Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture: Surfacing Histories 3030645851, 9783030645854

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Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture Surfacing Histories Edited by Yiorgos D. Kalogeras Johanna C. Kardux Monika Mueller Jopi Nyman

Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture

Yiorgos D. Kalogeras Johanna C. Kardux Monika Mueller  •  Jopi Nyman Editors

Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture Surfacing Histories

Editors Yiorgos D. Kalogeras Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Thessaloniki, Greece

Johanna C. Kardux Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

Monika Mueller Ruhr-University Bochum Bochum, Germany

Jopi Nyman University of Eastern Finland Joensuu, Finland

ISBN 978-3-030-64585-4    ISBN 978-3-030-64586-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Figure 4.1 is published courtesy of Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Figure 4.2 is published courtesy of National Anthropological Archives of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 8.1 is published courtesy of Gundo Rial y Costas. Figure 8.2 is published courtesy of ACME.  Excerpts from the poem “Prison Riders” are published with the permission of Gerald Vizenor. Ruth Benedict’s poem “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” is reprinted with the permission of Mary Catherine Bateson. Benedict’s poem “Myth” is reprinted with the permission of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc., New York, as well as by Mary Catherine Bateson.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Yiorgos D. Kalogeras, Johanna C. Kardux, Monika Mueller, and Jopi Nyman Part I Scraping off and Writing/Painting Over: Revisiting the Archive  19 2 Palimpsestuous Historiographies in Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I-Hotel 21 Silvia Schultermandl 3 The Body as a Palimpsest: Stor(y)ing Memories in Michelle Cliff’s Clare Savage Novels and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora 41 Izabella Penier 4 Cultural Palimpsests on the Ethnic Shore: Refunctionalizing Seaside Forts 57 Cathy Covell Waegner

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Part II Contested and Interwoven Histories: The City as Palimpsest in Literature and Culture  79 5 Littoral/Literal Watermarks: Layers of Signification in Maritime Marseille 81 Page R. Laws 6 Memory, History, and Identity: Postcolonial Urban Palimpsests in the Writing of Ivan Vladislavić 99 Kudzayi Ngara 7 Ominous Borders, Liminal Bridges: Narrative Palimpsests of Cultural History and Racial Subjectivity in Alejandro Morales’s Epic Novel River of Angels (2014)123 Sophia Emmanouilidou 8 Locating the Favela: Place and Representation in the Marvelous City of Rio de Janeiro143 Gundo Rial y Costas Part III Rethinking Cultural Structures and Literary Strategies 169 9 On the Poetry of a Boasian Cultural Anthropologist: Ruth Benedict’s Palimpsestuous Writings171 A. Elisabeth Reichel 10 A Palimpsest of Herstories: Intertextuality as a Womanist Practice in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills191 Marta Werbanowska 11 A Palimpsestuous Reading of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood213 Aparajita Nanda Index227

Notes on Contributors

Sophia  Emmanouilidou holds a PhD from the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, with distinctions in 2003 and was on a full scholarship from the Foundation of National Scholarships in Greece (IKY). She has been a Fulbright grantee at the University of Texas, Austin, and the John F.  Kennedy Institute (JFKI) for North American Studies, Freie Universität of Berlin. She has published several articles on Chicana/o literature and identity-focused theories. Her interests include border cultures, social studies, space theory, and ecocriticism. She is affiliated with the Department of American Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is the co-editor of the volume Ecothinking Across the Disciplines: Transnational Interconnections of Nature Studies and the Environmental Humanities (2020). Yiorgos  D.  Kalogeras is Professor Emeritus of American Ethnic and Minority Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He has written on the Greek American experience and his publications include editions of Konstantinos Kazantzes’s Istories tis patridhos mou [Stories of My Motherland] (Typothito, 2001), Demetra Vaka Brown’s Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women (2004), The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (2005), with Eleftheria Arapoglou and Linda Manney Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Globalized World (2006), and in Greek a monograph Ethnic Geographies: Socio-cultural Identifications of a Migration (Katarti, 2007). He has published “Retrieval and Invention: The Adaptation of Texts and the Narrativization of Photographs in Films on Immigration” in the Journal of Modern Greek ix

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Studies (2011). An essay on Crialese’s Nuovomondo/The Golden Door (2006) and Voulgaris’s Nyfes/Brides (2004) appeared in the Journal of Mediterranean Studies (2012). His paper on Albert Isaac Bezzerides was published in the collective volume Imagining Identities: Identity Formation in the Age of Globalization (2014), and another under the title “History as Ethnic Narrative” in A Transcultural Wanderer (2014). In 2017, he published electronically his paper “Revenge and the New Americans” in Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and the Media. He has edited, with Eleftheria Arapoglou and Jopi Nyman, Racial and Ethnic Identities in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Since 2012, he is the President of Multi-Ethnic Studies Europe and the Americas (MESEA). He is the founder and former editor of Gramma: A Journal of Theory and Criticism. Johanna  C.  Kardux  teaches American literature and culture at Leiden University (Netherlands) and is Chair of the MA program in North American Studies and Vice-President of MESEA. She holds a PhD from Cornell University (1985) and has authored numerous articles and co-­ authored Newcomers in an Old City: The American Pilgrims in Leiden, 1609–1620 (4th ed. 2020). She has co-edited Connecting Cultures: The Netherlands in Five Centuries of Transatlantic Exchange (1994), Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Art, Media, and Music: Performing Migration (2010), and Moving Migration: Narrative Transformations in Asian American Literature (2010). Her research interests focus on memory and trauma studies, particularly the memorialization of slavery in a transatlantic perspective. With Alan Rice, she has co-edited a special issue of the journal Atlantic Studies on The Slave Trade’s Dissonant Heritage: Memorial Sites, Museum Practices, and Dark Tourism (2012). In 2020, she led an international research network that organized an international conference on the sailing of the Mayflower, which was held at Leiden in 2020: “FourNation Commemoration: The Mayflower and the Construction and Politics of Public Memory.” Page R. Laws  is Professor of English and Dean of the R. C. Nusbaum Honors College at Norfolk State University in Virginia. Twice a Fulbrighter (Germany, Austria), Laws is co-editor of the book Transculturality: Perceptions of the Immigrant Other in Virginia and North Rhine-Westphalia (2011). She has also written chapters for Ethnic and Racial Identities in the Media, eds. Eleftheria Arapoglou et  al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); From Black to Schwarz: Cultural Crossovers Between African

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America and Germany, eds. Maria I.  Diedrich et  al. (2010); Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art – Performing Migration, eds. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung et  al. (2010), and other volumes. Laws reviews films for a variety of popular and online publications (e.g., Bright Lights, Cineaste). She holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MPhil and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Monika Mueller  is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. She has published monographs on major nineteenth-century literary figures (Gender, Genre and Homoeroticism in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Melville’s Pierre [1996] and George Eliot U.S.: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives [2005]) and has co-edited volumes on the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe [2011]), on transcultural vampires and zombies (Vampires and Zombies: Transcultural Migrations and Transnational Interpretations [2016]), on multiethnic detective fiction (Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction [2003]), on disgust as a cultural phenomenon (The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture [2007]), and on the performance of ethnicity (Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender: Transcultural Perspectives [2017]). She is Treasurer of MESEA. Aparajita Nanda  is a recipient of a Visiting Associate Professorship to the departments of English and African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and a Fulbright faculty teaching scholarship, teaching at University of California, Berkeley, and Santa Clara University. Her recent book publications include Black California (2011), The Strangled Cry (2013), Romancing the Strange (2004), and Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism: Critical Imaginaries for a Global World (2014). She has published several book chapters, most recently with Cambridge University Press and Modern Language Association (MLA). Her articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including Callaloo, and her academic treatises (by invitation) are in Oxford African American Studies edited by Henry Louis Gates. She is engaged in a book-length project titled Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler, contracted with Temple University Press. Kudzayi  Ngara is a PhD graduate of the English Department at the University of the Western Cape (2012). His research focuses on how liter-

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ary imaginings and representations (by means of fiction and “creative non-­ fiction”) of cityscapes offer different (to geographical, anthropological, and ethnological approaches toward studies of African urbanity) but complementary pathways to the uncovering of the fluid and contradictory qualities that mark many southern African postcolonial cities as sites of social, economic, and cultural transformation, as well as being spaces in which notions of contested identities are spatialized. Ngara has research interests in magical realism as an aspect postcolonial self-narration and a developing interest in the languages and cultures of the MalutiDrakensburg Afromontane, as well as post-apartheid public cultures. He lectures English and cultural studies at the University of the Free State, Qwaqwa Campus in South Africa. Jopi  Nyman  is Professor of English and Vice Dean at the School of Humanities at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu, Finland. He is the author and editor of more than 20 books in the fields of Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies, including the monographs Men Alone: Masculinity, Individualism, and Hard-Boiled Fiction (1997), Under English Eyes: Constructions of Englishness in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction (2000), Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee (2003), Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction (2009), Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing (2017), and Equine Fictions: Human–Horse Relationships in Twenty-First Century Writing (2019). His most recent co-edited collections include the volumes Mobile Identities: Race, Ethnicity, and Borders in Contemporary Literature and Culture, with Kamal Sbiri and Rachida Yassine (2020), and Border Images, Border Narratives: The Political Aesthetics of Boundaries and Crossings, with Johan Schimanski (2021). His research interests focus on human–animal studies, transcultural literatures, and border narratives. He is the Program Chair of MESEA. Izabella Penier  specializes in literary, cultural, and postcolonial studies. Her academic work focuses on Black diasporic literature. She holds a PhD from the University of Lodz in Poland. She has worked as an academic at the University of Lodz and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in the UK.  She has published over 20 articles on contemporary African American and African Caribbean literature and culture, 2 textbooks about literary theory and the American history, and a monograph on magical realism in the contemporary African American prose. In the years 2016–2018, she was a Marie

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Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at UCLan. She also works as Editor at de Gruyter where she is responsible for the Open Access program on culture and the journal Open Cultural Studies. A. Elisabeth Reichel  is Assistant Professor (Akademische Rätin a.Z.) of American Studies at the Institute for British and American Studies of Osnabrück University. She has been a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College and Georgetown University and has held research and teaching positions at the universities of Basel, Bern, and Mannheim. She is the author of Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict (2021). Apart from poetry, cultural anthropology, and (inter)mediality, her main research interests are located at the intersections of literature and economics and law and literature. Gundo Rial y Costas  holds a PhD in Latin American Studies (“Making America: The Social Imaginary of the Brazilian Telenovela,” accepted with summa cum laude) from Freie Universität Berlin (2011). He did his postdoctoral research at Universidade Federal Fluminense of Rio de Janeiro (2014) in human geography on the representation of favelas. He is a researcher at the Centre for Regionalization and Globalization at Universidade Federal Fluminense. He teaches German culture and language at the Instituto Cultural Germánico (ICG) in Rio de Janeiro where he is also the curator of the film club. Rial y Costas studies social, cultural, media, and literary transformations in the Americas and the German-speaking countries. He has published journal articles and book chapters in English, Portuguese, and German and has presented his work at international conferences in Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Poland, Portugal, and Hungary. Among his most relevant publications are “Spaces of Insecurity? The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro Between Stigmatization and Glorification” in Iberoamericana (2011), “The Transmigrant in the Spotlight? Space and Movement in the Brazilian Telenovela” in Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music and Art: Performing Migration (2012), and “Translating the American Dream? A Brazilian Vision of the Promised Land” in Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking (2014). He is also an activist who works on social projects in the favelas and writes critical articles about literature festivals in the periphery (with Jungle World and Latin American News, “Lateinamerikanachrichten”).

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Silvia Schultermandl  is Professor of American Studies at the University of Graz, where she teaches courses in American literature/culture studies. She is the author of a monograph on the representation of mother–daughter conflicts in Asian American literature and the (co-)editor of five collections of essays which explore various themes in transnational studies and American literature and culture, as well as family and kinship studies. She is preparing for publication a monograph on the aesthetics of transnationalism in American literature from the Revolution to 9/11 and is developing, with May Friedman, the Palgrave Series in Kinship, Representation, and Difference. Cathy  Covell  Waegner  taught American Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in 2013. She holds a BA from the College of William & Mary and an MA and a PhD from the University of Virginia. In addition to her work on Native American concerns and authors, including Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich, she has published on Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, as well as on topics such as 400  years after Jamestown, Afro-Asian “postmodern passing,” “hybrid tropes” in film, and the interaction between American and European cultural phenomena. She has written a chapter for New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches (2018). Waegner has co-­edited a MESEA volume with French colleagues on diasporic ethnicities, a project volume with Norfolk State University colleagues on transculturality and perceptions of the immigrant other, and edited Mediating Indianness (2015). She has co-edited a volume with Yiorgos Kalogeras titled Ethnic Resonances: New Perspectives on Performance, Literature, and Identity (2020). Waegner served as MESEA Treasurer for four years. Marta Werbanowska  is a doctoral candidate and undergraduate instructor at the Department of English at Howard University in Washington, DC. She holds a Master’s in English Studies from the University of Warsaw in Poland and has spent an academic year as a Fulbright scholar/researcher at University of North Carolina Charlotte. In her dissertation, she traces the presence of the Black Atlantic tradition of ecological thinking and critique of Western humanism in the works of selected contemporary African American poets.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Ledger drawing by Zo-tom, On the Parapet of Fort Marion Next Day After Arrival (© Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) 66 Ledger drawing by O-kuh-ha-tuh, Indian Prisoners and Ladies Archery Club St. Augustine (© National Anthropological Archives of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution) 68 Autonomous and self-funded graffiti by ACME in favela of Pavãozinho in Rio de Janeiro (June 2016) 153 Graffiti “Justice for Douglas DG” by ACME in the favela of Pavão155

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Yiorgos D. Kalogeras, Johanna C. Kardux, Monika Mueller, and Jopi Nyman

When the Spaniards discovered this land, their leader asked the Indians how it was called; as they did not understand him, they said uic athan, which means ‘what do you say’ or ‘what do you speak’ that ‘we don’t understand you.’ And then the Spaniard ordered it set down that it be called Yucatan. —Antonio de Ciudad Real

Y. D. Kalogeras (*) Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] J. C. Kardux Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Mueller Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. Nyman University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_1

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Parchments Are More Patient than Humans Histories and literary texts can be read like old parchments: inscribed on their surface, there is a strong identification with a literate high culture. Such a high culture is presented as coexisting with an entire political unit and its corresponding total population. The aim underlining the inscription is to establish a sentiment of wholeness and a sense of continuity with the past as a means of erasing alienation and rupture. Nevertheless, while some readers will be content with the visible text alone, others might prefer to delve deeper, uncovering layers of text either purposefully covert or struggling to surface over time. One such story is encapsulated in the epigraph, derived from Antonio de Ciudad Real’s (1551–1617) ethnographic observations during his travels from Mexico to Nicaragua from 1584 to 1589.1 The story has invited ironic—and, we would suggest, palimpsestic—readings: Rather than the puzzlement the sixteenth-century Franciscan friar predicates in this passage about the naming of Yucatán, scholars have recently decoded the response as the indigenous people’s challenge to their Spanish colonizers: they return the colonizers’ question to them. As anthropologist Quetzil Castañeda (2002, 120) points out, the often-cited story of the first encounter of the indigenous Maya and the Spanish conqueror has thus become a topos of postcolonial critique (Todorov 1984, 98–99; Greenblatt 1992, 104). Like a palimpsest, de Ciudad Real’s text is thus read to contain, and upon scrutiny reveal, a deeper layer of meaning, in which the invaded call into question the presence of their invaders. Ironically, however, Castañeda sees this postcolonial reading as another form of imposing Western meaning and thus reproducing the “colonization of space, history and people” (2002, 121). Postcolonial reiterations of the story do not recover the “lost” indigenous voice or reveal the “authentic” origin of the colonial name for the region as grounded in “the Maya expression of miscomprehension” (Greenblatt 1992, 104); such readings, Castañeda (2002, 121) argues, fail to engage in a “more rigorous decipherment” of a text that traces the Maya’s active participation in this toponymic construction. In unraveling the entangled layers of Ciudad Real’s translated text in its multilingual dimensions, Castañeda performs precisely the kind of palimpsestic—or rather as we will call it, palimpsestuous—reading that is a central theme and methodology in this volume. Ethnic and postcolonial texts, studied diachronically, as shadows of absence, and synchronically, as manifestations of a new presence, allow

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contemporary scholars to read cultures as complex palimpsests, in which the old texts interact in complex ways with the new ones, thus generating new meanings. Certainly, modernity has obliterated much of earlier discourses and narratives; yet, it is still possible, as the chapters in this volume argue, to uncover traces of the meta-narratives that organize nations, often hidden underneath the text of colonial and neo-colonial histories. The task is not easy: As Castañeda’s revisionary reading of the story of the naming of Yucatán suggests, new texts are constantly being added to the existing layers, mingling with, and sometimes even replacing, older inscriptions. Parchments, no doubt, are more patient than humans.

Palimpsests in Theory Historically, the palimpsest has been associated with the recovery of long-­ lost texts which had been scraped off from old parchments which were then overwritten with new texts. Thus a palimpsest is a “parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing” (Oxford English Dictionary 2020). One of the most famous examples is the Archimedes palimpsest; a thirteenth-century Greek prayer book was written upon leaves that contained the erased texts of two otherwise unknown treatises by Archimedes (The Archimedes Palimpsest 2020). Originally, the whole procedure of deciphering the underlying text on a parchment was part of a textual resurrection in which the newest text was not considered to be as important as the older one(s), as was the case with the Archimedes palimpsest. While the recent interest in the palimpsest as a trope has led to a very productive theorization of the term in literary and cultural studies, such theorization has taken into consideration not only the older text(s) but also the newer one, as well as the obvious and not so obvious relations between the two. Very important in the recent theorization of the term are Gerard Genette’s (1997) and Sarah Dillon’s (2007) studies, which provide the theoretical framework for several chapters in this volume. Genette’s Palimpsests (1997) introduces the terms “hypotext” and “hypertext” to define the complex relationship between the older and the newer texts. As Genette writes, “[W]hat I call hypertext … is any text derived from a previous text [hypotext] either through simple transformation, which I shall simply call from now on transformation, or through

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indirect transformation, which I shall call imitation” (1997, 7). Thus, Genette slightly alters the traditional definition of the palimpsest, and proposes that a palimpsest is a document where “on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not conceal but allows to show through” (1997, 398–399). Genette (1997) postulates that every literary work evokes some other literary work and that in this sense all literary texts are hypertextual. Multiple narratives are either directly quoted or implicitly evoked, adding layers of meaning that can be distinguished. In his understanding, hybridization is a common feature of any text. In a palimpsest, the earlier layers of writing are not completely erased but can be retrieved and reconstructed. Regarding textual hybridity as this definition of the palimpsest implies, Lene M. Johannessen (2011, 880) makes an important point; citing Susan Stanford Friedman (1998, 86), she writes that it could certainly be argued that hybridity is ordinary and ubiquitous, but it should also be remembered that it is “‘transgressive, counterhegemonic, resistant, [and] interruptive.’” For Genette, “each literary or aesthetic text produces a palimpsest, superimposing several other texts which are never completely hidden, but always hinted at” (Morgan 1989, 271). The palimpsest is a complex hybridized structure; layers of different narratives determine its meaning. Johannessen argues that “such layeredness operates chronologically and vertically lending itself to the unearthing of meanings and stories” (2011, 872). She connects the palimpsest with the postcolonial critique of the “archive,”2 recalling Mikhail Bakhtin’s pronouncement that at any moment in the development there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time. (Bakhtin 1975, 106)

The figure of the palimpsest is particularly appropriate to denote or represent cultural contact situations involving intertextual relationships. Our volume, Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture: Surfacing Histories, focuses on the ways in which this literary trope can be applied to ethnic literary and cultural studies. The notion of the palimpsest we are working with in this volume refers to the unearthing of long-ago silenced voices that have been hidden under layers of violence and

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suppression. Our project aims to uncover the long-suppressed histories of colonization, to detect the traces left behind, and to expedite the resurfacing of voices that paradoxically have been preserved in spite of the destructive forces working against them. In so doing, we follow Lene M. Johannessen’s view: The critic approaches the postcolonial text “not entirely unlike the excavation site, sensing the presences of pasts …, trying to discern what memories and meanings they carry” (2011, 873). Lene M. Johannessen (2011) raises a very appropriate issue that ties in with the statement in the previous paragraph but more importantly also with a point this volume makes. If a theorist attempts to conflate the palimpsest with intertextuality, s/he needs to remember that the two work differently: “[W]here intertextuality finds its place among narratives always already there, the palimpsest produces its layers as the hitherto unheard of, the forgotten, the unaccounted for: palimpsesting is fraught with the fractures and seams of forced erasure and suppression, and, in a word, comes with jagged edges” (Johannessen 2011, 879). Johannessen (2011, 876–877) clarifies the conceptual distinction in an analysis of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s poem I am Joaquín (1975): The epic poem reworks Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” from the perspective of Mexican American experience and gives voice to silenced stories and the witnesses of the past. As Johannessen puts it, “the singing of a coherent Self as a metaphor of nation is countered with a conflicted self constituted into being by plurality” (2011, 878). Sarah Dillon’s The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) also emphasizes the difference between the intertextual and the palimpsest. She claims that “the figuration of a text as palimpsest does not describe the relationship between a text and its sources. The palimpsest is not a metaphor of origin, influence or filiation; it is not a synonym for intertextuality” (2007, 85). She thus suggests that the palimpsest provides a concept for the global experience of writing that is more appropriate than the concept of intertextuality. The figure of the palimpsest avoids the confusion with source study that, according to Julia Kristeva, plagues the term “intertextuality” by virtue of the fact that the texts that constitute the palimpsest are historically unrelated with each other (Dillon 2007, 85). By using the definite article when referring to the palimpsest, Dillon aims to differentiate between an actual, physical copy of an overwritten manuscript and a figurative understanding of the palimpsest as a metaphor for texts seemingly unrelated to one another. She argues that palimpsestic

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texts do relate to one another—the palimpsest is an inherently dialogical device that fosters intertextual conversations. In the introduction to her book, Dillon (2007) also proposes a distinction between the palimpsestic and the “palimpsestuous.” She defines the palimpsestic as the process of layering that produces the palimpsest, while the palimpsestuous refers to the structure created by this process of layering and the “subsequent reappearance of the underlying texts” (2007, 3). The term “palimpsestuous” evokes the way in which “otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other” (Dillon 2007, 2). Aware of the performative nature of her etymological search, Dillon (2007, 4) traces the origin of this neologism back to Gerard Genette, who attributes it to Philippe Lejeune, though he does not mention the essay on Roland Barthes in which Lejeune coined the term. However, most importantly, she emphasizes the unfamiliarity of this adjective; it is an unfamiliarity that makes the reader stop and consider what is invested in the word: As a striking and unfamiliar neologism, “palimpsestuous” immediately performs this function in relation to the concept of the palimpsest. Not surprisingly, like all words, it is also itself palimpsestuous—it is composed of meanings, sounds, and other words, which collide and collude on and in its surface. (Dillon 2007, 5)

Ethnic and Postcolonial Palimpsests In addition, the palimpsest is not only a literary or textual phenomenon. In his essay “Ethnic Palimpsest,” Werner Sollors (1995) has suggested that the concept can be applied to urban settings to understand the ethnic transformation of particular localities. In such a case a particular migrant group enters a particular neighborhood and eventually moves away and is replaced with other groups. However, each group leaves traces of their life in the locality, possibly texts, images, or linguistic markers (Sollors 1995, 262–279). In a case study addressing the Norwegian American community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and its heritage, Vivian Aalborg Worley (2007) shows how a locality that was mainly Norwegian until the 1960s gradually transformed as the Norwegians left the area that was taken over by other migrants, generating a new layer in the palimpsest. For instance, the Norwegian Seamen’s Church remains on its place, but has been converted to condominiums (Worley 2007, 71). In this urban palimpsest, the

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earlier layer may remain seen for a period in shop signs advertising ethnic foods associated with the formerly dominant community (Worley 2007, 77).3 In his highly influential study Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen also argues that “literary techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively, and deconstructively” can be woven into our understanding of lived cities and buildings as “urban palimpsests,” evoking “memories of what there was before” as well as “imagined alternatives to what there is” (2003, 7). Scholars in border studies have also suggested that borderlands where borders have shifted produce similar palimpsest landscapes where changing political realities generate different architectural layers, as shown in Nadir Kinossian and Urban Wråkberg’s (2017) analysis of the changing urban landscape of the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda (formerly Memel) with German, Lithuanian, and (post-)Soviet layers. Palimpsests, as they often deal with imagined pasts and histories, have played a significant role in ethnic and postcolonial literatures. Like intertextuality, the palimpsest is a way of writing back and challenging the authority of established texts and associated power hierarchies by showing how they re-emerge with new meanings. In so doing, ethnic and postcolonial texts revisiting earlier texts, through either intertextuality or the palimpsestuous, are examples of what Helen Tiffin (1987) describes as “counter-discourse.” Postcolonial versions of canonical texts such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) or J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) are not merely responses to the English literary canon, but write back more generally and politically “to the whole of the discursive field within which such a text operated and continues to operate in post-colonial worlds” (1987, 23). Such counter-discourse challenges not only colonial texts, epistemologies, and ideologies but also cultural myths and stereotypes. As Deborah Madsen shows in her analysis of Chicana responses to the myth of La Malinche, a figure that symbolizes “the conquered, colonized woman” (2003, 71), contemporary writers such as Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo challenge in their rewriting of the myth established and harmful views based on machismo and victimization (see 2003, 72–76).4 Critics of ethnic and postcolonial literatures have shown that the uses of the palimpsest (and the palimpsestuous) are many, ranging from linguistic and textual strategies to rewriting histories of colonization and migration, as also the case studies in the volume testify.5 Postcolonial African literature written in European languages, as Chantal Zabus (2007) has argued, can be understood as a palimpsest where the surface of the colonizer’s

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language does not manage to suppress the writer’s primary language: What Zabus calls “an African rhythm” (2007, xvii), deriving from, for example, Igbo or Mandinka, indigenizes the colonizer’s language by expressing culturally specific, African patterns of thinking and concepts through it (Zabus 2007, 3). Seen most clearly in linguistic strategies such as use of pidgin and linguistic code-switching in literary texts, the “scriptural authority” (Zabus 2007, 3) of the colonizer’s language is eroded and a different layer emerges and gives the text its distinct identity. In addition to the West African literatures discussed by Zabus, good examples of linguistic palimpsest can be found in the English–Spanish code-switching characterizing Chicanx writing from Gloria Anzaldúa to Denise Chavez, and in the multilingual streets of New York’s Lower East Side found in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934).6 The palimpsest is also a central trope in postcolonial literature where it has been particularly employed to critique established and monological representations of history. As Roland Sintos Coloma, Alexander Means, and Anna Kim write, “the concept of palimpsest is particularly relevant to comprehend the discursive, material, and psychical linkages of history and the present since, despite effacements, the sedimentation of previous texts remains” (2009, 3). Such entanglements have been explored in the novels and other works by acclaimed writers such as Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh; the multilayeredness of history is often forgotten in dominant discourse and postcolonial texts make it possible to understand the “process of erasure, inscription and partial emergence of suppressed discourse” (Salgado 2007, 158). According to Minoli Salgado, the representation of history as a palimpsest, consisting of different intertwined narratives and stories with fictional and historical figures, in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) suggests that history is not an ordered, linear story with “a logic of cause and consequence,” but a hybrid construct of cultural fusion characterized by “temporal compression and simultaneity” (2007, 161) that cannot be acclaimed by any particular ideology or political group. Indeed, Mona Narain (2006, 55) suggests that by introducing Moorish, Jewish, and Portuguese pasts in India, the novel challenges and “destabilizes” religion-based Indian political discourses through its historical palimpsest. Other postcolonial writers also see history as multiply written and erased. In his discussion of the significance of the palimpsest in Amitav Ghosh’s various texts, Anshuman A. Mondal (2007, 149) points to the way In an Antique Land (1992); the text addresses the correspondence

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between a twelfth-century Jewish trader and his slaves and sees history as a palimpsest where earlier layers are obscured by later ones.7 At the same time, in his 2008 novel The Wasted Vigil, Pakistani–British author Nadeem Aslam emphasizes that the different layers of history sedimented in the landscapes of Afghanistan do remain visible, with a half-buried statue of the Buddha recalling the fact that the province in which the novel is set “was one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Buddhist world from the second to the seventh centuries AD” (2007, 22–23), despite the Taliban’s violent attempts to destroy the traces of the religions predating Islam in the region. Further, palimpsest histories, as Saskia Fuerst (2017) suggests, can be approached from a different perspective that sees their effect in the present as haunting. In Fuerst’s (2017) view, the past may extend to the present through intergenerational, “ancestral,” and “ghostly” memories and stories that haunt the black women characters in the Caribbean fiction she analyzes. Fuerst sees the characters’ attempt to cope with the traumatizing past in their lives as a palimpsest: The stories by Edwidge Danticat and Dionne Brand participate in the reconstruction of Caribbean histories as “they actively rewrite specific, traumatic experiences of the protagonists and of their ancestors through hauntings to provide these events with a new or (renewed) purpose and meaning for the present” (Fuerst 2017, 67). In other words, in the stories the past of the character’s ancestors emerges with new meanings, thus showing how they are written anew.

Structure of Volume The different chapters address both figurative and concrete examples of palimpsests as they raise issues such as the implied relationship between different sources of knowledge and between seemingly unconnected archival materials. They theorize the connections between the originary hypotext and the subsequent hypertext as connections of intimacy and separation. Cultural fragments that at first appear to be unconnected and disparate are viewed as strong traces that, when merging in the imaginary with vestiges of the past, bring together previous experiences with startling new perceptions. Furthermore, the chapters show how revisionist interventions into official histories modify the latter and produce new archives. The case studies also bring to the fore narratives that retrieve and reassemble what has been dis(re)membered and what remains unaccounted for. Genette’s and Dillon’s theoretical models of the palimpsest

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are frequently cited in the individual chapters and thus serve as a shared frame of reference, adding theoretical unity to the volume. Other scholars whose work is highly relevant for the volume include Andreas Huyssen (2003) and Lene M. Johannessen (2011). Following Dillon (2007) and focusing on ethnic literary and cultural texts, the volume’s contributors engage in acts of “palimpsestuous” reading, attending to the ways in which multiple inscriptions and competing narratives are intertwined and dialogized, producing complex meanings. Positioning themselves in multiethnic, transnational, and/or postcolonial literary and cultural studies, the individual chapters explore, for example, the palimpsest histories of military forts on the coast of Virginia and Florida; the socially, economically, and culturally stratified urban landscapes of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles; the layered sites of memory of the Black Atlantic; and the palimpsest configurations of mythologies and religions that blur strict cultural distinctions while also arguing against cultural relativism. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part, “Scraping off and Writing/Painting Over: Revisiting the Archive,” includes three chapters that thematize the palimpsest as a means of making the unrealized potentialities of the past visible in the present. The volume opens with Silvia Schultermandl’s “Palimpsestuous Historiographies in Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I-Hotel.” Schultermandl discusses the concept of the palimpsest as an organizational logic in historical recovery projects. Addressing Lowe’s and Yamashita’s monumental projects as examples of palimpsestuous historiographies of political affinities and complex pasts, Schultermandl analyzes the creative scholarly and artistic practices through which historical recovery projects explore the multidirectional affiliations among various ethnic communities. Such historiographies foreground the role of historical archives of ethnic movements and colonial legacies not as repositories of primary sources but as themselves subject to critical scrutiny. Engaging with these archives’ complex and intersecting layers of historical evidence, this chapter shows how discourses of good and bad colonial subjects and citizens factor into the decision which stories history usually tells, and how Lowe and Yamashita re-negotiate such value judgments for the sake of exposing the teleological narratives of progress and liberalism. In “The Body as a Palimpsest: Stor(y)ing Memories in Michelle Cliff’s Clare Savage Novels and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” Izabella Penier engages with three texts, Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984) and No Telephone

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to Heaven (1987) and Gayle Jones’s Corregidora (1975). All three narratives are histories of “yellow” (biracial) women. In the case of Clare Savage and Ursa Corregidora, the characters’ bodies serve as palimpsests and their skin color inadvertently reveals the silenced history of racial and sexual exploitation of their great-grandmothers. Both authors reconstruct the submerged histories of the past and engage with the stor(y)ing of memories, but their narratives illustrate different dynamics and outcomes of “scraping off” the dominant narratives of the past. Cliff’s novels recount a now conventional story of a “mulatto” heroine, trained to pass for white and erase her black heritage. In these novels, the indigenous discourse must be recovered from erasure from the dominant colonial discourse. In Corregidora, however, the maternal narrative, telling the story of Brazilian slavery and the suffering of Corregidora women, is the dominant one. The submerged narrative, which Ursa Corregidora needs to retrieve from the muddled past, is the fascination that Corregidora women felt for their oppressor, the Portuguese slave-owner named Corregidora. The protagonists Ursa and Clare take different routes toward self-awareness and spiritual wholeness. For both of them motherhood, or “making generations,” is connected to making political choices of “painting over” or “scraping off” the disconcerting remains of their pasts. Cathy Covell Waegner’s “Cultural Palimpsests on the Ethnic Shore: Refunctionalizing Seaside Forts” completes this part. By considering the transforming uses of monumental forts on the eastern US seaboard (specifically Fort Monroe and Fort Marion) from military defense to incarceration of Native “renegades” and/or refuge for runaway slaves, Waegner offers ways to discursively activate the static trope of the palimpsest through what she calls an “imaginary of the functional.” She draws on cultural theorists such as Andreas Huyssen, Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, and Jace Weaver to develop the concept of two-way dynamic processes interrelating palimpsest and heterotopic layers in littoral spaces. She analyzes Diane Glancy’s imaginative linking of ostensibly disparate historical and personal strata in Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education and uncovers layered protest in the captives’ ledger drawings. Moreover, Waegner shows that the circulatory paths of the Native and African American fort-dwellers crossed palimpsestically, thus evoking transcultural-historical dialogue on the ethnic shore. The second part is titled “Contested and Interwoven Histories: The City as Palimpsest in Literature and Culture” and consists of four chapters. The chapters in this part focus on four major urban zones: the “global

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cities” Marseille, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and Johannesburg. Because of their importance as sites of cultural interchange across time, these cities are nodes for “palimpsestuous” cultural and artifactual practices, which are studied by the contributors through textual analysis. Page Laws’s “Littoral/Literal Watermarks: Layers of Signification in Maritime Marseille” examines the port city of Marseille as a sensory and cultural palimpsest, awash in 2600 years of the sights, sounds, and smells of Mediterranean Europe, Africa, and even distant America and Asia. Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy of plays about Marseille from the 1920s and 1930s (later turned into films, most famously the 1961 film Fanny) represent a native’s affectionate perspective on this city of immigrants. However, Marseille’s Vieux Port also inspired Banjo (1929), by Jamaican–American author Claude McKay, seminal author of the Harlem Renaissance, and The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2001) by James Welch, co-founder of the Native American Renaissance. As Laws shows, comparing Pagnol’s harbor folk with McKay’s dockworkers and Welch’s stranded American Indian (also a dockworker) reveals surprising strata of signification. As last case study, Laws discusses Senegalese writer and filmmaker Sembène Ousmane’s semi-autobiographical Francophone dockworker novel Le docker noir (1956), which adds another significant layer to the 2600-year-old-­anddeep Marseille palimpsest. Kudzayi Ngara’s “Memory, History, and Identity: Postcolonial Urban Palimpsests in the Writing of Ivan Vladislavić” bases its analysis on the dynamic tension between history and monuments. Ngara’s chapter argues that acts of covering up result in ironic versions of the post-apartheid urban palimpsest in selected stories by South African author Ivan Vladislavić. The present–absent nature of historical monuments instantiates democratic procedures and serves as a subtle and ambiguous reminder of the fluidity between an age that is past and one ushered in post-1994 South Africa. Ngara examines how the palimpsestic effect is achieved in the overwriting of different histories onto physical space, histories that are contesting but inextricably interwoven in palimpsestuous fashion. He deploys the logic of the palimpsest to evaluate how one contesting history (the hypertext) can be directly written over another, without completely eliding the older, underlying version (the hypotext). Sophia Emmanouilidou’s “Ominous Borders, Liminal Bridges: Narrative Palimpsests of Cultural History and Racial Subjectivity in Alejandro Morales’s Epic Novel River of Angels (2014)” tackles the traumas and tragic reversals in the lives of a wide array of characters whose

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frames of reference are the fickle Los Angeles River and the construction of bridges. The novel conceptualizes porciúncula (part of the original name of the Los Angeles River) as a turbulent borderland space and a metaphor for the free flow of self-identity. The bridges function not only as a catalyst of racial segregation but also as a liminal site for the implementation of numerous border crossings. River of Angels proves to be a productive case study for a palimpsestuous reading of urban expansion, socio-political complexity, and multiethnic presence in the Los Angeles basin area. The part closes with Gundo Rial y Costas’s “Locating the Favela: Place and Representation in the Marvelous City of Rio de Janeiro.” This empirically grounded analysis considers location and representation of the favela based on reading its representation through Appadurai’s theorization of localities and translocalities. It highlights that favela construction oscillates between removals from and forced “integration” into “Marvelous City,” the historical and current creation of Rio de Janeiro. Attempts to overcome the stigmatizing rhetoric of a “divided city” for the geographically close and symbolically remote favelas are suggested. The increasing interest in the favela has led to a new gentrification called here “vidigalization.” The representation of the favela is situated between erasure and hyperspatizalization and reinforced by favela film and tourism. Community museums, and especially the open-air graffiti “Museum of Favela,” showcase alternative favela self-representation. Finally, two examples from the favela are proposed as new translocalities which offer the “Marvelous Favela” as an alternative to the “Marvelous City.” The final part of the volume, “Rethinking Cultural Structures and Literary Strategies,” consists of three chapters. The part opens with A. Elisabeth Reichel’s “On the Poetry of a Boasian Cultural Anthropologist: Ruth Benedict’s Palimpsestuous Writings.” Reichel takes issue with Clifford Geertz’s claim that in Ruth Benedict’s ethnography “[t]he Not-us […] unnerves the Us” (1988, 106) and cautions that her classic Patterns of Culture is rife with the differentialism that inheres in cultural pluralist and relativist conceptions of culture, thus precisely forestalling what Geertz terms “[s]elf-nativizing” (1988, 106–107). It is against this backdrop that Benedict’s largely unexplored poetry and her peculiar, palimpsestuous poetic style gain significance. By layering diverse mythologies in palimpsest-like configurations, Benedict confuses cultural distinctions, including those along familiar discriminatory lines such as p ­ rimitive/modern. Benedict thus offers an access to anthropology’s subject of

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investigation that not only short-circuits differentialist and essentializing tendencies but also unsettles the observer’s I-here-now in a culturally inflected binarism against They-there-then. The second chapter in this part is Marta Werbanowska’s “A Palimpsest of Herstories: Intertextuality as a Womanist Practice in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills.” Reading Naylor’s work from a womanist, rather than feminist, perspective, Werbanowska argues that the polyvocal and palimpsestic textual strategy in Linden Hills embodies the ideas of reclamation and liberation of a specifically black and female agency, informed by communal consciousness and a sense of racial collectivism. Focusing on the storyline of Willa Prescott Nedeed, she claims that the novel’s palimpsestic textual strategy fosters a reclamation and liberation of black female agency. The polyphonic narratives of Willa and her predecessors—black women functioning in a space dominated by whiteness and masculinity—form a textual palimpsest that celebrates the previously silenced Black female voices and privileges cooperation (along and across gender lines) as a healing force in the black community. The final chapter of the part and of the volume is Aparajita Nanda’s “A Palimpsestuous Reading of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood.” This chapter offers a reading of Octavia Butler’s science fiction trilogy Lilith’s Brood as a palimpsestuous text that brings into play epistemological fields as diverse as genetics, environmental science, religious studies, and even linguistics. Using Dillon’s definition of the palimpsestuous as a concept that acknowledges the simultaneous existence of conflictual discourses to discuss the African American writer’s engagement with Hindu texts, Nanda argues that, through the philosophical lens provided by Hinduism, one may better explain the possible survival of humanity and the environment in Butler’s fiction. For Butler, Nanda concludes, the future of this world lies in the concept of flux, of unpredictability and open-endedness that in its new palimpsestuous structures need to acknowledge the contribution of other cultures.

Notes 1. The epigraph is borrowed from Castañeda (2002, 119), who references Clendinnen (1987) as his source. Clendinnen’s (1987, 229) own source reference indicates that it is a quote from Antonio de Ciudad Real’s Relacion de las cosas que sucedieron al R. P. Comisario General Alonso Ponce … (1588), in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, vols. 57 and

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58, Madrid, 1872. The translation is evidently Clendinnen’s. Clendinnen also uses the quote as an epigraph in her book Ambivalent Conquests (1987). 2. The notion of the archive as validating dominant and logocentric historical memories and narratives has been critiqued by postcolonial scholars such as Ann Laura Stoller and Diane Taylor. Taylor (2003) suggests that by addressing the past from a different perspective, not through textual archives, which she calls “the repertoire,” it is possible to engage with past through embodied memory: “performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing— in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (2003, 20). 3. Stanley D.  Brunn calls such spaces “ethnic palimpsest landscapes” (2010, 226). 4. For other postcolonial rewritings, see Thieme (2001). 5. The term has been used quite widely in ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural criticism. For instance, Brenda Watts (2004) applies it to Gloria Anzaldúa’s version of the utopian Chicana/o homeland of Aztlán. Jenna Grace Sciuto (2016) has suggested that the contradictory representation of biracial Charles Bon in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) can be understood as a palimpsest that brings forth the different forms of colonialism in the novel. Brett St Louis (2018) has described Stuart Hall’s posthumous memoir Familiar Stranger (2017) as a “post/colonial palimpsest” because of the way it addresses the evolution of Hall’s thinking through a lens of critical self-reflection and mobility. 6. See, for example, Wirth-Nesher (1990), Donadey (2000), Martin (2005), and Lauret (2014). 7. While many critics emphasize the role of imperialism and colonialism as playing a major role in palimpsestic representations of often violent histories, Glasgow and Fletcher (2005) suggest that postcolonial palimpsests can also use other narrative strategies such as irony to express and erase meanings.

References Aslam, Nadeem. 2008. The Wasted Vigil. London: Faber and Faber. Bakhtin, M.M. 1975. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brunn, Stanley D. 2010. Reading and Mapping America’s Changing Ethnic Geomorphologies and Palimpsest Geographies. In Multicultural Geographies: The Changing Racial/Ethnic Patterns of the United States, ed. John W. Frazier and Florence M. Margai, 219–230. New York: SUNY Press. Castañeda, Quetzil. 2002. Post/Colonial Toponymy: Writing Forward ‘In Reverse’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 11: 119–134. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1356932022000004166.

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Clendinnen, Inga. 1987. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517–1570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coloma, Roland Sintos, Alexander Means, and Anna Kim. 2009. Palimpsest Histories and Catachrestic Interventions. In Postcolonial Challenges in Education, ed. Roland Sintos Coloma, 3–22. New York: Lang. Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Donadey, Anne. 2000. The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian Palimpsest. World Literature Today 74 (1): 27–36. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1998. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fuerst, Saskia. 2017. Palimpsests of Ancestral Memories: Black Women’s Collective Identity Development in Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat and Dionne Brand. English Academy Review 34 (2): 66–75. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10131752.2017.140629. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity. Genette, Gerard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Dubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Glasgow, Melita, and Don Fletcher. 2005. Palimpsest and Seduction: The Glass Palace and White Teeth. Kunapipi 27 (1): 75–87. Greenblatt, Stephen J. 1992. Marvelous Possessions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Johannessen, Lene M. 2011. Palimpsest and Hybridity in Postcolonial Writing. In The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson, vol. 2, 869–902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kinossian, Nadir, and Urban Wråkberg. 2017. Palimpsests. In Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe, 90–110. New York: Berghahn. Lauret, Maria. 2014. Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Madsen, Deborah L. 2003. Counter-Discursive Strategies in Contemporary Chicana Writing. In Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Deborah L. Madsen, 65–76. London: Pluto. Martin, Holly E. 2005. Code-Switching in US Ethnic Literature: Multiple Perspectives Presented Through Multiple Languages. Changing English 12 (3): 403–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/13586840500347277. Mondal, Anshuman A. 2007. Amitav Ghosh. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Morgan, Thais. 1989. The Space of Intertextuality. In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, 239–279. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Narain, Mona. 2006. Re-Imagined Histories: Rewriting the Early Modern in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2): 55–68. Oxford English Dictionary. 2020. Online ed. www.oed.com. Accessed 19 September 2020. Salgado, Minoli. 2007. The Politics of the Palimpsest in The Moor’s Last Sigh. In The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah, 153–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sciuto, Jenna Grace. 2016. Postcolonial Palimpsests: Entwined Colonialisms and the Conflicted Representation of Charles Bon in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47 (4): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2016.0044. Sollors, Werner. 1995. Ethnic Palimpsest. In Performances in American Literature and Culture: Essays in Honor of Professor Orm Øverland on His 60th Birthday, ed. Vidar Pedersen and Zeljka Svrljuga, 262–279. Bergen: University of Bergen. St Louis, Brett. 2018. Post/Colonial Palimpsest and the Place of Ideas. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 25 (1): 55–60. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1070289X.2017.1412155. Taylor, Diane. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. The Archimedes Palimpsest. 2020. www.archimedespalimpsest.org. Accessed 19 September. 2020. Thieme, John. 2001. Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London: Continuum. Tiffin, Helen. 1987. Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse. Kunapipi 9 (3): 17–34. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper and Row. Watts, Brenda. 2004. Aztlán as a Palimpsest: From Chicano Nationalism Toward Transnational Feminism in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands. Latino Studies 2: 304–321. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600104. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. 1990. Between Mother Tongue and Native Language: Multilingualism in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. Prooftexts 10: 297–312. Worley, Vivian Aalborg. 2007. The Past is Never Lost. MA Thesis, Department of English, University of Bergen. http://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/2756. Accessed 19 September 2020. Zabus, Chantal. 2007. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Anglophone Novel. 2nd enlarged ed. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

PART I

Scraping off and Writing/Painting Over: Revisiting the Archive

CHAPTER 2

Palimpsestuous Historiographies in Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I-Hotel Silvia Schultermandl

Introduction: The Palimpsest and the Archive Whether through artistic or scholarly engagement, recovering the past bears many difficulties, among them the paradox of recovery itself. Thinking of historical recovery as palimpsestuous processes yields insights into the various linkages between different histories while honoring the inherent challenges that result from the systematic omissions or compartmentalizations which have shaped archives, especially those of minoritized groups. In her seminal study The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), Sarah Dillon describes the chemical/mechanical process through which the palimpsest comes into being as a visual phenomenon of imperfectly erased scripture on parchment whose traces of iron-containing ink corrode and emerge in a reddish, phantom-like impression on the scroll. Hence her definition of the palimpsest as “an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately

S. Schultermandl (*) University of Graz, Graz, Austria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_2

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interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other” (Dillon 2007, 4). I employ the palimpsest as a concept through which to rethink processes of historization of late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century liberalism and mid-twentieth-century democratization in the broadest context of the US nation-state. Dillon’s notion of the palimpsest epitomizes the relationship between seemingly unconnected archival material, whose disparate states result from a distribution of knowledge according to prevalent epistemological frameworks brought about by hegemonic knowledge production and dissemination. What is crucial in Dillon’s use of the term “palimpsest” is its implied relationship between different sources of knowledge. Thus, I am using the term “palimpsestuous” in Dillon’s sense to denote a “simultaneous relation of intimacy and separation” (Dillon 2007, 3)1 for my analysis of recent projects in transnational American studies whose composition and form call attention to the issues historical recovery yields. I discuss two different practices of palimpsestuous historiography, practices which I describe in terms of a spatial logic of archival recovery work: Lisa Lowe’s project of assembling seemingly disparate sources from different archives in her study The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015b) employs the palimpsest as a logic to connect horizontally; Karen Tei Yamashita’s project underlying her novel I-Hotel (2010) employs the palimpsest vertically to show how different historical traditions intersect in one geographical location. For her study of the myriad material realities of historical colonial governance, Lowe (2015b) reads across the Great Britain National Archives in an attempt to lay bare the rich documentation of the interconnectedness of American, European, Asian, and African social lives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reading this material counter the organizational logic of nationalist and mono-­ ethnic political projects, Lowe (2015b) traces the intricate and intimate relationships between different locations within the British Empire and the discursive constructions which imprint imperial ideology on each of these locations and the forms of social life staged in them. To this end, Lowe (2015b) implies an alternative way of narrating a global colonial past: a past conditional history of the “could have been” which reclaims these intimate connections and thereby resists historiographic linearity. The horizontal connections Lowe’s (2015b) study unearths link phenomena of colonial life geographically and, in turn, throw into relief the superpositions of one ethnic-national history and genealogy to the Americas over another one when in fact the two mutually constitute one another.

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Similarly, Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel I-Hotel (2010) weaves together the history of Asian presence in the United States, but while Lowe’s project connects materials from disparate locations and their expressions of colonial governmentality, Yamashita’s project brings together the history of many racial-ethnic political movements through their relationship to the physical location of the I-Hotel, a former boarding house in San Francisco’s Manilatown. Yamashita uses the final years (1968–1977) of the historical I-Hotel as temporal frame to narrate the history of Asian American political consciousness and activism, including Japanese and Filipino strikes on the sugar plantations, Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese Americans, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Vietnam War, Civil rights movement, and global decolonization movements. Yamashita assembled this archive over the timespan of ten years during which she collected historical materials and conducted over 100 interviews. The various traceable lineages intersect in this archive of the International Hotel, projecting connections to various historical events in the larger context of Asian American history. In the following sections, I not only read Yamashita through Lowe or vice versa, but engage both texts in a larger discussion of historical recovery as a dialogic space facilitating encounters with historical injustice and its persistence, albeit in altered form, to present conditions of how we think of ourselves in relation to the past. My reading of Lowe’s and Yamashita’s respective projects attends to the role of historical archives of ethnic movements and colonial legacies not as sources of material but as material of study themselves, whose complex and intersecting layers of historical evidence allow us to appreciate the palimpsestuous nature of multiethnic communities and alliances.

The Paradox of Historical Recovery The notion of a palimpsestuous historiography foregrounds how archival practices shape dominant epistemologies regarding ethnic and transnational communities. Many critics have challenged the archive’s primary function of historical record keeping and have, in turn, emphasized its affinities with hegemonic structures of power. In her groundbreaking study, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), Diane Taylor contends that the archive is in and of itself a limited space which privileges logocentric recordings of history at the expense of embodied practices of cultural memory. Moreover, Taylor

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argues, archives are characterized by a static nature whose effects on knowledge dissemination become tangible in two myths: “one is that it is unmediated, that objects located there might mean something outside the framing of the archival impetus itself […] Another myth is that the archive resists change, corruptibility, and political manipulation” (2003, 19). Taylor introduces the repertoire as an alternative mode of engagement with history which “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (2003, 20). Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire points to the historically founded practices of historiography which privilege the record of certain cultural practices (material objects, written texts, etc.) over others (embodied and performative practices). Like Taylor, Ann Laura Stoler (2009) argues that the aspects of form and category which underwrite archival structure are often left out in projects which selectively assemble materials in order to document present preconceptions about imperial governance. In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), Stoler engages with the full range of archival materials in her juxtaposition of the official papers and the private record of agents within the colonial governance of the Netherlands East Indies exemplifies the ways in which these agents oscillate between their official relationships toward the colonial center and their personal relationships with colonial subjects on site. Stoler argues that these ambivalences can be traced throughout the archive and become visible in what she terms “archival form,” namely the “prose style, repetitive refrain, the arts of persuasion, affective strains that shape ‘rational’ responses, categories of confidentiality and classification, and not least, genres of documentation” which give grammatical and rhetorical expression to the tension between these relationships within colonial governance (Stoler 2009, 20). Both Stoler (2009) and Taylor (2003) recall to memory Michel Foucault’s insistence that archives are governed by rules and that “since it is from within these rules that we speak […] its modes of appearance, its forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance” are always also implicated in the constituency of every archive (1972, 130). Following Foucault (1972), Stoler (2009), and Taylor (2003), archives are to be met with suspicion because of their inability to account for embodied practices and for the dynamics of the production, circulation, and reception of these practices. But on top of

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that, even if we were to focus on the material and textual nature of archival artifacts, the selection processes leading to the accumulation of things is full of ideological cues about the hegemonic practices of collecting. This implies that certain things have for sure been lost because they did not figure into the sense of historical relevance prevalent at the time of their collection. But not only these things are lost and unredeemable, but so, too, are the ontological conditions of the people whose lives they capture. Archives are therefore both essential in the recuperation of socially excluded lives and not quite adept at restituting these lives. In the present scholarship on the archive of slavery and historical conditions of unfreedom, the potential of historical recovery continues to be of scholarly interest. A recent special issue of the journal Social Text, on the topic of “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive,” broaches this question in a broad sense. In their introduction, guest editors Laura Helton et al. (2015) survey the recuperative work of the first generation of African American Studies scholars, ranging from W.E.B. DuBois’s black nationalism and Pan-Africanism to the decolonial and anti-imperial work by Afro-Caribbean thinkers Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. These critics had, so Helton et  al. contend, “inaugurated a critical historiographical tradition that both mirrored and served broader anticolonial and social-­ democratic movements” (2015, 3). Their work ensured the visibility of diasporic Africans in the United States and elsewhere in the watershed historical moments of world history and simultaneously marks a particular spot for African American experience within modernity. Still, historical injustice can never be undone. For instance, Helton et  al. insist that “historical recovery may never adequately restore the ontological totality of African-descended people silenced within the archive of slavery and freedom” (2015, 7). Lisa Lowe’s contributing essay “History Hesitant” (2015a) takes this a step further by arguing that the recovery of archival knowledge about slavery and conditions of unfreedom is always limited by the imposition of unfreedom exercised in the past which can never be undone.2 This ambivalence between the importance of work through historical layers to unearth the connections around the slave trade and the impossibility to blind out the present social context which benefited from the institution of slavery is central to Lowe’s project. In this light, Lowe maintains that this paradox involves a divergence either between the affirmation of the recovered presence of enslaved people and the many terrains of freedom

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struggle, or the refusal of the temptations of recovery, owing to suspicions that not only modern positivist methods of historical recovery, but also the promises of liberal political enfranchisement to emancipate and redeem, risk subjecting the enslaved to the dominant terms under which they had so long suffered and within which they have been deemed lacking, indebted, or failed. (2015a, 85)

Central to Lowe’s argument about the concurring emergence of a desire for redemption and of the conditions of its foreclosure is the institution of slavery, which, as W.E.B.  DuBois has suggested in Black Reconstruction (1935), is not to be understood as “an aberration of American democracy but its central contradiction” (qtd in Lowe 2015a, 85–86). But, as I argue here, this paradox of recovery also pertains to the archival retrieval of raced, classed, and gendered marginal groups at large. Lowe’s own latest book, The Intimacy of Four Continents (2015b), as I show in this chapter, acknowledges the paradox of recovery and reads history against the grain of established categories of historiography. The connections she draws across the different niches within the archive of late eighteenth- to mid-­ nineteenth-­century global trade of goods, peoples, and ideas highlight the underlying colonial premises which divided the world in a certain way, a division the Great Britain National Archives in London reproduce and thus perpetuate through their categorization of archival material. In the same vein, Yamashita’s archival research for I-Hotel shows that the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown is not only a historical site of Filipino/a American history but the center of intersecting histories of the Black Panther and Yellow Power movements, the Japan Town Collective, the Third World Liberation Front coming out of UC Berkeley, the Mexican farmworker movement, and the Native American occupation of Alcatraz. In what follows, I read Lowe’s and Yamashita’s projects as examples of palimpsestuous historiographies of political affinities and complex pasts as a means of engaging with the question of “the Good” and “the Bad.” In both examples, discourses of good and bad colonial subjects and citizens factor into the decision which stories history usually tells and how Lowe and Yamashita re-negotiate such value judgments for the sake of exposing teleological narratives of progress and liberalism. I am interested in Lowe’s and Yamashita’s respective political and aesthetic engagements of these histories and want to connect their projects to recent trends in inter-­ generational, transnational, and multiethnic scholarship. Through its

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focus on the palimpsest as a critical paradigm which captures the complexity of Asian American history, my reading of Lowe and Yamashita follows recent epistemological shifts in Asian American studies and current ethnic-­ centric formulations of postmodernism.3

The Palimpsest of Colonial Intimacies in Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents Lisa Lowe’s scholarly monograph The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015b)4 engages with the palimpsestuous nature of the Great Britain National Archives, which hold the records of British imperial settlements all over the world, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the governing of British colonies, the importation of Chinese laborers to the Americas, and the abolition of the slave trade. Reading across the categories with which the materials were organized thematically (trade, commerce, law, correspondence, etc.) or geographically (Africa, Asia, New Zealand and Australia, the West Indies, the Atlantic), Lowe frames these connections between these disparate archives via the trope of intimacy, both in its dominant sense of personal intimacy and in its emergent sense as intimacies in the colonies which enabled modern intimacies of domestic life in Europe. For Lowe, intimacy is a heuristic through which to “observe the historical division of world processes into those that develop modern liberal subjects and modern spheres of social life, and those processes that are forgotten, cast as failed or irrelevant because they do not produce ‘value’ legible within modern classifications” (2015b, 17–18). The dialectical relationship between these forms of intimacy in the colonial economies of the Caribbean connects the slave economies which instrumentalized diasporic Africans and indenture and servitude of East and South East Asians with the foundation of European bourgeoisie and the formation of the modern nation-state as manifested in the European era of Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Hence, Lowe’s study brings together ideas resulting in European liberalism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, settler colonialism in the Americas, and the China and East Indies trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The result of this reading across the Great Britain National Archives (which hold, among others, the papers of the British Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, the Slave Trade and African Department, the War and Colonial Department, the Record of the Treaty and Royal Letter

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Department) is an eclectic set of chapters, each one offering a variation on the overall theme of intimacies: Chapter 1 establishes these intimate connections by retracing their geographical connections; Chapter 2 elaborates on the emergence of the liberal political subject and its aesthetic rendering of the contradictions of colonial slavery in Olaudah Equiano’s autobiographical form; Chapter 3 critically examines Britain’s free trade policies with China in commodities such as silk, calico, tea, and opium, and the related import of Chinese indentured laborers into the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1834; Chapter 4 studies John Stuart Mill’s writings on free trade to examine the social conditions and notions of governance which allowed free trade and colonial practices to operate simultaneously in the early nineteenth century because of a very ambivalent rhetoric of what constitutes liberty; and finally, Chapter 5 analyzes black reconstructionist discourses and the ways in which they expose the formation of a liberal political subject in Europe through a rewriting of Hegel’s and Marx’s respective thoughts on historical progress. In each chapter, Lowe draws a connection of these debates on governance with literature (Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Franklin’s Autobiography; William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary), with history (James’s The Black Jacobins and W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America), and with philosophy (Hegel and Kant), and offers detailed analyses of the appearance and function of colonial commodities in the material culture of the four continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas) whose intimacy Lowe re-inscribes. Lowe’s work in not entirely new in scope: While it is true that no other study has traced these intimacies in just such meticulous ways, there have been recent studies which operate with a similar framework of pursuing the transnational connections of a topic in order to understand the nationand empire-building apparatus which yields hegemonic power in the first place.5 What is special about Lowe’s engagement of the palimpsestuous historiography of Asian America is her interest in “explain[ing] the politics of our lack of knowledge” (2015b, 39; emphasis original) of the “relationship between” (2015b, 4; emphasis original) the individual archives she researched. This is also how Lowe positions her critique of the archive as an institution which not only records history but also records the practices of a historiography in the service of liberalism and modernity: the archive that mediates the imperatives of the state subsumes colonial violence within narratives of modern reason and progress. To make legible the

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forcible encounters, removals, and entanglements omitted in liberal accounts of abolition, emancipation, and independence, I devise other ways of reading so that we might understand the processes through which the forgetting of violent encounter is naturalized, both by the archive, and in the subsequent narrative histories. (2015b, 2–3)

The palimpsestuous historiography Lowe presents in her study asks readers to abandon, to a certain degree, their preconceived knowledge of the geographical and cultural impact of British colonialism and their assumptions about the disciplinary boundaries that contain pockets of knowledge about such a complex history. In its place, Lowe propositions the notion of a “past conditional temporality” (2015b, 175), which does not imply the history of a “moralizing admonition about what ‘should have been’” (2015b, 174), but an engagement with the Great Britain National Archives which refutes calcified practices of historiography and operates with the assumption of “other conditions of possibility that were vanquished by liberal political reason and its promises of freedom” which allows us to “open those conditions to pursue what might have been” (2015b, 175). This palimpsestuous historiography foregrounds, for instance, the intimate socio-ontological conditions governing life on Caribbean sugar plantations in the decades leading up to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Here, Lowe calls attention to the competing histories of Afro-­ Caribbean emancipation culminating in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and the strategic indenture of Chinese emigrant laborers to regulate the political demands of the African-diasporic workforce in the Caribbean. Lowe’s study of the papers documenting the Trinidad Experiment show that the importation of Chinese laborers occurred through the invention of the category of the coolie, a collective term which did not so much define a person’s national origin—coolies apparently hailed from various parts of Asia—but rather a “particular category of labor” (Lowe 2015b, 25) characterized by the ambivalent racialization of Chinese laborers as both more free than Africans and less free than the British. The phenomenon of the coolies shows how the term was strategically employed to “define and to obscure the boundary between enslavement and freedom, and to normalize both” (2015b, 25). This, as Lowe argues, helped conceal the coolies’ instrumentalization as the better laborer, a decision which was documented in the “Secret Memorandum” of 1803, at a time when it must have become evident to the British that their form of governance in the Caribbean might soon become impaired

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by the slave revolt on site and the abolitionist movement across the Atlantic world; it is as though this decision to introduce Chinese laborers into the sugar plantation economy yielded an understanding of the intimacies, that is, the mutual connections among the various agents within this enterprise, that documents such as the “Secret Memorandum” intended to conceal. A palimpsestuous reading of the various materials which document the consolidated efforts made by the British Empire to obscure the relationship between these historical events excavates the “circuits, connections, associations, and mixings of differentially laboring peoples, eclipsed by the operations that universalize the Anglo-American liberal individual” (2015b, 21). Lowe’s study shows that the underlying politics distinguishing between bad slaves from Africa and good coolies from China strategically pitted different racial-ethnic demographics against each other which resulted in the concealment of the fact that they were both discursive and racialized products of the same colonial hegemony and economic liberalism. The past conditional temporality Lowe theorizes in her study is thus to be understood as an attempt to excavate the elisions that were necessary for the formulation of a liberal humanist politics from which the European and the North American parts profited more fully than the other geopolitical territories intertwined in the intimacies of four continents. On the level of form, Lowe’s project is situated between the academic disciplines of English and History and their respective methodological traditions. The individual chapters reference each other multiple times, thus enforcing rhetorically the connections Lowe draws among the many materials she studied. Each chapter compresses the geographical distances between the four continents conjoined by British colonial governance into a discussion of expressions of intimacy, examined on the basis of material objects (oriental rugs and their representation in Thackeray’s novel) and discursive practices in law, literature, and trade protocols. Therefore, the ideological connections her project seeks to display become tangible on the level of the individual chapters, which each offer variations on the core assertions about intimacy. The tight structure and the abundance of meta-­ references acknowledge—on the level of form and composition—the relationality between the seemingly disparate materials Lowe studied. In this sense, the chapters themselves are conceived of as an expression of the histories of the “could have been,” the underlying rationale of Lowe’s palimpsestuous historiography.

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The Palimpsest of Activism in Karen Tei Yamashita’s I-Hotel In the afterword to I-Hotel, Karen Tei Yamashita summarizes the paradox of historical recovery she encountered when collecting historical materials for her project in the following way: I began to create a structure for the project. I found my research was scattered, scattered across political affinities, ethnicities, artistic pursuits—difficult to coalesce into any one storyline or historic chronology. The people I spoke with had definitely been in the movement but oftentimes had no idea what others had been doing. Their ideas and lives often intersected, but their ideologies were cast in diverse directions. Their choices took different trajectories, but everyone was there, really there. (2010, 610; emphasis original)

By suggesting that everyone was really there, Yamashita employs the concept of a palimpsest to evoke the multiple strands of historical development which intersected at the physical location of the International Hotel between the years 1968 (the year the first eviction notice was given to the longtime tenants) and 1977 (the year the tenants were forcibly removed from the premises). The aesthetic renderings through which Yamashita calls attention to this palimpsestuous relationship among the various aspects of “the movement” occurs through the serial nature of the titles of her ten novellas, the interlacing of fictional narrative and quotations from historical figures, and the genre transgressions and intermedial storytelling characteristic of Yamashita’s avant-garde style.6 The choice to conceptualize the novel as a collection of ten novellas (rather than a novel consisting of ten chapters) has to do with Yamashita’s appreciation of the novella as a narrative form which can capture the “many layers of activities and events that were happening at the same time” Porte (2011). The titles of these novellas either include homophones, such as in 1968: Eye Hotel, 1970: ‘I’ Hotel, 1971: Aiiieeeee! Hotel, 1976: Ai Hotel, and the eponymous 1977: I-Hotel, or include variants of the term “I-Hotel,” such as in 1969: I Spy Hotel, 1972: Inter-­National Hotel, 1973: Int’l Hotel, 1974: I-Migrant Hotel, and 1975: Internationale Hotel. There are plays within the narratives, poems, and subchapters in graphic novel style, and some chapters offer loosely bound assemblages of historical documentation and fictional narrative.7

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In the novel’s paratext, Yamashita evokes this structure in the form of ten identical origami box instructions, each one filled with information about the time, place, major protagonists, and themes of the individual novellas. The field on time contains references to the years from 1968 to 1977 as well as mention of a historical event, such as the strike of the Third World Liberations Front in 1968 and 1969, Bruce Lee’s death in 1973, and the stroke of Shig Murao (an important figure in the San Francisco Beat poetry scene). These temporal references are also to be read in the sense of what Wai Chee Dimock (2006) has termed “deep time,” a concept which establishes a relationship between places and times beyond immediate shared historical moments, resulting in an elongation of any specific time period. Dimock’s work on Margaret Fuller, for instance, draws a connection to Ancient Egypt and the Italian Revolution, thus pushing back the assumed starting date of the influence of “European” culture onto American literature way beyond America’s colonial past (Dimock 2006, 52–72). On a smaller scale but indicative of the same gesture, Yamashita’s novel goes beyond the timeframe maintained by the years from 1968 to 1977 and addresses prior political moments in Asian American history. In this vein, her novella 1972: Inter-National Hotel looks back at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and at Malcolm X’s reference of Bandung in his 1963 work. That these are not only randomly concurring but interconnected aspects of the history of liberation of Asian- and African-descendant peoples becomes clear through the umbrella terms Yamashita uses to pinpoint this particular novella’s overall contribution to the Asian American cultural history her novel depicts: the theme here is “class, nation & race, aphorism” and the locations are “Manilatown” and the “Third World” as its international counterparts. While some scholars have argued that the demolition of the I-Hotel registers as a “distinctly Filipino experience” (Habal 2007, 2), Yamashita explicitly addresses the theme of inter-ethnic and global alliances8 and the palimpsestuous nature of these concurring and in part competing historical movements in an anecdote between the partners Ben and Olivia in the novella 1972: Inter-National Hotel. Ben, a Filipino American working-­ class guy, and Olivia, a descendant from a wealthy Chinese American family, figure here as representatives of the heterogeneous and multinational communities that congregate in the effort to build an Asian American alliance within the United States and on a global scale. The palimpsest, quite literally, occurs when Ben scribbles his reading notes into Olivia’s copy of Edgar Snow’s book on early Maoist China, Red Star over China

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(1937), so that his marginalia become more important than the original text of Olivia’s book. The passage below shows how their dialogue is full of tension; the mixture of things spoken and unspoken contributes to building this tension; the numbering of their turn-taking imposes an additional reminder of their difference: Ben in even, Olivia in odd numbers. 8.8 To read it again with all your notes and underlining. 8.9 She grabbed Snow’s book with a kind of dismay and shock, as if her mind and thoughts had been violated, as if an intricate diary of her life had been revealed in her scribbling in the reader’s margins. The reader’s life, captured invisibly in the dust between each turning page, is secret. 8.10 I hope you don’t mind, Ben said. I added my notes to your notes. It was Ben’s turn to smile coyly and to flash his mischievous look. Where else may there be a true meeting of minds but within a book? (2010, 310; emphasis original)

This passage evokes the palimpsest as a metaphor for historiographic practices: The practice of annotating texts and adding marginalia epitomizes how the protagonists actively engage with history. From Olivia’s reaction, the reader can assume that there is a claim to ownership in her abhorrence of Ben’s comments in her book, a rejection of his practice of personalizing history on the textual surface of a book she owns. Ownership is also an expression of access to books, an implied class narrative in the complex constellation of Olivia’s and Ben’s relationship. Assuming that the two lovers function as stand-ins for the Asian American movement, their dispute over the access to historiographical practices hints at the internal differences within the Asian American movement along the axes of national origin, class, and sexuality. In a similar vein, Yamashita also explores the emergence of Asian American literature along the politics of difference inherent in the Asian American movement. One very familiar example she incorporates into her palimpsestuous historiography of the International Hotel is the controversy between Asian American authors Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston in the novella tellingly entitled 1971: The Aiiieeee! Hotel. In this novella, Yamashita presents a collage of Asian American artistic expressions represented in different media, ranging from prose, poetry, and drama to performance art, opera, graphic novel, and comic book. The novella is thus a multimedia meditation on the state of Asian American art, centered mostly on the epistemologies and ontologies of Asian American

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culture. In Chapter 1 entitled “Outlaws,” Yamashita’s narrator introduces the notion of kinship as a concept through which to theorize Asian American community; this notion of kin operates with a dyadic opposition between “inlaws and outlaws” (2010, 223), gesturing toward the underlying dynamics of community building through practices of inclusion and exclusion. This sets the tone for the entire novella, and its various medial renditions always also focus on the onto-social conditions of the emerging Asian American community. The theme of kinship also intervenes in the central question of what became known as the Aiiieeeee! controversy, initiated by Frank Chin’s distinction between real and fake Asian Americans as employed in his proposition of a working definition of Asian American literature in anthology Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian–American Writers (Chan et al. 1974) and its sequel The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Writers (Chan et  al. 1991). Both anthologies and Chin’s adherence to essentialist categories of real and fake Asian Americans operate with politics of exclusion, which Yamashita’s novels renders visible and turns around. In this novella’s Chapter 2 “Theater of the Double Ax,” Yamashita’s narrator introduces a short play set in “Asian America (where’s that?)” (2010, 230), and with the words: “Time to wag that thick honey tongue of yours, translate all those grunts and gutturals to the page. Aiiieeeee!” (2010, 229). In this play, Yamashita again picks up the theme of dualism by introducing five sets of Siamese twins which represent two kinds of dualism: hyphenated identities (“Come to America, and your children all come out hyphenated. Half this—half that” [2010, 231]) and the psychological turmoil of growing up ethnic in a racist, hegemonic, Anglo-dominant culture (“Working through schizophrenia and assimilation” [2010, 231]). With specific reference to the Aiiieeeee! controversy, Chapter 4, entitled “War and Peace,” incorporates the conflict between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston, Chin’s primary example of authors who produce fake Asian American literature. What this chapter does, and this is symptomatic of Yamashita’s engagement with this incident in Asian American history, is move from a representation of the dichotomy between the two to a representation of their intersectionality, the latter achieved in the images which appear in the form of a diptych of images which actually belong together. While in the first few panels of this graphic novel chapter, Chin and Kingston are depicted in close-ups set against different backgrounds, in the subsequent panels they are represented against the same

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background, which makes the gutter dividing the panels seem to represent an artificial border cutting across a picture whose two equal parts belong together. This graphic rendition emphasizes the parallels between the two figures, and therefore refuses to side with either of the two antagonists in one of the most heated controversies in the emerging formation of an Asian American literary canon. The anecdote between Ben and Olivia and the reference to the Aiiieeeee controversy allow Yamashita to comment on inter-ethnic tensions within the history of Asian American activism. Yamashita’s endeavor to cast Asian American political activism palimpsestuously foregrounds the historical connections between many different but not unrelated political activities. This, as Susan Koshy asserts, is a historical legacy that shaped the Asian American political movement and manifests itself in its underlying tents “that the separate circumstances of Asian ethnic groups are linked by a common history of exclusion and racism, that the myth of assimilation has been used to neutralize ethnic resistance and deny racial stratification, and that an assertive identity politics can be the basis of challenging Anglo hegemony” (Koshy 2000, 476). Like Lowe’s project on the breadth of influence British colonialism had over Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Yamashita’s project on the multiethnic activism ultimately offers a critique of white supremacist governmentality.

Conclusion Lowe’s and Yamashita’s respective projects are monumental efforts to assemble the histories of Asian America not in terms of pan-Asian or pan-­ ethnic but as global histories. They critically engage archives not only as sources of historical evidence/material but as sites of knowledge production. Their performances of palimpsestuous historiographies build on the contradictions and tensions within the materials they gathered, which produces messy texts9 whose aesthetic experience can leave the reader with a feeling of awe, shock, reverence, or frustration. This is a kind of historical recovery work that goes beyond the goal of restitution and recuperation, and instead strategically implicates the readers in conditions of inequality and injustice which produces notions of the good and the bad amidst the superimposed/submerged/surfacing/interlocking histories of Asian Americans. By adopting spatial metaphors to describe the palimpsestuous histories Lowe and Yamashita produce in their respective works, my chapter seeks

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to emphasize the possibility of casting the multidirectional potential of palimpsests across time and space. What emerges from the horizontal and vertical connections Lowe and Yamashita delineate, respectively, are alternative records of the historical linkages that materialized in the times we are in and the paradoxes of historical recovery we face today. Because historiography may potentially reinstitute historical injustices by allowing prevalent practices of knowledge production to remain intact, Lowe’s and Yamashita’s respective projects incorporate specific formal and aesthetic means of engaging with the past. Both projects, the scholarly monograph and the intermedial novel, innovate formal expression, in order to exemplify—and make the reader experience—the intense labor needed to re-­ assemble historical material in opposition to calcified practices of historiography. Both projects extend pan-Asian and pan-ethnic epistemologies of previous works in Asian American history toward the global and the transnational in order to fully trace the impact of various manifestations of exclusion and suppression in which the immigration of Asian laborers in the Americas and the mobilizations of Asian American citizens coalesced. Lowe’s notion of intimacy draws horizontal connections among dislocated expressions of colonial governmentality and brings them closer together—literally—through the symbolic meaning of the term intimacy itself and the intimate connections her chapters detail. Similarly, Yamashita’s origami box instructions in the paratext present different historical events as symbolically lying side by side. In a three-dimensional realization of these plans, through the stacking of the cubes which these instructions intend, Yamashita mimics the shape of the historical I-Hotel. Through this stacking of historical events the individual cubes represent, Yamashita reminds readers of the multiple possibilities of constructing historiographical narratives from existing archives. Lowe and Yamashita are not primarily undertaking analyses of Asian American ontologies; instead they illustrate the hegemonic structures which have obscured the connections which always already existed. The palimpsestuous historiographies Lowe and Yamashita create in their respective projects envision the palimpsest as a hermeneutic practice with the goal of countering the perpetuation of historical injustices maintained through traditional archival practices.

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Notes 1. Sarah Dillon’s definitions taken from the OED highlight the condition of the term palimpsestuous versus the activity of the palimpsestic, the former describing the “type of relationality reified in the palimpsest” and the latter the “process of layering that produced a palimpsest” (Dillon 2007, 4). 2. The hesitation Lowe mentions in the title of her essay bears the following significance for her project: “Hesitation, rather than rushing to recover what has been lost, need not be understood as inaction or postponement, or as a thwarting of the wish to provide for a future world. Rather, it halts the desire for recognition by the present social order and staves off the compulsion to make visible within current epistemological orthodoxy” (2015a, 98). The term “history hesitant” is a reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1905 essay “Sociology Hesitant” which critiques positivist sociology because of its tendency to reduce human (inter)action to “law, rule, and rhythm” (qtd in Lowe 2015a, 99n1). Instead, Du Bois maintains that three iconic formal elements (the Novel, the Trust, and the Expansion of Europe) are crucial factors in the social and ontological conditions of Western modernity. 3. For a discussion of the entanglement of the ontological category of Asian American and the category of Asian American literature, see Ho (2010, 205–225). For a discussion of postmodernist form which aligns itself with political projects in diaspora, globalization, and transnationalism, see Adams (2007, 248–272); see also Barnard (2009, 207–215). For a specification on the role of transnationalism in the world novel, see Irr (2011, 660–679). 4. An earlier version of Lowe’s Chapter 1, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” appeared in Ann Laura Stoler’s anthology Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (2009, 191–212). All subsequent citations from Lowe’s study will be taken from her monograph and will be given parenthetically within the text. 5. Compare to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (2014), Goldstein (2014), Hartman (2007), Jung (2014), and Smallwood (2008). 6. See Ziser (2011, 76–79). Ziser argues that “[r]readers knowledgeable about the place and time [of Yamashita’s novel] will easily recognize many of the figures thinly disguised behind her pseudonyms and composite characters” (2011, 77). 7. For an analysis of other artistic productions which engage the complex history of the I-Hotel, see Oishi (2016, 132–143). 8. For a discussion of Yamashita’s creative form as a means through which to express the tension between the simultaneously occurring political movements of the time period covered in her novel, see Ragain (2013, 137–154). 9. Norman K.  Denzin employs the term “messy texts” to describe ethnographic texts that “are aware of their own narrative apparatuses, they are sensitive to how reality is socially constructed, and they understand that writing is a way of ‘framing’ reality” (1997, 224).

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References Adams, Rachel. 2007. The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism. Twentieth-Century Literature 53 (3): 248–272. https://doi.org/10.121 5/0041462X-­2007-­4002. Barnard, Rita. 2009. Fictions of the Global. Novel 42 (2): 207–215. https://doi. org/10.1215/00295132-­2009-­006. Chan, Jeffrey Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. 1974. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian–American Writers. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. ———, eds. 1991. The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. New York: Meridian. Denzin, Norman K. 1997. Interpretative Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. 2014. New World Drama. Durham: Duke University Press. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Pantheon: Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York. Goldstein, Alyosha, ed. 2014. Formations of United States Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press. Habal, Estella. 2007. San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Root. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Helton, Laura, Justin Leroy, Max A.  Mishler, Samantha Seeley, and Shauna Sweeney. 2015. The Question of Recovery: An Introduction. Social Text 33 (4): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-­3315766. Ho, Jennifer Ann. 2010. The Place of Transgressive Texts in Asian American Epistemology. Modern Fiction Studies 65 (1): 205–225. https://doi. org/10.1353/mfs.0.1665. Irr, Caren. 2011. Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in Twenty-First-Century Expatriate Fiction. American Literary History 23 (3): 660–679. https://doi. org/10.1093/alh/ajr021. Jung, Moon-Ho, ed. 2014. The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Koshy, Susan. 2000. The Fiction of Asian American Literature. In Asian American Studies: A Reader, ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Min Song, 467–495. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lowe, Lisa. 2015a. History Hesitant. Social Text 33 (4): 85–107. https://doi. org/10.1215/01642472-­3315790. ———. 2015b. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press. Oishi, Eve. 2016. I-Hotel. In The Routledge Companion of Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature, ed. Rachel C. Lee, 132–143. New York: Routledge. Porte, Clint. 2011. Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita. ihotelguide.blogspot.com. http://ihotelguide.blogspot.co.at/p/interview-­with-­author-­karen-­tei.html. Accessed 1 September 2020. Ragain, Nathan. 2013. A Revolutionary Romance: Particularity and Universality in Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel. Melus 38 (1): 137–154. https://doi. org/10.1093/melus/mls012. Smallwood, Stephanie. 2008. Saltwater Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stoler, Laura Ann. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Diane. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Yamashita, Karen Tei. 2010. I-Hotel. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Ziser, Michael. 2011. Checking In. Boom: A Journal of California 1 (4): 76–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/boom.2011.1.4.cover.

CHAPTER 3

The Body as a Palimpsest: Stor(y)ing Memories in Michelle Cliff’s Clare Savage Novels and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora Izabella Penier

Introduction The trope of the palimpsest is a particularly appropriate paradigm for stor(y)ing cultural memories and exploring hybrid cultural identities. Focusing on three postcolonial and African American novels, I will investigate how these works of historical fiction engage with the trope of the palimpsest to explore the construction of memory and identity. Belonging to the genre of what I will call Black Atlantic mnemonic writing, the Jamaican author Michelle Cliff’s novels Abeng (1995 [originally published 1984]) and No Telephone to Heaven (1996 [originally published 1987]), which together are often referred to as the Clare Savage novels, and the African American author Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora (1975) are centered around a biracial female protagonist, Clare Savage and Ursa

I. Penier (*) University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_3

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Corregidora, respectively, who grapple with a heritage of racial and gendered oppression. All three novels are feminist texts that speak of that heritage in the language of the body, with the racially mixed body becoming a palimpsestic trope. In all three narratives, the protagonists’ skin color inadvertently reveals the silenced history of racial and sexual exploitation of enslaved women as well as what Frantz Fanon described as the colonized people’s desire to “whiten” the race (1967, 42). Finally, all three texts take the metaphor of the womb as a site of cultural memories and collective identities. I have also chosen these novels because of one marked difference that sets them apart. Cliff’s narratives can be situated in the black feminist tradition established by such great African American women authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. This tradition is “impelled by the struggle against negative stereotypes [of black women]” and “characterised by folk practices associated with the rural South [of the United States]” (Dubey 1994, 2), or more broadly the extended Caribbean (Wallerstein 1980, 167).1 By contrast, as Madhu Dubey maintains, Gayl Jones’s novels “do not confirm the ideological aims … of black feminism” (1994, 2). They do not glorify folk heritage or offer a corrective reading of black womanhood. Consequently, Dubey points out, “Gayl Jones’s fiction is conspicuously absent from most black feminist works on the black women’s fictional tradition, including Barbara Christian Black Women’s Novelists, Susan Willis’s Specifying, and Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spiller’s Conjuring” (1994, 2).

Neo-slave Narratives and Postcolonial Counter-­Discourses as Palimpsests Before proceeding with my analysis of Cliff’s and Jones’s novels, I will briefly introduce the theoretical concepts related to the palimpsest that I use. Using these three novels as case studies, I explore the politics and poetics of the mnemonic writing of the Black Atlantic. I have chosen these novels because they can be read as historical palimpsests that challenge political assumptions of dominant or colonial texts and rewrite them by means of new genres—the neo-slave narrative (Jones) or postcolonial counter-discourse (Cliff). Following Gérard Genette (1997), I understand palimpsest in two senses. First of all, it serves as an ideological discourse that writes “into” an official history, modifying it and subjecting it to imaginative revision. As it overwrites previous stories, it reconstructs the

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memory of historical events and functions as an alternative archive of cultural memory. Secondly, palimpsest is also a complex discursive structure that draws its meaning from inter-textual relationships between different narratives. As Gérard Genette (1997) has argued, “each literary or aesthetic text produces a palimpsest, superimposing several other texts which are never completely hidden, but always hinted at” (qtd in Bulman 2007, 22). Thus, palimpsestic fiction alludes to, and bears the imprint of, other earlier texts. Genette called the earlier, precursor text a “hypotext”—it serves as the source of a subsequent literary work or a “hypertext” (qtd in Bulman 2007, 22). A literary palimpsest could be then defined as an organization of various forms and manifestations of inter-textual references in a literary work. These inter-textual references, as Lars Eckstein points out, are “the memory of a text” (2006, 7)2; therefore, palimpsests are mnemonic also in their aesthetic/textual dimension. Postcolonial and ethnic palimpsests of the Black Diaspora combine and rework various mnemonic sources, producing narrative fictions which are significantly different from the existing hypotexts. They are “second-­ degree texts” to use Genette’s (1997, 1) term; that is, they do not draw on direct personal experiences, but on other already written texts. In African American literature, for example, in Corregidora, these hypertexts often take the form of neo-slave narratives, which “Signify”3 on slave narratives. African American literary tradition abounds in oral and written accounts by former slaves (hypotexts) detailing the experience of uprooting, displacement, and inhumane treatment. These hypotexts could be called after Paul Ricoeur (1980) “testimonies,” as they bear witness to personal experiences of historical events. They are a record of personal perceptions, focusing on the inner processes of working through the traumatic memory of enslavement and its aftermath.4 Postcolonial African Caribbean fiction in general, and the Clare Savage novels in particular, can be conceived of as Black Atlantic palimpsests that use the technique of counter-discourse to “write back” to dominant/colonial hypotexts and to reconstruct the historical memory of slavery and colonialism. These postcolonial counter-(hyper-)texts “[prevent] the dominant voice from completely silencing the others” (Alarcón 1988–1990, 35–36), challenge dominant and authoritative historical narratives, and open “the potential for future reinscriptions of the cultural and historical palimpsest, for shifts in the balances of power and force” (Dillon 2005, 255). Therefore, Black Atlantic writers’ relation to the past, regardless of their geographic location, can be profitably compared to the relationship of a restorer to a

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painting that has been painted over many times or an archaeologist who unearths layer after layer of ancient artifacts. Through the process of narrativization and storytelling writers recollect and reassemble what has been “disremembered and unaccounted for” (Morrison 1987, 275). There are several ways in which black writers can reconstruct the submerged histories of the past and engage with stor(y)ing their ethnic memories. A hypertext derives from hypotext(s) through a process that Genette calls (1997) “transformation” in which the hypertext “evokes” the hypotext. Drawing on the work of the French critic Laurent Jenny (1982),5 Lars Eckstein (2006) argues that there are four types of possible transformations that turn mnemonic texts into elaborate palimpsests. The first one aims at “participation and conservation of memorized sources”; in other words, it commemorates the hypotext. The second type subverts the hypotext through irony, pastiche, parody, and so on to delegitimize the hypotext and replace it with a hypertext, which contains “alternative truths and legitimacies” (Eckstein 2006, 56). The third type of transformation is what Lars Eckstein terms “encircling meaning,” that is, clarifying valid historical truths to make a fuller and more complete sense of the past. Finally, the fourth type of transformation is “diffusion” of official meanings. “While [encircling meaning] desperately grasps onto the idea of making sense of past events discursively, being ‘obsessed by the process of meaningfulness,’ … [the] last ideological attitude … ultimately turns against this very process” (Eckstein 2006, 55). It is a strategy that can be employed against Western hegemonic discourses because it entails radical questioning of the logical, ethical, and aesthetic foundations of Western civilization, or, in postcolonial parlance, “writing back.” I argue that the postcolonial counter-discourse contains both elements of diffusion and subversion. Cliff’s texts represent a traditional black feminist palimpsestic strategy of reading history; her narratives strive to excavate the underlying indigenous text overwritten by the hegemonic colonial text. Jones’s novel, on the other hand, is situated outside this tradition. It traces the fabric of interlocking narratives of the dominant and subaltern cultures and shows how the subaltern narrative tries to sideline and delegitimize the other, even at the cost of historical truth. Therefore, Cliff’s and Jones’s narratives illustrate different dynamics and outcomes of “scraping off” the dominant discourse of the past. In the Clare Savage novels, Clare wants to liberate herself from the version of her past and of Jamaica’s history that is imposed on her by her snobbish white-oriented father, who wants her to pass for white. In Corregidora, Ursa is forced to liberate herself from the

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testimonies passed on to her by her black mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, which prevent her from having a happy and full life. Whereas Clare desires to recover the hypotext by rereading her story and Jamaica’s story through folk African maternal lines, Ursa arrives at the core of truth about her female ancestors’ past only after she manages to transcend the dominant maternal discourse. In Cliff’s novels, the paternal and colonial discourses overwrite the maternal and indigenous discourses; in Jones’s novel, the black maternal narrative is the hypertext that needs to be subjected to a retrospective act of analysis. Therefore, Jones’s novel is about the necessity of encircling meaning in earlier slave testimonies to create inter-textual palimpsestic spaces for historical “truth.” Cliff’s novels, on the other hand, diffuse and subvert the colonial narrative to avert cultural amnesia produced by the colonial practice of passing.

Corregidora Ursa Corregidora, the protagonist of Jones’s novel, is a blues singer living in Kentucky at the beginning of the twentieth century, who is said to look Hispanic rather than black. She is also the last woman in a family line that started generations earlier in Brazil in times of slavery with her enslaved great-grandmother and a Portuguese plantation owner named Corregidora. Corregidora abused Ursa’s great-grandmother and their female offspring not only for his sexual gratification but also for profit. He made his living from prostituting the bodies of his slaves, including his daughter’s. He also had sexual relations with his daughter (Ursa’s grandmother), thus compounding rape with incest. After the abolition of slavery, the Corregidora women, as they call themselves, move from Brazil to the United States, but they are haunted by the memories of the past. Corregidora, “the whoremonger and breeder, [who] fucked his own whores and fathered his own breed” (Jones 1975, 6) is still a vivid presence in their lives, and they pass on stories about his cruelty and his photograph so that they “know who to hate” (Jones 1975, 9). Consequently, neither Ursa’s mother nor Ursa herself can accept any men in their lives. Ursa’s mother cannot reciprocate the love of her husband, Martin, who eventually abandons his family. Ursa also resists physical intimacy with her husband; when she imagines him caressing her body, the old man Corregidora “howls” inside her. Mutt tries to fight Corregidora’s women’s obsession with the past, insisting that “[w]hichever way you look at it we ain’t them” (Jones 1975, 151). But that is not the way Ursa perceives

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the relationship of the past to the present. For her, “we’re all consequences of something. Stained with another past as well as our own. Their [i.e., her ancestors’] past is in my blood. … My veins are centuries meeting” (Jones 1975, 45–46). When during one of their violent fights, Mutt pushes Ursa down the stairs and she loses the child she is expecting, as well as her womb, her identification of Mutt with Corregidora becomes complete. Mutt also takes away from Ursa what she sees as the most important source of her power: the power to “make generations” of witnesses who could testify to the atrocities of slavery and who would keep on hating Corregidora and men like him. Keeping that bitter historical truth alive is an obsession of the Corregidora women. They even see it as their historical mission, for when Brazilian slavery was abolished, the authorities burnt all documents related to the slave trade, presumably as an act of purging of the history of Brazil of the shame of slavery. For the formerly enslaved, including the Corregidora’ women, however, the burning was rather an attempt to whitewash Brazil’s history. As Ursa’s grandmother points out, “That’s why they burned all the papers so there wouldn’t be no evidence to hold against them” (Jones 1975, 14). Therefore, the memories of women and their daughters are to serve as living archives. Passing family history from one generation to another is a means of preserving the truth against all official attempts to erase it. “We [black women] got to burn out what they put in our minds, like you burn out a wound. That scar, that’s left to bear witness. We got to keep it visible as our own blood” (Jones 1975, 20). The collective memory of the Corregidora women is not only a form of resistance against violence and distortion of truth but also a weapon by means of which Corregidora’s women want to avenge themselves for all their torment and misery. However, Cat, Ursa’s friend, rightly observes that using procreation as a way to get back at Corregidora is a “slave-­ breeder’s way of thinking” (Jones 1975, 21). Procreation, she argues, was also in the interest of slave-owners, who wished the population of slaves to multiply. Moreover, the fact that Corregidora continues to be the primary motivation behind all their actions and decisions proves, to Cat’s mind, that he still, to a large extent, controls their lives. For Cat, identity exclusively based on being Corregidora’s woman equals being Corregidora’s slave and “whore,” rather than a free and independent individual. Ursa is so overwhelmed by a deep-rooted hatred and so dedicated to revenge that she does not recognize this contradiction in her way of thinking. Nevertheless, her sterility puts an end to her obsession. Like the

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burned documents that can no longer testify to the oppression, Ursa becomes “speechless” and helpless after she is “wounded” by Mutt. She cannot contribute to the revenge scheme by “making generations” and passing on stories of slavery. She feels exempted from the obligation to remain loyal to her foremothers: “I am different now. I can’t make generations. And even if I still had my womb, even if the first baby had come— what would I have done then?” (Jones 1975, 22). Thus, Ursa’s struggle to achieve an identity free from inner contradictions takes place on many different levels. She fights to liberate herself from the tension between the past and the present, between her painful experience of gender oppression and the even more painful experiences of other Corregidora’ women. She strives to be loyal to the women in her family, but also she yearns to get free from the pathological effects of slavery, which prevent her from having a normal life. The most serious challenge that Ursa faces is to overcome the psychological rupture caused by her biracial origins. Dreading and abhorring the white man who is “in her veins,” she finds it impossible to accept the legacy of incest and rape that runs in her family. Eventually, however, she is able to come to terms with it when she realizes that the feelings Corregidora’s women had for him were more complex than they cared to admit. In retrospect, Ursa’s grandmother thinks she was glad to be rescued from Corregidora’s hateful tyranny, but then she has doubts about her feelings because “it is hard to always remember what you were feeling when you ain’t feeling exactly that way no more” (Jones 1975, 24). Martin realizes the nub of the dilemma that troubles Corregidora’s women—“[h]e had the nerve to ask them how much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love” (Jones 1975, 24). Ursa’s life starts anew when she begins to understand that stories passed on by the Corregidora women cannot be trusted. Too much is lost in them or willfully forgotten: the repressed love and desire for Corregidora or the power that Ursa’s great-grandmother wielded over him, a power so great that it made him want to kill her. Unable to rely on the stories told by her grandmother and mother, Ursa must find her own way to discover what that power was and to resolve her inner conflicts. She seeks the answers in blues, thus transforming confusion into art. She also experiments with sex, treating it as a means to gain individual power.

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The Clare Savage Novels Cliff’s novels can be read as palimpsestic texts engaging with black histories in the New World. They are an allegory of decolonization, in which a postcolonial daughter, Clare Savage, emancipates herself from her father’s colonial mindset. Abeng is set in the 1950s on the eve of emancipation, when Clare is twelve years old and on the verge of womanhood. No Telephone to Heaven traces Clare’s development through the post-­ independence period, during which Clare sets off from Jamaica to an adoptive mother country, the United States, then to the imperial “motherland,” England, to finally return to her homeland, where she embraces her African heritage and dies as a revolutionary. Clare is an “Afro-Saxon,” that is, a descendant of the privileged biracial elite, which she refers to as the Jamaican “pigmentocracy” (Mercer 2000, 114). Cliff calls this elite “white negroes” because they “absorbed the white oppressor’s status” (Hornung 1998, 87). As Cliff explains in her essay “Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character,” even in independent Jamaica light skin meant “privilege, civilisation, erasure, forgetting” (1990a, 265). In spite of her privileged status, however, Clare suffers from what is sometimes called “mulatto angst,” that is, an anxiety experienced by people of color suspended between white and black traditions. She is torn between the warring worldviews of her racially mixed parents: her “pretentiously whitish” father Boy, who sees himself as a descendant of slave-owners and her “darker” mother Kitty, who sees herself as a descendant of enslaved Africans. Kitty cherishes her African Caribbean heritage, which is denigrated by Clare’s openly racist father, but does not pass it on to her almost white-looking daughter, assuming that, for her own good, she should be brought up by Boy to pass for white. Thus, at the beginning of her quest, Clare is presented as a cultural orphan, abandoned by her African Caribbean mother and betrayed by her mother’s refusal to counter her husband’s racist narrative with her own. Clare, who has inherited her father’s looks and her mother’s affection for Jamaican folk culture, is an allegorical figure par excellence—she is a daughter caught between the disparate and conflicting identities of her parents. As Cliff herself explains, this inner conflict is encapsulated in her very name. “Clare” connotes the privilege connected with her white skin, whereas her surname “Savage” is suggestive of the wildness and blackness she has been taught to tame and “bleach out.” As Cliff explicates, Clare’s story is about “blackening” of what has been bleached: “[a] knowledge of

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history, the past, has been bleached out from her mind, just as the rapes of her grandmothers are bleached out from her skin, and this bleached skin is the source of her privilege and her power too, so she thinks, for she is a colonized child” (1990a, 264–265). Clare’s cultural amnesia, caused by her mother’s reticence, is counterbalanced by the omniscient narrators of both novels, who explain Clare’s allegorical quest from the values of her father’s “inauthentic” whiteness to her mother’s undervalued but more “authentic” blackness. Cliff’s narrators recount the mythical history of the island connected with two sisters, Nanny and Sekesu, who are positioned as the foremothers of the Jamaican nation. The narrator tells us that it was believed that all the island’s children descended from one or the other. Nanny is a half-mythical and half-­ historical figure—a leader of the Maroons, runaway slaves living in the inaccessible Jamaican mountains. She is the symbolic mother of that part of the nation that put up heroic resistance against enslavement, colonial oppression, and assimilation. On the other hand, Sekesu, who remained enslaved, stands for bondage, defeat, and resignation. She is a passive victim of the abusive white regime, which has manipulated black women through their reproductive powers. First it forced them to be “slave breeders,” and then encouraged them to “lighten up” (Fanon 1967, 89) by choosing light-skinned partners and giving birth to children that became whiter and whiter with each generation. Cliff’s authoritative omniscient narrators make it clear which of these two mothers Clare and the other children of Jamaica should love and respect. The narrators put down Sekesu and her female descendants as bearers of “degraded” female identity, as breeding machines and vessels for the reproduction of the colonial mindset. Sekesu’s name becomes synonymous with traitor, consort of the enemy, a woman who let herself be used against her own people. In contrast, the novels applaud enslaved women’s refusal to reproduce through contraception, abortion, and infanticide. The women engaged in such acts of resistance are pictured as heroic reincarnations of the formidable Nanny. All female characters in Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven are inscribed in this Manichean dialectic outlined by the Nanny/Sekesu myth. The omniscient narrators seek to recuperate the forgotten narrative of the woman warrior, overwritten with the narrative of Sekesu’s life. The novels show that the identities of Jamaican women are firmly rooted in either white or black tradition, but true “Jamaicanness” can only stem from one principal origin—the African past.

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Clare’s mother Kitty best epitomizes the complex interaction of these two narratives. Her betrayal of Clare is attributed to her decision to become a mother. To quote one of the wise grandmothers out of context, Kitty has chosen to become a “breeder” instead of a “reader” (Cliff 1990b, 95). Instead of becoming a teacher, as she had planned, Kitty follows Sekesu’s path by marrying Boy and reproducing him in Clare. Therefore, her love for black people is at odds with her loyalty to her racist husband, and she rather unconvincingly describes her marriage to Boy as “an attempt to contain colonialism in her own home” (Cliff 1995, 128). Belinda Edmondson has argued that in Cliff’s two novels “female bloodlines are envisioned as dangerous carriers of infection. … Menstruation, the onset of womanhood, and the ability to bear children is also the commencement of the history of betrayals” (1998, 77). However, Clare manages to steer clear of this trap. In No Telephone to Heaven, Clare becomes pregnant by a black Vietnam War veteran, but, as explained earlier, due to her miscarriage she becomes sterile and decides not to pursue motherhood. Her rejection of motherhood and its past betrayals originating with Sekesu reconnects Clare to her “right” mythical mother Nanny and to Jamaica, which is “female as womb, [and has] the contours of [the] female body” (Cliff, 1990a, 266). This “reprieve from womanhood” (Cliff 1996, 157) sets her on the course of becoming a rebel in the tradition of the great Nanny. After Clare returns to Jamaica, she restores “ties [that] had been broken”—she reclaims “her grandmother’s land” (Cliff 1996, 103, 91), and joins a revolutionary group, whose aim is to sabotage the shooting of an American film that purportedly appropriates and trivializes the history of the mythic mother figure Nanny. Eventually, Clare is killed in a guerrilla action, which allegorically represents a challenge to misreading of the history of Maroons and Jamaica.

Conclusion Cliff’s and Jones’s novels represent two different approaches to the reading and rewriting of erased subaltern histories. Cliff’s Clare Savage novels are “involuted” palimpsests (Dillon 2005, 244); they attempt to uncover the earlier native text to bring to light what has been erased and buried under the weight of the dominant culture. Her novels diffuse and subvert the meaning of the colonial discourse, passing at the same time a harsh judgment on the Jamaican society that has failed to preserve orally or to construct a meaningful narrative of the past. Just as in colonial narratives

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official history overwrites cultural memory, Cliff palimpsestic novels reverse that layering, with the effect that her narrative of the heroic black women warriors from Jamaican folklore displaces the colonial narrative of a black woman as a collaborator. On the other hand, Jones’s “palimpsestuous” rewriting of the Black Atlantic past illustrates the complex relationality embodied in the palimpsest. Jones’s novel sees black history in the New World as a “structure in which multiple and varying inscriptions are intertwined” (Benstock qtd in Dillon 2005, 257). Her novel describes the textual interweaving of two narratives, the dominant and the subaltern, each of which tries to “establish” itself as “the normative one” (Spivak qtd in Dillon 2005, 255). In Corregidora, the maternal narrative, telling the story of Brazilian slavery and the suffering of the Corregidora women, is the normative one. Even though it gives voice to previously silent or suppressed subaltern subjects, it is full of highly significant gaps, silences, and omissions that compromise its aspirations to establish a historical truth about slavery. While Cliff’s novels invert the two poles, yet keep intact the binary structure of the colonial encounter, Corregidora negotiates the meaning of the black diasporic experience by analyzing reverberations between layers of historical accounts. It emphasizes that all of them, the hypotexts/slave testimonies or hypertexts/neo-slave narratives have a discursive character. Jones’s narrative illustrates Ricoeur’s point that the very act of narrativization or storytelling positions mnemonic writing in specific cultural contexts and in relation to various discourses of power. Therefore stor(y)ing memories is never a completely disinterested and neutral act. To say that personal memory is subject to a reconfiguration in the process of narrativization implies, as Ricoeur emphasizes in “La marquee du passé,” that no texts should be treated as sources of objective historical truths. On the contrary, Ricoeur argues, they show “the structure of transition from memory to history” and the interaction between memory and political/social forces. As Ricoeur reminds us, memory is an “opaque mélange of recollection and fiction in the reconstruction of the past”; it is not a “representation” but “representational” (qtd in Eckstein 2006, 16). Ursa and Clare take different routes toward self-fulfillment and spiritual wholeness, as they grapple with interlocking and competing stories of the past. For both of them motherhood or “making generations,” as Ursa puts it, are connected with making the political choice of “painting over” or “scraping off” the disconcerting remains of their pasts. Therefore, these two novels not only aim at imaginative recovery of black women’s

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experiences, but they also locate the history of colonial and interracial encounters in the female body. They both use the metaphor of the womb to signify the capacity of women to create and pass on a distinctly black feminine history and culture. In the feminist writing of the Black diaspora, the womb is a recurrent trope that signifies personal and historical continuity and functions as a conduit of collective consciousness, collective values, and life-sustaining mythologies. The “theft” of the womb—instances of childbirth gone awry such as miscarriages, abortion, or infanticide—are often symbolic manifestations of history entering and demolishing black women’s lives or black female resistance to history. The two protagonists’ loss of the capacity “to make generations” is a striking similarity between these two very different narratives. Both of them conflate womb images and death, perhaps signaling in this way the exhaustion of the model of resistance that relies on storytelling perpetuated by the “female line” (Cliff 1996, 185). Cliff’s novels mourn the death of this tradition in Jamaica and try to fill in the void by her palimpsestic reading of the official history of the island. But there is a sense of irrevocable loss that pervades these novels and pessimism in their closure, in spite of Cliff’s efforts to picture Clare’s quest for personal integrity as successful.6 On the other hand, Jones’s more radical, palimpsestuous narrative does not unabashedly celebrate memory and orality and their power to challenge hegemonies and national narratives. It rather dramatizes the biased and partial nature of personal narratives and the way in which counter-­ hegemonic ethnic hypertexts validate their inscriptions of the past, sometimes at the expense of other texts. However, the narrative closures of both plots, whose childless protagonist will not pass on the mythical or filial stories of the past, betray, in my view, a certain uneasiness about the fixation with a history of enslavement that has characterized the mnemonic writing of the Black Atlantic. As palimpsestuous compositions of literary memory, the Clare Savage novels and Corregidora not only give voice to the silenced and make erased stories visible, they also show with great clarity what Pierre Nora has called la guerre de mémoires—the clashing of divergent and particularizing narratives of the past. To my mind, they also shed light on what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Figures in Black has called “[the] brilliant substructure of the system of slavery” (1989, 100). For Gates this substructure rested on the total dependence of the enslaved on his or her memory. The slave, who had been deprived of his or her African genealogy, “had no past beyond memory; the slave had lived at no time past the point of recollection”

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(Gates 1989, 101). Likewise, one can argue that for ex-slaves and their descendants, memory “gave shape to being itself” (Gates 1989, 100). For Ursa and her female progenitors, their dependence upon the memory of the atrocities committed under slavery made each of them, to borrow Gates’s words, “a slave to [her]self, a prisoner of [her] own power to recall” (1989, 101). Clare is a slave to memory in another sense: To quote Gates again, her whole life is a “quest to locate facts that could bolster the limitation of memory” (1989, 102). Therefore, the narrative closure of the two novels can make one wonder if the palimpsestic process of destructuring and restructuring of the traumatic slave past is indeed a liberating practice. Though it may seem that the purpose of such writing is a resurrection of the past to bury it and put it behind, in the novels discussed in this chapter, this sort of writing destroys individual and collective futures.

Notes 1. Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1980) term designating an area that stretches from northeast Brazil to Maryland in the United States. 2. Eckstein (2006) is drawing on Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism (1997). 3. Henry Louis Gates defines Signifying as an African American cultural practice that aims “to account for the configuration of texts in their literary traditions” (1988, xxv). Denoting the specific form of inter-textuality in African American texts, Signifying is defined as a “non-thematic manner in which texts respond to other texts” (Gates 1989, 1). According to Gates, the black literary tradition is a counter-discursive strategy associated with the African trickster figure the Signifying Monkey and the Yoruba trickster and messenger Esu-Elegbara. His theory of Signifying bears resemblance with the postcolonial practice of literary revisionism in the form of counter-discourse. 4. According to Toni Morrison (1995), these slave narratives were shaped by political goals of the abolition movement and written with white audiences in mind. Runaway slaves were not at liberty to reveal the whole truth about their experiences. They were obliged to be economical with the truth to save white middle-class audiences from embarrassment. Therefore, slave testimonies are incomplete. It is the job of African American novelists to tear down the veil of willful forgetting, Morrison writes, or, in accordance with the notion of the palimpsest, to scrape off the politically correct narrative layer (Morrison 1995). 5. See Jenny (1982, 37).

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6. Toland-Dix goes on to argue that the damage done to Clare, “who has been rejected, abandoned and dismissed by the matrilineage by which she so longs to be acknowledged” seems to be irreparable (2004, 16).

References Alarcón, Daniel Cooper. 1988–1990. The Aztec Palimpsest: Toward a New Understanding of Aztlàn Cultural Identity and History. Aztlàn 19: 33–68. Bulman, Gail A. 2007. Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Cliff, Michelle. 1990a. Clare Savage as a Crossroads Character. In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, ed. Selwyn Cudjoe, 263–268. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux. ———. 1990b. Screen Memory. In Bodies of Water, ed. Michell Cliff, 87–104. New York: Plume. ———. 1995. Abeng. New York: Plume. ———. 1996. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: Plume. Dillon, Sarah. 2005. Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies. Textual Practice 19 (3): 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502360500196227. Dubey, Madhu. 1994. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eckstein, Lars. 2006. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Edmondson, Belinda. 1998. The Black Mother and Michelle Cliff’s Project of Racial Recovery. In Postcolonialism and Autobiography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, 77–97. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New  York: Oxford University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hornung, Alfred. 1998. The Burning Landscape of Jamaica: Michelle Cliff’s Vision of the Caribbean. In Postcolonialism and Autobiography, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, 87–97. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Jenny, Laurent. 1982. The Strategy of Form. In French Literary Theory Today, Trans Trans. R.  Carter and ed. Tzvetan Todorov, 34–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Jones, Gayl. 1975. Corregidora. Boston: Beacon. Lachmann, Renate. 1997. Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism. Trans. Roy Sellers and Anthony Wall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mercer, Kobena. 2000. Black Hair/Style Politics. In Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader, ed. Kwesi Owusu, 111–121. London: Routledge. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Knopf. ———. 1995. The Site of Memory. In Inventing the Truth, ed. William Zinsser, 103–124. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. The Hermeneutics of Testimony. In Essays in Biblical Interpretation, ed. Mudge Lewis, 119–154. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Toland-Dix, Shirley. 2004. Re-negotiating Racial Identity: The Challenge of Migration and Return in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven. Studies in the Literary Imagination 37 (2): 16–37. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1980. The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. New  York: Academic Press.

CHAPTER 4

Cultural Palimpsests on the Ethnic Shore: Refunctionalizing Seaside Forts Cathy Covell Waegner

Introduction The sediments of forts on the eastern US seaboard divulge a multifunctional history of palimpsests of use. The military powers of the New World constructed defensive forts that later served as sites of incarceration for Native “renegades,” many of whom had never previously viewed the ocean. Furthermore, in the case of Fort Monroe in Hampton/Virginia, it became a Federal “loophole of freedom” (beginning in 1861) for runaway slaves during the American Civil War. In this chapter, I call on such cultural theorists as Andreas Huyssen (2003), Michel Foucault (1986), Paul Gilroy (1993), and Jace Weaver (2014) to support the concepts of two-­ way dynamic processes interrelating palimpsestic and heterotopic layers, as well as the littoral (the liminal space where land and sea meet) as generating particularly intensive contact trajectories and functions. Huyssen calls for “productive remembering” (2003, 27) in our age of images “freefloating across our screens” (2003, 28), a remembering that admits change

C. C. Waegner (*) University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_4

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in even such ostensibly stable phenomena as monumental buildings and hegemonic attitudes. A form of this “productive remembering” can be found in the shaking up of the static trope of the palimpsest, actively linking the present and the layering of the past; I offer a discursive way of activating the trope by considering the transforming uses of such monumental buildings, specifically two forts, through what I call an “imaginary of the functional.” Diane Glancy’s work Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (2014) illustrates an activation of the palimpsest trope when she vividly reimagines the 72 Plains Native prisoners’ encounters at the refunctionalized and heterotopic seaside Fort Marion (St. Augustine/Florida) in connection with her own childhood ordeals as a Cherokee pupil in Kansas City. The Fort Marion prisoners produced colorful “ledger drawings,” many depicting their coastal perceptions overlying previous experiences. These drawings were, among other things, a form of palimpsestic protest against incarceration and ethnic disrespect by the overwhelming Euro-­ American hegemony and against the fixed musealization of what was widely presumed to be vanishing Native life. The circulatory and littoral paths of the Native and African American fort-dwellers crossed in strikingly palimpsestic ways, evoking transcultural-­ historical dialogue: The first shipful of unfree Africans in North America (1619), captured from the Spanish by the Dutch, was unloaded in the English colony of Virginia at the very site of later Fort Monroe on the outskirts of Hampton, which—in palimpsestic irony—became a refuge for hunted slaves and then in 1868 the venue of a school for newly emancipated African Americans. The Natives released from Fort Marion in 1878 were shipped to that same location, 17 of them to attend this school. All of the now freed Fort Marion prisoners actually toured Fort Monroe, thus walking in the footsteps of the slaves who had audaciously sought freedom there just 17 years earlier.

Heterotopias in Motion and in Dialogue: Theoretical Considerations In his study of contemporary cultural memory titled Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), Andreas Huyssen sees the transformability of monuments as evidence that the palimpsest is the “major trope” of our time to reveal the complex processes producing

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“public memory.”1 Using littoral imagery such as “anchoring,” “flux,” “free-floating,” “circulation,” “vortex,” and “bulwark” that incorporates oceanic processes and procedures, Huyssen (2003) claims that the intensity of contemporary memory culture reflects social insecurity in an age of mass culture and virtual media: Many memory practices today “express the growing need for spatial and temporal anchoring in a world of increasing flux in ever denser networks of compressed time and space. … We now need productive remembering” since “the mnemonic convulsions of North Atlantic culture today seem mostly chaotic, fragmentary, and free-­ floating across our screens” (2003, 27–28). Seeking stability in monumental buildings and musealizations alone, however, is fruitless, Huyssen tells us, since both public memory and the material structures—forts as museums, we could propose as an example—are constantly subject to change; neither memory nor material can be “stored forever” (2003, 28). According to Huyssen, they are “sucked into the vortex of an ever-­ accelerating circulation of images, spectacles, events” (2003, 22), paradoxically creating, despite the increasing compression and density, “an expanding synchronous space” (2003, 22) like a limitless ocean which resists any “bulwark” (2003, 23). Huyssen includes heterotopias as a key component in the imaginary of productive remembering (2003, 7). In his lecture “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault presents a theory of heterotopias as “counter-sites” (1986, 23) that simultaneously represent, contest, and invert other real sites in a culture. Particularly “heterotopias of deviation” (Foucault 1986, 25), prisons being a prime example, grant the notion of changing function as a society’s “history unfolds” (1986, 25). The heterotopia can also encode a number of “superimposed meanings,” even “incompatible” ones (Foucault 1986, 25), in our case study the fort of hegemonic military defense becoming a site of ethnic incarceration or an ethnic refuge. According to Foucault, heterotopias are generally not freely accessible, presupposing “a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them [limitedly] penetrable” (1986, 26). Foucault sees the ship as the “heterotopia par excellence,” a “floating piece of space … that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of that sea” as it moves from “port to port” (1986, 27)—or, for my purposes, fort to fort—in extreme littorality. In his groundbreaking study of the “Black Atlantic,” Gilroy also views the ship, “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” that connects fixed points, as “especially important” (1993, 4) for his endeavor

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to use the Atlantic as “one single, complex unit of analysis in … discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective” (1993, 15). In a carefully documented opus on the “Red Atlantic,” Weaver stresses, among many other points, the two-directionality (west to east as well as the colonizing east to west) of multilayered contact zones. Furthermore, “the ocean itself became a contact zone as American indigenes engaged in trade and supplied maritime labor” (2014, 20; emphasis original) on ships crossing the Atlantic in both directions.2 Ships as heterotopias in circulatory motion, creating dynamic palimpsests in multifunctional and littoral settings, both open and close my study. Two ships delivered their non-white passengers to a specific location on the ethnic shore in what can be viewed as one long painful voyage lasting well over two and a half centuries, from 1619 to 1878—culturally and personally still not over, as Diane Glancy’s work with its illuminating autobiographical stratum clearly shows. Huyssen would greet, I claim, Glancy’s activation of the imaginary of the functional. In Huyssen’s concept of “productive remembering,” palimpsestically “the strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses, and heterotopias” (2003, 7). The historical and imaginative refunctioning of the seaside forts indeed provides loopholes for expanding those traces and recouping a measure of those losses.

“Gibraltar of the Chesapeake”: Multifunctional Fort Monroe Situated in a strategic position at the entrance to the large Chesapeake Bay and surrounded by a moat, Fort Monroe is the biggest and supposedly most secure stone fortress in the United States. With grand ceremony, Fort Monroe was proclaimed a National Monument by President Obama in 2011 and placed under the auspices of the National Park Service, shortly after the fortification had been decommissioned by the US military. It was to serve as a historical landmark and, not least, attract tourists to boost the local economy. Obama justifiably stressed the role the fort and its site spectacularly played in African American heritage (The White House 2011), although the European and the Native American nexuses are inextricably tied in with that heritage.

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The English colonists who established the first permanent English settlement in the New World made landfall on April 26, 1607, somewhat to the south of the Fort Monroe location. Two days later an exploratory crew spotted the point of land we are concerned with beside a sought-after channel leading inland, and they named the strategic position “Cape Comfort.” A succession of forts was built at Cape Comfort, at first to defend against Spanish incursions, but the forts fell victim to fire and weather, particularly strong hurricanes. During the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 the British easily landed and set fires in the area, showing an urgent need for a strong defensive fortification to serve as the “Gibraltar of the Chesapeake [Bay]” (Quarstein and Mroczkowski 2003, 9). A Frenchman, General Simon Bernard, was commissioned to design a permanent structure, to be named for the fifth President James Monroe. It was constructed from 1819 to 1834—in part by slaves hired from local plantation owners. In addition to seventeenth-century hostilities with the Native people, called “the naturals” by the first settlers, a brief but significant Native American node within Fort Monroe’s history in the first half of the nineteenth century furnishes an early epitome of the ever increasing connections among inland resistance, coastal regions, centers of power (particularly Washington), and ethnographic tourism. Black Hawk (Sauk) and other war leaders of the “British Band,” including his five closest advisors and his eldest son, were imprisoned in Fortress Monroe for a month after their defeat in the 1832 Black Hawk War centered in Illinois. Before and after their incarceration in 1833, they were exhibited as a spectacle to curious crowds in tours of the East; Black Hawk (1833) recounts his coastal experiences in a highly mediated autobiography.3 The difficulty of accessing the palimpsest layer of Black Hawk’s impressions and assessments, much of which is no doubt lost in translation, is implied in a telling sentence in his autobiography: While meeting with President Andrew Jackson in Washington and requesting to be returned to his homeland, Black Hawk reports that the president “insisted, however, on our going to Fortress Monroe; and as the interpreter then present could not understand enough of our language to interpret a speech, I concluded it was best to obey our Great Father, and say nothing contrary to his wishes” (Black Hawk 1833, Chapter 2). Black Hawk’s farewell to Colonel Abraham Eustis, the commander of Fort Monroe, strengthens the connections mentioned above. Preceding a presentation of deerskin hunting dress and white eagle feathers to Eustis, Black Hawk supposedly relinquished the inland resistance:

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Our great father … has at length been pleased to permit us to return to our hunting grounds. We have buried the tomahawk … Brother, your houses are as numerous as the leaves upon the trees, and your warriors like the sands upon the shore of the big lake (Hampton Roads [flowing into the Chesapeake Bay]) that rolls before us. (United States Army 1975, 33)

President Obama focused on the insidious beginning of African servitude at the geographical and cultural contact zone of Cape Comfort, as well as the ingenious refugee strategy put into place by Fort Monroe’s commander Major General Benjamin F. Butler in May 1861 during the War Between the States: “Fort Monroe has played a part in some of the darkest and some of the most heroic moments in American history” (The White House 2011). As already mentioned before, in a striking refunctionalization of the historic Virginia fort, it served as a Union free-space refuge, in this context a heterotopia, for thousands of slaves fleeing from nearby plantations during the Civil War years. Three slaves who had escaped from the Mallory plantation in Hampton sought sanctuary in the Union fort, an island in the Confederate “sea,” the Confederacy’s capital being nearby Richmond. Even Butler, an experienced criminal lawyer from Massachusetts, was obliged to obey the Federal “Fugitive Slave Act” of 1850 that required runaway slaves to be returned to their masters. But he cleverly found a loophole in the law, pronouncing the three slaves “contraband of war,” which legally enabled him to retain them. Many thousands of slaves flocked to what became known as their “freedom fort” (United States Army 1975, 35). Butler managed to engage them in work in the fort and even on warships in the harbor, and many set up camp in the adjacent port city of Hampton, which the Confederates had burned to the ground in August 1861 to keep it out of Federal hands. Following Fort Monroe’s example in encouraging a lead-in to slave emancipation, Union strongholds established contraband camps throughout the Southern States, although sturdy Fort Monroe remained one of the few Federal forts in the South not captured by the Confederate army during wartime.4

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Constructed from the Sea: Fort Marion and Its Waves of Inlanders Nearly half a century after Black Hawk was taken to a fort on the Atlantic coast as a prisoner of war and gawked at by curious Easterners, a trainful of Plains Natives was shipped in 1875 from Fort Sill in Oklahoma, amidst staring crowds at every stop, to an ancient fort on the Atlantic shore, the oldest standing fortification in the continental United States. Fort Marion in St. Augustine/Florida was in fact utilized for three waves of Native imprisonment. This fort, constructed from sea-stone (coquina) and completed in 1695 by the Spanish, using mostly Native labor, had been called “Castillo de San Marcos.” When the United States acquired Florida in 1821, the fort was renamed Fort Marion in honor of the “Swamp Fox” General Francis Marion of Revolutionary War fame. It became a stronghold for combating the long indomitable Seminole bands fighting against being pushed inland and south from their traditional territories. During Seminole leader Osceola’s highly publicized incarceration in the fort in 1837, touted in postcards for the burgeoning Florida tourist industry, approximately 20 warriors and family members mysteriously managed to escape from the prison. The army eventually quelled most Native resistance, however, transporting many Seminole people, including a considerable number of African American descent, far away to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. In a counter-movement from west to east, Plains Natives, mostly young male warriors, approximately a dozen chiefs of various levels, and a warrior-­ woman, all stamped as dangerous troublemakers by authorities, but never tried in court, were chained and transferred in a harrowing three-week transcontinental trip to Fort Marion in 1875. To a large extent the tribal groups spoke mutually unintelligible languages, which meant that the hostages could communicate cross-group only with sign language. Some of the peoples were historically inimical toward each other. Richard Henry Pratt, who had engaged in crushing Native rebellion in the West from 1867 to 1875, including fighting with the African American “Buffalo Soldiers,” was in charge of the prisoners.5 Pratt’s records and published recollections are the main archival source for information about the incidents occurring during the prisoners’ three-year stay at Fort Marion—but the thick lens of his own agenda to succeed paternalistically and publically in educating and Christianizing his “Florida boys,”6 teaching them tough “object lessons,” as he called them (e.g., 1964, 129, 130), to push them

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into assimilation, weighs heavily on his reports. As I point out below, Glancy attempts to see through the layer of his lens in this palimpsest, simultaneously by placing her own over it and by excavating to the layers underneath. Granted, Pratt, an inlander from Illinois, frequently joined in the seaside lessons, at least once switching his pronouns from “their” to “our”: “[Skinning a giant sawfish] promoted our education in the wonders of the ocean” (Pratt 1964, 131; emphasis added). Nonetheless, he could use the Fort Marion “island of heterotopia” as a perfect testing ground for his developing notion of boarding schools serving as springboards to total assimilation for ethnic youths.7 Indeed, Fort Marion was a premium Foucauldian heterotopia with its only partially penetrable walls. The shackles were discarded (except for cases of extreme disobedience) and the prisoners allowed relatively free access to town to sell their handicrafts, such as polished sea beans, alligator teeth, bows and arrows, and drawings, to tourists; they earned money from jobs in the area; and they were taught seaside skills such as sailing and rowing. Nonetheless, the “heterotopia of deviation” was only partially transformed into a more positive “counter-site.” The Indigenes remained Other as not yet “civilized” fortress dwellers, even as they made capital of this in popular performances of war dances, whooping, and chanting for townspeople and visitors. Pratt reported that the Natives enjoyed the camping outings he organized (beginning in summer 1875) on Anastasia Island close by, including foot races and other sports: “These contests were usually intertribal, which was great stimulation” (1964, 124)—but the attentive reader of Pratt’s memoirs can question the prisoners’ surface contentedness when realizing that the Kiowas hatched an elaborate but foiled escape plan only for their own group (March–April 1876). Along with the sale of curios and the “war dance” performances, the numerous often ingratiating letters written to authorities in Washington by both Pratt and the prisoners, even by the girl Ah-kes, whose voice is often heard in Glancy’s book, served to strengthen the nineteenth-century connections (first discussed in the section above on Fort Monroe) among inland resistance, coastal regions, centers of power (particularly Washington), and ethnographic tourism. The molding of face masks of the Native prisoners to be put on display (along with the taxidermied giant sawfish) at the Smithsonian Institution for visitors to the “city of the Great Father at Washington” (Pratt 1964, 137) is a revealing case study. Pratt presents the encasing of the prisoners’ heads in plaster as an amusing, voluntary, and informative activity. As I will discuss in more detail later,

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Glancy retrieves the Natives’ fear of drowning underneath the thick plaster of ethnographical burial. The next wave of incarcerated Natives at Fort Marion had no immediate commander who took consistent interest—however vexed—in their welfare. The fort had fallen into disrepair when approximately 500 Apache men, women, and children, including most of Geronimo’s Chiricahua band, were transported East in 1886  in several shipments, some under inhumane conditions, from the desert climate of Arizona to languish in the seaside prison and its environs. The prisoners were allowed to visit St. Augustine to sell their craft products and were supported by the population with food and cloth, but the unfamiliar Florida humidity along with the cramped and unsanitary conditions took a great toll, resulting in a plethora of deaths from such illnesses as malaria and dysentery. In 1887 the survivors of imprisonment in Fort Marion were distributed to other Federal forts, some of them remaining as long as 27 years in captivity. Alicia Delgadillo’s 2013 encyclopedic study, From Fort Marion to Fort Sill: A Documentary History of the Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War, 1886–1913, thoroughly addresses this less well-known layer of Fort Marion’s history. Some of the older children attended the mainly African American Hampton Institute near Fort Monroe, following the trail of 17 of the earlier Fort Marion prisoners. Thus the trajectories of forts Monroe and Marion intertwine in a further loop on the ethnic Atlantic shore.8

View from the Parapet: Littoral Ledger Drawings Perhaps one reason the Fort Marion Native prisoners from the Southern Plains are more present in public memory than the Chiricahua Apaches can be found in the former’s avid production of ledger drawings during the time of incarceration, mostly as gifts for white patrons or as souvenirs for sale to tourists. Nearly 700 of these remarkable drawings have been preserved and studied carefully in expensively printed publications, particularly since the 1960s.9 The prisoners were continuing the practice of sketching on (used) pages from accounting (“ledger”) books or other paper provided by the traders or military and governmental personnel on the Plains, a practice that in turn derived from traditional Native pictorializations on rocks, buffalo skins, shields, and tipis. The conventions of those pictorializations, as catalogued, for instance, in Petersen 1971, were increasingly transculturally mixed with Western perspective angles and coloring material. The majority of the Fort Marion drawings present scenes

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from their earlier lifeways or encounters on the Plains, but a number of them visualize the prisoners’ life on the Florida shore and provide valuable traces of their palimpsestically layered wonder, interests, viewpoints, fears, and even moments of humor.10 Kiowa warrior Zo-tom (Biter) movingly depicts the prisoners shortly after the arrival at the fort, showing a line of them on the parapet, looking out—probably for the first time—at the seemingly infinite ocean, which goes beyond the lighthouses, islands, and ships in the distance to the sky in a seamless horizon (Fig. 4.1). The wife of Black Horse could have been gazing at this view when she asks, as Glancy imagines, upon seeing the ocean for the first time, “But what was it?—One sky facing another?” (1964, 16). The perspective of this drawing is simultaneously from within the imprisoning fort and to the wondrous outside. Although the Natives are seen only from behind, some sitting and some standing, the still row

Fig. 4.1  Ledger drawing by Zo-tom, On the Parapet of Fort Marion Next Day After Arrival (© Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)

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of the Native observers, watched over by a guard on the left, turned toward them rather than toward the sea so familiar to him, the emotions the prisoners could feel in this double-edged situation are poignantly encoded in the drawing. At least three drawings exist of what appears to have been a favorite activity, a seaside version of the not forgotten buffalo hunt in the prisoners’ Plains homeland—shark hunting. In fact, the sharks were called “water buffalo” in the prisoners’ communication with the Fort soldiers (Pratt 1964, 127). In further littoral drawings, prisoners sail along the coast, a skill so very different from those practiced in their western homelands, although their camping accommodations on Anastasia Island resemble tipis more than army tents, contrasting with firm structures such as the lighthouse. Some campers retain the squatting position common in Native settings (Hoebel and Petersen 1964, 75). Another outing, this time to Matanzas, produced a picture of the fort there protecting the southern entrance by water to St. Augustine. Possibly the sketcher was not aware that “matanzas” means “slaughters” in Spanish, as this was the site of the massacre of French Huguenots by Spanish forces in 1565, when St. Augustine was founded. A colorful drawing depicts excursion boats filled with tourists and boasting American flags galore, the boats crowding each other in the St. Augustine inlet. It was in a similar pleasure boat that a group of the Natives was taken north to Hampton upon their release. Before this release, back on the fort’s parapet, Cheyenne “ringleader” (Pratt 1964, 139) O-kuh-ha-tuh (Making Medicine) set an amazing scene of six women from the local female archery club practicing with two prisoners, while two ladies and a large dog lounge nearby (Fig.  4.2). The women’s ribbons seem to be fluttering in the sea breeze—could the wind be the reason none of the arrows has reached the target? Perhaps eyeing the piquant scene inquisitively, two men in a small skiff have rowed close to the shore, the littorality strongly marked by double lines separating the crenelated fort walls from the water. Not more than two years after the captives were incarcerated for alleged deeds such as “participat[ing] in the killing of the Germain[e] parents and son and daughter, and in carrying away into captivity the four sisters” (Pratt 1964, 140), the ladies of St. Augustine feel safe in company with Natives holding weapons. The functions of the ledger drawings were more than occupational therapy for the prisoners or a means to earn money to send home to their impoverished families or even more than a way to familiarize the new coastal environment. Kimberly Blaeser (2015) sees them—specifically the

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Fig. 4.2  Ledger drawing by O-kuh-ha-tuh, Indian Prisoners and Ladies Archery Club St. Augustine (© National Anthropological Archives of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution)

drawings showing Native lifeways and events in the Plains—as a palimpsest of changing agencies, with “each powerful expression drawn over the colonial accounting, symbolically reclaiming a kind of tribal autonomy.” Furthermore, the drawings protested against layers of suffocation, against interment through incarceration, and, on a larger cultural level, against the hegemonic and riveted musealization of Native life. In “Prison Riders,” Gerald Vizenor encapsulates this protest in a poem referring to the many-­ colored horses of the ledger drawings, which offer an escape through imagination and art: I ride out of prison on a painted horse … My visionary mount always captured in prisons and museums. (2005, 59)

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Two-Way Interaction with “Voices Often Choppy as the Waves”: Diane Glancy’s Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education Diane Glancy traces the three-week journey of the Plains prisoners from Fort Sill to an “abandoned fort on the Atlantic Ocean” (2014, 72) and imparts the prisoners’ reactions to the end-of-the-road setting of Fort Marion; Glancy does this by imaginatively retrieving the voices of the captives, “voices often choppy as the waves” (2014, 45). The meta-story of her research, her travels, her current reading, and her past, especially at school, recounts the process by which she hears traces of those voices, interlacing them with historical reports, images from the ledger drawings, and Native creation myths with which the captives might have comforted and oriented themselves. Poetic littoral metaphor is one of the keys to the complex and dynamic palimpsestic interaction between her own story and that of the prisoners.11 Letters in online archives are her “moorings or anchors” (Glancy 2014, 98), which Huyssen finds necessary for memory culture, anchors “that held the shaky boat of imaginative history. They were a dock” (2014, 98), but Glancy wants more, the flux involved in Huyssen’s dynamic memoralization: “It was the ocean I was after. The undulating, changing sea of the prisoners’ experiences” (2014, 98). For Glancy, the littoral space of the Natives’ imprisonment yields rich maritime imagery to describe the alienation and liminality of the Plains captives: “Fort Marion called the prisoners to be something they were not. Called them to dwell in a place they could not understand. Left them bobbing on unstable water in a waterlogged boat. … They had no plumb line. No compass” (2014, 113). “Digging a hole in the water” is repeated in the text, implying the impossibility of fully acquiring and appreciating the Other culture despite the officials’ and clergy’s effort to educate and “civilize” the fort captives, who compared the regimentation to the shoreline: “The waves come in rows like prisoners in the classroom” (2014, 54). Glancy views her difficult project of linking the palimpsests of captives’ voices and her perceptions from her own school days in terms of the instability of the interface between land and surf: The voices and perceptions “remained on the shore rocking as driftwood and broken shells hitting against each other at the end of the waves” (2014, 107).

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In sophisticated narrated monologue combining third- and first-person views, Glancy recreates the Natives’ initial view of the Atlantic, linking it to the trauma of their journey largely on wheels by wagon and railroad: “When the prisoners saw the ocean, they had to have been afraid. What was it?—Water. More water than the land they had come from—more restless than the tall grasses on the prairie. Even the waves had wheels—see them rolling onto the shore” (2014, 24). At times the individual speakers are identified like characters in a play speaking their individual lines, as in this passage in which the Natives relate the unsettled water to their own experience: “LONE WOLF—The ocean is at war with the land. Look at it trying to climb on the land. It attacks and attacks—STRAIGHTENING AN ARROW—The ocean is a prisoner, like us—… BLACK HORSE—It is troubled—tossing—tossing. … A trouble causer—like us” (2014, 16). Glancy’s radical use of dashes recalls Emily Dickinson’s punctuation of immediacy and underscores the shifts in point of view. Glancy justifies the shifts with a postmodern attempt to subjectify history: “I’m interested in different versions of the same story—the telling and retelling of the story in different ways—moving from third person to first and back” (2014, 14).12 The broad range of narrators enables Glancy to mediate in the interstices: “I wanted the multiple narrators—the rewrite of a broken history broken into different narratives. … I tried to work between the unfolding versions of history” (2014, 11). Applying the strategies of oral storytelling, Glancy advances many restarts, returning again and again to the arrival in St. Augustine, as in this late chapter: “They entered a stone fort by the ocean—the smell of [the ocean] did not go away—the sound—the pounding waves were a buffalo stampede that kept running and never stopped, night or day” (2014, 90). Similes show the Natives’ efforts to relate the Otherness of the ocean setting to the familiar: the pounding waves as a buffalo stampede, the swelling sound of the nighttime ocean calling up “the wind in the cottonwoods” (2014, 20), the undulant sea as “a place where the water held its ceremonial dance” (2014, 11). Well-intentioned women residing in the town of St. Augustine, many from the North spending their winters in the mild Florida seaside climate, gave the prisoners literacy lessons. Pratt reports that the prisoners looked forward to the classes and learned eagerly (Pratt 1964, 172), but Glancy’s interpretation is decidedly less positive, colored by her knowledge of, even personal recollection of the erasure of Native perspective in language through Western alphabetization. She vividly ventures to reinstate that perspective, the prisoners seeing individual letters as (littoral) movement

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rather than two-dimensional figures: “I think the prisoners would have seen the letters of the alphabet in terms of motion during their English lessons. The letters would have seemed like the footprints of shorebirds that ran along the surf and disappeared along the edge of oncoming waves” (Glancy 2014, 111). For the prisoners, the phonetic phenomena of English were as vacillating as the tides; the sound of the letters, for example, often changed unpredictably according to what other letters they “sat by” (Glancy 2014, 26): “They were traitors, those letters. They were Indian scouts for the U.S. cavalry” (2014, 26). In general, education “should tell us how to live beside the [fluctuating and Othering] sea” (2014, 70). If the Natives could learn to write, they “could dig a hole in the water” (2014, 25) of the soldiers’ slippery language, the language of the treaties which the Natives “could not read” (2014, 25), the treaties which betrayed them again and again. Indeed, to return to that important image: “digging a hole in the water,” Glancy suggests, describes the way the dislocated Natives felt in their liminal position between lifeways on the Plains and military expectations in the Fort. Although in many ways the Natives seemed to acculturate to military life in the prison, wearing neat army uniforms, keeping their hair and even fingernails short and trim, passing inspection every morning, performing drills and guard duty, accepting ranking as sergeants and privates, passing judgments in a tribunal of peers, Glancy claims that their estrangement was deep and ever present. They were allowed to roam through the town, hawking their artifacts to tourists, but they themselves remained the chief curios. Only Wolf Stomach, who died soon after arrival in St. Augustine, was able, in death, as Toothless imagines, to accomplish the impossible feat of overcoming the “distance from their land” (Glancy 2014, 26), combining that land with life at the ocean by “[digging] a hole in the water” with the tin cup left on his grave (2014, 25). Glancy’s liminal position between sophisticated writer and hearer of the traces of the prisoners’ voices makes her undertaking of layering her own experiences over the Natives’ transient voices in written form, in her view, also impossible but longed for: “I want to write in the ocean” (2014, 111; emphasis original). The humid marine climate, so prized by the growing numbers of Florida vacationers, proved pernicious or even deadly to a number of the prisoners used to the Plains weather conditions: “The ocean made the Indians sick. They buried those who died of the coughing sickness and other maladies” (Glancy 2014, 78). Glancy links illness to the rhythm of

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the waves: “The prisoners stood on the wall of the fort and stared at the water. The waves kept coming like the cavalry. The prisoners rocked back and forth with the waves. They were stultified. They were sick” (2014, 79). Standing Wolf (also known as Shaving Wolf) suffered from paralysis of his legs—“it was as if he began to fill with sea water” (2014, 71)—and died in December 1876. Big Moccasin literally fills up with water in November 1875 and drowns in his own urine when he desperately ties a string around his penis to induce a uric acid suicide. The aspect of the ocean as a dangerous and claustrophobic trap is inscribed into the punishment of single incarceration, in iron shackles, in a “small dark windowless room” (Glancy 2014, 18), one of Pratt’s countless “object lessons.” The sensation of drowning in bottomless darkness is vividly invoked during Glancy’s description of the making of phrenological casts for the Smithsonian Institution, which she recreates as the frightful experience of having one’s head covered in blinding plaster to serve the ethnological interests of the so-called progressive science documenting the “vanishing race” (2014, 43). The “underwater breathing, this smothering” (2014, 38) felt to Making Medicine as if there were “an ocean on his head” (2014, 41). Dry Wood relives a childhood trauma: “[He] had fallen in a creek when he was a boy. He couldn’t breathe. Now he was under water again” (2014, 41). The imagery complex of drowning and entrapment segues in Glancy’s text into a prevalent “box” conceit, ranging from “the box-that-moves” (e.g., 2014, 6), which was the train transporting the chained prisoners cross-country, or the “box cars, box fort, and box houses of the new people’s world” that contrasted so strongly with the open prairies, to the rectangular graves in which the deceased prisoners were buried in the far “southeast corner” of the post cemetery (2014, 25), echoing Fort Marion’s geographical southeast corner position in the US map. Despite the distaste for boxes, Howling Wolf claims he “would ride the train again, if it left the ocean” (2014, 40) and brought him back to his home territory. The lines of the ocean waves and currents are restless, yet the prisoners speculate that these lines provided the prototype for the straight lines of the written page: “The lines were straighter than the waves on the shore— Is that where the new people got the idea to make lines in their books?— They just copied the waves coming in? The surveyors did the same in the Indians’ hunting lands” (Glancy 2014, 92), the straight lines of the written word being compared to the seemingly arbitrary straight lines drawn by authorities and echoed in the endless lines of train tracks, the settlers’

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plowed fields, and the lines of intruding soldiers recreated in the ledger drawings. Only the true flight of Natives’ arrows, it seems, could begin to counter the Euro-Americans’ straight lines. Now, instead of weapons, the Natives were armed with crayons: “The Indians drew with colored pencils they held like arrows” (Glancy 2014, 92). The colored pencils often drew rows and rows of prisoners at drill and during their lessons, which Telling Something (Ta-a-way-te) compares to the sea, in a strong simile already cited earlier: “The waves come in rows like prisoners in the classroom” (2014, 54). Just as harrowing as the ocean’s lines and rows, as the sea’s ability to pull under and suffocate, is its apparent infinity. A daunting imaginative leap was required by the prisoners gazing out at the sea to believe the white race came from the other side of the “great waters” (Glancy 2014, 10), “the great waters—the place the soldiers came from” (2014, 16). More certain for the Natives was that they had been forced to trace in reverse the path of the white settlers as a hegemonic mode of elimination, pushing the prisoners into nothingness: “The soldiers sent them on a train to the great waters to get rid of them. To send them as far away from [the Natives’] people and land as they could” (Glancy 2014, 11). Only the sun moving toward the west every day can give them a sense of mapping: “CHIEF KILLER—I walk on the beach and watch the sun pass over the sky—back toward the way we came” (Glancy 2014, 76). Glancy specifically views her project in terms of a palimpsestic uncovering process, of “overlay” (2014, 9; emphasis original): She wants to excavate, to dig from “what was said on the surface” to “what was thought underneath” (2014, 14), to intervene not with an aftermath but rather with the “undermath” (2014, 117). Glancy can see the words on a page “move like ocean waves” (2014, 109) to reveal the sediments below. The layers of sediment can even be sifted through to enable an inversion from writing to orality: Sometimes it takes an accretion of incongruous layers to reach the undercurrents of meanings in the structure of Native concepts and oralities. It happened when I was writing an explanation for another disjointed piece. It takes the stretching of the English language to get to the rhythms of the old language that still shows through the text. It has something to do with another image of making-old-language-show—in which a pencil is streaked back and forth across a page [making visible what was written on the

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­ revious missing page] … It is this process through which I discover stories. p (Glancy 2014, 109–110)

Glancy’s undertaking is ostensibly the palimpsestic opposite of what the Natives have done in their petroglyphs depicting “visages of animals and warriors” (2014, 35), now barely discernible, on the fort “casement” [sic: casemate] walls (cf. 2014, 34–35). These wall drawings “remain an act of placing what is known upon the unknown” (2014, 35), which is reflected in their relating the littoral phenomena to what they are already acquainted with: The sound of the surf is “Thunder Beings pound(ing) their drum” (2014, 24), sharks are “water buffalo” and alligators “water horses.” The Natives have also been engaged, however, in excavation, helping exhume ancient Native artifacts from burial mounds near the fort, for instance, remnants of culture, probably Timucuan, which preceded those of the Plains Natives, or discovering oyster shell mounds that appeared to be “the creation of the Indians prior to the advent of the white man” (Pratt 1964, 125). Glancy too is involved in both sides of the covering and uncovering in a two-way palimpsestic interaction: She places her estranging school experience over that of the Native prisoners, which reveals insights into the functions of both. It is no coincidence that the constant covering and uncovering recall the inseparable ebb and flow of oceanic waves and tides.

Conclusion The “traces of the past, erasures, losses, and heterotopias” that Huyssen sees as “merg[ing] in the imaginary” with “strong marks of the present space” (2003, 7) to create contemporary productive and public memory are activated in Glancy’s undertaking. In energizing the imaginary of the functional she opens up palimpsestic loopholes in the ostensibly fixed layers of cultural sediments, creating her text from interaction with the “traces of the past,” which she picks up and values like “the arrival of shells on the waves each morning” (Glancy 2014, 106). This is her personal counter-strategy, made public through her writing, to hegemonic agendas of erasure: “We don’t know what we’ve wiped out in the passage of time and our conquering ways” (Glancy 2014, 121). In a relevant sense she indeed succeeds in “digging a hole in the water” by imaginatively mobilizing the voices of the captives. Glancy’s project, the Native prisoners’ protest through their layered ledger art, and recognizing the palimpsestically

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heterotopical functions of the monumental seaside forts encourage transcultural-­historical dialogue on the ethnic shore and aid the imaginary to work toward redeeming a quantum of the erasures and losses.

Notes 1. This strong formulation—“major trope”—comes from the back cover of Present Pasts. Of course, Huyssen discusses the importance of the palimpsest trope in the text of his book (see most notably 2003, 7). “Public memory” is a term that appears multiple times in his study (see, e.g., 2003, 16, 28, 94, 180). 2. Hsinya Huang has written a fascinating article filled with the language of littorality in her treatment of “the Pacific” as “a contact zone, method, and concept” to formulate “positive notions of transnational indigeneity, which in turn feed back into local native traditions” (2016, 173). 3. Black Hawk’s autobiography, published in 1833, was dictated to Antoine LeClaire, a government interpreter living at Fort Armstrong on Rock Island, Illinois, in the Mississippi, a fort then on the western frontier. 4. Not coincidentally, the African American layer of Fort Monroe history enfolds a further cultural landmark: Words to a number of spirituals were written down for the first time in that fort, for example, “Go Down Moses” and “Let My People Go.” 5. Pratt lists the prisoners as Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Caddo. At least 11 were of Mexican origin, captured by the Kiowas and Comanches (Pratt 1964, 138–144). 6. The condescending term “Florida boys” appears not infrequently in Pratt’s correspondence (cf. Lookingbill 2006, 8). Particularly when one considers that at least a third of the prisoners were over the age of 30, “boy” does indeed call up associations with the racist form of address to an adult African American in the pre-Civil Rights era. 7. In her review of Glancy’s book, Crystal K.  Alberts clearly supports this point: “Simply put, these prisoners were Pratt’s initial experiment in cultural assimilation through education that would serve as the model for Native boarding schools for decades” (2015, 155). Pratt founded the infamously successful Carlisle Indian Industrial [boarding] School in Pennsylvania in 1879. Pertinently, one of Huyssen’s explicit examples of a “crisis heterotopia” is the boarding school of the nineteenth century (Huyssen 2003, 24). 8. American deserters from the Spanish–American War in 1898 were also detained in Fort Marion. The fort was taken out of active operation in 1900, turned into a National Monument in 1924, and once more officially

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designated as Castillo de San Marcos in 1942. It has become a well-visited museum, many tourists combining a visit to St. Augustine with tours of Cape Canaveral and Disney World in a palimpsestic but questionably palatable triple-decker American cultural sandwich. 9. Hoebel and Petersen (1964) list approximately 673  in their appendix (91–93). A sampling of the rich scholarship includes Hoebel and Petersen (1964), Petersen (1971), Berlo (1996), Earenfight (ed.) (2007), and Szabo (2007, 2011). 10. The sources of the two illustrations: (1) Zo-tom, “On the Parapet of Fort Marion Next Day After Arrival,” Arthur and Shifra Silberman Collection, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum 1996.17.0203A; (2) O-kuh-ha-tuh, “Indian Prisoners and Ladies Archery Club St. Augustine,” National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 39B. 11. The reviewer of Glancy’s book for The American History Journal does not seem to understand Glancy’s goals and strategies when he critiques her for “quot[ing] prisoners and mak[ing] up dialogue, without citations for her sources” (Reyhner 2015, 888). In contrast, Steven Williams reviews the book with understanding and appreciation: “By incorporating her own experiences and emotional responses to the prisoners’ artifacts and spaces, Glancy’s text illuminates the legacy of Native dislocations and re-alignments in education that link Native experiences past to present” (2015, 119). 12. An extreme example of the deliberate pronoun switches: “They [the Natives] followed her [the teacher’s] marks on our [the Natives’] slate boards with their [the Natives’] marks” (Glancy 25–26).

References Alberts, Crystal K. 2015. Rev. of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education and Report to the Department of the Interior: Poems, by Diane Glancy. Transmotion 1 (2): 155–159. https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/transmotion/article/view/190/706. Accessed 1 September 2020. Berlo, Janet Catherine. 1996. Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the American Federation of Arts and the Drawing Center. Black Hawk. 1833. Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk. Dictated 1833. Ed. J. B. Patterson. Rock Island, Illinois. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7097/7097-­h/7097-­h.htm. Accessed 1 September 2020. Blaeser, Kimberly. 2015. “Mochi, Prisoner of War.” “Stories of Native Presence and Survivance in Commemoration of the 151st Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre,” ed. Billy J. Stratton. Common-Place: The Journal of Early American

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Life 16 (1). http://common-­place.org/book/stories-­of-­native-­presence-­and-­ survivance-­in-­commemoration-­of-­the-­151st-­anniversary-­of-­the-­sand-­creek-­ massacre/. Accessed 1 September 2020. Delgadillo, Alicia, and Miriam A. Perrett. 2013. From Fort Marion to Fort Sill: A Documentary History of the Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War, 1886–1913. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Earenfight, Phillip, ed. 2007. A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Glancy, Diane. 2014. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hoebel, E.  Adamson, and Karen Daniels Petersen, eds. 1964. A Cheyenne Sketchbook by Cohoe. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Huang, Hsinya. 2016. Trans-Pacific Ecological Imaginary. In Comparative Indigenous Studies, ed. Mita Banerjee, 173–198. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lookingbill, Brad D. 2006. War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Petersen, Karen Daniels. 1971. Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Pratt, Richard Henry. 1964. Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indians, 1867–1904. Ed. Robert M.  Utley. New Haven: Yale University Press. Quarstein, John V., and Dennis Mroczkowski. 2003 [2000]. Fort Monroe: The Key to the South. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing. Reyhner, Jon. 2015. Rev. of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education, by Diane Glancy. The Journal of American History 102 (3): 888. Szabo, Joyce M. 2007. Art from Fort Marion: The Silberman Collection. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 2011. Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings by Howling Wolf and Zotom at the Autry National Center. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary. 2011. President Obama to Sign Proclamation Designating Fort Monroe a National Monument. 1 November. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-­p ress-­o ffice/2011/11/01/president-­ obama-­s ign-­p roclamation-­d esignating-­f ort-­m onroe-­n ational-­m onum. Accessed 1 September 2020. United States Army. 1975. Fort Monroe. N.P.: Boone Publications.

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Vizenor, Gerald. 2005. Prison Riders. In Native American Voices on Identity, Art, and Culture: Objects of Everlasting Esteem, ed. Lucy Fowler Williams, William Wierzbowski, and Robert W.  Preucel, 59. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. Weaver, Jace. 2014. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, Steven. 2015. Rev. of Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education, by Diane Glancy. American Studies 54 (2): 118–119.

PART II

Contested and Interwoven Histories: The City as Palimpsest in Literature and Culture

CHAPTER 5

Littoral/Literal Watermarks: Layers of Signification in Maritime Marseille Page R. Laws

Introduction—Allons enfants…! Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé! … Aux armes, citoyens, Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu’un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons! (Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, “La Marseillaise” [1792]) The quarter of the old port exuded a nauseating odor of mass life congested, confused, moving round and round in a miserable suffocating circle. Yet everything there seemed to belong and fit normally in place. It was as if all the derelicts of all the seas had drifted up here to sprawl out the days in the sun. (McKay 1957, 18)

P. R. Laws (*) Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_5

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The trope of the palimpsest undergoes a “metaphoric coupling” (Sarah Dillon qtd in Whalen 2009, 333) in this chapter with the related trope of the watermark. Palimpsest and watermark are cousin terms from papermaking, an ancient activity based, as we know, on combining water and plant fibers. A palimpsest is created by multiple, overlapping uses of the surface of the same piece of paper. Though the paper starts off with one apparent surface, a palimpsest in effect creates multiple surfaces to a piece of paper which interact (usually unintentionally) with one another. The watermark, however, is a sign mechanically embedded inside a piece of paper. The inclusion of a watermark within the body of a piece of paper is a very intentional, though sometimes somewhat secretive, act, conceived of to either embellish the paper (expensive stationery often bears a watermark) or to protect the paper-user or users’ security. Official documents (e.g., checks) contain watermarks often made visible only when the paper is held up to the light (an excellent metaphor for what this critic is attempting to do!). But the word “watermark” has a second maritime definition equally relevant (Dillon might even say “palimpsestuously related”) to this volume’s theme. The Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995) defines “watermark” as “a mark showing the highest or lowest level that a river or the sea reaches.” The space between such marks is also known by a cousin term: the “littoral.” The littoral area of a coastline— even in the Mediterranean which has relatively slight tidal action—is that area constantly subjected to the deposit of flotsam and jetsam, frequently followed by the erasure of those same objects or particles. The tides along a coastline, influenced by the moon and weather, write their stories on the land’s surface in a way quite comparable to the varying ink or other deposits that form a palimpsest upon paper. To “metaphorically couple” yet another conceit related to the palimpsest theme, the tide in the Vieux Port of Marseille comes and goes, creating and erasing stories, in much the same way Freud (1999) describes a child’s Wunderblock (called in America, a Magic Slate) being written upon by a stylus, only to have the words or figures erased by the lifting of the device’s celluloid protective sheet. In my comparison, the tide is the lifted “erasing” sheet. But the tide is also the stylus that deposits a new message, with all the markings—old and new—being retained upon the device’s deepest, wax surface, a kind of waxen palimpsest. Freud used this metaphor to describe the human unconscious—full of written and written-over memories (see “Notiz über den Wunderblock” [1999]).

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The texts to be examined in this chapter wash up and down upon one another, jostling, depositing, and erasing meanings as predictably and unpredictably as the tides in Marseille, the 2600-year-old Phoenician-­ Greek-­Roman-Provençal-French port that inspired them all. While there is only one hypotext (Pagnol’s plays) mentioned in a specific hypertext (Sembène Ousmane’s Le docker noir [1973, originally published 1957]), all the texts work palimpsestuously together, their disparate and similar ideas mixing like the harbor smells all of the texts actually do mention.

Marseille: A Sensory and Cultural Palimpsest Marseille is a sensory and cultural palimpsest, awash in the sights, sounds, and smells of Mediterranean Europe, Africa, and even distant America and Asia. If Marcel Pagnol’s affectionate realism in his famous Marseillaise trilogy of plays and films (Marius [1946, originally published 1929], Fanny [2004, originally published 1931], and César [1988, originally published 1936]) represents one French native’s perspective on Marseille, this city of immigrants (legal and not) also bears palimpsestic layers and watermarks of literary works by Jamaican American Claude McKay, seminal author of the Harlem Renaissance, and Blackfeet/Gros Ventre James Welch, author of The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2001) and a founder of the Native American Renaissance. McKay was recently honored by having a street (a passage) named for him in Marseille where his 1929 Pan-Africanist novel Banjo is set. While Welch has not yet received such cartographic recognition, literary traces of his lost Native American Charging Elk—who brought his dreams of arid Dakota badlands to the 1890s France via Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—add their own surrealistic layers of signification to this ancient Phoenician port. Comparing Pagnol’s petit bourgeois harbor folk with McKay’s “beach boys” (African and African American dockworkers) and with Welch’s thoroughly alienated, stranded Native (who also ends up a dockworker) reveals multiple layers of signification, created by the ebb and flow of Marseille’s maritime cultures. Sembène Ousmane, Senegalese writer and filmmaker, layers on yet another dockworker novel, this one about an African and from an African point of view, in his 1956 semi-autobiographical Francophone work Le docker noir. The adventures of immigrant Diaw Falla, part-time writer and full-time longshoreman/labor organizer, add another significant layer to the Marseille palimpsest.

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The strongest connotation of the word “Marseille” throughout the world is surely the bellicose French national anthem that bears its name: “La Marseillaise,” written by an Army engineer from a different region as a “Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin” [“war song for the Army of the Rhine”; all translations are mine] but rechristened for a set of Marseillaise militiamen who came to the aid of Parisians during the Revolution. The song famously calls for the French to spill the impure (foreign) blood of their enemies into every furrow of soil [“Qu’un sang impur/Abreuve nos sillons!”] before their enemies have a chance to slit the throats of French sons and countrymen. This call to arms—intelligible throughout the Francophone world and known to others in translation—tends to give France’s Second City, Marseille, a militant, pugnacious image reinforced, perhaps, by the barfights repeatedly mentioned in the three plays and three novels examined in this chapter. But setting aside its famous song, those who actually visit the ancient Phoenecian (then Greek, then Roman, then Provençal) port—and all the authors considered here indeed spent time in Marseille—tend to foreground its olefactory impact, the “nauseating odor” of the Vieux Port cited in the second epigraph above, as perhaps its most salient feature. One assumes the multimillion-dollar yachts now anchored in the Vieux Port are evidence that the city has solved, at least to some extent, its maritime odor problem. In the most strongly centralized nation in the world (Paris being the center of the French universe), it is ironic that the French national anthem should bear a secondary city’s name. But Marseille is awash in irony and inconsistencies: The home of charming Pagnolesque French citizens who are saltwater “salt-of-the-earth” souls, it is also a southern “capitale de la douleur [capital of pain]” (Smyth 2007, 120)—full of poverty, disease, crime, and legal and illegal immigrants exploited for their labor and subjected to casual, sometimes pernicious racism—yes, even in a country where racism officially does not exist. Edmund Smyth quotes Montale, saying “Pour L’Europe, nous ne sommes toujours que la premiere ville du tiers-monde [For Europe we are always just the first city of the Third World]” (Smyth 2007, 120)—where the clear blue sea and a leftist democratic tradition still contrast with pollution and right-wing Front Populaire intolerance (Kristeva in Smyth 2007). The “chief port of the French Colonial Empire” (Richard 2013, n.p.), Marseille has also been called a “crucible” where “civic, French and various Mediterranean identities converged, collided” (Takeda 2011, 2). Sembène Ousmane even speaks of its African quarter as “le petit Harlem marseillais” (Ousmane 1973, 77).

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Though this look at the image of Marseille in six works by four authors mentioned above is by no means comprehensive,1 it is an attempt to show a city certainly “entre deux mondes” for its foreign visitors but also for other Frenchmen (culturally and linguistically), judging from its most famous native portraitist, Marcel Pagnol. Kind/cruel Marseille offers a promising site for such study with its timeless characteristics acting like an indelible watermark on paper—always the same, always ghosting and haunting what is written upon it. But Marseille is also subject to its ever-­ changing tides of people and cultures. They leave littoral tidelines—different kinds of watermarks—that persist for a while, then disappear and are replaced. The differences among the six literary works are telling, but the explicit and implicit links among them are even more so. A brief look at the characteristic smells and sounds depicted, the bar life, the dockworkers, the teeming ethnic enclaves, should provide a way to analyze worldly, world-weary Marseille as a richly layered palimpsest of humanity, layered by its inhabitants’ disparate tribes, places of origin, races, classes, religions, and even time periods.

Marseille “in the Hexagon”: Pagnol’s People C‘est drôle come on voit les pays par leur odeur. [It is funny how one sees countries by their smell.] (Pagnol 1946, 46) Il est exactement huit heures quartre à l’horloge des docks. [It is exactly 8:15 according to the dock clock.] (Pagnol 2004, 14)

Because France resembles a rough hexagon in shape, the geometric figure sometimes substitutes symbolically for the country, minus its overseas départments. (For an American, the phrase “lower 48” to refer to our contiguous US landmass is somewhat analogous.) The view of Marseille by its own proud inhabitants—people who know various visiting ships by their horns and set their watches by the port’s clock—versus the view of Marseille by Parisians (quel horreur!), the Lyonnais, and indeed the rest of France, is one conflict at the heart of Pagnol’s endearing, influential trilogy of plays/films: Marius, Fanny, and César (all originally staged in Paris and all repeatedly adapted for film, but “César” originally written as a film script rather than a play). The citizens of Marseille have not always appreciated Pagnol’s influence on their image. For instance, a “Pagnolade” has come into the French language as a word for a tirade that represents the

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speaker as “unintelligible and overly impassioned” (cf. Maguire 2015, 22). But the Marseillais suffered from such stereotyping well before Pagnol’s “Théâtre Filmé” (Maguire 2015, 13), perhaps because of their isolation at the far southern edge of the Hexagon, accessible only by climbing over mountains or by means of the Vieux Port until the Tunnel de la Nerthe was constructed in 1848.2 Indeed Pagnol dramatizes their sensitivity to stereotyping in more than one scene, only to end up contributing to the problem malgré lui. The plot of the trilogy is straightforward and seemingly scant for three whole plays/films. Centered in the Bar de la Marine, owned by the blustering César, the comic drama concerns Marius, César’s beloved but oft-­ berated son who is torn between his “folie de la mer”—his passionate desire to go to sea—and his love for the fishmonger Fanny who works just outside the bar. As a result of their affair, Marius impregnates Fanny who, without informing him, encourages him to seek his bliss at sea out of a fear he will resent being tied down. He departs for a long voyage, saying “Chacun s’en va vers ce qu’il aime. Toi, tu épouses l’argent de Panisse et moi, j’épouse la mer. Ça vaut mieux pour tous les deux [Everyone’s going for what he loves. You, you’ll marry Panisse’s money, and me, I’ll marry the sea. It’s better for both of us]” (Pagnol 1946, 237). Fanny is lying, of course, when she encourages Marius to go to sea, but she is soon saved from public disgrace by doing just what Marius foretold: marrying Panisse, the master sail-maker of the Vieux Port and perhaps its richest citizen. (Panisse has also been courting her for some time, and still wants her when she reveals to him that she is carrying Marius’s child.) The first play ends with Piquoiseau (a harbor hanger-on) reciting at curtain a list of Fanny’s successful rivals for Marius’s love: “Suez. Aden, Bombay, Madras, Colombo, Macassar” (Pagnol 1946). The second play, Fanny deals with Cesar’s deep grief at the absence of his son, Fanny’s marriage to Panisse (much to her somewhat grasping mother’s relief and delight), and the arrival of Césariot, named for his biological grandfather César (Panisse’s best friend and sparring partner), who “passes” as simply the child’s godfather. The third play César deals with the actions of Césariot at 20 years of age, having been raised by Panisse and Fanny “comme un coq en pâte [with a silver spoon in his mouth]” (Pagnol 1988 [1936], 91), given the very best Parisian education, first-class train rides, custom-made suits, silk ties, “etcétéra etcetera.” The play also deals briefly with Marius’s somewhat “wasted” life in nearby Toulon working as a car mechanic. Having learned about the child, he feels his life has been stolen from him because of

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Fanny’s decision to keep his baby a secret from him and marry Panisse. Panisse resolves the problem the only way possible, by rather cheerfully dying of natural causes, and by wishing the now middle-aged lovers Marius and Fanny, their long-delayed happiness. Césariot, once he learns who his real father is, eventually comes around to accepting him, class difference and all. The plot, as said, is skimpy for a trilogy, but masterfully meted out by Pagnol to satisfy his audiences. One loves the trilogy not for its plot but for Pagnol’s characterizations, bolstered by ambience to burn. Marseille itself is indeed “personnage principal [the star]” (Rageot qtd in Maguire 2015, 25). That the characterizations are caricatures cannot be denied. The films were even promoted by now-famous posters featuring comic drawings by Toé.3 But Pagnol redeems himself by thematizing this very flaw. Critics point to the scene in Fanny where A Fat Man stinking of garlic, wearing a bizarre beard with two points and a pith helmet, appears in the Bar embodying what the rest of France and the world apparently saw (circa 1931) as Marseille Personified. César immediately comes to his beloved city’s defense, explaining to M. Brun (a barely tolerated Lyonnais), that the Man is a sham Marseillais: Eh bien, monsieur Brun, à Marseille, on ne dit jamais bagasse, on ne porte pas la barbe à deux pointes, on ne mange pas tres souvent d’aïoli et on laisse les casques pour les explorateurs [Well, Monsieur Brun, in Marseille, one never says “bagasse” (for baggage), one doesn’t wear a two-pointed beard, one doesn’t eat garlic all the time, and one leaves pith helmets to the explorers]. (Pagnol 2004, 24)

Warming to his subject, César continues proudly: et on fait le tunnel du Rove, et on construit vingt kilometres de quai, pour nourrir toute l’Europe avec la force de l’Afrique. Et en plus, monsier Brun, en plus, on emmerde tout l’univers [And one builds the Tunnel of Rove, and one constructs 20 kilometers of quais, in order to nourish all of Europe with the resources of Africa. And, what’s more, Monsieur Brun, what’s more, one tells the whole Universe to take a flying leap!]. (Pagnol 2004, 26; also qtd in Koëlla 1951, 307)

Like the Bard and all other great comic writers, Pagnol includes the potentially tragic, the dangerously dark, if only to end up skirting it. This same César, so full of civic pride above, is not above trying to throttle his son or

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shoot at Panisse (the bullet hits and deflates a diver’s suit hung for ornamentation in the bar). Panisse is so thoroughly obsessed with money that he eagerly sells a boat he knows will sink to a “friend” whom he knows to be a nonswimmer. (The boat does sink, but the friend is rescued.) Panisse takes pride in being a sail-maker, until the market “forces” him into selling the new-fangled polluting marine motors that end up making him rich. Marius almost resorts to violence to get back his rightful “wife” and son, but he does not. And the native denizens of the Vieux Port—awash in Arabs and Africans and Americans and Asians—cheerfully spout their songs in Provençal, but likewise utter ethnic slurs and remarks full of casual racism. Fanny’s mother Honorine says things like “nous ne sommes pas chez les nègres [we aren’t living like negroes]” (Pagnol 1946, 112) to indicate her own superior “civilized” values. An infuriated César later says to Panisse about Honorine’s granting him the hand of Fanny, “elle te l’a vendue, sa fille- vendue comme une petite négresse d’Afrique. Dis la vérité-­ vieux négrier: c’est ça que tu as fait [she sold her to you, her daughter— sold her like a little African negress. Tell the truth—old slave-trader: that’s what you have done]” (Pagnol 2004, 130). The term “Sidi” is used as a generic word (usually pejorative) for North Africans, with “Sénégalais” serving for all Sub-Saharan Africans (Pagnol 1946, 58). When Arabs sing a song outside the bar, they are said (paternalistically) to laugh “comme des enfants [like children]” (Pagnol 1946, 93). Still Fanny herself, having spent some time in North Africa, speaks Arabic in Marius and even César allows himself to speculate on the possibility that all nationalities may be right about their putative God(s) in César. In short, Pagnol’s people exhibit a warmth, humanity, and even a nobility that well exceed their venality, chauvinism, and racism on most occasions. Pagnol’s place as the beloved twentieth-century portraitist of the Marseillais therefore seems justified, even when his affectionate realism turns to caricature. A true (not generic!) Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane (1973) even mentions Pagnol as an indelible part of Marseille culture in his novel Le docker noir, a case of one layer in the palimpsest(a Genettian hypertext) opening up access to a previous, deeper layer (a hypotext).

McKay’s Banjo: Marseille as Pan-African Juke Joint The fish-women spread themselves broadly, behind their stalls. And in bright frocks and thick mauve socks and wooden shoes, the fish-girls pattered noisily about with charming insouciant ease, two between them

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bearing a basket, buxom and attractive and beautiful in their environment, like lush water-lilies in a lagoon. (McKay 1957, 85) Oh, shake that thing, He’s a jelly-roll king. (McKay 1957, 50)

Were Banjo not published originally the very same year (1929) Pagnol first produced Marius, one could swear the Jamaican American author had just chatted with Pagnol or his character Fanny (first epigraph) at a Vieux Port bar in Marseille before writing the romanticized description of the fishwomen. (Perhaps that happened, but there’s no evidence it did and publication dates do not support any direct influence in either direction.) McKay’s hero Banjo loves Marseille “the marvelous, dangerous, attractive, big, wide-open port” (McKay 1957, 12) as much as César does (or as much as Banjo’s fellow sea-wanderer Marius loves other exotic ports), but Banjo does so in a very different way than Pagnol’s harbor folk. Banjo, the deracinated nomad, is virtually homeless in Marseille, bedding down on the breakwater’s rocks or in girlfriends’ apartments, eating all his meals on ships and in bars. But Banjo is blissfully, deeply “at home” in Marseille or anywhere else music can be played and people can dance. Pagnol’s People bloom only in their salty native soil, and Pagnol sees the city through nostalgic native French eyes; McKay, by contrast, sees it through the eyes of a traveling American intellectual under the powerful sway of Pan-African essentialist ideals (voiced in the novel by McKay’s surrogate character, Ray). But at least McKay’s novel is dialectical—presenting multiple competing points of view before trying to synthesize them. The palimpsestic layer that he lays down is more richly textured for his pains. Much of what we need to know about McKay’s first focal character Banjo (Ray takes over for much of the novel’s second half) resides in Banjo’s “speaking” names and nicknames. The novel begins with the following line: “Heaving along from side to side, like a sailor on the unsteady deck of a ship, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, familiarly known as Banjo, patrolled the magnificent length of the great breakwater of Marseilles, a banjo in his hand” (McKay 1957, 3). “Lincoln” and “Agrippa” both reveal Banjo’s roots in the American South and its history of slavery (we learn much later that Banjo’s youngest brother has been lynched). The Great Emancipator served as namesake to many black babies born during or after Reconstruction; and Latin names such as Agrippa, Pompey, Caesar, and so

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on had circulated widely as slave-names. Banjo’s surname “Daily” also speaks of his character. Daily, that is, from day-to-day, is exactly how Banjo chooses to live his life, for better or for worse. McKay’s use of Southern dialect for Banjo’s speech (e.g., “moh” for “more,” “evah” for “ever”) brands him as colorful but uneducated. He thinks admiringly about the great breakwater, for instance: “It sure is some moh mahvelous job. … most wonderful bank in the ocean I evah did see” (McKay 1957, 3). Banjo has no knowledge of the French or Provençal languages he is hearing around him, so he and his “beach boys” (perhaps “posse” in today’s vernacular) use the “other” lingua franca: English. Ray, by contrast, will arrive with a knowledge of French commensurate with his better education. While Banjo’s thoughts and adventures tend to focus on wine, women, and (especially) song, he is particular about what he plays (“I don’t play no Black Joe hymns” [McKay 1957, 90]) and well aware of the port’s dark side: its poverty, prostitution, and violence which he calls “rough house” (McKay 1957, 94). It is just that he masterfully adjusts to whatever environment in which he finds himself. Banjo seems to live adaptively in the moment, moving without explanation from job to job—dockworker, coal miner, sailor, bum, occasionally petty thief. His luck inevitably runs out, but that is in the nature of his itinerant callings. With the zeal of traveling anthropologists, the narrator and later Ray articulate the pecking order of the port’s inhabitants, according to their country of origin and the cafés they frequent (McKay 1957, 45). Even though he must have personally benefitted, wittingly or not, from France’s preference for American blacks over African ones, McKay seems cognizant of the racism all people of color encounter in Marseille. David Murphy (2000, 466) suggests, in fact, that McKay may have been more aware of French hypocrisy about race than perhaps other dazzled travelers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. The African owner of the Café Africain, for instance, repeatedly voices his preference for America, flaws and all, over self-righteous France. The most striking feature of the novel, however, remains McKay’s insistence that whatever their ethnic or tribal backgrounds, all Africans can unite in their shared love of music and dance, their valorization of instinct over intellect. It is this theme within Banjo that makes it both memorable and oddly dated, essentialism and “vitalism” having generally passed from favor among intellectuals, black and white. But that realization barely lessens one’s joy at experiencing Banjo’s sunny disposition, McKay’s

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endearing enthusiasm, and the author’s renderings of jazz riffs into poetry (see especially the chapter entitled “Jelly Roll”).4

The Empire (Finally) Writes Back: Ousmane’s Le docker noir

Dans cette Afrique mériodionale de la France, toutes les origines, tous les groupes ethniques sont représentés. Gardant avec lui les coutumes de sa terre natale, chaque territoire a son propre canton: les bars… [a long list of African tribes and bars follows.]… Puis il y a les Ouolofs, très suceptibles, rusés, roublards … Ils ont pour sobriquet “les Corses noirs.” Dans leur comportement,ils vont d’un pôle à l’autre. Doux comme un chaton, ou violents comme un volcan. [In this meridional Africa-in-France, all the origins, all the ethnic groups are represented. Retaining with them the customs of their birthplaces, each tribal territory has its own “canton”: the bars… [a long list of African tribes and bars follows.]… Then you have the Wolofs, very sensitive to insults, wily, foxy…. They’re nicknamed “the Black Pirates.” In their behavior, they go from one extreme to the other. Gentle as a kitten, or violent as a volcano.] (Ousmane 1973, 78) Il avait le choix entre deux personnages: le docker, qui n’était qu’un être animal, mais qui vivait et payait son loyer; l’intellectuel qui ne pouvait résister que dans un climat de repos, et de liberté de pensée. La subordination lui était insupportable. [He had a choice between two personas: the docker, who was nothing more than an animal, but who lived and paid his rent; or the intellectual who could only resist in a climate of rest and free thought. Subordination was intolerable to him.] (Ousmane 1973, 134)

Though critic David Murphy is certain that Ousmane never read McKay’s Banjo (2000, 464), the first epigraph above shows the two authors clearly shared a fascination for Marseille’s ethnic bar life. In his useful comparison of Banjo and Le docker noir, Murphy (2000) notes the following similarities in the authors’ biographies, despite their very different origins (Jamaica and Senegal, respectively). Both, he notes, were self-taught and Marxist in their leanings; both left their native lands to live in Europe; both chose to live mostly in Marseille; both worked as dockers; and both evinced a clear sympathy with the city’s black workers (2000, 464). Both even shared a belief that music and dance form “la matrice de la culture africaine [the matrix of African culture]” (Murphy 2000, 472). But having acknowledged these similarities, Murphy goes on to insist that the two authors

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produced “deux images complêtement différentes de l’identité noire et de l’experience de l’exil en Europe [two completely different images of black identity and experience of the exile in Europe]” (2000, 478). For one, says Murphy (2000), Ousmane totally rejects McKay’s penchant for Négritude, Pan Africanism, and essentialism. Seemingly disregarding its subtitle “A Story Without a Plot,” Murphy unconvincingly places Banjo in the line of American picaresque novels such as Huckleberry Finn. The problem is, of course, that Banjo changes very little if at all over the course of the novel, and even cedes his place as chief focal character to Ray in the last half of the book. Two picaros just will not do. Plus, Banjo is equally a Novel of Ideas. Le docker noir, on the other hand, seems to Murphy “un combat pour le droit à la parole, la lutte de l’écrivain noir pour se faire entendre dans un domaine dominé par les Blancs [a battle for the right to speak, the struggle of the black writer to make himself heard in a domain dominated by whites]” (2000, 474). Here, Murphy is more convincing. Diaw Falla as a hero shares much more with the intellectual Ray than with the “beach boy” Banjo, but he shares even more with Richard Wright’s troubled, violent heroes Bigger Thomas and especially the hero of The Outsider, Cross Damon. Falla is as serious as a stone and passionately interested in issues of social justice. If McKay celebrates Marseille’s “communauté noire énergique et spontanée [energetic and spontaneous black community],” Ousmane bemoans Marseille’s “communauté noire opprimée et marginalisée [oppressed and marginalized black community]” (Murphy 2000, 465). Diaw Falla finds dockwork hellish and inhumane, with the materials being loaded and unloaded far more carefully cared for than those doing the labor (Ousmane 1973, 129). But he takes action, organizing his fellow workers to the extent that he can. Diaw Falla’s Wright-like downfall—he kills the white woman editor who has stolen his novel and published it (to great acclaim) as her own—is his sensitive, violent Wolof (see the epigraph mentioned earlier) nature. If Ousmane were not himself a Wolof, one might accuse him of stereotyping his and other African tribes—merely a different form of essentialism (tribal rather than racial), after all. Diaw Falla’s last words in the novel come from prison where he continues to strive for both existential and political freedom. He has been sentenced to a life of hard labor. His mother in Africa dies of grief; his French wife Catherine turns to prostitution and alcoholism, and only his baby son is left to carry his name (Ousmane 1973, 207). In this fate he almost resembles our last book’s protagonist, a warrior from a very different, very distant tribe and land. We conclude with another

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America-influenced multicultural palimpsestic layer. But the hero who lays down this sediment is nothing like the sunny Southerner in Banjo. Charging Elk is a dark, displaced soul forever dreaming of his lost Western homeland.

A Song of Profoundest Exile: James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk [H]e smelled something sharp and unpleasant. It was a smell he recognized. The smell of the sea. (Welch 2001, 30) He said Breteuil did something to him that men do not do to each other. (Welch 2001, 293)

James Welch’s doubly or even triply alienated Marseilles dock-working protagonist, Charging Elk, was inspired, according to Cathy Waegner’s (2015) essay “Buffalo Bill Takes a Scalp,” by the real Black Elk’s (famous for Black Elk Speaks) having been left behind his main travel group in Manchester, the United Kingdom, and by the story of Standing Bear who, like Charging Elk, was injured during Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and left behind in 1890 Vienna, not Marseille (2015, 51). The real-life prototypes of Welch’s Charging Elk may have suffered some trauma at being left behind their traveling companions, but surely nothing any worse than Welch’s fictitious Native American who fell into what Waegner has called a “transcultural crack” in Marseille (2015, 46). The 23-year-old Charging Elk, who wakes to find himself in a Marseilles hospital with a dying friend nearby (with whom his papers and name are accidentally confused), suffers the profoundest alienation of any of the characters in any of the works mentioned heretofore. First Charging Elk has serious physical injuries— such as broken ribs—when he flees the hospital in fear, and becomes a homeless harbor dweller. But more than this, he is linguistically shut off, and culturally on another planet altogether (the transcultural crack). A renegade Indian who has refused to go live on a reservation when Cody hires him for his riding skills, Charging Elk is a plainsman who has never seen the sea before crossing it, with the Wild West Show, in an “iron boat.” The Wild West Show in which he performs is an artificial entertainment, wildly popular in both the United States and Europe (a recreation of it still plays at Disney Paris) but it is at least a simulation of his real culture. He can wear Indian clothes, speak Lakota to others who

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understand it, ride horses for a living, and eat the meat he craves. He does not really kill anyone in the shows (which he has done in warfare at home), but he is treated by others in the show with some of the respect his warrior/huntsman’s skills deserve. When he is cut off from this tiny piece of South Dakota which Cody has recreated for him and his fellow “show” Indians, Charging Elk truly is in trouble. He cannot communicate with his fellow man, and, much more importantly, he cannot communicate with the spirits who help guide and maintain him as a person. Charging Elk (or his “case”) is handed over to the Marseille police and then an American consul who has relatively benign intent but who thinks more often of himself than his client. Charging Elk is temporarily saved from utter despair and degradation by being given over to a French host family headed by René Soulas, a seafood handler, and voilà, we are almost back in the world of Pagnol’s People (the “Marius” plays and films serving as my hypotext, to repeat Gérard Genette’s useful terminology), among warm-hearted harbor folk reminiscent of César, Marius, and Fanny. The Soulas family, including a skeptical wife who eventually comes around and two friendly children, is unfailingly kind to their strange guest who goes to work (the first of many jobs in Marseille) helping his host load and sell fish. But Charging Elk eventually finds it desirable to have his own apartment— he selects the Black quarter where he feels more at home—and he eventually must follow his natural instincts as a young man (making this text also comparable to our previous one—the penultimate layer of our palimpsest—Ousmane’s Le docker). Charging Elk starts frequenting a brothel to satisfy his sexual needs, and he falls for one of the girls, Marie. Early on in his work with René loading fish, Charging Elk had caught the eye of a predatory gay man who is secretly smitten with the strictly heterosexual Charging Elk. This man named Breteuil, a renowned chef in Marseille, blackmails Charging Elk’s prostitute girlfriend into drugging him. But Charging Elk wakes up during the sexual assault and, acting out of instinct, kills his assailant, Breteuil. His own culture has acquainted him with homosexuals—called heyoka or holy clowns and valued for their difference (Welch 2001, 208)—but not with the humiliation of male rape (see epigraph above). This crime leads to long incarceration in La Tombe and further suffering. That downward spiral of pain is somewhat arrested when Charging Elk is given the care of a prison garden, and after a decade he is pardoned. His agricultural skills lead him to work for another good French “salt-of-the-earth” peasant family whose daughter he eventually marries. After almost two decades of involuntary exile, Charging Elk is finally given

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the chance to go home to his mother in S. Dakota, but he decides to stay with his pregnant wife Nathalie in France, thinking “This strange, sweaty city [Marseille] was home” (Welch 2001, 414). This short synopsis of Charging Elk’s life as a Native American among Frenchmen and as an Indian among whites (wasichu) leaves out his dreams (foretelling Wounded Knee) and his whole spiritual life, the element that most places him “entre deux mondes.” Welch also shares his fellow authors’ interest in Marseille’s own ethnic tribalism and bar life. And as much as the French love the Peaux Rouges as an idea (or as whooping actors at a Wild West Show), Charging Elk is a man of color, just as subject to Marseille’s cruel racism as to its Pagnolesque kindness.

Conclusion: Marseille in World Mythology and Literature Il n’ya rien d’irréparable, Marius, rien d’irréparable… [There’s nothing irreparable, Marius, nothing irreparable…] Fanny to Marius at the end of the Marseillais trilogy. (Pagnol 1988, 217) Toute la Provence endimanchée était dans les rues;… l’air sentait la soupe de poissons, les moules et la marée; le tableau coloré ressemblait à celui d‘un Pagnol. [All of Provence, ensconced in Sunday, was in the streets;… The air smelled like fish soup, mussels and the swamp; the colorful tableau looked like a Pagnol play.] (Ousmane 1973, 121)

The final line in Pagnol’s trilogy, “Nothing is irreparable,” refers, of course, to Fanny and Marius’s lives-lived-in-waiting. But now that good old Panisse is dead and their two-decade wait is over, they can now repair their lives and enjoy their long-delayed love. Marseille sometimes presents a similarly smiling face (looking like a Pagnol tableau), even to Sembène Ousmane in perhaps the darkest of the works examined here. Diaw Falla, unlike Welch’s Charging Elk, is not pardoned and resurrected from his tomb (La Tombe) of prison. Falla will end his life behind bars, betrayed by his white Parisian editor whom he has—somewhat accidentally—killed. And Falla’s wife has joined the ranks of Marseille’s prostitutes. All of the non-French writers discussed have pejorative names for the white race with whom they must contend in and around Marseille. McKay’s Southern African American Banjo calls whites “ofays”; Ousmane’s Senegalese calls them “toubab” (a West African term also heard in Alex

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Haley’s Roots); Welch’s Native American calls them “wasichus.” Whatever the pejorative, some of the whites of early twentieth-century Marseille depicted in these six works are casual or even virulent racists. Others, of course, are Pagnolesque—warm and deeply humane. The city has also been a hotbed of crime, poverty, and general “saleté [dirtiness],” Edmund Smyth’s term in his essay “Marseille Noir: Jean-Claude Izzo and the Mediterranean Detective.” Yes, Marseille is “noir” in that sense, as well, the Chicago-sur-Méditerranée for Izzo’s “neo-polar, roman noir engagé, existential roman noir metaphysique [neo-polar, black novel engagé, [his] black existential, metaphysical novel]” (Smyth 2007, 111–113). Twenty-­ first-­century Marseille is also comparable to Los Angeles in the fact that rappers have set up a rivalry there with Parisian word artists, quite analogous to the Los Angeles/New York City split (Thomas 2012, 193–195). In the eighteenth century, Marseille was hit by a deadly plague, which, after decimating the population, led to quarantine practices at their Lazaretto comparable to America’s Ellis Island. Chicago, Los Angeles, Ellis Island—Marseille shares qualities with all these US cities. But Marseille is quintessentially and currently a modern Mediterranean port, subject to the extraordinary stresses of the current wave of migration. Thomas calls it a “privileged site of postcolonial migration”; Smyth calls it the “capital” of the former colonies, rife with urban alienation, decay, unemployment, and second-generation immigrés. It is also a natural target for Far Right anger. The rap group IAM laughingly calls itself “Invasion Arrivant de Marseille [Invasion outta Marseille]” in tribute to their own iconoclastic status, but perhaps that of the other invaders, as well. In 2013, Marseille-Provence was named a European Culture Capital (Richard), some cynics saying as an act of “positive discrimination” (what Americans call “affirmative action”). The Vieux Port, as noted in the Introduction, is now filled with sailing and motor yachts, rather than its former mercantile fleet. The city’s famous/infamous smell will forever stay tied to the tides and the amount of pollution carried in and out. Long may it be tempered by the rosemary and lavender of Provence and the fish stews bubbling on Pagnolesque harborside stoves. To “couple” in my other metaphor, as long as tides of people and water wash its shores, Marseille will bear its sometimes secret watermarks, ready to be further scrutinized and studied.

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Notes 1. See anthologies such as Judith Benhamou-Huet’s (1995) Marseille traversées or Julie Agostini and Yannick Forno’s Les Écrivains de Marseille (1997) for a more comprehensive treatment of Marseille in literature. David Murphy (2000, 462) complains, however, that neither of these works contains African or Maghreb writers. 2. Bridget Maguire’s work “La trilogie marseillaise de Marcel Pagnol: représentations de la culture marseillaise et de l’identité régionale” (2015) is a wonderfully astute and well-researched 2015 Senior Thesis (!) written in French for Trinity College (Hartford, CT). 3. The French actor Raimu became famous for his César on stage and in the first set of film adaptations (on which Pagnol himself worked). According to Vincendeau (quoted by Maguire 2015, 17), the only non-Marseillais actors in the original play productions were Pierre Fresnay as Marius and Andre Fouché as Césariot. Maguire (2015) believes that mentions of foreigners in Marseille were then minimized in the film adaptations as a result of French xenophobia of the 1930s. The American film adaptation of the trilogy directed by Josh Logan featured Charles Boyer as César and Maurice Chevalier as Panisse. Leslie Caron played Fanny. Daniel Auteuil played Marius in a more recent French film adaptation. 4. Please see also a close reading of Chapter Five in my article entitled “On the Waterfront: Claude McKay’s Banjo as a Core Text of African Diasporan Literature” (Laws 2010).

References Agostini, Julie, and Yannick Forno. 1997. Les Écrivains de Marseille. Marseille: Éditions Jeanne Laffitte. Benhamou-Huet, Judith, ed. 1995. Marseille, Traversées, Enquête littéraire. Paris: Descartes & Cie. Cambridge International Dictionary of English. 1995. Watermark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1643. Rouget de Lisle, Claude Joseph. 1792. La Marseillaise. www.lyricsreg.org. https:// www.lyricsreg.com/lyrics/la+marseillaise/french+national+anthem/. Accessed 1 September 2020. Freud, Sigmund. 1999. Notiz uber den ‘Wunderblock.’ 1925. Gesammelte Werke. Ed. Anna Freud et al. Bd. XIV, 1–8. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Koëlla, Charles E. 1951. Les Marseillais de Marcel Pagnol. The French Review 24 (4): 307–324. Laws, Page R. 2010. On the Waterfront: Claude McKay’s Banjo as a Core Text of African Diasporan Literature. In Substance, Judgment, and Evaluation: Seeking

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the Worth of a Liberal Arts, Core Text Education: Selected Papers from the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, ed. Patrick T.  Flynn, Jean-Marie Kauth, John Kevin Doyle, and J.  Scott Lee, 139–144. Lanham: University Press of America. Maguire, Bridget E. 2015. La trilogie marseillaise de Marcel Pagnol: représentations de la culture marseillaise et de l’identité régionale. Senior Thesis, Trinity College Digital Repository, Trinity College, Hartford, CT. http://digitalrepository.Trincoll.edu/theses/501. Accessed 1 September 2020. McKay, Claude. 1957 [1929]. Banjo: A Story without a Plot. San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Co. Murphy, David. 2000. La Danse et la parole: l’exil et l’identité chez les Noirs de Marseille dans Banjo de Claude McKay et Le docker noir d’Ousmane Sembène. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 27 (3): 462–479. Ousmane, Sembène. 1973 [1956]. Le docker noir. Paris: Présence Africaine. Pagnol, Marcel. 1946 [1929]. Marius: pièce en quatre actes et six tableaux. France: Fasquelle. ———. 1988 [1936]. César. Paris: Éditions de Fallois. ———. 2004 [1931]. Fanny: pièce en trois actes et quatre tableaux. Paris: Éditions de Fallois. Richard, Ferdinand. 2013. Marseille-Provence 2013, Cultural Capital, but for What Kind of Europe and under Which Globalization? www.amicentre.biz. http://www.amicentre.biz/Marseille-­P rovence-­2 013-­c ultural-­5 63.html. Accessed 1 September 2020. Smyth, Edmund J. 2007. Marseille Noir: Jean-Claude Izzo and the Mediterranean Detective. Romance Studies 25 (2): 111–121. https://doi.org/10.117 9/174581507x193009. Takeda, Junko Thérèse. 2011. Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Thomas, Dominic. 2012. Vom Planeten Mars: Rap in Marseille und das Imaginäre der Stadt. Review of book by Daniel Tödt. Research in African Literatures 43 (2): 193–195. Waegner, Cathy Covell. 2015. Buffalo Bill Takes a Scalp: Mediated Transculturality on Both Sides of the Atlantic with William F. Cody’s Wild West, from Show to Hollywood and YouTube. In Mediating Indianness, ed. Cathy C.  Waegner, 45–72. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Welch, James. 2001. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. New York: Random House. Whalen, Christopher. 2009. Rev. of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory by Sarah Dillon. The Review of English Studies 60: 332–334.

CHAPTER 6

Memory, History, and Identity: Postcolonial Urban Palimpsests in the Writing of Ivan Vladislavić Kudzayi Ngara

Introduction In his analysis of the dynamic tension between history and monuments in South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s 1996 collection of short stories Propaganda by Monuments, Christopher Warnes (2000) focuses on the poignancy of the act of covering up the statues of Louis Botha and Barry Hertzog on the occasion of Thabo Mbeki’s swearing in as president of South Africa in 1999. Following the ideas expressed on the palimpsest in recent scholarship, most notably those presented by Sarah Dillon (2005, 2007), I will focus on how the histories and iconographies of apartheid undergo overwriting and are seemingly subsumed by what Genette (qtd in De Groote 2014, 112) refers to as the “hypertext” of postcoloniality or the post-apartheid inscriptions. However, true to the nature of the palimpsest as described by Dillon (and others), the post-1994 reality or

K. Ngara (*) University of the Free State, Qwaqwa Campus, Phuthaditjhaba, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_6

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script bears the traces of the insidious irruptions of what lies beneath its veneer. In considering the notion of “authentic representation” as it pertains to Vladislavić’s short stories “Propaganda by Monuments” (1996a) and “The WHITES ONLY Bench” (1996b), I extend the logic of the palimpsest to evaluate how one contesting history can be directly written over another, but without completely eliding the older version. These short stories occupy space on the narrative continuum of the writer’s concerns with the dialectical relationship between memory, space, heritage, and identity. These have to do with notions and questions of belonging and the spatialization of memory. These questions have periodically appeared on the South African psychic terrain and have most recently been reinvigorated with renewed urgency by the #RhodesMustFall movement of 2015.1 This chapter analyzes these two stories from the collection Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories with the intention of moving toward a re-­ reading of the dynamics and power of historical symbols and monuments in public spaces, as fictionally represented in the selected texts. Moreover, I argue that Vladislavić suggests through these stories ways in which the postcolonial urban palimpsest may offer pathways to creative and non-­ exclusive reappraisal of the past and its symbols. Among the fairly recent critical engagement with the collection Propaganda by Monuments, two broad trends are discernible. The first concerns critics who give a stylistic analysis of the stories, and the second consists of critics who share my own interest in how history and memory manifest themselves in the emerging postcolonial2 city. The second group of critics includes Christopher Warnes (2000), Monica Popescu (2003), and Shane Graham (2007), who all specifically theorize on making and translating memory, especially in the title story “Propaganda by Monuments,” and I will engage in greater detail with their positions on precise aspects of the stories at relevant stages of this chapter. Suffice it to say for the moment, Warnes (2000), Popescu (2003), or Graham (2007) do not address the palimpsest or its linguistic derivatives (palimpsestic and palimpsestuous) as a figurative trope in the writing of Vladislavić, even if the last two mention it in passing. This is in contradistinction to the approach that I take in this chapter: I configure the palimpsest, as a concept, as occupying a pivotal position in our understanding of the author’s narration of memory and history in the context of apartheid and its after-effects.

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Configuring the (Postcolonial) Palimpsest Before presenting close critical readings of the ways in which Vladislavić’s selected short stories represent and problematize postcolonial urban palimpsests, it is important to provide a brief theoretical overview of the term “palimpsest,” generally, and then perhaps to point forward to its use in this chapter in a post-apartheid/postcolonial context. Since the turn of the millennium, the work of academic Sarah Dillon has been pivotal in terms of the conceptualization of the palimpsest, perhaps more so than most critics, to the extent that in the available post-2005 literature on the palimpsest, she is named as an almost ubiquitous point of reference. In “Palimpsesting,” Dillon makes allusion to “the Thessalian witch who specialized in reanimating the dead” (2007, 32). I view the act of reanimation as a poignant metaphor for the palimpsestic gesture in the sense that the process reinvigorates and inaugurates new meanings in the layers that constitute the palimpsest. The past (in this case the underlying textual layer and its meanings) is alive, as evident in Dillon’s further elaboration that “the past is in fact anything but the past, anything but past. Rather, thinking through the palimpsest, temporality is figured as the erasure, superimposition and persistence of one temporal moment in another, a spectral temporality which is defined by the inhabitation of the present by the past” (Dillon 2007, 32). Following this logic, past texts and the meanings they instigate are never completely elided but survive in the new. In its most basic, common-sense form the term is defined as layers of text overwritten over one another, especially before the developments of newer technologies which made paper and therefore publishing much cheaper and more widely available. However, Powell (2010) remarks how “poststructuralist and postcolonial uses of the term have underscored palimpsest as a metaphor for the reinscription and legibility of discourses situated within institutional power structures and for the reexamination of subjectivity” (2010, 541). While this formulation coheres with Dillon’s logic that precedes it, I aver that the latter more accurately reflects the intentions of this chapter, which is to examine how literary representations of the palimpsest (or representations of the city through the figure of the literary palimpsest) by Vladislavić allow for nuanced reflections on apartheid and its postcolonial sequel, in terms of both state power and individual identity and subjectivity. In addition, for the purposes of this analysis, texts are not only defined as written but are approached more broadly as narratives; hence the focus on Lenin’s statues and apartheid-era

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public benches is not necessarily addressing their materiality but the generic narratives they symbolize. This approach is also in line with Dillon’s views on the diversity of texts and theoretical fields to which the term “palimpsest” is applicable and in which it is utilized. In her analysis of De Quincey’s essay “The Palimpsest,” Dillon’s (2005) stated purpose is to “draw attention to how the palimpsest is reinscribed in and by a broad range of contemporary critical discourses, including deconstruction, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, feminism and queer theory” (2005, 243). It is in this light, then, with special focus on the postcolonial, that I deploy the palimpsest as a theoretical lens through which to problematize monuments, memory and remembering in the selected short stories. Key to understanding Dillon’s views on the importance of the palimpsest, in my view, is an appreciation of the theoretical underpinnings of her movement from palimpsest to the adjectival “palimpsestuous.” By her definition, the palimpsestuous does not name something as, or as making, a palimpsest. Rather, it describes the complex (textual) relationality embodied in the palimpsest. Where “palimpsestic” refers to the process of layering that produces a palimpsest, “palimpsestuous” describes the structure with which one is presented as a result of that process, and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script. (Dillon 2005, 245)

The distinction made here between the palimpsestic and the palimpsestuous is relevant for my own purposes insofar as the focal points of my discussion, Lenin’s statues and the Whites Only benches (as they are fictively represented), are the outcomes of the process of overlaying of successive narrative texts which have their distinct meanings when taken in isolation but also create a new one—a new “structure” of meaning—as a result of being brought together. This is significant for my analysis which is oriented in postcolonial theory because where “[t]raditional palimpsest reading has as its sole aim and objective the resurrection of the underlying script [with] the overlying one [made] irrelevant” (Dillon 2005, 253), my concern is to uncover coloniality (read as apartheid) and its after-effects. The two stories I analyze here are both set almost immediately after the political watershed of 1994 when the first democratic elections were held in South Africa. This chronology is important because of the ways in which the stories instantiate, in representational terms, the moment of legislated transition. They are also significant in capturing the beginnings

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of the transformation of the former apartheid cities Pretoria and Johannesburg into postcolonial urban spaces. In some respects, the stories demonstrate the ways in which local and cosmopolitan conceptions of the city are mapped across the changing cityscapes. Examples of this phenomenon include, but are not limited to, the way individual characters in the respective short stories self-dramatize or perform themselves in terms of their identity. They do this sometimes in interaction with and in reaction to other “players” in the space they occupy on the urban stage. The overarching question in this chapter is the degree to which the characters are imaginatively engaged in active and involuntary role-playing. Therefore, I have to take performance and performativity as aspects of city life into consideration. Due to the specific historical moment with which the stories are concerned, we can productively analyze them as stories that engage with an uncomfortable past and as a means to imaginatively fashion future possibilities in which history is not so much of a burden or impediment, but rather a catalyst for positive social interaction. The main focus of this chapter is on the use of monuments, history, and historical memory to mark the passage of time in the postcolonial metropolis. The stories “Propaganda by Monuments” and “The WHITES ONLY Bench” readily lend themselves to the examination of the operations of memory in the post-apartheid city because of the questions that they raise about authenticity and the privileging of certain practices of remembering such as the constructions of monuments and museums. Through these short narratives, author Ivan Vladislavić broaches the possibility of different and perhaps competing avenues for the memorialization of history, both as events and as processes. This is in keeping with the broad framework of his fictional oeuvre, which is premised on recognizing the existence of multiple representations of the postcolonial city. I aver that such multiple readings lie at the heart of the contemporaneous discourses on memory emblematized by the #RhodesMustFall movement earlier alluded to. In the two stories, seemingly sterile monuments to the past are therefore brought into sharp contrast with what one may refer to as living museums that rely less on the conventions of past traditions, but more on forward-looking dynamism and relevance. In this emerging urbanity, with its absence of stable referents, individual characters have to constantly reinvent their senses of themselves as well as the way in which they appropriate and make use of their physical environment.

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Reinventing Memory in Postcolonial Public Spaces Following the logic of Foucault’s views on history and how it is written, Dillon postulates that, in the context of postcolonial theory the “palimpsest is used to figure the interpretation of culture and of history crucial to that discourse’s social and political, as well as literary critical, enterprise” (2005, 254). This formulation informs the rationale of my argument and analysis with reference to the “Propaganda by Monuments” and “The WHITES ONLY Bench.” In the way that Tamara Gosta figures that “Scotland itself is a palimpsest” (2011, 707), a similar supposition may be made about South Africa, or any state that has been subject to imperial conquest for that matter. As Gosta elucidates further, the memory of the past is inscribed upon a palimpsest: it marks a moment, offers a point of origin and stability, but fades in the light of newer writing. Yet the writing of the past penetrates the writing of the present and poses an interruption to the present’s unfolding in the very preservation of itself. [These] are palimpsestic texts that interrupt and confront the present with the past and competing histories, overwriting narratives and historical memories. (2011, 708)

This formulation, quoted above, speaks in my view to the various phases of, in this case South African, colonial history and how successive epochs maybe read as different social and cultural texts on the fabric of the nation. The two selected stories highlight the interplay between history or memory on the one hand and different city spaces on the other. Through the different characters portrayed in each of the stories and the interactions they have among themselves as well as in relation to the spaces they occupy, Vladislavić represents various contradictions that play out between particular historical moments and the spaces in which they become manifest. An example in the first story is in the dichotomous perceptions of the Lenin monuments by some members of the Russian bureaucracy and an emergent postcolonial entrepreneur in a South African city. Similarly, as in the second tale, the historical artifact has different significance depending on the locale it is situated in. While the monument or artifact is an attempt to inscribe or totalize the meaning of a particular historical moment, the meaning derived from such an endeavor is never stable but is always dynamic, always in flux. The monument and artifact can thus be read as palimpsests reflecting the layering of competing meanings over historical

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time. It is important to note at this juncture that the layering alluded to here and elsewhere is imperfect but rather that the texts are, in effect, what Alarcón calls “interlocked, competing narratives” (qtd in Dillon 2005, 255). “Propaganda by Monuments” tells the story of two very unlikely protagonists and correspondents, Pavel Grekov (a Russian bureaucrat) and Boniface Khumalo (a South African township tavern owner), who only encounter one another through an exchange of letters initiated by the latter as he seeks to acquire one of Lenin’s busts that have been uprooted in the wake of glasnost in Russia. Khumalo’s motivation is innocent enough, on the face of it, as he wishes to establish a themed restaurant in Atteridgeville, Pretoria, called the V.I. Lenin Bar and Grill. For him, this would mark the completion of his own transition from a tavern owner operating on the edges of law and profitability into a fully fledged businessman in the recently liberated South Africa. Through the intertextual media of written letters and the displaced monuments of Lenin, both the letters and the monuments are or, more accurately, become palimpsests. Their underlying scripts are palimpsestuous relationships with the overlying ones. Vladislavić maps periods of transition in Moscow and Pretoria, with all the attendant ironies implied in the linguistic and cultural dichotomies dramatized in the exchanges between Grekov and Khumalo. Vladislavić uses the artifacts of the Russian transition from Soviet communism to provide fodder for the staging of the South African version, albeit a miniaturized version in the individual ambit of the life of Khumalo. As Monica Popescu insightfully comments: “As landmarks of the hegemonic discourse of the communist past, the statues representing Lenin need to be obliterated or ‘translated’ into more useful forms or to remote cultures that might make use of them” (2003, 408; emphasis original). Popescu further argues that the gap between “two individuals,” “two cultures at a time of transition,” and “two critical discourses” can best be “approached through the figure of translation” (2003, 408). Beyond Popescu’s “translation,” I posit that there lies more. In a palimpsestuous gesture, Khumalo overlays the text of the post-apartheid miracle over the “hypotext” of the communist nightmare but the meanings of the past, the meanings of Lenin’s bust, are not completely obliterated by the potential relocation because the success of the commercial (read capitalist) enterprise hinges on the recognizability of the bust as that of Lenin. Referencing Soja’s theoretical consideration of Third Space, Singh (2016) remarks how “[postcolonial] urbanism shares an

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inextricable relationship with a city’s palimpsest by drawing on both the physicality of past as well as the accumulative social and cultural capital of its histories” (2016, 73). With specific reference to the operations of the palimpsest as part of a city’s fabric and the figurative iterations of its social and cultural fabric, Khumalo’s fantasy, as highlighted above, instigates a rich cross-cultural tapestry which effectively results in a Third Space imaginary. This imaginary is located neither wholly (exclusively) in post-glasnost Moscow nor in post-1994 Pretoria, but rather occupies an interstitial space between the distinct social and cultural referents. Whereas the unwanted statues are emblematic of the attempts to discard and elide history in Russia, in Boniface Khumalo’s vision they are paradoxically symbolic of entrepreneurial genius and means to success. As Grekov walks into Moscow’s Bulkin Street, he comes upon one of the many heads of Lenin that are in the process of being uprooted from their plinths. According to the narrator, this particular head has very imposing dimensions: “In the middle of the cobbled space, on an imposing pedestal, was a large stone head. Not just any old head—a head of Lenin. And not just any old head of Lenin either. According to Roads and Pavements it was the largest head of Lenin in the city of Moscow” (Vladislavić 1996a, 17). Lenin’s stone head is a landmark, not just of Moscow but also of history. It speaks to and is of a particular historical era in the same way that all other large and well-known landmarks are referents for their respective epochs in history. One can draw parallels between the sequence that follows and the historical, televised scenes from Iraq that portrayed Saddam Hussein’s final humiliation as the general populations dismembered his statues. In South Africa after Apartheid, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes has suffered similar, if not worse, indignity, as it is often smeared with fecal matter. The statue of Rhodes located on the campus of the University of Cape Town became both touchstone and touch paper for the #RhodesMustFall movement until its removal on April 9, 2015. In its occupation of pride of place and beyond its removal therefrom, it is yet still a delightfully intricate illustration of the palimpsestic and palimpsestuous. More than most figures Rhodes represents the daring ambitions and excesses of the nineteenth-century British colonial enterprise in Africa and the land occupied by the campus (Groote Schuur Estate) was bequeathed to the university by Rhodes. The physical statue of Rhodes, the material palimpsest, may have been removed but the metaphorical superscript, the palimpsestuous “reality” or manifestations of the connections between the colonial past and the post-apartheid present and future is impossible to

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overlook.3 Dillon in noting the spectral presence of the past in the present and future writes that [t]he palimpsest visibly represents what Derrida describes as the “non-­ contemporaneity with itself of the living present.” The “present” of the palimpsest is only constituted in and by the “presence” of texts from the past, as well as remaining open to further inscription by the texts of the “future.” The presence of texts from the past, present (and possibly the future) in the palimpsest does not elide temporality, but evidences the spectrality of any “present” moment which always contains within it “past,” “present” and “future” moments. (2005, 249; emphasis original)

Dillon’s analysis here highlights the way in which the past, present, and future of the palimpsest and the meanings it generates are all interlinked and entwined. Seen in this light, the destruction or removal of the monuments to Lenin, Saddam, and Rhodes do not provide closure or endings of their respective narrative scripts, but rather serve to illustrate the interconnectedness of the past, present, and future, as those monuments continue to produce meanings beyond the physical reality of their existence. The rather macabre scenes described above also point to the ways in which the heroic image or monument is often subverted and undermined, especially when the historical era that generated its previous signification has passed. In the case of the fictional Lenin, his heroic status has culturally deteriorated to the extent that his sculpted head is now referred to as a “monumental lump of history” (Vladislavić 1996a, 18). Dillon posits that the “history of the palimpsest is best defined by its own nature and structure [as] it is a complex network of superimposed and otherwise unrelated texts in which various usages and definitions of the palimpsest have been inscribed, erased and reinscribed, and persist” (2007, 30). Seen in this light, Lenin’s bust despite its description in the story as a “lump of history”—implying its monolithic physicality—can still be read as an amalgam of differentially layered texts and meanings that have accrued to it over successive epochs. The brevity of the attention paid to the monuments, either in their making or in their destruction, emphasizes the ephemeral quality of the meanings that are attached to them. Vladislavić, through the trope of the palimpsest and the metaphor of the dismantled statue or historical artifact, suggests that memories or historical meanings and the processes that give rise to them continuously have to be reinvented or reimagined in order to continue to be relevant.

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Just like Lenin’s statues, the city of Moscow itself undergoes a form of literal and figurative deconstruction as the various pieces from the old monuments are put to new uses in the different spaces of the city, such as paving the city’s roads. In the context of the metaphor of the palimpsest, which de Groote describes as the “ultimate metaphor of memory” (2014, 109), one can therefore read the paving stones that result from the crushed statues as a new narrative layer or script that has been written over the old text of the heroic Lenin. While the new script is most visible, the underlying one is not completely obliterated, hence the two can be described to be in palimpsestuous relation with another. The new narrative is not solely reliant on the existence of the old, nor does it bear direct semantic connections to it. The “palimpsestuous” refers to the new meanings or narratives that result from the dialectical interactions between the two scripts. Despite the symbolic permanence called to mind by these original cenotaphs and other memorial objects, the city is continually remaking itself and memories of itself, as in the following excerpt from Grekov’s meditations: “A single thread of iron, a severed spine twisting from the concrete, marked the spot where the head had stood. The head of Lenin. It was hard to imagine something else in its place. But that’s the one certainty we have, he thought. There will be something in its place” (Vladislavić 1996a, 21). In the spaces formerly occupied by such statues, new forms of appropriating space will emerge as new histories are created. With the passage of time, the monolithic narrative of the heroic image is almost always shown to be pretentious, as new truths emerge and perceptions of the heroic character transform. A slightly different way to think about and problematize the relationship between space and memory or history in this story is to take a closer look at the two correspondents—Grekov and Khumalo—in terms of the way they perceive history and what this says about themselves. What the one “knows” about the other is, as mentioned earlier, mediated through the letters that they exchange. Khumalo’s letter requesting a bust of Lenin for his township bar triggers the correspondence and his style of writing is designed to impress the Soviet bureaucrats through its affective register, which underscores the writer’s claim to revolutionary credentials. Take, for instance, the letter’s opening paragraph, with Grekov’s equally humorous and off-kilter comments appearing in brackets: I am greeting you in the name of struggling masses of South Africa, comrades, freedom fighters, former journeyman to Moscow—you may know

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some…. [Never met a military trainee, but believe they existed.] Also in the name of boergious countrymen known up and down [business “contacts”? class alliances?] here at home. I myself am struggle [struggling—infamous Apartheid]. (Vladislavić 1996a, 23)

These exchanges have the added complication that the language of communication is English and, though neither of them is functionally illiterate, certain faux pas are committed by both correspondents in the process of writing and reading, especially in the case of Grekov. For instance, Khumalo renders bourgeois as “boergious” and in that slip of the pen inadvertently and ironically writes on behalf of not only the masses but also their former oppressors—the Boers. The irony lies in the fact that Grekov’s annotations on the letter, many of which are misinterpretations of Khumalo’s intended meanings, provide a new layer of meaning to it and thus paradoxically transform the original into a multi-textual palimpsest. The irruption of new meanings that results from the overlaying of another textual layer inaugurates conditions similar to what Dillon and others have alluded to as “involuted.” According to Dillon, overlaying “contributes to the reader’s sense of the palimpsestuous fabric of the text, of an interwove[n]ness that is characteristic of memory and subjectivity, and of the involuted” (2007, 33). I would not go as far as Monica Popescu, who suggests that Grekov “gracefully” occupies the interstitial space that she defines as “the intersection between Russian (and former Soviet) culture and the English-speaking South African cultural landscapes” (2003, 408). I would, however, agree that Grekov’s translation of Khumalo’s letter shows “the imperfect globalizing character of English” (Popescu 2003, 409). My objection primarily rests on the fact that the translation produced, in spite of Grekov’s efforts to exude knowledgeability, is quite awkward and ungainly in the end, especially when one considers the originator’s semantic intentions. In addition, the interpretation is premised on the literality of a standard code of English but Khumalo does not emanate from such an “English-speaking South African cultural landscape,” at least not as imagined by Popescu. In truth, there is no single “English-speaking South African cultural landscape,” but rather there are many Englishes, and the letter is one such manifestation or version. A further illustration of the imaginative distance between Khumalo and his Russian correspondents is shown later in Christov’s4 enquiry as to the health of the livestock on the South African version of the steppe: “On a new thread. What is doing in the Transvaal?

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Do the cows and sheep graze on the veldt nearby free from harm?” (Vladislavić 1996a, 30). This interjection of the pastoral imagery could not be further divorced from the urban vision encapsulated in the dreams that Khumalo has for his tavern—a place of consumption and capitalism, notwithstanding the communist nomenclature. The letter bears all the hallmarks of Grekov’s semantic interference, with the conceptual dichotomy being doubled as a result of the latter’s transformative mediation through translation. Rather, I would posit that the misreadings and misdirected semantics of the communications between the two men reflect the fraught relations that the two subjects have, not just between themselves but also with the literal texts they seek to read and, by extension, with the literary narrative and figurative dimensions of history as represented by the Lenin statues. Christopher Warnes’s analysis of the dynamic tension between history and monuments, as well as the social and physical spaces in which they are situated, examines the poignancy of the act of covering up the statues of Louis Botha5 and Barry Hertzog6 on the occasion of Thabo Mbeki’s swearing in as president of South Africa in 1999. Botha and Hertzog were both pivotal in the formulation of racial policies that later manifested as apartheid, and Warnes sees the act of covering up the monuments of the two as having the effect of “temporarily removing them from the public space they inhabit” (2000, 68). The Union Buildings in Pretoria, where the South African presidents are inaugurated, are themselves the epitome of irony, as they were built to mark the coalescence of South Africa into a unitary state in 1910, yet at the same time the fact of becoming a single nation also ushered in the disenfranchisement of the majority black population. In that sense, then, the “union” became a double-edged sword because it was also an instrument of racial division. Warnes germanely concludes that the statues “raise the vital questions of how to negotiate the past without being limited by it and how to negotiate the paradoxes of change” (2000, 68). For me, the act of covering up results in the somewhat ironic renderings of the urban palimpsest that Vladislavić frequently returns to in his writing. The present-absent nature of the monuments to the forebearers of apartheid provides a backdrop for the instantiation of more democratic procedures and serves as a subtle but ambiguous reminder of the fluidity between an age past, and one that had begun to emerge. The palimpsestic effect is achieved, in this instance, through the overwriting of different histories onto the space of the Union Buildings

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and grounds, histories that are contesting but are nevertheless inextricably interwoven. In his analysis of Vladislavić’s “Propaganda by Monuments,” Warnes’s (2000) emphasis lies not on the immutability of the meanings suggested by the various artifacts and monuments, but rather on the symbolic and structural flows that exist between what may be considered to be the historical and the present. The specific meanings that different individuals may attach to particular historical events or their avatars (read as symbolic representations, such as monuments) may vary, but at the same time these responses are quite often framed along structurally similar, if emotionally and aesthetically different planes. In short, the heroism or villainy of a Botha or Hertzog largely depends on the political position or attitude of the individual toward what the two may or may not have “achieved.”

“It Is Our Duty to Be Authentic” (Or Is It?): Signposts of History in the Present In the story “The WHITES ONLY Bench,” the historical artifact has different signification depending on the locale in which it is situated. While the monument or artifact is an attempt to inscribe or totalize the meaning of a particular historical moment, the connotations derived from such an endeavor are never stable but always dynamic, always in flux. Unlike Warnes, whose focus is on the making and repudiation of history, Elaine Young accentuates considerations of realism and representation, arguing that in the story “The WHITES ONLY Bench” “[t]he ideas of ‘museumizing’ and historicizing, as opposed to representing and inventing are in tension” (2001, 40). Drawing from Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of the hyperreal and simulacrum, Young (2001) sketches a figurative illustration to expose that the model on which Charmaine’s invented WHITES ONLY bench is based is itself unreal because it masks an absent reality. The bench is not really a WHITES ONLY bench but becomes so because of the meaning invested in it by the policy of apartheid. The focus of this section of the chapter is on this notion of authenticity and how it is staged in the short story “The WHITES ONLY Bench.” Paraphrasing Foucault, Dillon describes the task of the historian as bringing into visibility that which was invisible through the analytical magnification of detail or focusing on the material which was historically deemed unimportant or lacking in any cultural value (2005, 263). In this context, my analysis of authenticity goes

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beyond ascertaining the factuality of historical events or material objects as represented literary by Vladislavić, but also to consider the affective readings and meanings that can be applied thereon. Young posits that the narrator’s use of photographs in “The WHITES ONLY Bench” reveals “a keen awareness of the impossibility of any transparent or disinterested depiction of reality” (2001, 44). Monuments and photographs, seen in this light, are shown to serve the same end in terms of the way both modes of representation attempt to capture an essence of a particular historical period or moment. Both Warnes and Young conclude that monuments and photographs, respectively, can never be an unbiased depiction of history because their “authors” or originators invest, intentionally or otherwise, certain preconceptions in them in the first instance, while we, as the “readers,” also view them from our own particular angles or perspectives. Among the most visible and portent symbols of what is often referred to as petty apartheid is signage that reads “WHITES ONLY,” which was designed to demarcate the spatial territory that different races could occupy, especially in the so-called public spaces of the city. Placed over doorways or on park benches, these plaques were designed to allot and confine people within particular physical domains to avoid the mingling of people of different races, as an extension of apartheid social engineering. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, Sallie Westwood and John Williams argue that “racism comes to rest on the body, using the visibility of the body as a major signifier but also as a site for racial abuse and violence” (1997, 9). Depending on the absence or presence of the physical bodies that were “othered” and became the sites of racial abuse, the WHITES ONLY sign—and such other signs that formed part of the exclusionary lexicon of apartheid—served to mark the spaces that these absent or present non-white bodies could potentially occupy. This is particularly pertinent in view of Fürst’s argument that “while palimpsests are usually thought of as documents […] human bodies can also serve as palimpsests” (2017, 68). During apartheid they were, in effect, attempts to signpost people’s occupation and experience of city spaces by creating zones of prohibition and exclusion, especially for the non-white citizens, of whom it was always thought necessary that they should be kept at the margins both physically and economically, as well as in the intellectual and spiritual senses. One such bench is the central artifact in “The WHITES ONLY Bench,” a tale that dramatizes various individuals’ divergent viewpoints on

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memory and history in the present. The foregrounding of this emblem of segregation and its simultaneous juxtaposition with an icon of the American civil rights movement, Coretta Scott King, serves to highlight the contestation inherent in the making and preservation of memory. The imagined spatial setting of these contradictions is a recently opened museum in the city of Johannesburg with the generic name The Museum (probably based on the Apartheid Museum), where the narrator works. The binaries of past and present, as well as authentic history and its fake recreations, are instantiated in the (fittingly) black and white photograph of Mrs. King that appears on the front page of the Johannesburg daily The Star. The snapshot shows her seated on a WHITES ONLY bench in the courtyard of The Museum in a pose described mainly in terms of its contradictions: There’s an odd ambiguity in her body, and it’s reflected in her face too, in an expression which superimposes the past upon the present: she looks both timorous and audacious. […] The rest of her features are more prudently composed, the lips quilted with bitterness, but tucked in mockingly at one corner. (Vladislavić 1996b, 52)

Mrs. King’s picture, in combination with the bench itself, helps to problematize some of the discourses around the meaning of “true” history or memory, especially within the space of a museum, in the context of the discussions that have raged among the museum staff prior to the opening of the exhibition to the public. The main topic of contention was whether to use a fabricated mock-up of the historic artifact (of a WHITES ONLY bench) or to source the genuine article from wherever it is to be found. The two schools of thought are represented by Charmaine, a younger curator who is given less to orthodoxy and reverence, and by museum director Strickland, whose approach is more formal and conventional. Deploying Foucault’s encouragement for a genealogical, as opposed to an exclusively archaeological reading of history, Dillon defines genealogy as a “form of palimpsestuous reading that does not focus solely on the underlying text […] such reading seeks to trace the incestuous and encrypted texts that constitute the palimpsest’s fabric” (2005, 254). An archaeological reading of this section of the story would focus solely on the origins of the bench upon which King sat, but a more genealogical reading would concern itself with the interplay of the narrative texts of apartheid iconography/petty apartheid (the bench); the American civil rights movement

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(King) and its theoretical sequel (the anti-apartheid struggle); and the post-apartheid moment (the non-segregated space of the museum with its ethnically diverse staff). Taken together, the three texts defined above constitute a palimpsestic fabric. What the narrator calls the “little drama” (Vladislavić 1996b, 53) had begun six weeks earlier as the staff prepared for the museum’s opening and there seemed to be no one in charge, allowing for the individual staff members to proceed very much on their own whims. When Strickland comes into the workshop one day to acquaint herself with the preparation of the exhibits, she finds Charmaine working on “her” bench. Strickland’s manner is very striking in its offhand quality and her penetrating gaze, which the others find to be simultaneously aloof yet intrusive. She carries herself in a way that seems to privilege the gaze above all else, as she silently observes and absorbs all that the staff is doing. According to Georg Simmel (qtd in Benjamin 1983), in urban settings the activities of the eye take precedence over the aural senses. In a scaled-down and mutated version of Simmel’s formulation, Strickland’s gaze gains ascendancy over sound in this instance because it has the effect of silencing the others, at least temporarily. In the words of the narrator, “[t]he silence congealed us, slowing us down, making us slur our movements” (Vladislavić 1996b, 55). The contentious bench is a result of an ingeniously disguised subterfuge on the part of Charmaine. Every facet and effect of the bench has been manufactured, from the shape of the iron legs to the signs of aging: The arms and legs were made of iron, but cleverly moulded to resemble branches, and painted brown to enhance a rustic illusion. The bench looked well-used, which is often a sign of a thing that has been loved. […] [A]ll these signs of wear and tear were no more than skin deep […]. Charmaine had even smeared the city’s grimy shadows into the grain. (Vladislavić 1996b, 55)

Because of its verisimilitude, Charmaine’s bench puts into crisis notions of the credibility of an image or symbol, as expressed in Strickland’s sharp retort to the former’s explanation for the necessity of a “recreated” bench. The museum director curtly responds that “[t]his is a museum, not some high school operetta. It is our historical duty to be authentic” (Vladislavić 1996b, 56). The older woman’s dismissiveness provokes questions on the reliability of Charmaine’s bench as a symbolic representation of a historical era, chiefly on whether the recreated article is adequate as a means of

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epitomizing that era’s meaning. However, Singh enjoins us to be aware that the “palimpsest acts as a meta-metaphor through which the existence of multiple, simultaneous and varied recorded histories reside on the singular material plane of the everyday” (2016, 67). I would add, that the palimpsest enables a multi-focal reading and understanding of history and thus invoke Gosta’s postulation that “history does not originate [but] is made through its palimpsestic form and its palimpsestuous reading” (2011, 714). The bench that is considered inauthentic evokes particular affectations among the viewing public and thus carries with it the imaginary apartheid and post-apartheid texts. In an ironical twist that is typical of Vladislavić’s writing, it turns out that the first “real” bench that the museum acquires is from the 1960s, but it had been in fact a so-called black bench, that is, a bench for non-whites that has since been relabeled. The rather sardonic justification for using this bench is that it had been at a black bus stop for Indians, and this convoluted logic is subtly used to show up apartheid as being, at certain levels, both petty and ridiculous. The confounding absurdity of these taxonomies gets further entangled later in the story with the sourcing of a genuine bench from the Municipal Bus Drivers’ Association which reads “EUROPEANS ONLY.” Reddy, another worker in the museum, effectively demonstrates some of the difficulties encountered in gathering what are considered to be “genuine artifacts” by advertising for them. Strickland suggested the idea of advertising for the “genuine” article in her single-minded pursuit of “honest” representation. Reddy’s cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of advertising for artifacts also helps to illustrate the possible existence of many historical truths because of the varied interpretations that people may have about a particular event. Any of the scores of bullets collected, in response to an advert for the bullet that killed Hector Pieterson in 1976,7 could be the “genuine” one, but at the same time each one also represents, at a symbolic level, how each prospective donor is staking a claim on history. In a way, all the proffered views, including narrator’s lengthy extrapolation on how to read the now-famous picture of the dying Hector (Vladislavić 1996b, 62–63), can be said to constitute what Dillon describes as the “resurrective fantasy of the palimpsest of the mind” (2005, 246). In this case it is the “palimpsest of the mind” that enables the monumentalizing of Hector Pieterson beyond June 16, 1976, and the picture of his death. It is through the interrogation and validation of these competing assertions that dynamism is injected into the historical

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project. The Museum, as a public space, is a key site for the playing out of these nervous tensions. The discovery of the “EUROPEANS ONLY” bench leads to the forestalling of Charmaine’s project and the rejection of her version for the planned official exhibit in Room 27. She clandestinely saves it from being destroyed, however, and, on the eve of The Museum’s opening, surreptitiously places it in the courtyard, under “the controversial kaffirboom” (Vladislavić 1996b, 65).8 Strickland’s “genuine” WHITES ONLY bench duly occupies pride of place with an extra, non-racial proscription. It now has the universally exclusive legend—PLEASE DO NOT SIT ON THIS BENCH—hanging between the armrests. As a concept, Charmaine’s bench also instantiates the varied uses to which post-apartheid public space can be put by different people. At the end of the story, an old white man is seen nonchalantly resting there, but a little later the narrator describes a different reaction altogether: “Then again, I’ll look up to see a black woman shuffling resolutely past, casting a resentful eye on the bench and muttering a protest under her breath, while the flame-red blossoms of the kaffirboom detonate beneath her aching feet” (Vladislavić 1996b, 66). An “explosion” of possibilities, contestations, and multi-level dialogue is aroused by the supposedly “inauthentic” bench made by Charmaine, which is in sharp contrast to the “dead” response engendered by the so-­ called authentic EUROPEANS ONLY bench that Strickland has sourced and insists on installing as the official exhibit. The fate of the latter bench is sealed by the notice placed on it, prohibiting people from sitting on it. Charmaine’s bench, on the contrary, even makes it onto the front pages of the newspaper, with a little help from Mrs. King’s sense of the ironic. For her part, Coretta King is quite consciously performing a role by deliberately placing herself—an acclaimed campaigner for civil liberties—in occupying the same space with such a powerful symbol of discrimination. I concur with Shane Graham’s suggestion that “[h]owever authentic the bench in Room 27 may be, it has been rendered ineffectual by being removed from its context, whereas the ‘fake’ bench occupies precisely the kind of public space that ‘petty apartheid’ was meant to regulate” (2007, 78). Irikidzayi Manase, writing on the “traditional and historical symbolism” of the city’s geographical spaces, finds that “new metaphors [are] arising out of the transforming Johannesburg” (2009, 54). In this respect there perhaps be no ironically poignant example than the fact that South Africa’s apex court, the Constitutional Court, is now housed in the precincts of what used to be the Johannesburg Prison or the Old Fort

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precinct, until its closure in 1983. The (now) Constitutional Hill Precinct was established in the late 1800s as a white male prison, served as a fort against the British for Paul Kruger’s South African republic and as a prison for Boer military leaders during the Anglo-Boer War. Sections for women and black inmates were later added and many of the country’s most prominent political prisoners—Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi—were imprisoned there. In its present iteration as the seat of the South African judiciary, Constitutional Hill there manifests as a palimpsest constituted by multiple layers of different narrative texts engendered by its histories. Due to the transformation alluded to by Manase above, the signification attached to various places and spaces also undergoes change because there is an unstable relationship between the signifier and the signified, making universally accepted meaning unachievable. To build onto Graham’s analysis above, it is pertinent to add that in Room 27, the historical bench becomes sterile in its signification because it has become, to a certain extent, a sanitized exhibit beyond the reach of the public who come to view it. Elaine Young convincingly argues that imaginative representation and invention are a more dynamic and preferable mode of engaging with the past, as opposed to simply storing and exhibiting historical artifacts. In marked contrast, Charmaine’s “falsity” is to be found in the courtyard, where it is potentially available for practical use. Here it stirs up many kinds of responses, negative and otherwise. It is a truly living history, a postcolonial urban palimpsest. The transition from apartheid to democracy engenders uncertainty in the manner people relate to their social and public spaces, as well as to each other. The meanings they attach to different spaces and markers of historical events and time are similarly put into crisis and remain contradictory and complex. Manase quite justifiably describes the disagreements, mainly between Strickland and Charmaine, in “The WHITES ONLY Bench” as “personality clashes and professional conflicts” which Vladislavić “unpack[s] and interrogate[s] in relation to the unfolding transformation of Johannesburg’s public spaces and the constitution of new urban and national identities” (2009, 56). In fact, I would go further and argue that the said “conflicts” are symptomatic of the different processes of interpretation and representational conventions of the various characters, with each privileging different categories and considerations with respect to aesthetics and authenticity. These oppositions are equally applicable with regard to the bench and other cultural artifacts, as well as historical memory. Due to the fact of transformation, the signification attached to various

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spaces and places also undergoes some kind of change; there is an unstable relationship between the signified and the signifier because a concrete (as set in stone) meaning is unachievable. Sue Kossew has reminded us that “monuments can be ‘read’ in a similarly semiotic way to literary texts,” in the process “providing examples of the same representational and interpretational instability to which literary representation is subject” (2010, 572). In light of this and another assertion by Kossew that “monuments are the indices for the ‘orchestration of memory and forgetting’ that accompanies shifts in power and the construction of and reconstruction of national histories” (2010, 572), the only logical conclusion one can therefore reach is that monuments, as signifiers of historical figures and epochs, are just as unstable as any other representations. The immediate question that arises has to do with the relevance of personal histories to Kossew’s (2010) formulation of nationhood. In other words, the question to be considered is how individual characters relate to these monuments, which are essentially national narratives, and then proceed to locate themselves in said narratives.

Conclusion In summation, this study has attempted to enunciate the thematic and representational concerns of Vladislavić’s oeuvre, such as the notions of belonging and the spatialization of memory, as they are manifest in transforming socio-historical context of an emergent postcolonial urban space. Through analysis of the short story “Propaganda by Monuments” I have uncovered the fluid meanings that may be attached to historical monuments during different phases of history, in particular the notion of the transience and translatability of meaning. Memory and history in the present (in the form of statues and artifacts) are used to signpost the appropriation, occupation, and experience of the city. Vladislavić’s stories initiate questions about authenticity and truthfulness in history, even in the context of an imagined museum. Contentious histories lead to the notion of what I conclude to be living history, manifesting in a palimpsest such as the old prison in Johannesburg, now used as the seat of the South African Constitutional Court at Constitution Hill. As opposed to the physical obliteration of monumental sites that are a reminder of historical trauma and oppression, I suggest that wherever possible we defer to the method suggested by Stuart Hall (1996), which is to deconstruct them in ways which enables them to self-reflexively critique the very histories that brought them into being.

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Notes 1. The #RhodesMustFall must fall movement started off as student protests against the presence of the statue of the British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes on the campus of the University of Cape Town. The statue was felt to symbolize the exclusionary practices of colonial institutions against black bodies, ideas, and indigenous knowledge in those spaces. The movement marks a significant epoch in the struggle for the decolonization of the South African academe and curricula (see Rhodes Must Fall Movement 2015). 2. For the purposes of this chapter, the terms “postcolonial” and “post-­ apartheid” are used interchangeably. 3. A further example, among many, of the incestuous relationship of the past and the present in this context is the existence of the almost oxymoronically named Mandela Rhodes Scholarship. 4. In the story, Christov is the aide or civil servant in the Russian Department of Foreign Economic Relations who had made the request for a translation of Khumalo’s letter from the Administration for Everyday Services, where Pavel Grekov works as a junior translator. 5. Louis Botha was a Boer veteran of the Anglo-Boer War who later became the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa in 1910. 6. Like Botha, Hertzog served as a Boer general and ultimately became Prime Minister from 1924 to 1939. One of the conditions of the negotiated settlement that gave birth to the 1910 Union of South Africa was that black and colored voters in the Cape Colony (where the British held sway) be disenfranchised. 7. The picture of the dying Hector Pieterson has become an iconic representation of the 1976 students’ uprising in Soweto. 8. Kaffirboom (my italics) is the controversial, former name of the erythrina caffra, or coral tree. In “Propaganda by Monuments” the tree is still designated with the racially derogatory name “kaffirboom” to underline the sense of irony and the conflicting meanings between the apartheid past and the more democratic present of the story.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1983. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso. De Groote, Brecht. 2014. The Palimpsest as a Double Structure of Memory: The Rhetoric of Time, Memory and Origins in Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Carlyle. Orbis Litterarum 69 (2): 108–133. https://doi.org/10.1111/ oli.12055.

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Dillon, Sarah. 2005. Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies. Textual Practice 19 (3): 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502360500196227. ———. 2007. Palimpsesting: Reading and Writing Lives in H.D.’s ‘Murex: War and Postwar London (circa A.D. 1916–1926)’. Critical Survey 19 (1): 29–39. https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2007.190104. Fürst, Saskia. 2017. Palimpsests of Ancestral Memories: Black Women’s Collective Identity Development in Short Stories by Edwidge Danticat and Dionne Brand. English Academy Review 34 (2): 66–75. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10131752.2017.1406029. Gosta, Tamara. 2011. Sir Walter’s Palimpsests: Material Imprints and the Trace of the Past. European Romantic Review 22 (6): 707–726. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/10509585.2011.615990. Graham, Shane. 2007. Memory, Memorialization, and the Transformation of Johannesburg: Ivan Vladislavić’s ‘The Restless Supermarket’ and ‘Propaganda by Monuments’. Modern Fiction Studies 53 (1): 70–96. https://doi. org/10.1353/mfs.2007.0024. Hall, Stuart. 1996. Introduction: Who Needs an Identity? In Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, 1–17. London: Sage. Kossew, Sue. 2010. Re-Reading the Past: Monuments, History and Representation in Short Stories by Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb. Journal of Southern African Studies 36 (3): 571–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305707 0.2010.507542. Manase, Irikidzayi. 2009. Johannesburg During the Transition in Vladislavić’s ‘The WHITES ONLY Bench’ and The Restless Supermarket. English Academy Review 26 (1): 53–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/10131750902768416. Popescu, Monica. 2003. Translations: Lenin’s Statues, Post-Communism, and Post-Apartheid. Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2): 406–423. https://doi. org/10.1353/yale.2003.0021. Powell, Kimberly. 2010. Making Sense of Place: Mapping as a Multisensory Research Method. Qualitative Inquiry 16 (7): 539–555. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800410372600. Rhodes Must Fall Movement. 2015. UCT: Rhodes Must Fall. Rhodes Must Fall. http://rhodesmustfall.co.za. Accessed 21 April 2015. Singh, Rahoul B. 2016. Architecture, Resilience and the Articulation of Urban Dilemmas. In International Planning History Society Proceedings, 17th IPHS Conference, TU Delft 17–21 July 2016, ed. Carola Hein, vol. 7, 63–75. Delft: TU Delft Open. http://iphs2016.org/proceedings/. Accessed 1 September 2020. Vladislavić, Ivan. 1996a. Propaganda by Monuments. In Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories, ed. Ivan Vladislavić, 13–38. Cape Town: David Phillip.

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———. 1996b. The WHITES ONLY Bench. In Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories, ed. Ivan Vladislavić, 51–66. Cape Town: David Phillip. Warnes, Christopher. 2000. The Making and Unmaking of History Ivan Vladislavić’s Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories. Modern Fiction Studies 46 (1): 67–89. Westwood, Sallie, and John Williams. 1997. Imagining Cities. In Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories, ed. Sallie Westwood and John Williams, 1–18. London: Routledge. Young, Elaine. 2001. ‘Or Is It Just the Angle?’ Rivalling Realist Representation in Ivan Vladislavić’s Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories. English Academy Review 18: 38–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/10131750185310051.

CHAPTER 7

Ominous Borders, Liminal Bridges: Narrative Palimpsests of Cultural History and Racial Subjectivity in Alejandro Morales’s Epic Novel River of Angels (2014) Sophia Emmanouilidou

Introduction: The Narrative Palimpsest In the epic novel River of Angels (2014), Alejandro Morales construes the municipal development of Los Angeles as a versatile passage from the past to the present, a passage overlaid with numerous cultural and political narratives of being-in-the-world. The Chicano writer uses the natural formation of the waterway as a metaphor for the free flow of cultural identity and (re-)examines the historical designations of the city in parallel with porciúncula, which, as Morales notes, was part of the original name of the Los Angeles River. However, porciúncula is also translated into English as a little place, a definition that evinces the creation of space in order for communities to preserve their cultural turf. In conjunction with the river metaphor, Morales explores the extensive, engineering endeavors to

S. Emmanouilidou (*) Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_7

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control the fickle Los Angeles River, and employs the architectural structure of the bridge as a way to control social life. In River of Angels, the bridge is initially a catalyst for social conflict and racial segregation, but later it turns into a liminal site for the implementation of border crossing and cultural exchange. In short, the bridge acquires a dual signification. On the one hand, in the prologue Morales presents the bridge as an imposing, mechanical structure that coincides with the coercion and marginalization suffered by the various ethnic identities scattered in the broader Los Angeles basin area. On the other hand, River of Angels uses the bridge as a means of wayfaring and exchanging cultural practices. Like the unpredictable river, which persistently changes its course to the sea, and the far-reaching architectural enterprises of a century and a half to tame the water flow, River of Angels depicts the twists and turns in the lives of numerous characters as they co-mingle along the river. Finally, together with ominous borders and liminal bridges, Morales traces the significance of multiraciality and does so in rough contrast to the perilous pseudo-­ philosophy of eugenics, a dogma that was sweeping the West simultaneously with the rise of fascism in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter approaches Alejandro Morales’s River of Angels as an enigmatic, narrative structure that largely resembles a palimpsest of diverse accounts of being. The palimpsest is “[l]iterally a manuscript which has been erased and written over again, [a manuscript that] bears textual traces of its history as visible evidence of change” (Watkins 2006, 248). For the purposes of this chapter, the palimpsest comprises layers of meaning that mainly relate to the masterful ways with which Morales weaves the historical account of the West Coast into his fictional depiction of life in Los Angeles. Drawing from Sarah Dillon’s theoretical definition of the palimpsestuous reading as a scalar process of narrative analysis, my intention is to perform a structured reading of River of Angels, a “palimpsestuous reading [as] an inventive process of creating relations where there may, or should, be none” (2007, 254). In other words, my critical angle will allow meaningful possibilities to arise because the palimpsestuous interpretation of River of Angels takes place in the seams between history, culture, race, and autobiography. An additional aim of this chapter is to explore the symbolic undertones in human construction work relating to border crossing, spatial being, and interculturalism. My main argument is that River of Angels disproves the compartmentalization of racial identity, and advocates that cultural correlation advances social replenishment, similar to the ways that genetic diversity boosts nature’s dilution.

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Along these lines, the first section of this chapter explores River of Angels as a serpentine, temporal rite into the history of the pueblo of Los Angeles. In this section, I read River of Angels as a bold literary endeavor and a text that unravels the interlaced and reciprocal links among the different cultural identities that appear in the narrative (i.e., Amerindians, Mexicans, Anglos, European ethnics). River of Angels delineates Los Angeles as a pluriform setting ad hoc, where the infusion of numerous ethnicities allows the formation of an urban palimpsest in line with the (re) configuration of the landscape and the cityscape. Morales re-envisions the history of Los Angeles, restores the city’s temporal pathway to the present, and discloses random appropriations of the West Coast as the land of opportunity solely for Anglos. The epic novel undertakes the mishaps and tragic reversals in the lives of a wide array of characters, whose elemental points of reference are twofold: First, the river, which symbolizes a geographical and figurative borderline, and, second, the bridge that manifests a transposing site of in-betweenness. The second section of this chapter discusses Morales’s personal attempt to collect evidence of ethnic presence in the history of Los Angeles. This section looks into Morales’s interview with Daniel Olivas (2014) as the writer’s straightforward statement that the factual is a fundamental aspect of the fictional, and that literary inception is always attached to real-life experience. Once again, Morales creates a polyphony, which destabilizes notional tools of cultural and/or racial supremacy, and empowers the silenced voices of all non-white inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin area. Finally, the third section of this chapter draws on Gerard Genette’s (1997) (post)structuralist literary criticism in order to pinpoint the importance of paratext as prominent threshold and exit information, which in the case of River of Angels reinforces the links between fact and fiction.

The Urban Palimpsest: Borders, Bridges, and Socio-Cultural Crisis River of Angels accentuates the overlapping coalitions, clashes, and detours of a wide set of characters on both sides of the Los Angeles River. The epic novel commences in 1842 and covers a temporal span of approximately one hundred years, during which the readers are acquainted with the lives of two different families: the Kellers and the Ríos. The latter epitomize the indigenous, cultural element of Los Angeles with the first-generation

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mexicano father figure Abelardo, his Native American wife Toypurina, and their two sons, Sol and Otchoo. Morales sketches out Abelardo as a knowledgeable carrier of the landscape’s cultural distinctiveness and also ascribes him with a primordial quality of understanding the powers of the river, an understanding that is close to reverence. Abelardo’s knowledge of the river came from family memory and personal experience. He made it a point of pride to remember the vivid descriptions of great floods, stories shared by his father and grandfather sitting around the dinner table, in front of the fire during cold rainy winters, or on the front porch during summer heat waves. (Morales 2014, 4)

Abelardo shows an endemic familiarity with his surroundings. He is a farmer “who owned a large portion of land bordering the river. [He] had inherited his ranch from his father, who had received the land from his father. It was Abelardo’s father who had named the parcel El Rancho el Cachito de la Porciúncula” (Morales 2014, 4). Abelardo is a pioneer and a skillful craftsman, a person who comprehends both the forces of nature and the perils of despotism. In fact, he has cultivated the awareness of the reciprocal connections between the land and “his people’s history […] from what had been spoken but not written” (Morales 2014, 7). Cognizant of the Indian cultural continuum that defines the local area, Abelardo embraces oral history, and in doing so he questions authoritative Eurocentrism. The intensity of all the images that were reproduced in the communal gatherings Abelardo has attended throughout his life is “[e]mbedded in his memory” and recreates the subsumed “scenes from the lives of the earliest inhabitants of this place, vivid stories of intruders who had arrived on the banks of the river and imperiled his people’s survival” (Morales 2014, 7). In short, Morales depicts Abelardo as a visionary or a quixotic artisan, who introspectively confers the marked differences between Anglo frontier way of thinking and local exoticism. River of Angels attains its epic dimensions in the socio-political complications that come about in the untimely commixture between the autochthonous Ríos family and the white American Kellers. The introduction of the Kellers in the mise en scène attests to the inordinate migration of Anglos from the East Coast to Los Angeles and also alludes to the exclusion of ethnic inhabitants from the cityscape’s booming economy. As for the epic texture of River of Angels, the Kellers distinctly demonstrate an antipodal grouping to the Ríos, and the warm interaction between the two families

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foreshadows the imminent tragedies inflicted upon their offspring. The Kellers epitomize the entrepreneurial settlers from the East, the upper-­ class Anglos who nevertheless cordially associate with the non-white Ríos on a financial but also on a personal level. The two families develop an amiable but, at the same time, unduly open interaction, a plot element that hints at Morales’s experimentation with the dialogic negotiations which take place between disparate hermeneutics of being-in-the-world. Put differently, in the wake of the twentieth century, the Ríos and the Kellers encapsulate antithetical accounts of US citizenship, since they represent two different narratives of being although they are inscribed on the same historical and social parchment. However, River of Angels attunes the two disparate cultural texts, highlights how they interlace, and advocates that “cultural negotiation is the future” (Morales 2014, x). In fact, the Ríos and the Kellers earnestly attempt to overcome racial discrimination and biased standpoints, and they foster a cordial relationship, the kind that facilitates the conditions of cultural exchange. The main complication in River of Angels arises with the introduction of racism in the story line. Racism functions as a narrative that superimposes the traces of egalitarianism upon the relationship between the Kellers and the Ríos. Pervaded by the intense propaganda to discriminate between races, the American public appears dismayed by the dogmas of eugenics, an ideology that professes the improvement of human societies through careful reproduction. Eugenics advocates the discouragement of people to reproduce because of hereditary and/or genetic defects and assails interracial marriage. According to Sir Francis Galton, “Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage” (1909, 35). This fascist ideology charts the political setting of the novel and becomes an overarching character type or the sublime villainous force of an epic. River of Angels affirms that just before the outbreak of World War I, the city-upon-the-hill is neither a utopia nor the beacon of democracy that pertains to equality and justice for all. Instead, the text depicts the nation as ethically possessed by the authoritarian discourses of controlled breeding and genetic purity. The rhetoric of racial cleansing is the forceful hypotext of River of Angels and a persistent social narrative that stipulates most of the text’s climatic instances. In fact, eugenics, racism, and the outbreak of violence against non-Anglos are embedded themes in the textual flow of River of Angels and appear in stark contrast to the Western world’s democratic ethos. In this context, Morales devises River of Angels as a

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“multiplicity of versions” of experience, and a “palimpsest [which] becomes less of a bearer of fixed final inscription than a site of the process of inscription,” a rite that, if I may add, allows the coexistence of opposing narratives of being (Bornstein 1993, 3). The character who embodies rampant racism in River of Angels is Uncle Philip, “the founder and president of Keller Lumber” (Morales 2014, 76). Uncle Philip embraces the Nazi pseudo-philosophy of eugenics, preaches pure whiteness, dreads miscegenation, upholds that Los Angeles “should be ‘a European city, a new Germanic center of wealth and culture in America,’ and that the city council should encourage only Aryan entrepreneurs to settle in the heart of Los Angeles” (Morales 2014, 76). However, in an ironic reversal to Uncle Philip’s unrelenting efforts at establishing fanaticism in his family, the Kellers adamantly resist the extremities of the so-called nativist groups (Morales 2014, 90). Instead of endorsing the Darwinists’ misappropriations of the Caucasian genetic make-up, the second- and third-generation members of the Keller family cherish their social engagement with the Ríos and the fruitful cooperation with their Mexican and Indian workforce. In fact, Ernest Keller makes a business decision to employ mexicanos and indios instead of Anglos, a decision which enfeebles Uncle Philip’s racist agenda. The family crisis that River of Angels presents largely corresponds to the history of the United States. To explain, Morales unfolds the crisis within the gulfs between members of the Keller family in order to project white American history as a blurry palimpsest of different political positions: On the one hand, there is Uncle Philip, who embodies autocracy, and, on the other, the rest of the Keller family, who illustrate racial tolerance. And since the conflict relates to drafting a national identity at the turn of the twentieth century, then this crisis relates to the intertextual polemics between the past and the future, the obsolete and the novel. By persistently and often wrathfully rejecting fascism, the younger Kellers become idealists who triumph over the fetishes and anxieties of the past, and create a mosaic of racial and cultural interchange. The second- and third-generation members of the Keller family initiate a disengagement from the intense creed of their predecessors and compose a social vision that promotes the associative possibilities of cultural correlation. In this light, the younger Kellers’ skepticism over Uncle Philip’s racist beliefs evinces a subversive political perspective. Manifesting itself at a decisive juncture in the novel, the younger Kellers’ belief in equality projects a new mindset that dismantles enmity and allows a new narrative of social existence to arise. And this co-presence between

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past and present self-narrations creates a palimpsestuous fabric of social behavior. Indeed, the palimpsest that River of Angels devises is the overlapping occurrence of the past, the present, and the future as if “the presence of texts from past, present (and possibly the future) in the palimpsest does not elide temporality but evidences the spectrality of any ‘present’ moment which always already contains within it ‘past,’ ‘present’ and future moments” (Dillon 2007, 7). Despite his persistent “toxic visits,” Uncle Philip is faced with the impossibility of indoctrinating his kin in the perils of interracial marriage (Morales 2014, 145). Hence, he resolves to exterminate the other-than-­ white male characters that socialize with his family. Bigotry and racial hatred trigger the epic crisis that leads to monstrous displays of aggression and violence from the Aryan club members with whom Uncle Philip associates. What this means is that the assumption of white racial superiority transposes into an idée fixe or an abysmal mania to annihilate the “mongrels” that jeopardize his white family’s pure bloodline (Morales 2014, 172). Consequently, Uncle Philip commits himself to inflicting death upon the Ríos men, to exterminate the up-and-coming, non-white, yet autochthonous and lawful citizens of Los Angeles, who attempt to become part of Anglo society. Uncle Philip is certainly delineated through his obsessive hatred for the “dark-skinned races” and his futile efforts at inculcating this fascist belief into his family (Morales 2014, 182). However, tragic irony is realized in the eventual downfall wreaked on him. So, at the end of the novel, Uncle Philip is excruciatingly haunted by three specters, the three Ríos men who died of his organized racist attacks. Finally, in a frantic attempt to reconcile his remorse with the inescapable memories of his illicit past, he seeks refuge in Mexico, isolates himself in a Catholic monastery, and dedicates his life to cleansing his soul of his sinful political crimes. But what truly cements the bond between the Kellers and the Ríos is the romantic relationship between Abelardo’s grandson and Uncle Philip’s niece. Albert and Louise are the third-generation members of the two families, and the characters who fully subvert the menacing antagonisms of the past. The two young lovers show a true devotion to one another and do not hesitate to yield to sensual attraction and emotional bonding. On a Sunday afternoon, Albert and Louise climb the incomplete First Street Bridge in order to grasp the vastness of the ocean, stretching beyond the river. Still a construction site, the bridge affords dangers which are betrayed in the mexicano watchmen’s words of warning: “Ten cuidado,

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muchacho!” (Morales 2014, 133). However, the young couple defies the risks, explores uncharted territories, and ascends the bridge to “look out beyond the river’s edge” (Morales 2014, 133). In a symbolic way, the scene liberates the young lovers from the insidious propaganda of racial purity that ravages Los Angeles. Reaching the top of the bridge symbolizes an elopement or an instant detachment from intolerance for the two young characters.1 As Morales writes: In the middle of the imposing platform the bridge finally joined and connected the west and east sides of Los Angeles. […] They kissed again. Still in Albert’s arms, Louise turned her body to face west to scan the horizon beyond the rising City of Angeles. From where they stood the view extended out to the ocean and to the Santa Monica mountains, to San Pedro’s developing ports and harbor, south to Montebello Hills, east to the San Bernardino Mountains and down to the beautiful river struggling to shrug off the concrete slabs that attempted to control its edges, its natural flow and currents, trying to hold it back from its natural meandering to the ocean. In the river’s natural path a few debris basins, short flood-control channels and small dams had been constructed to divert its water away from the city. (2014, 133–134)

The crisis that the reader faces in River of Angels relates to the tension between racism and equality. But this anxiety is surmounted by Albert and Louise’s earnest love, a love that unites two distinct races: Mexican American and white American. In other words, the love between people of two different cultures and races forms a borderland zone of coexistence, where no self-identity thrusts itself on the other, but both fuse into a palimpsest of existence. Opting for the critical category of an intertext, Morales proposes interracial marriage as the relief valve to the cumulative conflict between white and other-than-white Americans. In other words, in River of Angels the mixing of races becomes the deus ex machina that pacifies a turbulent world order. Moreover, the scenic beauty of the vista that lies ahead fully realizes the naturalness of the physical attraction that Albert and Louise feel for one another, an attraction that withstands prejudice. The platform that Albert and Louise arrive at acquires biblical proportions, since it translates into a paradisiacal site for the first born in a social interaction freed from racist doctrines. Embodying the first individuals in a newly found social setting, the two young lovers cherish the view of the vastness of nature, which connects the land, the river, and the ocean as a complete whole. The scene implies the breath of ecological

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entirety and unmasks the injustices done through the creation of segregated and patrolled spaces. In this context, the bridge is no longer an imposing edifice that defies the river’s powers beneath. Instead, it becomes a powerful medium that advances contact among different racio-cultural identities.

Literary Inception and Palimpsests of Writing The writer’s interlocutor […] is the writer himself, but as reader of another text. The one who writes is the same as the one who reads. Since his interlocutor is a text, he himself is no more than a text rereading itself. The dialogical structure, therefore, appears only in the light of the text elaborating itself as ambivalent in relation to another text. (Kristeva 1980, 86–87)

In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980), Julia Kristeva states that the associations between the text and the writer are inherently equivocal because of the “dialogical structure” that connects the writer and his/her text (1980, 87). This structure resembles an ongoing discourse, one that includes at least three parties: an acting agent, a reader, and the projection of one’s thoughts onto the printed page. Kristeva ingeniously separates the writer from the text only to reunite them in a bizarre type of communication in which the writer is simultaneously the one who produces a narrative, the one who reads the narrative, and the one who is influenced by this narrative. This encrusted interlocution between writing, reading, and comprehending dominates Morales’s interview with Daniel Olivas for the Los Angeles Book Review. Morales responds to an ordinary question about the source of inspiration for his latest novel River of Angels with an autobiographical anecdote. Morales recounts a personal experience in order to relay some of the cultural tokens endowed to him by his Chicana/o collective memory. The writer remembers being in abeyance and in need of “a person, an event, a structure that would reach out from history and call on [him] to write its story” (Olivas 2014). He also recollects that while seeking a spark of significance from his mundane routine, he succeeds in kindling a work of literature. Morales admits to being gripped by the pictorial presence of the multicultural workforce in the construction sites of the Los Angeles bridges during his visit to the public library. Morales recollects:

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A friend invited me to attend a reading at the downtown Los Angeles Public Library. It was crowded when we arrived. I escaped into a hallway and found a series of photographs of the crews that built the bridges that crossed into downtown. They posed before the bridge that they were building. I peered into the photos searching for a Mexican face among the men. From that time on, those photos registered in my memory and wouldn’t let go—what I saw, heard, felt from them. I began searching for information about the river and the workers who built the bridges. I came across the word “porciúncula” (a small portion, a little place) that was part of the name of the City of Los Angeles and in the original name of the river of Los Angeles. I read “porciúncula” as a metaphor for Los Angeles, evolving from little places, sites along the river, and extending in all directions, where even today people invest time and work to improve and to keep their little “porciúnculas.” (Olivas 2014)

Initiated by a random incident, Morales’s authorial energies mystically united into composing a semi-historical and/or semi-fictional tale of self-­ identification set in Los Angeles. And although the idea for his latest novel occurred amid a posh event, what seized Morales’s interest was the array of photographs of the crews that built the bridges. The images of the “warm, tough guys” prompted Morales’s curiosity about the historical cosmos of Los Angeles, and sparked a series of dormant memories, sadly though having been superimposed by present narratives of existence (2014, xv).2 In other words, Morales became attentive to the factual stimuli surrounding him and readily seized the fleeting moment to introduce his readers to the palimpsestuous texture of urban history, social being, and fiction writing. River of Angels is defined by its semi-autobiographical quality, mainly attained through the use of the elements of character and characterization. Although River of Angels hosts a wide array of characters, the one who fully facilitates the intertextual links between history and fantasy, fact and fiction, is Abelardo. The most intriguing aspect of Abelardo’s depiction is that he is a watchful and wise participant of social life and in this sense he becomes Morales’s alter ego. Abelardo and Morales complement each other in their diligent and conscientious attempts to traverse borders and create meaningful channels of communication. They show in-depth perception of cultural selfhood that exceeds the confines of a fenced plot of land or the premises of academia.3 Even though Abelardo is a fictional character and Morales is a real person, they both have the innate aptitude for seeking enigmatic traces of meaning and for drafting layers of rapport.

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A knowledgeable craftsman and an acknowledged novelist, Abelardo Ríos and Alejandro Morales create palimpsests which scrutinize the bygone past through some of our present necessities. In this context, Abelardo and Morales choose the raft and fiction writing respectively as their ready-­ hand means to avert the loss of lives and the misinterpretation of local history. In other words, Abelardo undertakes the construction of a safe passage to the other side of the Los Angeles River for those crossers who are unsuspecting of the whimsical flow of the water, and Morales writes a novel that restores the city’s history. Following Toypurina’s advice, Abelardo constructs a big ferry raft, which facilitates the crossing of the river for merchants, local farmers, and intrepid travelers. The undertaking symbolizes the carving of a passage or a way to safeguard the extension and sentience of democratic nuance for humanity. Quite similarly, Morales is confronted with an unplumbed existential crisis upon seeing the “rows of photographs” of non-white workers on the construction sites of the Los Angeles bridges (2014, xv). While attending the reading event at the public library, Morales realizes that the historical realities of ethnic subjectivity in Los Angeles have fallen into oblivion. Thus, he finds himself at an ethical intersection where he can clearly see some of the adverse instances, alarmingly enough the ones that lead to the erratic scribbling of history. Hence, he gazes at the cultural fathoms of his ethnic kin and compares this moment of awareness with the misrepresentation of mexicanos as “violent, unpredictable and promiscuous” (Morales 2014, 124). He also juxtaposes prejudiced depictions of the indigenous populations with the truthful testimonies passed on to him through oral history. Morales is consumed with the abrupt realization that American citizens of Mexican ancestry exist as though present-in-absence, like specters “replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (Davis 2007, 9). And the realization of the suppression of his ethnic kin’s cultural legacy and historical presence in Los Angeles becomes the defining moment that triggers the literary inception of River of Angels. Morales subverts Aryan fixations on racial purity in multiple ways. In fact, the text resourcefully proposes interculturalism as a viable means to restructuring dogmatic societies and abolishing totalitarian regimes. The multicultural, urban palimpsest that Morales creates fully effectuates the significance of ethnic inclusiveness and implies that plurality and polyphony can combat the looming hazards of absolutism. To elucidate this premise, Morales introduces the outlandish character of a curandera, a

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natural healer and an anciana, whose life is inextricably linked to the river. River Mother is the antipode to Uncle Philip. She is the character who summons the forces of her natural surroundings to alleviate human misery and pain. River Mother is “a withered old woman and the owner of an impoverished home” on the riverbanks (Morales 2014, 36). The walls of her odd dwelling present an astonishing assemblage of objects, washed up by the river and “intermittently covered with plaster and mud” (Morales 2014, 36). On a figurative level, River Mother’s adobe is a reservoir of memories and memorabilia, which the river seizes, retains, but also deposits back to the land. In short, the water, to which River Mother lives close by, has the power to preserve the remnants of long-gone, human histories only to deliver them onto the muddy soil for future generations to decipher. Textual transcendence analogous to Genette’s architextuality is most evident when Morales applies some traces of magic realism against the backdrop of a historical narrative. In this context, the generic nature of River of Angels eludes classification and often becomes “titular […] or […] subtitular” (Genette 1997, 4). River Mother is the character through which Morales achieves this evasive, generic quality of the text. For instance, River Mother is conversant with the fabled lizard people, the amphibians of the Native American cultural legacy, hybrids who adapted to adverse ecological conditions beneath the ground close to porciúncula. Part of the West Coast’s urban legends, the Lizard People formed an advanced civilization in pre-Columbian America. The local legend recounts how their clan built a complex network of underground tunnels and catacombs, which enabled them to safely hide their riches and protect themselves from a shower of meteors.4 The Lizard People sporadically appear in the text as reminders of a cultural heritage deeply associated with the history of Los Angeles, and River Mother is the character who fully comprehends their spectral presence in the narrative. Moreover, River Mother shows veneration for nature and approbation of mythical legacies, aspects of her character that stand in striking contrast to Uncle Philip’s oratory for eugenics. To explain, River of Angels certainly builds up layers of negative speculation, including Fascist political ideology, the misapplication of scientific breakthroughs, and the pervading fear of miscegenation. However, the text acquires its palimpsestuous quality with the character of River Mother, who inserts the layers of local color, ethnic cultural diversity, and respect for nature into Uncle Philip’s racist narrative.

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The most salient thematic concern of River of Angels is the plurality of thought processes that concurrently circulate the Los Angeles area at the turn of the twentieth century. By means of the different ways of apprehending experience, Morales stages instances of tentativeness that supersede the explicit crisis of an epic. In other words, Morales creates a focal antithesis between the native inhabitants of the area and the Anglo settlers from the East and this contrast constantly thrusts the reader toward a fearful exigency. The different mindsets that appear in the narrative engender a novel outlook of existence that does not truly require the superimposition of one upon the other, but the explication of a scalar meaningful framework. In this light, the conceptual tool of the palimpsest is most pertinent to the critical analysis of River of Angels because the text engulfs juxtaposing, and yet overlapping domains of thinking. For instance, advanced medical science and the primitive healing practices of indigenous groupings are polar opposite ways of living, which converge in Morales’s epic novel. The text insightfully poses a moral dilemma for the readers which centers on the shocking contrast drawn between the wicked Uncle Philip and the benign River Mother. Although the two characters never encounter each other in the narrative, the contradictory frames of mind that they personify inform much of the textual fabric. In fact, River of Angels invites the reader to take sides either for the eugenicist Uncle Philip or the autochthonous practitioner River Mother. Notably though, both cultural identities are alienating to the twenty-first-century reader since Uncle Philip adheres to an abhorrent racist philosophy and River Mother professes the generosity of nature spirits, the values of primitivism, and the mysticism of pre-Columbian, Native American societies.

Of Paratexts and the Palimpsestuous Reading Like “revision,” the concept of the palimpsest balances the idea of absence with presence, erasure with revelation. […] In poststructuralist criticism, the palimpsest is a marker of skepticism about the notion of origin and suggests the endless deferral of final and fixed meaning that lies at the heart of language. (Watkins 2006, 48)

The lives of the Ríos and the Kellers are conjoined in a narrative palimpsest which “balances the idea of absence with presence, erasure with revelation” (Watkins 2006, 248). The two families represent cultural narratives which are woven into each other, but they also offer the

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possibility of something new, of change. The Ríos and the Kellers cooperate in the construction of the architectural interventions over the river, and the bridges they build symbolize pathways to communion amidst a strictly stratified society. The scientific knowledge and the entrepreneurial skills that the Ríos and the Kellers have combine with the respect they show for their ethnic workforce. And their shared fondness for the narrative of cultural difference becomes a liberating plateau of serenity. Moreover, drawing from Gerard Genette’s (1997) (post)structuralist theories, River of Angels is not merely an epic novel with a rising action, a climax, and a resolution, but an assembly of interlaced narratives of being-­ in-­the-world. Morales’s epic novel incorporates political, cultural, and historical “textual traces” and also destabilizes the borderlines between fact and fiction (Watkins 2006, 248). For instance, the acknowledgment section of River of Angels glorifies the blurring of genres. Morales directly addresses potential readers of his epic novel with a warning against any frivolous approach to reading. In fact, he cautions readers that the ensuing textual flow is rendered highly treacherous and unpredictable. More precisely, the unstable semiotic essence of River of Angels is stated in the following caveat: “To the future readers of this work: If you read this book like a work of history, you are reading fiction; if you read this book like a work of fiction, you are reading history” (Morales 2014, iv). Apart from warning readers against generic categorizations, Morales sends out an invitation to venture a palimpsestuous reading of the narrative. Quite similar to Genette’s critical angle, Morales recommends a relational reading process along the lines of which the reader seeks kindred meanings in an affectionate way, quite similar to the ways the Ríos and the Kellers embrace interculturalism. In Genette’s own words: The duplicity of the object, in the sphere of textual relations, can be represented by the old analogy of the palimpsest: on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not conceal but allows to show through. The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading, the flavor of which […] may well be condensed in […] palimpsestuous reading. To put it differently […] one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together. (Genette 1997, 398–399)

The tale of the Ríos and the Kellers in the epic novel is engulfed by three autobiographical paratexts: the prologue, the epilogue, and the author’s note. All three paratexts are conducive to the overall

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intertextuality that River of Angels typifies. The paratexts themselves are not separate entities, but “they provide the text with a (variable) setting and […] a commentary […] which even the purists among readers […] cannot always disregard” (Genette 1997, 3). More particularly, the prologue sets the tone for the palimpsestuous reading of porciúncula and complicates Morales’s literary venture with multiple thematic interferences. In fact, River of Angels deftly masks its political undertones by foregrounding the elements of an epic, one that is reinforced with a consistent chronological sequence. In a subtle and intuitive way, the prologue introduces multiple political clashes, all of which are transposed in the troublesome contradiction between the sweeping forces of technology and the smothered river of the present. The critical comment at this point is that Morales envisions and anticipates the resurrection of the suppressed waters along with the resurgence of those histories which are still left untold. In fact, Morales creates a parallel between the subdued waterways of the river and the muted histories of ethnic subjectivities in Los Angeles. And in this light, the prologue reveals the political dimensions of the narrative, which develop side-by-side with the cultural and historical hermeneutics that the text tackles. In short, the palimpsestuous historicity of Los Angeles is ostensibly pronounced in the prologue. And the writer’s comments are read not only as enriching and illuminating interventions that call attention to the veiling of people’s fates but also as a hopeful challenge for the future generations to recover the effaced text of their ancestors and create the intertext of the present. Morales notes in the prologue: Across the river, Los Angeles proper shows off its skyline and several bridges that lead to downtown. Downtown, under the city, Los Angeles is a city with history buried underneath its present face. It is a palimpsest with archives layered one on top of the other by human beings crossing into this vortex since the ancient people settled here near the river. I am only an extension. In me there are several hidden currents of blood running through my veins, like the water running underneath the cement shell that the Anglos used—to bury, disfigure, control the Los Angeles River—in order to smother, oppress the natural waterways of the river. Someday the river will rise and break through, crush and wash to sea the tons of cement that for years have forced it down. (Morales 2014, xi)

The prologue of River of Angels is a memory mediation that creates channels of communication between the writer and the readers. Morales

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recollects feeling agitated at the “literary show” in the uptown event he attended with a close friend (2014, xiii). Almost “swallowed by the sharp, glamorous LA, Hollywood, Beverly Hills movie-industry and literary types,” Morales seeks an exit from this odd, belletristic circle of people (2014, xiii). In fact, he goes outside with the hope of finding “an outside patio where [he] can feel a breeze. [But he] finds [himself] walking toward another hall that offers another directional choice” (Morales 2014, xv). The escape from the social elite and the enclosed space of the library allows Morales to experience a personal revelation. He suddenly sees rows of photographs of workmen in the construction sites of the Los Angeles River bridges and this event becomes the crucial moment for the inception of his literary masterpiece. Morales shares the experience with his readers: Photographs, rows of photographs run the entire length of the walls. To my left, to my right, and before me the photographs multiply and draw me to them. Historical photographs of Los Angeles taken according to the dates circa 1931. I scan four and, to my surprise, their world and time peers back. They are photographs of the downtown Los Angeles River bridges at different stages of construction. I stand at a crossroad of time gazing at men and machines and their creations, and I know they are staring at me, calling me to recognize them, as if my glance into their space would make them live again and again. (Morales 2014, xv)

The writer discloses his predicament among the upper-class literary circles of Los Angeles in order to alert the readers’ attention to those fleeting moments of awareness that we obstinately disregard. Contrary to contemporary anxieties for immediacy and social ascendance, Morales gets off the treadmill of fierce competition and highlights the significance of those minor occurrences that can elucidate an individual’s self-perception.

Conclusion River of Angels is an excellent case for the palimpsestuous reading of urban expansion and socio-political complexity, one that bears witness to ethnic presence in various chronological layers. Because the epic novel includes disparate accounts of racio-cultural being, its critical analysis “seeks to trace the incestuous and encrypted texts that constitute the palimpsest’s fabric” (Dillon 2007, 254). Porciúncula consists of little places, small and secluded portions of land that were linked because of the construction of

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the bridges. Erecting imposing edifices occurs as part of a strategy to combat nature’s forces. However, in River of Angels, the river represents an unruly force due to its periodic flooding, the mud and debris that cause fatal consequences to the lives of ignorant crossers and settlers. Our understanding of the river’s powers and the rebellious relationship between Albert and Louise overlap, giving rise to an enlightening and subversive (re)reading of the history of Los Angeles. Accordingly, the text discloses two different tales of confrontation: technology versus nature, and bigotry vis-à-vis interculturalism. Indeed, the strenuous attempts to tame the river flow with the construction of bridges coincide with the wholehearted emotions shared by a Mexican boy of indio background and an upper-class white girl. Albert and Louise’s romantic relationship creates an emblematic overpass for ethnicities and carves the liminal space or the borderland utopia between communalities that are poles apart. As a symbol of societal flux, the bridge sets in motion the exchange of cultural practices and political standpoints. Literally, the bridge is an architectural undertaking that implements the safe crossing of actual physical boundaries, but it also symbolizes renewal through the transfer of values, morals, and ethics. Finally, the significance of the bridge is that it forms a lofty space for the reconsideration of self-identity, creates the circumstances to safely supersede the hazards of social demarcation, and allows people to enter the realms of evocative association.

Notes 1. According to Sanda Badescu, the construction of bridges is proof of humanity’s attempts to cover distances and overcome obstacles since time immemorial. Badescu notes that “[t]he history of bridges is so old that it is difficult to trace it back in time. Each bridge has its own stories: stories of building or of demolishing, stories of considerable effort or of subsequent uncommon events. The bridge can be actual or abstract; it can be a voyage between two worlds, a sentimental link between two communities, a passage between life and death. The bridge as a symbol may signify a passage from earth to sky, from human to super-human, from terrestrial life to paradise. It can also be a boundary space where the soul of the deceased engages in order to arrive at its final destination” (Badescu 2007, 1–2). For an insightful introduction to the symbolic undertones of bridges, see Sanda Badescu’s edited collection From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge (2007).

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2. My comment pinpoints the centrality of memory in socio-political and cultural texts (whether literary or theoretical), and the relevant critical approaches circulating throughout academia in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Ethnic writings of the 1980s and 1990s were committed efforts at recording and/or elucidating the past as a viable means to comprehending and restructuring the present for marginalized groupings excluded from the Anglo norm. According to Duncan Bell, recollections of individual and/or collective significance are ubiquitous as they assume the power to direct nuance for people’s self-understanding. Bell underscores that “[m]emory seems impossible to escape. During the closing decades of the twentieth century it emerged as a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe […]. Questions of historical memory […] have been at the forefront of debates over transitional justice, post-conflict reconstruction, the legitimacy of political violence […] and a plethora of other processes and practices” (2006, 1). 3. Alejandro Morales is Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is also an acclaimed novelist and the recipient of the 2007 Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. 4. For more on the legend of the Lizard People, see Bruce A. Walton’s edited work Mount Shasta: Home of the Ancients (1985).

References Badescu, Sanda. 2007. Introduction: On the Symbolism of the Bridge. In From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge, ed. Sanda Badescu, 1–11. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———, ed. 2007. From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bell, Duncan. 2006. Introduction: Memory, Trauma, and World Politics. In Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present, ed. Duncan Bell, 1–29. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bornstein, George. 1993. Introduction. In Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G.  Williams, 1–8. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Davis, Colin. 2007. Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Galton, Francis. 1909. Essays in Eugenics. London: The Eugenics Education Society. Genette, Gerard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press.

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Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Leon S.  Roudiez and Trans. Thomas Gora et  al. New  York: Columbia University Press. Morales, Alejandro. 2014. River of Angels. Houston: Arte Público Press. Olivas, Daniel. 2014. An Interview with Alejandro Morales Regarding his New Novel, ‘River of Angels’. Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 December. Accessed 1 September 2020. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-interview-withalejandro-morales-regarding-his-new-novel-river-angels/. Walton, Bruce A., ed. 1985. Mount Shasta: Home of the Ancients. Pomeroy: Health Research Books. Watkins, Susan. 2006. ‘Grande Dame’ or ‘New Woman’: Doris Lessing and the Palimpsest. LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 17: 243–262. https://doi. org/10.1080/10436920600998829.

CHAPTER 8

Locating the Favela: Place and Representation in the Marvelous City of Rio de Janeiro Gundo Rial y Costas

Introduction Rio de Janeiro has a long, moving, and eventful history of more than four centuries. Paradise beaches, stunning panoramic views, and also accelerated urbanization processes1 gradually turned the city into a global icon. However, only from the first decades of the twentieth century has it been nicknamed cidade maravilhosa, Marvelous City. Similar to the process of name giving for Latin America (Mignolo 2007, xi), the formation of identity in Rio de Janeiro has also been connected to the Other of (neo)colonial desire, from its erroneous baptism as a river by the Portuguese conquistadores up to modern days, in which the city is praised as “marvelous.”2 Yet the expression Marvelous City was only coined with the

G. Rial y Costas (*) Instituto Cultural Germánico, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_8

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emergence of the favela, as the hidden and supposedly inferior other of the previously colonial other. Originally, favelas were poor, often irregular settlements of simply built houses with restricted access to public services. In the present time, some of them have become legal, often directly juxtaposed to the supposedly marvelous parts of the city. On the one hand, these neighborhoods still suffer from the false stigma of being inferior, yet, on the other hand, they are also glorified for their rich contributions to the popular and so-called high culture. Despite their mushrooming all over Rio de Janeiro with more than one and a half million inhabitants, people from the outside are often discouraged from entering these allegedly dangerous localities (Zaluar and Alvito 1998, 15). The marvelous city of Rio de Janeiro with its many favelas thus constitutes a complex, constantly negotiated constellation. Reading the megalopolis of Rio de Janeiro as an intertwined network of several overlayered cultural texts in motion,3 a two-sided opposition of Marvelous City versus favela seems to fully represent neither the city’s historical nor current dynamics of urban space. The latter can be attributed to a non-linear, simultaneous constitution for more than a century of the formal and the informal city embedded in Rio de Janeiro’s 350 years of history. Multiple historical, discursive, and spatial relations are thus at work. This chapter focuses on the period when the favela first emerged up to the present time. As mentioned above, one can keenly observe erasure and removal of the favela-other. At the same time, there are also processes of mutual influence and exchange. Occasionally, they occur in immediate, deeply interwoven geographic proximities with ubiquitous, multi-sited flows and disjunctions of people, meanings, and social imaginaries (Appadurai 1996, 33; Appadurai 2013, 61). Hence, the dynamic concepts of localities or translocalities (Appadurai 1996, 184)4 aptly describe the occasionally simultaneous productions of different localities on a local and also transnational scale. The physical/concrete as well as the discursive constructions of a marvelous city-space containing its favela-other are narrated from a specific perspective. They suggest an author, someone with the authority as well as the agency to name, to write, and to produce. The latter evokes the long shadow of exclusive power asymmetries in Brazil resulting from colonialism and the slave trade (Batista 2003, 204). These stark asymmetries have been felt profoundly up to the present time by a clear-cut spatial segregation with a large majority of Afro-Brazilian favela inhabitants suffering

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severe human rights violation and arbitrary police abuse (Wacquant 2008, 57).5 Consequently, one needs to inquire who actually creates and represents city-space in Rio de Janeiro. In this context, I will draw on and extend Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 1999) postcolonial definition of subaltern representation by asking who and what are represented,6 and who and what are represented by whom. By means of an anthropological approach of constructing localities or multilocalities (Appadurai 1996; Low 2017) through the lens of subaltern representation (Spivak 1988, 1999) from postcolonial literary theory, the complex constellation of Rio de Janeiro as a marvelous city with its often negated favelas shall be described. In order to complement often stigmatizing texts dealing exclusively with the formal, so-called marvelous city, this chapter will prioritize representations on and by the favela-other.7

Construction, Removal, and Forced Integration as Make-Up The first favelas were built on hilltops in the center of Rio de Janeiro around the turn of the twentieth century (Valladares 2005, 22), subsequently spreading to the South Zone and finally to the entire city. Created when returning soldiers from civil war in Northeast Brazil were rewarded with land on hills, these neighborhoods subsequently mixed with others areas, such as housing for the poor called cortiços and also quilombos, from freed slaves (Campos 2005, 63). According to sociologist Licia Valladares (2005, 22), one can observe an initial, uncontrolled mushrooming of these settlements in the 1930s. They were followed by their criminalization (Benetti 2009, 186) including public containment programs in the 1940s. Later, in the 1960s, a period of relative negligence was observed before numerous, often violent removals ended the existence of several favelas (Pearlman 2010, 79). Finally, during the 1980s, the implementation of official favela urbanization was initiated. Within this panorama, a tendency becomes obvious. Apart from certain negligence, there were attempts to modernize these neighborhoods, oscillating between forced integration and violent removals. According to US anthropologist and eye-witness Janice Pearlman (2010, 79–80), the latter was implemented with inhuman practices such as removing people by ushering them into garbage vans, while separating entire families. Time and

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again, people were forced to live in places with a precarious infrastructure far away from their previous residencies. Even nowadays, this removal practice with a new forced redistribution of space has been continued by a new housing program called Minha casa, minha vida (“My house, my life”) that frequently does not provide families with residences in the same region. The latter was confirmed by Cleyton, an MC and social worker from the favela complex Cidade de Deus (City of God). During an interview in November 2016 (Cleyton 2016), he revealed that the program awarded housing in three different, distant regions of the city for him, his cousin, and parents.8 Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, favela modernization has become a key focus of neoliberal politics in Rio de Janeiro, especially during the last two decades.9 This strategy of representing and marketing Rio de Janeiro as a consumable tourism brand was implemented as a part of the Plan for Accelerated Growth (PAC: plano de crescimento económico) that included a new security strategy to further urbanize the city. Therefore, since 2008 so-called UPPs (unidades policiais pacificadoras), Units of Pacifying Police Forces, have been created supposedly to bring peace, law, and order to these neighborhoods (de Oliveira 2014, 16). They originally included social programs10 whose purpose was to retake territories lost to drug-traffickers.11 According to a large number of interviewees, the so-­ called pacification, which often used extreme violence, was not to the benefit of favela population. In this respect, the 42-year-old barman Marcello from the favela of Morro dos Cabritos stated, rather skeptically, in an interview: “What has changed, was actually not so much. Only that now it is the police that carry the guns and not the drug dealers anymore” (Marcello 2016). The new modernization programs of forced integration did not offer sustainable opportunities for the favela inhabitants’ participation in urban planning decisions. Two notable examples are found in Rocinha, Rio’s biggest favela. For example, one notes the selective color painting of only those houses on the road which connect the favela to the official city, while houses in locations invisible from the outside have not been painted. In addition, a grayish clay passage designed by famous architect Oscar Niemeyer and built arbitrarily in 2010 links the favela to the formal city, yet it lacks any meaningful connection to local community identity (Daflon 2011). This line of forced integration measures also includes the construction of a highly expensive cable car in Complexo do Alemão, one of the largest favela complexes of the Marvelous City. Due to supposed shortages

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in public spending, it stopped its service altogether in 2016 and has not returned to function ever since.12 The latter panorama of some emblematic examples belongs to a long series of urbanization processes from the formal, marvelous city of Rio de Janeiro destined to create mere superficial effects in favelas as Potemkin villages ready to be consumed by tourists.13

Close and Far: Dividing, Visiting, and Vidigalization Clearly, a specific, historically grounded constellation regarding favela representation is needed, as the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro belonged to the city’s periphery in the nineteenth century, including the present-day globally famous boroughs of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. Urban transformation was possible only after the construction of a tunnel that connected the south with the more central parts of the city in the late nineteenth century (O’Donnell 2013, 18). Subsequently, new forms of urban life developed with beautiful hotels, shiny illumination. and the discovery of the beach areas for mundane leisure activities (Bartelt 2013, 80). On the previously peripheral hilltops in the South Zone of the city, favelas had resisted gentrification and expanded, situated in absolute, complex proximity to the now noble and chic beach life of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. In some cases,14 they have developed into directly juxtaposed neighborhoods of the official streets and buzzing city life. Such close proximity entails constant friction, contact, and exchange, as people from the favela work as servants, porters, and cleaners in the households of the mostly middle-class and upper-middle-class boroughs and spend some of their leisure time on the nearby beach.15 Hence, one is confronted with more than a century-long juxtaposition of rather rich, middle- and upper-middle-class boroughs interwoven with favela settlements in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. As stated above, from early on, a negative image of the supposedly dangerous favela (Zaluar and Alvito 1998, 15) was created with a respectively negative semantics. Particularly in the last twenty years, this biased and non-representative tendency was emphasized by a binary narrative which has been reproduced ever since. It takes up again the historic, dualistic stigma of Marvelous City versus favela by naming Rio de Janeiro cidade partida, or divided city, as proposed by the journalist Zuenir Ventura.16 The expression divided city has turned into a common place that is widely (ab)used by hegemonic media, audiovisual productions and political discourse. Frequently, it comes with a binary rhetoric referring to the official city

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with its paved streets as asphalt, diametrically opposed to the supposedly illegal favela. In order to fully discern the world that extends beyond this non-­ representative discursive formation, one needs to consider alternative perspectives and listen to the voices of the favela-other. The favela-born geographer of Afro-Brazilian origin, Jailson Souza e Silva 2012, 20) argues that favela inhabitants always had to transcend the boundaries of the places where they lived, as they entered the formal city for work and leisure activities. The latter recalls and emphasizes the situation of constant friction and exchange mentioned above. By speaking from the perspective of a favela inhabitant, the geographer clearly questions such a division of the city (Souza e Silva 2012, 19–21) in an open letter to Zuenir Ventura. Following this argument, vital evidence for transcending the limits between asphalt and favela is found in a comment from Wesley, a communitarian radio activist and inhabitant of the favela of Rocinha in November 2012: “You know, it is absolute nonsense to speak about a divided city. It has always been one. Yes, the access to services is different. But listen, the middle-class people have always come to the favela, to dance at funk parties, to visit friends or to buy drugs” (Wesley 2012). One can observe a steadily growing number of foreigners coming to live in the favela. A rather ambivalent form of favela consumption and representation is enacted through so-called favela tours. Some are extremely voyeur-like, with tourists dressed in safari vests who enter in jeeps, drive around aimlessly, and make no contact with the local community (Jaguaribe 2007, 126).17 Other community-based tours, however, favor exchanges between tourists and local inhabitants. Local or locally instructed guides thus introduce the visitors to local history from the perspective of the favela, by also giving insight into capoeira, samba, handicraft, and gastronomy in the hood.18 A small, but influential number of the foreigners remain in the favela. They install NGOs, churches, and charity institutions (Freyre-Medeiros 2009, 20), open restaurants with regional cuisine from their homelands, and establish bars and often pricey party venues. Some of them, with the hyped South Zone favela Vidigal as the extreme emblem of this process, have transformed into gentrified places with particularly chic and expensive events that also attract visitors from all over Rio, Brazil, and abroad. In this locality, one can observe a new infrastructure for tourism brought from the outside with cumbia parties, techno raves, and exclusive upper-­ middle-­class events.19 As a consequence, prices for housing have

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skyrocketed and many locals have been forced to move to less expensive areas. In this sense, one could suggest the coinage of the term vidigalization to describe the unleashed, often exclusive and gentrifying commodification of favela spaces by branding a chic and trendy image of these localities.20

Representation: Between Interest, Erasure, and Hyperspatialization Regarding Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 271, 278, 283) above-mentioned question of “who and what are represented, and who and what are represented by whom,” numerous representations of Rio de Janeiro have been disseminated which adopt the perspective of the official city. Such perspectives depict the South Zone21 and its respective icons by erasing the favelas, even on official tourist maps.22 The South Zone excluding the favela was propagated first as the face of Rio de Janeiro and later of the entire nation. It was depicted through ubiquitously circulating images excluding the favela’s negative connotations which were consumed in Brazil and abroad, first, as setting for Hollywood films shot in Rio and watched all around the world (Freyre-Medeiros 2006a, 21). With the rise of Brazilian television since the 1960s, the favela has been transformed into a national showroom as part of the background setting for telenovelas, viewed regularly by a large segment of the Brazilian population (Alencar 2002).23 At the same time, and particularly since the 1930s, influential cultural expressions such as samba music, dance, and literature come directly from the favela. As a matter of fact, several of the most famous, globally known samba schools in Rio de Janeiro are based in the heart of favelas.24 Frequently, their themes refer to socio-historic and political favela issues in a colorful, yet critical way. These institutions involve thousands of people from the entire city who are part of the buzzing carnival industry, and draw on a long tradition of highlighting and reenacting relevant issues through music, scenography, and costumes. Setting new tendencies from the favela has been maintained by creating the notorious baile funk, a Brazilian version of funk music with a pounding bass line that is celebrated every weekend in hundreds of parties all over the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Essinger 2005, 73; Yúdice 2003, 123). During these baile funk parties, favela streets are appropriated and transformed into public, community dance floors. Funk music and choreographies25 are consumed and imitated

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by party guests from the hood, from outside, and also from abroad, sometimes even introducing foreign MCs.26 This has led to the creation of baile funk venues throughout Rio, Brazil, and around the world. From the inception of favela as a community, famous artists who live outside the favelas, both in Brazil and abroad, have expressed an increased, often voyeuristic interest in the favela-other. A revealing example is Tarsila Amaral, one of the most famous Brazilian painters, who was artistically inspired and copied the favela houses’ brownish color for her paintings in the 1930s (Freyre-Medeiros 2006a, 31). In addition, the Austrian writer Stephan Zweig compared favelas to African villages in his canonic Brazil, Country of the Future (Armbruster 2007, 359). Finally, French director Marcel Camus took Rio de Janeiro’s favela Babilonia as the setting for his romanticizing, Oscar-winning Orfeu Negro in the late 1950s (Leitão 2012, 242). On a national level, similar film productions depicting favelas and the daily life struggles of their dwellers remained largely unnoticed, as depicted in an early 1930s film (Shaw and Dennison 2007, 102) or 5 Vezes Favela and Rio Zona Norte (Johnson and Stam 1995, 32) in the 1950s and 1960s. Some decades of rather limited audiovisual output were followed by a decisive change in representation. Provoked by territorial control of heavily armed drug gangs in many favelas from the 1980s onward (Arias 2006, 3), a criminalization by the hegemonic media (Vaz et al. 2006, 242) was enacted. Hence, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a new subgenre developed the so-called favela film. Fernando Meirelles’ globally acclaimed City of God (2002; “Cidade de Deus”) constitutes its phantasmagoric icon depicting life and gang war in the hood.27 This innovative artistic output was followed by a long list of similar productions responding to a new audience demand, such as the widely circulating, award-winning films by director José Padilha.28 They highlight an exclusive, hyperbolic nexus between the favela, violence, and drug-­ trafficking by creating a new form of spectacularization (Larkins 2015) and hypervisualization of the favela-other (Hamburger 2008, 200). One might extend Esther Hamburger’s notion of the visualization of the social actors to the favelas as a whole, and speak about a ubiquitous hyperspatialization of the favela, as one can observe a strong hyperbolic aestheticization of its allegedly dangerous spaces which was absorbed by the audience and further negatively defined by the hegemonic media in Brazil and abroad. A close analysis of these different forms of representation reveals relational and contextual overlapping. Typical favela forms such as samba

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music and contemporary funk have been appropriated by the official city and packaged as entangled, mainstream, nationwide, and internationally consumed goods. These flows have led to widely reiterated practices such as colloquial expressions, choreographies, haircuts, and clothing styles which are also adopted by observers from the outside, who often set new tendencies and create new favela phantasmagorias. Such tendencies are especially visible as these elements are authentically interwoven in songs or utilized in sensationalist caricatures in the above-mentioned favela films.

Alternative Representation: Favela, Museum, Graffiti Within Rio de Janeiro’s complex constellation, a constant flow of new cultural production is set in motion by people from the hood who contribute their interpretations of the city.29 Of particular interest is the location of the visible, pictographic traces in the interwoven city fabric. Strolling through Rio de Janeiro, one can witness a large variety of their concrete manifestations; even in the city center and in the affluent South Zone, some traces of the favela-other can be found. Especially visible through a wide variety of tagging and ubiquitous graffiti, these traces often appear as tiny marks, manifestations of lovers, or large territorial demarcations of graffiti artists or drug gangs, some with geographic references to favelas. They can stretch as murals over several floors of a building, as the one depicting a female, Afro-Brazilian favela inhabitant on a large building at Siqueira Campos Street in the heart of Copacabana. It covers more than fifteen square meters, giving a face to the often forgotten parts of the city.30 Nevertheless, it is frequently overlooked; busy bypassers will not know that the portrait represents an elderly Black woman from the neighboring favela of Morro dos Cabritos, as there is no reference to the represented, only a tiny name tag to its Portuguese artist.31 Traces of artistic productions that belong to the favela prevail as specific representations of favela space in or as museums. Some of them are almost completely forgotten,32 some have become references for the whole country and occasionally they are exhibited abroad.33 Among the few museums whose displays feature more than the official city,34 the favela-based and community-operated open-air museum Morrinho reproduces a favela hill with hundreds of different painted bricks.35 Similar versions were

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constructed in other favelas in Rio de Janeiro, and also in “official” institutions in its home city, all over Brazil and also abroad (Morrinho Project 2020), sometimes adapted to the socio-cultural contexts of its new locations (Kalkman 2013, 290). Furthermore, the Museum of Maré (cf. O Dia 2014b) located in the poor North Zone favela complex Maré constitutes a further emblematic example. Its collection includes photographs, clothes, and artifacts donated from its community members; on display is life in the hood, emanating from the personal recounts of the hood dwellers. Subdivided into twelve showrooms, they bear dynamic labels: water, house, migration, resistance, festivity, faith, daily routine, child, work, market, future, fear. In the latter, empty bullet partridges from shootouts in the hood are showcased in a glass enclosure. A positive, non-linear, authentic recount of unmasked favela life from below is thus provided, as a true form of self-­ representation.36 This is reinforced by organizing events to inform, to strengthen social ties, and to keep alive community memory. A similar, yet different, approach of museum self-representation is followed by MUF (Museu de Favela), originally subsidized from the above-­ mentioned government program PAC for economic growth. It is a favela museum located in Pavão, Pavãozinho, and Cantagalo, a favela complex in affluent south Rio de Janeiro.37 On visits in 2011 and 2013, an absence of material objects, paintings, or sculptures was noticed.38 Instead, the former church building hosted a library and several other rooms for journalism and photography workshops. One of its administrators, the engineer Maria, stated in December 2011 that the geographic limits of the museum are identical to those of the entire favela complex. Based on approaches from social museology, the transformation of the entire community into an open-air museum is elucidated by entrances to different parts of the favela, with colorful round gates embossed with graffiti, imitating the Arch of Triumph in Paris. This direct reference to the globally famous monument in the French capital was underscored by ACME,39 one of the museum’s founders. The internationally acclaimed multimedia graffiti artist and inhabitant of the favela complex stated in an interview with the author of this chapter in June 2016: “You know, it should be the passage to something new, to a different world, making this transition clear” (ACME 2016b). Inside this different world, one takes note of a circuit with twenty-seven different, so-called canvas houses (casas telas) covering the entire favela complex. One by one, these graffiti creations were painted on favela houses; the front walls served as the

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background canvasses for important scenes of favela community life and history. The canvas house circuit starts with recounting hood history from the early twentieth century up to the present time. Thus the arrival of poor migrants fleeing from draughts in the northeastern part of Brazil and arriving in Rio de Janeiro are depicted; images of people fetching water from outside the neighborhood are also captured. Furthermore, one can observe that portraits of important community activists and a local football idol are also included; in addition, teenagers running kites, adults playing board games, and a scene of a catholic saint can be seen. The images are directly entangled with the everyday, framed by washing on a line (see Fig. 8.1) and people who look out of their windows. The graffiti occasionally come with brief descriptions, some written in ACME’s handwriting, in the poetic form of cordel lyric. They pay tribute to the first immigrants from the Northeast and provide an artistic, pedagogic

Fig. 8.1  Autonomous and self-funded graffiti by ACME in favela of Pavãozinho in Rio de Janeiro (June 2016)

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reconstruction of popular community memory. All have been created by ACME and his (inter)national sprayer friends whom he invited to paint the different houses.40 The museum also organizes tours through the circuit of the canvas houses. They provide an account of the neighborhood’s cultural history by explaining the stories behind the arts. In this way, the community’s history is retold through the authorship of its dwellers and reenacted through the different local and foreign41 tour guides’ versions for national and international visitors.42 Significant issues, such as struggles over land, water shortage, and migration thus find an updated form of graffiti self-­ representation. To conclude, one can describe the project in its entirety as a translocal performance of the flipside of favela history. ACME, the supposedly subaltern, characterized this creative project as follows in an interview: “MUF is intended to show the people the underworld of Copacabana, which is for all the people” (2016a).

Transcending Alternative Representation MUF serves as a vital example from below, where different, mostly favela people represent themselves through graffiti arts. However, there is a beyond, if one takes a closer look at the motifs and significations of the graffiti. A strong focus is placed on positive, peaceful, and harmonious representations, without any direct references to (police) violence, drug-­ trafficking, or (ethnic) segregation. Hence, the images transcend the stereotypical negative representations of favela hyperspatialization. In these self-expressions from below, a relative strategic omission of several specific topics is apparent. Such non-representation is implicit in a new form of negation, felt as the non-expression of an important voice in the hood. For example, an image of Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian religion popular among a smaller part of the community, had been painted on one of the canvas houses, foregrounding a central spiritual figure of this creed. However, due to strong pressure from evangelical and catholic neighbors, the graffiti was painted over and replaced with another image.43 Apart from this palimpsestic erasure, the artistic output of ACME, son of poor migrants of color and one of the founding members of the museum, illustrates the struggle over representation. Over the years, his works also focus on painstaking, polemical issues that declare an opposition to evictions and social injustice. The latter was exemplified by a large memorial mural (Fig. 8.2) which protests against

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Fig. 8.2  Graffiti “Justice for Douglas DG” by ACME in the favela of Pavão

the random shooting of black hood dweller and famous television show dancer Douglas Silva in the favela of Pavãozinho in 2014.44 Such a mural underscores the other of favela’s other face. In this graffiti, the text on the left-hand side of the image tells that “God chooses the star that shines.” On the right-hand side, we can see the name of DG’s funk group “Bonde de Madrugada” with a list of its members (Barnabé, Charles, Negão).

Conclusion In this chapter it was shown that the construction of the favela has always oscillated between violent removals from and forced integration into Rio de Janeiro. In the most extreme cases, the latter was enacted through the complete abolishment of some of these settlements. Nowadays, historical modernization claims for the Marvelous City of Rio de Janeiro have been taken up again to transform the city specifically into an easily consumable

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tourist commodity. In order to fulfill this urbanization strategy, favelas were violently “pacified” by military police units. A further aspect of the latter was showcased through forced integration strategies, such as the random construction of a clay passage in the favela of Rocinha and the now abandoned cable car in the favelas of Complex do Alemão. In sum, one could perceive that favela modernization programs had a mere cosmetic effect. In addition, the particularity of the favelas in Rio’s South Zone was elucidated. Historically derived from the periphery of the city, favelas resist in contemporary settings through directly juxtaposed geographic proximities to the rich boroughs. A stigmatizing rhetoric followed, labeling Rio de Janeiro a divided city, and emphasizing the supposed distance between the formal part and the informal favela one. This dualism by journalist Ventura (1994) was questioned by favela-born geographer Souza e Silva (2012) and by interviewee Wesley (2012), who both claim that there has always been interest and exchange between the two parts of the city. Of great influence in this respect was the role of visitors and especially foreigners, as consumers in the ambivalent favela tours and as creators who bring new tendencies, events, and institutions to some of these neighborhoods. In the special case of the hyped favela of Vidigal with a privileged view in the affluent South Zone of the city, the neologism vidigalization has been proposed to better describe these extreme processes of gentrification. Favela representation has worked from its beginning in a double bind. In its negativity, it was erased from official tourist maps and from landscape presentations of the particularly posh South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, converted into icons first disseminated in US movies, and then adopted by telenovelas and finally Brazilian fiction films. Yet early local productions from the favela have also emerged, such as samba, including its global industry. Nowadays this tendency has been continued by the notorious baile funk music with parties that are celebrated inside and outside favelas all over Rio, other Brazilian cities, and also abroad. The interest in the favela from the outside was further expressed from early on by Brazilian and foreign visitors such as the director Camus, the writer Zweig, and the artist Amaral, each of whom contributed to the creation of a new favela image. This image found a new, updated, and highly aestheticized global recognition with the favela film, City of God (2002), about gang war in the hood its shiny icon. This new form of emphasis on the linkage between the favela and violence was conceived by referring to negative, ubiquitous,

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and hyperbolic favela representation with the concept of hyperspatialization. Ethnographic notes revealed that graffiti throughout Rio bear marks connected to favela, often unperceived by its inhabitants. The museum was introduced as a specific place where favela self-representation can work on a community level. The brick reproductions of favela hills called Morrinho and the donations from the hood to Museum of Maré and “Museum of Favela” are all positive examples of self-organized and favela-­ based self-representations. The latter is further defined by organizing events to strengthen the community and to keep its memory alive. In this regard, Museum of Favela proposes the whole favela complex as an open-­ air museum, using the walls of the houses as canvases for graffiti to represent history and life in the hood, accompanied by tours from local and foreign guides who translocally reenact and perform community micro history. Yet even these self-representations from the hood suffer restrictions as proved by the forced overpainting of an image from the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda creed due to neighbors’ religious intolerance. However, particular constraints were also transcended. This was observed through graffiti artist of color ACME’s emblematic overpainting of an image on a house canvas from Museum of Favela in order to claim justice for the black hood dancer DG, aka Douglas Silva, shot by the police. The latter production condenses the empowered agency of favela self-representation. What can be deduced from the key claims of this chapter? In the first place, geographic and symbolic favela representations display an intertwined and constructed nature as even official maps erase favelas. Both seem to follow a cruel logic of erasure in order to construct and modernize the Marvelous City of Rio de Janeiro. Symbolic and real violence of removal and of disappearance conflate in this respect. Yet exclusive, straightforward explanations for the binary of modernization as forced integration versus the favela also have to be complemented in at least one aspect. The community-based self-creation of the Museum of Favela was funded by the PAC modernization program, yet the same government funds paid the salary of the so-called pacifying police officer, who shot and killed a Black dancer, DG, aka Douglas Silva, in the favela. But in the end, it was graffiti artist ACME who created a pictorial mural as homage to the dancer. Thus he inscribes his claim for justice into the canon of the otherwise peaceful Favela Museum self-representations on the canvas

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houses—consequently the social actors have transformed places into dynamic translocalities. It seems as if the representation of the favela often oscillates between extremes. On the one hand, it expresses the politically motivated self-­ representation of resistance; on the other hand, it displays the exaggerated hyperspatialization of its supposed places of violence. Nevertheless, there are a number of average favela settlements which lack many of these phenomena. Ambivalent and multiple nodes are in motion, yet the complex, constantly negotiated constellation of the favela within, outside, or beyond the Marvelous City of Rio de Janeiro also requires a typological description. The examples of samba baile funk and the favela film showed the many local as well as translocal links through the multi-sited flows of music, images, actors, activists, colloquial expressions, and venues. Furthermore, the linkage of the two proposed terms of vidigalization and hyperspatialization points furthermore to the creation of a new artifact-­ like icon, that of Favela Maravilhosa, or Marvelous Favela. Such a production conflates local and translocal processes as in the special example of privileged South Zone favela Vidigal. Construing vidigalization positively and considering the neighborhood as dynamic translocality, one could suggest that Favela Maravilhosa is constructed and imagined by social actors as it injects new potentialities. The above-mentioned artist Vic Muniz opened a fine arts primary school particularly for hood children in Vidigal, thus transcending mere gentrification effects by offering local and sustainable education. In addition, the fact that the project was showcased as a successful urbanization program at Biennale Arte in Venice highlights its translocal character. At the same time, however, one has to ask again, who represents whom: Is it the favela inhabitant or the artist who borrows her voice? Further, neglected facets of the favela-other’s representation can be cited. Such a representation appears at the crossroads of ethnicity and gender, and is illustrated by an example from the Brazilian delegation at the Frankfurt literature fair in 2013. The favela-born Paulo Lins was the only Afro-Brazilian writer present at the event,45 without any female Black representative to accompany him. This recalls Gayatri Spivak’s (1988, 308) claim for subaltern self-representation which cited political activist of color Bhuvaneswari Bhadura, who could only speak through committing suicide. The latter speaking-through-silence evokes a general discussion about gender and representation in Brazil. One might further inquire into

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female favela voices of Afro-Brazilian origin. Adelia Sampaio, the first Afro-Brazilian female director of a feature film, reported the erasure of her early works,46 thereby relegating her concrete artistic production to the domain of memory and oblivion.47 Therefore support for alternative forms of expressions such as literary festivals in the periphery and cultural productions from favelas are needed to make self-representing voices visible, heard, and public.48 The latter is echoed by the success of the favela-based samba school Mangueira, winner of the 2019 Rio carnival, which paid tribute to the imprints of Black and indigenous females on Brazilian society by singing to protest the erasure of their memories (Jornal do Brasil 2019).49 To conclude, it is a challenge to clearly retrace the limits, connections, and intensity of favela translocalities. Often derived from resistance against erasure and removal, they are reconfigured by new transcending expressions, such as the favela museum Morrinho. The multifaceted and mobile character of this dynamic installation allows the people to create a new community with bricks: In Rio de Janeiro children constructed the miniature of the gigantic Maracaná football stadium inside it, in contrast to the version set up in Amsterdam, which contains a coffee shop (Kalkman 2013). Hence, new versions of a different Rio de Janeiro are being built. Dream-like aspirations and the incorporation of other urban realities result in a new vision. They clearly go beyond the old favela excluding cliché of Rio de Janeiro as Marvelous City and propose an alternative version: the city as Favela Maravilhosa, as Marvelous Favela!

Notes 1. This transformation was especially prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century (Barbosa 2012, 43). 2. As succinctly stated by communication scholar Jaguaribe, the conception of marvelous as exotic (Jaguaribe 2011, 333) was imported to Latin America from Europe, and gained prominence with the emblematic creation of French-influenced real maravilloso literature by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (Jaguaribe 2014, 36). A parallel reference to the marvelous appeared in Brazil, 1908, to designate the city of Rio de Janeiro, when local organizers hosted an internationally acclaimed world exhibition (Jaguaribe 2011, 343). 3. According to Jacques Derrida, every text includes the trace of a previous text. This notion of ongoing, relational traces has influenced postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak (1988, 288; 1999, 308), who draws on Derrida

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(1997, lxxi), particularly in her discussions of the subaltern representation of difference. 4. A translocality (Appadurai 1996, 184–85) or translocal space (Low 2017, 25, 187) is constructed through social actors who establish connections with multiple localities through personal experience and material resources. The concept is similar to the geographical, epistemologically grounded concepts of multiterritorialities (Haesbaert 2004, 347–48) and transterritorialities (Haesbaert 2014, 81–82). 5. Accordingly, the country of Brazil has been described in its entirety as a defective, “disjunctive democracy” (Holston 2008, 18). 6. Based on faulty translations of the term representation, as used by Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx, Spivak differentiates between speaking about and speaking in place of someone else (Spivak 1988, 271). She thus concludes that the subaltern cannot speak for herself. A decade later, however, Spivak acknowledges that relational positions of articulation can allow the subaltern the possibility to speak (Spivak 1999, 310). 7. Interest in the favela-other is inspired by León-Portilla’s (1959) La visión de los vencidos, which contests mainstream narratives of the Spanish Conquista in Mexico and instead foregrounds indigenous counter-texts. The present study is based on original anthropological research data, which I collected and categorized from 2011 to 2020 (Rial y Costas 2011–2020). My database includes qualitative interviews as well as participant observation reports from two favela complexes in the affluent southern part of Rio de Janeiro, one of which is the favela neighborhood where I live (Morro dos Cabritos and Ladeira dos Tabajaras as well as Pavão, Pavãozinho, and Cantagalo); additionally, I have included observations from favelas in different regions of the city. Also included are analyses of specific favela literature, audiovisual, and journalistic expressions and news reports taken from the two hegemonic daily Rio de Janeiro newspapers O Globo and O Dia. The former is directed toward the conservative elite, while the latter has a local and popular appeal. Overall, my research aims to spatialize (Low 2017, 7) the representation of the favela by composing a mobile, multisited media ethnography (following Marcus 1995, 100; Marcus 1998, 80). This study is an extension of a postdoctoral research project, funded by CnpQ, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development of Brazil, in the area of Human Geography at UFF, Universidade Federal Fluminense Rio de Janeiro, and supervised by Professor Rogério Haesbaert. 8. Murani (2014) describes a similar disruption when he was relocated through this program. Having previously resided in the well-situated favela Cantagalo, he was subsequently moved to a former prison located far from his original neighborhood.

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9. This represents an effort to imitate Barcelona’s glorious transformation into a globally acclaimed urban metropolis when the city hosted the Summer Olympics 1992 (Burgos 2012, 387) by attracting highly visible media events such as the FIFA World Cup 2014 and the Olympic Games 2016. This form of branding also preceded the revitalization of the harbor area, evoking the city’s historic splendors in the label porto maravilha, that is, the magic port (Jaguaribe 2014, 30–32). 10. Originally termed UPP Social (O Dia 2014a) and then Rio a mais (O Globo 2014), these programs were hailed as harbingers of security, dignity, culture, health, and education in conspicuous and somewhat biased newspaper advertisements. 11. This was suggested by Minister of Security of the time, José Mariano Beltrame, in an interview after the so-called pacification of the Complexo do Alemão favelas was enacted (O Globo 2010). Finally, in 2015, the social and cultural programs were discarded altogether. Since they were limited and selective by design, most did not lead to lasting economic, social, or political change. Only the often violent and inefficient military programs remained. 12. The cost of this project, which transported thousands of favela inhabitants every day (O Dia 2016b), was approximately eighty million euros. A similar process of constructing and later abandoning a cable car in the favela of Providência, Rio de Janeiro, represents another example of such sheer neglect. 13. Cavalcanti (2015) regards favela integration into the city as an urban spectacle. 14. This is also true of the favela complexes Chapeu Mangueira and Babilonia, Ladeira dos Tabajaras, and Morro dos Cabritos as well as Pavão, Pavãozinho, Cantagalo, Cruzada, Vidigal, Chacará do Ceú, Santa Marta, Cerro Corrá, Perreirão da Silva, Vila Parque da Cidade, Santo Amaro, and Morro Azul. All are located in affluent boroughs such as Catete, Laranjeiras, Leme, Copacabana, Botafogo, Ipanema, Lagoa, Leblon, and Gávea. Furthermore, Rio’s largest favela, Rocinha, is currently regarded as an independent borough, and lies adjacent to the upper class community of São Conrado in the southern part of the city. 15. In Rio de Janeiro approximately 800 favelas comprise roughly one-fifth of the total population, the majority of which are located in peripheral regions of the city (Valladares 2005, 13; Souza e Silva 2012, 20). 16. Ventura (1994) lived in a favela for less than one year and then composed a rather superficial book which described what he viewed as a divided city from his self-declared position of favela resident. 17. Such tours resemble the above-mentioned favela visits during the twentieth century.

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18. Some years ago, the so-called cycle of gastronomies was initiated and featured an itinerary that led participants to restaurants in several different favelas (O Dia 2014c). 19. These observations are drawn from my field notes, dated February 2014 and December 2015 (Rial y Costas 2011–2020). Cf. FreyreMedeiros (2009). 20. Such an image is constructed through visual representations of venues in the area with stunning panoramic views. The appropriation of Vidigal’s splendors is further enacted through advertisements for a children’s art school. 21. One has to bear in mind the latent signifier of Rio’s poorer and less glorious “North Zone” which is always evoked in the binary of the South Zone as rich and affluent, while the North Zone is stigmatized as rather poor. 22. On such maps, favelas are depicted as undifferentiated green or brown spaces. Cf. the maps of Riotur (Empresa de Turismo do Município do Rio de Janeiro 2020), the marketing branch of the city council. 23. Well-known images of Rio, including beaches, the Tijuca Rainforest, and the statue, Christ the Redeemer, have typically appeared as background settings for popular television soap operas; favelas, however, have not been included, except when they are central to the narrative developed in the television soap opera (Hamburger 2008, 205). 24. One such example is the samba school Mangueira, located in the homophonous favela, which was honored during the 2016 and 2019 carnivals of Rio (O Dia 2016a; O Dia 2019). 25. One popular choreography is the dança do passinho, or dance of the little steps (Faustini 2012, 76). 26. These include MC Gringo from Germany and subsequently MC Don Blanquito from the United States. 27. The film is based on a novel by Paulo Lins from Cidade de Deus. Literary productions focusing on the favela began to circulate in the early twentieth century, beginning with Azevedo’s iconic O Cortiço, which chronicles the establishment and disintegration of the first favela-like settlement. Since 1940, several literary productions have featured the favela from an insider’s perspective, such as the diaries written by Carolina de Jesus. More recently, favela authors from the Festival of Periphery (FLUP) in Rio de Janeiro have achieved prominence, including the favela-born author Geovani Martins, whose work has been translated into several languages. 28. These productions, typically polemic and controversial, prompted extensive debate, in both national and international contexts, and elucidated the intrinsic relationship between the favela and the “official” city. Cf. Souza (2013, 194).

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29. Several self-organized and self-representing favela-based social projects and institutions are distributed across Rio de Janeiro, and many have achieved local prominence. For example, the favela newspaper Vozes da Comunidade has been referenced in the national and international press, along with the Maré-based community center Imagens do Povo, or Images of the people and the NGO Papo Reto or Straight Talk in Complexo do Alemão, directed by Raull Santiago; the young media activist turned telenovela celebrity, René Silva, has also presented himself in various media formats as a true favela representative. 30. Notes from my field diary, dated October 2016 (Rial y Costas 2011–2020). 31. Through close scrutiny, the viewer can discern the signature of the muralist, Vhlis, an acclaimed graffiti artist and activist who advocates for the urban poor through his creative work. The Portuguese artist had met the woman depicted in the mural during a workshop in the nearby favela complex Tabajaras and Morro dos Cabritos, where he also had offered a graffiti workshop for the local favela children. 32. A notable example is the first favela open-air museum at Providência, constructed as showroom for a new modernization program developed by the ruling government of 2005. Unfortunately, this project has been neglected in recent years (Menezes 2012, 105). 33. The Museum of Favela in Rio de Janeiro has been hailed as a shining star of the open-air museums in Brazil. Cf. Lord and Blankenberg (2015, 80). 34. Various groups have questioned whether or not favelas are central to city life and whether or not their personal living spaces should be subject to public observation (Freyre-Medeiros 2006b, 20). 35. Located in the favela of Perreirão da Silva, this construction was originally designed as a hill made of thousands of bricks (O Dia 2015). 36. This impression is documented in my field diary, June 2014, after a guided visit to the Museu da Maré (Rial y Costas 2011–2020). 37. The Museum of Favela is a community complex in which residents participate in sustainable economic development by conducting neighborhood tours, selling handicrafts, and organizing events. Local cultural forms which chronicle the history of favela development are foregrounded and include the origins of samba, the history of the Northeastern migrant community, Afro-Brazilian language and identity, visual arts, and dance. Also featured is a walk through the neighborhoods promoting environmental awareness. Cf. Museu de favela (2020). 38. In 2019, a number of exhibitions were organized, one of which portrayed the impact of women on favela life through reconstructions of their life histories in photo and video displays.

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39. After traveling to Paris to display his artwork, ACME attempted to integrate images from the European capital city in his home community, as he noted in an interview (ACME 2016a). 40. In an interview in May 2016, ACME (2016a) noted that graffiti artists often reproduce a specific regional style. 41. One such example is the German tour guide Isabel Erdmann, married to Sidney Tartaruga, one of the museum’s founding members. 42. This was stated by founder ACME in an article published in the museum’s magazine (ACME 2009, 1). 43. Subsequently, the figure was replaced by a painting of two favela dwellers, as reported by ACME (2017). As ACME emphasized in an interview (2020), this graffiti was an homage to his assassinated friend and paid from his own funds. 44. This mural was painted on top of an existing canvas house located in the Museum of Favela. 45. Paulo Lins wrote the internationally acclaimed novel Cidade de Deus (1997), which served as the basis for Fernando Meirelles’ Oscar-nominated film mentioned above. 46. She described her experience in the feminist collective As Adelias (the Adelias), December 2016, at the film school Darcy Ribeiro in Rio de Janeiro. 47. According to her account, original copies of her first short films disappeared from the film library at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. 48. This research would not have been possible without the voices of numerous inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and peripheries who assisted me in conversations, interviews, and everyday routines to gain insight into favela life and periphery. I extend my sincere thanks to Alex Jardim Gramacho, Cabelo Vidigal, Alex Cabritos, Uga Mangueira, Bea Maré, Regis Cantagalo, Carlos Pavãozinho, Aline Dona Marta, Dandara Magé, Paulista Tabajaras, Arley Rocinha, Joyce CDD, Rosy Chapeu Mangueira, and especially to the favela graffiti artist ACME, as well as MC Boom from the favela of Pavão. I am also very grateful to Rogério Haesbaert and my colleagues Josoaldo, Timo, Maria Lucia, Dani, Ana Angelita, and Pedro Paulo from the Human Geography Research Group Regionalization and Globalization, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Rio de Janeiro. These individuals elucidated the relevance of spatial configurations in Brazil and the entire world, and helped shape some of the arguments presented here. In addition, I would like to thank musician aka tourist guide MC Gringo de Janeiro, Florian, geographer Wolfram, arte-ista Katja, Luciano, Nils, and Alexandre for their first-hand insights, eye-opening thoughts, and numerous favela visits and projects. Finally I offer my deep-

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est gratitude to the staff and organizers of the literary fair of the peripheries (FLUP) in Rio de Janeiro Écio Salles (rip) and Julio Ludemir, who always provided me with privileged insights into favela life and cultural production in these settlements. In this regard I would also like to acknowledge MC Mingau, MC TR, and cultural producer Bruno Rangel from Cidade de Deus for their help and support. 49. Its tragic protagonist was the Afro-Brazilian, favela-born Marielle Franco, a politician from Rio de Janeiro who was brutally assassinated in 2018.

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Antonio Machado da Silva, and Soraya Silveira Simões, 373–392. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond. Campos, Andrelino. 2005. Do quilombo à favela: A produção do “espação criminalizado” no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. Cavalcanti, Mariana. 2015. Waiting in the Ruins: The Aesthetics and Politics of Favela Urbanization in PACification. In Urban Infrastructure in Context, ed. Stephen Graham and Colin McFarlane, 86–113. London: Routledge. Cleyton. 2016. Interview with Gundo Rial y Costas. 12 November. Daflon, Rogério. 2011. Teleférico conduz Rocinha á polemica. O Globo, 18 October. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. On Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Empresa de Turismo do Município do Rio de Janeiro. 2020. Accessed 9 September 2020. https://www.rio.rj.gov.br/web/riotur. Essinger, Silvio. 2005. Batidão: uma história do funk. Rio de Janeiro: Record. Faustini, Marcus Vinicius. 2012. Os moleques da favela operando o mundo. In O Novo Carioca, ed. Jailson Souza e Silva, Jorge Luiz Barbosa, and Marcus Vinicius Faustini, 75–78. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula. Freyre-Medeiros, Bianca. 2006a. Star in the House of Mirrors: Contrasting Images of Carmen Miranda in Brazil and the United States. Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 12: 21–29. ———. 2006b. Favelas como patrimonio da cidade? Reflexões e polémicas acerca de dois museus. Estudos Históricos 38: 49–66. ———. 2009. Gringo na Laje: Produção, circulação e consumo da favela turística. Rio de Janeiro: FGV. Haesbaert, Rogério. 2004. O mito da deterritorialização: Do fim dos territórios à multiterritorialidade. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. ———. 2014. Viver no Limite: Território e multi/transterritorialidade em tempos de in-segurança e contenção. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. Hamburger, Ester. 2008. Wired up to the World: Performance and Media in Contemporary Brazil. In Brasil and the Americas: Convergences and Perspectives, ed. Sérgio Costa, 199–222. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jaguaribe, Beatriz. 2007. O choque do real: Estética, mídia e cultura. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco. ———. 2011. Imaginando a ‘cidade maravilhosa’: modernidade, espetáculo e espaços urbanos. Revista FAMECOS: mídia, cultura e tecnologia 18 (2): 327–347. ———. 2014. Urban Life through the Eye of the City. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Randal, and Robert Stam. 1995. Brazilian Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Jornal do Brasil. 2019. 3 March. Kalkman, Simone. 2013. Reality in Miniature: The Morrinho Project as a Community-based and Site-specific Artwork from a Rio de Janeiro Favela. World Art 3 (2): 275–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/2150089 4.2013.789448. Larkins, Erica Robb. 2015. The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leitão, Gerónimo. 2012. Reconhecendo a diversidade das favelas cariocas. In Favelas cariocas: Ontem e hoje, ed. Marco Antonio da Silva Mello, Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva, and Soraya Silveira Simões, 235–252. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond. León-Portilla, Miguel. 1959. La visión de los vencidos. México: UNAM. Lord, Gail Dexter, and Ngaire Blankenberg. 2015. Cities, Museums and Soft Powers. Washington, DC: AAM Press. Low, Setha. 2017. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. New York: Routledge. Marcello. 2016. Interview with Gundo Rial y Costas. 18 June 2016. Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 95–117. ———. 1998. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Menezes, Palloma. 2012. A Forgotten Place to Remember: Reflections on the Attempts to turn a Favela into a Museum. In Slum Tourism. Poverty, Power and Cities, ed. Fabian Frenzel, Ko Koen, and Malte Steinbrink, 103–125. Routledge: New York. Mignolo, Walter. 2007. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Morrinho Project. 2020. Accessed 9 September 2020. www.projetomorrinho.org. Murani. 2014. Interview with Gundo Rial y Costas. 8 August. Museu de favela. 2020. Accessed 9 September 2020. www.museudefavela.org. O Dia. 2014a. 25 July. ———. 2014b. Guia das comunidades. July/August. ———. 2014c. Guia das comunidades. September/October. ———. 2015. Guia das comunidades. February/March. ———. 2016a. 24 February. ———. 2016b. 28 October. ———. 2019. 6 March. O Globo. 2010. 26 November. ———. 2014. 14 August. O’Donnell, Julia Galli. 2013. A invenção de Copacabana: Culturas urbanas e estilos de vida no Rio de Janeiro (1890–1940). Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.

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de Oliveira, Fabia Luci. 2014. Mais justiça e cidadania nas favelas cariocas pós-­ pacificação. In Cidadania, justiça e ‘pacificação’ em favelas cariocas, ed. Fabia Luci de Oliveira, 13–24. Rio de Janeiro: FGV. Pearlman, Janice. 2010. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford University Press. Rial y Costas, Gundo. 2011–2020. Field Diary. In Author’s Possession. Shaw, Lisa, and Stephanie Dennison. 2007. Brazilian National Cinema. London: Routledge. Souza, Soares Licia. 2013. O realismo pos-metafísico. Salvador: Uefs. Souza e Silva, Jailson. 2012. Carta para Zuenir Ventura. In O Novo Carioca, by Jailson Souza e Silva, Jorge Luiz Barbosa, and Marcus Vinícius Faustini, 19–21. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valladares, Licia. 2005. A invenção da favela. Rio de Janeiro: FGV. Vaz, Paulo, Carolina Sá Carvalho, and Mariana Pombo. 2006. Da pobreza à barbárie: a mudança na imagem da favela no noticiário de crime. In Imagens da cidade: espaços urbanos na comunicação e cultura contemporâneas, ed. Angela Prysthon, 235–253. Porto Alegre: Sulina. Ventura, Zuenir. 1994. Cidade partida. Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras. Wacquant, Louis. 2008. The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis. International Political Sociology 2 (1): 56–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-­5687.2008.00037.x. Wesley. 2012. Interview with Gundo Rial y Costas. 10 November. Yúdice, George. 2003. The Expediency of Culture. London: Duke University Press. Zaluar, Alba, and Marcos Alvito. 1998. In Um século de favela, ed. Alba Zaluar and Marcos Alvito, 7–24. Rio de Janeiro: FGV.

PART III

Rethinking Cultural Structures and Literary Strategies

CHAPTER 9

On the Poetry of a Boasian Cultural Anthropologist: Ruth Benedict’s Palimpsestuous Writings A. Elisabeth Reichel

Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), the first woman to attain a position of preeminence in American anthropology, is known today primarily for her formative role in the development of the anthropological paradigm of cultural relativism, first put forward by her teacher, mentor, and close associate Franz Boas at Columbia University. Benedict’s 1934 study Patterns of Culture (Benedict 2005) provided both lay and professional audiences with an accessible introduction to the Boasian school of anthropology and its relativist doctrine that cultures—uncapitalized and pluralized—should be analyzed on their own terms rather than against a Euro-American standard assumed to be universal—that is, Culture, capitalized, singular. The Some sections in this chapter will appear in my monograph Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict to be published by University of Nebraska Press (2021).

A. E. Reichel (*) Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_9

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bestselling monograph has been translated into 14 languages and “remains today the single most influential work by a twentieth-century American anthropologist” (Stocking 1976, 73). More specifically, Patterns contains ethnographic descriptions of three different cultures: the Zuñi, a Pueblo people of the Southwest, the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest, and the Dobu of New Guinea. Having analyzed them in the three middle chapters of her book respectively, Benedict concludes: The three cultures of Zuñi, of Dobu, and of the Kwakiutl are not merely heterogeneous assortments of acts and beliefs. They have each certain goals toward which their behaviour is directed and which their institutions further. They differ from one another not only because one trait is present here and absent there, and because another trait is found in two regions in two different forms. They differ still more because they are oriented as wholes in different directions. They are travelling along different roads in pursuit of different ends, and these ends and these means in one society cannot be judged in terms of those of another society, because essentially they are incommensurable. (2005, 223; emphasis added)

It is precisely this insistence on difference with which Boasian cultural relativism is fraught and which Walter Benn Michaels’s landmark Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) has famously shown to be the bedrock of early twentieth-century nativism. With groups of people being ostensibly not defined anymore by a Euro- and ethnocentric yardstick as either superior (read “civilized”) or inferior (read “savage” or “barbarian”) but as traveling in “different forms” along “different roads” “in different directions” toward “different ends,” assessments are necessarily grounded in their distinct and “incommensurable” identities. More recently, Eric Aronoff’s Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture (2013) has compellingly argued that the Boasian concept of cultures as distinct wholes is also reciprocally related to literary modernism and the New Critical notion of the self-contained aesthetic object, and has been deployed in the service of progressive as well as reactionary ideologies in its anthropological and artistic manifestations.1 Aronoff explores this convergence of modernist aesthetics and Boasian anthropology by featuring Edward Sapir—one of Boas’s first PhD students at Columbia and a close associate of Benedict, with whom he exchanged and discussed poems from 1922 to 19382—as a

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central figure in a network of anthropologists and literary critics who conceived of both cultures and literary works as relative, internally coherent systems of meaning. A principal tutorial text for Aronoff (2013, 42–56), Sapir’s essay “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (1924), tellingly appeared in The American Journal of Sociology only after its first part had been published under the title “Civilization and Culture” (1919) in the little magazine The Dial (which would also publish Eliot’s The Waste Land and other seminal texts of literary modernism).3 Sapir articulates a concept of culture as a spatial form which in its ideal realization, as “genuine culture,” is “richly varied and yet somehow unified and consistent”; it is “inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory” (Sapir 1924, 410). Culture according to Sapir is self-referential and independent in its generation of meaning from elements and contexts outside its self-enclosed unity. Within a culture, each individual element only has significance “in its relation to all others”; its meaning and value emerges from its relations to the other elements within the structure. Sapir’s paradigmatic exemplar of “genuine” culture is the way of life of the “American Indian” because of “the firmness with which every part of that life—economic, social, religious, and aesthetic—is bound together into a significant whole” (1924, 414). “Spurious” culture, on the other hand, is represented by industrial society, with its “technical routine that has an eventually high efficiency value but that answers to no spiritual needs” (Sapir 1924, 411). Sapir’s conception of culture as a complete system of reference—which is independent of such universal external standards and evolutionary narratives as progress or technical sophistication—connects his anthropology with New Critical ideas of the literary text that circulated around the same time. While this holism served critiques of evolutionary racism in both its anthropological and artistic manifestations, then, it was also the condition for the essentialized racism whose emergence Michaels notes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Michaels’s (1995) and Aronoff’s (2013) work at the intersection of literary and anthropological discourses notes the essentialism that inheres in Boasian cultural relativism and which in Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (2005) casts the Zuñi, the Dobu, and the Kwakiutl—as well as Benedict’s Euro-American audiences—as mutually exclusive entities. It is against the backdrop of their and others’ reasoned pleas for caution against Boasian cultural relativism that Benedict’s poetic writing gains significance. In contrast to her ethnographic writing, the relevance of Benedict’s poetry is

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sorely underexplored and “normally misconceived,” “stemming from an overly autobiographical, the Real-Ruth reading,” to use Clifford Geertz’s characteristically quotable words (1988, 109). Throughout her life, Benedict wrote 157 poems, 32 of which appeared in renowned magazines of the time such as Poetry, The Measure, and The Nation. What renders these poems valuable in a context of contested cultural representation is Benedict’s peculiar, palimpsestuous style of writing: By layering diverse mythologies in palimpsestic configurations, Benedict’s poetry confuses strict cultural distinctions, including those along familiar discriminatory lines such as modern/primitive. In this way, it offers an access to cultural anthropology’s subject of investigation that not only short-circuits the differentialist and essentializing tendencies implicit in cultural relativism but also unsettles the position of the observer’s I-here-now in a culturally inflected binarism against They-there-then. Concretely, this chapter traces the emergence of this style of writing in two parts which discuss the poems “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” (Benedict n.d.j) and “Myth” (Benedict n.d.-i) respectively.4 Whereas the unpublished “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” is marked by primitivist desire, based on an imagined divide between modern subject and premodern object of observation, “Myth,” which was published posthumously by Benedict’s fellow Boasians Margaret Mead and Clyde Kluckhohn,5 is representative of Benedict’s mature, palimpsestuous writing: It layers the myth of the noble savage with biblical mythology in such a way as to involve and engage groups of people that in a cultural relativist framework are conceived as incommensurable. Before I set out on close reading the two poems, however, a note is due on terminology. Following Sarah Dillon, I use “palimpsestic” to denote “the process of layering that produces a palimpsest” and “palimpsestuous” to refer to “the structure that one is presented with as a result of that process” (2007, 4). In both cases, then, I use “palimpsest” in a figurative rather than literal sense. That is, I maintain that what is imbricated and interfused in Benedict’s poems is a set of layers of meaning.

Primitivist Longing and Allochronic Writing “Parlor Car—Santa Fe,” as many of Benedict’s poems,6 is written in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet:

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With lazy ease you toss me back the ball Of jest and judgment on the latest play; You toy awhile in approved modern way With the newest art, and explode a sophistical Conceit of so-and-so’s philosophy. We are so wise! The gods run panic-struck From their old high places, and laughing at our luck We take their thrones—and call it victory. We are so wise! And out across these sands Men plant their feathered prayer-sticks in the moon Tonight, praying the gods of ancient pueblo sires. And we would dash our pride with naked hands To bury once a prayer-plume in the moon And pour in hearing ears our hot desires. (n.d.-j)

In its traditional function of outlining the setting and the problem that the sonnet treats, the octave presents two passengers in a parlor car: the poetic persona and her conversation partner. The latter is addressed in the second-­person singular so as to include us, the readers, as addressees of the persona as well. “We”—the persona, her interlocutor in the parlor car, and the readership—are thus integrated into a conversation that is conducted “[w]ith lazy ease” and in an “approved … way.” In this exchange even the “explo[sion]” of “a sophistical/Conceit of so-and-so’s philosophy” is conventionalized, leaving the persona unimpressed and unable to even remember the philosopher’s name. While this scenario is portrayed as distinctly modern, with the conversation being held “in approved modern way” and its topics including “the latest play” and “the newest art,” “[t]he gods” that “run panic-struck / From their old high places” represent the former, premodern order, which has been replaced. Yet rather than as progress, the evolution from this primordial order to modernity is cast as a process of degeneration. The “latest play” and “newest art” do not appear as artistic achievements but as staples of insubstantial conversation. “We … call it victory” and consider ourselves “wise” and in “luck,” but the gods’ “panic-struck” escape suggests otherwise. In fact, it indicates that there is a threat that we fail to perceive, suggesting ignorance and naïveté on our part, rather than wisdom and luck. Hence by the time the persona exclaims “We are so wise!” for a second time at the beginning of the sestet, its ironic and sarcastic overtones are self-evident. We are not wise, but this is what we tell ourselves emphatically and persistently, “call[ing] it victory.” It is at this point of resignation

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and frustration with the people that she is familiar with that the persona shifts the focus to those other than us, that is, in the spatial logic of the poem, those people outside of the luxurious parlor car, “out across these sands.” Apart from their spatial remoteness, what marks these people as different in the persona’s imagination is the ritualistic treatment of their primordial gods: They “plant their feathered prayer-sticks” and “pray[] the gods of ancient pueblo sires.” Where we, “in approved modern way,” have not only stopped praying but driven off the gods “[f]rom their old high places,” the Pueblo people that the persona imagines still engage in rituals of prayer to worship their “ancient” gods in their “old high places.” By way of the disenfranchising gesture that Johannes Fabian has termed allochronism (see 2014, 147), they are placed in a time that precedes the present and are thus denied coevalness with the persona and her addressees. Synchronic cultural data is spread on a diachronic scale and the distance in space that separates Us here from Them there turns into a distance in time separating moderns from primitives. Having thus construed a strict divide between Us-here-now, and Them-­ there-­then, the final tercet of the sonnet shows the “we” of the poem— the lyrical I together with her intra- and extratextual audiences—now using their imagined others as a foil onto which they project their desires. In order to return to the desired prelapsarian state, the poem thus argues, it would be necessary to adopt the Pueblos’ practices and “bury once a prayer-plume in the moon / And pour in hearing ears our hot desires.” The suggestion is that the lack of exchanges in modern times that are not already conventionalized and stripped of “naked,” “hot” emotion would be remedied by following their rituals of prayer. However, this resolution remains wishful thinking, which is rendered in subjunctive mood: If it were possible, “we would dash our pride with naked hands” and take on their customs. In the logic of the poem, the difference between the two cultures is irreconcilable, with cultures being conceived as separate and self-contained entities.7 When placed in historical context, the specific railroad which the poem’s title evokes provides further ground for reading “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” as staging a process of primitivist projection, which takes “our” and “their” culture to be incommensurably different. In the interwar period, the time when Benedict was most active as a poet, the Santa Fe Railway took on particular importance in satisfying primitivist urges by connecting urban populations to the Pueblo Southwest, which functioned as an “oasis” of “a resonantly exotic cultural life” (Stocking 1989, 219) or “a kind of ethnological theme park” in “the interwar mania for Southwest Indians”

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(Snyder 2007, 663, 664). By 1924, the Santa Fe Railway carried 50,000 passengers per year, owing greatly to vigorous marketing efforts that promised precisely “the exotic and simple life of an earthly paradise” longed for in an urban, presumably more complex and modern way of life (McLuhan 1985, 41, 16–17). At the center of these campaigns stood frequently the figure of the “Santa Fe Indian,” “a prototype of preindustrial society. Simplicity. Freedom. Nobility,” whose symbolic value the Santa Fe Railway associated particularly closely with their product by christening their trains the “Navajo,” the “Chief,” and the “Super Chief” (McLuhan 1985, 19). Passengers ranged from Eleanor Roosevelt to Harry Guggenheim to John D.  Rockefeller, Jr. (McLuhan 1985, 41). Artists, especially, were drawn to the Pueblo Southwest. Thus, according to Mabel Dodge Luhan, “the elaborate, unhappy, modern man” who visits the Taos Pueblo enters a space “where a different instinct ruled, where a different knowledge gave a different power from any [she] had known, and where virtue lay in wholeness instead of in dismemberment” (1999, 63); and D.H. Lawrence, who she enticed to come to the Southwest in 1923, similarly describes a sense of primordial wholeness. At the same time, however, he—as the passengers in “Parlor Car—Santa Fe”—continues to experience the Pueblos from both spatial and temporal distance, “sitting there on a pony, far-off stranger with gulfs of time between me and this” (1961, 101). Lawrence’s account of the Southwest Pueblos features as a particularly “precise” representation in Benedict’s Patterns (2005, 93). Clearly, his portrayal of primitivist longing frustrated by a denial of the subjects’ coevalness also resonated with Benedict and forms a point of convergence with “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” as well as Patterns. The Pueblo Southwest also soon became the “[t]he single most-visited venue” of Boasian anthropologists (Stocking 1989, 220). Besides Benedict and Boas himself, Elsie Clews Parson, Alfred Kroeber, Leslie Spier, and Ruth Bunzel all conducted ethnographic research on the Zuñi Pueblo. Both Carey Snyder and George Stocking argue that anthropologists at the time shared in the tourists’ exoticist attraction to the region (Snyder 2007, 665–72; Stocking 1989, 220).

Benedict’s Mature Style of Writing Having analyzed an unpublished, manifestly primitivist poem in my first close reading, in the remaining part of this chapter I present a poem that is representative of what became Benedict’s characteristic style as a poet.8

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To be sure, I am not arguing that “Myth” is devoid of primitivist longings; indeed, one can also make a strong case reading the poem’s style as a syncretist tactic to subsume primitive under Christian religious practices.9 What I venture here, however, is that the poem’s palimpsestuous layering of mythologies stalls primitivist acts of projection, confusing the prerequisite modern/primitive, here/there, Us/Them binarisms. Thus, Geertz’s enthusiastic appraisal of Benedict’s ethnographic style in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author is shown to apply more readily to Benedict’s poetry: “There confounds Here. The Not-us (or Not-U.S.) unnerves the Us” (1988, 106). To quote Benedict’s “Myth”: A god with tall crow feathers in his hair Long-limbed and bronzed, from going down of sun, Dances all night upon his dancing floor, Tight at his breast, our sorrows, one by one. Relinquished stalks we could not keep till bloom And thorns unblossomed but of our own blood, He gathers where we dropped them, filling full His arms’ wide circuit, briars and sterile shrub. And all alone he dances, hour on hour. Till all our dreams have blooming, and our sleep Is odorous of gardens,–passing sweet Beyond all, wearily, we till and reap. (n.d.-i)

While the opening image of a “god with tall crow feathers” is reminiscent of the portrayal of the Pueblo people in “Parlor Car—Santa Fe,” who “plant their feathered prayer-sticks” “praying the gods of ancient pueblo sires,” cultural classifications remain ambiguous in “Myth.” Instead of a divide between Santa Fe passengers and Pueblo people, segregated in space as well as time, “Myth” submits a cultural representation that involves several competing images layered on top of each other. For one, the image of a dancer “with tall crow feathers in his hair” reproduces stock features of the stereotypical romantic portrayal of the noble savage.10 The poem’s first stanza places an emphasis on bare, brown skin and body parts, with the object of the persona’s gaze appearing “[l]ong-limbed and bronzed” and carrying a burden “[t]ight at his breast.” His striking physique is moreover displayed in rhythmic movement, as he “[d]ances all night upon his dancing floor.”

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The end of the first stanza, however, marks a first fracture in this stock portrayal of the primitive, collapsing the temporal and spatial distance necessary to cast coexisting people as primitive. For it is “our sorrows, one by one” (emphasis added), that the noble savage holds “[t]ight at his breast.” It is also at this point of “tight” contact between Us and Them that another symbolic layer surfaces, further thwarting primitivist projection. The image of “[a] god” crowned “with tall crow feathers in his hair” that carries “at his breast, our sorrows” also strongly resonates with the Christian iconography of Christ, the “king of the Jews” (Matthew 2:22 in King James Bible Online 2020) who “hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4 in King James Bible Online 2020) according to biblical mythology. The second stanza then fleshes out the picture in detail and conjures up a “[l]ong-limbed and bronzed” Jesus figure that takes on our sins, with “stalks,” “thorns,” “briars and sterile shrub” standing metaphorically for “our griefs” and “our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4 in King James Bible Online 2020). “He gathers” all of them “where we dropped them, filling full” the “wide circuit” of his “long[] limb[s].” Further, the portrait that the second stanza draws evokes the sacrificial tradition of Christianity, with its emphasis on bloodshed, most manifest in the image of Christ crucified and his crown of “thorns unblossomed but of our own blood.” In addition to confusing dichotomies such as Us/Them, primitive/ modern, here/there, then, the poem unsettles the Christian self-­ understanding as being redeemed through the martyrdom of Christ. By layering the myth of the noble savage and biblical mythology so as to relate them palimpsestuously, the poem suggests that Christ is not the only figure in the history of humankind who had to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows. Crucially, the noble savage, too, carries “our sorrows, one by one.” The poem thus can be read as criticizing the use of other people as foils onto which fears and desires are projected, in this way making them carry “our sorrows.” By grafting their vision of a prelapsarian past onto their declared primitive others, Micaela di Leonardo contends, self-proclaimed modern Euro-Americans have “construct[ed] noble savages for their personal salvation” (1998, 3). As my first close reading has shown, Benedict’s “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” exemplifies this process paradigmatically. Yet importantly, in the third stanza of “Myth,” the portrayal significantly diverges again from the biblical account of Christ. For rather than showing a vanishing noble savage,11 a trope that would concur with the image of Christ as a martyr fated to die, so as to indicate a deplorable but inevitable step in human history, the end of the poem conjures up a much more resilient and persevering individual. “[H]our on hour” and “all

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alone he dances,” while we have long been asleep. He works tirelessly “[t]ill all our dreams have blooming, and our sleep / Is odorous of gardens,” whereas “we till and reap” “wearily.” Rather than suffer under the burden of “our sorrows,” represented by “briars and sterile shrub” in the poem, he recreates them, producing “blooming” mental landscapes. As a result of the poem’s palimpsestic layering of the noble savage trope with biblical mythology, then, a palimpsestuous configuration emerges which involves and engages groups of people that, from a cultural relativist perspective, are seen as divided by irreconcilable differences. Even more, they are often seen as on opposite sides of modern/primitive, present/ past, here/there, Us/Them dualisms, with Christ being commonly associated with “modern,” “present,” “here,” “Us”—the irony of his ancient Middle Eastern birthplace of course notwithstanding. As these binarisms collapse, the I-here-now of the persona is denied a foothold on either side. More than that, by imbricating given mythologies, Benedict’s mature, palimpsestuous style of writing also performs a rewriting. Layered with and against biblical mythology, the myth of the noble savage is thus recast in “Myth” to challenge acts of primitivist projection, such as those exemplified by “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” and the early twentieth-century marketing of the Santa Fe Railway. “Myth” further creates an image that resonates with the martyrdom of Christ only to throw indigenous persistence and resilience into relief.

Salvage Anthropology, Cultural Pluralism, and Benedict’s Poetry The significance of portrayals that counter and complicate the stock figure of the noble, vanishing savage for early twentieth-century—if not contemporary—discourses on culture in anthropology can hardly be overstated. In concluding, I therefore want to shift again from Benedict’s poetry to her ethnographic work and the discipline of anthropology at large, in order to further explore the political and epistemological repercussions of the recast savage in “Myth.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes that anthropology “fills a preestablished compartment within a wider symbolic field,” namely, the titular “savage slot” of his oft-cited essay (1991, 18). This symbolic compartment was established in the sixteenth century through the medium of both travel accounts and fictional utopias, which featured the noble savage

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as an inhabitant of an ideal, Edenic place (Trouillot 1991, 23–28). The trope is thus enmeshed with the very foundations of anthropological discourse. Clearly, it is also this idealized image of an indigene uncorrupted by processes of modernization that features prominently in what Jacob W. Gruber first described as “salvage ethnography”: Though the idea of the corrupting influences of civilization was not a new one—it is, in fact, a continuing theme in Western culture—the idea that such alterations were the necessary price of an indefinite progress was a particular product of nineteenth-century optimism. In the face of the inevitable and necessary changes, in the face of an almost infinite variety of man whose details were essential to a definition of man, the obligation of both scientist and humanist was clear: he must collect and preserve the information and the products of human activity and genius so rapidly being destroyed. (1970, 1293)

Gruber identifies James Cowles Prichard’s alarmist 1839 intervention before the British Association for the Advancement of Science as a foundational moment of this particular brand of anthropological thinking and traces its translation into Boasian anthropology. James Clifford, then, in his influential critique of salvage anthropology, deconstructs the dominant view among Boas’s students that their subjects are disappearing and must therefore be scientifically recorded in “a last-chance rescue operation” (1986, 113). He notes that the salvage imperative and its concomitant “theme of the vanishing primitive” is “pervasive in ethnographic writing” of the early twentieth century; in fact, it “has oriented much, perhaps most, twentieth century cross-cultural representation” (Clifford 1986, 113).12 Struck by the discipline’s infatuation with the soon-to-be-dead, Susan Sontag remarks laconically that “[a]nthropology is necrology” in her tellingly titled essay “The Anthropologist as Hero” (1970, 188). Examples abound,13 but the resulting rhetoric of salvage among anthropologists and its persistence well into postcolonial times may be best illustrated by quoting at length a passage from Margaret Mead published in 1975: Anthropology […] has both implicitly and explicitly accepted the responsibility of making and preserving records of the vanishing customs and human beings of this earth, whether these peoples are inbred, preliterate populations isolated in some tropical jungle, or in the depths of a Swiss canton, or in the mountains of an Asian kingdom. The recognition that forms of

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human behavior still extant will inevitably disappear has been part of our whole scientific and humanistic heritage. There have never been enough workers to collect the remnants of these worlds, and just as each year several species of living creatures cease to exist, impoverishing our biological repertoire, so each year some language spoken only by one or two survivors disappears forever with their deaths. This knowledge has provided a dynamic that has sustained the fieldworker taking notes with cold cramped fingers in an arctic climate or making his own wet plates under the difficult conditions of a torrid climate. (2003, 3)

In her autobiography, Mead remembers that it was this definition of anthropology as a salvage operation and the sense of moral urgency generated by it that Benedict, her teacher at that time, used to convince her of entering the field: “That settled it for me. Anthropology had to be done now. Other things could wait,” Mead decided for herself (1975, 122; emphasis original). The way Benedict assures Mead of the supreme value of anthropology is also indicative of the discipline’s long-standing use of the salvage imperative to legitimize and vest with authority the knowledge that it produces. Importantly, this political move takes place at the cost of the very people that anthropologists claim to save by representation. They are not only assumed to be weak and in dire need of anthropological patronage (Clifford 1986, 113); Clifford moreover criticizes their “relentless placement […] in a present-becoming-past” rather than in a present-­becoming-­ future: “What would it require, for example, consistently to associate the inventive, resilient, enormously varied societies of Melanesia with the cultural future of the planet?” he asks (1986, 115; emphasis original). Drawing on Clifford, Brian Hochman has recently asserted that “[a]t bottom, the architects of the salvage paradigm insisted that certain populations were incapable of progressing beyond the primitive social state” and that “[i]t was the duty of the civilized to record primitive life in the face of its certain demise” (2014, xiii). Hochman (2014, xiv) considers this line of reasoning to be based on two premises: On the one hand, cultural pluralism and the idea that cultures are irreducibly different; on the other, cultural evolutionism, which posits that certain groups of people are underdeveloped, thus less fit to survive and bound to yield to the more developed groups. In this frame of thought, extinction seems inevitable; even more problematic, those cultures that are marked as savage, barbarian, or primitive are taken to be inherently disadvantaged and unable to

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adapt to changing historical circumstances, thus being doomed to disappear by their very nature (Hochman 2014, xiv). It is in this context of a discursive field that casts her subjects of investigation as innately unfit for survival and dependent for representation on her as an anthropologist that Benedict’s palimpsestuous writing and rewriting of the myth of the noble savage acquires its full significance. “Myth” offers a counterimage to the popular portrayal of the ever-­ disappearing, tragically dying primitive, making a step toward an understanding and treatment of the subjects of anthropological research as coexisting people well able to represent themselves. It is thus exemplary of Benedict’s mature poetry, which proposes an access to the subjects that cultural anthropologists study that departs in significant ways from the Boasian pluralist and relativist conception best represented by her own Patterns of Culture (2005). The latter’s conception of culture is rife with assertions of essential difference, which must be read through the last two decades’ pleas for caution, for instance, by Walter Benn Michaels (1995), against cultural pluralism as the bedrock of nativism. What renders Benedict’s poems valuable in such a context, I have argued, is her peculiar style of writing: By layering diverse mythologies in palimpsest-like configurations, Benedict’s poetry confuses familiar cultural distinctions such as vanishing primitive versus overpowering modern. This chapter was written in the context of the transdisciplinary research project “Of Cultural, Poetic, and Medial Alterity: The Scholarship, Poetry, Photographs, and Films of Edward Sapir, Ruth Fulton Benedict, and Margaret Mead,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and realized at the University of Basel. Apart from these institutions, I am grateful to the directors of this project, Philipp Schweighauser, Gabriele Rippl, and Walter Leimgruber, for their generous support. This institutional frame allowed me to gain access to the archival materials necessary for the present chapter. I am further indebted to the staff of the Archives and Special Collections Library of Vassar College and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, which hold the Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers and the Margaret Mead Papers respectively, and in particular to Ronald Patkus and Dean M. Rogers at Vassar for their assistance and patience.

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Notes 1. See Aronoff (2013). Marc Manganaro makes the same observation in his earlier study Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (2002). Aronoff acknowledges his great debt to Manganaro, who is a colleague and friend of his. He substantially elaborates on what ultimately remains one among many observations in Manganaro, and renders it the core of his analysis. 2. Margaret Mead Papers and the South Pacific Ethnographic Archives, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box T4, folders 1 and 2; box S15, folder 2. 3. Sapir (1924); Sapir (1919). 4. Ruth Benedict “Parlor Car—Santa Fe” (n.d.-j), Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries, folder 46.24; Ruth Benedict, “Myth” (n.d.-i), Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries, folder 46.24. Cf. Benedict (n.d.-h). 5. Benedict shared her poetry not only with Sapir but also with her colleague and close friend Mead on a regular basis. Thus, the Margaret Mead Papers also contain a copy of the poem “Myth” (box Q19, folder 6), which Mead published in both her anthologies on Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959), 477, and Ruth Benedict (1974), 24. Kluckhohn, too, received copies of Benedict’s verse, as a note on the title page of the latter’s unpublished poetry anthology November Burning indicates (Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, folder 46.24). Kluckhohn published “Myth” in his contribution to Alfred Kroeber’s Ruth Fulton Benedict: A Memorial (1949, 20). 6. Benedict’s poems “Rupert Brooke, 1914–1918” (1959d); “Discourse on Prayer” (1959a); “Profit of Dreams” (1959c); “Price of Paradise” (1959b); “For My Mother” (1928a); “For the Hour after Love” (1928b); “Miser’s Wisdom” (1926b); “Sight” (1926d): “Our Task Is Laughter” (1926c); “Any Wife” (n.d.-a); “For Splendor” (n.d.-c); “Genessaret” (n.d.-d); “The Night’s for Fires” (n.d.-k); “The Wife” (n.d.-n); “Wilderness” (n.d.-o); “For Faithfulness” (n.d.-b); “I Have Content more in Your Loveliness” (n.d.-e); “Monk of Ariège” (n.d.-f); “The Moon New Seen” (n.d.-g); and “‘Too great has been the tension of my cloud’” (n.d.-m) are all written in the Petrarchan sonnet form as well. 7. One could even go as far as to argue that, according to the poem, the only way the moderns’ “hot desires” may be “pour[ed] in hearing ears” is by expressing them precisely in this way, that is, in a poem. 8. Other poems that are characteristic of Benedict’s mature, palimpsestuous style of writing include “In Parables” (1926a); “Preference” (1925);

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“Price of Paradise” (1959b); “The Sacrilege” (n.d.-l); and “Resurrection of the Ghost” (1934). 9. For a reading of the poem along these lines, see Schweighauser (2019). 10. The trope of the noble savage was famously formalized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau but can be traced back to Alexander Pope and Daniel Defoe and even further to travelers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, Antonio Pigafetta, and Pierre Boucher (see Trouillot 1991, 26–27). Scholars have also pointed out its importance in ancient Greece, most recently, Robert A. Williams, Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization (2012). Out of the many publications that discuss the trope, Stelio Cro, The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom (1990), and Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (2001), offer particularly comprehensive and nuanced analyses. For elaboration on and illustration of the stereotypical romantic portrayal of the noble savage, see especially Ellingson’s discussion of the romantic aesthetic paradigm of the picturesque in representations of the noble savage (2001, 169–92). 11. The vanishing race myth is “as old as the New World itself” (Hochman 193n.4) and by the end of the nineteenth century, it “was as widespread as it was flawed, already something of a hallowed cliché” (Hochman x). For more detailed accounts of its genealogy, see Brian W.  Dippie (1982), Patrick Brantlinger (2003), and Mitchell (1981). Lucy Maddox (1991), after briefly surveying the theme of the vanishing Indian (15–50), provides useful readings of the manifestations of the trope in nineteenth-century American literature. On the close discursive association between the noble and the vanishing savage, see, for instance, Dippie’s second chapter, “The Anatomy of the Vanishing American” (1982, 12–31), and Brantlinger (2003, 2–3, 9–10, 45–49). 12. In “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm,” Clifford (1987) claims the persistence of the salvage imperative in contemporary anthropology and offers an extended theorization. His first monograph Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988) then sets out to offer “a different historical vision” from a “world as populated by endangered authenticities” (1988, 5). His “primary goal is to open space for cultural futures, for the recognition of emergence” (Clifford 1988, 15–16). 13. To cite only a few, particularly prominent practitioners of salvage rhetoric: Commenting on the state of research on primitive cultures in Canada, Boas insists in 1910 that “primitive life is disappearing, with ever-increasing rapidity; and, unless work is taken up at once and thoroughly, information on the earliest history of this country … will never be obtained” (1910, 529). “Now or never is the time in which to collect from the natives what is still available for study. … What is lost now will never be recovered

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again,” Boas’s student Edward Sapir echoes one year later (1911, 793). Aleš Hrdlička, the first curator of physical anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History and one of Boas’s strongest opponents, deplores in a similar vein and with regard to the United States that “Indians […] are in most localities rapidly disappearing and in a considerable proportion of the tribes have become actually extinct or are on the point of extinction” (1917, 266). On the other side of the Atlantic, Bronislaw Malinowski opens his classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (1932 [originally published in 1922]) wistfully, joining in his colleagues’ plea for urgency: Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity. Just now, … when men fully trained for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants—these die away under our very eyes. … For though at present, there is still a large number of native communities available for scientific study, within a generation or two, they or their cultures will have practically disappeared. The need for energetic work is urgent, and the time is short. … The number of workers is small, the encouragement they receive scanty. I feel therefore no need to justify an ethnological contribution which is the result of specialised research in the field. (1932, xv–xvi)

References Aronoff, Eric. 2013. Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Benedict, Ruth [Anne Singleton]. 1925. Preference. The Measure 52: 13. ———. 1926a. In Parables. Palms 3 (6): 165. ———. 1926b. Miser’s Wisdom. Palms 3 (6): 166. ———. 1926c. Our Task Is Laughter. Palms 3 (6): 168. ———. 1926d. Sight. Palms 3 (6): 166. ———. 1928a. For My Mother. Poetry 31 (4): 192. ______. 1928b. For the Hour After Love. Poetry 31 (4): 193. ———. 1934. Resurrection of the Ghost. New York Herald Tribune Books 10 (51): 6. ———. 1959a. Discourse on Prayer. In An Anthropologist at Work, ed. Margaret Mead, 160–161. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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———. 1959b. Price of Paradise. In An Anthropologist at Work, ed. Margaret Mead, 478. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1959c. Profit of Dreams. In An Anthropologist at Work, ed. Margaret Mead, 164–165. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1959d. Rupert Brooke, 1914–1918. In An Anthropologist at Work, ed. Margaret Mead, 5–6. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 2005 [1934]. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. n.d.-a “Any Wife.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24. ———. n.d.-b “For Faithfulness.” TS. Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 47.29. ———. n.d.-c “For Splendor.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24. ——— [Anne Singleton]. n.d.-d “Genessaret.” TS. Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24. ———. n.d.-e “I Have Content more in Your Loveliness.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 48.1. ———. n.d.-f “Monk of Ariège.” TS. Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 48.10. ———. n.d.-g “The Moon New Seen.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 48.11. ———. n.d.-h “Myth.” TS.  Margaret Mead Papers and the South Pacific Ethnographic Archives, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington. Box Q19, folder 6. ———. n.d.-i “Myth.” TS. Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24. ——— [Anne Singleton]. n.d.-j “Parlor Car—Santa Fe.” TS. Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24. ——— [Anne Singleton]. n.d.-k “The Night’s for Fires.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24. ———. n.d.-l “The Sacrilege.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 48.21. ———. n.d.-m “‘Too great has been the tension of my cloud’.” TS. Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 48.30. ———. n.d.-n “The Wife.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24.

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———. n.d.-o “Wilderness.” TS.  Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905–1948, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries. Folder 46.24. Boas, Franz. 1910. Ethnological Problems in Canada. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 40: 529–539. Brantlinger, Patrick. 2003. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Clifford, James. 1986. On Ethnographic Allegory. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 99–121. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1987. Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage’ Paradigm. Discussions in Contemporary Culture 1: 121–130. ———. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cro, Stelio. 1990. The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Di Leonardo, Micaela. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum. Dippie, Brian W. 1982. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Ellingson, Ter. 2001. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fabian, Johannes. 2014 [1983]. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity. Gruber, Jacob W. 1970. Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology. American Anthropologist 72 (6): 1289–1299. Hochman, Brian. 2014. Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hrdlička, Aleš. 1917. The Vanishing Indian. Science 46 (1185): 266–267. King James Bible Online. 2020. www.kingjamesbibleonline.org. Accessed 2 Sep 2020. Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1949. [Untitled.] In Ruth Fulton Benedict: A Memorial, ed. Alfred Kroeber, 18–21. New York: Viking Fund. Lawrence, D.H. 1961. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H.  Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann. Luhan, Mabel Dodge. 1999 [1937]. Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Maddox, Lucy. 1991. Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1932 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge & Sons. Manganaro, Marc. 2002. Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McLuhan, T.C. 1985. Dream Tracks: The Railroad and the American Indian 1890–1930. New York: Abrams. Mead, Margaret. 1974. Ruth Benedict. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1975. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Pocket Books. ———. 2003 [1975]. Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words. In Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings, 3–10. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———, ed. 1959. An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Michaels, Walter Benn. 1995. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press. Mitchell, Lee Clark. 1981. Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-­ Century Response. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sapir, Edward. 1911. An Anthropological Survey of Canada. Science 34 (884): 789–793. ———. 1919. Civilization and Culture. The Dial 67 (20): 233–236. ———. 1924. Culture, Genuine and Spurious. The American Journal of Sociology 29 (4): 401–429. Schweighauser, Philipp. 2019. Of Syncretisms, Foils, and Cautionary Examples: Ruth Fulton Benedict’s Ethnographic and Poetic Styles. In Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary Articulations, ed. Jasmin Herrmann, Moritz Ingwersen, Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank, and Olga Ludmila Tarapata, 193–205. Berlin: Lang. Snyder, Carey. 2007. ‘When the Indian Was in Vogue’: D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Ethnological Tourism in the Southwest. Modern Fiction Studies 53 (4): 662–696. Sontag, Susan. 1970. The Anthropologist as Hero. In Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. E.  Nelson Hayes and Tanya Hayes, 184–196. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1976. Benedict, Ruth Fulton. In Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement Four, 1946–1950, ed. John A.  Garraty and Edward T. James, 70–73. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ———. 1989. The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition. In Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W.  Stocking Jr., 208–276. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Williams, Robert A., Jr. 2012. Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 10

A Palimpsest of Herstories: Intertextuality as a Womanist Practice in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills Marta Werbanowska

Introduction Gloria Naylor’s second novel Linden Hills (1986, originally published in 1985) has received much critical attention to date. The heavily intertextual nature of the novel has doubtlessly constituted one of the driving factors behind this intense scholarly interest, as the larger part of criticism about the book has focused primarily on the references and allusions to the (mainly Western) literary canon incorporated into Naylor’s work. Significant scholarly attention has also been devoted to the feminist aspects of Linden Hills, in particular through the readings of the novel in conjunction with Naylor’s more obviously women-centered works, The Women of Brewster Place (1982) and Mama Day (1988). Moreover, several of those readings have signaled the relationship between intertextuality and Black feminism in the novel, indicating that Naylor’s polyphonic layering of various intertexts and narrative voices may be read as a strategy for the

M. Werbanowska (*) University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_10

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empowerment of the doubly marginalized (Black and female) subjects in Linden Hills. This chapter reads Naylor’s work from a womanist, rather than feminist, perspective, and argues that the polyvocal and palimpsestic textual strategy in Linden Hills embodies the ideas of reclamation and liberation of a specifically Black and female agency, informed by communal consciousness and a sense of racial collectivism. This chapter focuses on one particular aspect of intertextuality within Naylor’s novel: the palimpsestic storyline centered on Willa Prescott Nedeed. Willa’s story is not only incorporated into what initially appears to be the main body of the narrative as a visually separate text, but it is also composed of several layers of sub-texts whose contents are merged into Willa’s narrative as she discovers and reads them. Therefore, the use of intertextuality in Linden Hills is not only external, that is, based on references to and quotations from other published texts, but also internal, as the texts existing exclusively in the fictional world of the novel are introduced and fused into the primary storyline to influence its meaning and form a multilayered, palimpsestic narrative. In what follows, I argue that this polyphonic narrative construction is a literary instance of a womanist practice in that it (i) restores and celebrates the previously silenced and underprivileged voices and subjectivities of women of color, and (ii) privileges cooperation (along as well as across gender lines) as a path toward the healing of the Black community. Naylor positions the narratives of Willa and her predecessors—Black women functioning in a space where whiteness and masculinity are, more or less overtly, the dominant values— as disruptive and, ultimately, transformative forces in the novel. Through this, the author reveals the dormant potential of her heroines, their women-oriented male counterparts and—perhaps most importantly—of the novel’s reader to reclaim agency and take action against the destructive forces of patriarchy and racism.

Intertextuality, Palimpsests, and Womanism: Theoretical and Critical Contexts Although the idea of various literary and non-literary texts being in conversation with one another “is at least as old as recorded human society” (Alfaro 1996, 269), the term intertextuality was only introduced by Julia Kristeva in her 1966 essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (Kristeva 1986b). Elaborating on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism, polyphony, and

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the carnivalesque in the novel, Kristeva states that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (1986b, 37; emphasis original). Kristeva further divides narrative texts into representatives of either monological or dialogical discourse. A monological narrative accepts, rather than subverts, social and linguistic prohibitions, and fails to accept the collective dimension of language. Dialogical discourse, on the other hand, is carnivalesque and polyphonic; it “breaks through the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics and, at the same time, is a social and political protest” (Kristeva 1986b, 36). In other words, dialogical narratives embrace their intertextual nature: They openly engage in conversation with other, pre-existing texts and represent a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. In a way, any heavily or overtly intertextual, dialogical text may also be described, at least metaphorically, as a palimpsest. Traditionally defined, a palimpsest is a “parchment, etc., which has been written upon twice, the original writing having been rubbed out” (OED qtd in Allen 2000, 108). Gérard Genette, in his extensive study of the palimpsestic quality of literature as a tradition, slightly alters this definition to mean a document where “on the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not conceal but allows to show through” (1997, 398–99). In Genette’s (1997) take, the key feature of a palimpsest becomes the fact that the earlier layers of writing on its surface have not been completely erased, but enough of the original text has remained visible to allow for its deciphering and, perhaps, reconstruction. Thus, a palimpsest—or, more accurately, the palimpsest, following Sarah Dillon’s use of the definite pronoun to differentiate between an actual, physical piece of overwritten manuscript and the more figurative understanding of the palimpsest as a metaphor for the ways in which seemingly separate texts relate to one another—is an inherently dialogical device that fosters intertextual conversations. As Dillon explains in her book-length study of what she terms the “palimpsestuous” structures of literary works, the palimpsest is an “involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other” in intimate ways (2007, 4). The palimpsest, born out of the economic reality of the scarcity of parchment that required texts to be (partially) erased and superimposed on one another, has become the

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perfect metaphor for the heterogeneous and multilayered quality of literary texts. The use of intertextuality and dialogism (and thus, implicitly, of the palimpsest) in Linden Hills has been discussed in some detail by several literary critics to date. In her doctoral dissertation on the subject, Christine Berg (1997) argues that Naylor’s use of white/male literary borrowings and references, primarily to Dante’s Inferno and to poetry by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot, “only highlights the extent to which her own voice—as a woman, as an African American, and as a contemporary writer—differs from theirs as she appropriates canonical expressions of experience and interprets them to be suitable to the experiences of her African American characters” (1997, 7). Tracey Thornton observes that “in appropriating Dante, Naylor does not attempt to insert the black voice into the canon; instead … she illustrates why such white paradigms cannot be used to delineate or provide a space for the pain, endurance, and everyday struggles of black people” (2003, 128). In a similar vein, John Noelle Moore states that “Naylor’s intertexts teach us that these western stories … cannot accurately reflect the history of her black characters” (2000, 1411). As these examples indicate, Naylor’s intertextual choices have usually been analyzed from the point of view of critical race theories, and her employment of the European canon has been understood as a subversive strategy, what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has termed “signifyin(g)” (1988, xxv). The novel’s internal intertext—the storyline of Willa Nedeed—has also received significant critical attention. For example, Helen Fiddyment Levy analyzes how the “female voices [in Linden Hills] reach out to each other over time and distance” (1993, 276) in a tragic attempt to form a community via textual artifacts; Teresa Goddu reads Willa Nedeed’s “autobiographical herstory” (1993, 222) as a disruptive signification on the patriarchal system of oppression; and Keith Sandiford claims that “Willa confers value and legitimacy on a set of female values commonly defined as madness” (1993, 208) and thus represents a subversion of the gothic paradigm. Finally, Luke Bouvier (1993) reads the storyline of Willa’s Nedeed’s imprisonment and spiritual self-discovery as a typographical intervention in the main body of the text, “constituting a rupturing text” which suggests herstory’s potential to explode the hegemonic, male-­ dominated, materialist narrative of Linden Hills (1993, 149). As signaled by this brief overview, the majority of existing criticism on the subject reads the overall intertextuality of Linden Hills as an African

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American reworking of the European canon and the specific intertext of Willa’s story as a feminist interruption of the patriarchal system. No critical analyses to date have combined the race critical, feminist, and structuralist lenses to approach the use of intertextuality in Naylor’s work from a womanist perspective nor have they to elaborate on her use of the palimpsest as an explicitly womanist device. The most compelling womanist reading of Naylor’s work, conducted by Dorothy Perry Thompson (1999), excludes Linden Hills from its scope of interest. Instead, Thompson identifies Naylor’s later novels—Mama Day and Bailey’s Café—as literary expressions of Africana womanism. Clenora Hudson-Weems, who coined the term in the late 1980s, identifies the following among the features of an Africana womanist: “self-namer and self-definer, strong, in concert with male in struggle, whole, authentic, flexible role player, … spiritual, male compatible, respectful of elders, adaptable, ambitious, and mother and nurturing” (2001, 137–38). While these elements are doubtlessly present and celebrated in Mama Day and Bailey’s Café, I argue that Linden Hills participates in the womanist discourse in a perverse way: by exploring the grim consequences that await those Black women who either choose to reject or are late to embrace womanist values. While Hudson-Weems’s idea of Africana womanism does inform my analysis of Linden Hills, this chapter primarily employs Alice Walker’s original definition of womanism as the framework for its reading of the novel. In her 1983 collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Walker lays out a four-part definition of womanism. She first describes a “womanist” as a “black feminist or feminist of color,” and then broadens the definition to also mean a “woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually,” who “[a]ppreciates and prefers women’s culture” and who is “[c]ommitted to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female” (1983, xi; emphasis original). The third and fourth parts of the definition are decidedly more poetic and elusive than the first two and feature a list of ten things that a womanist loves unconditionally (including music, food, the struggle, the folk, and herself) and the now-famous statement according to which “[w]omanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (1983, xii). Walker’s definition thus explains womanism as a philosophical and political stance which enables women of color to intervene in, and eventually disrupt, the combined “forces of racism and sexism that deny people wholeness” (Winchell 1992, 14). By re-reading Linden Hills as a text which participates in a womanist discourse not only through its content but also through its formal uses of

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intertextuality, I hope to shed new light on the combination of craft and message in Naylor’s novel. Reaching back to Kristeva’s argument that polyvocality and a carnivalesque aesthetic (primary elements of intertextuality) are textual strategies which contribute to a novel’s subversive or revolutionary significance, this chapter illustrates how Naylor’s use of these devices underscores the womanist message embedded in the content of her novel. Through the positioning of Willa’s storyline as an intertext which interrupts the dominant narrative of Linden Hills and, by contrast, through the nearly seamless merging of the accounts of previous Nedeed wives into Willa’s narration, Naylor juxtaposes an “underground” community of women against the hegemonic, masculine narrative that is Linden Hills. The particular methods and, ultimately, contentious effects of this juxtaposition are discussed in the following sections of this chapter.

Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills As Gloria Naylor put it in an interview, Linden Hills is a “look at what happens to black Americans when they move up in America’s society” and cut off the “ties with [their] ethnocentric sense of self” (Carabi and Naylor 1991, 33). The novel follows two young Black men, Willie Mason and Lester Tilson, as they venture into the middle-class African American housing estate of Linden Hills to perform odd manual jobs and make extra money before Christmas. During their Dantesque journey toward the bottom of the hill on which the estate is located, they become accidental observers of the miserable lives of its residents who have given up their identities, traditions, and communal ties in exchange for financial success and upward class mobility. On Christmas Eve, they visit the house of Luther Nedeed, Linden Hills’s all-controlling manager and mortician, who has imprisoned his wife and their dead son in the basement. By the end of the night, Willa Prescott Nedeed emerges from her confinement and inadvertently kills herself and her husband in a fire which destroys their house; barely escaping from the disaster, Willie and Lester remain the sole witnesses of this “fall of the house of Nedeed.” The reader learns additional details of Willa’s story from intertextual inserts into the main narrative. Held captive in the basement by her husband, who accuses her of infidelity after their son is born with a dark black skin color, Willa discovers unofficial records which document the lives of the Nedeed wives before her. Among them, she finds Luwana Packerville’s diary entries and letters hidden between the pages of the Bible, Evelyn

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Creton’s autobiographical cooking recipes, and a series of family photographs featuring Priscilla McGuire. As Willa follows these palimpsestic “herstories,” she realizes the long history of patriarchal oppression in the Nedeed family. Finally, she emerges from the basement with a resolution to reclaim agency and take control of her life—a resolution which, ultimately, both brings down Luther’s patriarchal reign and ends her life. Willa Nedeed’s storyline constitutes an intertext to the main narrative of Linden Hills, which follows Willie and Lester on their journey to the “heart of darkness” of the Nedeed residence. Most popular understandings of intertextuality tend to see it as an incorporation of pre-existing literary texts; however, as Adolphe Haberer postulates, “in trying to understand the issues of intertextuality … one should very clearly distinguish the intertextual effect from the type of scholarly research which aims at elucidating all sources, tracing all allusions, finding all references” (2007, 66). The “intertextual effect,” therefore, does not have to stem from incorporating external sources into a text but rather can be a result of the dialogic or polyphonic discourse employed in the text itself. As Graham Allen explains in his study of intertextuality, a “polyphonic novel presents a world in which no individual discourse can stand objectively above any other discourse; all discourses are interpretations of the world, responses to and calls to other discourses” (2000, 23). By positioning Willa’s narrative as an intertext, first clearly separated from and then smoothly incorporated into the main text of Linden Hills, Naylor not only assures the polyphonic quality of her novel but also makes visible the very process through which marginalized voices can interrupt and/or take over hegemonic narratives. The first two chapters of Linden Hills are dominated by male presence and male voices, and Willa’s weak textual presence does not disrupt this male-centered narrative; it is not until the beginning of the third chapter that Willa’s storyline is introduced in her own voice. Her “underground” storyline in the novel is strongly contrasted with the above-ground narrative by both linguistic and typographical devices. With the shift to Willa as the focalizer, the language of the narration leans toward what Julia Kristeva dubs the “semiotic” modality: the maternal and organic aspect of language in which the “vocal and kinetic rhythm” takes precedence over the strict rules of grammar and syntax (1986a, 94). In contrast to the relatively structured and coherent language of other parts of the novel, the language of Willa’s narrative is emotionally saturated rather than descriptive; it is open to gaps, discontinuities, and linguistic manipulations which

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reflect the psychological and emotional distress of the character: “Oh God, please stop that noise—she couldn’t hear the clock. Painfully, she took a deep breath, concentrated, and tried to go on without it. But the spraying water forced different rhythms into her brain—Iwantyoutolive… I wantyoutolive… Iwantyouto…” (Naylor 1986, 70). Apart from this dramatic linguistic shift, Willa’s thread is also marked by its typographical difference from the rest of the text. As Grace E. Collins points out, these sections of the novel are printed in sans serif bold, while the main storyline is set in Roman typeface; it is only when “Willa realizes that she has a will, that she can choose to ascend the steps, [that] Naylor abandons sans serif bold, symbolically incorporating Willa’s regeneration into the dénouement” (1997, 81). In a similar vein, Luke Bouvier asserts that this typographic isolation of the parts of the narrative in which Willa Nedeed is the focalizer posits her story as “a rupturing text that … undermin[es] any concept of a pure, unified, masterful narrative of Linden Hills” (1993, 149). The linguistic and textual devices separate Willa’s narrative from the rest of the text work to underscore her otherness and isolation; however, this radical difference also draws the reader’s attention to the fact that her story disrupts the otherwise smooth flow of the narrative. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, Willa’s marginalized position makes the intervention of her voice into the hegemonic world of Luther Nedeed’s Linden Hills all the more pronounced. The intertextuality of Willa’s storyline is not, however, limited to its role as an intratext, or an intertext within the novel itself. This narrative of extreme isolation is intertwined with several tropes and motifs persistent in the Western literary canon, the most pronounced of them being that of the “madwoman in the attic.” By physically setting Willa in a basement and making her victim to an imprisonment at the hands of her husband, Naylor both alludes to and spatially reverses the famous trope first identified in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979). However, while Brontë’s Bertha Mason Rochester exemplified the repressed Victorian “psychic split between the lady who submits to male dicta and the lunatic who rebels” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 86), Naylor’s Willa Nedeed bridges this split: She is sentenced to confinement precisely because she had submitted to the “male dicta” of her husband, and it is only as a result of the imprisonment that she becomes insane. Moreover, her lunacy is not one of rebellion but of ultimate submission to her role as a housewife for whom restoring an impeccable order to all the rooms in her husband’s residence becomes a mission “inextricably tied to

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her continuing existence” (Naylor 1986, 297). Thus, Willa’s storyline parallels the above-ground narrative by employing the same device of reversal of a canonical motif: While Willie and Lester’s descent to Luther Nedeed’s house at 999 Tupelo Drive secularizes Dante and Virgil’s journey in Inferno by translating it into a Black middle-class context, Willa’s underground confinement spatially reverses the “madwoman in the attic” trope as a metaphor for the oppression faced by (Black) middle-class women in 1980s America. This spatial reversal, in which it is the basement rather than the attic that becomes the space in which the (now racialized) woman is confined, may also be interpreted as Naylor’s nod to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic novel Invisible Man, where the unnamed Black male protagonist resorts to a voluntary exile from society and into a clandestinely occupied underground space that symbolizes psychological separation, the role of Blackness as America’s unconscious (as famously postulated by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark [1992]), and a site of subversion and resistance all at once. Read in this context, Naylor’s relocation of her textual “madwoman” into the basement not only hints at the prevailing social hierarchy that situates Black women as inferior to whiteness but also self-­ consciously inscribes her novel into the larger African American canon. Furthermore, the “madwoman in the attic” device allows Naylor to contextualize Willa’s experiences and situate her character in the long history of female oppression “in the architecture—both the houses and the institutions—of patriarchy” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 85). Willa’s isolation is no longer absolute when it enters a conversation with other women who have experienced similar circumstances, and this engagement takes place on at least two levels. On the intratextual level, Willa’s discovery of clandestine documents left behind by the previous Nedeed wives allows her to establish an intimate connection with their experiences of oppression, rejection, and objectification by their husbands. On the other hand, the structural design of her storyline invites Willa into an extratextual pantheon of subaltern women: marginalized, excluded, silenced, and struggling to find their own voice and identity. As Maxine L.  Montgomery observes, the “documents Willa reads bear a close resemblance to the often private, gendered forms of expression figuring into texts by Jane Austen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Brontës, and Emily Dickinson— precursor works likely inspiring Naylor and other women writers” (2010, 29). Thus, through the form as well as the content of her novel, Naylor creates an intra- as well as intertextual community of women, spinning a web of continuity of female experiences under patriarchy.

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As a result of this intertextual strategy, Willa’s story is not quite, or not exclusively, her own. Rather, it is composed of several layers of stories told by the previous Nedeed women and interwoven into Willa’s own narrative. As Willa “releases their voices from a long enforced silence, and … imaginatively suppl[ies] those places where the[ir] texts are silent” (Sandiford 1993, 208), their herstories come together as a palimpsest of the previously mute voices of the Nedeed wives and mothers. However, while literary scholars such as Genette (1997) and Dillon (2007) have applied the metaphor of the palimpsest to represent the nature of intertextuality in general, the Nedeed women’s stories in Linden Hills assume the form of a palimpsest also in a more literal sense of the term: that of another layer of text being physically written over a pre-existing one. Luwana Packerville’s personal narrative “smuggled” in-between the pages of the Bible, Evelyn Creton’s autobiographical notes hidden among her cooking recipes, and Priscilla McGuire’s scribblings and other alterations of her family photographs are all texts whose palimpsestic quality emerges from their material situatedness within and in relation to other, pre-existing texts, rather than from any self-conscious intertextual design of their authors.

The Palimpsest of Herstories The clandestine writings discovered by Willa form an intricate, palimpsestic tale about the generations of “madwomen in the basement” struggling to survive as human subjects under their husbands’ tyrannical rule. The first of these texts comprises Luwana Packerville Nedeed’s diary entries written over the pages of a Bible. Luwana, both wife and slave to the first Luther Nedeed back in the early nineteenth century, registers her decline into insanity in a “fine, webbed scrawl that was crammed onto the gold-­ edged tissue paper that separated one book of the Bible from another” (Naylor 1986, 117). Thematically, her entries correspond to the contents of their neighboring biblical sections in a manner that is at once prophetic and grotesque. The beginning of her life as a Nedeed wife and her journey from Mississippi to Linden Hills are recorded between the books of Genesis and Exodus, or creation and departure. The birth of Luther’s son, heir to the kingdom of his enterprise, was an event “carefully placed between First Kings and Second Kings [as] no accident” (Naylor 1986, 119), while Luwana’s realization of the everlasting nature of her bondage and the desperate cry to God which accompanies it directly precede the

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book of Lamentations. Her final entries, which assume the form of correspondence between her split selves, are located immediately before Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Thus, Luwana’s fear that she has “been the innocent vessel for some sort of unspeakable evil” through giving birth to Luther’s clone-like son (as well as the account of her self-scarification which stops short of her carving the apocalyptic 666th scar onto her body [Naylor 1986, 123–24]) may be read in conversation with Paul’s prophecy of “the wrath of God” which is to be “revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Rom 1:18 in King James Bible Online 2020). To Willa’s disappointment, “[e]ven though she leafed all the way through to the Book of Revelations, there was no record” of any further entries in Luwana’s Bible (Naylor 1986, 125); what she does not know yet is that it will be up to her to play out the events which will correspond to the Revelation of St. John and become an agent of the Armageddon that will descend upon the house of Nedeed. Read in conversation with both the corresponding sections of the Bible and the following chapters of Linden Hills, Luwana’s diary entries form a complex and palimpsestic intertext which both comments on the life story of Willa and prophesizes the apocalyptic ending of the novel. The records left behind by the next two Nedeed wives are similarly prophetic of Willa’s plight. As she reads closely into Evelyn Creton Nedeed’s “thick, heavy cookbooks,” Willa discovers sections written in letters “crammed together so tightly they were almost a blur” (Naylor 1986, 139, 141). These bits of text include minute documentation of Evelyn’s quasi-magical recipes intended to win back her husband’s affection and, later, the records of her suicidal strategies of eating and purging. These transcripts end on December 24 with the receipt of prussic acid and “a quart of vanilla ice-­ cream,” a mixture with which Evelyn apparently ended her life (Naylor 1986, 191). The dating of this entry foreshadows Willa’s own inadvertent suicide on the same day of the year almost a century later. By the time she finds the photo album of Priscilla McGuire Nedeed, Willa already senses a metaphysical connection to her maternal forebears. In one of the photographs, Priscilla’s lips seem to Willa to be “caught in the act of saying I knew you would come, and I’m so pleased to meet you” (Naylor 1986, 205; emphasis original). This welcome is also an invitation to join the underground, matrilineal community of the mistreated, silenced, and eventually insane Nedeed women—an invitation that Willa has no choice but to accept. The photographic evidence of Evelyn’s gradual disappearance—in later pictures with her own and Willa’s future

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husband, her “entire face … has been removed. This had been done on purpose”—ends with “the word me … scrawled across the empty hole” where her face had once been (Naylor 1986, 249). Grammatically, the referent of the pronoun me is radically unstable and always depends on the identity of the speaker. Thus, its use here may imply the interchangeability of the positions of Willa, Evelyn, and, by extension, all of the Nedeed women: Each one of them has been made “faceless,” forced to disappear in the shadow of her husband’s patriarchal project of Linden Hills. Structurally, the stories of the Nedeed wives are both palimpsestic and intertextual. First, they are composed of textual layers within themselves: Luwana’s diary is placed among the Bible pages, Evelyn’s story of conjure and suicide is “hidden in plain sight” among regular cooking recipes, and Priscilla’s is a peculiar collage of scratched out photographs with their final inscription. These narratives then come together as a tiered amalgam of “herstories” onto which Willa eventually inscribes her own identity. Yet, their stories also form an intertext with the above-ground narrative of Linden Hills, as the “underground” section does not constitute a separate chapter but instead “interpolates itself periodically into the body of the main text” of the novel (Bouvier 1993, 149). Moreover, analyses of the novel’s narrative structure have found thematic and structural parallels between “Willie’s literal journey through Linden Hills … and Willa’s psychological journey to self-discovery” (Collins 1997, 81). As Collins observes, the placement of Luwana’s segment immediately after Willie’s contemplation of an objectifying picture of a Black woman in Penthouse “reiterates the message … [that] women are still psychologically and physically enslaved” (1997, 84). The sections depicting the disturbing feast at Lycentia Parker’s wake, Willie’s nightmare revolving around food and death, and Evelyn’s recipe books are all intertwined to show how “[s]imultaneously, Willie and Willa are learning the true extent of perversion in Linden Hills” (Collins 1997, 85). Finally, the revelation of Priscilla’s ultimate disappearance, followed by Willa’s reclamation of her name and identity, parallels Willie’s discovery of Laurel Dumont’s corpse (and his subsequent insistence on referring to her by her first, instead of her husband’s last, name) as well as the nightmare in which Willie himself is faceless (Naylor 1986, 252, 273). Through this complex textual strategy of layering and interweaving both internal and external intertexts, Naylor shapes Linden Hills into a polyphony of narratives and voices that undermine the hegemonic narrative of the Nedeed patriarchy. In the words of Barbara Christian, Willa’s

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exhumation and restoration of the otherwise unrecorded lives of her predecessors makes the reader “realize how the experiences of the women are a serious threat to the men’s kingdom” (1993, 115). Symbolically, Naylor’s strategy of textual assemblage allows for an intrusion of the historically erased and oppressed voices—those of Black women objectified and marginalized into virtual non-existence by the reproductive and capitalist demands of patriarchy—into the main discourse which works to exclude them. Intertextuality becomes a mode of resistance that, like Mikhail Bakhtin’s aesthetic of the carnivalesque, produces a connection “between challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law” (Kristeva 1986b, 36). In Linden Hills, this challenge takes on a form of a womanist intervention whereby the intricate textual devices that highlight connections rather than ruptures work to strengthen the novel’s message: one that underscores the importance of community, cooperation, and continuity in the economic and mental liberation of contemporary African Americans.

Womanist Practice in and Beyond Linden Hills The ending of Linden Hills, where Willa’s apparent madness leads to the ultimate destruction of the Nedeed family and the mansion that housed it, has been interpreted by critics in contradictory ways: as either a failed or a successful feminist project. Advocates of the novel’s failure as a productive feminist text indicate that, while “Willa literally brings down the house of patriarchy, … the novel institutes no counter-tradition of strong womanhood to oppose the destructive legacy of patriarchy” (Homans 1993, 172). Thus, “Naylor’s revisioning of history” through Willa’s discovery of the otherwise undocumented life stories of the Nedeed women does not “offer an alternative system” to that of patriarchal oppression (Eckard 2012, 807). Christopher N. Okonkwo seems to be the only critic so far to see Willa’s character as a successful revolutionary messiah whose “revolt and victory collaborate as well as conclude the [Nedeed] women’s generational fight for face and voice” and who serves as a “positive metaphor of Black women’s liberatory activism” (2001, 128). In Okonkwo’s reading, the patriarchal and capitalist hegemony of Luther Nedeed in Linden Hills represents “abominations … so entrenched and diabolic that their cleansing might imperil human life” (Okonkwo 2001, 129). Thus, Willa’s sacrificial death is perhaps the only valid socio-political intervention that would

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have the potential to disrupt the destructive and oppressive system within the novel’s fictional world. As observed by Patricia Hill Collins, the “journey from internalized oppression to the ‘free mind’ of a self-defined, womanist consciousness has been a prominent theme in the works of U.S. Black women writers” (2000, 112). Importantly, this “womanist consciousness” and self-­ assertion are “not defined as the increased autonomy gained by separating oneself from others” but usually “found in the context of family and community” (Collins 2000, 113). In Linden Hills, Willa’s spiritual quest in search of her identity follows this womanist pattern: While her downfall is brought about by her isolation from the Black community and female ancestry, her redemption comes from rediscovery of matrilineal bonds. At first, Willa—unknowingly following in the footsteps of all the women before her who gave up “their names, identities, and their souls to claim and use the title ‘Mrs. Nedeed’” (Hall 1995, 120)—actively chooses to separate herself from the spiritual nourishment offered by matriarchal community and knowledge: And she remembered being so ashamed of her great aunt, Miranda Day … perhaps if she hadn’t been so eager to quiet the old woman, to move her out of the room away from the amused and contemptuous eyes of her teenaged friends, she would have also heard about ivory-root, white pepper, and sassafras. [Now] … there was nowhere else to turn except to her piles of Cosmopolitans and Ladies Home Journals. (Naylor 1986, 147–48)

Miranda Day, later the eponymous character from Naylor’s third novel Mama Day, represents a traditional folk Black culture of which the middle-­ class aspiring Willa used to be ashamed. What the young Willa did not know was that by rejecting the values of the folk, she automatically also rejected the womanist values of “survival and wholeness of entire people,” “the Folk,” and “the Spirit” (Walker 1983, xi–xii). Disregarding the tradition of Black female bonding in favor of the patriarchal and capitalist values of nuclear family and “that biannual trip to New York and that walk down miracle mile” (Naylor 1986, 149), Willa found herself isolated from any spiritually nourishing community and, therefore, at the absolute mercy of her tyrannical husband. It is only when she discovers the hidden and forgotten accounts of other Black women whose experiences reflected her own that she can start to recreate her subjectivity and reclaim agency over her life. The discovery of the clandestine

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herstories of Luwana, Evelyn, and Priscilla invites Willa back to the Black female community she had previously rejected and makes her a part of what William R. Hunter refers to as “quilting culture”: one in which Black women, excluded from the dominant white/male narrative, take “the media which are available to them and use these as non-traditional, non-­ masculine, forms of narrative to present a history beyond the control of men” (1993, 172–73). Knowledge of the stories of her foremothers enables Willa to rediscover herself after six years of oppressive marriage and days of imprisonment in her husband’s basement; through reasserting the coordinates of her self—her name, age, and physical features—she “quilts” herself anew, realizing that “[s]he had owned that first name for as long as she had the face which she was now certain that she possessed” (Naylor 1986, 277). However, as the tragic ending of the novel suggests, Willa’s reclamation of the “identity that was rightfully hers” (Naylor 1986, 280) happens too late to bring about a lasting, transformative change in her own life. As Willa realizes at a certain point of her introspective journey, the loss of her Black and female self “didn’t happen in a moment or even in a marriage. This had happened a long time ago … she couldn’t touch what had already escaped her long before she came to Tupelo Drive. Now she was left with only the ends” (Naylor 1986, 204). Here, the narrative voice suggests that both the destruction and the healing of one’s self are long-lasting processes, and so the consequences of the accumulated choices and actions Willa made in her past cannot be redressed overnight. The work of womanist self-healing is constant and communal labor, not a spectacular, individual act. In other words, it is a matter of continuity rather than rupture. Having rejected the womanist values of self-love, self-expression, and Black female bonding long ago, Willa is only capable of an act of destruction, and the only matrilineal community where she can find her place is that of the dead Nedeed women. With her spiritual “sisters” and her son dead, the only way out of the identity-destroying patriarchal/capitalist system available to Willa seems to be death. Yet, Willa’s self-destruction is far from synonymous with the failure of Naylor’s womanist project. First of all, her death also brings about that of Luther Nedeed and the demolition of his house, thus radically disrupting the patriarchal, capitalist, and anti-Black structures governing Linden Hills. While no future is possible for Willa as an individual, the legacy of her revolutionary act may eventually lead to the healing of the rest of the community, now freed from the tyranny of Luther’s rule. Therefore, if the

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project of healing is understood in terms of an entire community rather than an individual character, then Linden Hills does offer the promise of a womanist transformation. Willie Mason, positioned throughout the novel as Willa’s spiritual alter-ego, may be understood as one agent of this transformation to come. Having survived the fire at the Nedeed house, Willie and his friend Lester walk “out of Tupelo Drive into the last days of the year” (Naylor 1986, 304). These final words of the novel shift focus from the rupture, associated with the demise of the Nedeed clan, to the continuity of nature: The end of one year inevitably means the start of a new one and thus the promise of a new beginning. If Willie Mason, as his last name implies, is the one to lay down the foundations for a new social reality in Linden Hills, it is likely that the reconstructed community will be founded on principles aligned with womanism. Unlike Willa, Willie has never lost his connection with the Black community and folk culture. He remains skeptical of middle-class values, asserting that “if you wanted to write about life, you had to go where life was, among the people” (Naylor 1986, 28). Convinced that the “written word dulls the mind, and since most of what’s written is by white men, it’s positively poisonous” (Naylor 1986, 29), he is the most Afrocentric character in Linden Hills. Moreover, as some critics have indicated, Willie and Lester’s gender and sexual identities are slightly queered throughout the novel, which may suggest that a tender and “genuine friendship between men who share similar values, as well as friendship between women, is critical to the Afro-American community’s search for empowerment” (Christian 1993, 124). Finally, Willie “enjoys a close relationship with a litany of female residents” (Montgomery 2010, 24) and shares an unconscious spiritual connection with Willa, about whom he composes a poem and whose exit from the basement he facilitates by accidentally unlatching the door (Naylor 1986, 277, 297). Ultimately, his constant characterization as a positively female-centered Black man suggests his alliance with the womanist worldview and illustrates that while Black men “cannot have black women’s experiences,” they can “support African American women by advocating anti-racist and anti-sexist philosophies in their intellectual and political work” (Collins 1996, 16).

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Palimpsest Beyond the Page: Linden Hills and the Role of the Reader The possible fruition of the womanist project set in motion by Willa’s textual discoveries and inherited by Willie is, however, not depicted in the novel. This, I argue, is not because Naylor cannot envision its execution in practice but because the ultimate agent of the healing project instigated in Linden Hills is located outside of the fictional world of the novel. According to Keith Sandiford, in her journey through the narratives of her foremothers, Willa Prescott Nedeed “unites the functions of reader, narrator, and interpreter, transforming herself into the historian of these women’s lives and experiences” (Naylor 1986, 207). With Willa’s untimely death and the novel’s end, it is up to the reader of Linden Hills to take over these functions. Naylor’s intricate intertextual design of her novel—realized in Willa’s palimpsestic readings of her predecessor’s texts, in the intratextual relation of her storyline to the above-ground narrative, and in the whole text’s wider conversation with the literary canon—is a question of aesthetics as much as politics. As Aldon Lynn Nielsen reminds us, aesthetics “is not an area of investigation apart from ideology,” and one “of the many valuable things art does is to call our attention to this fact, … to draw us into ever deeper meditation on that which we take for granted about the social and the pressing question of how we came to take it for granted” (2007, 607). In other words, an author’s aesthetic choice is oftentimes influenced by the social, political, or cultural message of the text. Thus, the heavily intertextual structure of Linden Hills, which stresses the continuity and interrelation of all its narratives, ultimately increases the reader’s engagement with and investment in the womanist knowledge which Willa gains through her own reading. In Tracey Thornton’s reading of the novel, Willa Nedeed’s narrative “is intermeshed with the histories of other characters’ lives, creating a complex intertextuality that can be seen to symbolize Naylor’s own position as a writer and cultural and discursive agent” (2003, 115). What Thornton’s analysis does not account for is the fact that Willa’s intertextual position is symbolic of that of the author as well as the reader of Linden Hills. Similarly, while Keith Sandiford focuses on how Naylor’s “harmonization of form and strategy not only achieves the ultimate deconstruction of the Nedeed text … but also achieves the dissolution of her own narrative” and thus challenges the very notion of authorial control in the text (1993, 213), he does not dwell on extratextual consequences of such textual

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strategy for the reader. Indeed, by illustrating the potential of the Nedeed women’s collective voice to disrupt an otherwise hegemonic narrative of the Nedeed men through continuity and collaboration, Naylor shows a possible method of a womanist intervention available to her readers. Assuming that their situation is not as drastic as that of Willa and her predecessors, the novel may inspire its readers to embrace and/or reclaim their cultural and social inheritance—an effort that, in the case of the last Mrs. Nedeed, is aborted by madness and death—and thus engage in a viable and sustainable womanist practice. By suggesting Willie’s role as an heir to Willa’s domestic revolution, the text of Linden Hills enacts the womanist principle of shared transformative action by serving as a reminder of the fact that, when guided by similar, community-centered sensitivities, “African men and women have been equal partners in the struggle against oppression from early on” (Hudson-Weems 2001, 143). In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker imagines how the foremothers of the Black women of today “waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known; but guessed, somehow in their darkness, that on the day of their revelation they would be long dead” (1983, 232). In Linden Hills, Willa Prescott Nedeed first uncovers the buried herstories of the “crazy, loony, pitiful women” (Walker 1983, 231) who came before her, then writes herself into the “quilt” of their combined narratives and, ultimately, joins them in their darkness. Although she fails to “strike a balance between the traditional role of wife and mother … and the revolutionary activism necessary in dismantling the master’s house of female subjugation,” her gesture of womanist disobedience “places her in a long line of radical, proactive women who refuse to acquiesce in the face of male power” (Montgomery 2010, 33, 77). Willa’s rebellious gesture is only one of many textual devices which relate the novel to other herstories, texts, and extratextual realities and thus create a paratextual palimpsest that reaches beyond the printed page into the lived history of womanist activism whose legacy the reader is invited to continue. The intertextual and palimpsestic nature of Linden Hills underscores connections: those between particular narratives within the text, between this and other novels by Naylor, between Naylor’s work and that of the writers before her, and, finally, between the author, the text, and the reader. Such textual structure provides an example par excellence of Bakhtin’s polyphonic and carnivalesque novel whose reader, in the words of Kristeva, “is both actor and spectator” in a “space of thought much larger than that of the novel” (1986b, 49, 59). Linden Hills invites its

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readers into the textual community shared with Gloria Naylor as well as with the Nedeed women and encourages them to add yet another layer to its palimpsestic text. The novel’s dialogic, open structure encourages its readers to act toward the securing of a “racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings” (Walker 1983, 85; emphasis original). Ultimately, the polyphony of Linden Hills fosters the continuation of its womanist project outside of the constraints of the novel and into the realm of lived reality.

References Alfaro, Maria Jesus Martinez. 1996. Intertextuality: Origins and Development of the Concept. Atlantis 18 (1/2): 268–285. Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. London: Routledge. Berg, Christine G. 1997. Methods of Intertextuality in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills. Diss. Lehigh University. ProQuest. Accessed 19 Sep 2015. Bouvier, Luke. 1993. Reading in Black and White: Space and Race in Linden Hills. In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, 140–151. New York: Amistad. Carabi, Angels, and Gloria Naylor. 1991. Interview with Gloria Naylor. Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 1: 23–35. http://institucional.us.es/revistas/estudios/1/art_2.pdf. Accessed 1 Sep 2020. Christian, Barbara. 1993. Naylor’s Geography: Community, Class and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills. In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A.  Appiah, 106–125. New York: Amistad. Collins, Grace E. 1997. Narrative Structure in Linden Hills. In The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor, ed. Sharon Felton and Michelle C.  Loris, 80–87. Westport: Greenwood. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1996. What’s In a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond. The Black Scholar 26 (1): 9–17. ———. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory. London: Continuum. Eckard, Paula Gallant. 2012. The Entombed Maternal in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills. Callaloo 35 (3): 795–809. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Goddu, Teresa. 1993. Reconstructing History in Linden Hills. In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, 215–230. New York: Amistad. Haberer, Adolphe. 2007. Intertextuality in Theory and Practice. Literatūra: Research Journal for Literary Scholarship 49.5: 54–67. https://www.journals. vu.lt/literatura/article/view/7934/5805. Accessed 1 Sep 2020. Hall, Chekita Trennel. 1995. The Blues as a Paradigm of Cultural Resistance in the Works of Gloria Naylor. Diss. Bowling Green State University. ProQuest. Accessed 19 Sep 2015. Homans, Margaret. 1993. The Woman in the Cave. In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A.  Appiah, 152–181. New York: Amistad. Hudson-Weems, Clenora. 2001. Africana Womanism: The Flip Side of a Coin. The Western Journal of Black Studies 25 (3): 137–145. Hunter, William R. 1993. The Quilting of Culture: The Depiction of African American Community in the Novels of Gloria Naylor. Diss. Purdue University. ProQuest. Accessed 19 Sep 2015. King James Bible Online. 2020. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/. Accessed 2 Sep 2020. Kristeva, Julia. 1986a. Revolution in Poetic Language. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, 89–136. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1986b. Word, Dialogue, and Novel. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, 34–61. New York: Columbia University Press. Levy, Helen Fiddyment. 1993. Lead On with Light. In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A.  Appiah, 263–284. New York: Amistad. Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. 2010. The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Moore, John Noelle. 2000. Myth, Fairy Tale, Epic, and Romance: Narrative as Re-Vision in Linden Hills. Callaloo 23 (4): 1410–1429. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Naylor, Gloria. 1986. Linden Hills. New York: Penguin. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. 2007. Foreword: Preliminary Postings from a Neo-Soul. African American Review 41 (4): 601–608. Okonkwo, Christopher N. 2001. Suicide or Messianic Self-Sacrifice? Exhuming Willa’s Body in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills. African American Review 35 (1): 117–131.

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Sandiford, Keith. 1993. Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills. In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, 195–214. New York: Amistad. Thompson, Dorothy Perry. 1999. Africana Womanist Revision in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Bailey’s Café. In Gloria Naylor’s Early Novels, ed. Margot Anne Kelley, 89–111. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Thornton, Tracy. 2003. Breaking Canonical Chains: Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills. In Postcolonial Perspectives on Women Writers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the US, ed. Martin Japtok, 113–130. Trenton: Africa World. Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: Harcourt. Winchell, Donna Haisty. 1992. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne.

CHAPTER 11

A Palimpsestuous Reading of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood Aparajita Nanda

Introduction African American writer Octavia Butler’s science fiction trilogy Lilith’s Brood brings into play epistemological fields as diverse as genetics, environmental science, and religio-cultural studies. The encounter between these disciplines is never placid; in fact, as Sarah Dillon, quoting Roland Barthes, points out, it produces an “unease in classification,” a confrontational tension between the disciplines that is a necessary “point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation” (Dillon 2007, 2). This “productive violence” is imperative to what Dillon’s has called the palimpsestuous as against the palimpsestic, which is the most common adjective derived from the noun palimpsest, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (2020) as “a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next.” As Dillon explains, “[w]here ‘palimpsestic’ refers to the process of layering that

A. Nanda (*) University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1_11

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produces a palimpsest, ‘palimpsestuous’ describes the structure that one is presented with as a result of that process, and the subsequent reappearance of the underlying script” (Dillon 2007, 4). This chapter proposes an analysis of Lilith’s Brood through genetic species splicing, celebration of hybridity, collision and conflation of religion and cultures, merging and melding of disparate identities to create a sense of interdependence as Butler’s palimpsestuous strategies necessary for the survival of humanity and the environment. As the term palimpsestuous suggests, such relations call for a simultaneous discourse of “intimacy and separation” (Dillon 2007, 3), where the different discourses retain their individual identities and often resurrect themselves in the narrative that follows. Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood opens in the wake of an apocalypse in which humanity nearly brought about its own demise and the ruin of the environment by means of a nuclear war. The Oankali, a nomadic, gene-­ trading alien species, rescue the few surviving humans with the intention of interbreeding with them to create a superior breed of Human–Oankali constructs in an environmentally viable milieu. The aliens justify their actions by proposing to eliminate the violent trait of what they call the “Human Contradiction”—a combination of intelligence and hierarchical thinking—to produce a sustainable, creolized third identity better suited to the universe’s ecology. The trilogy, consisting of the novels Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989), which in 2000 were published in one book titled Lilith’s Brood, begins with the awakening of Lilith Iyapo, an African American woman who had been kept in an Oankali-induced coma for centuries. She is charged with convincing the humans to accept the Oankali agenda and happily procreate with them. The other two books revolve around the birth and evolution of her mutant offsprings, Akin and Jodahs. Written during Ronald Reagan’s arms race with the Soviet Union, Lilith’s Brood forecasts the potential self-destruction of humanity brought on using nuclear weapons. Butler has said that Reagan’s arrogant advocacy of a “winnable … [or] limited nuclear war” inspired her to write the trilogy (McCaffery 1990, 56): I thought there must be … something really genetically wrong with us if we’re falling for this stuff. And I came up with these characteristics. The aliens arrive after the war and they tell us that we have these two characteristics that don’t work and play well together. They are intelligent, and they tell us we’re the most intelligent species they’ve come across. But we’re also

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hierarchical. And I put this after the big war because it’s kind of an example. We’ve one-upped ourselves to death, just our tendency to one-up each other as individuals and groups, large and small. It has a greater consequence if you combine it with intelligence.… [I]f you’re going to have somebody sending people off to war for egotistical or economic reasons, both hierarchal sorts of reasons, you end up with a lot more dead people. (Sanders 2004)

Gerry Canavan notes that Butler had a great contempt for Reagan and in her personal journals admits that the dictatorial President Jarred in her novel Parable of Talents (Butler 2000b), whom she refers to in her notes as “President Hitler,” is “a Reagan, young, vigorous and utterly unencumbered by conscience” (2016, 246). For Butler, unfettered human pride, which often goes together with the dangerous assumption that human progress depends on it, may well be a precursor to the destruction of the species.

Religion and Science Fiction In a panel discussion on “Science Fiction and Science Future” at UCLA in 2002, Butler suggested that only religion can serve as a potential antidote or much needed “break” to the highly charged volatile political situation (“Octavia Butler: Science Fiction and Science Future” 2002). Though religion and science fiction seem unlikely partners, science fiction offers a fertile ground for exploring theological questions. Before World War II, science fiction used religion as a superstructure or a satiric backdrop rather than a discourse openly engaging with theological issues. Today, religious science fiction exists as a sub-genre in which religious themes are proposed, explored, and debated (Herbert 1977; Miller 1986). In apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction, the concept of the world ending is often a significant catalyst for religious questioning. Butler admits her fascination with religion in a volume of interviews compiled by Consuela Francis in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009). She admits that religion is a force to be reckoned with, one that often helps humans survive in dire circumstances. For her, religion is not simply having faith in God, though she admits this is what enabled her relatives to survive, “for they would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish” (Hampton 2010, 88). Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (2000, originally published 1998) introduce the Earthseed religion, a mixture of traditional religious faiths and science. In the latter

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series, God is part of a process of chaos and change that embraces “many different scientific theories and doctrines from diverse religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism” (Allen 2009, 1363). I propose that Butler’s Earthseed religion harkens back to tenets of Hinduism as it recognizes the need for change and regeneration brought forth by destruction and chaos. This need is repetitive but not erratic, as it builds on the mistakes of the past even as it encounters the same pitfalls. For this regenerative process Butler recommends a new planetary environment where humans can adapt and settle down to a mutually beneficial life with other species, embracing diversity as a form of sustenance. Butler envisions a far more progressive and radical religion. While the Earthseed series seem to offer a radical critique of Christianity, critics have argued that Christianity forms the basis of the Earthseed religion, even suggesting, as Donna Spalding Andreolle (2001) does, that Earthseed is the “new” Christianity. I argue that Butler uses religious premises that her readers are familiar with. The word parable in her titles invites the reader to decipher the meanings embedded in the Earthseed religion. Thus, Lauren Olamina is the sower and shaper of the words of God, words that speak of change rather than adherence to dogma. At one point in the Parable of the Sower, Lauren takes exception to a God who seems like “a super powerful man, [who plays] with his toys? … What if God is something else altogether?” (1993, 25–26). From this point on, Lauren moves away from the Baptist articles of faith preached by her father. In Lauren’s encouragement to act rather than have faith in divine intervention, one may safely assume Octavia Butler’s silent endorsement of this religion of change. Indeed, change is at the heart of the Hindu ethos that Butler may have been toying with, given her wide-ranging interest in African myths and folklore, Nubian culture, and Asian cultures and religions.1

Butler’s Palimpsestuous Textual Relationality Given Butler’s diverse religious interests, it is not surprising that her works feature, or rather remain open to a discourse of “(textual) relationality” where apparently unrelated texts are brought into a conversation to create the “palimpsestuous structure” of the whole (Dillon 2007, 4). I propose that various ideas of Hindu philosophy echo throughout Lilith’s Brood only to surface for informed readers. I will specifically focus on some concepts of Hinduism that I feel palimpsestuously resonate with Butler’s narrative. The question of the interconnectedness of all living beings is

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seminal to Butler’s concept of human survival, a concept that the Oankali claim defines their very existence as their survival is based on interbreeding with other species. The interconnectedness of life is emphasized repeatedly in both Lilith’s Brood and the Hindu texts the Bhagavad Gita and the Isa Upanishad. Godhood or Vishnu, the god of preservation in the Hindu Holy Trinity, is contained in all His creations: as written in the Bhagavad Gita, “everything rests on me as pearls are strung on a thread. I am the original fragrance of the earth. I am the taste in water. I am the heat in fire and the sound in space. I am the light of the sun and moon and the life of all that lives” (Bhaktivedanta 1989, Bhagavad Gita 7.7–9). The classic Vedic2 text Isa Upanishad reminds one that “everything in the universe belongs to the Lord. Therefore, take only what you need, from what is set aside for you. Do not take anything else, for you know to whom it belongs” (Isa Upanishad 2014, 100). This interconnectedness represents the “eternal essence of life” that is built on the concept of a Life Force that flows through humans, animals, and plants emanating from and going back to its essential source in godhood. In fact, the word Hindu traces its etymological roots to the river “Indus,” which flows through the northwestern plains of the Indian subcontinent; thus, this etymological link emphasizes the connection of bioregion with religion. Similarly, as bell hooks contends, for African American women writers a connection to the environment meant a spiritually life-sustaining relationship with the “earth that was ongoing and life-affirming” (2002, 177). In a life-sustaining universe, interdependence among all living beings is a given. As Lilith’s Brood chronicles the rehabilitation of an environmentally devastated Earth, it portrays the spaceships of the Oankalis as natural, organic entities that respond to Oankali needs and vice versa, creating thereby a virtual symbiotic community. Oankali existence depends on a miniscule cell called the organelle that “divide[s] within each … cell as the cells divide …[;] the original Oankali had evolved through that organelle’s invasion, acquisition, duplication, and symbiosis” (Butler 2000a, 544). In their very essence, the Oankali reject the notion of a “pure” lineage; in fact, as Christa Grewe-Volpp points out, “a return to some pure origin as it is desired by human resisters would … mean total regression [for the Oankali]” (2003, 161). Their holistic interconnection is what the humans lack, defined as they are by their divisive, hierarchical logic and narratives of purity claiming descent from Adam and Eve. Thus the handful of humans who are saved by the Oankali are taken on a spaceship to gain an

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understanding of the extended communication and circulated professions of empathy between the Oankalis and their spaceships to which the humans owe their survival. These mobile and topographical places provide locations of interaction between the two species that are crucial to this narrative of the interconnectedness of life as well as to bonding and belonging, to generating new life and a new identity. It is all a part of a living evolutionary process. The living ships or Oankali towns respond like flesh to the touch. In fact, as Jdahya touches it, a hole in the wall widens “as though it were flesh rippling aside, slowly writhing” (Butler 2000a, 29). Lilith stands dumbstruck, taking in the fact that everything in the Oankali world is living and interconnected. Autonomy in this world is clearly impossible, and any pain that one might cause another living being (be it human or animal) comes back to the inflictor. However, to feel the pain of others, to create a sustainable, peaceful future, is to opt for hybridity rather than purity. To keep the inter-species connection alive, the human self needs to be destroyed for the regenerative process to continue in the form of a third identity that connects to both species: a Human–Oankali construct. The Human–Oankali construct, Akin, is a product of a palimpsestuous relationship between genetically diverse beings possibly inspired by Hindu avatars, hybridized versions of man and animal. The Puranas, the major writings of Vaishnava Hinduism, state that every time there is a decline of righteousness and an insurgence of evil, the god Vishnu incarnates himself as an avatar and wages war against evil. Time in the Puranas is divided into cosmic cycles (mahayugas) that have four ages. The god Vishnu is said to have descended into the world during each of these cycles, initially in the form of an animal (swan, tortoise, fish, and boar) and lastly as a hybrid man and animal (Narasimha, man-lion), in order to overcome evil. In the present cycle, or yuga, the Bhagavad Gita predicts that when nature is ravaged by human greed, the avatar Kalki, who is the god Vishnu in the form of an apocalyptic horse rider, will appear to cleanse the earth of evil. Only the righteous will survive and proceed to a new age of truth and honesty. However, to simply read Akin, the construct son of Lilith, as an incarnation of godhood as per Hindu philosophy would be a simplistic reading of Butler’s trilogy. For Akin is also part Oankali, who despite their professed altruistic agenda—to save the human species from extinction—could also be read as encroaching colonizers driven by a selfish intent (the Oankali survive by constant and consistent interbreeding with other species) and insidious power play. Although the humans are portrayed as stubborn and

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violent, there is no easy referential dynamic that presents Akin as a divine redress for human sinfulness. On the other hand, the Oankali, through their repetitive interbreeding with all species, create a symbiotic relational dynamic that is totally antithetical to discrimination against and persecution of others. In other words, while human hatred or fear for the “other” can only be posited in terms of competition and domination, Oankali philosophy celebrates interconnectedness. Akin’s story is a narrative of bonding with his “human” other to build what Val Plumwood calls a “self-in-relationship” (1993, 20). Akin’s rite of passage from birth to adulthood is based on a relationship in which his “self” is defined as both human and alien, as “posthuman.” A third-person voice recalls “his stay in the womb.” The remembrance is fraught with a dawning awareness of sounds and tastes … [that] meant nothing to him, but he remembered them. When they recurred, he noticed. When something touched him, he knew it to be a new thing—a new experience. The touch was first startling, then comforting. … When it withdrew, he felt bereft, alone for the first time. When it returned, he was pleased—another new sensation. When he had experienced a few of these withdrawals and returns, he learned anticipation. (Butler 2000a, 253)

A “startling” touch that later becomes “comforting” initiates a sense of desired bonding and leaves behind a strong void in its withdrawal as “he felt bereft, alone for the first time.” The desolation etched into loneliness indicates a longing to connect with “others.” The diversity of his four parents, two humans and two Oankali, makes Akin long for a sense of “wholeness.” Akin’s multi-parenting significantly accords equal status to both sets of parents as well as to both species, setting up genetic palimpsestuous possibilities in the making. To further emphasize this new sense of relationality and interconnectedness, Butler introduces the ooloi, a subadult Oankali with ambiguous and variable gender, as a facilitator who enables and monitors the coitus of the two species, to form a triadic arrangement. Butler’s professed desire “to create, in fiction at least … a world in which people were inclined … to accept one another’s differences” (Butler 2001) seems to be embodied in Akin, his body a palimpsestuous site in which opposing beings merge and collapse to make him realize that “he was also part of the people who touched him—that within them, he could

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find fragments of himself” (Butler 2000a, 255). Despite these realizations, the merging evident in Akin’s physical transformations and mental agility is never absolute. His own psyche becomes a battleground for understanding both the Oankali and the humans that ultimately makes him an “intra-­ species” instrument of salvation (Tucker 2007, 168). Reminiscent of the Hindu avatars, who in their dual (human and animal) incarnations became the only possible saviors of humanity, Akin remains humanity’s only hope for survival through interbreeding with the Oankali. Akin’s name foreshadows and presages his purpose. In African communities, an infant’s name reflects that infant’s personality or his life mission (Ampim). A “kin” to Oankalis and humans, Akin can also be read as what one may call “a-kinsual,” his loyalty divided because of his hybrid birth that casts doubt on his ultimate allegiance to his parent species. A phonetic extension of Akin’s name, “ah-keen,” to me signifies a loud, wailing lament for the demise of “pure breed” humans. And yet in his other role, as protector and savior of his “human” kin, Akin transforms this discourse of death into one of life. In fact, the literal meaning of Akin’s name synthesizes these two meanings; as he explains, “It means hero. If you put an s on it, it means brave boy” (Butler 2000a, 351; emphasis original). Thus Akin’s mission is spelled out and prefigured, like that of the Hindu avatars, who as manifestations of godhood embrace traits of both the human and the animal world, making even the playing field, thereby creating an Eastern redefinition of the Great Chain of Being. Akin’s mother Lilith can be read as a palimpsestuous trope; a mother figure, as destroyer (for Lilith does opt to become the Oankali agent) and yet a nurturer and protector of her hybrid son, Akin. Thus, it is not easy for Akin to understand his mother. Initially baffled by his reaction to his human mother Lilith, as one who was both “[d]eadly and compelling” (Butler 2000a, 257), Akin even fails to recognize the human traits in himself. He is “frightened and miserable and shaking with anger” when he is taken captive by the human resisters. Initially he is shocked at the “mix of intense emotions” till a chance remembrance dawns on him. He remembers Lilith’s anger, which “had always frightened him, and yet here it was inside him” (Butler 2000a, 329). As he strives to understand this very human emotion, he remembers his mother’s words: “Human beings fear difference. … Humans persecute their different ones. … Oankali seek difference and collect it. … You’ll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior. … When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference” (Butler 2000a, 329). A closed mind that feeds on

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fear and leads to persecution of the other is typical of resister humans. Akin is prompted to reject such discriminatory mind frame and advised to go the Oankali way. In an ironic take though Akin embraces “difference” leading to a positive attitude that seeks to understand the other, the human, part in him. Akin, as a palimpsestuous construct, celebrates hybridity as he defies the traditional rendering of genealogy, a necessity for a palimpsestuous reading (Dillon 2007, 7–9). Akin variously abides, rejects, combines, and even improvises traits that speak to a combination of his human and Oankali genes. To maintain peace, in keeping with his Oankali trait, Akin avoids violence and bloodshed, for example, when he lies to the parents of Tino, a human who had strayed over to the Oankali camp, that their son’s killer is dead. The pain Akin feels when he sees human suffering generates the wish to alleviate it and makes him question why humans choose death and reject the Oankali option of genetic healing. However, he understands that genetic healing alleviates suffering for the humans but also comes at the huge cost of losing their reproductive rights forever. Akin’s musings lead him to question the Oankali contention that humans would not survive their self-destructive instincts if they were not genetically modified and purged of their violent genes. This doubt in turn enables him to understand how vital the right to reproduce is for humans. As he tells Dehkiaht, his ooloi, “[L]et them fail. Let them have the freedom to do that, at least” (Butler 2000a, 468). Akin’s sympathy for the humans determines his decision to become their spokesperson as he understands that “[h]e was Oankali enough to be listened to by other Oankali and Human enough to know that resister Humans were being treated with cruelty and condescension” (Butler 2000a, 404). By virtue of his hybridity, Akin conveys what he feels to all the residents of Chkahichdahk, the Oankali ship, through the Akjai, a “pure breed” Oankali: The Akjai spoke to the people for Akin. Akin had not realized it would do this—an Akjai ooloi telling other Oankali that there must be Akjai Humans. It spoke through the ship and had the ship signal the trade villages on Earth. It asked for a consensus and then showed the Oankali and construct people of Chkahichdahk what Akin had shown Dehkiaht and Tiikuchahk. (Butler 2000a, 469)

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What Akin and the humans suffered and bore at Phoenix, the resister settlement, as well as what Akin had learned there about humans—their dreams, their hopes, and their fears—reflexively is experienced by everyone at Chkahichdahk. For a moment, the human experience becomes a shared experience of all—made known to all, Oankali and constructs alike, through a bodily transmission. Akin tells the Oankali that they “should at least know [the human resisters] before [they] deny them the assurance that Oankali always claim for themselves” (Butler 2000a, 468). Thus Akin’s own experience of knowing his “other” is passed on, to augment the Oankali vision with that of a human, breaking the binary and self-­ containing message of the Human Contradiction: “Perhaps next time their intelligence would be in balance with their hierarchical behavior, and they would not destroy themselves” (Butler 2000a, 467). It becomes Akin’s mission to give “life to a dead world,” to restore life on a new planet for the resisters, the life they had before Oankali intervention. The task demands total physical and mental investment from Akin. As he transmits his story to the Akjai, Akin perceives through the latter. The trajectory of exchange depends on resonances and adjustment to the pace of the relay. Perceptions of closure, of “people … turning away” (Butler 2000a, 469), make Akin “communicate his confusion” to the Akjai. The Akjai’s momentary failing to perceive Akin’s “wordless questioning” gives way to Akin’s ability to directly “broadcast his bewilderment, letting people know they were experiencing the emotions of a construct child—a child too Human to understand their reactions naturally. A child too Oankali and too near adulthood to disregard” (Butler 2000a, 469–470). The whole process of communication is based on a blurring of identity, where the self and the other virtually merge. This merging may be found in Lord Vishnu’s incarnation as Narasimha (man and lion) in the Bhagavata Purana story of Hiranyakashipu (the demon king) and his son, Prahalada, who was a true devotee of Vishnu. When Hiranyakashipu wanted to kill Prahalada for his devotion to Vishnu, the latter manifested himself as part lion and part man to kill the evil king and bless his son with happiness and prosperity.3 The palimpsestuous identity construct brings together the divine, the human, and the animal as it sets up a unique communicative process. Like Narasimha, who draws on both his human and animal traits, Akin also improvises on the spot to survive and manipulate the situation. His improvisational abilities are put to the test as he tries to convince the Oankali to grant the humans their reproductive rights and freedom. The

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mental agility with which he changes sides and the quick uptake that follows speak of his ability to combine his human and Oankali traits. He rationalizes with the Oankali: “give us the tools we need, and … give the Humans the things they need. They’ll have a new world to settle …. He stopped. He could have gone on, but it was time to stop. If he had not said enough, shown them enough, if he had not guessed accurately about the Human-born, he had failed” (Butler 2000a, 470–471). The success of Akin’s mission lies in his art of convincing, his use of rhetoric, and his sense of timing to make appropriate political decisions. Though resisted by many in Chkahichdahk, Akin’s story prompts “human-born constructs to start to think, start to examine their Human heritage as they had not before” (Butler 2000a, 471). Akin’s story awakens that human other that had been dormant and neglected, that had thus far only been perceived by the Oankali self. The bond that Akin creates with humans is one that the Akjai is able to translate in its bond with Akin, and the message received and given is significant and far-reaching, transforming a discourse of power that stems from the limiting and debilitating vision of the Human Contradiction to a sermon on hope and futurity: “all people who know what it is to end should be allowed to continue if they can continue” (Butler 2000a, 471). Thus, Akin offers himself as “palimpsestuous” harbinger of humanity’s future: His message is one of hope, rehabilitation, and the procreation of human children again on Mars. The fate of humanity wavers between a repetition of their former history of devastation and ruin brought on by their violent, hierarchical tendencies and the possibility that they, following Akin’s example, will be able to overcome these tendencies and embrace difference. Although Adulthood Rites ends in an ambiguous space with the outcome uncertain, the encounter between the two species not only endorses a discourse of hybridity over purity, but privileges unpredictable changes and accidents—the outcome of palimpsestuous encounters. Accidents are often the means by which traditionally accepted notions of genealogy, of a view of the “past as a patient and continuous development” stands challenged “according to its own palimpsestuous logic— [and] how [this logic] reveals that at the ‘heart’ of things is ‘the dissension of other things,’ ‘disparity’” (Dillon 2007, 8). Jodahs, the hybrid protagonist of Imago, the last book of the trilogy, is a genetic accident, the first of a new species. He resembles the ultimate phase of a metamorphosing insect, the result of a process involving, as Cathy Peppers puts it, “the production of offspring different from either of its parents” (1995, 47),

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that is, unlike Akin. Like Akin born of five different parents, Jodahs becomes the new symbol of hope; as Naomi Jacobs points out, Jodahs “mak[es] room for and giv[es] voice to emergent forms of political consciousness and agency that speak to the conditions of the times” (2003, 109). Dystopic possibilities haunt Jodahs, for he is the product of a transgression that happens when the ooloi Nikanj gives in momentarily to his personal desire to have a “same-sex” child (Butler 2000a, 524), “a flawed ooloi … [a] flawed genetic engineer—one who could destroy with a touch” (Butler 2000a, 542). However, at the same time Jodahs’ “regenerative abilities” enable him to repair damage done to others (Butler 2000a, 547). Alongside his power to help others, comes a heightened sense of vulnerability, almost as a price to be paid for his physical appearance and need for proximity with others to learn from them and teach them. Jodahs is totally dependent on others as he comes into his own, not only on the human other but also on the natural world of trees and animals, as he develops webbed feet and his body becomes “green [and] scaly” (Butler 2000a, 610). The unpredictable quality of this new construct, as Jodahs himself recognizes, is that he is “not just a mix of Human and Oankali characteristics, but able to use [his] body in ways that neither Human nor Oankali could. Synergy” (Butler 2000a, 549). This synergy gives him the potential to transcend the mélange of human and alien species as an independent hybrid with a lifestyle of his own. Jodahs shows a distinct preference for creating a new environment with new possibilities. He is bored with the Oankali spaceships because these places contain no surprises for him, for there were “no forests or rivers. No more wildness filled with things [he] had not yet tasted” (Butler 2000a, 608). The situation ultimately leads him to the planting of a seed “deep in the rich soil of the riverbank” that he “brought out of [his] body through [his] right sensory hand” (Butler 2000a, 746). “I felt it,” he recollects, “begin the tiny positioning movements of independent life” (Butler 2000a, 746).

Conclusion Akin and Jodahs, both direct descendants of the alien Oankali and humans, are similar in certain aspects (in that they are hybrids) and yet so vastly different from each other. Akin is the first male construct of the two species, a combination at best of them both, while Jodahs defies all calculated planning on the part of the Oankali as he is the result of an unintended

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mishap. The one constant factor that defines both is that they are part of a process of change, a process of hybridization, palimpsestuous constructs. The most radical change is in the functioning of the ooloi, or rather the strategies by which hybridity thrives. Whereas Nikanj, the ooloi in the first two books of the trilogy, virtually coerces his sexual partners by stimulating their neural systems or manipulating their minds, Jodahs, the “same-­ sex” child of Nikanj in the last book, believes in free love, as he looks ahead at reproductive independence. If the narrative of “hybrid” hope for the survival of the human species had begun with Akin, it reaches a culmination in Jodahs. To echo with Octavia Butler the future of this world lies in the concept of flux, of unpredictability and open-endedness that in its new palimpsestuous structures, her hybrid constructs, need to acknowledge the contribution of other religions and cultures. In this context, my reading brings together inter- and intra-species genetic engineering with its promises of creolized beings that in their palimpsestuous hybridity augurs a better tomorrow.

Notes 1. See her 1991 interview with Kenan. For Butler’s interest in Eastern cultures and religions, also see Allen (2009). 2. The Vedas, composed in Sanskrit, comprise of four texts: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda, and the Atharvaveda. These texts, the oldest extant scriptures of Hinduism, are records of revelations experienced by ancient Hindu thinkers or sages. 3. See Narsimha Avatar (2020).

References Allen, Marlene D. 2009. Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable’ Novels and the ‘Boomerang’ of African American History. Callaloo 32 (4): 1353–1365. Andreolle, Donna Spalding. 2001. Utopias of Old, Solutions for the New Millennium: A Comparative Study of Christian Fundamentalism in M.K. Wren’s A Gift upon the Shore and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Utopian Studies 12 (2): 114–123. Avatar, Narsimha. 2020. The Story of Hiranyakashipu and Prahlada. www.apnisanskriti.com. http://www.apnisanskriti.com/the-­story-­of-­hiranyakashipu-­ and-­prahlada-­narsimha-­avatar-­61. Accessed 1 Sep 2020. Bhaktivedanta, Swami Pravupada. 1989. Bhagavad Gita. Los Angeles: International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

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Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner. ———. 2000a. Lilith’s Brood. New York: Grand. ———. 2000b [1998]. Parable of the Talents. New York: Warner. ———. 2001. NPR Essay: UN Racism Conference. 8 January. https://legacy.npr. org/programs/specials/racism/010830.octaviabutleressay.html. Accessed 1 Sep 2020. Canavan, Gerry. 2016. Octavia Butler. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism and Theory. London: Bloomsbury. Grewe-Volpp, Christa. 2003. Octavia Butler and the Nature/Culture Divide: An Ecofeminist Approach to the Xenogenesis-Trilogy. In Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination, ed. Sylvia Mayer, 149–173. Hamburg: LIT. Hampton, Gregory. 2010. Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires. Lanham: Lexington Books. Herbert, Frank. 1977. Dune. New York: Berkeley Books. hooks, bell. 2002. Touching the Earth. In At Home on this Earth: Two Centuries of U.S.  Women’s Nature Writing, ed. Lorraine Anderson and Thomas S. Edwards, 360–364. Hanover: University Press of New England. Isa Upanishad. 2014. Trans. Pritish Nandy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, Naomi. 2003. Posthuman Bodies and Agency in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis. In Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopic Imagination, ed. Tom Moylan and Rafaella Baccolini, 91–111. New York: Routledge. McCaffery, Larry. 1990. An Interview with Octavia Butler. In Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, ed. Larry McCaffery, 54–70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Miller, Walter. 1986. Canticle for Leibowitz. New York: Perennial. “Octavia Butler: Science Fiction and Science Future.” 2002. YouTube video, 4:03, from a panel discussion at UCLA in 2002, posted by “sonic1267.” 10 March 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgeyVE3NHJM. Accessed 1 Sep 2020. Oxford English Dictionary. 2020. Palimpsest. Online ed. Accessed 1 Sep 2020. Peppers, Cathy. 1995. Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler’s Xenogenesis. Science Fiction Studies 22 (1): 47–62. Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Sanders, Joshunda. 2004. Interview with Octavia Butler. Motion Magazine. 14 March. http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ac04/obutler.html. Accessed 1 Sep 2020. Tucker, Jeffrey. 2007. ‘The Human Contradiction’: Identity and/as Essence in Octavia E.  Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ Trilogy. The Yearbook of English Studies 37 (2): 164–181.

Index1

A ACME, 152–155, 157, 164n39, 164n40, 164n42, 164n43, 164n48 African American literature, 43 African Americans, 11, 14, 25, 41–43, 53n3, 53n4, 58, 60, 63, 75n4, 75n6, 83, 194–196, 199, 203, 206, 213, 214, 217 Anthropology, 13, 171–174, 180–183, 185n12, 186n13 Apartheid, 99–103, 106, 109–113, 115, 117, 119n8 Appadurai, Arjun, 13, 144, 145, 160n4 Archive, 4, 9, 10, 15n2, 21–29, 35, 36, 43, 46, 69, 137 Aronoff, Eric, 172, 173, 184n1 Asian American (literature), 34, 37n3

Asian Americans, 23, 27, 32–36, 37n3 Aslam, Nadeem, 9 The Wasted Vigil, 9 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 192, 203, 208 Barthes, Roland, 6, 213 Benedict, Ruth, 13, 171–183, 184n4, 184n5, 184n6, 184n8 “Myth,” 174, 178–180, 183, 184n5 “Parlor Car—Santa Fe,” 174, 176–180 Benjamin, Walter, 114, 160n6 Bhagavad Gita, 217, 218 Black Atlantic, 10, 41–43, 51, 52, 59 Black Hawk, 61, 63, 75n3 Blaeser, Kimberly, 67

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. D. Kalogeras et al. (eds.), Palimpsests in Ethnic and Postcolonial Literature and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64586-1

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INDEX

Boas, Franz, 171, 172, 177, 181, 185–186n13 Body, 11, 41–53, 82, 112, 113, 119n1, 130, 178, 192, 194, 201, 202, 219, 224 Borders, 7, 13, 35, 123–139 Brand, Dionne, 9 Bridges, 13, 123–139, 198 Butler, Octavia, 14, 213–225 Lilith’s Brood, 14, 213–225 C Castañeda, Quetzil, 2, 3, 14n1 Castillo, Ana, 7 Chicana/os, 7, 15n5, 131 Chicanx, 8 Cities, 7, 12, 62, 64, 83–85, 87, 89, 91, 95, 96, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 112–114, 116, 118, 123, 125, 128, 130, 133, 137, 143–149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 159, 159n2, 160n7, 161n9, 161n13, 161n14, 161n15, 161n16, 162n28, 163n34, 164n39 Cliff, Michelle, 10, 11, 41–53 Abeng, 10, 41, 48, 49 No Telephone to Heaven, 10–11, 41, 48–50 Clifford, James, 181, 182, 185n12 Coetzee, J.M., 7 Foe, 7 Colonies, 27, 58, 96 D Danticat, Edwidge, 9 de Ciudad Real, Antonio, 2, 14n1 Delgadillo, Alicia, 65 Derrida, Jacques, 107, 159n3 Dichotomies, 34, 104, 105, 110, 179

Dillon, Sarah, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 21, 22, 37n1, 43, 50, 51, 82, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 124, 129, 138, 174, 193, 200, 213, 214, 216, 221, 223 intimacy and separation, 9, 22, 214 Dubey, Madhu, 42 DuBois, W.E.B., 25, 26, 28 E Eckstein, Lars, 43, 44, 51, 53n2 Edmondson, Belinda, 50 Environment, 14, 67, 89, 90, 103, 214, 216, 217, 224 Ethnicity, 31, 125, 139, 158 Ethnography, 13, 160n7 F Fabian, Johannes, 176 Fanon, Frantz, 25, 42, 49 Favela, 13, 143–159 Forts, 10, 11, 57–75, 117 Foucault, Michel, 11, 24, 57, 59, 104, 111–113 “Of Other Spaces,” 59 Freud, Sigmund, 82 Fuerst, Saskia, 9 G Gates, Henry Louis, 52, 53, 53n3, 194 Geertz, Clifford, 13, 174, 178 Gender, 14, 47, 158, 192, 206, 219 Genette, Gerard, 3, 4, 6, 9, 42–44, 94, 99, 125, 134, 136, 137, 193 hypotext and hypertext, 3, 9, 43, 44 Ghosh, Amitav, 8 In an Antique Land, 8 Gilroy, Paul, 11, 57, 59

 INDEX 

Glancy, Diane, 11, 58, 60, 64–66, 69–74, 75n7, 76n11, 76n12 Graffiti, 13, 151–155, 157, 163n31, 164n40, 164n43, 164n48 Graham, Shane, 100, 116, 117 Greenblatt, Stephen, 2 H Herstory, 191–209 Heterotopia, 58–60, 62, 64, 74 Historiography, 10, 21–36 hooks, bell, 217 Huang, Hsinya, 75n2 Huyssen, Andreas, 7, 10, 11, 57–60, 69, 74, 75n1, 75n7 Hybridity, 4, 214, 218, 221, 223, 225 Hypertext, 3, 9, 12, 43–45, 52, 88, 99, 136 Hypotext, 3, 9, 12, 43–45, 51, 83, 88, 94, 105, 127 I Intertextual, 4–6, 105, 128, 132, 191, 193, 194, 196–200, 202, 207, 208 Isa Upanishad, 217 J Johannessen, Lene, 4, 5, 10 Jones, Gail, 10, 11, 41–53 Corregidora, 10, 11, 41–53 K Kristeva, Julia, 5, 84, 131, 192, 193, 196, 197, 203, 208 L Ledgers, 11, 65–69, 73, 74 Lejeune, Philippe, 6

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Los Angeles, 10, 12, 13, 96, 123–126, 128–135, 137–139 Lowe, Lisa, 10, 21–36 Intimacies of Four Continents, 10, 21–36 M Madsen, Deborah, 7 Marcus, George E., 160n7 Marseille, 10, 12, 81–96 McKay, Claude, 12, 81, 83, 88–92, 95 Banjo, 12, 83, 88–93 Mead, Margaret, 174, 181–183, 184n5 Memory, 7, 9–11, 15n2, 23, 24, 41–53, 58, 59, 65, 69, 74, 82, 99–118, 126, 129, 131, 132, 134, 137, 140n2, 152, 154, 157, 159 Michaels, Walter Benn, 172, 173, 183 Mignolo, Walter, 143 Migration, 7, 96, 126, 152, 154 Mnemonic, 41–44, 51, 52, 59 Mondal, Anshuman A., 8 Monuments, 12, 58, 99, 100, 102–105, 107, 108, 110–112, 118 Moraga, Cherríe, 7 Morales, Alejandro, 12, 123–139 River of Angels, 12, 123–139 Morrison, Toni, 42, 44, 53n4, 199 Museu de Favela, 152 N Nation, 3, 5, 28, 49, 84, 104, 110, 127, 149 Native Americans, 26, 60, 61, 93, 95, 96, 126, 134, 135 Naylor, Gloria, 14, 42, 191–209 Linden Hills, 14, 191–209 Mama Day, 191, 195, 204 The Women of Brewster Place, 191

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INDEX

O Ocean, 57, 59, 60, 64, 66, 69–73, 90, 129, 130 Ousmane, Sembène, 12, 83, 84, 88, 91–95 Le docker noir, 12, 83, 88, 91–94 P Pagnol, Marcel, 12, 83, 85–89, 94, 95, 97n3 Fanny, 12, 83, 85–87 Palimpsest, 2–14, 15n5, 15n7, 21–23, 27–36, 37n1, 41–53, 57–75, 82–85, 88, 94, 99–118, 123–139, 174, 183, 191–209, 213, 214 Palimpsestuous, 2, 6, 7, 10, 12–14, 21–36, 51, 52, 100, 102, 105, 106, 108, 109, 113, 115, 124, 129, 132, 134–138, 171–183, 193, 213–225 Paratexts, 32, 36, 125, 135–138 Poetry, 13, 32, 33, 91, 171–183, 194 Popescu, Monica, 100, 105, 109 Postcolonial, 2, 4–10, 15n2, 15n4, 15n5, 15n7, 41–45, 48, 53n3, 96, 99–118, 145, 159n3, 181 R Red Atlantic, 60 Relativism, 10, 171–174 Religion, 8–10, 85, 154, 214–217, 225, 225n1 Rhys, Jean, 7 Wide Sargasso Sea, 7 Rio de Janeiro, 10, 12, 13, 143–159 Roth, Henry, 8 Call It Sleep, 8 Rushdie, Salman, 8 The Moor’s Last Sigh, 8

S Salgado, Minoli, 8 Salvage ethnography, 181 Sapir, Edward, 172, 173, 183, 184n5, 186n13 Science fiction, 14, 213, 215–216 Slavery, 11, 25, 26, 28, 43, 45–47, 51–53, 89 Sollors, Werner, 6 Sontag, Susan, 181 South Africa, 12, 99, 102, 104–106, 108, 110, 116 Space, 2, 11–14, 15n3, 23, 36, 45, 57, 59, 60, 69, 74, 76n11, 82, 100, 103–114, 116–118, 119n1, 123, 131, 138, 139, 139n1, 144, 146, 149–151, 160n4, 162n22, 163n34, 176–178, 185n12, 192, 194, 199, 208, 217, 223 Spivak, Gayatri, 51, 145, 149, 158, 159n3, 160n6 Stoler, Ann Laura, 24, 37n4 T Taylor, Diane, 15n2, 23, 24 Tiffin, Helen, 7 Todorov, Tsvetlan, 2 Trauma, 12, 70, 72, 93, 118 V Vizenor, Gerald, 68 Vladislavic, Ivan, 12, 99–118 W Walker, Alice, 42, 195, 204, 208, 209 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 42, 53n1 Warnes, Christopher, 99, 100, 110–112

 INDEX 

Weaver, Jace, 11, 57, 60 Welch, James, 12, 83, 93–96 The Heartsong of Charging Elk, 12, 83, 93–95 Womanism, 192–196, 206 Worley, Vivian Aalborg, 6, 7

Y Yamashita, Karen Tei, 10, 21–36 I-Hotel, 10, 21–36 Z Zabus, Chantal, 7, 8

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