jewish] detachments did not make more progress and at less expense than all the others, they at least knew how to equal the Christians in courage, in discipline, and in their burning zeal to serve the colony” (Nassy 65–66).

3. P ORT JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION 1. According to Mandel, Beloved’s dedication and the debate that surrounds it are not about slavery and the Holocaust per se but instead “raise the complex implications of African Americans and Jewish Americans comparing the extent, degree, and clout of their respective victimizations” (170). 2. Zierler makes a related point at the opening of her article “My Holocaust Is Not Your Holocaust.” 3. See Ryan, Calls and Responses (chapter 3) on African American writers’ engagements with Elkins’s thesis. What Halloran calls the “Black Holocaust view of the Middle Passage” (161) also figures in some works of Caribbean slavery fiction such as Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe, in which the narrator asserts that “it was the same suffering, historically speaking, between living on this Plantation and living-through the War in Europe. Much of a muchness. When you think of it. The same War. The same taking of prisoners. The same bloodshed. And the same not taking of no prisoners. So, in the eyes of Europe, we couldda been the same as Jews” (18–19). 4. Inspired by its founder’s visit to Yad Vashem, the museum “makes an explicit connection between the profit-driven European violence against, and forced repatriation of, millions of Africans through the Middle Passage journey, and the targeted and systematic extermination of millions of Jews throughout Europe that constituted the Shoah” (Halloran 9).

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5. As Beaulieu observes, “The dynamics of the slave narrative genre rest largely in the interaction between polar opposites: black versus white, rich versus poor, empowered versus disempowered, enslaved versus free” (15). 6. It is not coincidental, then, that Jones’s novel itself includes a minor Jewish character, Esther Sokoloff. 7. Several of the novels signal their awareness of this history by giving their Jewish protagonists names that correspond to historical counterparts. See Romain (“Ethnicity, Identity” 127) on the family from whom Condé presumably took the name d’Azevedo and Hill (The Book of Negroes 473) on the source of Solomon Lindo’s surname. Dabydeen’s Jewish protagonist bears the name of a prominent eighteenth-century Anglo-Jewish banker who may have inspired Hogarth’s caricature. 8. The essays collected in Jews and Port Cities, 1590–1990 document such aspects of Jewish Atlantic life as the role that Sephardi merchants played in the development of the Curaçaoan language Papiamentu, the ambivalent racial constructions of Jews in nineteenth-century Charleston, and the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the development of Jewish communities in Liverpool and Bristol. In their preface to their coedited volume Atlantic Diasporas, which brings together the insights of Atlantic history and port Jews scholarship, Kagan and Sutcliffe identify fluidity, liminality, and cross-culturalism as the hallmarks of port Jews and as key to their success as cultural and economic brokers (viii). 9. In a 2010 address that was subsequently published in The Jews in the Caribbean, Faber noted that the borders of early American Jewish history are usually defined with respect to the U.S. mainland; yet, he argued, from the perspective of the Bevis Marks congregation in London, the American mainland would likely have been grouped together with the other New World congregations in the Caribbean and viewed as one whole. Accordingly, he called for a global history approach that would integrate different regions in the Atlantic Jewish world and stress interchange among them (“Borders”). When we reframe our understanding of Jewish history along these lines, the Caribbean emerges not as peripheral to the United States and Europe but as an important center of Jewish colonial life, one that was linked to Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Charleston, and New York by extensive familial, religious, and economic networks. Reversing conventional assumptions about center-periphery relationships, this perspective reveals the Caribbean origins of and contributions to early Jewish communities on the U.S. mainland that were supported with financial as well as other resources. 10. Recent discussions such as Schorsch’s (Jews and Blacks 7) and Rosengarten’s (“Introduction” 4) stress the extent to which Jewish behavior was not distinctive from that of non-Jewish slave owners but rather conformed to values of the time. 11. Walcott’s Jew and the slave are so strongly identified with one another that at one point they are presented as interchangeable: when the sailor García is stabbed by a slave, he thinks it is the Jew who has killed him, and yet the Jew insists that he “could not kill a man” (175). Instead, his message is one of peace, as when he urges Paco to put away a knife with which he threatens the slave broker (156). 12. As Thieme observes, the play “promotes federalism not only as a union of nations, but also as an ideal of inter-racial harmony” (66). This message is also reinforced in the play by the carnival, which bridges cultural divides:

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3. PORT JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION So, you men of every creed and class, We know you is brothers, when you playing Mass, White dance with black, black with Indian, but long time Was rebellion, No matter what your colour, now is steel and drums. We dancing together with open arms. (293)

13. Condé explains that the inspiration to include the character of Benjamin came from a Jewish colleague who brought to her attention the fact that the Puritans had also persecuted Jews (“Return to the West Indies” 62). Thus as Debrauwere-Miller observes (228), Condé contradicts Fanon’s dictum that, unlike a Black, a Jew can forget his Jewishness by presenting Benjamin as a fellow victim of racializing discourses. 14. On Caribbean Jews and slave concubinage see Mirvis, Ben-Ur (“A Matriarchal Matter” 154), and Romain (“Ethnicity, Identity” 135). 15. Robinson observes that slave romance “is not fully explored in fugitive slave narratives. In this regard, the inclusion of romance becomes yet another way in which the neoslave narrative completes the picture of the people who were enslaved. In doing so it affirms the existence of romance for the enslaved African Americans and hence its importance to the full expression of their humanity” (40). Yet Condé does not simply recover this dimension of slaves’ lives in order to assert their humanity and agency; she also introduces significant complexity into her portrayal of sexual politics under slavery. While Tituba’s relationships with men offer her scope for self-expression, they are at the same time deeply oppressive. Indeed, it is her passion for her first lover, John Indian, that directly results in her enslavement. This ambiguity is echoed in Tituba’s relationship with Benjamin: as her owner who initially refuses to free her, Benjamin’s love offers some respite from her dehumanization as a slave and yet at the same time furthers her oppression. 16. See Steyn (45) on demonic images of Jews and Gilman (The Jew’s Body, chapter 2) on the figure of the limping Jew. 17. See O’Regan (111). O’Regan also identifies intertextual allusions in Moi, Tituba to Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient, which “implicitly makes common cause with the Jewish people” through references to holocausts and the “arbres de Judée” (O’Regan 108–9, 109n35). This intertextual link in turn lays the groundwork for another layer of reference to the Schwarz-Barts’s La mulâtresse Solitude, a work of slavery fiction whose final lines draw an analogy between a ruined plantation and the Warsaw Ghetto. Thus O’Regan demonstrates that the meeting of Black and Jew in Moi, Tituba occurs on a metatextual level as well, intertextuality becoming another means through which Condé insists on the importance of the intercultural. 18. According to Gyssels’s more negative reading, this scene reveals that Benjamin remains the master in their unequal relationship (Sages Sorcières? 121). 19. Learning of her second pregnancy, Tituba remarks that “Christopher’s brutal embraces had conceived what the love of my Jew had not been able to do” (158).

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20. Even Benjamin’s purchase of Tituba after the death of his wife from a whooping cough epidemic is depicted as a positive marker of Jewish difference and of his devotion to the memory of his wife: “Since he did not intend to remarry, as all the other men in the colony did in such cases, he preferred to have a slave” (123). 21. See Sharpe and Wallace for critiques of the romance plot in slavery fiction. 22. On the one hand, as Sharpe observes, “there could be no consensual relations between white men and slave women when the women were not in a position to choose their partners or to refuse the sexual advances of their masters and overseers” (102). And yet, by the same token, concubinage could also be a means of exercising agency. McLeod writes in her book on the eighteenth-century free Black Surinamese woman Elisabeth Samson, for example, that “a relationship with a white man was one of the means adopted by black women to ensure that their children would be born free and enjoy a better life” (The Free Negress Elisabeth 5). 23. We might note, for example, that it is only when Benjamin’s children die in the fire, and thus when he no longer has need of a surrogate mother for his children, that he frees Tituba—and yet this is not a motivation that the novel explores. 24. At the height of her disenchantment with Solomon, Aminata refers to him as “the man who claimed that he was not white” (229). On the relationship of early modern Sephardim to whiteness, see Schorsch (Jews and Blacks chapters 7 and 8). On Jews and whiteness in nineteenth-century Charleston, see Romain (“Ethnicity, Identity”). Romain argues that, while in the public sphere there was little antisemitism, in the private sphere Jews in Charleston were “often singled out as racially different” (136). 25. By contrast, Romain’s research suggests that “whilst Jews were largely accepted in Charleston society, at times of crisis they were deemed inferior and traditional anti-semitic stereotypes emerged within the public arena” (“Ethnicity, Identity” 126). 26. Accordingly, both Hill and Dabydeen include scenes that revolve around the language used in advertisements for slaves. Just as Hill’s Aminata contests the terminology Solomon has employed in advertising her services as a midwife, Dabydeen’s slave protagonist Mungo questions why a notice advertising his sale renames him “Noah” and describes as “tribal scarring” the brand that Captain Thistlewood likely has put on his forehead (164). 27. Johnson’s Dictionary, which appeared too late for me to give it full consideration here, revisits and expands on many of the themes of A Harlot’s Progress including the Jew as a shadowy figure of uncertain loyalties. While A Harlot’s Progress situates the Jew in London, Johnson’s Dictionary more directly engages the Jewish Atlantic context by featuring an enigmatic Russian Jewish protagonist, Theodore, who works as an accountant on a Caribbean plantation. Johnson’s Dictionary attests to the continuing importance of Jewishness in Dabydeen’s slavery fiction but is less explicitly concerned with the genre of the slave narrative that is the focus of the present chapter. 28. See page 142: “Betty loved the Jew. She was jealous of the Jew’s relationship with Mary. She accused Mary of theft and had Captain Thistlewood condemn her to hanging. Or else it was the Jew who tired of Mary and discarded her . . . Or else there

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was no Mary, except a baby which Betty bore for the Jew, and out of shame strangled it . . . ” In the novel Mungo is a similarly unstable figure in representational terms: after first being renamed “Noah of Barambongdodo” by Betty, he is subsequently christened “Perseus” by Lady Montague and “remodelled into a fantastic land creature, part Indian (his turban), part English coxcomb (his suit), part Chinese (his slippers)” (207). Thus if Pringle’s oppressive presence distorts the slave narrative and results in various omissions, one of these, as Wallace notes, is that “it cannot speak of the Jew’s essential humanity” (239). Mungo cedes control of his slave narrative to Pringle, who makes Mungo feel like “a strumpet whose performance is undeserving of his coin” (178). Remarking upon the kinds of details that he cannot tell Pringle, Mungo concludes: “Life and print: two different things” (226). See Eckstein (129) on the historical Thomas Pringle’s distortive influence on Mary Prince’s narrative. See Gilman (The Jew’s Body 96, 119) on the association of Jews with sexual diseases and criminality. Thus as Eckstein notes, Sampson is “probably the most obvious” example of Dabydeen’s ekphrastic technique in which “the visual models are not appropriated in a one-to-one relationship, serving instead as starting-points for free imaginative transformation” (139). Dabydeen’s novelistic engagement with the figure of the Jew is anticipated by his academic studies of Hogarth. In Hogarth, Walpole and Commercial Britain, Dabydeen argues for a political reading of A Harlot’s Progress rather than the more standard reading of it as a moral tale. In developing this interpretation, Dabydeen devotes considerable attention to the figure of the Jewish merchant and takes care to situate this figure in relation to both textual and visual traditions of representing the Jew in English society as well as to the contemporary politics of Hogarth’s day, including debates surrounding the naturalization of Jews. In Hogarth’s print, the Jew symbolizes a decadent, colonial-derived wealth that corrupts those around him. Thus Molineux argues that, rather than suggesting “the idea that mastery over black slaves communicated English virtue and benevolence,” Hogarth’s “representations of slaves instead comment on the moral corruption of Londoners who seek to elevate their status” (514). There is ambiguity in the novel text regarding whether this Jewish doctor and Sampson are one and the same (see Eckstein 126). Dabydeen’s interrogation of the slave narrative genre and its conventions problematizes ethical frameworks by foregrounding Pringle’s interfering editorial presence and by defying his desire to order Mungo’s narrative into a clear, meaningful sequence. In this regard, the Jew as a figure whose motives and loyalties are shadowy and indeterminate once again becomes useful to Dabydeen in thematizing this ethical ambiguity and in destabilizing the notion of ethics itself. Thus both the representational and moral indeterminacy of Sampson’s character contribute to Dabydeen’s subversion of the discursive and ethical frameworks that shape textual and pictorial representations of the slave. On the novel’s emphasis on incompleteness, see Wallace (238–39).

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4. PLANTATION JEWS IN SLAVERY FICTION 1. Ryan argues that slavery fiction tends to echo trends in the historiography of slavery so that “contemporary fiction is not in opposition to historiography; it is often its popular transmitter” (Calls and Responses 210). In the case of Caribbean literature and its engagement with Jewish colonial history, however, the fiction has tended to anticipate the historiography. As one historian notes, Jewish historiography was reluctant to address the question of slavery until the Nation of Islam charges in the early 1990s required a response (Cesarani, “Introduction” 8). 2. Another variation on this script may be found at the end of Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010), in which the slave protagonist’s son is able to establish his printing business in Jamaica only as the result of the patronage of a Jewish client. 3. McLeod explains in an interview that three of her four grandparents had Jewish fathers and mixed-race mothers (“Personal interview”). 4. For a reconstruction of the lives of a Surinamese Jew and his slave, see Davis (“David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’”). 5. Ben-Ur identifies the uniqueness of Jodensavanne: “By the mid-eighteenth century, Jodensavanne was surrounded by dozens of satellite Jewish plantations sprawling north- and southward and dominating the stretch of the river. . . . at the time, they collectively formed the largest Jewish agricultural community in the world and the only Jewish settlement in the Americas granted virtual self-rule. The setting—a selfdetermining Jewish village—represents one of the few situations in diaspora history in which the highest form of social climbing meant becoming a Jew, rather than a Christian or a Muslim” (“A Matriarchal Matter” 153). 6. Ben-Ur writes that “the former Dutch colony provides an unparalleled case study for a diachronic investigation of black-Jewish interactions in the early modern world. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Suriname was home to the largest Jewish community in the Americas, peaking at just over a thousand souls. . . . Suriname was a plantation society, the vast majority of whose members were of African descent; thus, creolization meant the fusion of European Jewish and black cultures and peoples” (168–69). 7. Schorsch cautions against Jewish scholars [who] are fond of pointing to the colored Jews of Surinam as evidence of the attraction of slaves to Judaism and its encouragement by Jewish masters, as well as the implied beneficence of Jews as slave owners. The colored Jews serve to corroborate the feelings of the researchers as to the kindly nature of Jewish slave owners. Reiterating the favored position of these lighter-skinned slaves, more eager to assimilate to the master culture, Jewish scholarship has paid far more attention to them as well. . . . Yet even these usually lighter-skinned Africans and their descendants, some with Jewish names, when freed, often failed to remain affiliated with the community. (Jews and Blacks 218–19)

8. Surinamese Jews developed their own version of the “Suriname-style marriage” in which marriage by a full member of the community to a Mulatta woman resulted in his demotion to the class of congregante (Ben-Ur, “A Matriarchal Matter” 154–55). On Suriname-style marriage, see Price and Price (xxxii–xxxiii).

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9. McLeod recounts: “I was fourteen years old when I read Gone with the Wind. Oh, I loved the book . . . so much. And I was all the time thinking: if only we [Surinamers] could have a novel like that. . . . I never knew that I was going to write it myself ” (“Personal interview”). McLeod adds that she wrote The Cost of Sugar while living in Washington DC, not very far from where Mitchell’s novel is set (“Personal interview”). See also Ryan’s observation that “even black-authored novels focusing upon the African American experience in slavery hew closely to the path set by Mitchell’s fiction” (Calls and Responses 186). 10. Ryan argues that by concentrating on those figures who were neither the primary wielders of power on the plantation nor its most oppressed victims, these novels “soften the system of slavery” (Calls and Responses 59). 11. Hébron is located halfway between Paramaribo and Jodensavanne, symbolizing Elza’s half-Jewish/half-Christian identity. 12. McLeod’s characterization is consistent here with the Essai historique, whose eighteenth-century Sephardic Surinamese authors also present themselves as unequivocally white. See Schorsch, Jews and Blacks (285). 13. Notably, however, Maisa’s perspective is foregrounded only at the moment in which she is enlisted to help Elza defend herself against Sarith’s machinations, the effect of which is to keep the focus primarily on Elza’s struggle. 14. For example, Hendrik’s betrayal of Mini-mini echoes Rutger’s disloyalty to his wife Elza. 15. Richard and Sally Price note that during the colonial campaigns against the Maroons “some eight hundred thirty additional men were sent from Holland in 1775 to supplement the original contingent of eight hundred, yet only a couple of hundred lived to return to Europe” (Stedman’s Surinam xxiv). 16. Phaf-Rheinberger notes that McLeod’s view that, “after the English, the Jews are the historical founders of Surinamese plantation society” is one that “breaks with a generally accepted taboo” (“Creole tori” 410). 17. Elza’s exclusion from the Jewish community recalls the Mahamad’s discriminatory treatment of other mixed populations during this period, in particular the Mulatto Jews whose petition for greater rights it fiercely opposed. 18. See Smith (“Diasporic Slavery Memorials” 85). According to Smith, as “a written memorial to slavery,” Hoe duur was de suiker fostered a mourning process that has taken on a greater urgency in the context of the mass migration of former colonial subjects from Suriname and elsewhere to Holland over the past thirty years (84, 91). 19. McLeod also revises colonialist historiography through descriptions of the colonial architecture. For example, she consistently notes the slaves’ dwellings rather than excising them from the landscape as the arrogant European painter does in Andrea Levy’s neoslave narrative The Long Song. The Surinamese landscape is also marked by traces of the slaves’ presence that speak to this unacknowledged history. When Alsana dies after her beating, she is buried in a “nameless grave in an opening in the rainforest next to the other graves of hundreds of nameless slaves” (133), recalling Glissant’s discussion of a cluster of trees that serves as the only marker of the site of a slave graveyard near a Louisiana plantation (Faulkner, Mississippi 12). In the landscape of the plantation, nature remembers what history forgets.

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20. McLeod’s interest in complicating assumptions regarding the nature of enslavement and resistance is also evident in her more recent work on Elizabeth Samson, an eighteenth-century free Black Surinamese woman whose story challenges the understanding of slavery as disempowerment. 21. Halloran argues that Caribbean writing generates a “‘museum effect’ by exhibiting slavery through the use of quotations or vignettes” that function like “museum dioramas or exhibitions” (17). 22. See Ben-Ur’s collaboration with architect Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries and Synagogues of Suriname. 23. In her interview with Victor, McLeod repeatedly mentions inherited Jewish objects that were present in her own childhood home (“Personal interview”). 24. Written at a low point in relations between Jews and Gentiles in Suriname, the Essai historique sought to challenge Surinamese prejudices against Jews, including the common charges that Jews were “responsible for the running away of slaves,” were “bad farmers,” and “were exceptionally cruel masters for their slaves” (van Lier quoted in Phaf-Rheinberger, “The Portuguese Jewish Nation” 493). 25. As Phaf-Rheinberger observes, Nassy sought to situate his “arguments within the norms of public opinion in Europe . . . in [his] day, according to which not slavery itself but the excesses of the system were considered questionable” (“The Portuguese Jewish Nation” 496). She concludes that the Essai historique constitutes an early example of an “effor[t] to negotiate confirmation from a minority position” (501). See also Schorsch’s discussion of the Essai historique, which he deems “one of the most remarkable and unique early modern literary productions by Jews” (Jews and Blacks 282). 26. According to the Washington Post, The Whipping Man is “one of the most-produced new plays on U.S. stages right now” (Pressley, “‘The Whipping Man’”). 27. This common notion also features in Hill’s The Book of Negroes. 28. See Grammer (63) for a discussion of this convention. 29. Cheuse here offers a variation on novels such as Absalom, Absalom! that “make literal the metaphoric claim made by many plantation novels, that on the plantation blacks and whites belonged to one big, extended family” (Grammer 73). 30. In this respect, McLeod’s novel contrasts with Cliff ’s more romantic portrayal in Free Enterprise of Surinamese Jews and Maroons as allies. 31. This portrayal corresponds to recent historical studies such as that of Ben-Ur, who emphasizes that, given the scarcity of white Jewish women in the colony, the emergence of a colored Jewish population was “nigh inevitable” (“A Matriarchal Matter” 154). 32. Handley observes that “the original sin of colonialism is not miscegenation but the disavowal of the mulatto offspring’s claims to the national patrimony” (Postslavery Literatures 80). 33. See Smith (“Diasporic Slavery Memorials”) as well as Phaf-Rheinberger (“Creole tori”) for further discussion of how McLeod’s novel engages questions of Surinamese nationhood. 34. See also Davis’s discussion of David Nassy and his slave Mattheus’s exposure to abolitionist ideas during their sojourn in Philadelphia in the 1790s. Davis suggests that Nassy’s Philadelphia experience did not alter his belief in the legitimacy of slavery: “No friend of abolition, Nassy went no further in his views than the most enlightened of

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the Suriname planters and preachers: slavery was an acceptable institution but must be conducted with humanity and beneficence” (“David Nassy’s ‘Furlough’” 87). 35. In keeping with the slave narrative genre’s emphasis on the acquisition of literacy, the film adaptation also periodically inserts scenes of Mini-mini putting pen to paper accompanied by her first-person voice-over.

PART 2: HOLOCAUSTS 1. In Postcolonial Witnessing Craps is critical of Eurocentric discussions of the globalization of Holocaust memory that assume the centrality of the Holocaust as “unique, unprecedented, and singular, which implies that colonial and indigenous genocides are lesser, incomplete, marginal, or even primitive” (80). 2. Heeding Gilroy’s call to bring the histories of fascism and racism into a common frame, a handful of critics, notably Rothberg, Silverman, Cheyette, and Craps, have worked to uncover the “multidirectional” (Rothberg) and “palimpsestic” (Silverman) operations of memory as well as buried intellectual, cultural, and social histories of contact and exchange. In addition, an April 2012 conference in Sydney, Australia entitled “The Holocaust and Legacies of Race in the Postcolonial World, 1945 to the Present” explored “how societies, cultures and political systems defined by legacies and on-going issues of ‘race,’ racism and anti-racism responded to the Holocaust after the Second World War.” 3. Mandel’s Against the Unspeakable, for example, focuses on the slavery fiction of writers such as William Styron and Toni Morrison who have been charged with appropriation and blackface.

5. CALYP SO JEWS 1. The history of Jewish refugee immigration into the British Caribbean has been the subject of two unpublished doctoral dissertations (Newman; Siegel). Newman estimates that from 1933–45 the British West Indies served as a refuge for several thousand Jews (“Nearly the New World” 262). The refugee presence also extended beyond the British Caribbean. The Dominican Republic was the only nation at the Evian conference to make a concrete proposal to take in refugees, creating the agricultural colony of Sosúa, which had five hundred Jewish settlers at its peak (Kaplan 3). According to another scholar, Cuba took “in more Jewish refugees than any other country relative to its size” (Behar 270). For further discussion, see Gigliotti on the Dominican Republic, Lansen on the Dutch West Indies, and Martin on the Trinidadian case. See also Jennings’s Vichy in the Tropics, which uncovers archival evidence that in late 1940 a scheme was proposed to relocate French Jews to the Antilles. The plan was derailed by the Vichy colonial administration, however, which insisted that the Antilles could only accommodate a maximum of four hundred refugees (96). 2. See Rohlehr (chapter 6) for his important commentary on the censored calypsos, some of whose lyrics he also reproduces. For further discussion of the calypsos to

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which Rohlehr originally drew attention, see Newman (“Nearly the New World” chapter 5) and Siegel (37–42). Newman argues that such responses must be placed in the context of the era of political and social unrest in which the refugees arrived: “Much opposition to Jewish immigration stemmed from economic conditions on West Indian islands, but it also represented different reasons. At a time of emerging political consciousnesses, new forms of West Indian identity were being formed. The immigration of another group of European settlers also represented to many West Indians competition in the middle ranks of society” (“Nearly the New World” 258). Lévi-Strauss was one of only three passengers to escape internment, while the others were sent to Le Lazaret concentration camp where they remained until the argument of the local tradesmen that their internment “was depriving the town of a source of financial profit” (32) eventually prevailed. Mann later learned that the Maltese for whose protection the camp had originally been built had refused to be evacuated there because they deemed the living conditions too poor. Esther Davis’s contribution to Our Calypso Shtetl also points to how the refugee Jews’ emigration to Trinidad at times resulted in a confusion of racial categories. Davis relates an incident involving a Black nurse that occurred after she left Trinidad to resettle in New York: “The black Jamaican nurse next to me begins talking. ‘Girl, where you from?’ I tell her that I am from the Caribbean, Trinidad, to be exact. She looks at me for a long moment and then says with a laugh in her voice, ‘But girl, you could almost pass for white.’” Accordingly, Kaplan writes with reference to Jewish refugee settlers in the Dominican Republic that “Sosúa highlights the strange and contradictory legacy of twentieth-century racism in which Jews were driven out of Europe for being ‘other,’ admitted into North and Latin America hesitantly and erratically for being ‘other,’ and then invited into the Dominican Republic again for being ‘other,’ only this time positively constructed as ‘white’” (5). The access of Jews in the Caribbean to the privileges of whiteness was not uniform, however, but instead varied according to their diverse backgrounds. In Trinidad, Eastern European Jews who worked as peddlers and dry goods traders tended to be viewed not as part of the upper echelons of society but rather as competition for Chinese, Syrian, and other immigrant groups. Siegel explains that “Jews fell into a ‘Trinidad white’ category. Like Syrians, Lebanese, and even Portuguese, they were considered ‘mixed’ or ‘part white.’ This was a strength not a weakness. They were light enough to avoid the discrimination levelled against Blacks. But neither were they entirely white, a fact that shielded them later on, in the post-independence period and at the time of the Black Power Crisis, from violent outbursts directed at the British white elite” (340). In a New York Times review, Harrison complained that “mostly Mr. Potter is a man erased by his own biography. Somewhere in the process of becoming Mr. Potter, he disappeared” (par. 7). The Guardian reviewer was still more critical, identifying Mr. Potter as an example of how “writing becomes revenge; telling someone else’s story can be a means of silencing them. . . . Rather than dignifying the lives of the ‘no account’ people that it describes, this novel seems to bask in the author’s godlike power: not so much to give life, as to withhold it” (par. 7). For a contrasting perspective, see Rhodes-Pitts’s defense

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of Kincaid’s resistance to a dominant literary model that seeks to “rescue individuals . . . rendered inarticulate by the animate, all-powerful entity called History” (11). RhodesPitts suggests that the reviewers’ discomfort stems from the fact that in Mr. Potter “Kincaid doesn’t undertake an excavation on these over-earnest political terms” (11). Weizenger appears to be based on the Czech refugee doctor Kincaid mentions in A Small Place (28, 34). Matos characterizes the novel as “lyrical, digressive, almost agonizingly repetitive” and observes that “Mr. Potter pushes Kincaid’s characteristically demanding and provocative rhetorical techniques to their limits” (82). Thus when we are told that the uprooted Shoul and Weizenger are forced to make themselves anew, we understand that on some level, this is Potter’s challenge as well: “Hear the arrival of Mr. Shoul and Dr. Zoltan Weizenger in the world of Mr. Potter and their presence in the world Mr. Potter occupied came about because all they had ever known was completely shattered and then vanished and so they had to begin again, re-create their own selves, make something new, but they couldn’t do that at all” (194). Similarly, a scene in which Potter’s wife visits the island’s botanical garden indirectly and tangentially suggests the condition of displacement that is exhibited both by the island’s slave-descended inhabitants and by its more recent arrivals. The rubber tree in the botanical garden, about which Kincaid also writes in her gardening essays, is a symbol of plant migration that echoes human displacement and uprooting: “and she would wheel her children around the botanical garden, stopping to rest . . . at the rubber tree, a specimen of vegetable matter so far away from the place in which it had originated, as were the perambulator and the curtains and the panes of glass that made up her windows, and Mr. Shoul and Dr. Weizenger” (156). Notably, then, Shoul and Weizenger are included here among the elements that make up the novel’s landscape of displacement. In a 1989 interview Kincaid cites Woolf as an influence and remarks that she doesn’t “like realistic fiction” (“Jamaica Kincaid” 402–3). Unlike Woolf, however, Kincaid does not present these moments as being revelatory or epiphanic for the characters themselves, who do not display the self-awareness of Woolf ’s protagonists. Nor, moreover, does Kincaid offer the degree of access to her characters’ thought processes that Woolf ’s stream-of-consciousness technique affords. See Craps’s discussion of Berthold Brecht’s and Dominick LaCapra’s critiques of “crude” forms of identification and empathy in which the other is assimilated to the self (“Linking Legacies” 191–92). See also the related distinction Rothberg draws between metaphoric or substitutive forms of identification and a more complex understanding of identification as metonymic and ambivalent (156).

6. BETWEEN CAMP S 1. The impact of World War II on daily life in the Caribbean also was profound, so much so that the protagonists of Gisèle Pineau’s novel La grande drive des esprits (The Drifting of Spirits, 1999) feel that “the war was very much here, just off the coast of

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Guadeloupe” (130). On this dimension of Pineau’s novel, see Casteel, Second Arrivals (151–52). On the British West Indian experience of World War II, see Rush, Bonds of Empire (chapter 6). Oppel describes Maillet’s novel in similar terms, suggesting that she “creatively composes a new genre: the French-Caribbean Black Holocaust novel” (91). Burnett, for example, characterizes Walcott’s analogy in The Schooner Flight between the genocide of Jews, Afro- and indigenous Caribbeans as “unconventional but distinctively Walcott’s” (69). Philip comments: “I find it interesting that my introduction to racial persecution came through the events of Jewish history—in particular reading Leon Uris’ Exodus and I was so outraged. Interesting, given that I am a descendant of formerly enslaved Africans and lived in a post-colonial, post-slavery society. Very little was taught about our history when I went to school” (Personal correspondence, October 4, 2014). Philip’s essay was included in Showing Grit and later reprinted in the magazine Border/Lines 29/30 (1993): 64–71. See also Trinidadian Canadian writer Dionne Brand’s remark that she grew up “on films about the Second World War, Germany, Nazism, the Holocaust” so that for her, “Germany is forever attached to these images” (81). See Burnett (69–70). Burnett explains that, because of this biographical background, Walcott (much like Césaire and Fanon) uses Nazism in his poetry “to access related European oppression, and its universally deplored racism is held up as an image of the deeply entrenched racism still widely sanctioned in white culture” (Burnett 189–90). Holocaust imagery also appears in the work of another poet of Walcott’s generation, Kamau Brathwaite. See Brathwaite’s reference to “Jews in Europe’s gasses” in The Arrivants (54). My thanks to Faizal Deen for bringing this passage to my attention. There is also some evidence that this pattern of identification could be transferred from one generation to another. The British journalist Gary Younge, born in 1969 to Barbadian parents, “was ten years old when his mother told him and his brothers stay [sic] up to watch the television series The Holocaust. His mother explained to him that this was part of his history” (Romain, Connecting Histories 227). Romain reports that watching the series had a “huge impact” on Younge (227). See Britton, who argues that, in the postwar period, francophone Caribbean writers such as Schwarz-Bart and Pineau develop the theme of exile as incarceration by associating their experience in France with that of the Holocaust and the concentration camps. For further examples of francophone Caribbean writers and critics who draw analogies between Black and Jewish experience, see Cooreman’s discussion of Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s L’autre face de la mer and other texts (223–225). “Tandis que commençait mon initiation à l’alphabet yiddish et à la grammaire hébraïque, j’entendais l’écho de ma propre histoire, celle du peuple noir frappé par un même malheur: déportation—diaspora—ghetto.” (The translation is mine.) On screen memory and its relevance to the relationship between Holocaust memory and postcoloniality, see also Silverman (Palimpsestic Memory 15–16) and Craps (Postcolonial Witnessing 79).

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12. The formative impact of the Holocaust on Caribbean schoolchildren and the hold that it exerted on their imaginations would appear to be waning. This generational shift is reflected in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate’s decision in the mid-2000s to remove Anne Frank’s Diary from its list of examinable texts because of lack of student interest in the material. I thank Aliesha Hosein for sharing this information with me. 13. Notably, Cliff ’s Abeng, which I discuss in chapter 7, is also set in 1958. 14. As Sanders comments, “Teeth do not rejuvenate, re-grow. Dentists do not heal people; they remove the afflicted part” (137). 15. See the essay on Nassy that is included on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId =10005677). 16. Simultaneously, a second cross-cultural comparison is introduced in the story’s closing lines by the trumpeter’s use of the word midden to describe the pile of valuables that is being deposited by the deportees on the soldier’s table, but also recalls for her the Indian mounds that populated her childhood American landscape. This reference to Aboriginal motifs is in keeping with other Caribbean authors such as Maryse Condé and Derek Walcott who similarly triangulate Black, Jewish, and Native North American experiences of trauma and genocide. 17. While Cliff indicates in the note that precedes her story that Snow was a concentration camp survivor, Lusane suggests that the details of Snow’s possible internment by the Nazis are somewhat murky (152–58). 18. Hijuelos has been criticized for collapsing together the Holocaust and Cuba under Machado so that “the imaginary Jew is again a disguise for the multicultural experience of the victim” (Gilman, Multiculturalism 176). On Hijuelos’s critical reception, see Kevane (chapter 4n16). 19. On this history, see Lusane’s Hitler’s Black Victims. 20. Edugyan also calls attention to historiographical concerns through repeated references to Herodotus, a favorite author of Hiero’s. On the absence of discussion of Black victims from the historiography of the Holocaust, see Lusane (4–5). 21. Accordingly, in her preface to L’étoile noire, Veil notes that the diary motif signals a desire common to both Black and Jewish cultures to preserve memories of atrocities that are in danger of being lost to history. See also Larrier, who points out that the diary is privileged in such texts in a manner that recalls both the genres of slave narratives and the Holocaust diary (82). On connections between Maillet’s novel and the neoslave narrative, see Oppel. Larrier and Oppel both tend to focus on the novel’s relationship to Black literary genres rather than to Holocaust narrative. 22. “Les livres d’école ne parlaient pas de l’esclavage. Pourquoi? Mon père en parlait très peu, et ma mère détournait chaque fois la conversation. Il n’y avait que mes grands-parents maternels pour me raconter en créole cette époque de l’histoire des Antilles.” All translations from Maillet’s novel are mine. 23. “Trois siècles après mes ancêtres, me voilà donc bien revenue au point de départ: l’esclavage.” 24. “Le tatouage, c’est pour aujourd’hui. Retour à l’esclavage. Plus de nom, plus de prénom, plus de surnom: un chiffre. Un nouveau baptême. Un baptême déja connu aux Antilles.”

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25. “Un autre chant, une autre plainte, un écho de ma conscience, une houle douloureuse et sonore qui s’enfle et fait battre mon sang et mon pouls comme un sanglot. Est-ce celle qu’entendaient ceux qu’on appelait ‘le bois d’ébène’ dans les fond de cale des vieux voiliers qui les transportaient vers les Amériques?” 26. “Pour la première fois de ma vie, je sens renaître en moi la mémoire de l’Afrique, mes ancêtres, non pas les Gaulois, non pas les Antillais, mais, plus loin encore, les Africains. . . . Pour la première fois je pense à l’Afrique, je rêve à l’Afrique, l’Afrique déferle en moi.” 27. “L’expérience de la souffrance rapproche bien plus qu’elle n’éloigne ceux qui en sont les victimes.” 28. “Sidonie nous ressemble et nous lui ressemblons.” 29. “Pour mes compagnons de misère, je ne suis pas des leurs. Une intruse, une anomalie, une erreur. La solidarité de la misère, du chagrin, de la détresse? Même ici, dance ce manège où nous sommes tous traités, non pas comme des hommes et des femmes ennemis, suspects, juifs, noirs ou je ne sais quoi, mais comme des animaux, les cloisons, les distinctions, les méfiances se dressent encore, se dressent plus que jamais. Je suis une Antillaise, une Martiniquaise, une femme des colonies, une Négresse, une fille d’esclaves.” 30. “Je sens que je fais partie de la même catégorie humaine que tous ceux qui sont ici. J’appartiens désormais à un groupe indistinct dans lequel Hitler a classé les Juifs, les Slaves, les Tziganes et les Noirs.” 31. “Nous sommes toutes différentes et pourtant semblables. Nous ne sommes plus personne. Plus rien. Pas même des animaux.” 32. “Avec ce maigre jour gris, nous sommes toutes de la même couleur, personne ne s’apercevrait que je suis noire.” 33. Mistaken identity is a recurring motif in Black and Caribbean Holocaust narratives. In Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody for example, Israel Levis is mistaken for a Jew because of his Jewish-sounding name. In Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, the Afro-German Hiero paradoxically appears to be the most foreign member of the jazz band because of his dark skin, while, with their blond and light-skinned features, the German Jewish Paul and African American Sid pass as Aryans. 34. “Combien sont-ils? Combien sommes-nous, maintenant que je fais partie de ce troupeau?” 35. “Jamais je n’ai été obsédé par la couleur de ma peau, mais depuis cette nuit je ne pense plus qu’à cela.” 36. Aucune des autres femmes noires ne se sent acceptée.” 37. Levi writes that in the camp “the enemy was all around but also inside, the ‘we’ lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but rather many confused, perhaps inumerable frontiers, which stretched between each of us. One entered hoping at least for the solidarity of one’s companions in misfortune, but the hoped for allies, except in special cases, were not there” (38). 38. In Half-Blood Blues we see a similar shift when, after the band’s flight from Germany and removal to Paris, it is reduced to half its original size. Paul has been arrested and deported to Sachsenhausen. Ernst makes a deal with his father to stay in Germany in exchange for securing exit papers for the other band members. Fritz betrays the

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band by accepting an invitation to join the Nazi-sanctioned jazz troupe the Golden Seven. As a result, the formerly multiethnic group is pared down to its African diaspora members. Yet Half-Blood Blues does not convey the same sense of a progression away from such cross-cultural affiliations toward an emancipated Black identity that we see in Maillet’s L’étoile noire. Instead, a relational and multidirectional logic governs Edugyan’s novel throughout, with Black and Jewish victimhood consistently juxtaposed. Negritude and its impulse to make links across the African diaspora also features in Cliff ’s “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet Is Deported.” When Cliff ’s trumpeter meets the Senegalese steward, she proclaims: “Who is to say he is not her people” (126). Once arrived in Paris, the African American trumpeter comes into contact with the Negritude movement in the form of a Martinican selling a Black student newspaper. “Une résistance noire et sauvage vit en moi: la mère Afrique.” Larrier argues that the formation of cross-cultural relationships is central to the novel. Yet it is striking for a Holocaust novel that none of Sidonie’s friendships is with a Jewish inmate and, in general, that her interactions with Jews are extremely limited. Instead, the major cross-cultural relationship that develops is between Sidonie and Suzanne, a sympathetic non-Jewish political prisoner who comes to Sidonie’s aid during the deportation and remains her ally and protector throughout her ordeal. Sympathetic interactions with Jewish characters such as the doctor on the train and the young girl Rachel whom Sidonie tends are, by contrast, very fleeting and are confined to the early chapters of the novel. Indeed, unlike Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, the novel does not contain any significant Jewish characters. At the end of the novel, in a deeply Césairean moment that channels Discourse on Colonialism, the blockowa tells the Black inmates that the Nazis are simply continuing the civilizing mission begun by the European colonial powers of France, England, Spain, Portugal, and Holland: “Ils avaient compris qu’il y a des races qui sont faites pour commander les autres. Ce sont eux les auteurs du term ‘soushomme’. Mais nous, nous avons la solution finale” (They understood that there are races who are made to command others. It was they who invented the term “subhuman.” But we, we have the final solution) (193). Rosello charges that Sidonie’s “discourse of differences” ultimately “betrays the Dubreuils and it refuses to address the fate of Jewish people as long as they can be described as others” (201). See Oppel for further discussion of the novel’s relationship to debates in the 1980s and 1990s surrounding French colonialism and French society under German occupation. Britton remarks that “the fact that she explicitly intends to model her autobiography (that is, the text that we are now reading) on Anne Frank’s diary . . . is evidence that representations of the Holocaust provide a kind of template for representations of the early period of Caribbean exile [in France]” (155).

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7. WRITING UNDER THE SIGN OF ANNE FRANK 1. The Papiamentu edition of Frank’s Diary is entitled E Kas Patras: Diario den forma di karta. The pamphlet was produced for a 1996 exhibition about Frank, Panelnan Antiano: Un historia di guera i di awe (Antillean Panels: A Story of the War and Today). 2. In their discussion of the “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust memory, Levy and Sznaider observe that the global circulation of Frank’s diary has not “led to its homogenization” but rather to its “reconfigur[ation] within the framework of local (national) contexts” (62). 3. The Nature of Blood has been cited by numerous critics as exemplifying a multidirectional rather than competitive mode of memorializing the past. Such critics have sensitively and exhaustively analyzed the formal techniques that enable Phillips to draw Black and Jewish histories into relation without sacrificing the specificity of these experiences. They have argued persuasively that these techniques mitigate the accusation of appropriation leveled against Phillips by Mantel in her 1997 review “Black Is Not Jewish.” 4. See for example Zierler. See also Sundquist’s description of Phillips’s Holocaust writing as “unparalleled in recent literature and commentary” (145n). 5. Rothberg writes of Schwarz-Bart and Phillips that he “can think of no other two authors whose projects turn so definitively on interrogating the links between European Jewish and African, African diaspora, and Caribbean history” (153) and suggests that “Phillips alludes to Schwarz-Bart’s oeuvre in order to decompose it” (137). Other critics have identified Phillips as responding directly to Fanon (Fokkema) and Gilroy (Whitehead). 6. The Nature of Blood’s intertextual relationship with Frank’s Diary is noted by Ledent and others, but it has not been explored in a sustained fashion or linked to the formal concerns of the novel. In particular, although Dawson addresses the testimonial form of Eva’s narration (89–93), and Birat notes Phillips’s use of interior monologue (203–5), the novel has not been discussed in relation to the Holocaust diary genre. 7. Another example is Algerian novelist Waciny Laredj’s Balconies of the Sea (2002). See Zayzafoon, who discusses Laredj’s novel and the solace that Frank’s diary offers to its protagonist (73). 8. Sundquist allots a footnote to Cliff ’s invocation of Frank, but deems it only “mildly interesting” (303n). Rody, by contrast, notes the significance of Cliff ’s cross-cultural approach, but presents it as “uncommon in current black and postcolonial discourse” (The Daughter’s Return 174). For a rare extended treatment, see Van Nyhuis. 9. Visiting the Anne Frank House again some years later, Phillips’s response is equally strong but now he is better able to surrender to it: “This time, as I walked around the house, the emotional train ran me down, and I felt deeply moved and able to submit to the anger and helplessness that coursed through my body as I thought about the lost life of Anne Frank and millions like her” (“On ‘The Nature’” 7). 10. Frank’s entry for Wednesday, March 29, 1944, reads: “Bokestein, an M.P., was speaking on the Dutch News from London, and he said that they ought to make a collection of diaries and letters after the war. Of course, they all made a rush at my diary immediately. Just imagine if I were to publish a romance of the ‘Secret Annexe’” (172).

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11. In the fountain pen entry, Frank describes how she accidentally burned her pen, eerily forecasting the extinguishing of her literary voice. 12. As Clingman suggests in the interview, it is striking that the Jewish protagonist of The Nature of Blood shares her last name with the (presumably Jewish) émigré history teacher whom Phillips singles out as a key influence. 13. See Rothberg’s nuanced analysis of the intricacies of this “viewing scene” (154–55). 14. Cliff had earlier recounted this same episode in her interview with Raiskin, her repeated reference to it suggesting the depth of its impact on her (“The Art” 61). 15. Thus, as Rothberg notes, “through a process of identification, the history of the Holocaust helps to form Phillips as an adult subject and as a writer” (154). 16. Van Nyhuis is right, then, to argue that, alongside other intertexts such as Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, “Anne should figure more prominently in discussions of Clare’s psychological and physical developments” (177). Comparing a passage about puberty from the Diary with one from the novel, for example, Van Nyhuis observes that “at times the narration of Clare’s actions and thoughts even seem to come from Anne’s diary entries” (177). 17. The adolescent’s visual identification with the iconic photographs of Frank frequently features in literary invocations of the Diary. In her memoir Black, White, and Jewish, for example, Walker recalls how she would “stare at the picture of the young girl on the cover for a long time. . . . There is something about her eyes that pulls me, that makes me want to know her” (88). As Waxman comments, “The prevalence of [Frank’s widely circulated photographic image] and the ‘personal’ connotations of diary writing make many people feel that they actually knew Frank: she is an accessible Holocaust witness” (130). 18. Cliff has objected to the tendency to read her novels as memoir (“Sites of Memory” 57), and it is not my intention to blur the border between these genres of writing. However, it is clear from Cliff ’s interview with Raiskin that her treatment of the Frank material in Abeng was inspired by her own youthful encounter with the Diary. 19. Smith observes that “reading the diary and establishing intimacy with Anne, Clare is transported elsewhere, to another time and space, and in that elsewhere she is imaginatively released to articulate questions about oppression, suffering, victimization, ethics, heroism, and God’s beneficence” (“Memory, Narrative” 49). 20. See Naipaul’s 1964 essay “Jasmine.” 21. Cliff employs a comparable relational strategy at the conclusion of her essay “Sites of Memory,” in which the idyllic landscape of the Rhine merges with that of the American South, connecting the haunted landscapes of the Holocaust and slavery. 22. See Edmondson’s discussion of the contradictory figure of the white Creole woman, who is “simultaneously both and neither,” challenging the binaries not only of Black/ White but also colonial/postcolonial and male/female (“Race, Privilege” 182). 23. Relevant here are Zivin’s comments on the “anxiety surrounding ‘Jewishness’ within modernity: its lack of fixedness. Hence the desperate need to assert the stability of the category ‘Jew’: if the ‘Jew’ will always be a ‘Jew,’ then I will always be myself as well” (122). 24. See Gilman (The Jew’s Body, chapter 7) and Itzkovitz (“Passing Like Me” 39–42). See also Harrison-Kahan, who has shown how recent passing narratives introduce Jewishness as a “representation of multiplicity and ambivalence” that disturbs the black/ white binary, “expos[ing] the social construction and plurality of whiteness” (22).

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25. See Glissant’s discussion of how in plantation societies, “the always multilingual and frequently multiracial tangle created inextricable knots within the web of filiation, thereby breaking the clear, linear order to which Western thought had imparted such brilliance” (Poetics of Relation 71). Interestingly, like Phillips, Cliff associates the Jewish presence with the quality of confusion and multiplicity that characterizes “the feeling of the Caribbean” (“The Art” 63). 26. Ledent points to the way in which Phillips’s slippery reworking of The Diary “rescues the young diarist from the sanitized interpretations of her writing that celebrated such sentences as ‘I still believe that people are really good at heart’” (Caryl Phillips 157). 27. See Rothberg (156–57) and Craps (“Linking Legacies” 198) on the metonymic mode of identification and view of history that undergirds Phillips’s writing. According to Craps, the value of this analogical method is that, by resisting straightforward identification, it acknowledges the limits of cross-cultural empathy, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of empathy as appropriation (195). 28. Also relevant here is the Diary’s publication history. As Ozick’s 1997 article “Who Owns Anne Frank?” illustrates, the Diary has become famous as much for its misappropriations as for its revelatory power. The controversy-ridden publication and reception history of The Diary testifies to the discursive rather than straightforwardly mimetic status of Holocaust writing and draws attention to questions of representation. 29. While Phillips uses this phrase in his anthology Extravagant Strangers to refer to writing about Britain by authors who were born elsewhere, it is also suggestive of Phillips’s larger interest in writers who are outsiders—writers who address experiences of exile, displacement, and dispossession, are preoccupied with the problem of belonging, and challenge the ethnic and racial homogeneity of the nation. 30. It is also from this perspective that we can understand Phillips’s statement that, in composing Eva’s story, “Anne Frank’s narrative wasn’t the most important narrative. The example of Anne Frank has obviously been important to ‘free me.’ There were any number of books that had a pretty profound effect on me, but there was no one story or one person about whom I thought let me try to recreate her voice” (“Disturbing the Master Narrative” 61, italics mine). In other words, although the Diary is a key intertext of the novel, the framework of intertextuality in a narrow sense does not capture the full significance of the Diary, which, more than providing literary inspiration, “frees” Phillips to write. For this reason, the relationship of The Diary to The Nature of Blood cannot be fully grasped outside the context of a larger pattern of Caribbean/diaspora identifications with the Holocaust. 31. Exceptions included the Sonderkommando inmates who buried records of their experience near the Birkenau crematoria, defying the Nazi determination to erase all traces of the genocide (Waxman 82). On the Holocaust diary, see Waxman as well as Garbarini. 32. Like Frank’s Diary, the power of Eva’s narrative derives in part from the juxtaposition of her present condition with her life before her captivity. In the Diary Frank repeatedly questions whether the occupants of the annex will be able to return to their prewar selves, remarking at one point that “it gives [her] a very queer feeling to be able to appear in the world again” (231). Frank’s “queer feeling” anticipates the challenges Eva will face reentering the world after her discharge from the DP camp.

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33. Here Phillips imitates the technique of some Holocaust memoirists who compose their narratives in the third person (see Foley 340). 34. See Waxman (63) and Garbarini, who explains that “what had happened to them did not conform to existing norms of the plausible or conceivable. It was a moment of excess in which experience either would change discourse or would remain unrepresentable” (15). 35. See Birat’s illuminating discussion of the interaction of personal and collective narratives in The Nature of Blood. 36. See Cheyette, “Venetian Spaces.” 37. Another example of this nexus of associations between Jewishness and literariness can be found in Phillips’s novel Higher Ground. In the third section of the novel, the Polish Jewish refugee Irina is working as the caretaker and cataloguer of a library in London. The recently arrived Caribbean immigrant Louis, barred from staying in his hostel during the day, seeks shelter in the library. Against Irina’s wishes, Louis is kicked out by her boss. Eventually, Irina, too, is expelled from the library, losing her job and finding herself without any other option than to return to the mental hospital where she had been a patient for ten years—a fate that forecasts Eva’s in The Nature of Blood. If the Jewish refugee models a way into the English literary canon for the Black protagonist, she is only marginally less vulnerable than the Black immigrant to exclusion. This scene from Higher Ground in turn bears comparison with Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, in which Jewishness and literariness are also associated. In Hill’s novel, discussed in chapter 3, when Solomon Lindo gains his slave Aminata entry into the Charles Town library, he remarks that he himself had until recently been banned as a Jew from the library. 38. A more conventional representation of the Jew as Shylock may be found in Sam Selvon’s portrayal of the exploitative Jewish tailors in The Lonely Londoners (1956). The Shylock figure also notably appears in Naipaul’s 1967 novel The Mimic Men in the form of Ralph Singh’s Jewish landlord Mr. Shylock. Yet, as Cheyette notes, “Singh’s mirroring of Shylock, however ambiguous, avoids the gulf that, in other renderings, can come between Jewish and black histories in Britain and the United States” (Diasporas of the Mind 35). Instead, Naipaul’s Shylock serves as a model for the colonial emigrant of how to become English much as Zadie Smith’s Jewish protagonist Marcus Chalfen does for Irie in White Teeth (2000). 39. Rosenberg observes that “in the history of Jewish literary iconography, [Scott’s] importance is second only to Shakespeare’s, and of a parallel nature. Ivanhoe to all intents and purposes made the Jews’ fortune in the novel, in the sense in which Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice gave them a permanent place in the theater” (From Shylock to Svengali 4). Moreover, links between the two texts can also be made. Docker, for example, suggests that Ivanhoe is a complex rewriting of The Merchant of Venice that also revises it, particularly in challenging Jessica’s assimilationism with Rebecca’s more assertive stance (58–59). 40. In a 1993 interview, Cliff complained of how damaged both Black-Jewish and BlackIrish relations had by then become in the U.S. and suggested that part of the project of her fiction is to recover the history of “a real bonding between oppressed peoples” (“The Art” 66). 41. See Ledent (Caryl Phillips, 157) and Craps, for whom Eva as a result of these and other revelations comes to “exemplif[y] the notion of empathetic unsettlement” (“Linking Legacies” 200–1).

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INDEX

Abeng (Cliff), 24, 206, 248, 268, 281n13, 286n22; Columbus and, 87; decolonization in, 249–57; A Diary of a Young Girl and, 239, 249–57, 262; Holocaust in, 249–57; Jewish doctors and, 179; Jewishness and, 46; Sephardi thesis and, 86 Aboriginal motifs, 301n16 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 163 Adler, Esther Zaks, 183 Adolescent cross-cultural identification, 205, 239 African Americans, 216; antisemitism of, 11–12, 209; cultural politics of, 207; A Diary of a Young Girl and, 239; sites of memory of, 240 African diaspora, 100, 111, 288n2 African slavery, 4, 42 Afrocentrism, 222, 227, 230 Afro-Germans, 216, 220 Afroiberians, 38 Against the Unspeakable (Mandel), 297n3 Aizenberg, Edna, 35–36, 38 Alejandra (fictional character), 75 Alexander, Elizabeth, 28 Allegory, 212 Allure of Sepharad, The (Aizenberg), 35–36 Amerindians, 38 Aminata Diallo (fictional character), 119–22, 139–40, 291n24

Analogies, 212; in Caribbean literature, 6, 55, 65–67; of Holocaust, 6, 12–13, 65–66, 283n28; Marrano/Maroon, 91–92 Anne Frank House, 241–43, 305n9 “Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” (Phillips), 241, 243 Anti-Black racism, 218, 229, 240, 243 Antisemitism, 229, 240, 243; African American, 11–12, 209; colonial racism and, 10–11, 170, 211; European, 64; in France, 53 Arendt, Hannah, 170 Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (Belisario), 30–31 Ashkenazi, 3, 35–36, 38, 41; Jewish studies and, 28; refugees, 2 Atilla, 182 Atlantic Jewry, 28 Atlantic World, plantation Jews in, 139–42, 293n3 Autobiography of My Mother, The (Kincaid), 192 Autograph Man, The (Smith), 20 Azoulay, Katya, 17 Bahamas, 181 Baldwin, James, 262 Barbados, 77, 176; gravestone in, 112; Jewish settlement in, 3, 15–16; Tituba and, 47, 111–13, 117

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INDEX

Baumgartner’s Bombay (Desai), 179 Beam, Carl, 236 Behar, Ruth, 20 Belafonte, Harry, 27 Belisario, Isaac Mendes, 27, 30, 30–33, 31, 60, 60–61, 282n25 Belisario: Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist (Ranston), 32 Beloved (Morrison), 12–13, 99–100, 152, 288n1 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 36, 279n1 Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo (fictional character), 110, 111–12, 112, 132, 290n13 Ben-Ur, Aviva, 142, 284n6 Beracha Ve Shalom synagogue, in Suriname, 69, 153, 156 Berlin, Isaiah, 207 Bernice Heneky (fictional character), 187–89, 191 Between Camps (Gilroy, P.), 203, 206–7, 251–52 Bial, Henry, 139 Birbalsingh, Frank, 192 Black, Jewish and Interracial (Azoulay), 17 Black, White, and Jewish (Walker), 306n17 Black Atlantic, 103 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy, P.), 10 Black historical experience, 2 Black Holocaust Museum, 100, 288nn3–4 Black Holocaust narratives, 204, 216–21 Black-Irish relations, 308n40 Black-Jewish analogy, in Caribbean literature, 6, 55, 65–67 Black-Jewish literary dynamics, 5–6, 11, 12, 16–17, 277n15, 277n17 Black-Jewish relations, 2, 3, 238, 308n40; in Britain, 11, 17; in other locations, 17, 277n16; in Suriname, 155; in U.S., 5, 13–17, 99, 277n14; victimhood and, 201 “Black/Jewish Relations” (Philip), 206, 209–16 Black Power, 182, 184, 298n7 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 229, 249

Black slaveholder, 101, 288n5 Blyden, Edward Wilmot, 5, 54–55, 282n21 Bonaire, 184 Boni, 151 Book of Mechtilde, The (Henriques, A. R.), 42–45, 44, 52, 62, 70, 280n11 Book of Negroes, The (Hill), 101, 123, 133, 308n37; Aminata Diallo in, 119–22, 139– 40, 291n24; port Jews in, 121; Solomon Lindo in, 119–22, 139–40, 291n25 Boyarin, Jonathan, 8, 53, 277n10 Braziel, Jana Evans, 193 Brenner, Rachel Feldhay, 244, 265 Breton, André, 185 Brighter Sun, A (Selvon), 176 Britain, 132; Black-Jewish communities in, 11; Black-Jewish relations in, 11, 17 British West Indies, 182, 297n1 Broadway, 244, 246 Budick, Emily Miller, 15 Burnett, Paula, 300n3, 300n7 Butler, Octavia, 100 Bystanders, 253 Cabral, Amílcar, 171 Calypso (as a musical form), 180–81 Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Rohlehr), 180 Calypso Jews, in Trinidad, 1–3, 176–80; doctors, 179; gravestones of, 176; Land of the Living and, 186–92; Mr. Potter and, 192–200 Calypso shtetl, in Trinidad, 1, 21, 176, 180–86 Canada, 17, 76 Cape Verde, 74 Caribbean: creolization in, 3, 7, 17, 19–20; cultural influences of, 72–73; languages of, 88, 141; see also Calypso Jews Caribbean literature: Black-Jewish analogy in, 6, 55, 65–67; see also Sephardism, in Caribbean literature Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate, 301n12

INDEX

Caribbean Sephardism, 37, 70, 72, 164; examples of, 22, 36, 39, 66, 88; features of, 42, 45, 46, 48, 52, 61 Caribbean society, in Drums and Colours, 108 Caribbean upbringing, of Pissarro, 61–63, 282n26 Catherine (fictional character), 77–79, 81–84 Catholic Church, 36 Celan, Paul, 16 Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, at Temple University, 20 Césaire, Aimé, 5, 9, 16, 249, 304n42 Cézanne, Paul, 62 Chancy, Myriam, 18–20, 22, 33, 39, 69–98; see also Loneliness of Angels, The Charlotte Amalie, synagogue in, 69 Cheuse, Alan, see Song of Slaves in the Desert Chevet Achim synagogue, in Cuba, 70 Cheyette, Bryan, 1, 6, 8–10, 124, 172, 276n7, 276n9 Chiasmus, 194, 198 Chosen Place, the Timeless People, The (Marshall), 47, 281n14 Christianity, 95, 96; Catholic Church, 36; forced conversions to, 19, 70; JudeoChristian tradition, 8 Civil War narratives, 157, 159, 163 Clare Savage (fictional character), 94, 206, 249–57, 262 Cliff, Michelle, 5, 39, 69–75, 77–85, 88–90, 219, 221–22, 228, 238–42, 268, 287n32; “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire,” 93–96; Into the Interior, 76, 179; No Telephone to Heaven, 91, 94, 95; “A Pilgrimage, a History Lesson, Two Satires, and a Vision,” 243; “Sites of Memory,” 240, 306n21; “A Visit to the Secret Annex,” 241–42, 254; “A Woman Who Plays the Trumpet,” 217–18, 228, 303n39; see also Abeng; Free Enterprise

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325

Code noir (1685), 16, 29 Cohen, Judah, 58 Colonialism, 12, 222; Nazism as, 170; of New World, 3; reconquista and, 38, 40 Colonial racism, 122; antisemitism and, 10–11, 170, 211; fascism and, 171–72 Colorism, 94, 254 Columbus, Christopher, 1, 7, 12, 86–87, 256, 285n21 Committee for the Remembrance of Slavery, 231 CommonQuest: The Magazine of BlackJewish Relations, 235 Comparative approaches to literary study, 7–13 Competitive memory, 5, 12, 100 Concentration camps, 207, 216 Condé, Maryse, 5, 29, 33, 132–33, 244, 301n16; Black-Jewish relations and, 13–14; Committee for the Remembrance of Slavery and, 231; see also Moi, Tituba, sorciére . . . noire de Salem Conversos, see Sephardic conversos de Cordova, Jacob, 27 de Cordova, Joshua, 27 Cosmopolitanization, of Holocaust memory, 236, 304n2 da Costa, David, 112–13 Counterhistory, 37 Craps, Stef, 261, 297n1, 307n27 Creole, 71, 80, 82, 92–96, 183, 256, 287n31; intermarriage and, 74; Mulatta and, 94; Papiamentu language of, 74, 141; Sranan Tongo language, 141 Creolization, 283nn2–3; in Caribbean, 3, 7, 17, 19–20; in Suriname, 141–42; theory of, 71; see also Marranism and creolization “Cross” (Hughes), 94 Cross-cultural identification, 208, 230, 239, 246, 248, 262; adolescent, 205, 239; francophone anticolonial theory and, 173; with Jewishness, 238; memory laws and, 231

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INDEX

Cross-cultural relationships, 303n41 Crown Heights, 13, 14 Crown of Columbus, The (Dorris and Erdrich), 86–87 Cruse, Harold, 11 Crypto-Judaism, 75–86, 87, 284n14 Cuba, Chevet Achim synagogue in, 70 Cuba, Jews in, 176, 297n1; emigrants from Eastern Europe and Ottoman Empire, 1; Jewishness of, 20; as polacos, 3; refugees from Nazism, 1; Sephardic Conversos, 1, 3, 12, 19, 72, 74, 98; from Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, 1 Curaçao, 176, 184, 236–37, 270; creolization in, 74; Jewish settlement in, 3, 4, 29 Dabydeen, David, see Harlot’s Progress, A; Johnson’s Dictionary Damas, Léon, 230 Davis, Esther, 298n6 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 293n4, 296n34 Days of Awe (Obejas), 1, 69, 85, 178–79 Death of God, motif of, 227 Decolonization, 221–22; in Abeng, 249–57 Delavante, Marilyn, 18 Deleuze, Gilles, 258 de Lisser, Herbert G., 27 Desai, Anita, 179 Diary of Anne Frank, The (film), 46, 247, 248, 251 Diary of a Young Girl, A (Frank, A.), 232, 235–39, 241, 243–45; Abeng and, 239, 249–57, 262; African Americans and, 239; misappropriations of, 307n28; The Nature of Blood and, 257–58 Diaspora, 4–5, 9, 27–28; African, 100, 111, 288n2; intercultural history of, 8; paradigm of, 10–11; Sephardic, 42, 111; studies of, 7–8; see also Caribbeandiaspora writers; Trading diaspora, of Sephardic Jews Diasporic double-consciousness, of Pissarro, 50 Dickens, Charles, 132, 252 Disciplinary thinking, 9

Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 9, 249, 304n42 “Dju-tongo” language, 141 Docker, John, 28, 37 Doctors, Jewish, 179 Dominica, 176 Dominican Republic, 176; Jewish settlement in, 3; Sosúa, 182, 297n1, 298n7 Dorris, Michael, 86–87 Double écriture (double writing), 223 Drastic Turn of Destiny, The (Mann), 175, 185 Dreyfus affair, 53, 281n19 Drifting of Spirits, The (La grande drive des esprits) (Pineau), 300n1 Drums and Colours (Walcott), 46, 101, 105, 133; “A JEW” in, 106–8, 289n11; Caribbean society in, 108; Emmanuel Mano in, 108; interracial harmony in, 108, 290n12; Paco in, 106; Sephardic motif in, 109; slaves in, 106–7 Du Bois, W. E. B., 238, 240 Dutch, Surinamese Sephardism and, 149 Dutch national slavery movement, 152, 295n18 Duvalier regime, 83–84 Eastern Europe: emigrants from Ottoman Empire and, 1; Jews from, 3 Edmondson, Belinda, 95–96, 287n32, 306n22 Edugyan, Esi, 222; Half-Blood Blues, 218–21, 228, 303n33, 303n38 Elkins, Stanley, 100 Elza Fernandez (fictional character), 143–56, 165, 294n11, 295n17 Enemy aliens, 180, 184, 204 Engle, Margarita, 177–78 Enlightenment, 154 Erdrich, Louise, 86–87 Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam, 154–55, 295n24 Ethnic competition, 201 L’étoile noire (Maillet), 24, 204, 217, 221–32, 251, 259

INDEX

European antisemitism, 64 European Tribe, The (Phillips), 205, 235, 241, 243 Eva Stern (fictional character), 259–61, 263–65, 308n32 L’exil selon Julia (Exile According to Julia) (Pineau), 232–33, 239 Exodus (Uris), 206 Exodus narrative, 159 Expulsions, 66, 285n20; from French Islands, 29, 279n5; Iberian, 41, 42, 86; from Spain, 2, 12, 75, 86, 100 Extravagant Strangers (Phillips), 307n29 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 223 Faber, Eli, 104 Fagin (fictional character), 132 Fanon, Frantz, 204, 208, 229, 249, 262 Farrakhan, Louis, 11, 15 Fascism, 9, 206; analysts of, 170; colonial racism and, 171–72; lynchings and, 218; Nazism and, 207 Faulkner, William, 163 Feast in the House of Levy, The (Veronese), 51 Female sexuality, 114–16 Fierst, Shai, 138 Fighting Téméraire, The (Turner), 62 Figueroa, John, 201 Foley, Barbara, 220, 224 Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, 227 Fort-de-France, 208 1492 literature, 28, 37 France, 16; antisemitism in, 53; BlackJewish relations in, 17; Impressionist movement in, 49; Rhineland and, 219 Francophone anticolonial theory, 173 Frank, Anne, 87, 232–33, 235–38, 258, 261; permission to write and, 244–49; sites of memory and, 241–42; see also Diary of a Young Girl, A Frank, Leo, 14 Freedman, Jonathan, 74, 81–82, 94, 284n15 Free Enterprise (Cliff), 22, 47, 70, 71, 94, 96; Sephardic maroons in, 86–97, 98,

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288n35; Sephardism, marranism and creolization, 72; de Souza, Rachel, 89–92, 95, 97, 287n30 Free French Army, 204 French Islands expulsion, of Jews, 29, 279n5 French Revolution, 37 Freud, Sigmund, 208 Friedman, Saul, 104 Fuentes, Carlos, 19 Fugitive slave narrative, 148 Genealogy and romance, in Jewish plantation narratives, 137, 156–66 Gerber, Jane, 275n2 Ghost of Bridgetown, The (Spark), 15 Gibraltar Camp, 184, 185 Gies, Miep, 254, 256 Gilman, Sander, 255 Gilroy, Beryl, 206 Gilroy, Paul, 1, 3, 5, 99–100, 208, 210, 246, 297n2; The Black Atlantic, 10; Between Camps, 203, 206–7, 251–52 Gladwell, Malcolm, 28 Glissant, Édouard, 258, 271, 279n1, 295n19, 307n25 Globalization, 297n1 Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, 38 Goldish, Josette Capriles, 96, 287n33 Gone With the Wind (Mitchell), 137, 143, 294n9 Good Morning, Midnight (Rhys), 92–93, 286n28, 287n29 Gordon, Lewis, 20, 69 Gorilla, 175, 181 Grande drive des esprits, La (The Drifting of Spirits) (Pineau), 300n1 Growler, 181 Guattari, Félix, 258 Gyssels, Kathleen, 275n2, 278n20, 291n18 Haiti, 76, 77 Halevi-Wise, Yael, 37, 39, 279n2 Half-Blood Blues (Edugyan), 218–21, 228, 303n33, 303n38

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INDEX

Hall, Stuart, 28, 30–33, 74–75, 284n6 Halloran, Vivian Nun, 153, 295n21 Handley, George, 49, 62, 64, 136, 281n15, 283n27, 296n32 Harlot’s Progress, A (Dabydeen), 22–23, 101, 122, 133, 261; Betty in, 126–27, 128, 292n28; Christian girls in, 124, 126; critique of Jews in, 124–32; Gideon in, 124, 125–26, 127–31, 292n32, 293n36; Lady Montague in, 125, 127, 128, 131; Lord Montague in, 125, 127, 128, 132; Mary in, 126; Moll in, 124, 129; Mungo in, 123, 125–26, 127–28, 131, 292n30; Noah in, 123; Perseus in, 123, 127; Pringle in, 126, 128, 292n29; slavery in, 123–24, 291n26 Harlot’s Progress, A (Hogarth), 124–27, 125, 129–30, 292n34 Harpers Ferry, 87, 89 Harriet Blewchamp (fictional character), 212–14, 251 Harriet’s Daughter (Philip), 212–13, 214, 230–31, 251 Hearne, John, 23, 24, 179–80, 186, 192, 200–1; see also Land of the Living Henriques, Anna Ruth, 39, 42–45, 44, 52, 62, 70, 280n11 Henry-Valmore, Simone, 208 Herodotus, 302n20 Herzl, Theodor, 54 Hester Prynne (fictional character), 116 Hieronymous Falk (fictional character), 219, 221, 303n33 Higher Ground (Phillips), 258, 261, 308n37 Hijuelos, Oscar, 19, 20, 42, 301n18; A Simple Habana Melody, 71, 75, 84, 218, 303n33 Hill, Lawrence, 101, 119–22, 133, 139, 219, 291n24, 308n37; see also The Book of Negroes Hillel Academy, in Jamaica, 27 Hispaniola, 29 Historiography, of Jewish Atlantic, 6, 10 History: counterhistory, 37; of Holocaust, 24; medicinal, 89; Sephardic Caribbean, 28, 30–33; see also Jewish history History of Jamaica (Long), 28

Hitler’s Black Victims (Lusane), 217 Hoe duur was de suiker? (McLeod), 17–18, 23, 45, 69, 101, 295n19, 296n30; Alex in, 143, 145, 146, 147, 151; ambiguity in, 142–48, 150; Andersma in, 144, 164; Ashana in, 143, 148, 150, 152; death in, 147; Elza in, 143–56, 165, 294n11, 295n17; epilogue of, 155–56; Esther in, 143; infidelity in, 147; Jan in, 144, 145, 153; Jeremiah in, 151; Jewish Surinamese history in, 142–48; Julius in, 143, 146, 150, 155, 164–65; Levi in, 143, 150, 151–52; Maisa in, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152, 294n13; Mini-mini, 143–44, 146, 148, 150, 155, 164–67, 296n35; museum effect in, 153–54, 295n23; plantation family saga in, 21, 136, 142–48, 294n10; plantation Jews relating to, 135–40, 142–48, 294n12, 295n15; poverty in, 147; Rebecca in, 143; Rutger in, 143–48, 151, 165, 166, 295n14; Sarith in, 143–49, 153, 155, 164; slave protagonists, 138 Hogarth, William, 124–27, 125, 129–30, 261, 292n34 Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Dabydeen), 129 Hollywood, 211, 212, 244, 246 Holocaust, 2, 7, 8; in Abeng, 249–57; analogies of, 6, 12–13, 65–66, 283n28; connective node of, 12–13; diary of, 6, 21, 224, 257–68, 302n21; history of, 24; mass media and, 247; memory of, 23; pseudofactual novels, 224; slavery and, 100; as surrogate issue, 205–9; as surrogate memory site, 204; see also Calypso Jews, in Trinidad Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age, The (Levy and Sznaider), 236 Holocaust narratives: black, 204, 216–21; surrogate memory and, 209–16 House for Mr. Biswas (Naipaul), 179 Hughes, Langston, 94 Hybridity, 73

INDEX

Iberian expulsion, 41, 42, 86 “I Don’t Want Any Syrians Again” (Growler), 181 “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire” (Cliff), 93–96 Imagism, 199 Immigration, of Jews, 180–81, 297n1, 298n3, 298n6 Impressionist movement, 49 Inquisition, Spanish, 3, 19, 29, 48, 51–52 Intercultural history, of diaspora concept, 8 Intercultural sympathy, 116, 117 Intermarriage, 74 International Survey of Jewish Monuments, 153, 295n22 Interracial harmony, in Drums and Colours, 108, 290n12 Interracial relations, 16 Intersections: Caribbean-Jewish, 2–3, 9, 11, 20; of Sephardism, marranism and creolization, 73–74, 284n5 Intertextuality, 110, 239, 258, 259, 261, 269, 307n30 “In the Ghetto” (Phillips), 205, 206 Into the Interior (Cliff), 76, 179 Ireland, 76, 285n16 Isaacs, Jorge, 165–66 Israel, 269; Ten Lost Tribes of, 1 Israel, Jonathan, 14, 102 Israel Levis (fictional character), 75, 84, 218, 285n19, 303n33 Italy, 137 Itzkovitz, Daniel, 255 Ivanhoe (fictional character), 254–55 Ivanhoe (Scott), 252, 254–55, 308n39 Jamaica, 43, 176, 184, 185, 250; Hillel Academy in, 27; Jewish influence in, 27–28, 278nn1–2; Jewish settlement in, 3, 18, 23; synagogue in, 70 Jamaican/diaspora figures, 27–28 Jamaican Jews, 104 Jazz music, 217–19, 228 “Jean Rhys” (Walcott), 58, 92

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329

“A JEW,” in Drums and Colours, 106–8, 289n11 Jewish Atlantic, 28, 29, 133, 135, 137, 155; historiography of, 6, 10; scholarship on, 104; writing of, 102–5, 289n7, 289n9 Jewish-Black miscegenation, 164, 165, 296n32 Jewish Daily Forward, 138 Jewish difference, 92, 286n26 Jewish history: Black-Jewish diasporic, 11, 66, 102, 113; Caribbean, 28–32; in Hoe duur was de suiker?, 142–48; in Suriname, 137–42, 148–56, 294n8 Jewish humanitarianism, 110, 114, 119 Jewish influence, in Jamaica, 27–28, 278nn1–2 Jewish Life (magazine), 240 Jewishness, 192, 255, 256, 268; Abeng and, 46; in Caribbean literature, 5, 6–7, 8–11, 20–21, 109–10, 276nn6–7; cross-cultural identification with, 238; of Cuban Jews, 20; ethical perspective on, 190–91, 202; identification of, 136; literariness and, 308n37; metaphor relating to, 6; modernity and, 306n23; negative association of, 92; textuality and, 267 Jewish settlements: in Barbados, 3, 15–16; in Curaçao, 3, 4, 29; in Dominican Republic, 3; in Jamaica, 3, 18, 23; in Martinique, 3–4; in Suriname, 3, 18, 29, 30, 69, 91, 97 Jewish studies, 8–9, 28, 276nn8–9 Jewish surnames, 4 Jewry: Atlantic, 28; Southern, 162; Spanish, 38 Jews: critique of, 124–32; Eastern European, 3; French Islands expulsion of, 29, 279n5; immigration of, 180–81, 297n1, 298n3, 298n6; Jamaican, 104; liberties of, 30; as narrator, 186–87; outmigration of, 182; plantation, 23, 97, 101, 135–40, 142–48, 294n12, 295n15; port, 22; real and metaphorical, 20–21; Reformed, 162; representations of, 113, 115, 122, 129–30; restrictions of, 29; slave

330

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INDEX

Jews: (continued ) concubines and, 110, 113–19, 290n14, 291nn18–23; slaveholding by, 13–14, 101–2, 104, 138–39, 146, 155, 157, 159, 277n13; slaves abused by, 150–51; slave’s emancipation relating to, 136, 293n2; sugar production and, 29, 279n4; trials of, 29; Turkish, 3; victimhood narratives of, 48, 102, 140, 167, 186, 257, 268–69; see also Antisemitism; Calypso Jews, in Trinidad; Cuba, Jews in; Plantation Jews; Sephardic Jews Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Schorsch), 105 “Jews in the West Indies” (Gorilla), 175, 181 Jodensavanne, in Suriname, 30, 69, 97, 141, 153, 155, 244, 270, 293n5 Johnson’s Dictionary (Dabydeen), 124 Jones, Edward P., 101 Jonkonnu, 32, 61 Judeo-Christian tradition, 8 Juxtaposition, 194–95, 308n32 Kabbalah, 84, 85, 98 Kaddish, 156 Kagan, Richard L., 140 Kandiyoti, Dalia, 38, 66, 70–71, 73, 277n11, 280n6, 284n5 Kaplan, Marion, 182, 298n7 Kincaid, Jamaica, 23, 24, 186; The Autobiography of My Mother, 192; My Brother, 192; A Small Place, 299n9; Woolf and, 199, 299n12; see also Mr. Potter Kindred (Butler), 100 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 236 Known World, The (Jones), 101 “Koo, Koo, or Actor-Boy” (Belisario), 31 Kriz, Kay Dian, 61, 282n24, 282n25 Ku Klux Klan, 64 Lamming, George, 201 Land of the Living (Hearne), 23, 179–80, 195; Calypso Jews and, 186–92; in-betweenness in, 200–1

Langer, Lawrence, 225 Languages: of Caribbean, 88, 141; Djutongo, 141; Papiamentu, 74, 141; Saramaka Maroon, 141; Sranan Tongo, 141; Yiddish, 183 Larrier, Renée, 223 Latin American literature, 16–17, 22; foundational fictions of, 137, 165–66 Latino/a literature, 22, 38 Laufen internment camp, 217 Ledent, Bénédicte, 205n6, 258, 275n2, 307n26, 309n41 Leibman, Laura, 275n2 Le Lazaret concentration camp, 298n4 Leprosy, 89, 91–92, 286n27, 286nn23–24 Levi, Primo, 230, 269 Levins Morales, Aurora, 39, 43–48, 89, 280nn8–10; background of, 41; Sephardic background of, 41–42; see also Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 184, 298n4 Levy, Andrea, 4 Levy, Daniel, 236, 304n2 Lindo, Alexander, 104 Literary archaeology, of slavery, 71 Literary Sephardism, 22, 37–38, 279n3 Loi Taubira, 231 Loneliness of Angels, The (Chancy), 18–19, 22, 71, 96–97, 284nn9–11; Catherine in, 77, 78–84, 284n13, 285n18; CryptoJudaism in, 75–86, 87, 284n14; Elsie in, 77, 80, 82, 285n16; multiple geographical sites in, 76–77, 81; Romulus in, 77, 79; Rose in, 77, 80, 82; Ruth in, 77–86, 89, 284n12; Syrian Jewish characters in, 78, 82 Lonely Londoners, The (Selvon), 308n38 Long, Edward, 28 Lopez, Matthew, see Whipping Man, The Lopez Laguna, Daniel Israel, 27 Louis XIV (king), 29 Lusane, Clarence, 217, 301n17 Lynchings, 218

INDEX

MacFarlane, Tony, 18 Machado, Imanuël, 84, 301n18 Mahamad, 142, 154, 296n25 Maillet, Michèle, 208, 227, 231–32; see also L’étoile noire Mandel, Naomi, 252, 297n3 Mandela, Nelson, 236 Mann, Fred, 175, 185, 191, 298n5 Mantel, Hilary, 261 Marcus Heneky (fictional character), 187–92 Margot Stern (fictional character), 259–60 María (Isaacs), 165–66 Marley, Bob, 28 Maroon motifs, 91, 96 Maroons, 152–53, 295n20; see also Sephardic Maroons Marranism and creolization, 22, 69–71; Sephardic maroons in Free Enterprise, 86–97, 98, 288n35; Sephardism and, 72–75, 284n5 Marrano, Pissarro as, 50 Marrano/Maroon analogy, 91–92 Marranos, 22, 36, 50, 70–72, 74; see also Crypto-Judaism; Sephardic maroons in Free Enterprise Marshall, Paule, 47, 92, 281n14 Martinique, 176, 184, 185; Jewish settlement in, 3–4 Matos, Nicole, 195 McLeod, Cynthia, 29–30, 33, 135–68, 207, 244, 283n1, 296n34; see also Hoe duur was de suiker? Medicinal history, 89 Melbye, Fritz, 56 Memory: common, 225; competitive, 5, 12, 100; cosmopolitanization of Holocaust memory, 236, 304n2; deep, 225; multidirectional, 12, 100, 208–9, 214, 227, 231, 297n2; palimpsestic, 212, 214, 297n2; screen, 208; sites of, 240–44; surrogate, 209–16, 247 Memory laws, 231 Mendes, David Pereira, 18 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 267–68, 308n39

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331

Mestizaje, 73 Metaphor, 212 Middle Passage, 7, 48, 63, 83, 90, 106, 216; L’étoile noire and, 222; legacies of, 51, 170; “Stop Frame” and, 211; survival of, 46, 99, 119 Mikvé Emmanuel Synagogue, Willemstad, Curaçao, 4 Mikvé Emmanuel Synagogue Museum, 235 “Milkwoman” (Belisario), 60 Mimic Men, The (Naipaul), 308n38 Mini-mini (fictional character), 143–44, 146, 148, 150, 155, 164–67, 296n35 Miranda (fictional character), 210–12 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 59 Miscegenation, Jewish-Black, 164, 165, 296n32 Misrecognition, 195–96 Misrepresentation, 220 Mistaken identity, 303n33 Mitchell, Margaret, 137, 143, 294n9 Modernist fiction, 199 Modernity, 306n23 Modernity, Culture, and “The Jew” (Cheyette and Marcus), 1, 10 Mohammed, Patricia, 180 Moi, Tituba, sorciére . . . noire de Salem (Condé), 17, 22–23, 45, 47, 101, 109, 120–21; ambivalent historiography of, 111; Benjamin Cohen d’Azevedo in, 110, 111–19, 112, 132, 290n13; David da Costa in, 112–13; element of parody in, 110; female sexuality in, 114–16; intercultural sympathy in, 116, 117; Jewish humanitarianism in, 110, 114, 119; Jews and slave concubines in, 110, 113–19, 290n14, 291nn18–23; slave narrative genre of, 110, 111, 122, 123, 130, 133; Tituba in, 110, 111–19; witch trials in, 111, 113 Moll (fictional character), 124, 129 Monet, Claude, 62–63, 199 Morant Bay rebellion, 106 Morgan, Philip D., 140 Morrison, Toni, 12–13, 71, 99–100, 152, 297n3

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INDEX

Mr. Potter (Kincaid), 23, 179–80, 192–200, 201, 202, 298nn8–11; as imagistic novel, 193; misrecognition in, 195–96; organizing images in, 198–99 Mulâtresse Solitude, La (Schwarz-Bart and Schwarz-Bart), 20 Mulatta, 93, 94, 185 Mulatto, 142, 154 Multidirectional memory, 12, 100, 208–9, 214, 227, 231, 297n2 Mungo (fictional character), 123, 125–26, 127–28, 131, 292n30 “Muse of History, The” (Walcott), 48 Museum effect, 153–54, 295n23 Music: calypso, 180–81, 184; jazz, 217–19, 228 My Brother (Kincaid), 192 Naipaul, V. S., 179, 200, 252, 308n38 Nassy, David de Isaac Cohen, 154, 296n34 Nassy, Josef, 217, 301n15 Nate Pereira (fictional character), 161–62 National Museum of the American Indian, 15 Nation of Islam, 104, 139 Nature of Blood, The (Phillips), 24, 238–39, 243, 257–68, 269, 304n3 Nazism, 171, 300n7; as colonialism, 170; fascism and, 207; refugees from, 1–3 Negritude, 230, 303n39 “Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto, The” (Du Bois), 240 Nelson Island, 184 Neoslave narrative, 21, 110, 115, 123, 132, 137 Netherlands, 17, 137, 138, 145 Nettleford, Rex, 32–33, 35, 207, 208 Newman, Joanna, 182, 297n1, 298n3 New World, 12, 28, 38; colonial economy of, 4; colonialism of, 3; discovery of, 7; Indigenous populations of, 1 New World Order, A (Phillips), 257, 261 Nidhe Israel synagogue, in Barbados, 112 Night (Wiesel), 227 No Telephone to Heaven (Cliff), 91, 94, 95 Obejas, Achy, 1, 2, 42, 69, 85, 178, 283n1 Old Testament, 190 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 132

Omeros (Walcott), 46 Once Jews: Stories of Caribbean Sephardism (Goldish), 96, 287n33 “On ‘The Nature of Blood’ and the Ghost of Anne Frank” (Phillips), 235, 243, 248 Othello (Shakespeare), 239, 258, 266–67 Our Calypso Shtetl, 183, 298n6 Ozick, Cynthia, 258, 307n28 Palimpsestic memory, 212, 214, 297n2 Pan-Africanist movement, 16 Papa Legbo, 79, 80, 86 Papiamentu language, 74, 141 Paramaribo, 217 Parataxis, 194, 195 Passover, 158–59 Path of the Righteous (Darhe Jesarim), 142, 294n7 Paul, Sean, 28 “Persecuted Jews, The” (Atilla), 182 Petit, Christophe, 185 Phaf-Rheineger, Ineke, 148, 295n16, 296n25, 296n33 Philip, M. NourbeSe, 204, 222, 232; “Black/ Jewish Relations,” 206, 209–16; Harriet’s Daughter, 212–13, 214, 230–31, 251; Showing Grit, 99, 203, 205, 209, 212; “St. Clair Avenue West,” 214–16, 232; “Stop Frame,” 210, 211, 214, 225; surrogate memory and, 209–16 Phillips, Caryl, 11, 20, 206, 207, 208, 237, 240, 247; Anne Frank House and, 241– 43, 305n9; “Anne Frank’s Amsterdam,” 241, 243; The European Tribe, 205, 235, 241, 243; Extravagant Strangers, 307n29; Higher Ground, 258, 261, 308n37; “In the Ghetto,” 205, 206; The Nature of Blood, 24, 238–39, 243, 257–68, 269, 304n3; A New World Order, 257, 261; “On ‘The Nature of Blood’ and the Ghost of Anne Frank,” 235, 243, 248 “Pilgrimage, a History Lesson, Two Satires, and a Vision, A” (Cliff), 243 Pineau, Gisèle, 208, 232–33, 239, 300n1 Pissarro, Camille, 3, 22, 33, 36, 85, 199, 281n16; biography of, 55; Caribbean

INDEX

upbringing of, 61–63, 282n26; critique of, 57; diasporic double-consciousness of, 50; as Marrano, 50; as painter, 49, 59, 59–60, 282n23; in St. Thomas, 48–51, 53–58, 282n22; Sephardic background of, 49–55, 58–65, 281nn17–18; Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas, 59, 59; Walcott relating to, 51–57 Place Abbé-Grégoire, 208 Plantation family saga, 21, 136, 142–48, 294n10 Plantation Jews, 23, 97, 101, 135–40, 142–48, 294n12, 295n15 Plantation Jews, in slavery fiction: in Atlantic World, 139–42, 293n3; genealogy and romance, 137, 156–66; Hoe duur was de suiker?, 135–40, 142–48, 294n12, 295n15 Plantation societies, 307n25 Pleasant, Mary Ellen, 87, 92, 95 Pleasures of Exile, The (Lamming), 201 Polacos, 3 Politics, of representation, 110, 122, 132 Port Jews, in slavery fiction, 289n6, 289n8; Black-Jewish romance, 109–22; in The Book of Negroes, 121; A Harlot’s Progress, 22–23, 101, 122–32; Jewish Atlantic writing, 102–5, 289n7, 289n9; Moi, Tituba, sorciére . . . noire de Salem, 17, 22–23, 45, 47, 101, 109–22; see also Drums and Colours Port of Spain: Queen’s Park, 177; synagogue in, 69 Portulan, 16 Postcolonial Witnessing (Craps), 297n1 Postslavery narrative, 136 Powell, Colin, 28 Prince, Mary, 114 Prisms, 36–37, 279n1 Prose, Francine, 244 Pseudofactual Holocaust novels, 224 Puerto Rico, 29 Queen’s Park, Port of Spain, 177 Racialization, 8 Racial particularism, 213, 221

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333

Racism, 113; anti-Black, 218, 229, 240, 243; colonial, 10–11, 122, 170, 211 Ragussis, Michael, 37 Ranston, Jackie, 32, 104 Rastafarians, 189 Realism, 199 Rebecca (fictional character), 143, 254–55 Reformed Jews, 162 Refugees: Ashkenazi, 2; from Nazism, 1–3 Relationality, 198, 242 Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas (Levins Morales), 40, 52, 71; Iberian expulsion in, 41, 42 Reynolds, Joshua, 124 Rhetorical techniques, 194 Rhineland, 219 Rhys, Jean, 92–93, 286n28, 297n29, 306n16 Robert (Admiral), 185 Rody, Caroline, 110–11 Rohlehr, Gordon, 180 Romain, Gemma, 11, 277n16, 291n24, 291n25, 300n8 Romance: Black-Jewish, 109–22; in Song of Slaves in the Desert, 161; see also Genealogy and romance, in Jewish plantation narratives Rosello, Mireille, 231 Rothberg, Michael, 8, 109, 204, 231, 238–39; competitive memory and, 5, 12, 100; multidirectional memory and, 12, 100, 208–9 “Royal Palms, The” (Walcott), 46, 281n12 Rubenstein, Rachel, 276n8, 277nn14–15 Rushdy, Ashraf, 145 Russ, Elizabeth, 135 Ruth (fictional character), 77–84 Ryan, Tim A., 100–1 Salem witch trials, 111, 113 Sampson Gideon (fictional character), 125–26, 127–31, 292n32, 293n36 Sancho, Ignatius, 262 Sanders, Leslie, 211 Santería, 85–86 Saramaka Maroon language, 141

334

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INDEX

Sarith (fictional character), 143–49, 153, 155, 164 Scharfman, Ronnie, 13–14, 15, 138, 277n12 Schoelcher, Victor, 225 Schorsch, Jonathan, 33, 96, 104–5, 289n10 Schwarz-Bart, André, 20, 224, 238 Schwarz-Bart, Simone, 20, 208, 224 Scott, Sir Walter, 252, 254–55, 308n39 Screen memory, 208 Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, The, 14, 129, 139 Selvon, Sam, 176, 308n38 Sepharad allure, 40–48 Sephardic background: of Levins Morales, 41–42; of Pissarro, 49–55, 58–65, 281nn17–18 Sephardic Caribbean history, 28, 30–33 Sephardic Conversos, 1, 3, 12, 19, 72, 74, 98 Sephardic diaspora, 42, 111 Sephardic Jews, 244, 257; historical presence of, 5; from Spain expulsions (1492), 2, 12, 75, 86, 100; trading diaspora of, 4–5, 102–3; see also Plantation Jews, in slavery fiction Sephardic Maroons in Free Enterprise, 86–97, 98, 288n35 Sephardim, as founding people of Caribbean, 40 Sephardism: literary, 22, 37–38, 279n3; triangulation and, 61–65 Sephardism, in Caribbean literature, 35; The Book of Mechtilde, 42–45, 44, 52, 62, 280n11; motifs of, 22, 33, 36–37, 39, 45, 66, 70–72, 74–77, 109, 284n7; Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas, 40–42; Sepharad allure, 40–48; theorizing Sephardism, 37–40, 280nn5–6; Tiepolo’s Hound, 22, 36–37, 39, 46, 281n15 Sephardism, marranism, and creolization, 72–75; cultural influences with, 72–73; Free Enterprise relating to, 72; in-betweenness relating to, 74; intersection of, 73–74, 284n5; The Loneliness of Angels relating to, 72

Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination (HaleviWise), 37 Sexuality, female, 114–16 Sexual relations, 74 Shakespeare, William, 239, 258, 267–68, 308n39 Shandler, Jeffrey, 236 Sharpe, Jenny, 118, 291nn21–22 Shawl, The (Ozick), 258 Shearer, Hugh, 27 Shohat, Ella, 38, 40, 280n4 Show Boat (musical), 210 Showing Grit (Philip), 99, 203, 205, 209, 212 Shylock (fictional character), 267, 308n38 Sicher, Efraim, 209, 223, 275n3 Sidonie Hellénon (fictional character), 222–31, 251 Siegel, Arthur, 183 Silverman, Max, 204, 212 Simons, Moisés, 218 Simple Habana Melody, A (Hijuelos), 71, 75, 84, 218, 303n33 “Sites of Memory” (Cliff), 240, 306n21 Six-Day War, 246 Sketches of Character (Belisario), 32, 61 Slave concubines, Jews and, 110, 113–19, 290n14, 291nn18–23 Slaveholders: Black, 101, 288n5; Jewish, 13–14, 101–2, 104, 138–39, 146, 155, 157, 159, 277n13 Slave narrative genre, 102, 110, 111, 122, 123, 130, 133 Slave protagonists, 138 Slavery, 3, 12, 23, 32, 119, 197, 200, 201, 206, 211; African, 4, 42; in A Harlot’s Progress, 123–24, 291n26; Holocaust and, 100; literary archaeology of, 71; representations of, 130, 133; writing of, 135, 293n1; see also Plantation Jews, in slavery fiction; Port Jews, in slavery fiction Slaves: in Drums and Colours, 106–7; emancipation of, 136, 293n2; Jews’ abuse of, 150–51

INDEX

Small Place, A (Kincaid), 299n9 Smith, Zadie, 20 Snow, Valaida, 218, 221–22, 301n17 Snyder, Holly, 29, 104 Solomon Lindo (fictional character), 119–22, 139–40, 291n25 Sommer, Doris, 137, 166 Sonderkommando, 269, 308n31 Song of Slaves in the Desert (Cheuse), 139, 157, 296n29; Isaac in, 162; Jonathan in, 162–63; Liza in, 163; Nate in, 161–62; romance plot of, 161; Southern Jewry in, 162 Sosúa, 182, 297n1, 298n7 Souls of Black Folk and Up from Slavery, The, 206 Southern Jewry, 162 de Souza, Rachel (fictional character), 89–92, 95, 97, 287n30 Spain expulsions (1492), 2, 12, 75, 86, 100 Spanish Inquisition, 3, 19, 29, 48, 51–52 Spanish Jewry, Golden Age of, 38 Spanish Portuguese Jewish Nation of the Caribbean, 137 Spark, Debra, 15 Sranan Tongo language, 141 Stavans, Ilan, 72, 73 “St. Clair Avenue West” (Philip), 214–16, 232 Stefan Mahler (fictional character), 186–92 Stephan Stern (fictional character), 258 Steyn, Juliet, 132 Stiebel, George, 27 Stiefel, Barry, 275n2, 283n1 St. Kitts, 206, 248 St. Louis (SS), 178–79 “Stop Frame” (Philip), 210, 211, 214, 225 Strasberg, Louis, 183–84 St. Thomas, Pissarro in, 48–51, 53–58, 282n22 Styron, William, 297n3 Sugar production, 29, 279n4 Sundquist, Eric, 239, 259, 305n8 Suriname, 3, 18, 91, 103, 207, 237, 244; Beracha Ve Shalom synagogue in, 69,

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335

153, 156; Black-Jewish relations in, 155; creolization in, 141–42; Jewish history in, 137–42, 148–56, 294n8; Jewish settlement in, 3, 18, 29, 30, 69, 91, 97; Jodensavanne in, 30, 69, 97, 141, 153, 155, 244, 270, 293n5 Surinamese Sephardism, Dutch and, 149 Surnames, Jewish, 4 Surrogate memory, 209–16, 247 Synagogue of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds, 51 Synagogues, 4, 69, 70, 112, 153, 156 Syrian Jewish characters, 78, 82 Sznaider, Natan, 236, 304n2 Temple University, 20 Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, 1 Testimony, in L’étoile noire, 221–32 Textual conversions, 98 Textuality, 267 Thomas Pringle (fictional character), 125–26, 128, 292n29 Tiepolo’s Hound (Walcott), 22, 36–37, 39, 46, 85, 109, 199, 281n15; synagogues in, 69; triangulation and Sephardism, 61–65; see also Pissarro, Camille Tittmoning internment camp, 217 Tituba, 47, 110, 111–19 Tobago, 206 Toumson, Roger, 16 Trading diaspora, of Sephardic Jews, 4–5, 102–3 Triangulation, 199; Sephardism and, 61–65 Trinidad, 23, 206; Black Power in, 182, 184; Calypso Jews in, 1–3, 176, 176–80, 186–200; calypso shtetl in, 1, 21, 176, 180–86 Trinidad Guardian, 181 Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 105 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 184 Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (Engle), 177 Tubman, Harriet, 213 Turkish Jews, 3 Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas (Pissarro), 59, 59

336

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INDEX

Underground Railroad, 213, 214 United Congregation of Israelites, 12 United States (U.S.), 76, 139; Black antisemitism in, 209; Black-Jewish relations and, 5, 13–17, 99, 277n14; Harpers Ferry and, 47; Latino/a writing in, 38; Salem witch trials in, 111, 113; see also African Americans United States Holocaust Museum, 15, 217 University of Mainz, 240 University of the West Indies, 184 Uris, Leon, 206 U.S., see United States van Daan, Peter, 237, 270 Van Nyhuis, Alison, 306n16 Veil, Simone, 227, 231, 302n21 Veronese, Paolo, 51 Vichy aux Antilles (Vichy in the Antilles) (Petit), 185 Victimhood, 155; Black-Jewish relations and, 201; narratives of, 48, 102, 140, 167, 186, 257, 268–69 View of Kelly’s Estate (Belisario), 30 “Visit to the Secret Annex, A” (Cliff), 241–42, 254 Vodou, 84 Walcott, Derek, 5, 29, 33, 35, 97–98, 199, 202, 207–8, 300n7, 301n16; “An Interview,” 203; “Jean Rhys,” 58, 92; “The Muse of History,” 48; Omeros, 46; parents of, 52, 62–63; Pissarro relating to, 51–57; “The Royal Palms,” 46, 281n12; see also Drums and Colours; Tiepolo’s Hound Walker, Rebecca, 94, 306n17

Warburg Institute, 246 Warsaw Ghetto, 224, 240 West Indian Federation, 106, 108 Whipping Man, The (Lopez, M.), 139, 296n26; Caleb in, 157–61; Civil War drama of, 157; John in, 158–60; Passover in, 158–59; Simon in, 158–61 White, Black, and Jewish (Walker), 94 Whitehead, Anne, 261, 262 Whiteness, 298n7 White Witch of Rosehall, The (de Lisser), 27 “Who Owns Anne Frank?” (Ozick), 307n28 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 306n16 Wiesel, Elie, 227 Witch trials, 111, 113 “Woman Who Plays the Trumpet, A” (Cliff), 217–18, 228, 303n39 Woolf, Virginia, 199, 299n12 World at War, The (documentary), 206, 247, 248 Wynter, Sylvia, 191, 192, 193 Yiddish, 183 Yom Kippur War, 246 Younge, Gary, 300n8 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 72, 95–96, 280n5 Zionism, 16, 54 Zivin, Erin Graff, 95, 98, 279n3, 287n33, 306n23 Zoe (fictional character), 250, 252, 254 Zoltan Weizenger (fictional character), 194–99, 299n9, 299n11 Zong (ship), 130