The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings 2014015006, 9781138800168, 9781315755618

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

This book studies the creative discourse of the modern African diaspora by analyzing poems, novels, essays, hip-hop, and dub poetry in the Caribbean, England, Spain, and Colombia, and capturing diasporan movement through mutually intersecting axes of dislocation and relocation, as well as efforts at political group affirmation and settlement, or “location.” Branche’s study connects London’s multimillion-dollar riots of 2011, and its antecedents associated with the West Indian settler community, to the discontent and harrowing conditions facing black immigrants using contemporary Spain as a gateway to Fortress Europe. It links the brutal massacres that target Colombia’s dispossessed and displaced poor—and mainly black—“throwaway” citizens, victims of the drug trade and neoliberal expansionism, to older Caribbean stories that tell of the original spurts of capitalist greed and the colonial cauldron it created, at the center of which lay the slave trade. In revisiting the question of what really has awaited Afro-descendants at the end of the Middle Passage, this volume brings transatlantic slavery, the making of weak postcolonial states that bleed people, and the needle’s eye of racial identification together through a close reading of rappers, black radicals, dub poetry, and novelists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Branche at once demonstrates the existence of an archive of Afro-modern diasporan, discursive production, and just as important, points toward a historically rooted theoretical framework that would contain its liberatory trajectory. Jerome C. Branche is associate professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora SERIES EDITORS: Fassil Demissie, DePaul University; Sandra Jackson, DePaul University; and Abebe Zegeye, University of South Africa

1 Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs Daniel McNeil 2 Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art Charmaine A. Nelson 3 Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora Edited by Regine O. Jackson 4 Critical Perspectives on Afro-Latin American Literature Edited by Antonio D. Tillis

5 Afro-Nordic Landscapes Equality and Race in Northern Europe Edited by Michael McEachrane 6 Pilgrimage Tourism of Diaspora Africans to Ghana Ann Reed 7 The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora Transatlantic Musings Jerome C. Branche

The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora Transatlantic Musings Jerome C. Branche

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of Jerome C. Branche to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Branche, Jerome, author. The poetics and politics of diaspora : transatlantic musings / by Jerome C. Branche. pages cm. — (Routledge studies on African and Black diaspora ; 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literature—Black authors—History and criticism. 2. African diaspora in literature. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. 4. Slavery in literature. 5. Slave trade in literature. 6. Africa—In literature. I. Title. II. Series: Routledge studies on African and Black diaspora ; 7. PN841.B73 2015 809.8896—dc23 2014015006 ISBN: 978-1-138-80016-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75561-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

for my grandfather’s mother Tante Lil for my son Djibril

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Contents

1

2

3

4

5

Figures Preface and Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction: Malungaje: Toward a Poetics of Diaspora

1

Dislocation and Re/membering: Ndongo and D’Aguiar Write the Middle Passage

19

Dislocation and Double Consciousness in Kamau Brathwaite: The Poet as Guinea-Bird

43

Speaking Truth, Speaking Power: Of “Immigrants,” Immanence, and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Street 66”

69

Exile’s Half-Life, Exile’s Dead End: The Conundrum of Relocation in Equatoguinean Literature

97

Marcando Territorio (Marking Territory): Location as Project and Process in Colombia

135

Conclusion

173

Works Cited Index

175 189

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Figures

5.1 5.2 5.3

Dock with container vessel. Photograph by Augusto Gallo. The water’s edge and the local dwellings. Photograph by Augusto Gallo. TCbuen warehousing area. Photograph by Augusto Gallo.

164 166 166

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Preface and Acknowledgments

I grew up on the east bank of the Demerara in Guyana, some three or four miles from the Atlantic coast. Perhaps it was the accumulated weight of the number of times that I was made to identify myself by writing my address as a child. Perhaps it was because, from Georgetown, the capital, we always looked outward to the islands, extending ourselves as West Indians, hardly ever looking around and over our shoulders to the rainforest and the continent behind us. Perhaps it was that that made me feel disoriented the first time I stood at the edge of the Pacific in California. I am from the Atlantic. My maternal great grandmother was from Barbados. Her husband was from Barbados. Beyond that, in an easterly direction, was the Atlantic and our original homes, shrouded in mystery on the African continent. The uncomfortable feeling happened again the second time I went to California. For a second time I felt I was falling off the ledge of my world. At Buenaventura, Colombia, some years ago, as we ate lunch outdoors and watched the Pacific extend to the horizon, what was by then a personal superstition reasserted itself. To get to Buenaventura we had traveled through the Cauca valley from Cali. The vista of the mountains was unmatched. Libardo had come to get me. They had said that “the Dean” of the university at Buenaventura was coming to meet me. The road between Cali and Buenaventura was a part of Colombia’s untamed west, a zona roja (red zone), on account of the FARC and the ongoing guerilla struggle with the government. Libardo was as big as a boxer; some six foot four. As he entered the dining area of the hotel, I thought he might be the Dean’s driver or bodyguard or something. It turned out that it was he who was the Dean. Racism will get you every time. I am not used to dealing with brothers bigger than me. I flashed back to a scene in El Paso, Texas when some African-American males came into the elevator. They were there for a convention of sorts. All big. Suddenly there was no longer anything special about being six foot two and two hundred plus pounds. I was filled with wonder and puzzlement. Diaspora is scatteration. I am sure that is the word Fela Kuti would use if he were to speak of the slave trade and the genetic dispersal of Africans out here in the West. Fela mostly had other things on his mind, though. Nigeria is more than enough.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

That was my first flashback. The second happened as we stood outside Buenaventura’s overloaded La Galería market. It was an old three-storied iron structure with every imaginable tropical fruit and ground provision for sale, as well as the miscellanea of plastic consumer merchandise. Inside it would be cool and dark and a hot homemade market lunch would be served by familiar unknown women whose body language and conversation put you at ease. Outside the heat and the humidity were familiar, too, and so was the melanin that shone in the midday sun as the local people swarmed around us. When at one point I locked eyes with a youth across the street, and tumbled back over time to my own adolescence, it finally dawned on me that this really was just another version of my home market of Stabroek, at Georgetown, where the Demerara meets the Atlantic. So is this the end of the Middle Passage, I asked myself, recalling a phrase from Gordon Rohlehr. Did “the thing” bring us all the way here? I wondered if my earlier Pacific unease was a foreshadowing of this discovery about scatteration. Buenaventura would nag me for three years until I went back. It was not in the original plan to work with people or documents from there. It’s just that there is a pull, sometimes, to the order of things. During lunch with Libardo he spoke of crime in his city as if it was a person, and of the predatory hold it had on the youth, acknowledging that but “for the grace of God” he could be any one of the long-deceased schoolmates who had fallen into the clutches of the drug trade or were recruited by one or the other side in the ongoing civil war roiling beneath the surface of Colombian society. This too was déjà vu, though on a much smaller scale. Guyana had only recently been drawn into the vortex of international narco trafficking. We were still relatively innocent and vulnerable to its inexorable dynamic, of the way it chewed up and spat out those who dared cross its path, whether as suppliers or consumers. Its specter had moved in my old neighborhood back home, and I knew many of the young victims. Their fathers had been men of respect, seamen and boxers and carpenters. Even the old family home had come under threat, prompting my last remaining family members to move on out, in one case as far away as Europe. My father’s people had migrated there since after Emancipation. Diaspora, it seems, is an unending wave. This, then, is a long-winded way of offering my thanks to Libardo Córdoba Rentería for introducing me to Buenaventura and the Black Pacific. I am likewise indebted to Miguel Penilla for showing me around the town, and to the boys of the basketball club for their warm welcome. I owe thanks as well to the members of Marcando Territorio for their time and conversation and for the fervor of their faith that things can be better. In the same spirit I thank Viviana Gamboa of Bogotá for opening some doors that would otherwise be held closed, and to Francisco Flores Bolívar for showing me Chambacú, the way it is now. Similarly I thank Rubén Darío Alvarez for helping me see, through the eyes of his parents, Chambacú, the way it was then.

Preface and Acknowledgments

xiii

In London, at the time of the riots of 2011, I reunited with fellow travelers Kimani Nehusi and Gorden Stuart and enjoyed their conversation and hospitality. Many thanks and much respect also to Linton Kwesi Johnson and to Gus John for their time and conversation and for the example they set. I likewise thank Marcus Rediker for the BBC hookup, and Anthony Wall and the BBC Arena Production Team for their collaboration and generosity. My thanks to Francisco Zamora of Madrid and to Juan Tomás Avila for shining a light on Equatorial Guinea from the perspectives of home and abroad. Thanks as well to Margaret Daniel of Bridgetown, Barbados for rapid retrieval of hard to reach Caribbean bibliography. Multiple thanks also to my loving sister Kim and my brother-in-law Seth Oppong for accompanying me across the Ghanaian countryside. One does not visit the slave castles alone. Finally, thanks most profuse to the Center for Latin American Studies and the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh for their constant support of my research ideas and to the Edwards Fund at the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences for support in indexing.

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Introduction Malungaje: Toward a Poetics of Diaspora

Over the past few decades, the African diaspora as an aspect of the modern Atlantic has come into its own as an independent unit of analysis for scholars of imperial history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and other related disciplines. In this introduction I revisit the question of the theoretical challenge that the African diaspora represents and consider its applicability to black creative writing and discursive activism in the context of the broader postcolonial and globalized racial regimen. It bears emphasizing that the study of the African diaspora as an academic endeavor, as others have noted, is an inevitably ongoing and unfinished project, on account of its complexity, its political connotations, its geocultural expanse, and its historical depth. One might fruitfully surmise, however, that it is in relation to the modern nation-state (both during and after slavery), that the question of the population of dispersed Africans and their descendants across the geopolitical borders of the modern Atlantic comes into sharpest focus, particularly on account of the recurring phenomenon of the sociopolitical marginalization and economic disadvantage of large sectors of this population in its respective national contexts. This is so especially to the extent that we take into account the conditions of colonial and capitalist production, and the dominance of racial whiteness in the formation of particular states in which Afro-descendants were incorporated, and where they continue to be subordinated, and in the world system at large. If ongoing black marginalization and invisibility invoke the epistemic gap between slave and citizen in former New World colonies and their erstwhile metropoles, it is also a measure of the dystopia that characterizes both conditions, slavery and marginalization, notwithstanding the notions of “progress” that purport to attend the historical transition from one situation to another within nationalist rhetoric(s). This marginalization likewise highlights the failure of liberal projects of multiculturalism and “cultural diversity” within the states in question as they interpellate and seek to integrate their black populations today, even as the statist “schizophrenia” (Wallerstein 1997, 99) that such liberal projects reveal as their contradictions vis-à-vis these populations becomes more evident.

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Diaspora’s defining tension involves at once a mournful backward gaze to a historical time and place of rupture and loss, and a utopian forward projection to recuperation and wholeness (Clifford 1997). For most Afrodescendants this backward glance would be to the old continent as primary epistemic referent, or alternatively, to any of the many post-African (postcolonial) locations where they came to reside over time. Whereas this “looking backward” might understandably be seen as a spontaneous or affective impulse, albeit one that incurs the risk of essentialism and stasis, it is arguably a necessary one for recuperation in all its multidimensionality to take place (Hall 1997a, Wallerstein 1997). Indeed, it is through a wholesome engagement with the past, as part of the formidable theoretical undertaking of diaspora as recuperation, that a poeticist and analytical discursivity with what Paget Henry calls “action-orienting potential” (2000, 104) might be produced, and it is this discursivity that I am concerned primarily with here. An important recent intervention by Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelly sees the African diaspora as both a process, for its translocal and transgenerational continuity, and a condition, for its location within globalized hierarchies of race and gender. This observation is significant. So too is these scholars’ accompanying call for a coherent articulation of the linkages that constitute diaspora (Patterson and Kelly 2000). Articulating diaspora’s linkages might predictably achieve at least two things. It would account for the phenomenon on the synchronic as well as the diachronic planes, illuminating its lateral, geocultural (coeval) dimensions, as well as its unavoidable concern with the question of origins and return. The ensuing narrative would, in other words, describe diasporan cultural production and political struggle across time and space, even as it gave an account of its insertion in and its ongoing critique of the modern West and Occidentalism. In this regard the study by Brent Hayes Edwards of Modernist Paris in which thousands of African, Caribbean, and African-American soldiers, musicians, workers, and intellectuals created a black cosmopolis through varying registers of translingual engagement, collaboration, and community making is exemplary. Hayes Edwards’ account of postwar Paris in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism simultaneously assumes both a theoretical dimension and a concrete one, and provides an important instantiation of diaspora studies on the synchronic plane. By highlighting a historically constituted conglomeration, Paris between 1920 and 1940, in this way, he makes visible a prototypical platform for the kind of group appellation and political organization that he feels should characterize diaspora activism and study. It is also significant that this study deviates from what Hayes Edwards has referred to elsewhere as the “U.S.- and English centered model of black identity on the complex experiences of populations of African descent” (2000, 47). The Anglo-French intercourse to which Hayes Edwards calls our attention in the study of diaspora and the subsequent wide-ranging impact of

Introduction

3

Negritude beyond its Parisian origin and its temporal markers are of doubtless importance. So too is Agustín Lao Montes’ subsequent advocacy of an Afro-Hispanic dimension to the field, to the currency of black struggle in South America (Esmeraldas in Ecuador, the Colombian Chocó region, etcetera), and his genealogical projection to seventeenth-century Spanish Renaissance literato Juan Latino (2000, 2007). Specifically “Afro-Latin” “practice” of diaspora, per Hayes Edwards, besides, is notably articulated by way of the famous encounters of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and Afro-American poet Langston Hughes in the latter 1920s, and their vigorous efforts to promote each other’s work in their respective linguistic communities. The latter can itself be seen as an extension of the broader Modernist moment whose Parisian expression is the subject of Hayes Edwards’ research. It might be pertinent to add, in this regard, that the internationalist inflections of black journalism and public intellectualism (practiced by both Hughes and Guillén),1 have characterized Afro-Hispanic writers throughout the twentieth century, from Brazil’s José Correia Leite in 1920s São Paulo to Ecuador’s Juan Montaño Escobar and Juan García in Quito at the turn of the twenty-first century.2 Similarly, a translocal and diasporan sensibility constitutes an important facet of Afro-Latino poets and prose writers from at least the post-Negrista period, 1940 onward, from such diverse locations as Colombia, Uruguay, Cuba, Ecuador, Panama, and Brazil. Their efficacy and import is to be seen in the fact that their work continues to be the subject of study for new generations of Afro-Hispanic literary and cultural critics.3 To the degree, however, that a transhistoric and transatlantic discursive diasporan bridge might be erected to reach all the way back to Juan Latino in seventeenth-century Spain to highlight the condition of diaspora, as Lao Montes proposes, it might be appropriate to explore Afro-diasporic discursivity and consciousness in the intervening period, and thereby tease out a more substantive archeology of the process, one that bears in mind the inescapable polyphonic and multilingual dimension to diaspora, as well as its historical determinants. It turns out that the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), where “negritude rose for the first time,” according to Aimé Césaire’s most famous poem,4 emerges as a focal point that connects the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in this regard. If the network of orality and communication that spread the word of insurgency around the “masterless” Caribbean and the black Atlantic at the moment of the most explosive and successful expression of black liberation struggle did so as a vernacular “unlettered” venture (Julius Scott), it would not be until the nineteenth century that an identifiably (belles) lettristic register would emerge to articulate the black cosmopolitan liberationist ethos through the writings of the likes of Martin Delaney of the United States, or of Placido de la Concepción Valdés of Cuba.5 The first half of the twentieth century would in turn provide a much wider translingual Afro-Atlantic corpus in the Harlem Renaissance, Negritude, and Negrismo. All of this suggests that the light that has been shone on nineteenth- and

4

The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

eighteenth-century dimensions of modern Afro-diasporic discursivity and consciousness by scholars like Julius Scott and Ifeoma Nwankwo allows us to more fruitfully ponder the question posed by Herman Bennet as to how, when, why, and under what conditions did slavery and racial oppression produce a “black consciousness.”6 Answering Bennet would allow a synthetic hypothetical response to the challenge of diaspora periodization as historical condition and ongoing process. For the present purposes it would also address the connection between consciousness and discourse. This said, we might now turn to the question of the archeology of Afrodiasporic discourse and interpellation and consider therefrom the matter of how a politically charged poetics of liberation might be imagined as a feature of its inevitable political decolonial challenge.

OF MALUNGAJE Among the Bantu peoples of Central and East Africa, particularly among the speakers of Kikongo, Umbundu, and Kimbundu, there exists a word/ concept in which at least three ideas intersect and combine depending on place and time coordinates. The ideas are (i) of kinship or brotherhood/ sisterhood, (ii) of a big canoe, and (iii), of misfortune. The word that brings these concepts together is malungo, and for the Bantu speakers who made the Middle Passage, it meant shipmate. In colonial Brazil, the term meu malungo referred to “my comrade-with-whom-I-shared-the-misfortune-ofthe-big-canoe-that-crossed-the-ocean.”7 Because the notion of the ocean (kalunga in Bakongo, another Bantu tongue) is embedded in the idea of a voyage in a big boat, and also refers to the line of demarcation between life and death, malungo, for Bantu speakers in Africa, also referred to the “traveler,” paraphrasing Robert Slenes, “on the sea of death who came back to the land of the living.”8 Indeed, considering the numerical preponderance of Bantu speakers among the enslaved in colonial Brazil, the fact that they shared a mixed Afro-Portuguese lingua franca as well as other complex cultural antecedents that cohered into new forms of sociability and outlook has prompted Slenes also to advance the idea of a Bantu proto-nation in Brazil before independence. Robert Walsh, a British travel writer, confirms the valency of the term in his chronicle Notices from Brazil in 1828 and 1829, and stresses its affective and consociative dimension. Of the malungos he writes: Notwithstanding the antipathies which the different tribes bring with them from their own country, and the petty feuds they excite in Brazil, cherished and promoted by the whites, there is often a bond which connects them as firmly as if they had belonged all to the same race, and that is a community of misery in the ships in which they are brought over. The people so united by this temporary association, are called

Introduction

5

Mallungos; they continue attached to each other ever after, and when separated, are quite rejoiced if they meet again. (II. 184 emphasis added) The joy that Walsh notes on the occasion of malungo reunions and the shared misery that produced their community indicate that these re-encounters were both a time of happiness and of sadness and reminiscing. Underlying malungo meetings would be the awareness among its interlocutors of being survivors and the knowledge that they had twice beaten the odds in overcoming the death-dealing conditions of captivity. First they had survived, not only the slave ship with its overcrowding, its infectious diseases, and its high mortality rate, but also, in many cases, the insalubrious slave factories on the West African coast and the harrowing overland trip to get there.9 In the crucible of the slave ship where this community of suffering and solidarity had been forged, its members would have witnessed others of their company grow sick and die from disease and punishment, or simply go insane from the magnitude of the trauma of their uprooting and confinement. Some of them would have been part of the many unsuccessful spontaneous or planned uprisings, and had either been among the casualties of the savage reprisals by the slave ship captain and crew or forced to watch these reprisals and the subsequent tossing overboard of the cadavers of their former comrades. They might have contemplated suicide like many actually did or, more likely than not, participated in the collective lamentations brought on by the mind-numbing aspects of the odyssey of the Middle Passage. Transatlantic malungos belonged to a community that, in a word, had been cemented over the course of an experience that had pushed their physical and psychological resources to their farthest limits and that could stretch out to as long as eight months between provisioning on the West African coast and the Atlantic crossing.10 Furthermore, they had again made it through the early days while awaiting purchase when many of their slave ship companions succumbed to ailments previously contracted either on board or in the unsanitary environment in the slave warehouses. Effectively, one of the most riveting sights awaiting new arrivals at Rio’s slave market, the Valongo, was the nearby burial ground for slaves. These slave dead, we are told, were buried only once a week and “mountains of semi-decomposed bodies” could be seen in the middle of the cemetery from the Valongo slave market (Karasch 1987, 39). The slave market itself, we note, would also have marked another crossroads in the lives of the captive individuals. It further dispersed them into the regimen of forced labor, whose conditions, depending on where they were placed in the colonial economy, often meant that they had a mere five to seven years left to live. One can appreciate, therefore, the happiness of former shipmates on a chance meeting, as well as the potential poignancy of such encounters. The implicit political dimension to a landed malungo “community” is particularly noteworthy in terms of the black “proto-nation” in Brazil to

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which Slenes has referred. My own interest in it has to do with the ideas of intersubjectivity, mutual acknowledgment, and subaltern solidarity inherent to the term, particularly in the context of black conscription into a system of production based on oppression and organized around an ideology of black inferiority and white superiority. Effectively, Slenes has pointed to what for him was a sort of “pan-Bantu” collective consciousness underlying slave conspiracies in 1847 and 1848, in the Rio de Janeiro province of Vassouras, and in the Paraíba Valley respectively, stressing, as did MichelRolph Troulliot in the case of the Haitian revolution, that the colonial class had no sense of the spirit of communicability and identity around which their laboring underlings cohered and conspired.11 Walsh had likewise taken note of the contemporary manifestations of slave insurgency, again in spite of the broad ethnic diversity of the imported Africans and the white colonial class’s continual fomentation of inter-ethnic differences and differences along gender and caste lines. It is, “particularly the case at Bahia and Pernambuco,” he declared, “where almost all the negroes [felt] an identity of interests; and here several conspiracies have been formed, and risings attempted” (1831, II.182). The phenomenon that Walsh observed was by no means unique to Brazil. In fact malungo “attachment” was a phenomenon observed in various other places in the Americas. Structured as it was on an extended family cultural template and the additive nature of African communities, this created and fictive kinship was known by its “French” cognate as malongue in Trinidad, batiment in Haiti, and simply “shipmate” in Jamaica. In Suriname a “cognate” of shipmate, sippi or sibi, designated it in the vernacular as did the term carabela in Cuba.12 Malungo attachment, according to all sources, turned out to be an important principle of group resistance to oppression, as indicated earlier, as well as of social organization. Its significance has been attested to, in one form or another, well into the twentieth century. Indeed, black novelists from disparate diasporan locations, from Jamaica to Brazil, offer evidence of the continued resonance of the concept in their relevant vernacular cultures as recently as the latter twentieth century.13 In terms of the history of the diaspora, the impulse to insurgency and resistance aboard the slave ship itself, outlined earlier, was immediately evident in the attempts to create landed maroon communities of difference in defiance of enslavement and racialized persecution, as manifested as early as 1503 on Hispaniola, the first New World colony. In 1545, scant decades later, an expedition from Cartagena to Tolú in Colombia, to exterminate a commune of recent runaways, would report on its return that it had not only subdued the ladino Spanish and Portuguese fugitives, but had indeed found a community of maroons that included individuals from as far away as Panama and Tierra Firme. This maroon community or palenque, in other words, was one that had been in existence since 1525, and had evidently welcomed the newcomers.14 The example three hundred years later at Floresta de Catucá in Pernambuco, Brazil, of a maroon community that was

Introduction

7

finally overcome in 1835 and whose leaders bore the title, significantly, of Malunguinho, effectively links the idea of slave ship group solidarity and the continuity among dispersed Africans and their descendants, in terms of their desire for and praxis of liberation during the colonial period.15 Considering all of these factors, it seems appropriate to advance the idea of the association and affect of the malungos, which I shall call malungaje, following Hispanic morphology, as a sort of first principle for the discursive imaginary of the diaspora, or as a broad (counterdiscursive) foundational trope for black cultural and identitarian politics and political action. A key component of this idea is its linkage with slave ship resistance culture and the subsequent liberatory impulse of maroonage. Malungaje’s valency is projected less in terms of the differences and commonalities in black cultural tradition in the Americas as these have been studied by anthropologists, or as a function of these communities’ purported Africanist “authenticity,” and more in terms of the broader systemic determinants that have produced the Afro-modern life world and aspirations in their transgenerational and translocal registers and instantiations. In other words, shifting focus from the structural preoccupations of anthropology to the terrain primarily of narrative and consciousness allows us to highlight the will to community and survivalism along a continuum of past, present, and future for these populations, particularly to the degree that the field of discourse allows for the evocation of a horizon open to intervention and transformation.16 It also allows us to hint at the beginnings of a post-African, post-ethnic sense of identity among captive Africans on their way to the New World, per Bennet’s question raised earlier. I find the implicit political dimension particularly suggestive not only in terms of a hypothetical collective generated by the slave ship as colonial instrument, but also as a landed “community” forged historically in the crucible of coloniality. Its hypothetical importance would stand as a counterweight to colonialism’s divide and rule ethic, to “colorism,” endoracism, and black self-deprecation, all aspects of the race and power continuum. If we consider that the ship that brought any given group or pair of malungos could have been any one of the hundreds that crossed the Middle Passage, just as the Valongo slave market in Rio could have been any one of the dozens of slave markets in the New World, it would make malungaje, as recognition and as resistance, transnational in scope, or rather “outernational,” as Paul Gilroy’s appropriation of Rasta morpho-syntax might suggest. As a counterideology to the psychic annihilation of the Middle Passage and the social death of slavery (every chance reunion of malungos implies the countless undocumentable separations wrought by the arriving slave ship),17 it becomes therefore an affirmation of life and a symbol of survivalism. The concept of the outernational acquires its relevance and force because it transgresses and transcends the homogenized strictures of the national state, geopolitically bounded as it is, enabling thereby a sort of horizontalist diasporan vernacular, which is in turn strengthened by the numerical

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

valency of diaspora’s ever-mobile population with its memories of and allegiances to other places of origin. The duration of the slave trade, as long as three hundred years in some locations, necessarily makes malungaje also, with its more or less obvious implications for the post-slavery era and even the present, a transhistorical concept, particularly bearing in mind black protagonism in the antislavery and anticolonial struggles and in the antisystemic movements that define the struggle for democracy and justice worldwide.18 Malungaje likewise interpellates its subjects as “conscripts” of the national state, especially considering their forced input into colonial economies, the tensions attendant on their integration to full rights of citizenship at the attainment of independence, and the double consciousness imposed on black subjectivity in the broader context of a racialized modernity.19

AN AFRO-DIASPORIC UR-TEXT Richard Price’s recuperation, as anthropologist, of Saramaka group history and worldview opens a window on maroonage, through their foundational narrative “First Time,” as coeval point of departure for a consideration of the phenomenology of diaspora, especially to the degree that it represents a continued rejection of or resistance to captivity and subordination as exemplified in slave ship revolts, as well as the construction of a post-African episteme as diasporan subjects confront the realities of their transplantation. In thinking of the First Time of the Saramaka, I stress the text’s functionality as a creative preservation of a particular group memory, and the ideological implications deriving therefrom, over and against the manner and method of its narrative “reconstruction” by the anthropologist as a purportedly “objective” representation of a particular series of discrete historical events.20 The Saramaka, like their neighbors the Njuka and the four other groups of so-called Bush Negroes in the Suriname rain forest, originated from various bands of fugitives from slavery, who conquered their legal and geopolitical autonomy within the borders of the former Dutch colony. They maintained it for some three hundred years. Their remarkableness is noteworthy considering the parallel historical existence of hundreds of other maroon groups across the Americas, whose existence was of much shorter duration or who evinced over time greater levels of integration into the proto-national and national states that surrounded them. Saramaka autonomy, as well as their sense of alterity vis-à-vis the colony and the emerging national state, and a coherent worldview and sense of history afford them a powerful claim to uniqueness within the diaspora. While Saramaka survival, like that of other maroon groups, was premised in part on the degree to which they successfully evolved a guerilla ethic and praxis as an organizational and quotidian norm, their claim to our attention in this discussion, relative to other groups, is due largely to the fact that their survivalist ethic and praxis seems more subject to recuperation on

Introduction

9

account of the linguistic vehicle that houses it, the “First Time” narrative, hence my reference to their oral tradition and its account of maroon experience as paradigmatic ur-text of the phenomenon. Comparable maroon groupings, say the palenqueros of San Basilio, in Colombia, the Garifuna of Honduras, the Jamaica Maroons, or the many extant Brazilian quilombos, have come to be sufficiently integrated in dominant national culture, both geographically and socioeconomically, for time and translocal intercourse to have eroded their original maroon frame of reference.21 A comparable “narrative of origins” does not seem to have survived among them either.22 This is not to suggest by any means, that these populations and their cultural practices no longer offer insights into the past or into the torturous transition to the present; quite the contrary. It is to be noted, however, that it is only in recent decades that violent incursions on Saramaka lands in the name of capital and of “development” have significantly disrupted a long-held period of independence, historically ratified by legal treaty since 1762. Indeed, it is the statist incursion that has served to highlight the importance of the foundational story of the Saramaka. The flooding in the 1960s of half of Saramaka territory to produce cheap electricity for Alcoa’s aluminum smelter, further state-sanctioned incursions for natural resources in the name of modernization, and a brutally unequal confrontation with the government have threatened to complete for them too the fate suffered by most maroon territories in the Americas since the beginning of transatlantic slavery.23 To the degree that the thrust to expropriate their lands and the resources therein, and to homogenize the Bush Negroes as part of the broader Surinamese national polity, destabilizes their structures of autonomy, these incursions must be seen as a reprise of unhappy historical antecedents. To be sure, it is to the epic hundred-year war against re-enslavement waged by their ancestors, and the Great Peace signed at Sentéa in 1762, retained in the First Time narrative, which Saramaka leaders and clanspeople have turned for inspiration in confronting the current as well as past crises. For the Saramaka, the temporal marker of the 1762 ceremony at Sentéa effectively divides Saramaka historical time into a “before” of enslavement and persecution and an “after” of peace and autonomy, with the period “before” being referred to ceremoniously as First Time. In this First Time knowledge is located the source of a worldview that is grounded in the opposition of freedom versus slavery for the Saramaka. In cognitive, chronological terms it represents the foundational century of flight, (re)grouping, and settlement during which varying numbers of fugitives organized to confront and overcome the formidable challenges of a hostile and alien terrain and to defend themselves, at great cost, from the colonial military expeditions aimed at their recapture or elimination.24 The importance of First Time knowledge is seen in the diligence with which its memories are preserved by the historians of the clan, and the reverence and awe that is accorded its symbols, first among which is the shrine to the Old Time

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

People, the Awónênge, who “heard the guns of war” (Price 1983, 5). The latter armed conflict, of course, would have been a constant in their existential matrix of flight, confrontation, and settlement. First Time, as their primary researcher explains, thus constitutes the “fountainhead” of their collective identity, knowledge of which constitutes the “true root” of what it means to be Saramaka (Price 1983, 6). A brief examination of the First Time narrative reveals that owing to its fundamentally oral character, it is neither linear nor unitary in its form, but fragmentary and dispersed among various media and expressed in a number of different registers. Its content is found in proverbs, commemorative place names, verbal maps, personal epithets and clichés, songs, and drum and horn slogans. These trace, among other things, the history of the group’s territorial dispersal away from the Surinamese slave coast, their confrontation with the rivers, rapids, and other perils of the unknown rain forest, epic battles with the colonial militia, clan genealogies, issues regarding land rights, inter-clan politics, and so on. Perhaps the core of First Time philosophy is associated with the sacred ancestral shrine to which they repair in times of collective crisis and the fragments of lore and philosophy they hand down over the generations to fortify their spirits forged in the crushing confrontation with the forces of colonialism and slavery. Price reproduces the dedication inscribed . . . “These people who didn’t live to see the Peace,” it states, “they must not be jealous. Their hearts must not be angry. There is no help for it. When the time is right, we shall get still more freedom. Let them not look at what they have missed. Let us and them be on one side together, these First-Time people” (1983, n.p.). It is in this homage, reverence, and gratitude to the ancestors for their dreams deferred, the prophecy and passion for “still more freedom,” and the tenacious hold on a creed that provides a prism for interpreting and confronting a world of continued oppression that I see the value of Saramaka First Time narrative as a potential Ur-text of Afro-American diaspora. This particular focus on the Saramaka text brings into attention the group’s contribution to Afro-modern discourses of liberty, especially to the degree that it antecedes the lettered tradition that has allowed for the (delayed) consecration of the numerous U.S. American slave narratives, of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critiques of the caliber of that of Quobna Cugoano, or Oladuah Equiano, or the aforementioned Martin Delaney and Plácido de la Concepción Valdés. In terms of broad Afro-American discursivity, First Time claims an archeological position vis-à-vis a larger putative canon or archive of diasporan utterances and textualities, whether these are constituted in the aforementioned slave narratives, in letters, newspapers, or in more recent creative writing endeavors. Most significantly, it potentially represents a quality of liberationist thinking that stands in critical counterpoint to the exclusionary freedoms of modernity and Enlightenment. It offers as well a point of departure for recuperation and memory, while at the same time providing an ethical template for the critical appreciation

Introduction

11

of this creative catalog. Saramaka First time rhetoric as a way of saying “never again” (Price 1983, 11) also has evident diasporan implications in that it is derived from and speaks to a sensibility of malungaje or matihood, to use a Surinamese and regional vernacular to which I return. A consideration of the ideology of First Time in terms of a diasporan prototext allows us to propose malungaje in its solidarian and political content not only in racial terms, but also in transracial ones as well. That is to say that whereas the racialized ideology of modern Atlantic slavery pounced on black Africans as its primary victims, the massive historical task that is required to undo its deleterious cumulative effect will outweigh by far the potentialities of any narrow particular polity. Indeed, transracial coalition is assumed as a crucial element in the prophetic trajectory of antiracist struggle espoused by Cornel West some time ago in his seminal text Race Matters.25 What is important is to underscore the significance of the transracial stance outside of white chauvinist history, especially regarding the antislavery movement, on the one hand, but also outside of Black Nationalist revisionist accounts of the contemporary period that might have a blind spot for progressive white contributions to black emancipation, on the other. First Time textuality itself provides an example of this principle. It is there in its transition from a primarily oral narrative to a scribal form, via the intervention of the anthropologist whose position taking as a knowledge producer seeks to disalign itself from the knowledge/power matrix of Western colonial and neocolonial domination that so often defined the discipline. Here we note the terms of solidarity and mutual respect under which anthropologist Richard Price was awarded the privilege, by the Saramaka, in 1978, of putting disparate fragments together of First Time history into one (printed) text, and his recognition of their “authorship” and cultural ownership of the narrative with the explicit intent of preserving and vindicating (without replacing or displacing) Saramaka arts of memory and its oral manifestations (1983, 22–25). The acceptance by the Saramaka of the outsider’s presence and the action of the latter in translating the narrative into the print medium goes beyond the symbolic. In a move that is reminiscent of Malê insurgents who took fragments of the Koran into battle in Rio de Janeiro in their 1835 antislavery uprising, this acceptance is also graphically manifested in the fact that the Saramaka took copies of this compendium of clan history and ideology into battle (First Time history in book form) in their recent armed confrontation with the Surinamese state.26 Again, Price’s physical involvement as an expert witness for the Bush Negro community when some of them sued the Surinam government for reparations arising out of civil rights abuses associated with the civil war speaks for itself.27 If on the inside of the clan the transfer of iconic First Time knowledge among and across generations is important, the wider testimonial value of this transfer is clearly vital also. It goes beyond its imputed academic value as “anthropological fieldwork,” to the degree that its counterinstitutional and

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

emancipatory intent and content is affirmed in the real world outside of academe. That the value of the First Time narrative to the diasporic and the broader community was made manifest by way of its conversion to the medium of print seems but a further exemplification of a fundamentally hybrid diasporan culture. This is so notwithstanding the extended isolation of Bush Negroes or the claims to authentic Afro-derived “otherness” that their isolation might prompt. In Sranan Tongo or Taki Taki, the Surinamese vernacular that the Saramaka speak, we recall that the term mati, although a synonym of sippi or “shipmate,” allows for a difference in meaning that provides an important distinction in the theorization of a “transracial” extension to malungo politics. It allows for an intersection of racial solidarity, via sippi, with non-raced identification and action via matihood, that is, of the racial and the transracial. It thus explains the terms of matihood under which a Price might be incorporated into Saramaka struggle. Taki Taki language itself is a New World hybrid. It came into being during the seventeenth century out of the consociation of enslaved Africans owned by the English and their counterparts owned by the Dutch, who might have already had an Afro-Portuguese pidgin antecedent. Most of the English planters would leave the sixteen-year-old colony they had established, turning it over to Dutch rule in 1667.28 Mati (or matty) reflects this hybrid etymological indeterminacy in that its use is perfectly congruent with the English mate/matey, and with the Berbice Dutch etymon maatje, which, like mate/matey, also denotes a close friend.29 In the final analysis, if malungaje came to birth on the slave ship, that ubiquitous machine of modernity, it is important to recall that the white sailors too, class differences aside, were shipmates of the African captives. Their physical degradation through disease and their abandonment by their erstwhile captains in so many of the New World slave ports offers the best proof of their dispensability to the larger capitalist enterprise. Marcus Rediker recounts the poignant scenes of the rescue of broken and indigent white former slave ship sailors by their former captives in colonial Atlantic ports, who on many occasions offered them solace by way of food or medical attention, or rescued their humanity by offering the ritual and a place of burial on their deaths (2007, 351–352). This particular dialectic reminds us of the ultimate importance of a transracial politics of liberation.30 In The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora: Transatlantic Musings, I offer an account of potential elements of an Afro-modern discursive archive, through the work of select black writers and poets whose writing follows and confirms three intersecting axes of the diasporan experience. My study begins with the literary recreation of the initial scenario of forced exodus into slavery and then turns its attention to works concerned with the postcolonial dispersal of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In relation to the latter, I pay attention to writing that concerns the struggles

Introduction

13

by Afro-descendants to claim a home space, whether as migrants, in the case of West Indians in England or Equatoguineans in Spain, or as nationals, as in the case of Colombia, or even as remigrants in the case of exiles or former exiles from Equatorial Guinea. I refer to these intersecting cycles respectively as the narrative of dislocation, of relocation, and of location. This parameter for my reading of black diasporan literature is loosely based on the insights of Caribbean historian, poet, and cultural critic Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite’s first trilogy The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1967) is premised on a localized interpretation of slavery based on the premodern Akan migration westward across the Sahara to the African coastlands, from which the modern encounter with the West ensued, and which continued in the triangular trade, with its millions of captive subjects, and with the movement of their descendants, many of whom, in the post-Emancipation generations, go to the colonial centers or to other places in search of a better life. Brathwaite’s applied notion of diaspora, I suggest, acquires relevance beyond the poet’s initial frame of reference. So too does his inquiry into and celebration of folk subjectivity and language in his native Caribbean colonial and post-Emancipation environment, his defense of African cultural premises in his projections of creolization, his awareness of double consciousness as a constant in the Black Atlantic culture, and his critique of the failings of postindependence governance. In the Poetics and Politics of Diaspora I study the politics of the transatlantic quotidian, of history, and of the state, articulated through a multigenre poetics that holds this politics, in all its harshness, as muse. Chapter 1 points out the relative paucity of stories that recreate the Middle Passage experience, that is, stories of dislocation, and ponders over why this “foundational” chapter in modern Atlantic history has received such little attention by creative writers on either side of the Atlantic. I offer close readings of Equatoguinean Donato Ndongo’s short story “The Crossing” (“La travesía,” 1977) and of a novel by GuyaneseBritish writer Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), in this regard, stressing the ethico-didactic intentions of both writers and their interest in paying literary homage to the victims of this vast movement of people. I also emphasize the importance of the fact that in his novel D’Aguiar is recreating a historical incident of the highest symbolic relevance to diasporan memory, that of the jettisoning of live cargo by the ships’ captains, in this case, that of the slaver Zong in 1781. While Ndongo’s unnamed main character does not survive the crossing, D’Aguiar’s Mintah does. I highlight the importance of her resistance and display of malunga solidarity both on board ship and subsequently as a worker on the Underground Railroad, and her literacy and multilingualism as consonant with the creation of the colonial contact zone and the subsequent transatlantic order of modernity. The second chapter continues the theme of dislocation, but here it applies less to the physical and cultural rupture with Africa, and more to that of a

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

colonial and postcolonial scenario in which the dominant culture has, over the intervening centuries, continually displaced the African premise following its will to power. The kind of healthy recuperation of this premise, by way of its identification and vindication within the larger process of the dynamic of cultural give and take in the region, is at the heart of Brathwaite’s theory of creolization, and here his works come under analysis. In discussing the poet’s creative deployment of the figure of the landed African captives, referred to disparagingly as Guinea-birds, and their evolving “ex-African” culture, I seek to establish an epistemic linkage with the previously met characters of the Middle Passage narratives. The Guinea-bird though, has a much broader cultural and rhetorical significance in the context of the book. S/he represents religion, language, cultural memory and resistance to deculturation, racial dignity and creativity, and most important, given the colonial historical matrix, a utopian trajectory toward social justice. Several of Brathwaite’s poems give expression to these values. I examine them through his adaptation of the Shakespearean characters of Caliban and Sycorax in The Tempest, who assume Guinea-bird characteristics and a vindicatory and countercultural discursivity as we see in the poems “Hex,” “Occident,” “Lix,” and “Nametracks, in his collection Mother Poem. Tracing the cultural lineage of the “ex-Africans” also leads to Rastafarian culture, particularly as it undergirded the vernacular renaissance that surfaced in the immediate postindependence period of the 1960s and 1970s in the West Indies. Here Brathwaite’s elegy to Guyanese revolutionary and historian Walter Rodney provides the poet an opportunity to project an embodiment of what he suggestively terms the alter/Native for the Caribbean; that is, an informed subjectivity grounded in the positive values offered by African cultural antecedents, inspired by the quest for dignity inherent to the antislavery enterprise, and imbued with the transcultural elements implied by the region’s varied demography. In this chapter dislocation speaks to the challenge of re/creating wholeness out of a fragmented history and the ongoing threat of the ever present hemispheric and global hegemonic currents. The third chapter takes the urban riots of August 2011 in England as its point of departure. The riots were triggered by the police killing of Mark Duggan, an unarmed black suspect, without due process. This chapter’s primary focus is on the documentary content of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry over the preceding thirty-five years, as he covered the crises experienced by West Indian settlers in England’s unwelcoming environment. It is the first of the book’s two chapters on twentieth-century relocation. I show, in spite of the broad gains in acceptability for this population, and the often overblown claims associated with the rhetoric of a multicultural Britain, that extrajudicial killings, the elimination of suspects while in police custody, and the racially asymmetrical and egregious practice of “stop and search” remain issues of grave concern to the black British population, along with disproportionately high indices of unemployment. The two main poems analyzed in this chapter, “Street 66” (1975) and “Liesense fi Kill”

Introduction

15

(2000), to the degree that they respond to police force and may be associated with the “retaliatory” riots and the civil rights activism in which the poet was also involved, confirm Johnson’s original ambitions as documentarian and his eventual status as cultural and political “spokesperson” for his generation. Although Johnson’s Mi Revalueshanary Fren was issued as a Penguin Classic in 2002, usually a canonizing gesture on the part of mainstream literary culture in England, and the poet himself has stressed his interest in having his work recognized primarily in terms of its value as “pure poetry,” the chapter proposes that the multigenre nature of his work is equally important to establishing its ultimate value. This argument thus recognizes the reggae cultural subtext to Johnson’s oeuvre and the Jamaican and Caribbean vernacular values that are associated with it, particularly the Rastafarian ethos and the complex of word/sound/power related to Rastafarian ritual chanting. The chapter makes liberal use of Stuart Hall’s disquisition on the alliance of the political elite and of the dominant news media in the creation of a “moral panic” in the face of underclass mass action, and the extent to which the authoritarian consensus thereby created facilitates the imposition of stricter social controls and overlooks in the process the basic social contradictions that produce an angry and riotous underclass, all of which were glaringly evinced in the August 2011 riots. Chapter 4 takes another instance of relocation as its subject. In this case it concerns the movement of Equatoguineans to Spain, the former colonial center of the country that used to be Spanish Guinea, stressing the specificity of this phenomenon in terms of ongoing postcolonial African diaspora, and in terms of the global South to North movement that impels the southern disadvantaged toward “Fortress Europe.” I begin this chapter by discussing the hunger strike of Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, which he launched in February 2011 as a form of protest against the dictatorship of president Teodoro Obiang Nguema, and the ongoing civil rights violations in that republic. I propose that, as Ávila Laurel is the most prolific writer of the current generation in Equatorial Guinea, his exile marks an important symbolic moment in the country’s literary historiography because he had managed to practice literary protest during the preceding two decades unharmed, and that was a significant change relative to the persecution of writers during the “years of silence” of the preceding dictatorship (1979–1989). In the two years of his recently concluded exile, Tomás Ávila attracted a large online community to raise international awareness of his country’s ongoing crisis. His memoir of exile and return is currently a work in progress. More substantively, the chapter offers a close reading of two items from writer in exile Francisco Zamora; his poem “Prisionero de la Gran Via” (“Prisoner of the Gran Via,” 1984), and his antiracist essay Como ser negro y no morir en Aravaca (How to Be Black and not Be Killed in Aravaca, 1993). The former highlights the sense of alienation that the immigrant and former colonial suffers in the metropolitan center and the double consciousness he experiences at being seen through the primitivist lens of the West, even as he wears a mask of cultural assimilation and civil

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

propriety. Como ser negro is a wide-ranging essay on the history of racism in Spain, which links it to the consolidation of the national state in the sixteenth century and with social hierarchy in its overseas colonial empire. Its objective is to establish that violent native resistance to racially different immigrants in present-day Spain is no anomaly, as dominant discourse would have it. My discussion of Donato Ndongo’s novel Los poderes de la tempestad (The Powers of the Tempest, 1997) shows the dilemma of the assimilated colonial from a different angle from that pointed out by Zamora in “Prisionero.” Here it concerns the difficulty of the individual returning from exile, who is so steeped in Western cultural codes of being that he is unable to connect culturally and politically with his compatriots to thereby generate the kind of liberatory ethos that would be necessary for the launching of a transformational counter to the dictatorship. Juxtaposing Zamora’s and Ndongo’s personae allows us to appreciate the disabling legacy of coloniality on the individual, and by extension the national collective, in the face of the opportunism of ethnocratic rule in the postcolonial scenario. The final chapter, framed around the idea of “Marcando territorio/ Marking Territory,” is staged in Colombia. It takes its title from the rap item of 2010 by young artists from the city of Buenaventura on the Pacific coast of Colombia, titled “Que sientan miedo” (“Let them Feel Fear”). These youth use the form to express their frustration and defiance at the incursion by foreign transnationals into the region in search of land space for trade and commerce, minerals, palm oil production projects, and tourism investment opportunities, all of whose direct and indirect consequences are the displacement and further social and political disempowerment of the local residents. The chapter begins with a discussion of a similar context, that of the writing of the 1963 novel Chambacú, corral de negros (Chambacú, black slum) by Manuel Zapata Olivella (1920–2004), which protested against a similar dislodging of residents of Chambacú, a marginal zone adjacent to the city of Cartagena on the Atlantic coast, to serve the interests of local speculators. The chapter offers an account of the writer’s development as an ideologue and essayist in the intervening decades, and underscores his importance in vindicating the Afro-Colombian and the broader Afro-Latin American historical and cultural presence in his work. The book’s thesis of location is emphasized by connecting Zapata Olivella’s early efforts as a Marxistoriented intellectual, shown in the novel, to the activism of Colombia’s Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities), which accompanies a constitutional turn toward pluriethnicity and multiculturalism that started in the 1990s. In this way, traditional literary discourse is juxtaposed with the vernacular performance arts of rap in pursuit of the common goal of black emancipation. The chapter also uses the opportunity to make a critical assessment of the Colombian government’s “pro-ethnic” minority policies that were symbolized in the 1993 Land Titling laws (Ley 70) and in the subsequent endorsement of academic studies on Afro-Colombian history and culture and the annual celebration of Afro-Colombian Month,

Introduction

17

even as traditionally black communities suffer dislodgement as a result of the unofficial civil war between the FARC, government forces, and paramilitary organizations engaged in the international drug trade. NOTES 1. Angel Augier, Guillén’s biographer, has put together three volumes of the poet’s journalistic writings. Of note are Guillén’s response to his initial meeting up with Hughes, the article produced therefrom (“Conversación con Langston Hughes,” March 9, 1930, Augier Vol I, 16–20), the two poets’ involvement in the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1937 in Europe, and Hughes’ translation of Guillén’s poetry. See Keith Ellis, “Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes: Convergences and Divergences” in this regard. 2. See Cuti and Michael Handelsman in . . . E disse o velho militante José Correia Leite and “Afrocentrism as an Intercultural Force in Ecuador,” respectively. 3. This “canon” would include work by such critics as Richard Jackson, Marvin Lewis, Laurence Prescott, Ian Smart, Edward Mullen, Miriam DeCosta-Willis, William Luis, Michael Handelsman, Zilá Bernd, Dorothy Mosby, and Dawn Stinchcomb, for example. 4. “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,” in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry,” 47. 5. See Ifeoma Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth Century Americas. 6. “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic.” 7. Roberto W. Slenes, “Malungu, Ngoma vem!” África encoberta e descoberta no Brasil. 8. Slenes, 1995, 9–11. See also Martin Lienhard, “Kalunga, o el recuerdo de la trata esclavista en algunos cantos afro-americanos.” 9. The paradigmatic firsthand account of Olaudah Equiano’s capture and transportation is particularly valuable in this regard. See chaps. 2 and 3 especially. 10. See Rediker regarding the frequency of suicide and rebellion during the Middle Passage and the bloody suffocation of same. Smallwood in turn stresses the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the slave ship cargoes, adding that their common condition laid the “groundwork” for a new kind of diasporic identity whose “existence and dimensions . . . would become known to them only in the setting of the diaspora” (2007, 120). 11. Slenes, 1995, 22. Also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. 12. Fernando Ortiz in his Nuevo catauro de cubanismos confirms its meaning as “neighbor and slave ship companion” (“vecino y compañero de cargamento,” 1974, 125). Cirilo Villaverde’s nineteenth-century classic of Cuban costumbrismo, Cecilia Valdés o la loma del angel, attributes the same meaning to the term (1992, 264). 13. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective, 43–44. My thanks to Richard Price for drawing this reference to my attention. Thanks are due as well to my colleague Shelome Godden, who pointed me to the term sibi. 14. Nina S. de Friedmann, “Presencia africana en Colombia,” 54. 15. “Malunguinho, negro guerreiro/divino de Pernambuco.” Alexandre L’Omi L’Odò, http://alexandrelomilodo.blogspot.com/2008/07/malunguinho-negroguerreirodivino-de.html, 5/13/2009.

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

16. See Davis Scott’s “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World” for a discussion of the work of Boas and Herskovits on the controversy regarding Africanist retentions and “pastlessness” among New World black communities. 17. Equiano is again illustrative of this as he details the successive reunion with and separation from his sister on the march to the slave coast, that of the African women who took care of him during the Middle Passage, as well as of the “countrymen” who spoke the same language as he did when their ship arrived at Barbados. He considers the rupture at this point to be total because he “never saw one of them again.” The situation would repeat itself again shortly after at Virginia (1989, 33). 18. On the latter, see Agustín Lao-Montes, “Cartographies of Afro-Latina/o Politics: Political Contests and Historical Challenges.” Unpublished paper. 19. I’m borrowing this usage of the term from David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, who in turn has acknowledged his indebtedness for it to Talal Asad (2004, 8). 20. See David Scott’s reservations on the matter of the historical accuracy of First Time narrative, “That event.” 21. See Price (1996) on the maroons and their elimination. Friedmann as recently as 1974 refers to inherited war games and rituals among the palenqueros of San Basilio. San Basilio was formed in the 1600s when Domingo Biohó escaped with some thirty followers. Their condition persisted until the beginning of the twentieth century when two sugar factories were established in the vicinity. This hastened their incorporation into the local economy. Friedmann also notes the prevalence of Bantu words and place names in their creole “Palanquero,” or “Lengua.” 22. Of the famous seventeenth-century Palmares Quilombo, Robert Nelson Anderson notes, “We do not know of any surviving accounts of Palmares by Palmarinos. The record of popular oral history is scant although it certainly exists” (1996, 564). 23. Price notes that in the case of the former Dutch colony, the agreement to accede to Bush Negro independence (separate jurisdiction and a “state-withina-state” arrangement) was an important precedent, in terms of Dutch colonial policy, to the apartheid regime that followed in Southern Africa (“Executing Ethnicity: The Killings in Suriname,” 456). It is important to note that in the 1990s many former and less isolated populations of former fugitives from slavery across Latin America, following a less hostile and more “enlightened” government policy, came in one way or another under a process of incorporation and modernization by their national states. This has included recognition of ancestrally held lands, provision of schools, and potable water, etc. Eva Thorne, “The Politics of Afro-Latin American Land Rights.” 24. See Stedman’s Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Society. 25. See particularly “Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning,” 23–32. 26. See João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, 106. 27. Richard Price, “Executing Ethnicity: The Killings in Suriname.” 28. “The Origin of Surinam Creole,” Creole Drum: An Anthology of Creole Literature in Surinam, Ed. Jan Voorhoeve and Ursy Lichtveld. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture (1992, 49). 29. Richard Alsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, 376. 30. Barry Unsworth’s 1992 novel Sacred Hunger offers an engaging critique of the Atlantic trade and capitalist modernity by imagining a “maroon” community of black and white former shipmates of a slave ship, guided by Enlightenment principles, in the Florida jungle of the eighteenth century.

1

Dislocation and Re/membering Ndongo and D’Aguiar Write the Middle Passage

The new countries offer a vast field for individual, violent activities which, in the metropolitan countries, would run up against certain prejudices, against a sober and orderly conception of life, and which, in the colonies, have greater freedom to develop, and consequently, to affirm their worth. Thus to a certain extent the colonies can serve as a safety valve for modern society. Even if this were their only value, it would be immense. Carl Siger, Essai sur la colonisation (1907)

In a book whose purpose is to consider the transatlantic musings of Afrodiasporan creative writers and poets, there is an unavoidable logic to beginning with the physical and symbolic historical markers, on both sides of the ocean, that frame these musings and serve as a prelude to studying its initial texts, set in the Middle Passage itself. They include touchstones evocative of some of the earliest modern contacts between sub-Saharan communities and expansionist Europe. Among them would be the 1472 “discovery” and claim by the Portuguese of the island of Fernando Po, today’s Bioko, in Equatorial Guinea, which is the homeland of Donato Ndongo, the author of our first story, “La travesía” (“The Crossing,” 1977), and the construction of the first permanent European stone structure on the West African coast, by Diego Azambuja in 1482. This Portuguese outpost, then called São Jorge da Mina, subsequently known as Elmina, followed an agreement with King Kwamena of the Fetu people.1 It was situated at the fishing village of Edina, part of an extended littoral destined to be the source of the highest concentration of captives bound for slavery in the New World, across the infamous Middle Passage, the location of our second narrative, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), by Guyanese-British writer Fred D’Aguiar. When Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison gave the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan in 1988, much of her discussion critiqued the absence of the figure of the enslaved in the larger American literary canon, as well as the contrived banishment of the topic of race from what she called “genuinely intellectual exchange” in America

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(1989, 3). Morrison’s broader function as literary creator and commentator, before as well as after the lecture, has been to render, as she said, the “unspeakable” in America’s past “speakable,” and to thereby catalyze a process of both emancipation and healing, a re/membering, as it were, of the shattered episteme of African-American-ness, through the narrative arts of memory. In 2008, twenty years later, Morrison inaugurated the “Bench by the Road” project, an initiative begun at Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for some 40 percent of the forced African migrants into America, to recall their enslavement and the raced odyssey of their descendants in the nation’s history. The bench, the first of a projected ten to be located at similarly symbolic sites around the country, would, in all its modesty, constitute for Morrison a “suitable memorial” to the aforementioned subjects,2 and serve simultaneously as a material complement to her own desire as a writer for them to be rescued from the “willful oblivion” of America’s dominant literary culture (1989, 12). To be sure, this process of literary rescue had begun at least two decades before, during the heyday of the civil rights movement, with the publication in 1966 of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, which was followed by a plethora of works of neoabolitionist orientation that revisited and reshaped the slave novels of the nineteenth century, particularly in regard to the controlling element of the white editorial presence.3 If America’s “benches by the road,” like Haiti’s famous monument to the Marron inconnu, Jamaica’s statue of Nanny, the rebel maroon leader and national hero, Barbados’ Bussa statue, and other sculptures on this side of the Atlantic, purport to re/member an imaginary African body through tributes to its survivalism and rebellion, the numerous forts, castles, and trading posts scattered along the West African shore from which it originated evoke a different reality, that of the dismemberment of this imaginary African body. According to conventional reports, there is little reverence reserved on the African shore for those who suffered the uprooting and trauma of slavery. The five hundred kilometers between Keta and Half Assini on Ghana’s Atlantic coast, for example, are littered with some eighty of the stated trading centers, silent testimonials to European imperial greed and competition and to the complicity and acquisitiveness of the local elites with whom they conducted business (Opoku-Agyemang 1996, Anquandah 1999). Among them, the most notorious and imposing are Cape Coast Castle and the aforementioned Elmina Castle, where between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries Portuguese, Dutch, English, Swedish, Danish, and Brandenburgers (Germans) traded their European wares for gold, spices, and human captives, and where the hapless victims bound for the Americas were housed in conditions that banish all thoughts of humaneness.4 Notwithstanding their stellar role in the imagery and materiality of the current Ghanaian tourist industry, the castles and the history they denote and connote mark a profound ambivalence for the Ghanaian people as a whole on the question of slavery, for according to anthropologist Bayo

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Holsey, “neither a desire to commemorate the slave trade nor connections to the African diaspora were the driving forces behind [their] conservation” (2008, 162). The castles, massive stone structures each covering about a hundred thousand square feet, were designated World Heritage Sites in 1979 and recuperated through USAID funding and developmentalist expertise, as a fillip for Ghana’s nascent tourist industry. The initiative behind their preservation subsequently included the biennial regionalist cultural celebration, PANAFEST, which started in 1992, to which was added an annual Emancipation Day celebration on the first of August, following a state visit to Jamaica of former president Jerry Rawlings in 1997, during which he witnessed that country’s yearly observance of Emancipation.5 This conjuncture would bring the slave trade back into public discourse in Ghana and make visible in the pan-Africanist projection implied by these celebrations fissures that are at once regional, national, and transatlantic. As it turns out, the Anglo-Ashante war of 1873–1874 drove the final nail in the coffin of whatever traditional form contemporary local autonomy had taken over the preceding centuries of Euro-African commercial intercourse, most graphically seen in the British and Dutch rivalry between 1647, when the latter took over from the Portuguese and made Elmina their headquarters on the coast, and 1872, when they ceded the castle to the English to pursue opportunities in the East Indies. Up until this time, Cape Coast Castle, provisioned mainly by the Ashante, had, after initial Portuguese tenancy, been under the control of the British, who finally seized it in 1664 in the contest that ensued after the castle’s construction by the Swedes in 1653.6 Elmina, similarly, received its goods, human and otherwise, from Fante-controlled networks of trade. Indeed, the city states, that is, the respective castles and the nearby towns, grew to be known, on account of their prolonged commercial engagement with their European interlocutors, as “Little Europe” (Elmina) and the “Athens of the Gold Coast” (Holsey 2008, 27). With the final military conquest of the Gold Coast on the part of the British, and the formal imposition of colonial structures of dominance, whatever fleeting cosmopolitanism and influence obtained among the coastal elites in these former slaving centers dissipated as the nineteenthcentury colonial economy shifted toward cacao, palm oil, and gold, and the British deployed local traditional rulers as intermediaries in their control of the broader populace. What remained indelibly imprinted in the mentalities of all concerned, however, after four centuries and the enforced exodus of the uncountable many, was the degraded status of the enslaved and the apparently pressing need to distance the social and national self from the stigma of both slaves and enslavement, particularly considering nationalist sensibility to the all-pervasive colonial discourse linking Africa to savagery and slavery. Observers have stressed the degree to which traditional practices of servitude in Gold Coast life, and the region’s role in provisioning the European capitalist project overseas with slave labor, is a taboo topic in the nationalist

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discourse of politicians of the independence era, in high school textbooks, and in everyday conversation in the domestic sphere (Holsey 2008). Even the pan-Africanism of independent Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, which brought several icons of black internationalism to Ghana and scores of diasporan “returnees,” mainly African-American, to reside in Ghana, a topic to which we return in Chapter 2, did not create the purchase sufficient to dispel suspicion and coolness toward these revenants or dua ho mmire (rootless ones), as Saidiya Hartman painfully recalls in her recent travel narrative (2007). That Ghanaian independence should be constructed as a teleological product of the struggle against colonialism, in which the chiefs, benevolent rulers, had to cede their traditional roles of respect, leaves undisturbed thorny ethical issues relating to the precolonial distribution of power locally, and the condition of the odonkor (slaves) not only at home, but also trapped in the genocidal trajectory of transatlantic slavery. What one finds, as a result, is an apparent agreement to forget, not unlike the one Morrison mentions in relation to the United States. Speaking of the absence, in Africa, of literary explorations of the topic of transatlantic slavery, Achille Mbembe refers to “the silence of guilt and the refusal of Africans to face up to the troubling aspect of the crime that directly engages their own responsibility” (2002, 260). The purported complicity of creative writers in erasing the question, however, is not complete. Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s volume of poetry, set precisely in the shadow of the castle at Cape Coast (Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems, 1996), and Donato Ndongo’s 1977 short story “La travesía,” contradict this general assumption. Written by a Ghanaian, Opoku-Agyemang’s work is particularly noteworthy not only for the grief, frustration, and anger at the loss, betrayal, greed, and cruelty implied in the slave trade, but also for vindicating the humanity of the unfortunate and forgotten class of the precolonial natives condemned to servitude and their accompanying social marginalization. Just as important is his highlighting of the pain experienced by the relatives left behind by those who were shipped overseas or otherwise sacrificed in the transatlantic enterprise. Although an in-depth examination is beyond our present purpose, his work merits attention for confronting anti-odonkor prejudice in Ghana, for its pan-African solidarian ethic, and for its critique of both the local seller elites and the buyer capitalists from overseas. In embracing both unnamed and canonical captives like the aforementioned Equiano, and Sengbe Pieh of the famous Amistad rebellion, his work marks an important point of departure, discursively speaking, from the other shore. It represents an important clearing out of the weeds of memory—to paraphrase one of his lines in his poem “The Watch”—for healing and re/membering (1996, 14). If it does not come as a surprise to find a diasporan sensibility and a lyrical critique of the Atlantic slave trade at the end of the twentieth century by a Ghanaian poet who, besides, has lived and studied in the West,7 a similar sense of black internationalism might equally be expected in Donato Ndongo, an Equatoguinean, given the circumstances of his life in

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1970s Spain. Ndongo, an ethnic Fang from Neifang in Rio Muni, came to Valencia to finish his secondary education at a Catholic religious college in 1965. With the postindependence military coup carried out in 1969 by Francisco Macías Nguema, and the human rights scandal associated with it, to which we come back in Chapter 4, he found that his initial role of “native informant” in satisfying the curiosity of his classmates concerning his African homeland was expanded and elevated to the level of reporter when the Spanish news agency ABC commissioned him to write a series of articles on conditions in Equatorial Guinea: “Guinea, vista por un guineano,” or “Guinea, from the point of view of a Guinean.” A student of contemporary African history and journalism, Ndongo would go on, apart from being a journalist, to also be a historian, novelist, poet, professor, and cultural ambassador for his country from his many nomadic bases in exile. It is noteworthy that his metropolitan location in the latter 1960s and early 1970s afforded him exposure to the currents of Black Power in the United States, the anticolonial movement, and black internationalism, and more important, for the first time in his life, to black literary stalwarts of the likes of Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka. The aggressive antiracist posture of the Afro-American writers, according to Obatela and Onomo-Abena, and these writers’ concern with the past, is seen as a factor in his short story, “La travesía,” written under the pseudonym of Francisco Abeso Nguema (2000, 41). In “La travesía,” Ndongo does not have, as in Opoku-Agyemang’s case, a nearby slave trading post as a constant reminder of history. Equatorial Guinea’s role in the Atlantic slave trade was negligible. Although it was placed on the Iberian colonial map as early as 1471, the main island, Fernando Po, turned out to be a “developmental failure,” according to Ibrahim Sundiata (1996, 4), and the continental enclave of Rio Muni was not fully explored and occupied by the Spanish until 1935, when the country’s continental borders were established. Native Bubi resistance, on Fernando Po, in fact, helped preserve that island’s relative integrity, as its role in the regional trade was in providing yams and other provisions to slavers during the 1700s and 1800s as the British and Spanish sought to establish preeminence over the putative colony. The fortress, then, from which Ndongo’s anonymous first-person narrator starts to tell his story is a generic one, and the temporal setting of the narrative is imprecise, although the names of some of his fellow captives, killed early in the account in a failed onboard uprising, suggest Fang ethnic origin and place the story in the Gulf of Benin. Ndongo’s primary achievement in “La travesía,” perhaps, is highlighting what the disaster of captivity and removal from the home and family meant for the individual in the context of the larger historical transformation experienced by West African coastal communities drawn increasingly into the orbit of commodity exchange with the European incursionists. As with the chief Mbatua, who has artificially incorporated him into a class of saleable criminals by exaggerating the gravity of his insult to an elder, the

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protagonist has no idea of the extent of the geography involved in this commercial network, nor, consequently, of his likely destination now that he has been sold to the foreigners. Indeed, when we meet him, in an account that starts in medias res, he is located in one of the European coastal fortresses. As he looks out to the vessel anchored offshore, his fear and his anxiety at captivity are intensified, particularly because no one among the hundreds of captives gathered could say where their impending departure would take them. In a process that would eventually objectify Africa’s exported millions as chattel through the “legal fiction” of slavery (Patterson, 1982, 31.), Ndongo recreates for his readers what its victims experience in the initial moments of this process of “thingification.” They are seen here in the assembly in the village square of the young men who Chief Mbatua is making into offerings for trade as they undergo physical examination by the dealers. The chief himself is smiling nervously at them as he caresses the firearms and other articles for which they have been exchanged (Ndongo-Bidyogo, 2000, 195), in a scene that points as much to the African elite’s increasing immersion in the Atlantic orbit of capitalism in an unequal relationship that would have tragic long-term consequences (Rodney, 1982), as it does to the seduction of consumerism. Stephanie Smallwood has commented on the regular use by the mid-1600s of imported guns among West African communities, stressing their importance in the consolidation and territorial aggrandizement, for example, of the Ashante under the legendary Osei Tutu at the turn of the seventeenth century (2007, 29). “La travesía” is not a case of such large statist confirmation. Its story seems to fit the profile of one of the much smaller units that might have sought to protect itself from the trade by participating in it. What is more important on this point, however, is the conversion of the protagonist into the equivalent of whatever objects would have been accepted for his acquisition. This was part of a larger mercantile calculus that would have originated in Europe, which would continue, subsequent to his “sale,” in his being stacked on board and resold as a pieza in the colonial marketplace. While his commodification contributes to preindustrial capitalist accumulation in Europe, it at the same time plays a role in the depopulation of the African continent and the destabilization of traditional processes of material and cultural production (Williams, 1994; Rodney 1982). It is appropriate, perhaps, in this sense, that Ndongo opts to leave him nameless, to signal the metaphorical morphing of people into objects. Apart from the inevitably varying and imprecise measurement of the human “article” as a pieza (Branche 2006, 101–103), the calculation involved in slavery’s transactions also included an ever more refined process of empirical measurement of the human capacity for survival over an unspecified number of weeks at sea that took into consideration such factors as the minimal quantity of food necessary, the relative aggressiveness of the required irons for shackling the prisoners, and the maximum number of bodies that

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might fit in the available space on board (Smallwood, 2007, 34–44). The narrator’s reference to the reduced daily diet of two yams each at the fort (195) and the number of bodies bound for the relatively small vessel could only exacerbate the sense of panic that was already overtaking him. Within the story of personal disaster for the captive, who apart from the physical trauma is also confronting the loss of his immediate family, is the larger issue of cultural damage that the slave trade engenders. We see it immediately as the ship embarks and the protagonist becomes aware that he has no means of communicating with the men to his immediate right or left. Linguistic and cultural isolation of slave ship cargoes, as we know, was a common strategy among slave traders, whose objective was to forestall the communication and rebellion that such interaction might have fostered. In the present situation, the loss of his former comrades of his ethnic group in their defeated uprising and his being left alone allow us to appreciate the slave trade as a generator of linguicide or language death, in terms of both small and large groups of speakers exported to the Americas, and in the case of the continental vernaculars subjected, subsequently, to the imposition of European colonial languages.8 Linguists are in agreement as to the depth of knowledge, among indigenous populations worldwide, of their respective ecologies. This includes, as David Crystal points out; “fauna and flora, rocks and soils, climatic cycles and their impact on the land, the interpretation of landscapes, and the whole question of the balance of natural forces” (2002, 47). And because language is a primary index of our identity as individuals and the repository of our culture, it is clear that the eventual death of Ndongo’s protagonist is meant to be emblematic of the cultural injury suffered by Africa and the world during this phase of the history of the continent. The particularity and value of the protagonist’s cultural baggage, his people’s “model of the universe” (Vjaseslav Ivanov qtd. in Crystal 2002, 36), both as present content and as potential legacy, is thus highlighted as we witness his demise as possibly the last speaker of his language. Notwithstanding the various models of reconstruction and transculturation of the African premises in the Americas that we saw briefly in the introduction, and on which much of Kamau Brathwaite’s creative work and cultural critique turns, as we see in Chapter 2, the absence of African language and language bearers in the New World scenario due to the slave trade constitutes the primary index of the irretrievability of African cultures and knowledges in the Americas. The protagonist’s ever-growing alarm at his isolation, then, is not only important in indicating how unlikely it would be for him to generate more resistance on board. It also points to the larger ontological and material deprivations occasioned by slavery and colonialism as there is no response to his repeated shouts: “¡¡¿Alguien habla mi idioma?!! ¡¡¿Me entendéis?!!” (197) (Does anyone speak my language? Do you understand me?). The protagonist’s unsuccessful insurrection, his isolation, and the progressive physical degradation due to the cramped conditions on the slave

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ship and the inadequate food, plus his possibly fever-induced hallucinations, foreshadow his eventual demise. As we witness his mental abjection, we also get to see, through him, the abjection of the generalized African body when it becomes his turn to tend to the shackled sufferers, to clean them of their bodily effluents, and to help toss overboard the cadavers of those who had already succumbed. There is a noteworthy intimacy created on the basis of shared suffering amongst these captive “shipmates,” whose eventual outcome, provided they survive the Middle Passage, constitutes the solidarian trajectory of malungaje, as I have proposed earlier. Ndongo’s protagonist is limited in this regard, however, as is the malunga project in this instance. Apart from the language barrier that inhibits communication, the other captives on board with whom he comes into contact are either dead or dying. The sense of identification and empathy that he feels with and for them as he goes about the imposed task of tossing their remains overboard, however, is unmistakable: Es una lástima, es una sensación en extrema desagradable cargar con un hombre a quien no conoces pero a quien conoces, que ha convivido varias semanas contigo, en la misma estancia, que sabe de tus sufrimientos y tú de los suyos, y que compartía el mismo destino, cargar con él, digo, subir esas estrechas escaleras, ver la luz que el ya no puede ver, que te ciega los ojos, y avanzar con él a cuestas hacia proa, y arrojarle al mar sin ninguna compasión. (200 emphasis added) (It is sad, it is extremely unpleasant to carry a man who you don’t know but who you know, who has lived with you for several weeks, in the same place, who knows of your suffering and you of his, and who shared the same destiny, to lift him up, I say, to climb those narrow stairs, to see the light that he can no longer see, that blinds your eyes, and to go to the prow with him on your back, and toss him overboard without feeling anything.) In the end it is the sensory overload of hunger, cold, the unbearable stench of the overcrowded ship’s hold, and his own weakening moral and physical state that precipitates his death. Donato Ndongo’s short story, one of the few and one of the earliest to address the theme of transatlantic slavery and the Middle Passage from the other shore, raises the cardinal questions regarding the etiology of diaspora. If we looked beyond the immediate referentiality of his protagonist’s questioning as to “why me:” “Por qué me lo quitaron todo? Por qué muero loco en medio del océano? Qué significa esta travesía?” (Why did they take everything away from me? Why am I dying crazy in the middle of the sea? What does this crossing mean?), it becomes clear that his reflections are a metonymical reference to the larger historical phenomenon of dislocation and an attempt, through literature, to revisit the phenomenon for its ethical and didactic value, in terms of both the critique of the power Mbatua exercised as local ethnic leader and of the European

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protagonists of the transatlantic trade. D’Aguiar’s novel, to which we now turn, shares similar objectives. It has, however, a concrete historical point of departure, that of the slave ship Zong, infamous for ditching 131 members of its captive cargo while they were still alive. The two stories create an interesting complementarity in terms of the larger question of dislocation and re/membering.

FEEDING GHOSTS: TOWARD THE AUGUST MONDAY HORIZON Fred D’Aguiar’s historical novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997) is a reaction to the story of the slave ship Zong and the premeditated jettisoning in 1781 of 132 African captives by Captain Luke Collingwood in his effort to limit the losses of a cargo being diminished by disease and to acquire the insurance benefits that would result therefrom. That the ensuing court hearing in England, rather than consider their drowning in terms of murder, adhered instead to considerations of marine law and to the dominant commercial paradigm in its judgment of the incident provoked the moral repudiation of the writer on discovering the case recently, hence his own addition to the other political and literary responses that the incident has provoked in the more than two hundred years since its occurrence.9 The displacement of the premise of the natural right to life in the deaths of the captive Africans in the Zong affair highlighted the objectification inherent to colonial slavery, as well as the legal double standards arising from its inherent assumptions of white racial superiority and black racial inferiority. D’Aguiar’s intervention is therefore a vindication of their essential humanity, a symbolic call to mourning, and a funeral of sorts for them. In the novel he articulates a culturally hybrid (African and post-African) ritual act of “feeding” of their ghosts with the objective of preserving their memory and symbolically reintegrating them into a broader outernational black community. In aligning himself with abolitionist discourse of the latter eighteenth century, he also participates in antiracist critique in both its diachronic (eighteenth-century) and synchronic (contemporary) articulations, as well as in the ongoing debate concerning race and national identity in Britain, and by extension in other Atlantic nation-states as well. The work is also important, I feel, for its representation of the initial moment of Afro-diasporan rupture and dislocation. In the rest of this chapter I want to tease out D’Aguiar’s didacticist trajectory, both as an instance of what I call transatlantic musing, and in terms of its meditation on the complex of (diasporan) routes and (African) roots, a construct memorably stated in Paul Gilroy’s treatise on Black Atlantic musical forms of expressive culture.10 Black post-Negritude writing of a neoabolitionist turn, to which D’Aguiar here contributes, constitutes an equally potent if less ubiquitous vehicle of articulation than does the music to which Gilroy refers in

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The Black Atlantic, one that never loses sight of the liberatory horizon that inspires it. Indeed, I see the novel’s engagement with liberation as the basis for its didacticism and the source of the interrelated themes of death and survivalism in the context of colonial biopolitics and of racial witnessing for emancipation or jubilee, and will proceed with this in mind. The book opens, significantly, with an epigram taken from fellow Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History,” with which it declares, on the one hand, its counterdiscursive and vindicatory intentions vis-à-vis received assertions of Caribbean lack. Walcott’s query regarding the purported absence of “monuments . . . martyrs . . . and tribal memory” in the region, and his suggestion that these are all locked in the “grey vault of the sea,” underscores a pessimistic view of the Caribbean past even as it reprises essentialist modern conceptions as to what constitutes nationness.11 On the other hand, for D’Aguiar in his guise as British writer, the book also speaks to Britain’s involvement in Atlantic slavery and to the politics of public memory in that nation relative to the black presence there (Rice 2003, 2005; Kowaleski Wallace 2005). It is striking that the primary subjectivity and life trajectory to be pursued in the novel, that of its protagonist Mintah the young Fetu woman, also extends, like that of the novelist himself, beyond local geographies, aiming eventually at the outernational.12 Indeed, their implied rearticulation of a usually naturalized relationship between nation and identity coincides with the increased importance recently accorded Atlantic marine space by historians and social scientists as theater for the development of capitalism and coloniality, and the role of ships (particularly slavers) therein. The Atlantic as muse for black writers of the diaspora responds to the same general premise. This observation is borne out in the fact that beyond the novel’s Caribbeanist and (Afro)British trajectory, D’Aguiar also situates himself alongside a plethora of African-American writers interested in articulating imaginaries of slavery and the Middle Passage, and in simultaneously issuing correctives to topdown and one-sided narratives of America’s colonial and postcolonial past. Such efforts can be traced back to Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), a black “birth of the nation” story that begins, not in 1776 with US independence, but after emancipation at the end of the Civil War almost a hundred years later. Jubilee ushered in an era of unprecedented editorial output that fed off the energies released by the civil rights movement and the wresting of black experience from the margins of national discourse.13 The diasporan projection in D’Aguiar also assumes a gendered dimension of relevance to the neoabolitionist turn, in the novel’s presentation of the slave that scrambled back on board the Zong, as a young female. The fictional character Mintah thus emerges for her rebelliousness and valor as a composite of both the United States’ Sojourner Truth and Jamaica’s Grandee Nanny, heroines of the Underground Railroad and of maroon insurgency respectively, and of Phyllis Wheatley, the first African-American writer. The gendered political tribute additionally has a personal dimension, as the

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writer recalls the inspiring and “incredibly robust” figure of his own Guyanese grandmother (Frías 2002, 421–422). By implication, then, his response to Walcott not only replaces the traditional stone and metal erections to national male heroism by a lyrical “monument.” In foregrounding historical black female agency it follows the lead of Margaret Walker in Jubilee, as well as that of several contemporary black women Atlantic writers and poets. These include Walker’s compatriot Toni Morrison in her reaction to a similar slave tragedy in Beloved (1988), Martinican Maryse Condé’s recreation of Tituba’s story in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992), Brazilian Miriam Alves’ poetic tribute to Maria Mahin’s frustrated uprising in Bahia in 1835 in “Mahin amanhã” (1998), and Cuban Georgina Herrera’s elegy to Yinga Mbandi of Angola and her historic struggles against the slave trade, “Canto de amor y respeto para Dona Ana de Souza” (1978). More important for D’Aguiar than his efforts at black Atlantic “canon making” or racial witnessing to confront the silence and illiteracy imposed on the slave collective of the past is his concern, as he himself once asserted, that his art play a transformative role in the present, particularly considering the long duration of the institution of slavery and the ongoing legacy of racism (Frías 2002, 420). His Zong story affords us important insights into both institutions. According to F. O. Shyllon, the ship left the West African coast on September 6, 1781 bound for Jamaica, with approximately four hundred seventy captives on board. After several weeks and with the onset of infection, sixty of the Africans as well as seven of the white crew members were dead (184). Fearing further contagion and escalating loss of his “stock,” and aware that the “natural death” of human cargo in the highly injurious environment of the slave ship was not covered by insurance law, Captain Collingwood, recast as Cunningham in the novel, decided on the preemptive move of jettisoning numbers of them under the pretext that diminishing water supplies had made this “absolutely necessary.”14 It is important to consider Collingwood/Cunningham’s actions in the context of marine and colonial law as it pertains not only to the objectification and disposability of captive Africans and their conversion into “perishable goods” under the commercial paradigm. His actions also speak to the issue of the geography of power, or the principle of sovereignty attending on colonial expansionism, a question that has not to date received the attention it deserves in discussions of this work. When Captain Cunningham overrode the objections of his first mate and other sailors to the murder of the Africans with the statement that “This is a problem for the insurers to resolve, not for us to suffer” (D’Aguiar 1999, 16), he was self-consciously functioning in a system that had in myriad ways already reified the projected subhuman status of blacks and Africans. In a bizarre process of reasoning that nullified black agency and simultaneously balked at its potential, insurance law governing jettison stipulated that if someone killed your black cargo or if they died as a result of rebellion, your investment was protected.

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If, however, your captives died a natural death or inflicted death on themselves, you the captain, and by extension the investors, were not protected because death of natural causes and suicide constituted the same rubric.15 That suicide could be considered a “natural cause” of death, or that death in the notoriously unhealthy conditions of slave cartage could be thought of in the same way, points as much to the dehumanization of the victims of mercantile speculation as it does to the dehumanization of the speculators themselves. The racial aspect of this phenomenon is especially relevant. The premise of blacks as “less than human” upon which hung Cunningham’s pursuit of the “clear profit” that he hoped to obtain after selling the surviving slaves and collecting the insurance benefits their deceased shipmates would generate (D’Aguiar 1999, 16) had been under cultivation for centuries. While in the contemporary scenario collars and padlocks were considered a “necessary part of the livery” of enslaved blacks in England (Shyllon 1974, 9), the predatory nature of slave trading had since the sixteenth century produced a semiotics in the coat of arms of privateer John Hawkins that displayed three African heads with ropes around their necks and a crest with another bound head and torso. With British domination of the slave trade in the eighteenth century, and with slave-related trade and labor fueling the entire colonial economy, the façade of the Exchange in Liverpool, England’s principal slave port, would unabashedly boast reliefs, in its turn, of African heads alongside elephants (Thomas 1997, 248). As in any colonial marketplace, the often uncovered bodies of the captives signified their status as objects at the coffeehouses, warehouses, and auction blocks of the cities of the colonial capital. Further, if the declaration by the cook that blacks were “[N]ot yet fully formed humans” (D’Aguiar 1999, 44) articulated a combination of the medieval Chain of Being that separated divinity and humans from the lower life forms, and the pseudo-science that developed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, their disposability was also confirmed by the dominant thinking behind the day-to-day use, abuse, and neglect captive Africans suffered both in Great Britain as metropolis and in its overseas colonies.16 The fictional Cunningham, as slave trader, would in turn reiterate his historical analog, seventeenth-century slave trader and philosopher John Locke, in stressing African subhumanity and dispensability when he asserted: “These privileges [God’s largesse] were earned by the faculty of language and by harnessing the world’s resources for the betterment of mankind” (D’Aguiar 1999, 73).17 “Language” and rational (industrialized) access to nature’s resources apart, miscegenation had also proved a source of anxiety since as early as 1596. Elizabeth I, uneasy over race mixing and the “threat to the purity of English blood,” expressed the desire to have the “‘blackamoors . . . sent forth of the lande’” (Shyllon 1974, 2). Cunningham’s brutality in the face of the surgeon’s projection that the disease would “run a short course” (D’Aguiar 1999, 36), and in spite of the vigorous resistance of many of the victims identified for jettisoning, is an eloquent articulation, then, of

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racist objectification and the profit principle. His concurrent annotation of the still-struggling bodies as “dead” in what he calls his “honest ledger” as they were heaved over the side (D’Aguiar 1999, 98, 99, 140) is as scandalous an epistemic perversion as the law whose provision he purported to follow. In his display of power over life and death, that is to say, in making the healthy “sick” and in making the “sick” dead, he sets the ultimate seal on the slave ship as a site of colonial sovereignty. Marcus Rediker has pointed to the power of slave ship captains by quoting from a letter written by slaver John Newton, famous for penning the words to the hymn “Amazing Grace.” “‘My condition when abroad,” stated Newton, “and even in Guinea, might be envied by multitudes who stay at home. I am as absolute in my small dominions (life and death excepted) as any potentate in Europe’”(2007 157). Newton’s reference to the binary of home and abroad evokes a geopolitics of coloniality that frames his power in relative spatiotemporal terms. The reference at once confirms malleable and extendable colonial space as a state of exception while reaffirming his authority as empowered emissary in the expansionist project. Bearing in mind the situation on board slave ships, exemplified in the Zong, Newton’s declaration that his power only stopped at the taking of life itself seems more likely to have been the effect of modesty or prudence than an honest rendering of reality, taking into consideration the fact that his interlocutor was his wife. It is the potential for totalitarianism, however, in the slave ship’s captain, as the embodiment of a Janus-faced law of jettison that would permit killings without the commission of homicide, that most imperiously requires our attention here. If the colonial space signifies the suspension of the ius publicum europaeum, with its apocalyptic abandonment of order and its countless corresponding corpses, then the slave ship must perforce be considered a part of this rubric.18 As the vehicle that put the metropolitan and colonial worlds into contact and as an instance of the intimate and extended interface of the captor and the captive populations, this role of the ship is not to be overlooked. Whereas the mercantile calculus anticipated value from the end products of the colonial plantations and mines, the value and end product of the slave ship was its cargo itself. This confirms its role as a cog in the economic wheel of coloniality. On account of its liminality, its lack of (geographical) fixedness, and the fact that it was the bearer of denigrated foreign bodies, the slave ship thus sat simultaneously both inside and outside the larger social and juridical order. Ultimately, however, it is the state of siege, martial law, and the reduction of its captive cargo to what Georgio Agamben describes in another context as “bare life” (1998, 128) that defined it. In fact it is the autonomy that derived from the ship’s isolation on the high seas that would provide the platform for Captain Cunningham to embody, Führer-like, the power and paradox of sovereignty, thereby establishing the slave ship as a forerunner of the concentration camp of the twentieth century, this latter correctly characterized by Achille Mbembe as the “central metaphor for sovereign

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and destructive violence and as the absolute sign of the power of the negative” for our times (2003, 12). As hinted earlier, the relationship between the captor and captive groups on the slave ship is framed by enmity and suppression, especially in the case of insurgency by the latter, as demonstrated during the course of the voyage. The wave of preemptive extermination unleashed as the infection on the Zong began to take its toll, however, reveals a violence of a different order. Undoubtedly the racial and national difference of the Africans, their reduction to commodities, and, given the infection, the conclusion that, as in the concentration camps, theirs were lives “not worthy of being lived” (Agamben 1998, 173) contributed to the captain’s fatal decision. It is Cunningham’s deployment of biopolitical power by way of the juridical precepts permitting jettison, though, that reveals the Hitlerian dimension to his malfeasance. His biopolitical excess consists in not only distorting the law as pointed out earlier, but in making himself the law by voicing the determination as to who would live and who would die. In so doing he replicates, or anticipates, depending on one’s historical point of view, the concept of race under the Nazi regime in which the created legal plane “passes over into fact” and fact “passes over into law,” constituting thereby the malleable and slippery reality that Agamben refers to as the “threshold” (1998, 170).19 Accordingly, Mintah, notwithstanding his acknowledgment of the fact that she was in good health, would be condemned to death by Cunningham, his grounds being that her insolence “was a sickness” (D’Aguiar 1999, 48). So too, he asserted, was her “[s]tubbornness” (48). Through Kelsal his surrogate (the comparison to Hitler’s lieutenant Adolf Eichmann that Fryer offers is not inappropriate here),20 he would proceed, additionally, to appropriate the authority of the ship’s surgeon, who had already indicated that the infection would be a transitory one (36). Kelsal would thus declare at the trial, based on his brief sojourn among the Fetu, that he knew Africans because he had lived with them, asserting authoritatively that “A sick African only shows ill-health in his eyes” (145 emphasis added), and that “Each of those Africans looked to be on the verge of death” (146). Agamben has stressed the degree to which physicians and scientists legitimated the eugenic project during the twentieth century (1998, 159). In an eighteenth-century depiction of sovereignty aboard a slave ship, the science and authority of the medical practitioner could be dispensed with and replaced by evidence provided by a layman, Kelsal. In conjunction with the captain, Kelsal would (re)write history in the captain’s ledger of truth where “every fact and act [was] scrupulously recorded” (D’Aguiar 1999, 144). Their creation of truth value would thus displace the empirical unfolding of events and claim primacy in the court proceedings that subsequently followed. On that occasion Mintah’s account of her lived truth would be dismissed as fantasy. She herself would be characterized as “mad” by Kelsal (157), and her book deemed the product of a plot by the insurers (162, 170).21

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In the end Collingwood/Cunningham’s slave ship sovereignty would dissipate once back in the metropolis, as his employers, the investors, would take over the matter and initiate their lawsuit on the insurers’ refusal to pay the indemnity. Although this particular historical aspect of the matter appears never to have been settled, and Collingwood died shortly after his return, what is important to point out is that the broader juridical context of the metropolis allowed the state of exception, constituted in the slave ship, to be challenged as abolitionist agency emerged in the protest, first through an anonymous letter in the newspaper, and then through the protestations of Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp.22 In stressing the natural rights to life of the captive Africans, Sharp would explode the prevailing dogma of their objectification as mere livestock and the double standard that held that, as blacks and as foreigners, they had not been had “in consideration or contemplation when the laws of England were made” (qtd. in Shyllon 1974, 33). Their property in their own lives, he would assert, was “infinitely superior, and more to be favoured, in law, than the slave-holders’ or slave dealers’ iniquitous claim of property in their persons” (qtd. in Shyllon, 1974, 196). Understandably perhaps, the fictional Cunningham would display dismay in the metropolitan court, as his actions were questioned by counsel for the insurers, and normative principles against killing would rise up to array themselves against him in his pursuit of his purportedly “gentlemanly endeavour” in profit making (D’Aguiar 1999, 140). Notwithstanding his eventual inability to bring the Zong principals up on charges of murder, Sharp, along with fellow abolitionists Clarkson and Wilberforce, would found the Anti-Slave Trade Society shortly after, in 1787. By the following year the British Parliament would begin to be bombarded with petitions calling for the abolition of the nefarious business of buying and selling Africans. Although D’Aguiar’s reflections on the Zong affair only focused on a few main characters in the narrative, among whom were Mintah, the captain, Kelsal, Simon the cook’s assistant, and Lord Mansfield the magistrate in London, their interaction with the rest of the crew, the slave cargo, and the authorities in the metropolis is more than adequate to convey the depth and drama of the tragedy of diasporan deracination and dislocation. Alongside the gross displays of terminal force on the part of Cunningham, the book’s objective is also to highlight the life-in-death existence of the victims of the Middle Passage from the time of captivity through the high hazard of the Atlantic crossing and beyond. Mintah’s struggle for subjectivity on board ship, her rebelliousness, and her eventual offering to the ghosts of the departed, through the 131 sculpted figures she creates, all symbolize a larger gesture of redemption vis-à-vis the collectivity of uprooted Africans and her assumption of a politicized sense of fictive kinship or malungaje with them. Again, recent descriptions of life “in extremity” (Des Pres 1976) in the concentration camps are useful in appreciating some of the dimensions of this earlier episode of human suffering in all its genocidal potential.

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The forced migration of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade was the largest such event in human history, and the Zong atrocity may be the most scandalous occurrence of its sort (Rediker 2007, 241), not least taking into consideration the ever-present sharks that would trail these vessels across the sea. If we bear in mind Aimé Césaire’s famous linkage between racism in coloniality and subsequent Hitlerism in Europe (Discourse on Colonialism, 1972, 14), and see the slave ship as a site of exception and sovereign violence in the unfolding of modernity, the trope of life in extremity that Des Pres uses to describe conditions in the death camps of the Holocaust is readily applicable to the kind of brutality that the Zong represents. Rather than the terminal projections of the Final Solution that underlay the experience of death camp inmates, however, it would be the “depletion of life” (Smallwood 2007, 36) that would bridge the ordeal of Mintah and her shipmates to that of sovereignty’s victims who succeeded her in racism’s march to the Holocaust. It was an ordeal occasioned in the minimalist calculus of rations on board the slave ship, the maximal restraint of the shackled hands and feet of the victims, and the extremely cramped conditions of cartage.23 Accordingly, through the protagonist we see the mortifying bodily dimensions of the experience, as well as its alienating psychological ones. Des Pres has referred pointedly to the retreat of desire and the reproductive instinct under the fear, hunger, and physical exhaustion of the death camps (1976, 189). D’Aguiar’s Middle Passage, likewise, is in many senses apocalyptic. When his protagonist Mintah is forced to dance on deck she opts for the ritual dance to the gods of fertility as she is experiencing the end of her menstrual cycle. We become painfully aware, however, that her desperate attempts to placate the gods and renew the cycle will have been in vain (D’Aguiar 1999, 32), and that the destruction of her womb will be one of the outcomes of the beating she will receive at the hands of Kelsal and crew. Her imminent infertility and the eventual ineffectuality of the wooden carvings she creates as surrogate offspring, however, are not only emblematic of personal loss. In a larger sense they symbolize the ongoing decimation of the African population and presage the future underdevelopment of the continent that would ensue from the encounter with modernity and the colonial.24 Significantly, her future barrenness points “backward” as well. In Orlando Patterson’s classic analysis of slavery as social death, loss to the individual is of both ascending and descending lines, as she or he is rendered a “genealogical isolate” (1982, 5). Mintah’s separation from her ancestral line acquires, as well, an additional dimension of finality beyond the disruption of the family. Its poignancy is enhanced as we recall the schism between her parents who chose, in the case of her mother, to leave the village and go with the monotheism of the Christian missionaries, with the repression of traditional song and dance that this entails, and the resistance of her father, who would rather stay and observe the more open and polytheistic worldview of their ancestors. To the impossibility of physical return to her culture of origin is added the progressive disintegration of that culture.

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Genealogical isolation would become one of the more vivid existential aspects of the instrumentality of colonial production, a condition that for most captives became full blown only later in the rigors of the regime of forced labor on land, as parents faced separation from their children in sale or as siblings were torn apart one from another. The protagonist’s situation at sea, however, takes us back to the very initial stages of captivity, and the social exclusion and placelessness brought on by the inexorable nature of the system of labor acquisition introduced by European demand. Captives bound for the Atlantic market through kidnapping, war, or purchase formed a new category of marginals in the “slave belt” of the African coast. Given its scale and ever-widening expanse, the integrated nature of exchange into which they were caught up meant that once the individual had lost his or her freedom, escape or an eventual return home was well nigh impossible, especially given the ubiquity of slaving agents and the panoptical nature of the enterprise (Smallwood 2007). The dissolution of the sense of place that was brought on by initial uprooting and transfer to the littoral would be worsened by the unfamiliar medium of the sea. Lacking what Smallwood calls the “Cartesian coordinates” that might help them locate themselves on the wide expanse of sometimes turbulent open water, captives were prey to the worst fears as to their eventual destination or when they might arrive there. Their ensuing anxiety was compounded by the ever present question as to what indeed was the purpose of their captivity and sale and the worry that it might be for purposes of cannibalism or some similarly horrendous motive (D’Aguiar 1999, 37). Barring the latter eventuality, time at sea was totally disorienting, a hapless prolonged extension of initial rupture in which the meaning derived from being in a nexus of time and place was lost: “A life on water was no life to live,” mused Mintah at one point, “just an in between life, a suspended life, a life in abeyance, until land presented itself and enabled that life to resume” (61). Captain Cunningham’s apparently random choice of victims for jettison, which included the image of his crew chasing after panicked children in order to throw them overboard, made death a much more stark and present reality than speculations regarding the future, however. The present onslaught would have compounded the terror of the moment as well as its larger cosmic significance for the Africans. Far from implying merely the end, the mortal death of the individual in precolonial African cultures allowed him or her to be integrated into their wider community of kinfolk, both living and dead. It provided a link also to those who were not yet born. For death to have full meaning, the appropriate rituals of mourning and interment were of paramount importance. These included the blessing of the living and their material offerings for the well-being of the deceased in their journeys in the afterlife, such as food, tools, clothing, and so on, all of which made the finality of death tolerable (Smallwood 2007). Lost at sea, and without the security of the earth for interment and for cosmic continuity, jettisoning in shark-infested waters deprived the Africans of important

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funeral rituals, their last bulwark against total oblivion.25 The narrative appropriately captures the fear of endless limbo that would follow: “Each spirit would have to find its way home over this sea, over a scattered road of bones” (D’Aguiar 1999, 37). Effectively, the (impossible) road to “Guinea” has turned out to be a primary motif in diasporic life and literature, symbolized most often by the trope of winged flight.26 These considerations notwithstanding, the last ten of the Zong’s victims would be overcome by the specter of mass murder and they would throw themselves over the side. Mintah, in turn, equally horrified on witnessing their demise, would slip into senselessness: “I became dumb,” she later recalled, “numb, stiff, cold, retreated from my name into my body or fled that body as those ten fled that deck into the sea. More death on that deck than in the sea. The shifting sea’s deck preferred to the Zong” (214 emphasis added). There is an interesting peculiarity to D’Aguiar’s protagonist that bears on her symbolic role as link between the precolonial and the modern in a discussion of the extreme conditions of the slave ship to which I should now like to turn. It concerns her early contact with the Danish missionaries, her literacy and cultural hybridity, and the quality of subjectivity for which this literacy in English as colonial tongue serves as platform and prelude. While Mintah’s literacy, manifested in the onboard journal that she produces, speaks to her entry into the contested realm of the Western logos, it also concerns both the raced and gendered aspect of this subjectivity in the slaver as colonial vehicle under the state of exception, and by extension in the wider colonial space on terra firma. Her literacy and her rebellious femininity speak, as well, to the larger objective of emancipation through struggle. Indeed it is her early confrontation with the first mate, Kelsal, that reveals her fundamental linguistic difference vis-à-vis the other captives and this initial aspect of her cultural hybridity. As the first Africans are thrown overboard, Mintah recognizes the chief perpetrator from their earlier encounter at the Danish mission on the African coast, and loudly challenges him by calling out his name and asking about the fate of the missing men. Her use of English in the exchanges with Kelsal reveals that she is no bozal and immediately upsets presumptions of racial hierarchy and exploitable African unfamiliarity with European ways. We recall that the bozal had entered the European episteme as early as 1611 as per Covarrubias’ dictionary, which defined the term to mean an African who “knows no language but his own.” This purported lack in the African would translate under the aegis of the colonial into the sign of the subhuman. Only by repairing this lack, as Fanon famously noted, would full humanity be restored to the colonized.27 Besides reducing the intersubjective distance implied by mutual incommunicability between captor and captive groups, Mintah’s defiant linguistic performance on the Zong explodes the myth of the colonial language as “barrier” to humanness and of the indigenous African tongues as empty insignificance. She would use, in effect, the three coastal vernaculars that she knew to instigate insurgency on board, whereas her written English

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would be deployed toward the larger aim of producing the testimonial. In her irruption into the Western logocentric order, reason and language would have emancipation as its aim, whereas for the captor culture, as seen particularly in the performance of legal counsel for the investors at the hearing, it produces sophistry to serve the purposes of oppression. While Mintah’s production of a (talking) book by no means allows her into the male-oriented realm of “letters,” her “authorship” generates the full force of Occidentalist logophobia.28 Faced by her vociferous protestations on board, Kelsal would gag her and threaten to cut out her tongue (D’Aguiar 1999, 40), whereas in the court proceedings in England that followed, the boatswain, semiliterate himself, states that it is impossible that she might have been capable, as an African female, of writing the journal (162). There is another series of events that speak importantly to the matter of her gendered subjectivity. They concern the colonial sexual economy and the degrees to which her experiences provoke a sense of double consciousness that make her reflect on her selfhood as a woman. In her initial confrontation with Kelsal and crew to the shock of revealing her knowledge of English to the sailors, she adds the fact that she was also part of the JudeoChristian oikoumene by stating, “I am baptized like you” (32). On the one hand the declaration places her and her tormentors all within the parameters of the same moral and spiritual community and its corresponding codes and restrictions. On the other hand, considering her practical nudity at the time and the imminence of sexual aggression on their part, it highlights the subtext of colonial rape hovering in the background throughout the text, and of the ship itself, again, as a state of exception. The soon-to-beenslaved Mintah might have ruptured male scriptoral hegemony of the “pen as penis” (Gilbert 1990, 286) by writing a book. On board, however, she would constantly face the force of the unadorned phallocentricity of what has been called Occidental “rape culture,” and the particular consciousness of herself as a gendered being entering into the New World order of slavery and multifaceted domination. Given the context of captivity and conquest, slave ship rape as a mechanism of intimidation and social control was a constant of the Middle Passage, although for reasons of historiographic occlusion and taste, little has been written about it in the dominant tradition (Brownmiller 1975, Dorsey 2005). Joseph Dorsey’s study of the events on board the Jesús María of 1841, however, in which girls as young as eleven were brutally violated, leaves little doubt as to its frequency or to the gory nature of its displays of penile power. The specter of sexual abuse likewise stalked the Zong. It is there in the predatory activity of the crew, who would “arm themselves with loaves of bread and chunks of cheese” and troll the lower deck for takers among the desperate and half-starved females, in a performance that was often the prelude to gang rape (D’Aguiar 1999, 75). Mintah’s declaration of Christianness therefore gives but brief pause to the evolving male ritual that had begun with the captain’s earlier command for her to dance in the pouring

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rain. Indeed it is his subsequent order that she be reminded “of her station” that overrides the pause that her words had effected in the sailors’ rhythmic clapping in time to her dance steps (32). She would realize immediately afterward that it was only the visible signs of her incipient menstruation that forestall disaster after Kelsal pushes her to the ground, his companions pin her down, and the boatswain “begins to unbuckle his trousers” (35). Their grisly and sadistic intentions would be realized subsequently, however, when as part of her punishment following her failed uprising, pepper is applied to her eyes and inserted into her vagina.29 The abrasive condiment is thus made to accompany the gag, the whip, and the club from whose effects she had already suffered, as these surrogate penises were put in play to enact male sexual hegemony and to compensate for the psychosocial insufficiencies of a slave ship crew whose phallic power in the larger institutional framework of patriarchy was otherwise severely limited.30 It is her recollection in the prolonged flashback at the final section of the novel that Kelsal’s rapist intentions had been frustrated by the appearance of her menstrual flow, which most clearly emblematizes the narrative’s use of the strategy of selfreflection through the prism of double consciousness to underscore the protagonist’s identity in womanhood. Kelsal, she recalled at that moment, had “change[d] his mind about my body . . . the moon rescued me. Blood, my blood is my savior” (186). In this regard the quality of transracial malungaje displayed by Simon in feeding and hiding her on board, in not participating in her torture, and in preserving and presenting the journal at a strategically vital moment in court is worthy of note. Mintah’s flashback, with which the final section of the novel begins, reads as follows: “I am Mintah. They threw me off the Zong. I should be food for fish now” (183). The first-person voice enhances a narrative strategy that has her return repeatedly to this affirmation of self, as is seen especially after the two bouts of captor reprisal in response to her acts of defiance. Apart from the gendered aspect of her identity that they restore, as pointed out earlier, they indicate a literal regaining of consciousness after her brutal punishment. The “out of body” experience that we see when she is comatose on the second of these occasions, apart from underscoring the extreme nature of the physical trauma and providing the prism for double consciousness, also serves as a window on her religious faith and allows us to see her devotion to the African premise even if her acknowledgment of Christianity through baptism simultaneously marks her as a culturally hybrid colonial subject. This adherence to the (unnamed) gods of wood is an important aspect of the broad narrative of her resistance, as well as of the transculturative and transhistorical functioning of the gods. It is important to D’Aguiar’s interpretation of the Middle Passage as site of (post)-African change as well. We note, correspondingly, that despite the apparent early unresponsiveness of the gods of fertility and the accompanying inability to procreate, Mintah’s salvation would proceed from faith in the gods of wood, a commitment she had learned from her father. This becomes evident first of

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all as the rope’s “plaited grain” is fortuitously provided when she is herself thrown overboard and is about to drown (D’Aguiar 1999, 53). Wood again provides the urgently needed medium of self-expression as she creatively channels the slave ship trauma into 131 carvings designed both to placate her frustrated motherly urge and to pay homage to her lost shipmates (119, 206–210), and it is into the wood of the ship’s deck that she offers her spirit, in a sort of animist projection, on the two occasions that she is beaten into unconsciousness. Finally, notwithstanding the fire that consumes her sculptures in their putative function as memorials, it is wood that provided the paper on which she pens the final story of their sacrifice, giving form to the food on which the dead of the story will feed to allow the survival of their spirits. This transformation in the narrative—from the material to the textual—of the “foods” that are offered to the ancestors in traditional African custom marks the narrative’s acknowledgment of cultural hybridity and polyvalency in the protagonist. In signaling change between the present and the past, though, it also points to African and post-African continuity, for the metaphysical content of the feeding of “ghosts” remains the same. “Those spirits are fled into wood,” the story concludes. “The ghosts feed on the story of themselves. The past is laid to rest when it is told” (230). The emancipatory intent of Feeding the Ghosts draws its inspiration from the moral scandal the Zong represents and the genocidal historical process of which it is emblematic. Beyond its relevance as diasporan memorial lies the lesson it holds for humanity in highlighting the human cost behind the forcible extraction of untold millions of Africans for slave labor in the twin processes of colonialism and capitalist modernity. Dislocation and relocation, we are told, accounted for 5 million lives across the Middle Passage and in the first year of exile for these Africans. At the time of the British and American abolition of the slave trade in 1807–1808, there were some 3.3 million individuals in the throes of forced labor across the wide plantation complex of the Atlantic. Among them, their predecessors, and their successors in the New World, they would eventually deliver some 2.5 billion hours of work without pay (Rediker 2007, 348), in a process whose foundational role in the current global distribution of wealth, privilege, and quality of life is still insufficiently unaccounted for. It is in this sense also that the novel, both as memorial and as testament to survivalism, that instinct to defy death and “tell the world,” evokes the primeval scream by which humanity’s biological ancestors, socialized primates, would warn the larger group of impending danger (Des Pres 1976, 220). D’Aguiar’s noted cognizance, in other words, of the continued relevance of race as a political system is what is behind his insistence on the importance of art as a “moral, intellectual and emotional force” and on the need to combat amnesia through the arts of memory (Frías 2002, 425). It also hints at his wish to establish the imperative that unconscionable (and genocidal) human exploitation be contained, counteracted, and eradicated by an ethical and liberationist politics.

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In the final analysis, the protagonist’s limited successes in resistance and insurgency on board ship and later on land are perhaps symbolic of the writer’s awareness that freedom is a relative state and ultimately an unfinished project. As Mintah observes at the eventual arrival of Emancipation to the British West Indies in 1833, back in Maryland where she had lived prior to her escape to Jamaica, her shipmates or malungos remained in bondage. Jubilee would not come to them for three more decades.31 Indeed, the staggered road to emancipation would extend practically to the end of the century, as in the remaining French colonies the enslaved would be freed later in 1848, and in Cuba and Brazil, the last of the Hispanic territories, slavery would not end until 1876 and 1888, respectively. From her outernational and prestatist position in colonial Jamaica, then, freedom was still not quite fulfilled. August Monday’s fullest fruit was yet on the horizon.32 Integration and full citizenship rights for Afro-descendants in the statist context would therefore be mostly twentieth-century achievements, seen on the one hand with the 1960s civil rights revolution in the United States and in the achievement of independence in the formerly British West Indies, and on the other, with the belated multiethnic and pluricultural constitutions that were adopted in several Latin American countries in the postdictatorial period of the 1990s.

NOTES 1. Fernando Po and Lopes Gonçalves had come upon the island in 1471, part of the downward exploratory project of Portugal’s Henry the Navigator begun decades earlier. Portugal would cede the island in a treaty with Spain in 1778 in exchange for colonies in the River Plate region, Sacramento, and Santa Catalina Island. 2. Felicia R. Lee, “Bench of Memory at Slavery’s Gateway.” 3. Rushdy notes that there were at least six anthologies “of slave narratives and interviews,” released in 1969, with some twenty-five black novels published in 1970 (2005, 95). He terms them “neoslave” novels on account of their historical relation to their nineteenth-century predecessors. 4. Archeologists excavating the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle in 1972 in preparation for future visitors encountered a thick surface layer of compressed matter consisting, inter alia, of human blood, feces, and exfoliated skin, a grim reminder of the conditions confronting the captives temporarily housed in the holding pens prior to the Middle Passage (Hartman 2007, 118). 5. This tradition in the former British West Indies harks back to the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which ended slavery on August 1, 1834. 6. Cape Coast was the English translation of cabo corso (short cape), as the Portuguese had originally called it. They were the first Europeans to establish a trading lodge there in 1555 (Anquandah 1999, 46). 7. Opoku-Agyemang holds a PhD from York University in Ontario, Canada. He has also had several visiting appointments at US universities. 8. David Crystal in Language Death points out that none of the twelve hundred indigenous languages in Africa serves currently as a means of instruction in secondary schools there (2002, 83). Even languages with millions of speakers,

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

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such as Yoruba (20 million) and Shona (7 million) (13), occupy a second-place status and carry a long-term disadvantage in this context, vis-à-vis the colonial language, English. The case of the Zong grew to be a scandal in the latter eighteenth century and a catalyst of the abolitionist movement that followed. The story featured prominently in the debates in the British House of Commons before the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. It inspired the abolitionist writings of Olaudah Equiano and Ottabah Cuguano as well as J. M. W. Turner’s famous 1840 painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On (Yellin 2005, 350). D’Aguiar learned of it in 1994 at the Liverpool Maritime Slave Gallery (Frías 2002, 421). See “Roots and Routes: Black Identity as an Outernational Project.” Also The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. “The Sea is History,” in Derek Walcott: Collected Poems, 1948–1984, 364–367. D’Aguiar was born in England and raised in Guyana up to the age of twelve. He was the winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature in 1988. The assertiveness that expressed itself in black vernacular culture in the Black Power movement and in black studies programs on college campuses sought an analogy in literature through the exploration of slave resistance and the small and large triumphs that accompanied the tragedies of slavery. See Rushdy, “The Politics of the Neo-Slave Narrative.” Feeding the Ghosts, 11. Hereinafter referred to as Feeding. The relevant provision stated that: “The insurer takes upon himself the risk of the loss, capture, and death of slaves, or any unavoidable accident to them. But natural death is always understood to be excepted: by natural death is meant, not only when it happens by disease or sickness, but when slaves are killed, or thrown into the sea in order to quell an insurrection on their part, then the insurers must answer” (Qtd. in Shyllon 1974, 185). Emphasis added. Shyllon documents several cases, in the context of abolition, where justice was sought for enslaved Africans abandoned, mistreated, or kidnapped by current or former masters. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government had alluded to industriousness and rationality as the basis of God’s largesse. See “Of Property” 291. Here one might consider the temporal spread between Bartolomé de las Casas’ account of Spanish sixteenth-century conquest in the Antilles, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las indias (1552), and Caroline Elkins’ recent exposé in Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, more than four centuries later. Agamben adds: “It is impossible to grasp the specificity of the National Socialist concept of race—and, with it, the peculiar vagueness and inconsistency that characterize it—if one forgets that the biopolitical body that constitutes the new fundamental political subject is neither a quaestio facti (for example the identification of a certain biopolitical body), nor a quaestio iuris, (the identification of a certain juridical rule to be applied), but rather, the site of a certain political decision that operates in the absolute indistinction of fact and law” (1998, 171). Yellin quotes from Robert Weisbord’s “The Case of the Slave Ship ‘Zong” in this regard (2005, 350). While the court’s incredulity at her literacy brings back the memory of Phyllis Wheatley in 1772 Boston (Gates 1986, 7), it also takes us back to earlier injunctions in the history of slavery in the West against slaves giving testimony in a court of law. According to that hallowed tradition such testimony could only be admitted if the speaker were under torture.

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22. The case, recorded as Gregson vs. Gilbert, was first heard at Gulhall, London, on March 6, 1783. Equiano read the anonymous letter in the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser of March 18 commenting on the scandal and brought it to the attention of Sharp (Shyllon 1974, 189). 23. Smallwood stresses the empirical element to the management of pain and hunger among slaves by the traders and their suppliers, and links it to the broader issue in the modern West of discipline and punishment of the mind and body “without extinguishing the life within” (2007, 36). 24. See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 25. The Christians, of course, observed their own burial rituals at sea (Feeding 108). Slave ships on returning home would also mark the passing of crew who did not return with an appropriate ceremony. See Rediker 2007, 247. 26. Alan Rice refers to this phenomenon as the “flying symbolic.” See “‘Up to the Highest Point:’ Liberation and the Flying Symbolic in Black Atlantic Culture.” 27. Fanon, “The Negro and Language” in Black Skin, White Masks.” See also the reference to the bozalic as motif for fun and derogation of black characters in Spanish Golden Age theater in Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature. 28. See Foucault’s “The Discourse on Language” on logophobia (1990, 158). 29. As frightful as D’Aguiar’s fictional rendering of this episode is, we are told that it was gunpowder (inserted in the anus and vagina) that was used in the nonfictional depositions concerning the victims of the Jesús María (Dorsey 2005, 303). 30. See Dorsey in this regard. See Daniel Boyarin for a discussion of the difference between the penis and the phallus in psychoanalysis. 31. See Peter Linebaugh in this regard; “Jubilating; Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee against Capitalism, with Some Success.” There is a noteworthy scene in the filmic rendition of Emancipation in the United States when Morgan Freeman’s character in Glory, at the head of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all-black company of slaves-turned-soldiers in the Federal Army, marches into black towns spreading the news of freedom as the Civil War draws to a close. Analogous references to black soldiery in the event in Walker’s novel Jubilee offer an interesting intertext. 32. While August 1 has been the official date for Emancipation celebrations in former British West, in Guyana the tradition, until recently, has been to celebrate the occasion on the first Monday of August, hence the resonance and symbolism of the term August Monday, similar to Juneteenth in the US-American context.

2

Dislocation and Double Consciousness in Kamau Brathwaite The Poet as Guinea-Bird

Te vi pasar, una tarde ébano, y te saludé: duro entre todos los troncos, duro entre todos los troncos, tu corazón recordé. (“Ébano real,” Nicolás Guillén)1

Critics of Kamau Brathwaite’s work have noted the centrality to its aesthetic and structure of such recurring themes and images as diaspora and dispossession; orality and the drum; African gods; the Caribbean landscape and folk culture; the mask; the experimentalism of the poet’s “video style” of writing; and so on. What the critics have not highlighted sufficiently, I believe, is the centrality, aesthetic versatility, and vitality of the personae that sustain his inspiration over decades of poetic reflection and articulation, particularly in his work up to 1987. I refer here to the initial objects of captivity and enslavement, the “arrivants” from Africa, for whom he names his first trilogy and whose remembered presence and heritage he uses as an epigraph to introduce the book.2 In this chapter I set out to explore the extended metaphor of African captives bound for slavery, that is, arrivants, (re)semanticized in the Jamaican colonial vernacular as Guinea-birds, and highlight their cognitive and symbolic value as muse and as hitherto underappreciated aesthetic and ideological point of departure in Brathwaite’s reflections as poet and as cultural critic. As D’Aguiar did in his work examined in the previous chapter, Brathwaite addresses an outernational “dislocated” space, although his intention is clearly based, given his twentieth-century postcolonial concerns, in imagining a (Caribbean) community that draws its sustenance out of values inherited from slavery’s early subjects as a response to material and psychological dislocation in the conditions of coloniality. An epistemic and “diachronic” link, if you will, might be established with the truncated narrative of Ndongo’s anonymous “Slave Coast” captive through D’Aguiar’s Fetu female character, who had left Africa, or more particularly the Guinea Coast, spent time in the United States, and ended up in the Caribbean, in Barbados, to be more precise, the homeland of Brathwaite. The

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contiguity of these writers’ concerns, I propose, speaks to the relevance of articulating an archive of transatlantic writing of the experience of diaspora. The arrivants appear in an early reference, albeit somewhat hesitantly, as “first link(s)” to Africa for the diasporan collective.3 The cognitive lacuna regarding slave subjectivity to which as poet he confesses at the time of writing “The Cabin” (where the reference appears), however, would subsequently be addressed by Brathwaite the historian, in his published doctoral thesis Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica, 1776–1820 (1970). In the thesis he offers an abundance of historical and ethnographic data concerning the newcomers as they “adapt their African heritage to the new and changed conditions” of the New World (6), constituting an identifiable cultural matrix that would participate in dynamic and creative engagement with European and other influences that appear in the larger Caribbean milieu over time. Brathwaite as cultural critic would go further in his seminal essay Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (1974), and highlight the essentially unfinished and ongoing nature of the process he calls creolization, that is, the cultural give and take between these elements. He would stress the role of power in the vertical as well as the lateral dimensions of the creolizing dynamic, and vindicate the denigrated arrivants and their heritage as source for a possible cultural and political alternative for the contemporary Caribbean, and as a way of arresting the alienation and stasis produced by the colonial and postcolonial regimen. The chapter will register the importance of the Guinea-bird—as agent and idea and as translocal and transhistorical trope—to the exploration and elucidation of Brathwaite’s early work, insofar as this work wrestles with such issues as black cultural identity in the Caribbean, the region’s vernacular (which he dubs nation language), and its distressing political legacy of slavery and colonialism. The main points of the discussion will be centered on the poems “Hex,” “Lix,” and Occident” in the collection Mother Poem (1979) and on Brathwaite’s elegy to his martyred fellow historian Walter Rodney, the “Poem for Walter Rodney” (1980–2010).4 Our encounter with the Guinea-bird as discursive and social construct comes initially in 1774 from observations in The History of Jamaica: Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, written by Edward Long, a British-born colonial apologist and member of the slave-owning planter elite in Jamaica. In his promotion of the island as a place for “young beginners” of “slender patrimony” from the colonial center, who might increase the white population and thus serve to protect the colony from enemies without and within, it is inevitable that Long would address, alongside flora, fauna, landscape, and economic conditions, the masses on whose forced labor the island’s success rested (2002, 1: iii). Long sets the ensuing discussion of the creole blacks and the newly arrived Africans within a larger analysis that would distinguish all blacks from whites. In so doing, he would follow the current raciological trend that rearticulated the medieval Great Chain of Being and

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placed white European males, the “perfect men” (2002, 2: 377 emphasis in the original), at its apex, while leaving black Africans to occupy the lowest rung on the ladder of human hierarchy. He hypothesized in his race thinking that blacks should not even be considered as belonging to the “genus” of Homo sapiens (2002, 2: 356), particularly because for two thousand years they had seemed “incapable of making any progress in civility or science” (2002, 2: 353). Instead they should more properly be compared with the orangutan (2002, 2: 365). Long’s comparison of the Africans with the creole blacks is equally revealing of the supremacist premise that anchored his colonialist and proslavery ideas. If there is a gradation to be found between ape and African, as his analysis proposes, a similar progression is evident among the Africans and the creole blacks because of the exposure of the latter to European civilization and to race mixture between them and the colonists. The creole blacks, consequently: differ much from the Africans, not only in manners, but in beauty of shape, feature and complexion. They hold the Africans in utmost contempt, stiling [sic] them “salt-water Negroes” and “Guinea birds,” but value themselves on their own pedigree, which is reckoned the more honorable, the further removed from an African, or transmarine ancestor. On a well-governed plantation they eye and respect their master as a father, and are extremely vain in reflecting on the connexion between them. (2002, 2: 410 emphasis added) Brathwaite as critic two centuries later would confront the regimen of force and persuasion to which the broader Afro-creole population was subjected and that impelled their biocultural approximation to whiteness through the acquisition of “manners” and “pedigree.” Many of his essays invoke this originary scene of colonial mimicry with its corresponding rejection and disavowal of the culture of the arrivants. The flight from blackness is most evident, he reports, particularly after Emancipation in the nineteenth century with the arrival of the missionaries; the suppression of the African drum and associated religious practices; the implementation of European-oriented curricula in public education in the West Indies; and with the region’s ongoing immersion into contemporary capitalist consumer culture.5 In his embrace of the Guinea-bird as source and resource for thinking of alternatives to the legacy of metropolitan cultural and political dominance, it is important to stress his emphasis on the fact of the survival of “ex-African” culture in a transgenerational or diachronic sense. In Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean, he suggests pointedly that: despite the shift to Europe, a strong Afro-creole element continued to persist within West Indian society. It expressed itself in the Africanization of Christianity, especially in the Baptist churches in Jamaica during

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The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora the 1860s, leading to an “outbreak” of mayalism on the eve of the Morant Bay Rebellion, in Garveyism after 1900, in the Rastafari movement (in Jamaica) since the 1930s, the Black Power of the 60s, and in the continuing African forms of marketing habits, family pattern, speech (dialect), magic-medicine (obeah), and religious practices, po/ kumina, vodun, shango etc. (1974, 31)

Brathwaite’s radical solidarity with an originary and evolving “Guineabird culture” is grounded also in his personal experiences and their transformational effect. Two moments demarcate the trajectory of what may be called an emerging and dialectical “born-again” Africanness in the poet. The first would lead him to conclude after journeying from Barbados, through England, West Africa, and back to Barbados, that the sojourn in the Ghanaian village “was my beginning” (“Timehri,” 38). “I came to a sense of identification with these people,” he states. “I came to connect my history with theirs, the bridge of my mind now linking Atlantic and ancestor, homeland and heartland” (38). The Ghanaian moment was preceded by the poet’s experience in England, where he went imbued with the sense of cultural belonging for which his elite colonial education in Barbados had prepared him, only to find that his “fellow Englishmen,” in the “Mother Country,” refused to recognize him under the terms that he sought.6 The experience was important to the extent that it afforded the writer a process of introspection, from a distance, as it were, through what W. E. B. Du Bois famously referred to as double consciousness. That is to say that, while Cambridge as metropolitan icon represented the point of arrival for the pilgrimage of the colonized intellectual, who as putative Afro-Saxon had simultaneously journeyed away from colonial Afro-vernacular culture, his sense of rejection in England and his Ghanaian episode would prepare him for full reconciliation with this culture, hence his conclusion, post-Ghana that “I came home to find that I had not really left” (“Timehri,” 38). It was the experience of Ghana, moreover, and the poet’s immersion into Akan history and folkways that produced the brilliant lyrical exploration into the how and why of slavery and diaspora that he articulates in the New World Trilogy, that resonated so well with African popular and academic sensibilities. This produced the second moment. If Ghana between 1957 and 1962 represented a “resurrectionary” phase (“Timehri,” 41) for filling a cognitive, ideological, and identitarian gap, the poet’s stint as visiting professor at the University of Nairobi in 1971 and the ceremonial changing of his name from Edward to Kamau in the Kenyan countryside served to confirm his anticolonial transition. Brathwaite is unequivocal about the deep personal and political symbolism behind the name change, invoking in his memoir the material and psychological violence African captives suffered in the primordial scene of transference to the Western political and cultural regime and the ongoing resistance to

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Afro-identification even in the postcolonial scenario. What is important about his Ghanaian and Kenyan moments is their transformational nature (Kamau translates as “Silent Warrior” from Kikuyu), and the fact that they offered vocational dimension and direction to his work and put him in touch with his repressed historico-cultural “first links,” that is, with the Guineabird as symbol and as cultural content. Transcending the colonial dominant would enable his exploration of Afro-creole and Caribbean cultural alterity through the articulation and vindication of nation language, as well, as we see later in this chapter. It would offer an epistemic foundation to his meditations on creolization and catalyze his quest for social justice. As a colonized black intellectual, Brathwaite’s experience with double consciousness en route to radical ideological positioning merits comment. Perhaps the most memorable of Du Bois’ words are the ones recorded by the African-American in reaction to the racist gaze and to the self-awareness prompted in blacks by being made to look at themselves “through the eyes of others” (The Souls of Black Folk, 2). Equally important are Du Bois’ notions regarding the necessary merging of the split selfhood, the racial and the national, into “a better and truer self” (2), his decades-long advocacy of equal rights for blacks in America, and his passionate pan-Africanism and globalism. The historian, public intellectual, and organizer of five panAfrican conferences between 1917 and 1945 would eventually turn to the communist paradigm and assume Ghanaian citizenship in the last three years of his life (1961–1963), under the sponsorship of his erstwhile mentee Kwame Nkrumah.8 Where the interests of Du Bois and Brathwaite coincide, national and epochal differences aside, is precisely in their critique of coloniality and the West and in their vindicatory Africanism. The reflections of both writers on black identity under the shadow of an unavoidable “duality” are also revealing. Du Bois’ early meditation on self and nation is framed by the racialist binary produced by slavery in the American context. It is aimed at healing the condition of an individual’s being both African and American at the same time, and projected toward a hoped-for future context of social and racial equality. His claim to nation through a black subjectivity in which “neither of the old (African/American) selves” would be lost is of enduring valency. The vindication of a vernacular black American culture, coterminous with the origins of the “wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave” and essential to what is truly American (7), is also important, notwithstanding the elitism evident in the historical role he imagined for a “‘talented tenth’” of black leaders (McGill, 1965, 80). In thinking through creolization, Brathwaite’s imagined community in Contradictory Omens, in contrast, is not national but regional, West Indian, and the cultural binary of blackness and whiteness that he confronts is complicated by lateral elements of race and class in the post-Emancipation scenario. On the one hand, his model of creolization involves vindication, “acceptance,” and “eventual absorption of the (former) subordinate [i.e., black Guinea-bird culture] into the

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‘mainstream’ of the (former) superordinate” [colonial culture], and vice versa, in an ongoing, two-way process of exchange (62). It points, as does Du Bois’ thought, to the desirability of a tertium quid beyond the polarized oppositions spawned by colonialism and slavery. On the other hand, Brathwaite’s Caribbeanist trajectory also takes into account the complications that ensued when post-Emancipation labor conscripts of South Asian or Chinese extraction participated and competed in a system of racialized dominance whose original targets for enslavement and denigration were the Africans and Afro-creoles. These latter were shunted to the margins of postslavery society on account of their unwillingness to return to the former slave plantations, and manipulated by the divide-and-rule tactics of the new colonial wage economy. For Brathwaite’s analysis, the post-Emancipation scenario in which “race” becomes “class” speaks to the shifting positions that become evident as the larger socio-racial contract favorably accommodates former racial subordinates, like the West Indians of Chinese, Jewish, and East Indian extraction, within nineteenth- and twentieth-century socioeconomic configurations (53, 63). Indeed, his elegy to Walter Rodney, educator, activist, and martyr to the multiracial Guyanese republic, to which we now turn our attention, brings these important national and regional issues, and others, to the fore. It is probably axiomatic to assert that the civil rights movement and Black Power movement together marked an epochal change in the struggle for racial and social justice in the United States. Half a century later, the speeches and writings of the protagonists of these movements still resonate and identify them as exemplars of resistance and sociopolitical vindication in international and wider Afro-diasporan terms. Du Bois, the AfricanAmerican civil rights champion and mobilizer and would-be senator from New York who also came to be known as the “Father of Pan-Africanism,” did not live to see the passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. It is perhaps a measure of his extra-national stature, though, that the US government, which had earlier refused to renew his American passport, neglected to recognize and offer condolences at the massive state funeral that was held for him in Ghana in August 1963.9 In the wake of Nkrumah’s 1958 All African People’s Conference, with its resounding demands for independence, freedom, and pan-African unity, Ghana would become a mecca for radicals, progressives, and freedom seekers from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa itself, some of the more notable of whom include Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X. Brathwaite’s arrival in Ghana in 1957, judging from his recollections, seems to be more the result of coincidence rather than a response to the pan-African impulse then current. In 1966, though, nine years after that country’s declaration of independence, and considering the military coup that had dislodged Nkrumah and the difficulties of postindependence governance that had preceded it, Rodney’s desire to “practice diaspora” through radical pedagogy would lead him, not to Ghana, but to

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Tanzania instead, and the University of Dar es Salaam. Here Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration and his embrace of socialism sought to make Tanzania the new hub of revolutionary Africanness.10 It is the violent and untimely shutting off of possibilities for transformation opened up by Rodney’s activism and intellectual insurgency, his real and perceived threat to concentric circles of power and oppression represented in the colonial and neocolonial orders, that animates Brathwaite in the elegy, a text that he has revisited and tinkered with for thirty years since producing the original manuscript in 1980. Walter Rodney’s critical and dissident consciousness was most likely born in the latter 1950s when he distributed political fliers for the multiracial preindependence People’s Progressive Party as a teenager in Georgetown, Guyana. It developed in his undergraduate years at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, where he read history, and matured later in London as he did research for his doctoral dissertation and published the eponymous A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800, and where he also served an apprenticeship in Marxist polemics and public speaking at Hyde Park under the mentorship of C. L. R. James, the noted Caribbeanist writer and thinker. The brief decade and a half between the completion of the dissertation and his demise in 1980 saw him mix radical academic practice with resolute counter institutional critique whose principal focus of concern was the disadvantaged and the racialized underclass in the Caribbean, Africa, and wider Third World. This critique was evident whether it was articulated during his brief tenure as professor and public speaker in Jamaica in 1968, before a timorous postindependence administration declared him persona non grata; in Tanzania, through his growing discomfort with and disavowal of ethnic partisanship and postcolonial accomodationism;11 or eventually in his native Guyana, where his confrontation with the gross specter of the independence leader-turned-dictator led to his elimination. In Brathwaite’s elegy to Rodney, we see a fortuitous emblematizing of what the poet once termed the alter/Native,12 unwaveringly censorious of social hierarchy and the colonial heritage, and of international capital and its avatars. Here the transformational logic embedded in the trope of the Guinea-bird would encompass a critical embrace of Africa as home and heritage. By way of a politics of memory, it would provide also a platform for transformative and liberatory imaginings that are anchored precisely in the registers of struggle created by slavery and the trajectory of colonial and postcolonial oppression, and by the rupture implied by the Middle Passage. The “Poem for Walter Rodney” or “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” begins with a contemplation of the mortal remains of the subject, “blown into fragments” (elegguas, 60) by the assassin’s bomb; the image of bodily destruction offered in deliberate complement to the sudden and painful reality of the truncation of a long-postponed process of nationhood and nation building. Rodney’s destroyed body (“your flesh/ like the islands that you love/ like the seawall that you wish to heal,” 60) is simultaneously

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representative, as the verse suggests, of both the Guyanese nation-state, riven by Indo/African postcolonial racial conflict, and of the larger imagined Caribbean nation, whose hopes of formalizing the projected unity of a shared geographical space and cultural heritage had sunk with the shortlived West Indies Federation in 1962. It is typical of Rodney, the Mona undergraduate, that he would have worked actively in 1960–1961 in support of Prime Minister Norman Manley’s efforts to have Jamaica remain in the Federation. It was typical of him also that his evolving nationalist commitment would lead him to consciously recuperate the ideal of transracial politics in his native Guyana, pursuant to the preindependence premise of the multiracial People’s Progressive Party. Brathwaite’s image of Guyana as a broken seawall in need of repair or healing is particularly appropriate considering the country’s susceptibility to flooding along its eastern coastline by the Atlantic ocean (Georgetown the capital lies six feet below sea level), and the vulnerability of the barriers laboriously erected by enslaved Africans to reclaim and protect arable land for colonial production. To the degree that Brathwaite has inserted the topos of black slave labor in eighteenth-century colonial Guiana under the Dutch with this image, and evoked a similar foundational effort by East Indian indentured laborers in nineteenthcentury Guianese agriculture, both of which are episodes recuperated by Rodney’s A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, he highlights the tragedy of race-based independence-era conflict as inimical to sound national beginnings. He also highlights thereby the trauma of the loss of a leader and of future possibilities in the need to repair the racial breach. Rodney’s own efforts to write a larger national multiracial narrative, it might be added, include the unfinished project whose first two volumes are titled significantly Kofi Baadu: Out of Africa and Lakshmi: Out of India.13 Rodney’s critical race thinking is pivotal to Brathwaite’s depiction of his fellow historian, not only the transcending by the former of Afro-ethnic particularity in the national Guyanese scenario, but also in his appreciation of race as a foundation of colonial and postcolonial domination. It is there in Rodney’s demystification of the white “racial contract”14 and the notion of negative difference on which white supremacy is premised, and in his revelation of the malleable contours of racial identity when he brings Africans and South Asians under the same racial rubric in The Groundings with my Brothers, following the current definition of blackness in England, as he discusses the political relevance of Black Power in the metropolitan and Caribbean contexts (16–17). It is also there in his exposé of the racial demagoguery underlying the creation of (black) national heroes, Marcus Garvey in the case of Jamaica (24–30) and the antislavery insurgent Cuffy in Guyana, by postindependence black leaders who would appropriate these symbols to help legitimize their rule. Ultimately it is the question of power and the subjectivity of the laboring classes, abused and exploited by local and transnational elites, that Rodney vindicates in his politically charged speeches and writings, based on his Marxist scrutiny of the social

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and political axis of history. In identifying the corrosive power that was held in common by white colonial slave masters, by the African ruling elites that helped enable the transatlantic holocaust, and by the black leaders in Africa and the Caribbean who continue to collaborate in the perpetuation of the capitalist world system, he reveals a fundamental premise on which radical social change might be imagined. The class-based argument allows Rodney to speak from a position that endorses race consciousness as a political mobilizer for people of African descent denigrated by colonialism and racism, but that is also aware of the potential for debilitating essentialisms that might inhibit wider solidarities and connections. Rodney’s loss in the poem, then, is primarily a loss to the poor in their perennially unequal confrontation with “those who have all these generations bitten us bare to the bone” (elegguas, 60), and in the creation, by the latter, of degradation, dependency, and underdevelopment. In the elegy, the poet imagines an apocalyptic moment of vindication and vengeance when “por cyaaan tek no moore” (the poor can take [it] no more) (62), which culminates a lengthy lyrical crescendo of “until/s” that not only create narrative tension in his verse, but also suggest the intensity of the longsuffering undergone by the dispossessed. It is also significant that Brathwaite clothes Rodney, the would-be bringer of “equal rights & justice” (elegguas, 60), in the emancipatory rhetoric of Rastafari. The unmistakable reference to reggae musician Peter Tosh’s famous lines expressing the desire for social equity15 invokes a particularly fervent moment of postindependence political awareness in the larger context of Black Power, and renewed Garveyism in the Caribbean. It is also a tribute to the Fanonian tenor of Rodney’s expression, in its acknowledgment of the necessity of violence as an instrument of liberation and of his personal valor in confronting postcolonial regimes in the Caribbean and Africa with his radical pedagogy. Considering the risks involved, the personal bravery required for Rodney to venture into Kingston’s slums to share what he knew about African history before his banning in 1968 is thus highlighted. The same might be said of his taking African leadership to task in 1974 in his searing critique of the 6th Pan-African Congress in Dar-es-Salaam, or of his refusal to be intimidated by the Burnham regime in the presence of statesupported thuggery in the latter 1970s. From this viewpoint, his assassination would be seen as the climax in an escalation of lesser forms of political suppression including government control and manipulation of the media, or the trumped up charges of treason and arson to which Rodney and his comrades were earlier subjected, or the generalized harassment of elements of the political opposition in Guyana at the time.16 Brathwaite’s poetic voice is particularly poignant when he declares that politics “should be like understanding. of the floorboards/ of your house swept clean each morning. built by hands that know the wind and tide and language” (65), pointing thereby to the crucial nature of intelligence as a feature of the necessary arsenal for the battlefield of politics. The reference also hints at the fact that despite

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Rodney’s brilliant academic deconstruction of the Burnham regime in his public discourses, the apparatus of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), the party he co-led, was nonetheless not immune to infiltration by the double agent that carried out his assassination. Rodney the politician was ultimately unable to determine, in the words of the poem, “from the heat/ of the hand-/ shake if stranger was stranger or cobra or friend” (64). Rupert Roopnarine, the other co-leader of the WPA and symbol of IndoGuyanese dimension to the transracial project, in a retrospective some three decades after the event, lamented “the failure to build . . . an effective antidictatorial unity” among the varying Guyanese constituencies as “the single most disabling factor in the Guyanese struggle in the Year of the Turn,” referring here to the months in 1979–1980 when the Working People’s Alliance accelerated its public campaign against the government.17 When Brathwaite returns at the beginning of the second section of the poem to his initial image of the martyred Rodney (“to be blown into fragments. your death/ like the islands that you love/ seawall that you wish/ to heal. bringing equal rights and justice to the brothers/ that children above all others would be like the sun-/ rise over the rupununi over the hazy morne over kilimanjaro” (elegguas 63), it is to be noted that his subject is now accorded an even larger political constituency than that of Guyana or the Caribbean. His expansion of Rodney’s imagined political public from Guyana (through the reference to the Rupunini river), to the Caribbean, and to Africa (through the reference to Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro), also speaks to the wider connotation of the reference. On the one hand, it reiterates an Afro-diasporan imaginary for Rodney. On the other hand, it inserts the black diaspora as symbolic platform for the historian’s transracial and universal agency as it is expressed in the lines that follow. Guyana’s Rupununi, St. Lucia’s Castries (evoked in the Middle Passages version 52), and Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro thus serve as individual and collective synecdoche for “any where or world where there is love/ there is the sky and its blue/ free. where past means present struggle” (elegguas, 63 emphasis added). In this articulation also, love and struggle through an enabling juxtaposition remind the reader of the necessary depth of affect that underlies (transracial) solidarity, and precedes activism, even in the face of what turned out, following Roopnarine, to have been an insurmountable challenge. The epistemic value of the black past, as indicated earlier, was clearly of much importance to the historian-activist. However, as Rodney underscored the importance to diasporans of the knowledge of the African contribution to universal civilization as a strategic necessity in the recuperation of black pride and in the struggle against racism, he was careful to observe that for New World blacks, “the history nearest to revolutionary action will be the history of Africans in their new American environments” (Groundings, 59). In this view, the significance of the achievements of ancient Africa in the arts and sciences, pivotal to a de-centering of the colonizing West, would complement a fresh liberationist episteme that was created in the New

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World. The fact of the perennial presence of power, though, the objective and subjective barriers to solidarity and collective action—the elements that set back revolutionary transformation in Guyana—impose on Brathwaite a philosophical tone as the poem moves toward what is at once a prophecy and an exhortation. When the hands that build the aforementioned national house know “the wind and tide and language,” as per the earlier lines, only then, he suggests, might “each man on his cramped restless island/ . . . take up his bed and walk/ in the power and reggae of his soul/stice/ from the crippled brambled pathways of his vision/ to the certain limpen knowledge of his nam” (65). In the absence of this condition, the horizon of freedom will always seem beyond reach. That the dream of liberation is utopian, however, does not render Brathwaite defeatist. Indeed, it is the very history of antislavery “revolutionary action” alluded to by Rodney, and endorsed by Brathwaite through his coinage and use of the term nam, that holds the solution, once the latter can be located and recuperated. For Brathwaite, nam is the indestructible soul force that guaranteed survival to the shipmates on the Middle Passage and subsequently underlay their insurgency. If the poem here makes nam something that is phenomenologically “certain,” but simultaneously “limpen” (each man . . . in the certain limpen knowledge of his nam), the apparent paradox contained in the image only seeks to acknowledge its untapped nature, that is to say, its immanence. From this exhortation the poem moves toward its conclusion, reiterating, in elegiac mode, the subject’s virtues and offering images of the living Rodney as a voice that created vistas of peace and justice and social harmony. The Rastafarian paradigm of social transformation in which the subject had initially been inserted now acquires a specifically spiritual dimension as he is described as “one of those ital brothers who have grace” (elegguas, 65); that is, as one whose asceticism and refined modesty are antithetical to and out of place in a universe of gross injustice and materialism, in “a world we never made,” according to the poem (66). The hint of the hagiographic in the reference to Rodney as a subjectivity imbued with “grace” was initiated by the earlier pronouncement of this section, which appears as a (meta) narrative within the larger account (“this is the message that the idren will deliver/ grounded with drift of mustard seed,” 54), and by the biblical metaphor that likens Rodney’s words and agency to the planter of small seeds that yield powerful and far-reaching fruit.18 Rodney as subject of the future narrative tradition of the community of Rastafari (“the message” of “the idren,” elegguas, 65) is a key trope in Brathwaite’s elegy, and it is significant that the poet, in this most recent version of the poem, has moved his speaking voice even closer to the subject by replacing his earlier third-person stance in speaking of this future narrative (“this is the message that the dreadren will deliver,” Third World Poems, 67 stress added), with a first-person enunciation (“idren”). Here the presumptive (self-)inclusion of the poetic voice thus identifies it/him

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within the Rastafarian episteme of identity, whose “I and I” subjectivity assumes plurality into selfhood, which itself marks an important departure from the dominant Cartesian mode of self-fashioning, by replacing modernity’s “I think, therefore I am,” with “I think, therefore we are,” following Gilroy’s acute observation.19 It all harkens back to Rodney’s lectures on Black Power, and on African, colonial, and Caribbean history and politics in Jamaica in 1968, particularly among this latter group, and to their acceptance and appropriation of him as “Brother Wally.”20 On account of his catalytic effect on the political consciousness of these and other Jamaican audiences, and his abandonment of the script of middle class professional attainment and reserve through his open and public critical discourse, Rodney came to be regarded as a public threat in an already volatile political landscape in Jamaica in 1968. The Jamaican home affairs minister, who had issued a ban on books by Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad, would later that year declare, according to Rupert Lewis: “I have never come across a man who offers a greater threat to the security of this land than does Walter Rodney” (1998, 113). Rodney was denied entry to Jamaica in October, after attending a conference on Black Power in Canada. The event not only triggered a student demonstration that turned into a mass riot in downtown Kingston, it also helped galvanize a region-wide wave of radical political and cultural response over the decade to follow.21 For Brathwaite, it is the almost sacramental act and effect of “grounding,” both in a dialogic and a politically vindicatory sense, that matters most in his reference to a (Rodneyite) message that would record and inspire what an earlier version of the poem referred to as a “groundation of the soul” (Middle Passages, 54). Recent etymological assessments of the term grounds in the Jamaican vernacular, particularly its application in Rastafarian parlance, from which Rodney drew the title for his famous The Groundings with my Brothers (1969), highlight its multifaceted nature and help us better understand Brathwaite’s use of it in this context. Drawing on previous work by linguist Velma Pollard, Anthony Bogues has pointed out morphosyntactic variations of the term that show its functions as noun, verb, and adjective; indicating how it might encompass a range of meanings that include the traditional plot for planting allowed to the enslaved during the colonial period (“a ground”), how it might involve the traditional act of communing and dialog known as “reasoning” among the Rastafari, or how it might simply be used as a descriptor for an individual who is without (false) pretentions to social prestige, that is, to speak of a “grounded person” (2003, 129–130). Brathwaite does not only capture the ethics and ethos of Rodney’s relationship with Rastafari with the phrase “groundation of the soul.” His reference to soul enhances a spiritual dimension that was already implicit in the experience of grounding as intimate dialog and exchange. Moreover, the plasticity to the image of “ground(n)ation” that is afforded by Brathwaite’s customary wordplay allows us to project the semantic content of the phrase

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beyond its immediate referent of the Rasta community, to have it signify, not only a nation, but indeed a grounded nation. If in making Rastafari the privileged bearers of Rodney’s message of emancipation the poet reaffirms his endorsement of the cultural, political, and philosophical value of transgenerational Guinea-bird culture which in Contradictory Omens he suggested they represent, a grounded nation points unerringly to that larger cultural alternative in which the nation and region would espouse enhanced, contemporary Guinea-bird values of the sort he seems to feel are embodied by Rodney the revolutionary. Rodney, notably, had recognized the counterinstitutional content of Rastafari culture, faced by the alienating neocolonial Jamaican milieu, and its fervent avowal of Africanness in an environment that still sought assimilation to “manners and pedigree” pursuant to the characterizations of Edward Long centuries before. It is in acknowledgment of Rodney’s unmatched work as a public intellectual, his living out of his own creed that “the black intellectual, the black academic must attach himself to the activity of the black masses” (Groundings, 63, emphasis in the original), that Brathwaite bemoans toward the end of the elegy the fact that the assassin’s bomb that took Rodney’s life also turned off a light that might have showed the way forward for Guyana and the Caribbean, effectively thereby re-fragmenting nation and islands and “letting back darkness in” (elegguas, 66). It bears restating that the racially inflected references to Rastafari here in Brathwaite are meant to be both a substantive symbol of black racial particularity and an emblem of the transracial and the universal. When Rodney recognizes Rastafari as the “leading force” in the expression of “black consciousness” in his Groundings, he does so in consideration of the deleterious effects of the colonial project on blacks and their identity and of this particular constituency’s assertive response to contemporary “philistine white West Indian society” (61). It is also noteworthy that his vindicatory invocation of African history in the Jamaican public lectures collected in the volume undergoes a shift in the more markedly multiracial demographics of Guyana. Here his excavations as historian would not only recuperate the African antislavery insurgent Accabre of the famous Berbice rebellion of 1763,22 they would also celebrate, among others, the heroism of white colonial missionary John Smith, tried for treason and executed for subverting the racist premises of the civilizing mission, and of Guianese colonial barrister Louis De Sousa of Portuguese extraction, jailed for exposing and challenging a corrupt administration (Sign of the Times: Walter Rodney’s Last Speech, 6). The expanded notion of a multiracial collective is what underlies his vision of a Government of National Reconstruction and National Unity, as expressed in his latter public declarations, and of the common cause that would bring together the racialized sectors of Guyanese labor divided primarily between “Indian sugar workers and African bauxite workers” in the sociopolitical scenario of Guyana in the late 1970s (People’s Power, 20). These precepts ultimately illuminate the

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poet’s sense of the importance of his subject’s project of wholeness and healing for the Guyanese nation. In the final analysis, however, race is just a “somatic” manifestation, so to speak, of the machinations of concentric circles of power in the West Indies, whose origins lie in colonialism and empire as challenged by Brathwaite’s subject in the name of equal rights and social justice. When Brathwaite in the first section of the poem makes reference to those who have “all these generations bitten us to the bone,” the temporal reference, as mentioned, speaks of a cannibalistic process of domination and exploitation through which Occidental capital and hegemony were diachronically constituted and consolidated. It is a process to which he had previously spoken through the Shakespearean icon of Prospero as part of a reconfigured poetic narrative, as we see later in the discussion of aspects of the 1977 collection Mother Poem. That Rodney fell prey, in June 1980, to a would-be local tyrant at the margins of empire, was by no means far from the preoccupations of the hegemon. It is now known that Rodney had been under surveillance by the Jamaican authorities since his undergraduate days in 1960–1963, and again on his return in 1968, and that the Jamaican police shared their findings with the US embassy. Similar intercourse between the representatives of US security interests and the Burnham regime in Guyana lay behind the concern over Rodney’s possible tenure at the University of Guyana in 1974 when his appointment to the chair in history was revoked (Michael West 2008, 94–96). Indeed, the perception by the US State Department that Rodney was the “real threat in the reorganizing of the entire social and political system” in Guyana,23 beyond the leftist posturing and rhetoric of the current government and its opposition, is the conclusion that recent research has revealed and that implicates the Central Intelligence Agency in his demise.24 Brathwaite’s condemnation of the event and his memorializing of it as part of a larger countercolonial poetic historiography, which takes into account the depredations of empire, are perfectly congruent with the poet’s vision in his earlier work. On the question of language, Brathwaite’s previous withdrawal from the path of the potential Afro-Saxon, mentioned earlier, had found its most significant catalyst in the appearance of George Lamming’s seminal 1953 novel In the Castle of my Skin, precisely on account of the novel’s orality and for the way it recreated a transgenerational ethos of black Barbadian folk culture. The discovery signals his initial transformational impulse toward broader cultural and aesthetic agency through the vernacular. Lamming, he reports, “gave us voice and story & after that it was possible for all of us (and again it went beyond Bajan) to ‘access’ not simply remember our childhood and the various faces of our ancestors but hear them & let them speak to us” (Barabajan Poems, 47). Inspired by a similar anticolonial initiative in the use of the vernacular by American modernist poet T. S. Eliot, he would later theorize and deploy what he has referred to as “nation language” in his work. Long again helps us to appreciate

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Brathwaite’s invocation of folk orality in the colonial writer’s assessment of West Indian language: The Africans speak their respective dialects, with some mixture of broken English. The language of the Creoles is bad English, larded with the Guiney dialect, owing to their adopting the African words, in order to make themselves understood by the imported slaves; which they find much easier than teaching these strangers to learn English. The better sort are very fond of improving their language, by catching at any hard word that the Whites happen to let fall in their hearing; and they alter and misapply it in a strange manner; but a tolerable collection of them gives an air of knowledge and importance in the eyes of their brethren, which tickles their vanity, and makes them more assiduous in stocking themselves with this unintelligible jargon. (2002, 2: 426–427) As in other instances, Long’s hierarchical sequencing of the colonial language continuum from the “Guiney” of the newly arrived Africans, through the intervening stages that lead to English English, reiterates his supremacist presuppositions.25 For Brathwaite, however, the ability of the forced migrants to rapidly create a vernacular out of a heterogeny of ethnic African tongues and the English of the colonizers in the cruel conditions of bondage represents their innate capacity for overcoming. It is a peculiar survivalist quality to which he applied the term nam, referenced earlier. The speech of blacks in colonial West Indian literature, based on what for the colonist was “gibberish” (“they confound all the moods, tenses, cases and conjugations without mercy,” Long maintains, 2002, 2: 427), was put in its correct perspective by Brathwaite as being deliberately reductive and fodder for the caricature that characterized this literature.26 For him, subverting the colonial dominant, and giving primacy to a “Creole way of seeing” as he explained in “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” (108), meant removing received notions of hierarchy attending different strata of language in the West Indies and exploring and employing the full range of the vernacular for its expressive possibilities. It also meant setting aside the elitist conditioning of colonial education, of which he was himself a product, in the undertaking of a new identitarian venture. This translated in poetry to a turning away from the dominance of the pentameter and the alienating imaginary of snowflakes, daffodils, and the Robin Hoods of European narratives, and a reclaiming of local landscapes and the human dramas that unfolded therein, as well as the rhythms and cadences that might most truthfully represent local speech, which he terms nation language. It is important, then, to stress the relevance of nation language to the Afro-derived cultural specificity that he champions within the broader context of creolization and culture contact in the Caribbean. Apart from Brathwaite’s usage of Standard English, there is no doubting the lyrical and emotional range that is added to the poet’s oeuvre by his use

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of the polyfacetical vernacular of the West Indies. This vernacular can appear as the voice of the narrative “I” in individual poems, as one or more of the multiple personae that people his lyric, or alternatively, as a combination of narrator and persona/e within the same work. The examples of his dexterity in code switching and in the display of different regional speech varieties abound. In The Arrivants and in Mother Poem the voices of the rural women are identifiably Barbadian, for example in “The Dust,” or as the wife in “Twine,” or the tailor in “Rites.”27 Similarly, recognizably Jamaican male voices are raised in rebelliousness in the oft-quoted “Wings of a Dove” (Arrivants, 42–45) and “Starvation” (Black + Blues, 32–34). Brathwaite’s sensibility to New World black vernacular even extends to the United States as he invokes urban African-American voices of the descendants of the mythical Uncle Tom, again in Arrivants (“All God’s Chillun,” 17). NonAnglophone Caribbean voicings include, as well, occasional fragments of voodoo ritual (“Attibon Legba/Ouvri bayi pou’moi” (Arrivants, 224) and a St. Lucian woman’s reiteration in two regional vernaculars, Anglophone and Francophone, as she denies having heard the distant drums that once awoke the poet on that island.28 Of particular importance in accounting for nation language, though, beyond the code switching or the deployment of regional varieties of the vernacular is its underreported African dimension. This is most evident in the pivotal long poem Masks, in which the poet, having immersed himself in Akan liturgy and litany, assumes the role and voice of the okyeame or spokesperson for the Ashante king or asantehene as part of the narrative, and reconstructs a historical account of the Asante people. Integral to this process, also, is the phonetic reproduction of the traditional drum poetry of the kyereme.29 Nation language for Brathwaite, while evidently intended as a “nationalist” gesture in the sense of vindicating the speech and culture of his home country, Barbados, is thus clearly diasporan in its use and symbolism.30 It is the historical perspective of the Guinea-bird, however, that allows us to tease out what may have been the most likely origin of the term for the poet. An initial hint as to its coinage is given in the epigraph to his History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, in which he quotes from a 1950s interview between American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and a Carriacou native. On the tiny Caribbean island, Lomax was apparently puzzled at the continued awareness of specific ethnic origins and culture among the island’s majority Afro-creole population, a century and a half after the abolition of the slave trade. To his query as to whether “people here [still] know what nation they belong to” the self-identified Kromantee interlocutor responded with calm assurance: “Yes. Everybody know what is a nation.” (n.p. emphasis in the original), signaling thereby the vibrancy of ancestral memory and the continuing validity of the oral tradition. A more conventionally “historiographic” dimension to the term’s origin and its tie to ethnic specificity might lie also in the fact that newly arrived captives were dubbed negros de nación in Hispanic

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slave-trading language to indicate African birth and to differentiate them from those of the enslaved who were locally born.31 This is a designation of which Brathwaite as historian and researcher of The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica (1770–1820) was quite likely aware. Regardless of the degree to which these possibilities account for the origin of “nation language” as discursive register in Brathwaite’s poetry, it is its connection to what I call transhistorical “Guinea-bird” culture that I feel he wishes to keep foremost in the minds of his readers, as well as its potential as poetic, and hence political, vehicle. For him, though, rather than designate a particular ethnic group as per the colonial prism (whether Congo, Kromantee, or else), “nation” in nation language metaphorically identifies speakers of the wider West Indian Afro-creole community as a unit, and as legatees of the original sources of the newly acquired language. The African base of this language would widen over time to incorporate the input of newer West Indian speakers from Asia after emancipation, as he points out in History of the Voice (260). Brathwaite’s incorporation of Shakespeare’s Caliban into his narrative is the instance in which he, most tellingly perhaps, dramatizes the confrontation between the colonialists and the colonized, and through this confrontation, his critique of the linguistic dominant and the civilizing mission. To the degree that the event at Cambridge marked a moment of double consciousness,32 the path to that moment, as suggested before, is to be located in the (mis)education of the poet’s colonial upbringing, emphasizing as it did the importance of assimilation. Through his adaptation of The Tempest’s Caliban and Sycorax in “Hex” and “Nametracks” (Mother Poem, 45–51, 56–64), in which he highlights the primordial contest between enslaved and enslaver, he again identifies with and vindicates Guinea-bird folk culture. The Hegelian dialectic on the relationship between bondsman and master stresses that it is founded on the mutual recognition of the respective roles of the two; of domination on the one hand, and of obedience and submission on the other.33 Brathwaite’s dissent is displayed as he takes the side of the latter when he goes to the core of this mythical struggle over identity through his (re)enactment of the confrontation between Prospero and Sycorax in these poems. Again it was Lamming who led the way in this reading of Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century Mediterranean play as an allegory of empire, positing the as yet racially ill-defined Caliban as slave and Negro, and as symbol of the subhuman on account of his inability to speak.34 Brathwaite in turn, keeps Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, in the role of witch, and with “prior” claim to the island. (We recall that Caliban had declared to Prospero at one point that “This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother which thou takst from me,” qtd. in Lamming, Pleasures, 101.) Further, in racializing the Shakespeare character as “black sycorax” (“Hex,” Mother Poem, 47), he also makes her into a sort of mythical (exiled) Afro-diasporan First Mother, whose instinct is that of protecting his, as narrative I, and Caliban’s nam or the inner core of his/their selfhood. This is to be done

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through her teaching them not to succumb to the pressures of subjugation, deculturation, and linguistic alienation by Prospero in his role as enslaver. In the scenario that “Nametracks” creates, Caliban’s Guinea-bird resistance is exemplified primarily in his not ceding his name. Sycorax’s teaching him to speak “in” nation language as “mother tongue” also is an important subtheme. The struggle around name protection evokes the historical practice of the replacing of the names of captives of the Middle Passage through baptism so as to erase their former identities and as a form of cultural initiation into the Christian West. Gordon Rohlehr has identified multiple levels of the symbolism of the mother in Mother Poem as a collection.35 What I would like to highlight is a counterpoint that is created between Sycorax, as overarching diasporan First Mother, who represents the principle of resistance and retention of African Guinea-bird values, and the contemporary (creole) mother of the narrator’s upbringing, who sees colonial education as the key to assimilation, success, and upward social mobility. The two opposing trajectories they represent are what would result eventually in the crisis of double consciousness of the son as native (colonial/preindependence) intellectual and as omniscient narrator. The poems “Lix” and “Occident” in the collection relate a confrontation between the contemporary creole mother and Charlie Chalkstick the schoolteacher, local executor of the imperial educational curriculum and cultural agent of Prospero. Their meeting is only ostensibly one of adversaries, though, for they are both in agreement as to the importance of formal education for the young boy narrator, and the value of the episode is that it shows the zeal of the teacher in the colonial context. This zealousness is made known in the fact that he has come, like the proverbial Mohammed, to the “mountain” of her home, in search of the pupil who has been absent from school. For the mother’s part, the fervent desire for her son’s success in school is indicated in her determination to fulfill her role at all cost (Mother Poem, 23). After all, it was/is universally accepted in the West Indies that a good and thorough education is a sine qua non for upward social mobility. In fact it is the implied accusation that there was a less than significant reason to explain the boy’s absence from school that had brought the teacher to her door, which in turn explains the prolonged and graphic description of her annoyance. Having displayed the requisite tact and politeness in the course of their exchange, sufficient to defuse the time bomb of the mother’s “ticking stare” (24), Chalkstick would withdraw, secure in the knowledge that he had acquired another captive for the educational enterprise. Brathwaite’s use of the term hostage (24) to describe Chalkstick’s triumphant act of (re)recruitment is consistent with his depiction of colonial education as a means of mental imprisonment and eventual alienation for the colonized. Indeed, the role is not without its sharper, more brutal edge. An earlier line from “Occident” would describe the teacher as “planter’s puncher” (22), invoking thereby the auxiliary role of educators and of the educated class in the perpetuation of the material aspect of colonial violence;

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in this case, the violence initiated by the powerful plantocracy. The suggestion of teacherly violence is reminiscent of a scene in Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin, in which the principal is embarrassed by the inopportune giggle of a pupil during the visit of the local inspector of schools on Empire Day, and whips him as punishment until the pupil soils himself (35). It is important, therefore, that Chalkstick’s false consciousness is highlighted in his portrayal. Both poems, “Lix” and “Occident,” introduce him as a “dreamer” (Mother Poem, 19, 22, respectively). But here what might seem as “professorial” symbolic capital in the reference to Chalkstick’s familiarity with Renaissance cantos and the knowledge of Latin is undercut by the apparent limiting of his implied bibliotheca or library to the material space of a single desk. This is done through the play on words afforded by the derogatory term “desk-oteque” to refer to his library and his “dais” (22), while the only speaker’s perch from which he might be allowed to display his purported knowledge is the one in his primary school. There is thus a sense of almost deliberate mockery in Charlie Chalkstick’s depiction. Beyond giving him a reductive, metonymic name, the poem shows him to be completely deluded in his notions of pedagogical importance by suggesting that his dreams of one day becoming a “senior master,” a “min-ister,” or eventually being converted into a “plaster of paris” icon of importance of the kind seen in libraries are just so “many more lies” that he lives (19). Chalkstick’s primary purpose within the system, however, is unequivocal. It is constituted in suppressing whatever remains of the African premise in his pupils’ cultural horizon and ensuring that they don’t regress into unrestrained drumming and dancing. The role of public education in Europe’s imperial project was to produce black Frenchmen as recalled by Negritude poet Leopold Senghor or young Afro-Saxons as Brathwaite in turn remarked regarding Barbados, even as this education strove to prevent them all from atavistically falling back into the purported savagery of their ancestors. The role of Brathwaite’s Sycorax in Mother Poem, in contrast, would be to protect the African premise and prevent cultural and identitarian erasure. If for the creole mother in “Occident” her son would be “lux occidente,” or an embodiment of Western knowledge and material and industrial triumphalism (23), Sycorax’s son in “Nametracks” would be taught the opposite. She would have him appreciate the transcendence of nature and cultivate a hawk-like sense of vigilance in the interest of self-preservation (59). Beyond the opposing languages in which their respective educational philosophies are couched, Latin and Standard English for the creole mother and nation language with its playful creativity for Sycorax, lies the deliberate counterpointing of east to west and a simultaneous upturning by Sycorax of the imperial hubris that would make (Western) Europe take the place of the sun (lux) rising in the east. Given the material depredation underlying empire, however, it is only fitting that Caliban, in being brought to an awareness of the true orientation of the world, is appropriately outfitted with the metallic vigilance and the panoptic vision and armament (“eye: ron,” 59) attributable to birds.

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In Brathwaite’s rendering of the Shakespearean characters of The Tempest, it is significant that both Sycorax and Caliban display the characteristics of arrivants. In Sycorax’s case, her coming to the island in a state of pregnancy enhances the argument for seeing her as a sort of mythical Afrodiasporan First Mother. We note that in “Hex” she is still haunted by the memory of gunfire and the panicked dispersal of the tribespeople that recall her captivity in Africa, and by the equally horrendous jettisoning of bodies during the Middle Passage (47). More important, in her capacity as witch, Sycorax has retained the (African) knowledge of healing herbs available in the New World (47), and the magical power of words with which she will protect her son. For Shakespeare, Caliban is characterized by inarticulacy and the subhuman. Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, has marked him as “savage,” adding that before being taught language by her father he would “gabble like a thing most brutish,” while Prospero himself described him as “A freckled whelp hag-born- not honor’d with a human shape” (qtd. in Lamming Pleasures, 109, 100). Indeed, the Tempest’s depictions of nonEuropean others at the beginning of the 1600s are consistent with Long’s rendering of the Guinea-birds more than a century and a half later. We have seen where for him the speech of the enslaved was “unintelligible” (2002, 2: 427). Similarly, Shakespeare’s Caliban as monstrous is matched by Long’s rendering of the Guinea-bird as “bestial.” Long’s raciology, as suggested earlier, sat squarely within the Enlightenment orthodoxy of polygenism, which argued different racial origins for whites and blacks. The “two different species” that blacks and whites constitute, are what, in his view, would explain the difficulty or unlikelihood of reproduction among mulattoes (2002, 2: 336). In (un)conscious echo of Miranda, Long also proffers that the Guinea-bird, a “ravenous savage,” would happily consume a “loin or buttock of human flesh” (2002, 2: 382). Sycorax’s word battle with Prospero takes the form of a children’s game, “O’Grady Says,” which serves as an ostensible frame for teaching Caliban language. In the original game O’Grady (Prospero) gives a word to the participants, which they must repeat correctly in order not to lose the game. But O’Grady has an alter ego, Ole Lady, through whom the children can be tricked into misspeaking or repeating the word incorrectly. As Rohlehr explains, in Brathwaite’s version of the game, Ole Lady’s role is changed and instead of representing risk for the players, she subverts Prospero’s authority, thus ensuring Caliban’s safety. The allegory of an apparently innocent game of children hides the lethal intentions of colonialism and slavery in which for the unwilling migrants all is at stake, not only their bodies bound for forced labor, but their spirit as well. Two interlocking tropes express Caliban’s triumph and his mother’s defiance in their clash with O’Grady/ Prospero: that of eating and that of domination. They are expressed in Caliban’s exultant declaration toward the end of the poem that his “mane” (name) had evaded devourment by the aggressor (64), after his mother’s insistence that their condition as “slaves” was nothing but a legalized fiction

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(57), in response to the captor’s boastful pronouncement that he had come to “nyam” them, or eliminate them materially and ontologically (61). To eat, or rather to nyam, for its connotation of “eating something as crudely as an animal would” (Alsopp 1996, 410), appropriately expresses the voracious desires of consumption that Prospero holds for his victims, assuming that Brathwaite in “mane” has transposed the consonants “n” and “m” and is referring here to Caliban’s name and identity. Regarding Prospero as icon of capitalism and slavery, the image also recalls the fears reported by Middle Passage survivors Equiano and Cuguano, of being eaten by white slave traders, and the instances such as the shipwreck of the Peggy and the Tiger in 1765 and 1766, respectively, when Africans were indeed devoured by the white crews as the latter faced starvation. The image also upends the cannibalism imputed to African and American natives in the European expansionist narrative from Columbus, to Walter Raleigh, to Mungo Park.36 Even if the poet’s use of (lion’s) “mane” was used to metaphorically signal Rastafarian self-concepts of endurance through synechdochial reference to their dreadlocks, the content of the sign, whether “name” or “mane,” would still be the same; that of resiliency and imperishability.37 What is important is that Sycorax has taught Caliban in the end that he is “[hu]man” (57) and not subhuman, and to assert this in language, his language, that is to say, this new tongue that would be nation language. Moreover, there is a particularity to his humanity in the fact that he is “mandingo,” and hence of African origin (57 emphasis added). In the final analysis, her speech has served to dismiss notions of absolute dominium that the slaveholder held, in slavery’s construction of the legal fiction of ownership.38 The dialog in “Nametracks” dramatizes, through Sycorax’s ostensible lesson to Caliban, that there are reaches to the spirits of the captives that remain inviolable by captivity and enslavement because these reaches constitute their very humanity and speak to their future potential, just as they encapsulate elements of their past. It was to articulate the ramifications of this concept that Brathwaite, inspired in the Akan creator-god Onyame, coined the term nam. The idea that there were important remnants of spirit in the battered bodies of the arrivants has been a cornerstone in Brathwaite’s thought. It is what, as he has repeatedly remarked, was responsible for their ability to creatively use remembered aspects of their original cultures to catalyze the process of creolization, both in life and in language. His premise contradicts the thesis that the traumas of the Middle Passage meant cultural erasure for the arriving Africans and their descendants.39 Brathwaite’s recognition of immanence (nam) in the arrivants not only speaks to the theological aspect of the term that identifies a divine element in humans. It also seeks to overtly reverse the orthography and ideological content of modern “man” as the white, male heteronormative construct that would usurp the epistemic space of the rest of humanity.40 Nam in operative terms as the poet would have it, then, is what explains the engine of liberation that drove Nanny Nanahemmaa, Tacky, Cuffy, Dessalines, Bussa, Nat Turner,

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and Zumbi of Palmares, all icons of antislavery insurgency and emancipation across the Americas. But if Sycorax is such a prominent mother symbol in Mother Poem, it is only because the British Bard was considered so important to Brathwaite’s Anglocentric education. The character of Caliban, who makes a first appearance in his work in Islands, published in 1969, would have been viewed with a similar sense of its canonical importance. The same may be said of the fictional Uncle Tom who appeared in Rights of Passage (1967) and who was the protagonist of the novel that made its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, “ the most celebrated author in the world” in her time.41 These characters reaffirm the poet’s deep investment and insertion in the hegemon and its literary culture. The following long excerpt from his reflections on the maroon poem “Stone” in X-Self (93–95) is revealing as to the suppression of African-oriented themes in secondary and tertiary education in the West Indies. It also underscores his belated discovery of the Guinea-bird as historical figure along with its tremendous significance: In this poem I am thinking of Palmares the great Maroon capital of Brazil for almost a century. I grew up as a historian without knowing anything about Palmares until not so long ago. I think this is a catastrophe as well: that we train ourselves into what we call the facts from our experience and yet can remain ignorant of such major events. I didn’t know about Palmares, I couldn’t internalize that Maroon centre until I wrote this poem in 1987. You see when I came to write the poem called “The Cabin” in Rights of Passage I had been confronted for the first time with a slave cabin. Coming from Barbados where we were not supposed to have slavery, when I saw a slave cabin in Jamaica, my first instinct was to take a photograph of it in words, which is what happens in Rights of Passage. But when I tried to have someone living inside the cabin I could not find in my mind a Jamaican slave living inside the cabin because I did not know enough then about our own slavery so I had to go back to the only slaves I know, those in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Eventually, of course, I discovered Tacky and Nanny and was able to write “Stone.” But the recovery of fragments is not easy and it leaves you with a lot of nomens that you have to retrieve.42 The discussion of characters from the Western canon in poems by Brathwaite helps us, first of all, to appreciate the degree to which the confrontation of Sycorax and the creole mother were and are necessary to dialectically resolve the two opposing principles in the consciousness of the preindependence intellectual, his “warring souls,” to go back to W. E. B. Du Bois’ metaphor. That the poet in Sycorax has adhered to a figure that

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is a figment of the Western imagination generates additional pathos as we revisit the previous lines from Masks, in which his speaking “I,” located somewhere between Takoradi and Kumasi in the Ghanaian heartland, sorrowfully laments his inability to either “find” his ancestral mother or father or to “hear the drum” (168). To be sure, in traditional Ghanaian society, to have slavery befall you is to literally and figuratively “lose your mother,” as Saidiya Hartman’s recent travelogue painfully confirms (2007, 85). Brathwaite’s lyrical investment in Sycorax in addressing this symbolic and genealogical lack thus makes her a found mother. Second, the dialogic interaction between Sycorax, the creole mother, and the son helps us to see the figure of Caliban as a dynamic and creative counter-hegemonic symbol in the defense of and in the transformation of language. Tom, as “first link,” is also a useful instance of the Guinea-bird trope for being able to face “both ways” in time, though, as I hinted earlier, the narrative voice that accompanies him in the metaphor would go further back in the past, as it does when it speaks as the poetic “I” in Masks, just as it is able to come further forward into the contemporary present. Brathwaite wondered in “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature 1970/1973” at the creative potential inherent to a hypothetical incorporation of such elements as “Asante, Twi and the Zulu epics” into the West Indian and possibly New World educational curriculum, as a way of injecting a sense of equilibrium thereto, considering its Eurocentric bias. “It would have made education truly bi-cultural,” he suggested (197). While a hesitant step was made in North American higher education in this direction through diversity and multicultural initiatives since the civil rights movement, a focus of the type that the historian envisioned is still largely absent in the West Indies where he grew up. In tracing his use of the Guinea-bird, I have attempted to show where he has worked against the grain of the dominant culture to identify, incorporate, and vindicate what is at once an archeological and contemporary subjectivity into his poetic and philosophical outlook, which because of its inherent qualities might offer a bulwark against the onslaught of an alienating imperially inflected modernity and move toward the production of an “alter/Native” in all the fullness this double entendre permits (209). In this view, exploring double consciousness makes visible those negated areas of selfhood whose suppression was the result of the domination of the cultural hegemon and allows individual and collective acceptance of formerly repressed dimensions of language, as well as the recuperation of an assertive political vision. The poet’s use of the Guinea-bird, in other words, has opened the way for a creative mediation between past and present, and between dominated and dominant culture in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It demonstrates the dialectical interrelatedness of these positions even as it probes philosophically and agonizingly for a way to liberation, whether this latter is found within the context of the national state or outside of it.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “Excerpts from “Poem for Walter Rodney” from Elegguas ©2010 by Kamau Brathwaite. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. NOTES 1. Nicolás Guillén: Obra Poética 1920–1972, Tomo 1. Havana: Editorial de Arte y Literatura, 1974, 229. 2. Brathwaite’s epigraph in The Arrivants quotes from a “Kumina Queen” in Jamaica. It reads in part: “Well, muh ol’ arrivance . . . is from Africa . . . That’s muh ol’ arrivants family. Muh gran’ muddah an’ muh gran’ fadda. Well, they come out here as slavely . . . you unnerstan”? n.p. 3. Arrivants, 72. The collections that make up the trilogy had been individually published earlier: Rights of Passage in 1967, Masks in 1968, and Islands in 1969. My citations from these collections will be taken from the 1973 trilogy. Note that Brathwaite had been writing poetry for a decade prior to the publication of Rights. See Gordon Rohlehr’s seminal work Pathfinder, 63. 4. The poem has slightly different versions, beginning in 1980 with Race Today Review, 68–71, and continuing in 1983 with Third World Poems, 62–68, in 1993 with Middle Passages, 49–56, where it carries the title “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” after Rodney’s influential work on African history, and 2010, with elegguas, 60–66. I shall mainly be using the version in elegguas. 5. See, for example, “Sir Galahad and the Islands,” “Roots,” “Timehri,” and “History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry.” 6. “Timehri,” 37, also Barabajan Poems, 56–58. 7. Citing resistance by his editors to his name change, Brathwaite recalls the reduction to chattel of Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte in the TV series Roots, in which he is beaten on the slave driver’s instructions until he accepts the Christian name of “Toby.” On Kunta Kinte’s acceptance of the new name, his tormentor declares: “That’s a good nigger.” Qtd. in Barabajan Poems, 237–239. 8. Nkrumah was also the beneficiary of his association with a group of radical Caribbean anticolonial thinkers in postwar London of the likes of C. L. R. James and George Padmore. Padmore, in fact, played a key role in the early independence administration of Ghana. See Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana. 9. See Weever-Shipley and Pierre 2007, 73. 10. I’m adapting the phrase from its original application in Brent Hayes Edwards’ The Practice of Diaspora. In Walter Rodney Speaks, the historian recalls, “I would have preferred to go to West Africa, which is my special area of research . . . But I don’t think I could have learned anything from participating in the kind of politics being developed in Nigeria, or at that time in Ghana after Nkrumah. Hence the choice was to go to Tanzania” (32–33). 11. See his paper “Towards the Sixth Pan-African Congress.” 12. “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” 209. 13. These posthumous publications were projected to include volumes on Chinese, Dutch, and Portuguese immigrants, as well as the indigenous population. 14. The term is taken from Charles Mills.

Dislocation and Double Consciousness in Kamau Brathwaite 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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See the 1977 Equal Rights track and album of the same title. See Eusi Kwayana in this regard and Rodney’s People’s Power no Dictator. See “Resonances of Revolution.” The parable of the mustard seed is reported in three of the Christian gospels, those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew 13:31–32 renders it thus: “The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” See “Could you be Loved? Bob Marley, anti-poetics and Universal Sufferation,” 240. See Rupert Lewis 1998, 86. See Rupert Lewis 1998, 117, also particularly Brathwaite, “The Love Axe,” 22. Citing its significance in the Caribbean context, Alvin Thompson describes this event as “perhaps exceeded in length and intensity only by the Haitian revolt of 1791” (1998, 77). Stabroek News editorial of July 12, 2006, quoting a Milton Brice study of CIA actions in the Caribbean between 1946 and 1983. See Roopnarine, “Resonances of Revolution.” By English English, I refer to Standard English in the national sense. There as everywhere, language is itself a marker of class and dominance. See Fairclough in Ashcroft’s Caliban’s Voice, 45. Also Ramchand 1970 on the language continuum in the Anglophone Caribbean. See “History of the Voice” and “Attitudes of Whites to Non-Whites” in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica. In Arrivants, 62–69, and Mother Poem, 6–7, respectively. “me nevva hear nothing—me na hear nuttn—mwen na rien, msieu,” Barabajan Poems, 167. Rohlehr, Pathfinder, 115–126. Also Irele 2004 and Fraser 1981, 22. Brathwaite reports in 1987 that 60 percent “or more” of his work up to that point was Barbadian in theme and orientation (Barabajan Poems, 23). According to Fernando Ortiz’s Nuevo catauro de cubanismos, “Negro de nación, decísase del negro nativo de Africa en contraposición al nativo de América, al que se llamaba criollo,” 366; “The Negro that was a native of Africa was referred to as a negro de nación, in contrast to slaves who were born in America who were called creoles.” My translation. Subsequent translations in this book are mine unless otherwise noted. In spite of knowing Macbeth and The Waste Land by heart, on attempting theater at Cambridge, the choice of “beg[ging]” was forced on him against his acceding to what he thought might be a “big inning” (Barabajan Poems, 56–57). His play of words in “beginning” and “big inning” uses the cricket metaphor as colonial trope and site of colonial struggle. See Hegel’s Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Ashcroft 2009, 17. Also Lamming’s “A Monster, a Child, a Slave.” See “‘Black Sycorax, My Mother’: Brathwaite’s Reconstruction of The Tempest.” Rice, “Who’s Eating Whom?” 134–135, 129. Also Hulme, Colonial Encounters. There is a similar transposition in the terse line “e mane bussa,” which ends Brathwaite’s “Portrait of Bussa, the Bajan Slave Rebel,” in Third World Poems, 14–18. See Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death in this regard, 29–31. As Orlando Patterson famously articulated, for example, in: “I’m saying that the past has no meaning for the present” (“Toward a Future that has no Past”). Also Pathfinder, 141.

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40. Barabajan Poems, 96. The concept is mentioned and reworked in several places, for example, in “History of the Voice,” Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica, and “History, the Caribbean Writer and X-Self.” Lamming’s early insight (1960) regarding immanence and the Middle Passage survivors (“They survived as though there were some divinity which made them unique in their capacity to last,” Pleasures, 98). See also Sylvia Wynter’s critique of Euronormativity in “On How we Mistook the Map for the Territory,” and “1492: A New World View.” 41. Preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, vii. 42. “History, the Caribbean Writer and X-Self,” 38. Emphasis added.

3

Speaking Truth, Speaking Power Of “Immigrants,” Immanence, and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Street 66”

I hope it is not melodramatic to suggest that a storm is on the way, and that both peace and democracy will be at stake when it breaks. Paul Gilroy, 20011

One of the more memorable events of the media coverage of the urban riots in England in the summer of 2011 was the interview between BBC anchorwoman Fiona Armstrong and black West Indian settler and activist Darcus Howe on August 9, and the critical torrent that followed in its wake. The attention the interview attracted might be appreciated primarily in the way the video clip went viral on the Internet and in the apology that the venerable institution subsequently offered.2 The riots themselves had been triggered by the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a twenty-eight-year-old black Briton under suspicion of criminal wrongdoing, and by the police response to the initially peaceful protest by relatives and by residents of Duggan’s Tottenham neighborhood, who marched to the station and demanded answers relating to his violent demise. Just as the shooting and the alleged roughing up by police of a black female minor among the protestors would prompt the worst countrywide rioting and destruction of property in twenty-five years,3 so would it also generate a combination of media blitz, judicial overkill, and statist moralizing in defense of the values of civility, civilization, and Englishness, all seen as mutually identical, and reported once again as being under threat by national and racial “others.” Duggan’s death, though, brought for Howe the unmistakable sensation that, as he implied in the interview, for black people in England, the racially motivated hostility and the ethos of animus present in British state and society had changed little over the fifty years since he had moved there as a young man from Trinidad. Indeed, the difference of race, class, and (national) origin between the interviewer and her interlocutor, as their conversation evolved, was remarkable. In the studio sat Armstrong, the distinguished media personality and member of the British baronetcy, and from the street responded the West Indian migrant, himself a media practitioner. Framing the whole was the underlying tension occasioned by the space and

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time determinant of colonialism, as manifested through a twentieth-century national politics that said that, although British colonial subjects might have belonged “to” Britain, their place was certainly not in Britain.4 The ensuing exchange would confirm the dichotomy, as Howe critiqued the current “law and order” premise in British society, the absence of due process in the elimination of Mr. Duggan, and the excessive and racially disproportionate application of the stop and search Public Order Act, adding that, to his mind, the riot, in the final analysis, was really a broad-based, transracial “insurrection of the masses,” of whose causes the political leadership in Britain was oblivious. His interviewer’s questions and her abrupt interruptions of his responses were illustrative of her own contrary position, and her combative questioning and posture seemed to be a reminder that in multicultural Britain of the twenty-first century, earlier forms of racial antipathy remain but skin deep. In a few contentious minutes the tone of her interrogatory would escalate from insinuation to open insult. Howe was invited to affirm that he was “shocked” at the outburst of lawlessness, and asked whether his reply in the negative meant that he “condone(d)” it. His attempt to draw attention to the fact that a British citizen had been killed by agents of the law in apparent disregard for the presumption of innocence was met by the assertion that pending an official report “we” can’t know (or say) what happened. And his allusion to the acute racial imbalance in British police stop-and-search practice was sidestepped with the response that “that” was no excuse for rioting, and by the interviewer recalling that he, Darcus Howe, had himself “taken part in them” in the past. At this point the exchange lost its semblance of decorum as the interviewee made a final, indignant denial.5 What is important about the Armstrong/Howe interview for the present purposes is the role of the BBC as primary media outlet in responding to and making sense of the event in question, and the alliance that became evident in the coverage between it and other sectors of the mainstream media, as well as with the British social, economic, and political hierarchy, and with the spokespersons for the law. Stuart Hall, the noted Jamaican migrant and cultural critic, who like Howe lived for more than half a century in Britain, in analyzing the spate of muggings in England in the early 1970s, had highlighted this alliance and the way it acted together to produce the idea of legality as intrinsic to Englishness, and associated a corresponding notion of criminality to the “other,” a “folk devil” that was often racialized as black (Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, 161–162). In his influential study, Hall stressed the role of this alliance in producing and articulating a “moral panic” that not only uses its created consensus to justify increased law and order initiatives, but that, more important, overlooks the causative factors such as unemployment, underemployment, and other structural indices of social decay, even as it calls for “stronger measures” to be taken against wrongdoing (63). In stressing the importance of considering the root causes of underclass discontent, and the particularity of the

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dynamic that makes the “poor poor” and the “rich rich” (x), he suggests pointedly that: “Once you perceive mugging (or in this case rioting) not as a fact but as a relation . . . the conventional wisdom about ‘mugging’ falls apart in your hands. If you look at this relation in terms of the social forces and the contradictions accumulating within it . . . the whole terrain of the problem changes in character” (ix emphasis added). If for Howe the accumulated contradictions over the longue durée of his life in social activism and antiracist work made the riots inevitable, as he pointed out in the interview, the slippage on the part of his interviewer, by which means his persona was assimilated into that of a “rioter” (he was actually acquitted of a charge of rioting in the famous Mangrove Nine case in 1970, to which I shall return), is also indicative of the larger process of the racial mapping of such events as per dominant discursive practice. Hall in Policing the Crisis spoke of the racial profiling of the black mugger as a function of the ideology of white nationalist homogeneity in England, and, as hinted earlier, as the “reverse image” of an Englishness that is associated with respectability, work, discipline, and family values (161). For this particular construct, the city stands as the apex of the march toward civilization and modernity (144–145). Its degradation by riot becomes by extension a regression into barbarity. This said, it becomes easier to understand Armstrong’s attempt to tack Howe’s image onto the cognitive map of the (young black) rioter during the interview, his evident seniority as a sixty-eight-yearold grandfather notwithstanding. Such a portrayal would be congruent with the racialized newspaper accounts of the event that reported it as “anarchy pure and simple,” or “mindless criminality,” or with subtitles that unsubtly claimed that “white people were being targeted for robbery by gangs roaming the streets.”6 Similarly, calls by the prime minister, the mayor, and other highly placed politicians for the judiciary to disregard normal sentencing guidelines and impose harsher penalties on the miscreants, or for the introduction of water cannon or a military curfew, speak eloquently to the argument advanced by Hall regarding the alliance among the media and other dominant agents. The resulting perspective would overlook first causes in the elaboration of an “authoritarian consensus” in England, in the imposition of the Gramscian diptych of coercion and consent, wherein the “rule of the few disappears into the consent of the many.”7 It is telling that the interruptions and silencing to which Howe was subjected in his BBC interview were made up for in a conversation that he had with Alexander Cockburn of the CounterPunch Diary a few days later. Here he addressed unemployment in England and the gross social inequality produced by late capitalism, as well as the spreading insurgency against state repression in North Africa and the Middle East, known as the Arab Spring of 2011, but most pointedly the suffocation of transracial solidarity amongst the British underclass. Howe’s final rhetorical question to Armstrong, in a moment of rising frustration at the line her questions were taking (“Where were you in 1981?” he asked), had been meant to confront his interlocutor,

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bent as she was on imposing her epistemic framework within the media as one of the primary definers of reality, with his own counter knowledge, born of protracted practical experience of racial subordination and the struggle for civil liberties in England. His reference to 1981, a year Linton Kwesi Johnson has described as “the most significant date in the history of the black experience in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century,” would not only reiterate the ongoing dynamic of domination and (riotous) resistance with which Howe had opened his initial response to Armstrong.8 It would also evoke the association and collaboration between himself and Johnson as activists and in terms of their respective roles as editor and arts editor in the influential magazine Race Today, organ of the Brixton-based Race Today Collective (1974–1988). More particularly, it would invoke key moments in the decade-plus of Johnson’s work as performer of dub poetry, consonant with his adherence to Race Today’s politics of “creation for liberation,” with which this chapter is primarily concerned.9 In what follows, I explore the context of Johnson’s poetics with a view to highlighting the importance of his role as documentarian of the modern West Indian experience in England, as an aspect of a larger Afro-diasporan process I call “relocation,” or the voluntary postcolonial movement out of the national states toward the (former) metropole, in diachronic continuance of an initial dislocation occasioned by the forced migration of the slave trade in the context of modernity and the evolving world system. I propose that a focused reading of the two poems “Liesense fi Kill” (2000) and “Street 66” (1975), complemented by other relevant texts, confirms the ongoing nature of the race and class relation alluded to by Hall, articulated particularly through (the) police force as an element of the state apparatus, and that the emancipatory thrust inherent to Johnson’s original Rasta-inflected positioning when he performed “Poet and the Roots” remains pertinent to the overall value of his work, notwithstanding Johnson’s disavowal of elements of this stance or his putative attainment of canonical status in the new century. In Johnson’s encapsulation of his poetics within the rubric of “creation for liberation” is evoked not only the logic that links art and agency. The phrase acquires its particular charge in that it evokes both second wave diasporan relocation, which begins in the nineteenth-century post-Emancipation period, and the confrontations triggered by the unwelcoming politics of race in England as host nation in the twentieth century. Migration after slavery had turned out to be a key social and personal means of escape and survival from small, overcrowded Caribbean islands plagued by the disinheritance of slavery and by severely limited opportunities for land acquisition and social advancement.10 The arrival in June 1948 of the SS Empire Windrush at Essex, with its 493 passengers, is the conventional marker of the modern West Indian phase of black settlement in England, but there had already been a full century of postslavery dispersal of black West Indians around the islands and the circum-Caribbean mainland, and as far afield as Ecuador and Perú on the Pacific coast of South America and

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Brazil. As they did in response to the labor shortage in postwar Britain, black West Indians had previously answered the call in the construction of the trans-Isthmian railway between Limón Bay in Costa Rica and the Bay of Panama in the 1850s, in the construction of the Panama Canal itself, which got under way in 1904, as well as in the emerging empire of the United Fruit Company. West Indians also went in their thousands to Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth.11 Notwithstanding turn-of-the-century notions of “commonwealth” in the still-extant British Empire, on relocating with their British passports to Britain, black West Indians encountered a too-often visceral and bloody animosity there, triggered significantly by the perception that they were taking work away from locals, by a centuries-old objection to their racial difference, and by anxieties over miscegenation. Their rejection would be expressed not only by the general populace, but by the politicians and ultimately the police as well. Johnson’s stated concern for an art with an emancipatory orientation is not only linked to stimuli within his immediate environment. It may be seen in the context of the larger liberationist struggles of the 1960s and ’70s as well, which found him as a young man in cosmopolitan London, having arrived there in 1963 at eleven years old. The independence movements in the Anglophone Caribbean and Africa, the Cuban revolution and the NonAlignment Movement, Black Power and civil rights in the United States, and Rastafari in Jamaica and the Caribbean all frame an epoch during which the liberation of black people intersected with similar quests among other areas of humanity and leave their thematic traces on his earliest writings. The influence of such radical black thinkers as Trinidadians C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones, whose diasporan itinerary had brought them through the US anticommunist crucible and who had also served the causes of panAfricanism and of the West Indian community in England, are also elements that are important to his contextualization, particularly in a late twentiethcentury setting in which creative writing, journalism, and public discursivity were crucial elements of an outernational black diasporan political praxis with a long and impressive past.12 Johnson recalls in this regard the importance of John La Rose, cofounder of the Race Today Collective and owner of the New Beacon Bookstore, in his own development, both as activist and strategist in the public arena and as the person who initially exposed him to Afro-diasporan writers from the period of the Harlem Renaissance, to Negritude, the Black Arts movement in the United States, and to the writings of Franz Fanon.13 The influence of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement is also of crucial importance to Johnson’s deployment of the Jamaican vernacular in his work, given Brathwaite’s prior use and vindication of Caribbean orality, out of which he had coined the term nation language.14 Johnson would point out to Burt Caesar in a 1996 interview that “From the beginning I saw myself as giving voice to,

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and documenting, the experience of my generation.” He adds significantly that from “an early age, in fact, when I was in the Panthers, I realized black people were in this country to stay, and we had to accept that we weren’t going anywhere . . . we’re a part of Britain and thus we had to build our own independent institutions here . . . and accept the reality of our situation” (Caesar 1996, 67, 69). Johnson’s recognition here of the fact that through the purpose and tenor of his work he had played a role in the development of a black political sensibility in England calls attention to the change that had come over the heterogeneous grouping of Afro-Caribbeans, Asians, and Africans vis-à-vis their unwelcoming hosts regarding the harassment and racial terrorization that had been visited on them over the preceding decades. It is also related to the conscious politics of resistance they eventually adopted. Racist rioting in 1919 and 1920 in the port cities where incoming West Indians sought work, followed by decades of a color bar in housing and in many public places, was behind the assaults of the infamous “Teddy boys” of the 1950s that culminated in the riots of late August 1958 at Notting Hill and Nottingham in which West Indians as a group turned and faced their assailants for the first time (Pilkington 1988, James 2004). The resurgent fascism of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement, whose supporters were behind the murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane in May 1959, and who were of a like mind with such extremist organizations as the neo-Nazi British Movement, Column 88, and the neofascist National Front, sought to make concrete their “whites only” agenda by way of occasional forays into electoral politics between the 1960s and 1980s and by relentless leafleting campaigns and provocative public marches. Indeed, immigration policy at the highest levels, under both Labour and Conservative governments, in the 1960s coincided in the anti-immigrant orientation, leading to legislation that would progressively deprive British nationals from overseas to the right of abode in England if they were not white, as stipulated eventually in the British Nationality Act of 1981 (James 1993, 2004). Winston Churchill’s abhorrence of the idea of what he called a “magpie society” in 1955 (James 2004, 370) had expressed sentiments that would later be repeated in Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech in which the latter voiced his horror at the gains won in the civil rights struggle in the United States, and at the size of the black population there, and called for “resolute and urgent action” to avert a similar fate in Britain.15 Incendiary political rhetoric thus found expression in individual acts of terror as exemplified in the arson attack on a West Indian party at Forest Hill in 1971, the fire bombing of the Moonshot black youth center in 1977, and the fire bombing of the Lewisham Way Center in 1980. In the wake of the infamous New Cross Massacre of 1981, another arson attack that claimed the lives of fourteen teenagers at a birthday party, the Joint Committee Against Racialism, formed in 1977, would present the Home Office with records pertaining to some eleven thousand racist episodes, twenty-six of which had

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resulted in death and had taken place in 1981 alone according to Gus John (2011, 47). If the Powell provocation in 1968 had produced a consensus in black settler politics in England that “come what may, we are here to stay,” as La Rose recalls (“Interview with Archipelago,” 30), the subsequent struggles around the institution of the Notting Hill carnival in the latter 1970s and the formation of such organizations as the Race Today Collective, the Black Parents Movement, and the Black Youth Movement, and the work of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee would prove that this determination was multipronged, effective, and long lasting. Johnson’s involvement at various levels in these associations and events and his strenuous efforts at documenting them as writer, as social commentator, and as artist speak volumes to the poet’s relevance to the cause he claimed. The episode at New Cross and the poem that accompanies it (“New Craas Massakah”) are pivotal to Johnson’s work and to the trajectory of black migrant politics of the period. As the piece suggests, New Cross served as a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of black life to anonymous sources of racist terror and underscored the perception among blacks as to their unwelcomeness in England. The Black People’s Day of Action, organized by the New Cross Massacre Action Committee (NCMAC), put some twenty thousand protesters in the streets of London. Particular delegations targeted the Houses of Parliament and delivered letters to the prime minister and the metropolitan chief of police with the complaint that the respective institutions had “ignored” their tragedy, had failed to find the perpetrators in the face of all the available evidence, and had “discounted racial motivation” in the crime in spite of the relevant antecedents (John, The New Cross Massacre Story, 58, 59). Indeed, two separate inquests, the first in 1981 and the second in 2002, returned open verdicts, leaving unresolved the crucial question as to who started the fire and why. Considering what Johnson calls the “relentless drive” (13) by the police to (re)configure the arson as a black on black affair, that is, the product of a fight amongst the partygoers themselves, and the apparent dismissal of the matter by the offices of the Queen and the prime minister even as the latter expressed condolences to Irish victims following a similar tragedy, the Declaration of New Cross that “there will be no social peace while blacks are attacked, killed, injured or maimed with impunity on the streets or in our homes” (57) calls attention to itself as an important marker of the level of mobilization contemplated and the political will assumed by the black community through the NCMAC. For noted Afro-British cultural critic Paul Gilroy, official inattention to New Cross “is inexplicable without reference to the kind of signifier that ‘black party’ had become . . . an extreme sign of disorder and criminality, of a hedonistic and vicious black culture which was not recognizably British” (1991, 102). Officialdom, in this view, had recoded the incident by way of a contemporary rendering of the colonial binary of civilization and savagery that would thus reduce the human worth of these ostensible outsiders, members of a collective that the public had been conditioned to see not as victims

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of crime, but as its perpetrators. John La Rose’s opinion, as chairman of the NCMAC, was equally arresting. According to La Rose, admission by the press and by law enforcement that the massacre had been the result of a fire bomb hurled by racists would have put not twenty thousand, but one hundred thousand protesters on the streets of London, augmenting thereby the scale of the scandal (“Interview with Socialist Challenge,” 14). If Gilroy is right in suggesting that the police department’s deployment of its Special Patrol Group to “swamp” south London with a “stop and search” offensive shortly after was a reaction, in part, to the mass demonstration of the Black People’s Day of Action (1991, 104), the subsequent Brixton riots of April 1981 may well be seen as an active extension of this heightened sense of outrage by the residents in the face of statist aggression.16 The whole points to the quasi-permanent relation of race and class mentioned by Hall earlier in this discussion. Johnson’s lyrical memorial to New Cross would take an appropriately grave and somber tone, even when the more animated sections of the poem are accompanied by the vibrant reggae rhythm in the background. The poem strives to capture the sense among the black British community, erstwhile colonials, of being let down by “Great Britn.” Their disappointment is palpable regarding the quality of life in the metropolis, formerly held to be the epitome of all places civilized: “is a hellava something fi true yu know/ wat a terrible price wi haffe pay dow, mah/ jus fi live a likkle life/ jus fi struggle fi suvive” (Selected Poems, 56). In another iteration of his memory of the event Johnson’s speaker would dispense with sadness. In the poem “Wat about de Workin Class?” his recollection of the fire and his determination to vindicate its victims is as forceful as the expletive in the vernacular would allow: “Wi naw goh figet New Craas” he proclaims, “nat a rass/ wi naw goh figet New Craas.”17 To the degree that we can speak of an intensified politicization among the black migrant and black British population in the 1970s and 1980s, and a “paradigm shift” in race relations in that country as a result of their antiracist and civil rights initiatives (Johnson, “We have not forgotten,” 1), it is important to reiterate the connection between these initiatives and other contemporary black struggles. Particularly relevant would be the awareness among the migrants of a history of similar experiences in the Caribbean, for example in the trade union movement, in the struggle for independence, or even farther back, in antislavery insurgency. Taking this into consideration, John La Rose, as activist and organic intellectual, and a veteran of the independence movement in Trinidad, suggests that West Indian migrants in England, unlike, say, the African-American community of the time, did not have the mentality of a besieged racial minority. They came instead with a “majority consciousness,” a sense of demographic plenitude appropriate to and marshaled by the political challenges historically presented by the social contradictions back home. These antecedents placed them and their first and second generation offspring abroad, in his opinion, not “between” two cultures (as per the agonic condition of “double

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consciousness” famously articulated by Afro-American philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois), but rather “within two cultures, two concentrics” (“Interview with Archipelago,” 30–31). This layering or “doubling” of consciousness would help explain their spiritual fortitude and their resolve in the trying conditions of relocation and exile. Coming from a leader in social movement organizations with a radical democratic stance, this insight is important, especially considering his involvement in community education, the organization of legal defense campaigns, book publishing and book selling, and the musico-cultural phenomenon of the Caribbean carnival. Indeed, the challenge to the political and cultural hegemony represented by the group that congregated around his shop, the New Beacon Bookstore, on account of its moral, ethical, and political content, may well be seen as replicating a praxis that is paradigmatic of the Caribbean experience, that of the ontological and epistemological process of self-, and in this case, group affirmation referred to in the Jamaican vernacular as “smadditizin.” According to philosopher Charles Mills, “smadditizin” goes beyond its Standard English cognate of “becoming somebody” in the sense of demanding and acquiring a sense of social standing and recognition. It emerges from and responds to the racist denial of personhood for masses of Africans and their descendants and historical analogs in the massive project of colonization, enslavement, and expropriation.18 An appreciation of the folk imaginary and the “distinct types of racist ideology and reasoning which inform the occupational culture of rank and file police work” in England, which translates assumed black subpersonhood and criminality into a need for terminal force (Gilroy 1991, 104), would explain the militancy of the New Beacon Circle in the politicized counteraction that we might liken to “smadditizin.” The vindication of black individual and social personhood, reflecting a layered or twinsourced ethic, that is, a “doubling of consciousness” that has both a West Indian and a metropolitan underpinning, is particularly applicable to Johnson’s work. So is the intrinsic human being of the constituency for which he speaks, particularly in the context of racialized difference in the postcolonial metropolis of the present. Whereas it is in such works as “Bass Culture,” to which I return subsequently, that the abstract epistemic value of this alterity is articulated, “Liesence fi Kill” addresses the more direct argument for “smaddification” or “somebodiness” as the statement for humanness.

RACE, RESISTANCE, ROOTS If we can speak of the coverage of the 2011 riots by the dominant media in England, in conjunction with the judiciary and the government, as articulating an apologetics in support of the status quo, following the pattern outlined by Hall, it would come as no surprise that the subsequent report prepared by the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, which was convened by the prime minister, his deputy, and the leader of the official opposition,

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would also display a careful alignment to officialist positions. This is particularly so with regards to its embrace of the “criminality” perception of the event, and the curious attempt to extract the Duggan death as a causative factor in the riots.19 Two of the more salient objectives of the panel, which coincidentally did not include the leadership of any of England’s many black community organizations, were to find out and say “what may have motivated the small minority of people who took part in the rioting,” and to determine “what may have been done differently to prevent or manage” the riots, given that “understanding what sparked them is fundamental to any effort to prevent riots in the future” (Five Days in August: An Interim Report on the 2011 English Riots, 8). But the panel’s approach to the riot’s ostensible causes and the public policy imperatives that would prevent a reoccurrence of a catastrophe that produced five fatalities and material losses projected at some half a billion pounds (28) seems handicapped from the start. This appearance is given first by its decision to focus on the police management of the affair after the death of the suspect, and second by a perspective that sees the riots as a sort of self-fulfilling result of poverty and criminality (premises already assumed by high-ranking politicos). The rioters, accordingly, were moral outliers, and the theft motive in their behavior is easily explained because, according to the panel’s findings, there “appears to be a link between deprivation and rioting” (11). Similarly the panel proposes that the catastrophe was “triggered by the police handling of the death of Mark Duggan, in particular communications with his family,” as if the actual killing were somehow in a separate category from the events that ensued and not integral to its teleology (11 stress added.). It bears pointing out, as well, that the sample of those arrested and studied, four thousand out of an estimated fifteen thousand rioters, was a limited one that had been acquired mainly thanks to the technology of close circuit television in stores and in other public places. It was taken from among individuals whose images were recognizable to the police on account of their having already been in a databank of the previously convicted. The panel’s finding that 88 percent of the rioters had had prior involvement with the law is therefore a foreseeable conclusion (29). These factors form the background of a seeming inability or unwillingness to confront the racial dimension of the event as a national problem of profound import. Indeed, it turns out that any criticism on the part of the panel is carefully couched within a narrative pattern that carefully separates what the panel feels from what the respondents say, and this is done in such a way that contentious questions regarding corruption in high places, social and racial justice, or possible police culpability or malfeasance in the event are hidden behind a shield of quasi-objective rhetoric. We have, therefore, in addition to the aforementioned poor application of police protocols in the public relations aspect, a dispersion of the agents and the motivations involved, so that there was seen to be a range of reasons behind the event. These in turn lead to the conclusion that there was “no single cause of the riots and no

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single group was responsible” (7). In this narrative, even the initial police efforts at damage control by leaking to the press that the suspect was armed and shooting at them was evacuated of its pernicious intent by the panel’s convoluted declaration that the “IPPC stated that they might have given misleading oral information to journalists in the initial aftermath of the incident about whether there had been an exchange of fire between Mr. Duggan and the police before Mr. Duggan was shot” (40). Likewise the racial profiling behind the egregious “stop and search” practice, a reality bitterly lamented by Darcus Howe in the BBC interview,20 is stripped of its visceral and traumatic content and minimized through its description as a mere “concern” expressed by black and Asian men “who felt it was not always carried out with appropriate respect,” 12).21 This narrative distancing, as it were, from the primordial scenario of minority community interaction with aggressive police surveillance under what for Hall is the law and order premise sets up the panel’s conclusion that these “were not race riots” (28, 55). The conclusion that in the 2011 riots race is not a factor of importance, ostensibly on account of the multiracial makeup of the participants, calculated at 42 percent white, 46 percent black, 7 percent Asian, and 5 percent other (29), and because they “differed considerably from riots in previous years such as 1981 and 1985” (55), raises many questions, a full response to which lies beyond the scope of this discussion. An important point of departure, though, might be an examination of the extent to which a transracial “uprising of the masses,” to use Howe’s characterization, in the current climate of popular antidictatorial insurgency, ultimately poses a greater political threat than the race-based vindications against the politics of keeping Britain “white” that provoked the riots in earlier decades. It is to be noted, moreover, that an important element in statements from organs like the panel in question lies in their interest in redefining social reality and in helping create a consensus according to the template established by other strands in the dominant narrative as we have seen with Hall. In these organs a key strategy consists in minimizing the political content of manifestations of protest and discontent at the conditions of unemployment and social disenfranchisement experienced by the poor. In that sense there is certainly common ground to be found in the relationship between the wagelessness, the rioting, and the semi-legal lifestyles of important sectors of nineteenthcentury London, and the high indices of unemployment and marginalization amongst black and white English youth today, particularly with unemployment among the former group exceeding the 50 percent mark.22 Also, an analysis that openly acknowledges race in this event, as we have seen with La Rose regarding the 1981 antecedent, would enhance considerably the scandal value of the episode, and hence the potential for real critical scrutiny and/or organized protest. On these grounds, then, one might understand the reluctance on the part of the handpicked panel to associate the state with racist practice, and its easy conclusions, particularly against the backdrop of two decades of a larger multicultural initiative that has seen

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blacks increasingly represented in sports, in television and advertisements, and even in Parliament.23 The apparent self-censorship of the panelists in the new multicultural Britain is perhaps best read against a context in which the only kinds of racist practice currently worthy of public attention and critique, according to Paul Gilroy, are those involving “organized neo-Fascists and white supremacists (when they) start to stalk the streets or if they seem on the edge of making an electoral breakthrough into respectable political society” (2004, 136). Gilroy’s call (since 2004) for a political culture in England in which race as vector must “enter comprehensively” if the quality of vernacular multiracial conviviality achieved by antiracist politics over the past few decades is to reach the deep structures of society and if the racial order is to be undone is thus appropriate. In the post-9/11 scenario, he is acutely sensitive to the failures of multiculturalism as evidenced in the fact that “homegrown” British terrorists Richard Reid, Zacharias Moussaoui, and el-Faisal (aka Trevor Forrest), under the impulse of quotidian forms of racial provocation and alienation, should have been driven to seek the solution offered by Islamist extremism (144). To the degree that the ongoing investment in racial hierarchy underwrites statist violence in continuance of colonial and postcolonial practice both within England as erstwhile colonial center and abroad (48), the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson maintains its relevance for facing the challenges posed by race to black disaporan relocation in England, in work that spans the decades from the mid-seventies to the turn of the twenty-first century. The 333 deaths of arrestees in police custody in England between 1998 and August 2011, which include purported cases of sudden suicide by some of the subjects, as with Jamaican singer Smiley Culture in March 2011, have not produced a single police conviction in the few official inquiries that have ensued.24 They, along with the unknown body count that would correspond to the extrajudicial killings of those who were not even taken into custody, provide an appropriate prism for reading the poem “Liesense fi Kill” (2000). If the refusal to deal with the Duggan incident as an object of analysis by the panel might be read as a denial of his subjectivity or a naturalization of his death (under the assumption that the lives of [black] criminals and marginals don’t matter), so too does the elision of the event as a causative factor in the 2011 riots under the impetus of the authoritarian consensus created by the moral panic of which Hall speaks.25 The elimination of a suspect by Scotland Yard’s Trident team, who had no previous convictions, but who was reportedly “on his way to commit a crime (so) officers had no alternative to move when they did,”26 recalls the kind of preemptive strike(ing) that was made policy amongst the United States and its postcolonial allies, notably Britain, in the wake of the Twin Tower attacks of 2001.27 Seeing an analogy between local British law enforcement and the role of the United States as global police is by no means outlandish. It goes to the linkage between terminal violence as an aspect of modern

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statecraft under the aegis of the ideology of racial hierarchy and the legacy of colonial conquest and administration, and that which underwrites contemporary configurations of empire (Gilroy 2004). The Duggan death (one recalls the militarized language of the Powell warning and its implicit calls for a response to the migrant “invasion”), as with others of its kind, might thus be seen to sit at the intersection of the often genocidal violence without guilt or accountability that was practiced both at home and abroad during the colonial and postcolonial eras, and the current antiterrorist containment policies carried out by drone attacks in Pakistan and other approved areas, with their “collateral damage” of uncounted civilian victims. In these contexts, the lives of the “lesser” races are deemed expendable, whether for purposes of production or capitalist accumulation, or as necessary to the greater good of “society” under the eugenicist premise or in the interest of racial and nationalist homogeneity, or the continuance of empire.28 “Liesense fi Kill” (Selected Poems, 98–101) is built around at least five thematic binaries, which include a) truth and untruth, b) justice and injustice, c) life and death, d) sanity and insanity, and e) free speech and censorship; all of whose positive poles circumscribe modernity’s social contract in (Western) democratic societies. The poem covers specific dates from 1983 to 1997, but as I have been proposing, its argument makes it relevant to events both prior to 1983 and after 1997. Although an apparent neologism in the poet’s Jamaican patois, the wordplay in the title (“Liesense”) does little to hide the poetic speaker’s invocation of a license to kill. Apart from being a clear reference to the iconic James Bond of Cold War-era film and fiction, and other such covert agents of the Intelligence Service who, on account of their superior training and professional integrity, assume discretionary powers to eliminate the enemies of the state in the interest of national security, the idea of the license to kill is here marshaled to provide that other state apparatus, the police force, with immunity from prosecution in the extermination of perceived enemies within the state.29 This is the implied argument articulated by Kristeen (Christeen), the coworker of the speaker, as she complains about the death of black suspects in police custody in England. The objective of the title’s double entendre, then, is to refute the implicit truth claim or the ethico-moral basis of such a license as it is exercised by executive fiat or through statist conventions in the real world. From Kristeen’s standpoint, such licens(ing) is a lie that deliberately blurs the line between justice and injustice or erases it completely. Kristeen, the speaker’s interlocutor, is crazy, though, and seriously so. We see this in the reiterated references to not only her idiotic or exaggeratedly jocular (“jokey-jokey,” 2) behavior.30 It is confirmed by her bodily abandon and lack of restraint and decorum under the influence of the music at the Christmas party, and the energy she put into the celebration. This is the “no-nonsense stance” with which, according to the poem, she “wine-dung di place laas krismus dance” (3–4). Kristeen’s penchant for conspiracy theories (5) is also ostensibly evidence of an easy and impressionable intellect.

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For her tongue-in-cheek interlocutor, she must be under the influence of an idiot (“waan idiat,” 24) to make the absurd, unsubstantiated, and ultimately improbable charge that black people are being killed with impunity in England by the nation’s peace officers. The poem’s fourth verse brings together the combined topics of national security, Cold War espionage, and intra-national terrorism involving Northern Ireland, still critical to Military Intelligence as the century drew to a close. yu tink a jus hem-high-five an James Ban an polece an solja owevah nawt highalan wan? wen it come to black people Winstan some polece inna Inglan got liesense fi kill (Selected Poems, 98)

The purported craziness of Kristeen is necessary, however, to the framing of the dialog with the presumably stable and reserved Winstan, against whom she serves as a foil. The contrast between the two is important as a narrative strategy, precisely on account of the gravity of the charges that she is about to level. Kristeen in “Liesense fi Kill” implicates a constellation of Britain’s most eminent public functionaries in what would amount to a particularly damning violation of the human rights of citizens and citizen migrants identifiable by their racial difference. Moreover, she names them one by one, and in doing so highlights several ideological state apparatuses and their interlocking functions in the establishment and preservation of political power in the context of the modern national state. Prime ministers Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) and John Major (1990–1997), Conservatives, and Tony Blair (1997–2007), Laborite, are all seen to represent the same policies vis-à-vis the (black) citizen migrants over a period of almost thirty years, that is, in spite of the social democratic and left-leaning reputation of the Labour Party in relation to the Conservative Party. So too are Michael Howard and Jack Straw, in their functions as home secretary (1993–1997 and 1997–2001, respectively), in conjunction with such individual police agencies as the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), the Police Complaints Authority (PCA), and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). The highlighting of these entities separately within the text amounts to the inscription of a veritable taxonomy of repressive state agents and their behavior. Such a bold use of freedom of speech by Johnson the settler, however, even if constitutionally grounded or defensible under “poetic license,” must create an awareness of the limitations of discourse, that is, of the associated censorship and logophobia that attend speech in society.31 As putative madwoman, Kristeen provides the writer with a degree of insulation in what is an expression that could easily be seen as either subversive or slanderous or both by its many referents. The world in which right and rights are obliterated by the exercise of sovereignty, in which the rational order (“sense”) is displaced by the lie, which

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then governs in its stead, is an upside-down world, from the standpoint of “Liesense fi Kill.” In this universe of unreason, proof of wrongdoing becomes an impossibility. How does one establish that the forces of good are serving the interests of evil, and that “some polece . . . got liesense fi kill?” (19–20). This is the conundrum that explains Winstan’s retort to Kristeen that whoever her source of information is, she or he must be stupid: “a who tell yu dat/ a mussi waan idiat/ yu cyaan prove dat” (Selected Poems, 25 emphasis added). And because evidentiary proof is required to establish criminality under the rule of law, and Kristeen on account of her intellectual limitations is not qualified to render this, it means that her accusations are empty. It is her response in the face of this proposition, however, that reveals the poetic shrewdness involved in the creation of the character. Kristeen’s indignant response to Winstan’s suggestion that she can’t “prove dat” is punctuated through two emphatic nonverbal gestures in the Afro-Caribbean vernacular, the kiss-teeth and the cut-eye: “Kristeen kiss her teet/ an shi cut mi wid her yeye/ an shi seh yu waan proof”(99).32 She then follows up with a lengthy dialectical retort that establishes the true clarity of her vision beneath the cover of her pretended madness. This consists of a detailed enumeration of the victims of police action, which cites their names and the manner of their deaths. In rhythmic repetition she stresses that you can’t ask the deceased how they died. They have been silenced and “dead men,” as the saying goes, tell no tales. She then directs her interlocutor to take his queries instead to the individuals overseeing the institutions responsible for their arrest and incarceration. It is in their (willful) silence, she suggests, where the proof of culpability lays. She would contend, in other words, that evidence of proof for her charges is not in speech, but in its absence; in silence. “yu cyaan awsk Clinton McCurbin bout him haxfixiashan an yu cyaan awsk Joy Gardner bout her sufficaeshan yu cyaan awsk Colin Roach if him really shoot himself an yu cyaan awsk Vincent Graham if a him stab himself but yu can awsk di Commishinah bout de liesense fi kill Awsk Sir Paul Condon Bout di liesense fi kill (Selected Poems, 99)

Also noteworthy in her dissertation, delivered deliberately in the migrant Caribbean vernacular, is its pointed critique of the silence of the media and other relevant social actors in the face of what is clearly a moral, societal, and judicial aberration. As he does in other pieces, Johnson registers the disappointment of the colonial or postcolonial incomers at what they imagined

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would be a higher standard of civil accountability in the metropolitan center, where the expectation is that not only are social problems identified and ventilated, they are solved. None of this concern applies apparently in this racially tainted matter, for as Kristeen would have it, “nat a cat mek meow ar a dyam daag baak/ . . . nohbady high-up inna society/ can awfah explaneashan nar remedy” (Selected Poems, 98). That the speech of his main character is obscure or ambiguous is deliberate, though. Kristeen’s projected madness, as indicated earlier, and her nonstandard speech may be seen as strategically necessary in view of the potentially subversive nature of the poem’s content, camouflaging thereby the writer’s intent. Even if this is so, Johnson dispenses with ambiguity by offering an extratextual narrative that makes his authorial intentions clear. In the footnotes that dutifully accompany each of the victims’ names there is information that renders them knowable as individuals, as well as the manner of their deaths in this necessary documentation of the history of the present. Clinton McCurbin’s asphyxiation in 1987, Joy Gardner’s suffocation in 1993, Colin Roach’s allegedly selfinflicted fatal gunshot, Vincent Graham’s reportedly self-inflicted fatal stab wound in 1989, the fatal police victimization of Brian and Wayne Douglas in 1995, Tunay Hassan’s death by neglect while in police custody in 1987, Marlon Downes’ alleged suicide in 1997 while in police custody, Ahmed el Gammal’s mysterious death in police custody in 1996, Ibrahima Sey’s death in police custody in 1996, Cynthia Jarret’s fatal heart attack during a police raid on her home in 1985, Oliver Price and Steve Boyce’s deaths in police custody; all constitute a metatext to “Liesense fi Kill” that insists, notwithstanding their footnote status, on being integral to the work. Even if the story that Kristeen is telling is tainted by her linguistic peculiarity, her curious jocularity, and her penchant for conspiracy theories, the cold, clear English of his footnotes leaves no doubt as to the poet’s intentions. “Liesense fi Kill” was preceded by a quarter of a century by “Street 66.” The interim saw the increasing growth of Johnson’s audience from those of schools and community centers in and around London’s black neighborhoods, to large-scale concerts in Europe, the United States, and Africa, and eventually to the entire world through record sales and the Internet. Although he made a temporary, strategic withdrawal from the “concert circuit” and public performance in 1985 to focus on his work as arts editor with Race Today and similar aspects of social commentary and cultural critique, the impact of his creative work to that point was such that it qualified him to be regarded as “having written the anthems of a generation” and of becoming over time “one of the most influential cultural commentators” in Britain,33 evidently for his association with antiracism and a social movement that had ushered in the multiculturalism of the end of the century. This kind of notoriety is explicitly linked to Johnson’s inclusion in the 2000 anthology IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, and more important, the publication by Penguin of a collection of his works in 2002, Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems, which herald

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his recognition as a “canonical” poet because the latter publication is part of the series of Penguin Classics.34 The item “If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet,” which is the one included in IC3, first appeared in 1994 and, like most of his other works, was also published with musical accompaniment, in this case in 1998 with the album More Time. Although Johnson is the originator of the term dub poetry, which has been subsequently accepted by other artists in the genre who have received less acclaim, it is noteworthy that he has also expressed some displeasure with the term, insisting on more than one occasion that his preference is to be referred to as a poet, “full stop.”35 The aspiration to recognition exclusively in terms of poetry is a curious one, especially bearing in mind that it is the complementarity of music and verse in “dub poetry” that has primarily identified him as a performer. Besides, his investment in “dub” is very evident in the stand-alone dub discs that he has produced under his record label.36 Notwithstanding his celebration of a putative canon of black diasporan poets like Kamau Brathwaite, Martin Carter, Jayne Cortez, Amiri Baraka, and Chris Okigbo, and his express desire to be “rude/ an rootsy/ an subversive” in his work, as proclaimed in “If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet” (Selected Poems, 33–35), the question may well be raised as to whether his apparent distancing from the dub label is also a distancing from the reggae roots of the genre along with its cultural implications, that is to say, toward (pure) poetry in terms of its association with high society and with a particular quality of what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital (Language and Symbolic Power). Reggae’s connection with Jamaican underclass counterculture, the anticolonial ethic, and with Rastafari is axiomatic.37 In this regard Johnson’s famous dismissal of Rastafari in a reported exchange with Bob Marley, on account of the Rasta tenets of repatriation and the divinity of Haile Selassie, his apparent embrace of “science an teknalagy,” and a corresponding endorsement of modernity over and against mythology and “antiquity” (“Reality Poem,” 3)38 may well point to ambivalence or a latent elitism in the poet on this score. At the same time it might indicate an underappreciation of Rastafari liberatory thought by the poet when he made the statement, and the function of myth within its worldview. “Street 66” seems to offer an appropriate illustration of this proposition. “Street 66” was published in 1975, the year that Johnson left Poet and the Roots, in which he performed with the drummers of Rasta Love. The moment of rupture with his former group might seem to bear the hallmarks of a moving on or transcending of a prior state, as the poet recalled it in the interview with Burt Caesar: “I didn’t identify with the Back-to-Africa, but neither did I identify with Selassie being God, but all the rest I could deal with,” including “aspects of Rastafarian language” (68). However, the aspects of Rastafarian language to which he refers, a peculiar orality and episteme that was spreading outward from its Jamaican source through music, other media, and migrants themselves, may have had a more than casual purchase on Johnson’s outlook and aesthetic, notwithstanding the

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somewhat diminished role for it that his comment suggests. Indeed, much of his early work evinces a “relocated,” if you will, articulation of values and principles that continue to be central to Rastafari, some of which might be accessed from the standpoint of Rastafarian language, or “dread talk,” and that emerge in the poem.39 Rasta core beliefs have been identified with interrelated concepts of Ethiopianism, Biblicism, anticolonialism, and an intersubjective “I-and-I” consciousness, which centers the (first person) subject and rehabilitates him or her from the diminishment and objectification of slavery and colonialism, while simultaneously assuming and identifying with the divine essence projected to be intrinsic to a broader human and cosmic plurality. These beliefs proceed from a folk intellectualism that has reinterpreted the dislocation of Africans and their descendants through an Old Testament narrative concerning the Israelites and their exile and enslavement, and the promise and prophecy of return. Exile aside, the biblical source provides two other related tropes of importance to Rastafari thought. The first one has to do with the ancient empire of Babylon, and an imaginative re-signification that sees it replicated in the Roman Empire and currently in the Western imperial alliance (Anglo-American and European) controlling the modern world system created by capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. Here religious and secular symbols of religious, ideological, and material alienation, the Vatican or Buckingham Palace, for example, both in the heart of the metropole and in its postcolonial margins, combine across space and time to create a new configuration of “Babylon”: as a plurivalent symbol of antihumanism, superexploitation, and ultimately self-destructive militarism. From a Rastafarian standpoint, the collapse of Babylon is necessary and imminent, whether through the mythical apocalyptic clash of good and evil, as biblically foretold, or through the ecological backlash that will be ultimately provoked by the current technological and materialistic abuse of the earth’s resources (Edmonds 2003). The other trope taken from the Old Testament by Rastafari is similar in content and purpose, although smaller in scale. It concerns an analogous image of destruction seen in the collapse of the walls of Jericho as a result of the vibrations created by the power and sound of the trumpets of the biblical Joshua who led the battle of Jericho. Rasta appropriation of these principles as a complex of word/sound/power has been central to their utopian discourse of emancipation, to their prolonged meditative conversations or “reasonings,” to their recorded reggae music, and to their ritualized chanting at Nyabinghi sessions directed at the “fall” of Babylon. Combined with an inherited reverence for the power of the word in African cultures, this complex discursivity, accompanied also by claims for repatriation to Africa, have provided a mythical as well as a material underpinning for Rasta-inspired reggae music from Bob Marley and the famous Wailers, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingstone of the 1970s, to the contemporary chants of artists like Junior Reid, Sizzla, or Capleton of the Rasta “house” of the Bobo Ashanti in Jamaica.40 While Rastafarian language as

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dialog or “dread talk” is not a major independent theme in Johnson’s work, its presence is certainly discernible as part of the oral dimension of the word/ sound/power premise of the Rasta outlook that it contains. It comes as no surprise to find that the younger Linton Kwesi Johnson, putative poet and documentarian of the settler experience, enthused by the transatlantic winds of Afro-diasporan rebellion, ex-Black Panther, and participant observer of the blues dance and sound system culture imported to London by fellow Jamaicans, would be accordingly impacted by the spirit and content of reggae music, in much the same way as he was by the writings of black Atlantic poets, as mentioned earlier. Significant items from his contemporary repertoire pay homage to reggae, both as narrative vehicle for black colonial and postcolonial history and as conduit for Rastafarian word/sound/power philosophy. They help us understand the poem in question. In a lyrical contemplation on “Reggae Sounds,” for example, his poetic speaker addresses the music repeatedly as a “tumble-doun sound” (Selected Poems, 17), with a “bubble-doun-beat bouncing” (17), in onomatopoeic acknowledgment of the signature bass component of reggae rhythm and of the sound/power vibration created therein. The poem acknowledges also the historical importance of reggae as a narrative cultural genre dedicated to telling the story of the modern enslavement and diaspora of Africans: “bass history is a moving/ is a hurting black story” (17). The Rasta sound/ power principle of chanting down Babylon is particularly evident in this poem’s incorporation of natural phenomena used to symbolize apocalyptic destruction that signals the end of oppression/downpression. Much like Bob Marley’s earlier invocation of “lightning, thunder, brimstone, and fire” to signal cosmic rebirth when “righteousness (shall) cover the earth,” in “So Jah Seh” (1974), “Reggae Sounds” sees “Thunda” and “lightening” [sic] as emanating from the bass drum (6), the “trumpet and a organ” (17), and from an “electrical storm” produced by the rhythm, all of which will lead to the revolutionary “time of turning” (17). An important difference with Marley, however, in Johnson’s projection of radical change, is that the revolutionary time “for bombs and for burning” (17), as his poem has it, will be recognized by “the people” who will “know what to do,” and will “do it” (17). From the poem’s standpoint, history-making change will be effected not only by cosmic forces, but also by coordinated human agents with a clear theoretical understanding of the whys and wherefores of social transformation and the role of violence therein, as his invocation of Marx and Fanon suggests.41 “Reggae Sounds” turns out to be a written poetic text that reflects on other (musical and narrative) texts, which ultimately, through its recorded dub-poetic version, also has an oral and musical expression.42 It is a lyrical and musical hybrid that metatextually incorporates and signifies on the original Rasta genre. Music as a personified entity in the poem “Reggae Sounds” is again personified in the poem “Bass Culture,” in which the bass serves as symbol and synecdoche for the instrumental ensemble and their narrative function to tell

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“bass history.” The poem is dedicated to famous 1970s toaster Big Youth, and here again music, as suggested in the title, on the strength of its inherent sound-based cosmic power, seems to be a primary organic protagonist in the pursuit and achievement of the objective of liberation. Human agency is at best complementary. People represent sentient but malleable vehicles in the struggle for change. “Bass Culture” achieves this by way of a thoughtprovoking metaphorical merging of the rhythmic beating of the heart, the “pulsing of blood” (Selected Poems, 14), with the “bubbling bass” of the reggae ensemble, creating what emerges as a parahuman entity whose (historical) task is to defeat racist oppression/downpression; to push “gainst the wall/ whe bar black blood” (14). The new entity in its hybrid “frightful form” (14) again makes use of the explosive forces of nature, the living heat of the “volcano core” (15), “thunda” (15), and a “deadly storm” (15). In accordance with the Rasta rhetorical background, the hurt and destruction visited on the enslaved and their descendants and their historically necessary vindication are cast in terms of the epic and eternal battle of good and evil, as this music and its retaliatory force is projected to “harm di wicked” (15). “Bass Culture” as paean to the agency of Rasta/reggae music and the power harnessed within it builds up to a climax in which the poetic speaker is seemingly left incoherent and at a loss for words before its awesome potential as he exclaims: “SCATA-MATTA-SHATTA-SHACK!/ what a beat!” (16). The latter image is striking in that, half jitanjáfora and half compound neologism,43 without prepositions or other syntactic linkages, it simultaneously expresses visual and auditory images of the explosion and shattering of matter, and of the shock waves of heat associated with such explosions. Its provenance is unerringly Rastafarian, and any doubt about this is removed in the final verse of the poem, which reiterates the threat and prophesy of the destruction of the “wall” of oppression as an inexorably imminent phenomenon, one that will allow the sound of music to revert to satisfying existentially less urgent concerns among humans, and to no longer serve as a tool of war, but of leisure. Most noteworthy in the trope, however, is the apocalyptic and explosive end to the reign of the oppressors/downpressors using a familiar Rasta image of the “scattering” of oppression. for di time is nigh when passion gather high and di beat jus lash when di wall mus smash, and di beat will shif as di culture alltah when oppression scatah (Selected Poems, 16)

While “Reggae Sounds” and “Bass Culture” contain abstract reflections on music and liberation and incorporate Rastafarian precepts of word/ sound/power, “Street 66” sheds light on a more concrete lived experience,

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even as it too integrates these and other features of symbolic liberatory Rasta thought and ritual. According to the poet, the poem came out of the perennial raids on black West Indian parties, their blues dances, and their centers of socializing and interaction.44 The famous Mangrove event of 1970, in which the eponymous black restaurant was raided a dozen times over the summer, its liquor license revoked, its patrons physically abused, and for which the ensuing protest march resulted in the longest trial in British history, is an example of the kind of statist incursion inflicted on the West Indian community, ostensibly on the grounds of investigating drug trafficking or supposed public health violations.45 Similar raids on homes and dance halls or shebeens are memorably documented in the 1980s by the group Steel Pulse in “Blues Dance Raid.” What we have in “Street 66” is a fairly straightforward micronarrative that describes a gathering of brethren in fellowship whose session of music and communion is rudely interrupted by the police, and that stops on the verge of their dramatic retaliation. Though there are no overt references to Jah or to repatriation, the poem signifies rastafarically on account of its underlying conceptual premise of word/sound/power, its depiction of communal “reasoning,” and the ritual Nyabinghi precept that shapes the confrontation with the authorities. In the clash of the indigenous white British policemen, putatively upholding the law, versus the black Jamaican settlers, presumed to be lawbreakers, lay its predetermined dramatic charge and its contextuality, particularly because there is no mention of a crime or alleged crime, nor evidence of a warrant for search or arrest. Rastafarian verbal intercourse known as “reasoning” has to do with meditative and sometimes prolonged conversation and philosophizing about the condition/s brought about by slavery, exile, and colonial oppression/downpression. Among other things, it constitutes an aggressive assault on the episteme of modernity that, while seeking answers to lived reality on the quotidian plane, also looks into the transtemporal dimension of existence as it affects or has affected black people.46 Among its favorite topics for dialog is the historical concept of Emancipation (1834–1838), regarded universally as unfinished business because it did not end in repatriation, and besides, offered reparations to the slave owners, instead of the aggrieved collective of the enslaved. Closely related to this discursivity is the Nyabinghi ritual in which Rasta reasoning is incorporated amongst other acts such as singing, dancing, drumming, and ganja smoking to generate ever higher states of consciousness and to eventually create, according to Prahlad, the kind of “concentration of word/sound/power that will speed the collapse of Babylon” (2001, 27). “Nyabinghi,” which translates loosely as “death to white and black oppressors,” is inspired in the historical defense of Ethiopia mounted by Emperor Haile Selassie against Italy’s Benito Mussolini in 1930, and in traditional leadership practices deployed in anticolonial resistance in East Africa’s Great Lakes region.47 Judging from what we know of Johnson, “Street 66’s” ritualistic interaction and atmosphere, and the confrontation

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with “Babylon” that it depicts, suggests either a deliberate artistic rendition of a Nyabinghi ritual or an unconscious “accidental” one. What is immediately remarkable in the poem from the outset is a sort of animation of the space of the narrative, done presumably to highlight the cosmic energy located therein. In what culminates in the generation of “pure scene” as it is described by the poetic voice (Selected Poems, 9), we get a reference also to the time of the narrative. The animation is of the dark six o’ clock hour, which is “howlin softly” (9) and “movin black” (9). In the room the chiaroscuro is permeated by the sound of music that appears too as a live independent property, “a mellow steady flow” (9), and the darkness and the music complement each other through parallel structures: “de room woz dark” and “de soun woz music” (9). Only after these precedents are set, are we allowed to see the combined effects of the ambience on the gathering, or rather, on one individual in particular: “an man-son mind jus mystic red,/ green, red, green” (9), with the intermittent green and red glow suggesting the intensity of the interior experience of illumination. The red and green of the mental and spiritual activity, against the black background with its barely visible silhouettes, together conjure up the three symbolic colors of Garveyism. They complete a context of Afroconsciousness and rebellion for the beginning of the poem. The vernacular expression “pure scene” with which the stanza ends not only concludes the visual and auditory picture of the space of the narrative and the interaction of those present, it also encapsulates, in Rastafarian terms, the active and intersubjective search for the “visionary stream” (Edmonds 2003, 356) produced by ganja-inflected reasoning. Here, in the quest for elucidation and higher spiritual consciousness, “I and I” as human life force merges with ambient ones. If mystical searches for higher states of being are said to produce possession or a condition of trance, it would explain the beginning line of the following verse, which explains that “no man would dance but leap and shake” (Selected Poems, 8), as bodily control and coordination amongst the gathering appeared to cede to external spiritual and cosmic forces. It would also explain the sense of epiphany when whatever it was that had taken hold of “man-son’s” mind hits the narrator also, as he explains: “cause when di music met I taps,/ I felt di sting, knew di shock,/ yea had to do an ride di rock” (9). The Biblicism of the trope that follows, “outta dis rock/ shall come/ a greena riddim” (9), is easily identifiable as originating in Christ’s inauguration of his Church on the symbolic “rock” of his disciple Peter, and the religious transformation for humanity purported therein. Rastafarically speaking, though, the “rock” that precedes the “greena riddim” is a double metaphor that simultaneously evokes music and a material and ideological foundation that responds to a concept of “dread history,” that is, history from a specifically Rastafarian standpoint, with its topoi of exile, oppression, and resistance, and its promise of rebirth into a concept of unshakable liberation. Accordingly, the new transcendental reality being envisioned, as

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the following lines indicate, produced and underscored through the commitment and covenant of the “rock,” will be “even more dread/ dan what/ de breeze of glory bread [sic]” (9). It will be constituted through a music and an ideological foundation even more powerful than that which served as existential soundtrack to the history of the heights of freedom previously scaled. In this context, “dread,” usually associated with difficulty, with threat, and with foreboding, includes an element of triumph appropriate to the Utopian tenor of the new greener “riddim” (9), which will characterize black existence.48 “Street 66” as relocated Nyabinghi ritual is confirmed by the virtual presence of the toaster I-Roy, famous for the genre characterized by extemporaneous rapping over the dub versions of reggae records, and his presence and the presumed content of his articulations would confirm the projected role of high priest within the proceedings. This is indicated in the honorific that is accorded him: “de mitey poet I-Roy woz on de wire” (Selected Poems, 26 stress added). The announcement of the presence of I-Roy makes way for the reference to the third participant in the gathering, Western. With Western we note that the crisis and climax of mutual acknowledgment in meditation has already been achieved and the earlier trance that only allowed the leap and the shake is now translated to a more measured and ordered movement, the skank. That the tension is broken is indicated in general laughter and the recognition of group catharsis. “Western did a scank an each one lawf:/ him feelin irie, dread I” (10). In “dread talk” etymology, “I-ry” or “Irie” is a conjunction of “I” and “free.”49 Western’s following statement confirms the attainment of the state of ideological and spiritual readiness that is the function of all such rituals: “any policeman come yah/ will get some righteous raas klaat licks/ yea man, whole heap a kicks” (10). If the reference to “kicks” is meant to be both serious and playful, the “licks” that preceded it make it clear that for Western the incursion by the state and its agents is unambiguously unrighteous because it represents a violation of a space and an activity consecrated as special by those present. The indecorous intrusion by the police when they show up, with their demands to “Open up! . . . Open up! . . . Come on, open up!” (10), brings a predictable response: “Yes, dis is Street 66;/ step rite in an tek some licks” (10). “Street 66” as indicated elaborates on the Nyabinghi through its dramatic staging of the confrontation of the forces of oppression and the forces of resistance and the bold declaration by the latter of their will to fight back. And although the actual clash of forces does not materialize, the poem’s importance lies in highlighting this confrontation as potentiality, and, more important, in the suggestion that retaliatory violence is an always already integral part of the structure of oppression, regardless of the relative power between oppressor and oppressed, and that its immanence is not to be overlooked because it is a part of what defines us as human. The poem holds fast besides, to an insight, articulated by Emperor Haile Selassie and adopted by the Rastafari as foundational, that oppression/downpression based on

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the precept of racial superiority will ultimately provoke war as a legitimate defense.50 Its religious dimension, as seen in the ritualistic smoking of ganja and the Selassie subtext, can hardly be said to subscribe to the idea of frivolous intoxication or to the prism for reading reggae as musical culture, as “escapist” and fun oriented as some critics have held.51 “Street 66,” rather, speaks to the relevance of myth and religion to (black) Caribbean survivalism, here relocated to the metropole as part of the ongoing condition of diaspora. As an expression of black settler resistance to statist marginalization, “Street 66” presages the activism in which Linton Kwesi Johnson would continue to be involved in the ensuing years, whether in the Race Today Collective, or as a member of the West Indian Carnival Committee, or else, and that would find expression in other aspects of his oeuvre. In 1976, shortly after the composition of “Street 66,” a massive police force in excess of fifteen hundred would try to shut down the Caribbean Street Carnival, provoking a riotous response from black youth. Similar circumstances prevailed in 1977, when the West Indian public, reclaiming a democratic principle of the right of assembly in the public domain, particularly at carnival time, invoked a phrase made famous by Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Kitchener, viz, “The road make to walk on Carnival day.”52 Johnson’s “Forces of Victory” album of 1978 would commemorate that year’s military theme and costumes used in the masquerade procession, and the conquest of Notting Hill as a public space for the continued celebration of carnival. If the Notting Hill carnival has become the largest street festival in contemporary Europe, attracting more than 2 million tourists and participants and representing a symbol of multiculturalism, it is just as true that the continuing contradictions across the lines of race and class in Britain’s liberal democracy, so vividly portrayed in the 2011 riots, ensure the continued relevance of Johnson as documentarian and activist, regardless of what items may be chosen from among his work to place him among the poets of the canon. Ideologically speaking, and in terms of the social contradictions that bred it, there is little to separate “Liesense to Kill” from “Street 66,” which was written a quarter of a century earlier. The concrete gains registered in civil society for racial minorities notwithstanding, they both speak to the continuing need for struggle for racial and human dignity in the old metropole.53 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Quote from “Wat about di Workin Class,” in Tings an Times: Selected Poems, by Linton Kwesi Johnson, in Bloodaxe Books, Glasgow, Scotland, 1991, 37. Quotes from “Liesense fi Kill” (98–101), “Reggae sounds” (17), “Bass Culture” (14–16), “Street 66” (9–10), and “If I woz a Tap-Natch Poet,” (94–97), by Linton Kwesi Johnson, in Selected Poems, Penguin Books,

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London (first published as Mi Revalueshanary Fren in Penguin Classics 2002, Penguin Books 2006). Copyright ©Linton Kwesi Johnson 2002, 2006. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Also reproduced by permission of LKJ Music Publishers Ltd.

NOTES 1. Joined-up Politics and Postcolonial Melancholia, 165. 2. Melanie Newton, “The ‘Accidental Rudeness’ of the British,” Stabroek News, Guyana, August 15, 2011. Newton reports that more than a million people had watched the video on YouTube within the first twenty-four hours of its posting. 3. The riots spread from London to engulf Birmingham, Manchester, West Bromfield, Salford, Bristol, Liverpool, West Bromwich, Gloucester, etc. Over four days and nights, five more lives were lost and thousands of homes and businesses ruined. The Metro newspaper reported that by Wednesday, August 10, “all police cells in London (were) full” (7). 4. Winston James, “The Black Experience in Twentieth-Century Britain.” 5. “Darcus Howe BBC News Interview London Riots.” www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZxO8k6R5_aQ. 6. Editorial, The Sun, Tuesday, August 9, 8, Lindsay Johns, “Apologists for these thugs should hang their heads in shame,” Daily Mail, August 9, 2011, 12; Rebecca Camber, “Surrender! Police let mob seize streets,” Daily Mail, August 9, 2. 7. E.g., Tom Whitehead and Andrew Hough, “Send in water cannon to clear streets, May told,” The Daily Telegraph, Final edition, 1. Hall, Policing the Crisis, 35. 8. Johnson, “We have not forgotten,” prologue to The New Cross Massacre Story: Interviews with John La Rose, 1. 9. “Creation for Liberation” was an outgrowth of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (1966–1972). It brought together artists from the black and minority communities whose agenda lay in social transformation and who saw performance and fundraising at concerts and exhibitions at schools and community centers as central to their practice as socially conscious artists. Unpublished interview with the writer, August 2011. Also see Brian Alleyne, Radicals against Race: Black Activism and Cultural Politics, 38. 10. Hilary Beckles addresses high population density in post-Emancipation Barbados, and landlessness among the formerly enslaved in “Kamau: Notes from the Barbadian Underground” in For the Geography of a Soul. 11. Elizabeth M. Thomas-Hope, “The Establishment of a Migration Tradition: British West Indian Movements to the Hispanic Caribbean in the Century after Emancipation.” 12. In this regard Carole Boyce Davies’ work on Claudia Jones, erstwhile member of the National Committee of the Communist Party of the USA, who also founded the West Indian Gazette and the Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the first London Caribbean Carnival in 1959, and later the Notting Hill Carnival, ably complements the more well-known liberatory trajectory of fellow Trinidadians C. L. R. James and George Padmore. See Boyce’s Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones and Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism: The Coming Struggle for Africa.

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13. See his interview with Burt Caesar. The poets he mentioned include Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, and Sonia Sánchez. In an obituary, Johnson refers to La Rose as the “elder statesman of Britain’s black communities” (“John La Rose (1927–2006”). An organic intellectual who came to England in 1961, La Rose had been an executive member of the Federated Workers Trade Union in Trinidad. He was also a founding member, along with Kamau Brathwaite and Andrew Salkey, of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (1966–1972) and chairman of the Institute of Race Relations, which published Race Today before the Collective took over. He also established the George Padmore Institute in 1991. He was a book publisher and documentary filmmaker as well, and had a leading role in the mobilization around the struggles for social justice among the West Indian community in England until his death in 2006. See Johnson, as well as Brian W. Alleyne’s Radicals against Race. 14. See Brathwaite’s History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, for example. 15. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech. Also Gilroy, 1991, 45–49. 16. In Johnson’s “Di Great Insohreckshan,” the Brixton 1981 April riots are described as an historical occasion (“an histarical occayshan”) in which the police (“Swamp Eighty Wan”) were routed (Selected Poems, 60–61.) 17. Tings an Times: Selected Poems, 37. Emphasis added. 18. Charles Mills, “Smadditizin.” 19. The Daily Mail’s deputy political editor, Tim Shipman, reported on Tuesday, August 9, that according to Tory MP Patrick Mercer, “We need to be clear about what these people are. They are mindless thugs who have endangered decent people and threatened our police officers,” 8. According to Amy Goodman in a “Democracy Now” interview with Rachel Cerfontyne and Darcus Howe on August 10, 2011, links with Duggan’s death and the unrest were rejected by British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who characterized the disorder as “needless, opportunistic theft and violence, nothing more, nothing less.” www.democracynow.org/2011/8/10/over_1_000_arrested_in_uk#. 20. Howe, in an interview with “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman on August 10, 2011, repeats the reference to his grandson’s innumerable encounters with “stop and search.” The boy was then fourteen years old. See www.democracynow. org/2011/8/10over_1_000_arrested_in_uk. 21. The euphemism here is belied by the ongoing television coverage during the riots that cited statistics indicating that more than one hundred eighty thousand such police stops had been made up to that point in 2011, which had yielded no dangerous weapons. Johnson’s poem “Sonny’s Lettah” (Tings an Times, 25) is based on his own intervention as a young Panther in a scene of “stop and search.” 22. Hall, Policing the Crisis, 189. John, “Epilogue,” 50. Pigler, “Damn it or fear it, the truth is that it’s an insurrection.” 23. Paul Gilroy traces these changes between There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (1991) and After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004). The BBC documentary series Windrush also covers half a century of the West Indian immigrant experience in which they are shown to have moved from “no niggers need apply” in the sphere of housing to occupying seats in Parliament and one in the House of Lords. 24. Reported in previously cited Amy Goodman interview on “Democracy Now” of Wednesday, August 10, 2011. Smiley Culture reportedly stabbed himself during a police raid while making a cup of tea. 25. Hall clarifies that “It is important to note that this (escalation of authoritarian statist violence) does not entail a suspension of the “normal” exercise of state power—it is not a move to what is sometimes called a fully exceptional form

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

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of the state. It is better understood as—to put it paradoxically—an ‘exceptional moment’ in the ‘normal’ form of the late capitalist state. What makes it ‘exceptional’ is the increasing reliance on coercive mechanisms and apparatuses available within the normal repertoire of state power, and the powerful orchestration, in support of this tilt of the balance towards the coercive pole of an authoritarian consensus” (217 stress added). As reported in the Daily Mail by Chief Reporter David Williams. The Trident Squad was set up in 1998 by the Metropolitan Police Specialist Crime Directorate with the express purpose of monitoring black gun- and drug-related offenses. See Hannah Arendt’s chapter on “Race and Bureaucracy” in this regard (1966). MI 5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5) has as its purview internal counter intelligence and security, and M16, or SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service), is charged with protection from foreign threats. I’m indebted to Shelome Gooden for helping clarify the use of the reduplicated adjective (“jokey-jokey”) to signify an intrinsic quality as per Afro-Caribbean nation language syntax. See Foucault’s “The Discourse on Language.” Alsopp describes the “kiss-teeth” or “suck-teeth” as “the action or sound of sucking your teeth.” He adds that “An ingressive salivary sound similarly made and with similar significance is found throughout W Afr [sic] cultures and in other sub-Saharan cultures as well” (1996, 538). Cut-eye similarly is “A woman’s gesture of contempt for sb [sic], shown by her looking at the person and closing her eyes while turning her face sharply away” (1996, 184). Sue Lawley interview. Podcast on BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs Archive, 2002–2005. Johnson is only the second living poet to be so honored by Penguin. See Robert McGill’s “Goon Poets of the Black Atlantic: Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Imagined Canon.” Quoted in Habekost, Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of AfricanCaribbean Dub Poetry, 3. See also “Desert Island” podcast. Unlike the “talk over” or “toasting” of his predecessors like Big Youth, U Roy, or I Roy, which consists mostly of extemporaneous monolog over hit records with the original vocal tracks removed, which in turn produces a “version” or several “versions” of the original, Johnson explains that his (dub) poems have musical and rhythmical accompaniment as an integral part of their composition. The Dennis Bovell Dub Band has accompanied him in his recordings and performances. See also Peter Hitchcock (1993) for a discussion of “versioning,” Dick Hebidge’s Cut ‘n’ Mix, as well as Christian Habekost’s Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub Poetry. There is a growing bibliography on this connection. See Lloyd Bradley, Stephen King, Sw. Anand Prahlad, and Norman C. Stolzoff, for example. Tings an Times: Selected Poems, 30. See Velma Pollard. See Janheinz Jahn (1978) on the concept of nommo and the power accorded the word in African cultures. Werner Zips discusses the controversial issue of repatriation among the Rastafari, highlighting the principles in international law to which they have appealed and the “repatriated” communities at Shashamane and Akuabu in Ethiopia and Ghana, respectively (2006). See, for example, Fanon on popular revolutionary violence in The Wretched of the Earth (35–106). In the album Independent Intavenshan.

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43. Jitanjáfora is the term used by negrista poets of the 1930s in the Hispanic Caribbean, who sought to use the acoustic properties of the Spanish language to make up words that would sound “African.” 44. Interview with the writer, August 2011. 45. Darcus Howe was one of the so-called Mangrove Nine who were arrested and tried for public affray. See Frank Rosso’s film short The Mangrove Nine. 46. Of “reasoning” Edmonds states: “The rastas seem to have evolved a definitive model of the universe in terms of which, members of the lower class, the dispossessed, and the oppressed, often illiterate, have been able to construct a more satisfying and meaningful lifestyle for themselves and to enrich their understanding as to what is happening to them and why” (2003, 353). 47. The twenty-one-day ceremony mounted by original Bobo Ashanti leader King Emmanuel Charles Edward in Kingston’s Back O’ Wall district in 1958, scarce months after Kwame Nkrumah’s declaration of independence in Ghana, in which the Union Jack was lowered and the red, green, and gold banner raised in Jamaica’s capital, remains the iconic Nyabinghi “occasion” in Rasta memory and lore. See Zips 2006, 135–137, and Bogues, 2003, 182–183. 48. See Bogues regarding the concept of “Dread history” (2003, 179–185). Hitchcock (1993) addresses some aspects of “dread” in relation to Johnson’s work. 49. Prahlad 2001, 21. 50. See Bob Marley’s “War” in Rastaman Vibration, 1976, with lyrics based on an address by Emperor Haile Selassie I to the UN General Assembly, 1963. 51. See Habekost, for example. 52. Lord Kitchener, “The Road,” 1963. Also Ashley Dawson’s “Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival in Britain.” 53. It is important to note that the precept of “racially motivated” crimes belatedly came to British jurisprudence in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

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Exile’s Half-Life, Exile’s Dead End The Conundrum of Relocation in Equatoguinean Literature

To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. Sékou Touré

In his address at the second conference of the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (CAM) on September 2, 1968,1 a younger Stuart Hall spoke, among other things, of the responsibility of CAM’s members, as writers and intellectuals, toward the new generation of black British of Caribbean ancestry. These youth, he said, for whom “the return to their historical past has for a second time . . . been cut off,” and “whose way home is genuinely blocked,” might benefit from the guidance and orientation of their elders in CAM to the degree that the latter could help them understand the peculiarities of the current historical and cultural context in which they found themselves, and show them how to best navigate their reality (qtd. in Walmsley 1992, 163). The particular historical moment required, he stressed, a narrative that was different in its orientation from the thematic of exile that had been dominant in the works of the preceding decade and a half of West Indian writing in Britain. Hall’s exhortation to the gathering, in making allusion to the fact that expatriate West Indians in England were completing the “third leg” of the historical triangular trade between Europe, the African continent, and the Americas, and in stressing to the attendees at a conference on art and writing that the majority of the immigrants over the preceding two decades had come to work and not study, is important. It first of all connects the question of the original dislocation of Afro-diasporan populations as victims of the Atlantic trade in slaves to that of the subsequent relocation of their descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries once the institution came to an end, even as both the mythical return to Africa for early and later diasporans remained an impossibility, and the Caribbean of the parents of these youth also remained an improbable place of refuge for them.2 Second, his statement points to the diverse nature of the migrant demographic, while stressing the historical responsibility of its writers and intellectuals to not only the second-generation youth, but to their nonwriting cohort as well,

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comprised of those settlers who had come to pursue more ordinary labor opportunities. Hall’s intervention, finally, helps us better appreciate the contemporary Afro-disaporan condition as a transatlantic postcolonial phenomenon, and to contextualize the present chapter, in which black African subjects, this time from Spain’s former colony of Equatorial Guinea, participate in the larger south to north movement of an international community of dispossessed travelers from the formerly colonized regions toward the northern metropoles in search of a better life, and in which the pilgrimage over land and sea emerges as a particularly dramatic topic. Unlike the situation for the numerous West Indians in 1960s and 1970s London, who were prodded into defiantly taking a position “to stay” in England, as we observed with Lynton Kwesi Johnson, Equatoguinean writers in Spain occupy a much more nuanced reality. It is one that is conditioned by two brutal dictatorships at home, which over the past four and a half decades have even proven capable of extending their reach into the heart of the exile communities abroad in order to eliminate their perceived enemies. This situation, on the one hand, militates powerfully against these writers returning to their native land, especially because the majority of them share a politics of protest. On the other hand, it confronts them with an environment in a purportedly multicultural Spain that is as likely to be as fatal as it is friendly, one in which an assertive politics of remaining and claiming Spanish “citizenship” in response to nativist rejection, as per the West Indian example in England, is not likely to emerge as a political objective. The result is that the lost homeland and the problem that arises of “not belonging” in either space, home or abroad, remains a central thematic node for them. A reading of select work from three of Equatorial Guinea’s most published writers, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (1966–), Francisco Zamora Loboch (1948–), and Donato Ndongo Bidyogo (1950–), helps illustrate the conundrum of exile in this area of afro-Atlantic writing. My emphasis will center on the question of the geographically dislocated postcolonial subjectivity of the latter two authors as they ponder the question of their racialized selfhood and negotiate the challenges of integration, while reflecting on the project of the(ir) nation, Equatorial Guinea, as it transitioned from its condition of formal colonization into independence. To this end, I propose an analysis of Zamora’s highly anthologized poem “El prisonero de la Gran Vía,” and his 1994 essay Como ser negro y no morir en Aravaca, as well as Ndongo’s novel Los poderes de la tempestad (1997). Ávila Laurel’s recent hunger strike and flight to Spain will serve the more limited function of highlighting the continuity of the politics of repression in Equatorial Guinea, and the continued subjection of small, vulnerable nation-states in the ostensibly “postcolonial” era. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the 927-page Nueva antología de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (2012) is its awareness and its insertion, albeit in Spanish translation, of items from the country’s multiethnic and multilingual oral tradition. It includes legends and myth of Fang, Bubi,

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Ndowé, Bujeba, Anobonese, and Krio origin, as well as the work by local writers that was produced under the aegis of the Catholic missions toward the middle of the twentieth century, and the larger body of creative writing that came after independence was achieved in 1968.3 The anthology builds on two earlier ones, the Literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (Antología) (2000), and the first such collection, edited in 1984, by Donato NdongoBidyogo, the Antologia de la literatura guineana. If a scant three anthologies make this by definition a “new” literature, the supposition of newness is underscored by the fact that there have only been two full-length studies of Equatoguinean literature in English thus far. The growing number of doctoral dissertations and scholarly articles in the United States, in Spain, and in Canada, however, speaks highly as to the intrinsic interest and relevance of the material.4 Indeed, Equatorial Guinea’s traditionally marginal status as a producer of literature in terms of both African literature writ large and of Hispanic literature as a whole would be more than sufficient justification for its exploration and analysis. What is of particular importance from the standpoint of this study, though, is its thematic orientation and content, especially insofar as these writers, by invoking the nation from abroad, confirm the fluidity of what “nation” means, particularly in its postcolonial variable, and the race-ethnicity diptych, particularly as it relates to African subjects under the determinative engine of colonialism and race making in modernity, and what all this means in terms of a wider afro-Atlantic (diasporan) episteme. Walter Rodney’s famous reference to underdevelopment as a verb (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), which targets coloniality as an historically active and ongoing process, one of whose primary objectives lay in the superexploitation of the peoples and natural resources of Africa first by European colonizers, and subsequently by the local political elites in collusion with the descendants of the former, is particularly applicable to Equatorial Guinea as a nonindustrial and supposedly independent, “postcolonial” state, whose population is plagued by lack and by political oppression.5 His further critique of ethnocratic rule on the occasion of the 6th Pan-African Congress, which we saw in Chapter 2, was pertinent to nguemista dictatorial rule, which has lasted from 1968 to the present, although at the time information on conditions within the country were not getting out. If indeed the regimen of Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who assumed power in 1979 on deposing his uncle Macías Nguema, has been less macabre than that of the latter, both the state apparatus of bloody control and of self-censorship among the populace are very much alive, once we follow the premise that complaints on the materiality of day-to-day existence are liable to be misconstrued as having a political objective and label the speaker an opositor or dissident.6 Subsequently, for writer Juan Tomás Ávila in February 2011 to leave the practice of letters and his editorial function in the Hispano-Guinean Cultural Center in the capital Malabo, and to publicly launch a hunger strike to protest living conditions in the country, could only be seen as an open declaration

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of war by the current regime. The Centro Cultural Hispano-Guineano was created back in 1981 under the aegis of Cooperación Española, the Spanish agency for international cultural outreach, with the objective of promoting culture in post-Macías Equatorial Guinea. Among its achievements was the successful creation of space for older writers, such as Anacleto Oló Mibuy, Juan Balboa Boneke, Cirako Bokesa, Maria Nsue Angüe, and Justo Bolekia Boleká, as well as younger ones, such as Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Joaquín Mbomio, and Jerónimo Rope. In the fifteen years from 1987 to 2002, for example, in seven of which Donato Ndongo served in a directorial capacity, the center produced more than a hundred titles in the various genres. Although the self-immolation implied by the hunger strike, as in Ávila Laurel’s case under discussion, might make its association with war seem counterintuitive, it bears noting, with Dingley and Mollica, that it is precisely in its conversion of the body to a weapon, as assassins, soldiers, or suicide bombers do, where the similarity in terms of political praxis is to be found.7 The difference lies in the fact that in their staging of resistance through the extreme self-denial of hunger, hunger strikers as a category of political antagonists do not set out to inflict harm in a direct way on their oppressors as do armed antagonists. They operate through their ostensible helplessness, by interpellating their oppressors and making them assume responsibility, as it were, for their eventual demise.8 The political function of this doing by “not-doing” is primarily at the level of the symbolic and its objective is to provoke action and subsequent negotiation with the regime in question, while simultaneously generating sympathy and solidarity among the striker’s implied constituency (Gronau 2012). Effectively this has been the “military” purpose of the practice of the hunger strike, as witnessed famously in the Irish Republican Army’s struggles of the 1980s and in any number of contemporary crisis situations worldwide. Juan Tomás Ávila, by his own admission, was not part of any organized political resistance or political movement in Equatorial Guinea.9 It therefore prompts the question as to why he would launch such an improbable offensive against an administration that has for decades proven to be implacably callous and that has been in part responsible for the immeasurable cheapening of life across the national landscape. What resonance, in other words, might the loss of another life have for a national community that suffered the reduction of close to a third of its population through mass migration and murder in the first decade of independence, and in which the current regime has merely mollified the modus operandi of its predecessor?10 For the most prolific of the younger generation of Equatoguinean writers, who has often been vocal in his critique of the regime even as he remained in Equatorial Guinea in doing so, the answer seems to lie in his own growing sense of desperation at the unending national crisis. More important, notwithstanding the writer’s assertion that his strike was not a premeditated act but an impulsive, overnight decision,11 it is impossible to not consider his protest in the context of Tunisian vegetable vendor Mohammed Bouazizi’s now historic act of

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self-immolation, which set in motion the Arab Spring of 2011. We recall that by the middle of February two North African governments, Tunisia and Egypt, had been overthrown as a result of a series of popular demonstrations, marches, and rallies, which had also left neighbors Jordan, Algeria, and Oman severely shaken, and which in turn catalyzed civil resistance across the Middle East and in other countries in North Africa. If it can be argued that for a protest writer to court martyrdom by way of the hunger strike amounts to a “capitulation” toward the side of silence, considering the ideological content and the political orientation of his extant written work,12 the act also has implications for the efficacy of so-called committed literature in the face of the challenge of social transformation, particularly in a situation, such as the Equatoguinean, where self-repression has been part of the political calculus of the dictatorship and has become a feature of the political culture of the nation. In the case of Ávila Laurel, it is to be noted that the writer as hunger striker did not attempt to initiate a dialog with his own government, but instead with Spain, the old metropole. His open letter to José Bono asked for Spain’s intervention and for assistance in the peaceable removal of the Obiang ruling clique. Considering the country’s independent status of four and a half decades, this might seem to be a politically naïve move on its surface, however, one can hardly question the larger political and humanitarian content of the communiqué he published several days later. On the seventh day of the hunger strike, announcing a news conference in Barcelona for the following day, he would declare: “On the question of the freedom of oppressed people, of people in chains, can we ask that they free themselves? Observe then this paradox; to achieve freedom one must oneself have a minimum of freedom, or use the freedom of others. This is what makes its achievement a universal challenge.” Ávila Laurel’s hunger strike and subsequent hasty exit from Equatorial Guinea to Spain, as the threat of physical elimination by government agents became clearer, produced a virtual whirlwind in the arena of social media abroad, particularly in Spain, with the support group “Support for Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel” (“Apoyo a Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel”) opening on Facebook immediately and gaining thousands of members. It eventually generated an international dialog on matters not only of importance to the question of human rights and democracy in Equatorial Guinea, but also in other African countries and the Middle East. The writer’s weekly blog has also been an important feature of this dialog since. Two years earlier, as the 2009 elections in Equatorial Guinea approached, Juan Tomás Ávila had published an article under the title, “Dos versiones sobre la práctica del poder,” in which he highlighted the main problems affecting the republic, anticipating all the while that in the upcoming contest Obiang Nguema and his Mongomo-based clan would retain their stranglehold on political power in the country. In the year 2009 also, oil production in Equatorial Guinea, sub-Saharan Africa’s third highest exporter of hydrocarbons, was up to half a million barrels a day, a resource mined by a variety

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of multinationals from Spain, France, the United States, and Italy,13 but from whose revenue there remains little evidence in terms of the well-being and the standard of living for ordinary Equatoguineans, who, it should be added, are not even allowed to work for the oil companies unless they belong to the president’s political party or satisfy some equally exclusionary conditions. The article’s criticism of the country’s lack of proper public schools and youth development programs, the absence of a daily newspaper, bookstores, or even a reliable supply of electricity and potable water, reaffirm the permanence of the twin-headed exploitive dynamic of underdevelopment as verb. In July 2004, for example, a US Senate investigation into allegations of money laundering by the Equatoguinean governing cabal through the Washington-based Riggs Bank found that “at least US $35 million of oil revenues” generated since the start of oil exportation in the mid-1990s had been misappropriated, and that it was “virtually impossible to tell the difference between state funds and the personal fortune of Obiang and his family.”14 The de facto monopoly and venality of the regime regarding the national treasury attracted more than usual attention when, within weeks of Ávila Laurel’s flight to Spain in 2011, a collapse was caused at the same bank by the one-time deposit of some $700 million in the name of Obiang. Indeed, in response to a New York Times article of July 2009 critiquing the massive corruption and nepotism surrounding the billions of dollars in oil revenue generated, the Equatoguinean embassy in Washington, DC issued a letter that, with remarkable aplomb, praised the “state-of-the-art hospitals and schools” in Equatorial Guinea and continued: “With technical assistance from the United States, European Union and the World Bank, Equatorial Guinea, has invested billions of dollars in recent years to improve our national infrastructure; to increase the quality and accessibility of our social services, education and health care systems for our people, and to defend the human rights of every Equatorial Guinea citizen.”15 Likewise, in the wake of the Riggs bank collapse in March 2011, former US consul general Anton Smith reportedly dismissed reports of human rights abuses, arbitrary arrest, torture, and forced child labor in Equatorial Guinea, saying that they were “exaggerations” and describing President Teodoro Obiang as “one of the good guys” in comparison with other presumably unsavory characters in the Equatoguinean landscape.16 Ávila Laurel’s testimonial recording his chapter in the Equatoguinean narrative of exile and accommodation to the new environment abroad is currently in progress.

FRANCISCO ZAMORA LOBOCH: ASSIMILATION, MULTICULTURALISM, AND THE DECOLONIAL As undertaken by the most published of the younger generation of Equatoguinean writers, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s flight to Spain undoubtedly marked a symbolic moment in the country’s larger narrative of exile,

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especially considering the opening in 1981 of the Hispano-Guinean Cultural Center as a source for new literary initiatives, and its potential role for civil society as it negotiated with the regime that succeeded the notorious “years of silence” imposed by the first Nguema dictatorship. As an event in literary historiography, his escape offers an interesting counterpoint to the moment when this narrative of exile began, that is, with Nguema’s declaration in 1971 that all of the Equatoguineans pursuing higher studies in Spain who had refused the regime’s demand that they come home “on vacation” would lose not only their scholarships, but their citizenships as well.17 Considering the fate of the ones who did return, as the government’s lethal campaign against intellectuals and professionals and perceived dissidents began to emerge, to which we return, it is no surprise that the students did not comply. As Francisco Zamora ruefully recalled, their being declared personae non grata by their own country and thus effectively stateless was a mortal blow to the morale of these students. It converted them overnight from possible “future leaders” in a new Equatorial Guinea, imbued with the enthusiasm of independence and the example of pan-African icons of pride and resistance, to indigents at the mercy of the Red Cross and similar institutions of charity in Spain. He insists, further, that it was due in great measure to the Darwinian struggle to survive that ensued, after the relative comforts of generously funded studies, that writing as a response to penury and as a means to condemn the tyranny of dictatorship emerged as a life choice. With the Spanish authorities in clear collaboration with the regime in banning news from Equatorial Guinea,18 Zamora’s own option would be for journalism, to be later complemented with a wide range of public activities including music and sports education. “Perhaps I sensed,” he mused, “in spite of being young, naïve, and without a country, that with pen in hand, I would be able to maintain a permanent intellectual commitment against the purported invincibility of tyrants.”19 Zamora’s “El prisionero de la Gran Vía” appears in the 1984 Antología de la literatura guineana. Judging from the implied present of the poem, it reflects a subsequent and more settled period in the life of its creator as migrant, if we assume, that is, a level of convergence between the poetic voice and the writer himself. Notwithstanding its effectiveness as an aesthetic account of the half-life of exile or its repeated publication in other anthologies and in Internet blurbs on Zamora, the poem has received little more than passing attention by critics. In it the speaker addresses his mother by letter with the complaint that a generic and authoritarian “they” of the dominant metropolitan culture are denying him the opportunity to engage in a performative display of his own (native African) culture on public holidays or “días de fiesta.” Instead, he reports, his social and cultural persona is only allowed expression when he is a raucously shouting soccer fan at the sports stadium, like thousands of other madrileños, or during the drink and conversation typical of the gendered male bonding at local beer pubs. The projected performance that he would like to engage in, which involves

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a carnival-like processing through the streets with ritual war chants and ceremonial loincloth, would be a demonstration of cultural affiliation and adhesion to Africa, and therefore deemed inimical to the features of the other, metropolitan aspects of his selfhood, and needed to be suppressed. The resultant crisis that the speaker addresses in the poem is an effect of the doubleness of his colonized subjectivity and of the tension and ambivalence it produces. In this thematic revisiting of the colonial binary of civilization and savagery in the poem through the invocation of a culturally hybrid character, Zamora may also be said to be subjecting his “tribal” alter ego to the gaze of the colonizer and gently mocking the image created therein, both because he knows that it is part of a larger historical construct or stereotype about Africa at the service of colonial propaganda and domination, and because he is aware that as regards Bioko, his home island, any unidimensional rendering that sought to reduce it to its traditional Bubi ethnic culture would overlook not only the multiple African groups that coexisted historically on the island that he had left behind, but also the presence of Portuguese, Dutch, British, and Spanish elements that made Bioko a complex contact zone since the Portuguese explorers first stumbled upon it in 1472. His speaker, notwithstanding, is reprising the historical role of the colonial asimilado or emancipado, the product of the so-called civilizing mission in Equatorial Guinea that was aimed at inculcating the values of the (Hispanic) West, principally through religion and the Spanish language. That such an asimilado should find himself at this iconic place in the metropolitan center marks the event, in one sense, as a triumphant conclusion of a journey that would have begun in an earlier generation, considering the implied involvement of the mother in his preparation, and of his/their acceptance of and immersion into the colonial value system in the interest of upward mobility. However, his reference to himself as a prisoner of the Gran Vía explodes the myth of assimilation or of Occidentalist universalism of which the civilizing mission boasted. The poem makes it clear that the values of Christendom, following the evangelical discourse of the age of exploration, have not produced the kind of community that embraces cultural and racial otherness through the process of expansion. We see this clearly in his admission that the semiotics of his tribal tattoos, inscribed on his face and body, may not be made available to the children of the city as a point of departure for their introduction to difference. Indeed, a recollection of Fanon’s famous “Look a Negro!” experience would stress the degree to which the black body is more likely to provoke fear and anxiety, rather than childlike curiosity in such situations.20 In other words, although the (post)colonial asimilado speaks the same language as the children, and may have established appropriately bounded social relations with their parents, as an unmediated foreign entity he remains outside of the possible orbit of interest and affection for them. The Gran Vía, then, while tentatively representing a moment of triumphant arrival—for Kamau Brathwaite’s persona

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in England as we saw in Chapter 2, the iconic Cambridge meant a “beginning” or a “big-inning”—in Zamora’s poem, by identifying the speaker as a “prisoner” (prisionero), it recalls those occasions of imperial success when trophies of foreign wars were paraded through the streets of the metropolitan capital or otherwise held up for public viewing in cages as exotica.21 It is important to underscore the importance of Zamora’s persona here as assimilated postcolonial subject on account of its larger significance to the objectives of this book. His hybridity, vividly evinced in the cultural contrast between the Roman alphabet and the loincloth on which his initials are embroidered, is further underscored when the latter are set against the tattoos that mark his body and face because the letters and the scars speak of distinct systems of signification. More important, they mark the imputed distance between savagery and civilization and the evolutionary advancement purportedly achieved by the subject as a product of the colonial project. Spain’s latter-day occupation of Equatorial Guinea in 1904 as a colonia de explotación or exploitation colony came with centuries of history and antecedents in the domination and management of new subjects and in the extraction of their resources. The Patronato de Indígenas (Native Trusteeship), derived institutionally and ideologically from the Leyes de Indias and the experience in the Americas, was put in place to civilize, Christianize, and teach morality to the natives, and to defend them and foster their adhesion to Spain (Ndongo 1998). The instrument was based on the racist premise of the natives as minors and of their lands, correspondingly, as unapologetically exploitable. The Patronato’s division of the population into categories of emancipado pleno (fully emancipated), emancipado parcial (partially emancipated), and no emancipado (unemancipated) is unambiguous in this regard. It simultaneously provided a quasi-legal platform for instituting a sociopolitical hierarchy that identified and trained a small number of Africans as administrative and propertied middlemen, while restricting the great majority to a subservient condition that left them susceptible to progressive loss of their lands, to forced labor, and to the disintegration of their material culture.22 The term emancipado itself is illustrative. Its application derives in part from the introduction in 1862 of formerly enslaved Afro-Cubans (emancipados) into Equatorial Guinea, under a seven-year indentureship as soldiers, artisans, and laborers in an unsuccessful attempt by Spain at finally settling the island. It is in the underlying understanding that both the indigenous Africans and the Afro-descendant Cuban incomers were negros, a designation that identified the two groups as simultaneously belonging to a tabula rasa category for inferiority and enslavability, or by way of the Darwinian paradigm of evolucionados and no-evolucionados, also applied to the segregation of the natives of Spanish Guinea, that we see the workings of race as a “floating signifier,” to use Stuart Hall’s term, and the power premise of colonialism.23 That Spain’s Patronato still embraced ancien régime premises in this, its last colony, more than a hundred years after the Enlightenment,

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after abolition, and after the independence of the majority of its American possessions in the nineteenth century, is a striking tribute to imperial nostalgia. The evangelization and exploitation, or the cross and sword dichotomy that accompanied the invasion of the Americas five and a half centuries earlier reappeared here not only in the material takeover of the means of production for Spanish Guinea, it also resurfaced in the writings and policy declarations of the colonial officials. Accordingly, Spain’s moral rectitude and its divine mandate withstand comparison with any other current or former colonial power. Writing in 1947, former judge of the District of Bata Yglesias de la Riva declared that: “In no country on earth has the colonized found the decided support and protection that has been offered to him by our legislation . . . whose record is infinite.”24 Shortly after, he underscored the historical depth of this democratic practice by stating serenely that: “The Bull published by Pope Paul III on the 2nd of June 1537 announced to Europe that those men of cinnamon color of the Indies were rational beings, exactly equal to an old Castilian or to the first Lord of the British Admiralty in the eyes of the Law.”25 While the work of civilization was not as successful as it could be, it was only because, his dissertation suggests, notwithstanding monogenesis and the Catholic doctrine of imago dei, “European civilization is not made for blacks.”26 The fetishism of the Africans, their lack of religion and philosophy, and the incapacity of their language to express abstract concepts had been established for at least two hundred years since Hume, Kant, and Hegel, and if Yglesias does not cite these august philosophers in his discussion, it can only be supposed that it was because their opinions were deemed common knowledge. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the heyday of eugenics, Spain’s educational policy regarding its colony still embraced the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of the craniometrists and of psychometrics. Their current instruments provided conclusive proof that the natives should not be considered more than just “un fruto más de la selva,” or one more offspring of the jungle, reifying thereby their unevolved condition, that of being stuck in the state of nature (43).27 In the final analysis, what was important from the colonial point of view was that the Patronato could without any fear of cognitive dissonance declare, regarding the reduction of the latter to unpaid or minimally paid labor, that: Full emancipation, acquired through a Letter of Emancipation by way of the application of Article 6 of the Decree on Indigenous Justice of November 10, 1938 (which holds as emancipated: a) persons who hold professional or academic titles granted by an Official Spanish Center; b) persons employed for a period of two years in an agricultural or industrial establishment and earning a salary above 5,000 pesetas per annum; and c) persons at the service of the State or Neighborhood Council, and of a category equal to or higher than an auxiliary advanced or assimilated native, or by way of the application of the Metropolitan legislation

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to persons who have acquired this right, may only be accorded those individuals twenty one years old or of majority or age as regulated in the Metropole.28 By way of the application of this rationale of studied and structured exclusion, and in the absence of the excuses that justified slavery in earlier eras, what was produced in Spanish Guinea was a supremely effective system of sociopolitical and economic filtering as reflected in the fact that with formal citizenship finally decreed by Madrid for all natives in 1959, there were only one hundred emancipados in a population of one hundred fifty thousand. Zamora’s postcolonial tension and ambivalence, though, is not registered in tragic mode. It assumes, rather, an ironic distancing and playfulness that can be said to be characteristic of the poet’s style, even as it acknowledges the seductive power of the dominant culture that has brought the poetic speaker to this place of alienation and “enslavement.”29 Here it is conveyed in part through the use of the subjunctive that he employs to address the mother figure, and its effect is to attenuate the sadness and the underlying existential gravity of the moment. The loincloth and the war chant, symbols of cultural identity and identitarian grounding and putative platform for historico-subjective agency, have been traded in for a diminished onlooker status in the metropolitan culture, in which the applause (war cries) of the spectators offer but passing catharsis, devoid of political possibility, particularly given the “bread and circuses” undercurrent to late capitalist governance in the metropolis. The modern sports industry as theater for the performance of masculinity and group control, the poem implies, has displaced the individual and his or her role within the larger social collective and sealed their vulnerability in the culture of corporate mass entertainment, enhancing thereby the speaker’s sense of displacement. Anthropologist Marc Augé suggests in a study of what he terms “supermodernity” that anthropological places are “organically social” and “relational, historical and connected with identity” (2008, 64). Accordingly, a location such as the Gran Vía in Madrid assumes resonance in terms of its symbolic connection to another “Grand Way,” Rome’s famous “queen of the long roads,” its Via Appia, an emblem of the might of the republic. Mass entertainment for political distraction apart, the Gran Vía in the current context would also invoke the legacy of the Roman Empire on account of its being a primary communication artery, on account of its being a center of commerce in contemporary Spain, and on account of its imposing early twentieth-century architecture. Following Augé, this site, located in a European metropolis with a high population of both locals and immigrants, and its pivotal subway terminal (the Gran Vía station), is a place of anonymity as well. It shares the characteristic disconnectedness that is experienced by the modern individual when involved, for example, in such typical everyday transactions as wordlessly making supermarket purchases, traversing

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tollbooths, or boarding airplanes; all activities that are paradoxically solitary, but socially contractual (82) on account of the conventions that govern credit cards, passports, and other forms of identification. It would seem that it is the dichotomy of identity and anonymity, or belonging and not belonging, relevant and applicable to local urbanites, but more so to culturally hybrid migrants from a far off Africa, and with a precarious perch on life in the European city, that underlies much of Zamora’s projection in “Prisionero de la Gran Vía,” and the poem’s central image of an individual who feels imprisoned although he is in a wide open space. To the degree that his declared racial and cultural otherness sets him apart from mainstream Hispanic culture, the status as (postcolonial) marginal and outsider would also allow for a particularity of perspective, the “second sight” to which we have seen W. E. B. Du Bois refer. Expressed in poetry here, this perspective would be expressed again through the medium of the essay in the writer’s response to the murder of immigrant Lucrecia Pérez Matos, of the Dominican Republic, in November 1992. Perhaps the most important thing about Como ser negro y no morir en Aravaca: manual de recetas contra el racismo (How to be Black and not be Killed in Aravaca: Guidebook against Racism) is that the book has less to do directly with the murder itself (the victim is mentioned only once, in the dedication on page 7), and more to do with what it symbolizes. It does this by presenting Aravaca’s intolerance and racial hostility and the neoNazi style murder it precipitated, as microcosmic of a larger national and cultural reality, and not the aberration that official circles and many media outlets projected it to be. From this standpoint, racist practice spans the gamut from everyday aggressions or microagressions in the public sphere to larger institutionalized acts expressed either materially or symbolically, and whether they are found at the local, translocal, or national-statist level. A racist murder, perpetrated in this case by Luis Merino Pérez, a member of law enforcement (the Guardia Civil), in the company of skinhead sympathizers and in an atmosphere of far-right agitation and propagandizing, could not take place in a cultural vacuum, that is, without precedent nor an enabling cultural context. This would place the writer/observer, himself a potential victim as black and as African, under the obligation to speak out, particularly considering the mollifying effect of officialist discourse and the other, overlooked victims of what for immigrants of color seems an ongoing crusade of hostility.30 The deceased Lucrecia Pérez had been a squatter, along with fifty other unemployed and semi-employed Dominican immigrants, at the building that had formerly housed the Four Roses discotheque in the well-to-do Madrid suburb. Here they shared whatever material means they came by, along with the dream of normalizing their immigration status and recuperating the sizeable debt incurred in booking their passage to Spain. Over time their Thursday and Sunday evening social gatherings in the local square proved an irritant to the locals, who would soon make them the target of

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their concerns over fights, drugs, and prostitution in the neighborhood, and issue ever-increasing complaints to the municipal police. According to one of the Four Roses squatters, one particular sergeant among the latter would regale them with such choice epithets as “cockroach” and “nigger” (“cucarachas” y “negros,” Calvo Buezas 1993, 107) during their twice or thrice weekly raids, during which they would be ordered to put their hands up while the place was searched. Equally explicit of racial animus as the sergeant’s alleged racial insults were the graffiti and posters around town, which bore such demands as “Españoles primero. Stop a la imigración” (“Spaniards first. Stop immigration”), or the more articulate flier with the “Grito de Covadonga,” a poem that called in shrill, military language for a defense of Spanish identity against the invasores, or invaders, who would soon reduce native (white) Spaniards to an oppressed minority and turn the country into any of the undesirable, underdeveloped nations of color that the immigrants came from: “If we don’t stop the invasion, Spain will become like Morocco, or Nigeria, or like a banana republic, within ten years.”31 In the context of a combined protagonism of neighborhood citizens, law enforcement agents, and far-right agitation in this event, and statements from both the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs self-righteously disavowing the presence of racism in Spain and separating it from occasional “brotes” (spurts) of xenophobia (29), the many demonstrations in support of the Latin American victim that were held across Spain’s major cities can only point to a profound ambivalence over the presence of foreigners of color. Zamora’s intervention would go beyond the prevarication of politicians, and beyond the selective sympathizing of a Spanish populace still smarting from decades of dictatorship under Franco and the by no means distant threat of local and transnational fascist agitation, and confront racism as a historical legacy both of nationalist consolidation and colonialist expansion. How to be Black and not be Killed in Aravaca, in other words, rhetorically sets up an equivalence in its very title, between racialized (black) being, and death in this suburb of Spain’s capital, and the relation of cause and effect it proposes is fairly clear. The subtitle, announcing a guidebook or “manual of recipes or prescriptions” against racism, raises the question of how to resolve what has been seen as the most enduring and comprehensive system of classification, oppression, and exploitation of the modern world (Mills 1997a, Winant 2001, Quijano 2007). If a comprehensive answer to this question is beyond Zamora’s means, and if he does not seek, with Como ser negro, to promote or provoke overt activism in his response to racism and diasporan relocation, as we saw with Kwesi Johnson in the British case, there can be no doubt as to his intention purely in terms of making a contestatory discursive statement. Como ser negro has not attracted much critical attention, quite likely because, as Michael Ugarte suggests, it is “difficult to categorize” (2010, 103). It is a work that does not follow academic orthodoxy with the requisite expository layout, separate footnoting and bibliography, and so on. It uses

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instead, in the chapter titles and heads of subsections, evocative themes and phrases often taken from popular culture to address its topic, along with a conversational style and a driving irony throughout the discussion. Then, of course, there is the highly creative “Racist Dictionary” with which the essay concludes. For Ugarte, although the work is “erudite at times,” its voice “is that of a stand-up comic,” and it engages consistently in “black humor,” all of which ostensibly leave the reader unsure as to the writer’s level of seriousness (2010, 102–104). My own inclination would be to take a cue from the writer himself in assessing the question of authorial intentions and “seriousness.” Zamora’s tone and positioning in his essay suggests that is impossible to be sanguine and equanimous when writing about half a millennium of racialized exploitation and genocide; of civilizations crushed as a result of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery; of a Eurocentric discursive hubris that universalizes the provincial and claims to speak for the rest of the human species; of a nationhood (Equatorial Guinea’s) stolen through a conspiracy of expropriation by local and international agents; and of the illogic of an untimely demise for a blameless and unsuspecting woman thousands of miles from her home, for whom race’s randomness has taken sudden paradoxical objectivity. It is a wide-ranging discussion that touches on theology, philosophy, literature, folklore, history, sexual violence, forced labor, sports, and territorial dispossession and migration, but that always has an eye to stressing the continuity of the past in the present, in the constitution of the world with which the writer’s postcolonial sensibility is wrestling. That he has chosen to be irreverent and ironic in addressing this reality is most certainly a tribute to its epistemic power and to the sense of diminishment produced in the individual by his attempt to confront it. Humor and derisive wordplay as a weapon of the weak is an important feature of African and Afro-diasporan vernacular culture, as it also is of Spanish culture. Stand-up comedy, if we are to assume that Ugarte is referring to the African-American practice, emerged out of a long tradition of laughing amongst the black community “so as not to cry,” on the one hand, and of making the narration of ugly social realities by comic entertainers on the professional stage palatable for audiences that might otherwise feel antagonized. Considering the practical labor involved in researching, accumulating, and delivering his material here, however, there can be little gainsaying Zamora’s seriousness or his writerly objective. There are at least two direct indications as to the route and the objective being taken in the articulation of Como ser negro. The first one is addressed in the blurb on the inside of the book’s cover. It records the writer’s response to the question, apparently often put to him, as to why he wrote the book, to which his reply is: “To prevent some smart white man, disguised as a Bantu, from writing it” (“Para que no lo escriba un blanco listo, disfrazado de bantú”) (n.p.). Whether the image of a white male in a black mask (an inversion of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks) is meant to be an ironic reference to the Martinican’s work in pointing out the degree of self-denial

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involved in the colonized subject’s capitulation to the values of whiteness, or an allusion to the notorious tradition of blackface in Western theater,32 what seems important in the response, humor aside, is the fact of the institutionalized signifying power of the hypothetical white writer/opinator visà-vis a black counterpart, and the capacity for discursive diminishment or dismissal of the issue at hand by the former, to the detriment of the latter. Linda Martin Alcoff in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, has argued cogently on the question of the relative power accorded to writers and critics along the axis of race, gender, and social class. It is a dynamic of which Zamora, as a black African journalist exercising his profession in Spain, was certainly aware, judging from the above response. Charles Mills, likewise, has emphasized the degree to which racist domination functions according to a racialized agreement to not only distort, but to misinterpret the world. According to Mills in this regard, it results in some individuals “see(ing) the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular” (Mills 1997a, 18; Branche 2006, 249). Considering Zamora’s counterdiscursive intentions as a postcolonial subject in the heart of the former colonial center, his challenge to the coloniality of knowledge implied in impugning the received understandings regarding Hispanic culture at home and in the overseas empire is not to be overlooked. In fact he makes that portion of his intended public explicit by declaring in the book’s prologue that it is a “Prologue for a Gachupin or Chapteon who thought that his Country was not Racist” (“Prólogo para un gachupín o chapetón, que pensaba que su país no era racista,” n.p.). As in the earlier example, the humor behind the double entendre might easily distract from the intention embedded in the reference to the Spanish national as a chapetón o gachupín. On the one hand, the terms identify chapetones and gachupines with Spain as both a geographically bounded European state and an erstwhile transoceanic empire. On the other, chapetón is a derisive term that designated a newly arrived colonial soldier to the New World as being “wet behind the ears,” on account of his perceived lack of ability to deal with the “Indians.” For Zamora here, as chapetón, the (contemporary) gendered national subject under the sway of nationalist Hispanocentric ideology, is also gullible for being so. Based on these premises Zamora reviews the history of a formerly multicultural and multiracial Spain before and after 1492, along with the violence involved in the nation’s move toward white, Christian homogeneity, and its highly trumpeted colonial conquests that began at that date, revealing thereby the ignorance and amnesia implicit in the commonplace assertion or assumption that Spain is “not racist.” Although it is beyond the present objectives to reprise the book’s account in detail, a summary of its primary themes will suffice. It is not surprising, given the event that triggered his reflections and the eventual essay, that Como ser negro should begin by referring to Abu Abdallah Muhammad XII, sultan of Granada,

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the last Moorish kingdom to fall in Hispania after a Moorish conquest and occupation that dated back to 711 C.E., or that he should sardonically refer, in mentioning Boabdil, as the Spanish called the sultan, to the current Ley de Extranjería, the legislation that protects the “Rights and Freedoms of Foreigners in Spain and their Social Integration.” Here his objective is to highlight the historical continuity in the violent distancing of otherness that might be obscured by more recent notions of integration and assimilation in Spain. (One might add, in passing, that numbering some seven hundred thousand, Moroccans comprise the largest single nationality among Spain’s immigrant community, and sub-Saharan Africans less than 5 percent of the almost 5 million would-be settlers in Spain.)33 Zamora’s insinuation that the homogenizing of the Spanish national body was a forerunner to contemporary experiences of “ethnic cleansing” (12) can hardly be taken lightly or deemed an exaggeration, given its historical ethic of blood purity or limpieza de sangre, the bloody role of the Inquisition in enforcing religious and cultural orthodoxy, and the hapless fate of the hundreds of thousands of bicultural Moors and converted Jews, respectively moriscos and conversos, who were ejected or came under the baleful eye of church and state.34 When his narrative voice deploys asyndeton to detail the long list of trades engaged in by the moriscos to show their usefulness to the economy and culture of sixteenth-century Spain, in a context in which (white) Christian Spaniards were beginning to be disdainful of purportedly lower occupations and of the tragedy of losing their contribution, he is not only seeking rhetorical emphasis.35 In establishing this relation between race and labor, he is also highlighting an emerging sense of white racial particularity that would be further exacerbated by political and economic power in the colonial contact zone, and produce the caste society in Spain’s American colonies and eventually create the racialized division of labor in the world system that eventually developed out of European expansion and colonialism. The book’s reference to Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican priest, famous to history as the Protector of the Indians, serves a similar purpose. In stressing the selective humaneness of Las Casas in his campaign to save the Caribbean and Latin American natives from further slavery and genocide, while recommending that African captives take their place in the provision of slave labor for the new colonies, Las Casas would not only contribute to subsequent associations of blackness with subservience, but demonstrate a blindness to black humanity that would be shared by Spanish and European churchmen, statesmen, and philosophers at large and underwrite the objectification and forced labor of blacks for centuries to come (16–19). Finally, his detailed accounting of the tradition of reductive imaging of incoming captive Africans and the enslaved Afro-Spanish during the golden age of Spanish literature, including the most celebrated of the nation’s writers, alongside the hostility experienced by foreign recruits into Spain’s highly successful culture of professional soccer today, helps establish the longevity of an attitude of antagonism and unwelcomeness for Africans and

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diasporans in Spain. It prompts his conclusion that a country whose patron saint is Santiago (also known as Matamoros or the Moor Slayer), and who produced Cardinals Cisneros and Torquemada of inquisitorial notoriety, or the acerbic poet and writer Miguel Angel de Quevedo, noted as much for his anti-Semitism as his anti-Hamitism, could hardly plead innocence on the question of racism (21).36 In a statement that sums up his tongue-incheek speculations as to the most effective means to fastidiar or of “getting back” at the Church by upturning the West’s traditions and re/presenting God as black instead of white (136), Zamora suggests that this would be nothing less than “Apocalyptic.” It would produce, among other things: “unpredictable cataclysms for theology, cinema, painting, music, architecture, literature or liturgy” (“cataclismos impredecibles para la teología, el cine, la pintura, la música, la arquitectura, la literatura o la liturgia,” 146), and upset the entire epistemic edifice associated with colonialism’s civilizing mission in its evangelizing aspect. While many of Zamora’s critical points of departure are not new—the historical presence and negative representation of blacks in the Hispanic literary tradition, for example, goes back at least to Carter G. Woodson’s research in the 1930s and to the larger critique of colonialism to the radical thought of diasporan thinkers like Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon at mid-century37—what is important is his own assumption of critical subjectivity as a product of Spain’s last colony, whose domination, as illustrated earlier, drew directly from the previous history of conquest and rule in the Americas. What we have in Zamora in diasporan terms, in other words, is the postcolonial African subject, signifying from his location within the heart of the former empire, and consolidating an already established platform for cultural critique, but from the inside, as it were, even if in doing so he speaks from a Calibanic posture of discursive irreverence and takes Bakhthinian delight in the excess of asyndeton.38 Whereas for Brathwaite on the other side of the Atlantic, the Calibanic was expressed through the “new” Caribbean vernacular of nation language, for Zamora, the distance (back) to the African tongues is too great for his communicative objectives. He finds, however, that the resources in linguistic expression made available by Cervantes, Quevedo, and Lope de Vega, the icons of Hispanophone high literary culture, are more than enough for his purposes, as he claims a discursive space within it. The incident at Aravaca, in the present context, then, is best understood against the new wave of blacks attempting entry into Spain, as part of an ongoing diasporan movement, and as part of the larger migration from the global south to the industrial north, particularly on account of the perils faced by these individuals in the process. Reports in early November 1988 of an overturned raft or patera in the Straits of Gibraltar, in which eighteen out of twenty-five travelers drowned, heralded the beginning of this new pattern of migration and the dangers it posed. Since then the pateras, and their often luckless passengers en route to Spain, from as near as Morocco and as far as the countries beyond the wide Sahara, many of whom have no

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form of identification, leave mortal evidence of their quest on the beaches of both sides of the Mediterranean, with the unidentified often ending up buried in mass graves. And here it is pertinent to note that of the almost 5 million immigrants to Spain, these constitute less than one percent, their mode of transportation being an indication of the extreme sense of desperation propelling them.39 Those who don’t come via the Canary Islands and choose the land route would have had to contend with armed Moroccan security forces or the electrified, six-meter-high, double perimeter fences that surround Melilla and Ceuta, the two Spanish enclaves on the North African coast, in their efforts to overcome this final geographical obstacle to gain entry to what by many is now designated Fortress Europe. Alongside the natural alarm that the phenomenon has generated in the Spanish media, a debate has arisen regarding the effect of these often undocumented refugees, in terms of their role in Spain’s economy, in terms of national and international law governing migrants, and in terms of their mere presence, particularly in the urban landscape. In the context of Spain’s entry into the European Union in 1985, after four decades of the Franco dictatorship, and the country’s old desire to distance itself from the stigma that Africa begins in the Pyrenees, the resulting us and them debates are important, especially in terms of the challenge posed by the racial and cultural difference of the incoming Africans, Asians, and Eastern Europeans, to Spain’s sense of self. Whereas Lucrecia Pérez’s Caribbean origins would most likely place her among the 63 percent of immigrants to have arrived by air, her racial identity, as we saw, made any perceived difference with the patera Africans irrelevant from the standpoint of her victimizers. To the degree that her murder is held as having prompted progressive legislation and “unleashed innumerable social and political movements in the struggle against racism” (“desencadenada inumerable movimientos sociales y politicos de lucha contra el racismo,” Bermudez, 240), there is also a claim to the contrary that the state has merely shifted the grounds of an old narcissism in calling for assimilation on terms that do little to stanch the abuse and economic exploitation to which Africans, Afro-descendants, and others are subjected on account of their plight, while keeping them prisoner to perceptions of negative difference and to the corresponding behaviors.40 The novel of Donato Ndongo, to which we now turn, revisits the question of Equatorial Guinea’s crisis of national becoming, as well as the libidinal fallout from the colonial contract and the modern-day odyssey of the diasporan subject.

DONATO NDONGO: TOTALITARIANISM, ASSIMILATIONISM, AND THE (NEW) NATION In a 1996 retrospective and analysis of the work of the older Stuart Hall, Grant Farred in “You Can Go Home Again, You Just Can’t Stay: Stuart Hall and the Caribbean Diaspora” quotes the critic’s famous assertion that

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migration is “a one-way trip” (44). Farred draws his readers’ attention to Hall’s statement that it was the failure of the West Indies Federation (1958– 1962), along with marriage and his growing relationship with Britain’s New Left, that prompted Hall’s decision to stay in England. He also adds a very pertinent reference to Hall’s turn to race as a political category as part of his activist agenda in England, underscoring the importance of the circumstances surrounding his Policing the Crisis as a sort of culminating moment in this process. Farred stresses, though, beyond the collapse of the putative West Indian Federation, that there was another factor of importance influencing Hall’s non-return. It had to do with the still extant climate of colonial assimilationism to whiteness in preindependence Jamaica and its implications not only for caste and class, but insofar as these social categories involved sexual relations, and the disabling effect this had on Stuart Hall the individual. Citing Hall’s own unpleasant experiences within his upper-class family as a victim of local “colorism,” and those of a sister who sought to break the taboo against marriage to a black(er) fiancé, Farred notes the importance of “colonialism’s psychic violence” and concludes that “Hall’s scarred psychobiography demonstrates that his personal history bears a greater responsibility for his non-return to Kingston than the lack of political will” (33). The references to Hall seem to offer an appropriate point of departure from which to discuss Donato Ndongo’s second novel, Los poderes de la tempestad,41 not only to the extent that they help frame diasporan relocation in terms of the (political) challenges that await its subjects either as immigrants in their new environments or “back home” in the place of their projected return, but also in terms of the colonially determined elements of caste, class, and sexuality that constitute their subjectivity in the first place. Ndongo’s novel tells the story of a returnee trained in Spain as a lawyer, who comes back home after thirteen years to place his knowledge and skills at the service of his country, but who is rejected by the anti-intellectualism of the regime and accused, besides, of being a subversive, a counterrevolutionary, and a spy, supposedly in the employ of Spain and its neocolonial agenda. He is thus imprisoned, tortured, and subjected to forced labor on the island of Bioko and escapes finally by sea to neighboring Gabon. The book has been read, and quite rightly so, primarily as an exposé of Macías Nguema’s egregious human rights violations of the 1969–1979 period, and as a critique of the ruling cabal’s blind self-interest, which would callously sacrifice the young nation’s human and material resources in order to consolidate and expand its hold on power. This analytical thrust, however, even as it highlights, correctly, I believe, the regime’s excesses, has nevertheless shown a tendency toward a species of binarism that would contrast Spain’s supposed enlightenment and embrace of the rule of law, and an ostensibly progressive and prosperous colonial period, to the savagery, the rabid destructivism, and the national decline of the former colony due to the dictatorship. Accordingly, Equatorial Guinea emerged from colonialism with

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“a high per capita income in comparison to other African areas, and one of the continent’s highest literacy rates” (Ugarte 2006, 272), and Spain’s work as symbol of “hope and peace” and material uplift for more than a hundred years was undone under the dictatorship because the latter represented its diametrical opposite.42 In Ugarte’s study, even when a direct historical and diplomatic linkage between Macías and Spain’s dictator of four decades, Francisco Franco, is alluded to, which might attenuate this binarism, there is a purportedly more weighty determinism invoked to make the regime “all too typical” of the “twentieth-century African holocaust of the kind perpetrated by Africans such as Mobuto Sese Seko, Idi Amin, Amadou Ahedjo, Sani Abacha, and others” (Ugarte 2006, 272). What is produced thereby is a perspective that at once confirms a Western influence on the Equatoguinean tyrant, but simultaneously diminishes it in favor of an apparently innate tendency toward dictatorship in African governance. In this view also, the sophisticated urbanity of the lawyer protagonist, schooled in Western values even before his departure for the metropole, and who has in addition come back with a white Spanish wife, is seen, along with the spouse, as victims of the retrograde (reverse) racism practiced not only by representatives of the regime, but by certain members of the protagonist’s family as well.43 These analyses, I propose, notwithstanding their apparently sound historical bases, overlook important aspects of the background that informs them and simplify some of the complex interactions and interfaces that define the colonial relationship. What I would like to do, in reading Poderes, is to complicate this binarism somewhat, with a view to de-essentializing the Macías dictatorship as peculiarly “African,” and, by focusing on the (post) colonial ambivalence of the novel’s unnamed protagonist, recast in less simplistic terms the racial dynamic as it evolves between himself, as remigrant, and his compatriots, and with his Spanish wife and daughter. Hannah Arendt’s 1951 study on The Origins of Totalitarianism lets us see in sharper relief not only the degree to which Francisco Macías’ primary motive was self-aggrandizement and how the material and ideological underpinnings of his government were necessary addenda thereto, in terms of the totalitarian modus operandi. It also opens a window on the link with Spain, and by extension other totalitarian regimes, whether these are or were in Africa itself, in Europe, the Americas, or elsewhere. Based on the history of Nazism and Stalinist rule, Arendt’s work stresses the primary role of violence and propaganda in the totalitarian state and emphasizes the importance of indoctrination in the making of its upside-down ideological constructs and its world of everyday official lies. To this she adds importantly that internal censorship and isolation from outside are key instruments of governance in the totalitarian context because they provide insulation from foreign interference (1966, 341–342). In the peculiar “social contract” of totalitarianism, membership in the ruling party for the population is as mandatory as association with opposing parties is dangerous. Not only does membership for affiliates provide material and psychological benefits in their day-to-day

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existence, it also offers a measure of security from the all-powerful agents of law enforcement. Even so, the party faithful, as well as the populace in general, become conditioned by observation and experience to understand that the latter will unhesitatingly exact retribution on individuals or groups of suspects associated with threats to centralized power, that is to say, whether these threats are real or imagined, and whether these groups or individuals are “innocent” or “guilty,” and of course, independently of the party affiliation of the suspects. The paranoia and skittishness of the state is thus seen, for Arendt, in that “every crime the rulers can conceive of must be punished, regardless of whether or not it has been committed” (1966, 427). It is with leadership, however, or rather in the “Leader principle,” that Arendt identifies the node of totalitarian governance. The leader, she argues, in an almost deific (self-)characterization as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and by way of his representatives at various levels of bureaucratic operation, assumes and articulates a political and philosophical outlook that simultaneously situates him transcendentally inside and outside of history. On the one hand, his interpretation of the nation’s current condition and destiny is the one that is ideologically most apposite, and on the other, because his actions “are planned for centuries to come,” the content of his vision is beyond question because “the ultimate test of what he does has been removed beyond the experience of his contemporaries” (1966, 383). Accordingly, the Leader appoints or dismisses all functionaries of any importance, and his will, whether in terms of policy writ large or in the minutiae of the quotidian, is projected through them. They, in turn, religiously observe the principle of loyalty in acknowledgment of his infallibility, so that what Hannah Arendt calls the “ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality” (1966, 385) might be maintained. The most important feature, however, of his regime, it bears repeating, is the terror, whether psychological or material, that immobilizes all opposition. The most cursory examination of the Macías Nguema regime establishes the degree to which it conforms to these general principles, save for certain particularities of the African postindependence state as they pertain to the Cold War. Most noteworthy would be the speed with which the former civil servant and frustrated emancipado (it took him three attempts to pass the civil service examination) set up his totalitarian machinery on assuming power in the new nation’s first and only free elections in September 1968, and the prompt grafting of accompanying ideological trappings onto the material structure of rule, all centered around his new persona as Leader. By the year following independence, celebrated on October 12, 1968, for example, a Popular Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Populares) was formed and a paramilitary youth arm of the party, Youth on the March with Macías, (the Juventud en Marcha con Macías), was established. In 1970, all political parties, potential rivals of Macías’ United National Party (Partido Unido Nacional), were prohibited, and over the following two years he assumed executive, legislative, and judicial powers and proclaimed one-party rule

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under a new constitution that named him president for life. This came with a structure of domination that descended from the two provinces, Malabo and Rio Muni, which were further subdivided into districts, down to the traditional villages that were run by comités de base or base committees under the control of militants, who replaced the traditional chiefs, and the establishment of a coterie of his clanspeople, of the Esangui of Mongomo, in key positions of administrative power. Where Macías entered history, however, and fashioned the appropriate accompanying mythical persona, was on the basis of the coup attempted by Foreign Minister Anastasio Ndongo, and the Equatorial Guinea United Nations delegate, Saturino Ibongo, in March 1969. The two had intervened at Spain’s request to stem the increasingly anti-Spanish rhetoric issuing from the new government in the wake of the expulsion of the ambassador Juan Duran Loriga and his consul general, which had been preceded by Duran Loriga’s calling out the Spanish Guardia Civil in response to the death of a Spanish foreman during a riot in Mbini. Macías, in arresting and eliminating Ndongo, Ibongo, and all declared and suspected political opponents, turned the date, March 5, 1968, one day after his final meeting with the Spanishbacked Ndongo, on which the latter declared himself president, into a seminal “birth-of-the-nation” moment. This relatively unremarkable (if brutal) act of self-preservation would be transformed into a narrative for future consumption in which he supposedly routed the forces of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, thus fulfilling a preordained nationalist destiny, becoming thereby for his willing or unwilling followers the Unico Milagro de Guinea Equatorial (Equatorial Guinea’s Unique Miracle) and Guinea’s Líder de Acero (Leader of Steel). One other such title would, curiously enough, considering his declared anti-intellectualism, dub him the Maestro de las Ciencias las Artes y las Letras de Guinea (Master of Guinea’s Sciences, Arts, and Letters). As terror emerged as the main instrument of political control, the Juventud en Marcha and the Fuerzas Armadas Populares became the regime’s primary policy enforcers, responsible for the identification, imprisonment, and elimination of the supposed enemies of Macías’ “revolution,” and for implementing restrictions on freedom of movement and association, the nighttime curfew, the constant reiteration of the president’s many and varied honorifics, and the verbal vilification of such “vestiges” of Spanish colonial culture as the Spanish language, food, clothing, Catholicism, and so on. Additionally, foreign journalists were banned, the missionaries expelled, and the Franco administration made to collaborate in a policy that put a seal on news coming out of the former colony, regarding it as classified information, which would last from January 1971 to October 1976. As part of its testimonial intent, Donato Ndongo’s Los poderes de la tempestad confirms this broad portrait of totalitarianism. Among the many details that it brings to our attention in doing so is a particularly graphic episode in which the totalitarian triptych of terror, propaganda, and indoctrination are combined. While making their way to his hometown

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in Rio Muni, the protagonist and his family are made to witness the public execution of ninety prisoners, comprised mainly of professionals and intellectuals, in groups of ten, by the Fuerzas Armadas Populares, complete with the slow-motion narration of the coups de grace of a shot to the head delivered by the commanding officer (171). The almost surreal event is topped off by the speech proffered by the cadre of the Juventud en Marcha as the bus resumes its journey, justifying the act in terms of policy, reiterating the Leader’s transcendence of vision, and reinforcing, most important, the dominant fiction about “subversion,” with the claim that the individuals killed moments before, some of whom were relatives and acquaintances of those present, were conspirators and threats to the state. The climate in which the word “intellectual” was banned from public and private conversation, and in which Equatoguinean children were encouraged to consider the dictator’s name as “sacred” (“sagrado,” 232), and to report to the authorities any suspicious statements made by their parents against the “father” of the nation (232), illustrates the single-minded and undiscriminating thirst for power of the totalitarian “Leader,” following Hannah Arendt’s reference. Ndongo’s representation of the cadre’s speech after the execution, in all its breathlessness, poor grammar, and rote phrases of “revolutionary” party doctrine is deliberate. That is how all the traitors who organized a plot to overthrow the constitutional government of the constitutional president for life of the republic of Equatorial Guinea president of the central committee of the Only National Workers Party, head of state and of the popular revolutionary government major general and supreme leader of the popular armed forces great popular leader much loved by his people and main architect of the democratic Guinean revolution and popular honorable and great comrade his excellency Mesie me Nguema Biyogo Ñgue Ndong are going to pay. They had created the neocolonialist and imperialist organization crusade of liberation of Equatorial Guinea by Christ the current drama of neocolonialism and imperialism and of its hired African traitors in Equatorial Guinea with the recent failed coup d’état in our country there it is alive and bleeding and integrally defiant through the living strength of the popular masses of the countryside and the city; of all the working people of Equatorial Guinea in their ideas of trying to strangle the popular revolutionary Guinean revolution and establish a neocolonial fascistic puppet government of slavery and oppression, run by remote control by their imperialist bosses by a privileged minority without the participation of the great popular leader Mesie me Nguema Biyogo Ñeque Ngong father of the revolution, and his Unique National Workers Party. (Así pagarán todos los traidores ésos habían organisado un compló para derribar al gobierno constitucional del presidente popular vistalisio de la república de Guinea Ecuatorial presidente del comité central

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If the protagonist is a mere witness to the regime’s brutality at Ngolo, his subsequent arrest on trumped up charges of treason and espionage, and his torture and forced confession at the Blavis prison, along with the forced labor to which he is made to submit afterward at the cacao plantation at Bioko, all bring him face to face with terror in a new and even more distressing manner. These episodes constitute the other main narrative pillar of Ndongo’s exposé. With the protagonist’s deployment in the cocoa fields as part of the workforce in Equatorial Guinea’s ailing agro-industry, we are afforded an albeit indirect appreciation of the essentially fragile nature of the nation’s postindependence economy, and of the regime’s inability to stand on its own feet given the flight of the mostly Spanish landowning and business class in the wake of the crisis of 1969. The March crisis, in which the Spanish ambassador was withdrawn, was also marked by the declaration of a state of emergency and the subsequent exodus of the European population. By the end of the month, Ibrahim Sundiata notes, there were only eighty Spaniards left out of a population of more than eleven thousand Europeans, according to a 1960 census (1996, 64). Their prior dominance in the economy explains the rapid decline in the country’s main foreign exchange earners. Equatorial Guinea had supplied almost all the cocoa imported into Spain since 1935, and its output of forty thousand tons in 1968 would fall to less than four thousand tons by the end of the Macías regime. Similarly, the production of almost eight thousand tons of coffee in 1968 fell to a negligible quantity in the same period, as did the three hundred thousand cubic meters of lumber exported in that year (Ugarte, “Interview with Donato Ndongo,” 233).

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Creole dominance in the late nineteenth century in cacao production on Bioko, for example, had ceded precipitously in the first decades of the twentieth century as Spain applied its “colonia de explotación” policy to the country and individual planters and companies from the metropole established themselves (Sundiata 1990). In the face of the diminishment of the local Bubi as a source of labor due to disease and overwork, the colonial planters sought and found a solution in 1943 with the importation of a Nigerian workforce, who became so important over time that the withdrawal by their government in 1973 of some sixty thousand of their migrant workers from Equatorial Guinea would strike a mortal blow to the earnings from cacao. In such a context, prison labor served two purposes for the regime; on the one hand, it offered a substitute for lost workers, albeit a poor one, and on the other, it served, in a more important sense, as a political tool in the larger scheme of despotic rule. The chain of events described in the narrative, in which not only the protagonist himself is ensnared by the dictator’s repressive machinery, coming out of a confrontation at his welcome home party, but also an uncle and three of his cousins, and is immersed into the horrors of the Blavis death camp, not only reiterates Macías’ tyranny. It also vividly illustrates the proposal that the postindependence dictatorship enjoyed a qualitative structural advantage over its metropolitan predecessor in terms of coercive governance. Its representatives on the ground, the delegados de gobierno (government delegates) and presidentes de consejo (council chairmen), particularly in the rural areas, spoke the local languages and were familiar with the cultures and communities, as Enrique Nzang Okenve reminds us (2009, 155), enhancing thereby the immediacy and effectiveness of their repressive practices, as we see in the episode that ends in his imprisonment (Poderes, 217–218). The quality of sovereignty to which the Equatoguinean state could lay claim, in the final analysis, and the Cold War real politik that would allow it to access and benefit from Western donor agencies, while simultaneously engaging in a diplomatic dance with the socialist trajectory of China, Korea, the USSR and Cuba, would all redound, tragically, in the ultimate abandonment and defenselessness of the Equatoguinean populace, whose interests were the last priority of the regime.45 In a separate reflection, Donato Ndongo invokes Joseph Konrad’s Heart of Darkness, to direct our attention to the Kurtzian extractive principle of colonialism as “robbery with violence, (and) exaggerated murder on a grand scale” (4).46 Even if the source of postcolonial despotism such as Macias’ lies in the colonial antecedents, he suggests, at the center of the issue is man’s predatory behavior toward our own kind, “homo homini lupus,” as his character in Poderes ponders resignedly as the milicianos and the members of the Juventud callously appropriate his and his family’s personal belongings while they clear customs and traverse the road blocks once in the country. Hannah Arendt had also, coincidentally, employed the famous aphorism in her description of totalitarianism (1966, 459). In an important retrospective

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on the Spanish presence in colonial Guinea, Ndongo would further highlight some important details of the regime that have a bearing on the novel, and on the background and formation of his protagonist and the forces arrayed against him. Recalling Spain’s comprehensive claim on the colony’s human and natural resources, and its determination to make the natives break their habit of laziness (“holgura”) and of forcing them resolutely (“con gran firmeza”) to work, so that they might accede to the state of “civilization” (1998, 148), he reflects on the various forms of paid and unpaid labor to which the natives had been subjected and on the multilateral imposition on them of metropolitan culture, of its language, religion, and cuisine, as well as the obligatory and institutionalized deference required for such imperial symbols as the king and the Spanish flag, and for all Europeans as a class; all of which culminated in a regime of racial separation and racialized power in Spanish Guinea, in which the few privileged and assimilated natives, following the dictates of the 1943 Statute on Education, would emerge ready to undertake the roles of intermediaries and colonial functionaries. Apart from the protagonist’s symbolic importance as victim in the postindependence scenario of Equatorial Guinea, then, his having been a product of the colonial period, in which he had spent the greater part of his life, is just as important for the fullest understanding of the novel. This is so especially in relation to the theme of diasporan “going home again” and for what, in the final analysis, is the impossibility of his project, as I propose later. If we take into consideration his upbringing as the firstborn male in a successful landowning family of coffee and cacao farms, with the requisite complement of labor to guarantee its ongoing success, and the political and cultural stake in the dominant culture that would have qualified him to formally pursue the Western religious and educational canon not only at home, but also in the metropole, it is easier to understand his heightened sense of self-importance as he thinks of his imminent return, notwithstanding the declared desire to serve his newly independent nation. Albert Memmi, in his classic study of The Colonizer and the Colonized, has commented on the class of the assimilated, stating that they “push a colonial mentality to excess, display proud disdain for the colonized and continually show off their borrowed rank, which often belies a vulgar brutality and avidity” (1967, 16). While the context in question is not that of the colony per se that Memmi has in mind, but more of its legacy in the postcolonial moment, it is not difficult to imagine that, alongside his desire to be of service, there is also a sense in the protagonist of his being a sort of secular missionary for modernity and the Western way, on the strength of his successful “pilgrimage in the lands of the wise men” (“peregrinaje por los mundos de los hombres sabios,” Poderes, 9), and of his purported conquest of the “wisdom of the whites” (“la sabiduría de los blancos,” Poderes, 9). Indeed, based on his reactions to the human and material landscape on his return, a picture emerges of (post)colonial doubleness and uncertainty in him that raise doubts as to his real interest in and suitability for “national service,” or of

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his ability to undertake the self-imposed task of returning the lost, mythical “splendor” of the “tribe” (“el esplendor de la tribu,” Poderes, 9). The protagonist’s ambivalence toward the natural, material, and human landscape is evinced from the moment of his arrival, in the hierarchical North/South cultural and developmental comparisons that he consciously and unconsciously makes. At the airport, the young native workers strike him as innately lethargic and slow of movement. Their sluggishness is apparently the result of “tropical indolence” (“la indolencia tropical,” Poderes, 17), so unlike the “purposeful and energetic movement” (“ese acucioso andar,” Poderes, 17) of the citizens of the urban, industrialized North. He finds the open air markets to be repugnant and uninspiring for their smells, their noise, and their unhygienic aspect, again, so different from his middle class environment of presumably clean supermarkets with neatly packaged food products, and his orderly life of cocktails, Sunday brunches, cinema clubs, and the summer beach home of his wife’s parents (111). At his cousin Mbo’s barracks, where he spends his first days as a guest, he finds that the stew prepared by Avomo, Mbo’s wife, literally stinks, as do the tiles and the dirty and unkempt guest room (40), not to mention the toilet, which has no running water. Here, as well as at his parents’ house, the spiders, rats, mosquitos, and cockroaches are a source of great anxiety, and in the city center, garbage and unpainted public buildings help create a negative calculus for what used to be the home space. In a word, for the returnee, everything seems to have fallen to ruin in the five years since the declaration of independence, and his disappointment seems to be provoked by equal portions of disgust at the decadence brought on by the new administration and nostalgia for the purportedly good old days of personal and class security. At one point he muses: barbarity had taken hold of the orderly, peaceful, prosperous and beautiful world that you remembered, most of all of those afternoons when, from the window in study hall at the seminary in Banapa, you would watch, with a twinge of sadness, at the sun as its rays wounded the tenuous mist at nightfall . . . tradition was [then] overcome by the Catholic spirit that the missionaries brought, favorably aided by such a paternalistic and protective colonial domination. (la barbarie se iba adueñando de un mundo que recordabas ordenado, apacible, próspero y hermoso, sobre todo en aquellas tardes cuando, desde la ventana de la sala de estudio del seminario de Banapa, contemplabas melancólico como los rayos del sol hería la tenue neblina del atardecer . . . a lo tradicional se superpuso el espíritu católico impuesto por los misioneros, favorecido además por la dominación colonial, tan paternal y protectora). (48) While an element of idealism is to be expected in recollections born of the deprivation of exile and of aversion toward the hollow symbolism of

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the new political order, that is, its new street names as a mark of “African authenticity,” the banning of the Spanish language, the ubiquity of the dictator’s image, and so on, it is important to recognize that what we have with Ndongo’s remigrant protagonist is a combination of the original distancing of the emancipado from the cultural hearth, with an assumption of a sort of enhanced Western “colonial” persona acquired in his travels in Spain, and as a result of the additional exposure and conditioning that would have taken place in his adaptation to the old colonial center. As we see later, the (alienated) colonial gaze is particularly strong in the protagonist’s interaction with his compatriots on his return, and highlights even more his ambivalence in terms of a hypothetical post-diaspora vision and prospects. If the returnee is reluctant to reengage with his past on the grounds of newly acquired tastes in dietary and culinary matters and in standards of hygiene, particularly with consideration of his wife and daughter for whom African cuisine and culture is new, his interaction with his compatriots should hardly need a prophylactic, given his repeated claim to Fang ethnicity and tradition, and his emphasis on the importance of family bonds. It turns out, however, that the racialized African body is a source of more than a little psychological discomfort in this primarily first-person narrative. While it is to be expected that the approved antagonists, the milicianos, the party “comrades,” and the ever-present members of the Juventud en Marcha con Macías would be portrayed in negative terms, as they all are, this is done by way of curious and repeated associations of their black skin color with the cruelty or moral decay of the regime, as if the two were naturally correlated. It is noteworthy that in Poderes, the black body is consistently seen through the stereotypical colonial lens of innate negative difference and derogation, and this notwithstanding a perhaps understandable association with poverty that a realistic portrayal might carry, given the circumstances. The protagonist’s description of his siblings offers the most striking example of his distancing from the racial blackness that has identified sub-Saharan Africans since colonialism. They had introduced me to several children, five or six of them, saying that they were my siblings, but I did not know any because they were born after my flight from home, and the truth is that I asked myself if those runny-nosed smelly dwarfs who licked their noses and who were covered with leaky smelly sores with flies all around them had anything to do with me, and who gave me a dumbfounded and timid look and ran off each time to hide behind the doors when Angeles went towards them. (Me habían presentado una serie de chicuelos, cinco o seis, diciéndome que eran mis hermanos, pero no conocía a ninguno porque habían nacido después de mi huida de la tierra, y en verdad me preguntaba si tenía algo que ver con aquellos enanos cochambrosos de mocos colgantes que se relamían con la lengua y de llagas supurantes y hediondas

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sobre las que rondaban bandadas de moscas, que se escondían cada vez que Ángeles se dirigía a ellos escondiéndose detrás de las puertas). (187 emphasis added) For the protagonist who had thought that he had overcome the selfconsciousness of “blackness in the presence of whiteness,” to paraphrase Fanon, by way of marriage and assimilation, the moment is a telling one.47 As had happened earlier, after a similar description of his young cousins at Mbo’s house, when he worried if Angeles might think that that is the way he used to be as a child (45), the mirror effect that his younger brothers and sisters provide acts as a trigger for his anxiety over the possibility of negative racial association with them. There is, as well, a similar recoil, again in the presence of his wife, from the poorly dressed former neighbors, described also as “very dirty and half-naked” (“muy sucias y semidesnudas,” Poderes, 184), particularly the women, whose exposed breasts cause him acute embarrassment (184). The Spanish-trained abogado experiences great difficulty, as well, predictably perhaps, in remembering the faces and names of these former neighbors. If my analysis regarding the abogado’s discomfort with black racial identity is correct, it throws into question the pretended transcendence of the racial divide that he claims is represented by his marriage to Angeles, the native white Spaniard, as well as his purported critique of the resistance to Angeles by his mother and by other compatriots, ostensibly on the grounds of her whiteness. “Don’t bring me back a white woman” (“No me traigas a una blanca,” Poderes, 10), he repeatedly recalls his mother saying, to which he muses that it is a retrograde position to take, one that has no place in the modern world (10). For him, his interracial marriage represents the “reconciliation of Humanity” (“la reconciliación de la Humanidad,” Poderes, 12) and the abolition of difference in the name of the more lofty ideal of love (14). His parents’ unreserved acceptance of his wife and daughter on meeting them, though, indicates that he had overestimated the bitterness that he imputes to them on the matter (191), and points us, rather, to the more reasonable conclusion that their apprehensiveness was justified as former black subjects in a racially segregated colony, in which marriage of black males to white females was theoretically taboo and unheard of in practice. To the extent that he reduces his mother’s defensiveness to mere prejudice, it would seem that he is dismissing the validity of her memory of this particular facet of colonial rule, and ignoring one of what Albert Memmi regards as the “wounds which it (colonialism) has left in the flesh of the colonized” (1967, 34). In the colonial libidinal economy, we recall that on both sides of the Atlantic, the black woman was among the most vulnerable of the populace. His mother’s response in this case, therefore, is hardly to be seen as an aggression. As an erstwhile emancipado of the colonial period, Ndongo’s protagonist has, to quote Fanon in this particular context, “nothing in common with

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real Negros” (1968, 69). If we follow the likely logic of his caste under the old regime, in which unlike the other natives he was permitted to “freely consume olive oil and alcoholic beverages and legally bear arms” (“consumer libremente aceite de oliva y bebidas alcohólicas y la tenencia lícita de armas,” Ndongo 1998, 118), we can see where acquiring the colonizer’s language and other dominant cultural assets such as his religion and his educational schema becomes a reasonable step in a progression that would lead to the existential ideal of “becoming white.” (The abogado would overtly articulate this desire at one point, admitting that he had been “anxious to be one of them” [“ansioso de ser uno de ellos,” Poderes, 9].) And if obtaining the “wisdom of the whites” is one of the teleological endpoints of becoming white, one may argue that another would be procuring the female white native of the metropole as wife. Angeles in this view turns out to be as much an acquisition, or a trophy, as the abogado’s other cultural conquests. We note that when they are together, the cachet or social capital she represents is as much a cause of envy and resentment amongst his compatriots as are his other material possessions such as the canned goods and the clothing and other consumer items with which he returns, and which the representatives of the regime at customs and at the road blocks greedily confiscate. “Whiteness,” Cheryl Harris (1993, 1713–1714) has persuasively argued, as a guarantor of privilege and a source of settled expectations and benefits, “is property.” Besides commenting on the curious and surprised stares of the public at his biracial family unit, the abogado is careful to note that even their aspect of robust health and bodily well-being, as evident “foreigners,” has become an object of envy for his less fortunate compatriots (Poderes, 65). But where the (post)colonial envy and resentment coalesce most strikingly, I believe, is in the figure of Ada, the bisexual militia woman, who he rebuffs and who participates in his humiliation while in prison. Ada’s aggression and sexual violation of both the protagonist and his wife have been seen in terms of her being the black woman “wearing the mask of the male colonizer-rapist” (Ugarte 2010, 74), and in terms of her making a vengeful anti-Spanish gesture (Marvin Lewis 2007, 151). The protagonist’s reaction to her is revealing, however, also in terms of her being an attractive and imposing woman, and particularly on account of her bisexuality, even as her envy of the couple on the basis of their material and metaphysical attributes is evident. As in other aspects of his responses to his home space and people, the visceral nature of the abogado’s rejection of Ada seems to be the product of her venality and belligerence as part of Macías’ exploitive and authoritarian machinery. This sense of rejection is complicated by her apparently radical sexuality insofar as it displaces and confounds the assumptions of his traditional, male-centered universe. Although he finds her sexually attractive, she is also thoroughly intimidating, not only for the double violation, but because her lesbianism explodes his cherished myth of the absence of homosexuality in African culture, and because of the castration implied in his inability to defend his wife’s

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honor according to the demands of tradition. This former is one of the main sources of his anxiety in the wake of his wife’s unhappy encounter with the militiawoman (Poderes, 41). The intensity of his portrayal of her in the narrative is therefore proportional to the hurt that she has inflicted. That Ada assumes a quasi-monstrous character in his subsequent account of her sexual abuse of his bleeding and prostrate body amidst the filth of the prison cell is most keenly appreciated when contrasted with the sanctity of the acts of intercourse he shares with his wife and the purity of the love he professes for her. He describes one such event early in the novel in which he kissed her, “slowly and with almost spiritual devotion” (“con lentitud y una devoción casi espiritual,” 82) (emphasis added). Accordingly, his graphic detailing of Ada’s “colossal withered breasts . . . from whose huge nipples, extremely black balls, protruded aggressive and strangely stiff hairs, like wires” (“pechos colosales, arrugados . . . en cuyos inmensos pezones, bolas nigégrrimas, nacían unos pelos como alambres, agresivos y extrañamente tiesos,” 259), give expression to a rejection on the grounds of her spiritual unworthiness for sharing this kind of intimacy with him, as well as the more immediately recognizable objection to the abuse of power that rape is. Here we recall that the militiawoman had made overtures to both husband and wife, premised on the likelihood that they might need her influence if they ever got into trouble in the republic. Sexual conquest, then, alongside the bureaucratic bullying, turns out also to be a clear manifestation of an antipathy in her that is born of a long-standing pool of resentment based on race and class. For the abogado it is so revolting that it causes him to retch on realizing that she has climaxed (259). For a seminarian to abandon his religious vocation and pursue a romantic interest in a former pen pal with whom he shared stamp collecting as a hobby, as well as other interests common to adolescence, is relatively unremarkable. In the case of the protagonist and Angeles, however, such a relationship is fraught with the challenges occasioned by colonialism and race, and, in the face of objections from their parents and other social agents, they eventually come to see themselves as under a state of siege which in turn increases their sense of mutual solidarity. Angeles says as much when she declares early in the narrative that: “We are on the same footing and alone, my friend . . . your parents don’t want me because I am white, and mine don’t accept you because you’re black” (“Estamos empatados y solos, amigo mío . . . tus padres no me quieren porque soy blanca, y los míos no te aceptan porque eres negro,” Poderes, 14). For him, their relationship, as indicated, represents a new departure and an embrace of a higher register of the human, which transcends obsolete racial rancor and division, and for her the most important thing about their marriage is that it is based on the “noble sentiment” (“sentimiento noble,” Poderes, 14) of love. The couple’s idealistic posture notwithstanding, although it is he whose voice is dominant throughout the narrative, is not as persuasive as they might like

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to make it seem. To the degree that they confront her well-off, middle class, urban, metropolitan Spanish parents to his rural Equatoguinean parents, who were formerly dependent on the colonial structure and are now frankly impoverished under the dictatorship, they are converting an asymmetrical relationship into one of equal power, and thereby basing their purported antiracism on a false analogy. As indicated earlier, there is little to support an argument for racial egalitarianism on his part. We have seen this from the standpoint of postcolonial critique (Memmi 1967, Fanon 1968), and just as possession of the colonizer’s language can come to represent ontological fullness for the colonized (Black Skin), so too does the acknowledged love of the female amongst the colonizers. Although it is in Angeles’ part of the dialog that we read of the power of love as “ennobling,” there is no mistaking the supreme sense of fulfillment that he experiences, both in terms of the contours of the “formerly” colonized black man established earlier, vis-à-vis the white woman, as well as in terms of the exile. In a bout of febrile love making back home he declares that this is his moment of greatest self-realization: “I reconfirmed, happily, that Angeles still loved me above everything else . . . for the first time I felt like I had it all, being close to Angeles in my own country, with the prospect of overcoming everything with her love” (“[R]econfirmé, gozoso, que Ángeles seguía enomorada de mí por encima de todas las cosas . . . por primera vez tenía la impression de tenerlo todo, estar junto a Ángeles en mi propio pais, con la perspectiva de dominarlo todo con su amor,” Poderes, 82, emphasis added). With his return to the other long-denied object of his desire, the nation, the postcolonial exile-with-white-wife has literally enacted the Fanonian insight that “her love (has taken) me on the noble road that leads to total realization” (Black Skin, 63). The returnee’s brief liaison with and ultimate dismissal of Clo, the Equatoguinean woman whose sexual companionship he seeks after Angeles’ departure and who brings him meals during his darkest hour in the death camp at Blavis, is as clear an indication as any of his racial preferences, his alienation from the vernacular culture, and ultimately of the (political) illusion he harbors of bringing back “the splendor of the tribe.” There is a noteworthy instance of cognitive dissonance when the abogado overlooks the sacrifice being made by Clo on his behalf, even as he praises the valor and spiritual fortitude of those Equatoguinean women who in spite of the risks and their abject poverty bring food for their husbands and relatives at the prison. His subsequent explanation of her destiny as an unmarriageable mother of seven is made to look as if it is her fault, and is devoid of the sense of empathy that might accompany a reference to a former lover from a putative popular leader, a title he not only envisioned for himself, but presented as his future calling (Poderes, 298). Perhaps it is here where the ultimate impossibility of his quest lies. Bringing back the splendor of the tribe is hardly ever articulated in terms of a concrete political objective. Although it is hinted at in the returnee’s profile as a man of law and a man

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of learning, save for its testimonial intention, there is an absence of a plausible transformational subtext to his story. Besides, in spite of his declared and demonstrated affection for his immediate and extended family, several of whom come to grief on the basis of their association with him or as a result of his return, there is no discernible political and ideological outreach to the Equatoguinean “masses,” in a modern political sense, in his narrative. Even the protagonist’s notion of a combination of modernity and tradition as an important platform for change is troubled by the idea that the tribal renaissance will come to pass by way of the (progressive) miscegenation of its leadership. How is one to explain to the tribe the prophecy that he quotes from the patriarch, Motulu me Mbenga, that “[F]rom my bloodline white people will be born and then they (the whites) will be vanquished” (“[D] e mi sangre nacerán blancos y entonces serán vencidos,” Poderes, 135), without conceding a natural superiority to whiteness? How does a putative leader, who admits in a rare moment of clarity that “an impregnable wall” (“una muralla inexpubnable,” Poderes, 58) had been erected between himself and his people, and that he no longer recognized himself “as a black man, as a Bantu, as an African, as a Guinean born into the same tribe”) (“como negro, como bantú, como africano, como guineano nacido en la misma tribu,” Poderes, 58), propose African cultural rebirth and, what is more important, postcolonial and post-dictatorial change? The returnee’s report, for all its value as a witness to tyranny, leaves these vital questions unanswered. At the beginning of this chapter we studied the recent case of the hunger strike and the flight into exile of Juan Tomás Ávila, the face of the new generation of Equatoguinean writing. Even if the present incarnation of nguemismo is not as murderous as its predecessor, Ávila’s exodus is evidence of the generalized crisis plaguing the country and of its effects on freedom of expression and of cultural production. Taken in the context of the Arab Spring, which has mesmerized the Western media from its beginning in December 2010, the silence of the dominant spokespersons for democracy vis-à-vis Equatorial Guinea’s equally deserving cause can only be seen in the context of the material and ideological interests of the West’s “International Community” and its corresponding historical disinterest in the lives and livelihood of sub-Saharan Africans. Just as important, however, is the fact that with Internet communicability, Ávila’s weekly blog, and the larger constituency that his continued efforts have managed to create, a greater vernacular international awareness of the crisis has been created, which will contribute to the basis of an eventual optimistic outcome, in spite of the entrenched material interests toward Equatorial Guinea of international capital, and its statist guardians. It is unlikely, though, that the writer, as individual, has been spared the agony of absence. His return on the second anniversary of his narrow escape signals as much personal valor as it does the emotional pressure of being away from home. If there is one thing about which Ndongo’s abogado was accurate, it was the quality

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of isolation to which the “relocated” diasporan, even when materially successful, is exposed. As he confesses to his cousin Mbo: Can’t you understand that I am sick of living alone in Spain, without any other family than the love of Angeles, without any other illusions than to see Ruth grow up, far away from my parents, from my brothers, from all of you? I assure you that having a wife, a daughter and certain comforts does not compensate for the tremendous solitude of the expatriate. (¿No puedes comprender que esté harto de vivir solo en España, sin mas familia que el amor de Ángeles, sin más ilusiones que ver crecer a Rut, alejado de mis padres, de mis hermanos, de todos vosotros? Te aseguro que tener mujer, una hija y ciertas comodidades no compensa la tremenda soledad del expatriado. Poderes, 75) This expression of the half-life of exile, as we have seen, comes from the same source that generated Francisco Zamora’s “Prisionero de la Gran Vía,” and his critique of metropolitan racism in Como ser negro y no morir en Aravaca. Poderes is unique and ultimately valuable as a text of relocation because it establishes the difficulty of going home again and of making a stand there, particularly to the extent that the story shows us the ugly details of colonialism’s legacy and of postcolonialism’s mistakes. Donato Ndongo, after several decades of activist writing as a journalist, historian, and more recently novelist, has stated his preference of being a writer, over and against life as a politician (Ugarte, “Interview with Donato Ndongo,” 242). This is not to say that the objectives he sought through the critical word were not also targeted via politics. On the contrary, he was involved in four separate fledgling exile movements in the 1970s while in Spain, and after a decision to withdraw from politics, again agreed in 1982 to be part of a new secret party, the Partido del Progreso, with Severo Moto, even to the point of them naming a Government in Exile (Obatela and Onomo-Abena 2008, 76).48 Even during his nine-year stint in Equatorial Guinea from 1985–1994, which came to a hasty and unhappy end when he was forced to leave on account of his constant criticisms of the government, Ndongo was courted by the Obiang administration with offers of ministerial posts, these being in information and education in 1989 and 1992, respectively, and as ambassador to Spain in 1993. For the writer of Los poderes de la tempestad, a story based in part on the experiences of his brother, a similar re-migrant and intellectual jailed for several years by the regime, the frustrations occasioned by political struggle from exile, as well as the proven difficulties associated with the challenge of transformation from within, provide a formidable testament to the problematic of diaspora in this register. A perhaps foreseeable pessimism would characterize Ndongo’s subsequent novel, El metro (2007), which narrates the exile of the young Lambert Obama Ondo, a Fang of no specific national origin, who dies, after a painful odyssey over land and sea,

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pretty much as the Antillean Lucrecia Pérez did, at the hands of skinheads, in the non-place of the Madrid underground. NOTES 1. The Caribbean Artists’ Movement had been formed in December 1966 out of an initiative by Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, Trinidadian publisher poet John La Rose, and Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey. The movement had come about in response to the need for West Indian writers, poets, painters, and sculptors in London to become acquainted with each other and to familiarize themselves with and discuss one another’s work. 2. Rastafari access to Africa, following the tenet of “repatriation,” is a relevant if understudied aspect of this picture. Current communities in Ethiopia and Ghana speak to this dimension of the idea of a return to Africa for descendants of the “original” migrants. 3. See M’baré N’gom’s “Introducción” (2013) and Donato Ndongo’s “El marco de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial” for an account of this history. Also, Obatela and Onomo-Abena, Entre estética y compromiso: La obra de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo. 4. These are Marvin Lewis’ An Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea: Between Colonialism and Dictatorship (2007) and Michael Ugarte’s Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain (2010). There has also been a special issue on Equatoguinean literature in the Afro-Hispanic Review (28.2:2009), and another one, forthcoming, of the Revista Iberoamericana. 5. Rodney’s seminal work speaks of an intensification of exploitation to which the postcolonial populace becomes subjected, in which a low birth rate, brief life expectancy, malnutrition, high incidence of disease, absence or poverty of health services, a high illiteracy rate, and absence or flight of professionals all characterize a condition euphemistically referred to as being of the “third world” (1982, 17–28). 6. See Enrique Nzang Okenve, “Wa kobo abe, wa kobo politik: Three Decades of Social Paralysis and Political Immobility in Equatorial Guinea.” Also Ibrahim Sundiata’s Equatorial Guinea: Colonialism, State Terror, and the Search for Stability. 7. See Dingley and Mollica, “The Human Body as a Terrorist Weapon: Hunger Strikes and Suicide Bombers.” 8. It is significant that Juan Tomás’ letter announcing his hunger strike was sent to José Bono, then president of the Spanish Congress of Deputies, taking advantage of an official visit of the latter to Malabo. The letter ends with the following rhetorical statement: “It is not fair to put my life in your hands, Mr. Bono, but I have to acknowledge that you will have a lot to do with what becomes of me, regardless of what happens.” (“No es justo dejar mi vida en sus manos, señor Bono, pero tengo que reconocer que los que pase de ella, tendrá mucha que contar”). This letter, although ostensibly “public,” was distributed only to friends and acquaintances of the writer. Confirmed by e-mail correspondence, November 2013. 9. Personal conversation with the writer, October 2012. 10. Max Liniger-Goumaz notes that within five years of the first Nguema regime, some one hundred fifteen thousand citizens, almost a quarter of the population, were refugees or living in exile (1989, 56, 71). 11. Personal conversation with the writer, October 2012.

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12. See Elisa Rizo, “En torno a la obra de Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, un protagonista de las letras guineoecuatorianas.” 13. These include Exxon Mobil, Amerada Hess, Marathon, Chevron, Devon, and Vanco Energy. 14. “Equatorial Guinea: US Senate Probe Reveals Massive Theft of Oil Revenue.” 15. “Building a Better Future,” Purificación Angue Ondo, July 10, 2009. 16. “Hunger Striker Seeks Ouster of Kleptocrat President—a US ‘Good Guy.’” Anon. 17. Zamora Loboch, “En septiembre de 1969 Madrid no era ninguna fiesta.” Hereinafter referred to as “Septiembre.” 18. The Spanish government stipulation that regarded news out of Equatorial Guinea as materia reservada or “classified information” was made late in the Francisco Franco dictatorship. It lasted from 1971 to 1976. 19. “Quizá yo intuía, a pesar de ser joven, ingenuo y apátrida que, con una pluma en la mano podía mantener un compromiso intelectual permanente contra la presunta invencibilidad de las tiranías” (“Septiembre,” 456). 20. Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” Black Skin, White Masks, 109–140. 21. Saartjie Baartman (the Hottentot Venus) in the early nineteenth century and the World’s Fairs of the early twentieth are the compulsory references in this regard. See Gilman (1985) and Pieterse (1992). Zamora’s sardonic poem “Salvad a Copito” on the albino gorilla brought to Spain for exhibition speaks to the contemporary relevance of the phenomenon. 22. See Ndongo (1998), Sundiata (1996), and Sánchez Molina on the property regimen in Spanish Guinea. 23. See Hall, Race, the Floating Signifier. 24. “En ningún país de la tierra ha encontrado el colonizado el decidido apoyo y protección . . . cuya antología es infinita,” Yglesias de la Riva, 1947, 11. 25. “La Bula publicada por el Pontífice Pablo III el 2 de junio de 1537 dió a conocer a Europa como aquellos hombres de las Indias, de color canela, eran seres racionales, exactamente iguales ante el Derecho, que un castellano viejo o que el primer lord del Almirantazgo británico,” Yglesias de la Riva, 1947, 11. 26. “la civilización europea no está hecha para los negros,” Yglesias de la Riva, 1947, 19. 27. Also Sánchez Molina (2002). 28. La emancipación plena, adquirida por Carta de emancipación del art. 6º del Decreto sobre Justicia indígena de 10 de noviembre de 1938 (que considera emancipados: a) los que posean títulos profesional o académico expedido por Centro Oficial español; b) a los empleados durante dos años en un establecimiento agrícola o industrial con sueldo igual o superior a 5.000 pesetas anual, y c) a los que estén al servicio del Estado o Consejo de vecinos, con categoría igual o equivalente al auxiliar indígena mayor o asimilada, o por la aplicación de la legislación de la Metrópoli a las personas a los que tengan veintiún años cumplidos, y equivale a la mayoría de edad regulada en la Metrópoli” (art. 4º), 73. 29. Quijano (2007) notes the power of seduction in coloniality. The positioning of the speaker is most properly postcolonial in the sense that the speaking “subject,” in the Althusserian sense, here assumes discursive equality with the implied metropolitan “Subject,” rather than bowing down to him. 30. Some of this structured exploitation in Spain’s southern agricultural zone is explored in Ndongo’s novel El metro. 31. “Si no detenemos la invasion, dentro de diez años España será como Marruecos, o como Nigeria o como una república bananera” (19). Here the military motif, the identification by the perpetrators of blacks as a soft target for scaring and the callous remarks of the shooter that he left the three slugs so that

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32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

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they might “share them” amongst themselves (Calvo Buezas 1993) reprise the ultranationalist elements we saw in the previous chapter. An important difference with England is the absence in the Spanish case of anything resembling an endorsement of the “Whites only” rhetoric that we saw among the highest political circles. Blackface started in Spain and went to England and finally to America where it became famous in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From his discussion of golden age literature it seems safe to assume that Zamora knows of this practice. Fra Molinero 2009, 94. Branche 2006, 49–61. “While this was going on, the Nazis of old, who would engender today’s skinheads, worked feverishly to kick the Moriscos out, who from time immemorial, that is, for centuries, had been dedicating themselves faithfully to professions, jobs and trades that the Spaniards of pure blood hated deeply, such as gardeners, boilermakers, sandal makers, soap makers, muleteers, ironworkers, tailors, weavers, veterinarians, mattress makers, olive oil retailers, potters” (Mientras tal acontecía, los Nazis de antaño, que luego engendrarían a las cabezas rapadas de hogaño, trabajaban febrilmente por poner también de patitas en la frontera a los moriscos . . . que desde tiempo inmemorial, o sea siglos, venia dedicándose laboriosamente a tareas, profesiones y oficios que los pura sangre hispanos detestaban profundamente, como era los de hortelanos, caldereros, alpargateros, jaboneros, arrieros, herreros, sastres, tejedores, albéitares, colchoneros, revendedores de aceite, olleros” (13). See Branche (2006) for a fuller discussion of the representation of blacks in Spanish golden age literature. Also Lemuel Johnson (1971) and Miriam DeCosta (1977). See Woodson’s “Attitudes of the Iberian Peninsula (in Literature),” for example. This is particularly evident in the “Dictionary” with which the book ends and in the discussion on race and sexuality. See Parvati Nair (2008). Also Joaquim Demmer’s documentary Tarifa Traffic in this regard (2003). Ugarte reports that there were some 3,286 cadavers reported between 1997 and 2001 on both sides of the Mediterranean (2006, 174). See Mikel Azurmendi’s “Diez tesis sobre el multiculturalismo.” For contrary positions see Juan Goytisolo (2007) and Rosalia Cornejo Parriego (2007). Hereinafter referred to as Poderes. Mengue 2004, 188, 194. Ndongo, in “Guineanos y españoles,” shows how such references to literacy and per capita statistics are misleading because the latter cover over the vast differences in income between urban and rural residents and between black and white residents in Equatorial Guinea. He also points out that, notwithstanding the gains in education between 1962 and 1968, the high levels of schooling touted by the Spanish government referred mainly to children of school age and not their older parents and relatives, most of whom were barely literate (1998, 198–201). See Mengue 2004, 188, 194, for example, and Obatela and Onomo-Abena 2008, 135–136. Ndongo deliberately employs incorrect orthography of the cadre of Juventud en Marcha in this speech to highlight its demagogic and ritualistic intent and content, and the low level of literacy with which his narrator associates the group. Undoubtedly the spoiled fish that the populace is reduced to consuming, as related in the novel, is a result of the ban on fishing placed on nationals, while the Soviet Union was granted a monopoly in this area as well as a naval base

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at Luba. The health assistance from China is reflected in the quick diagnosis of malaria in Ruth, the daughter of the protagonist, by a Chinese stranger on the bus trip in Rio Muni. The novel notes the increased imports of consumer items from this source as well. See Sundiata 1990, 73. 46. Ugarte makes this connection in “Spain’s Heart of Darkness: Equatorial Guinea in the Narrative of Donato Ndongo.” 47. The relevant chapter deals with “The Fact of Blackness” and of blacks’ experiencing being “through others,” 109. 48. He withdrew from the PP in 2006, thanking his erstwhile comrade for having kept his affiliation secret (Obatela and Onomo-Abena 2008, 76).

5

Marcando Territorio (Marking Territory) Location as Project and Process in Colombia

Entramos negros y salimos afrodescendientes. Jorge Romero Rodríguez (Afro-Uruguayan delegate at Durban, 2001) Tenemos nosotros como dueños de acá, que pararnos en la raya. Female fishmonger and resident, Buenaventura, 2013

In an album titled Man in the Hills, and on the track of the same name, reggae musician Burning Spear makes an intriguing proposition: “And if we should live up in the hills? . . .” For a recording artist in the contemporary global marketplace, the theme of withdrawal from modern, urban life to the presumptive peace of rural existence is nothing new. It stands, arguably, at the heart of the Western lyrical episteme, particularly if we consider the Beatus Ille of Rome’s Horace of two millennia ago, which celebrates the happiness of self-sustaining family life in the countryside, and the relevance of the theme as it was famously reinscribed into Spanish Renaissance poetry by Garcilaso de la Vega and Fray Luis de Leon. For Burning Spear, however (the pseudonym is in honor of Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu pan-Africanist), the idyllic picture of a nuclear family on the margins of consumer society, living according to traditional values of hard work, affection, and mutually accepting age and gender roles, with the sounds of birds and animals in the background, hails from a different source. As an exemplar of Rastafarian roots music, his Man in the Hills is best understood and appreciated from the standpoint of what critics of coloniality have referred to as “the colonial difference,” in that it epitomizes a site of enunciation in which the historical legacy of maroonage and recuperation from the social death of slavery for diasporan blacks resonates not only within his native Jamaica, but acquires its fullest meaning when considered in terms of its larger translocal and transnational or outernational field of reference. Accordingly, there is more than mere linguistic coincidence in the fact that the hills, or the bush, for the Anglophone Caribbean, is rendered by its dictionary cognate as el monte

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in Cuba, or alternatively as la manigua, according to Afro-Cuban Arsenio Rodriguez’s famous and soulful 1930s composition, “Bruca manigua,” which also “remembers” the days of slavery as Spear exhorts in another recording, and which locates the pursuit of material and spiritual freedom in the wilderness, that is, outside the borders of the modern postcolonial state.1 All of these signifiers (the hills, el monte, la manigua) speak of a space of refuge and reconstruction for fugitives from slavery within Afro-diasporan structures of memory. Man in the Hills (1976) not only articulates an old Afro-creole yearning. Its subtext also invites us to contemplate contemporary postcolonial Jamaica, and the Caribbean by extension, as sites of stark social inequality, political corruption, and economic insecurity in which the marketed image of the tourist paradise is exploded by the testimonial truths of its artists, some of whom would ponder, as in the present case, the possibilities of withdrawal to life “in the hills.”2 Expanding this diasporan episteme to include Colombia’s Afro-descendant communities is suggestive, particularly as it pertains to the communities of the Pacific river basin, where historically the unfree, in contrast to the usual agro-industrial paradigm associated with the Atlantic, were mainly deployed in gold mining, and their descendants, whether enslaved, fugitive, or emancipated, progressively populated the vast network of hinterland waterways. The Colombian Pacific provides a larger basis from which to consider the dynamic of comparative cultural (re)adjustment in the diaspora, and the challenges involved in forging an alternative life world that while in the West, was manifestly not of the West. Again, it is no coincidence that the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), the main organization that emerged over the past two and a half decades to coordinate the defense of the rights of Colombia’s displaced and endangered black communities, has chosen the historically significant term palenque (maroon village) to identify and demarcate the ancestrally inhabited spaces to which they have recently been forced to lay formal claim in order to symbolize and anchor their political identity and to articulate their quest for alterity, that is, for “life, happiness, and freedom” (“vida, alegria, libertad,” Escobar 2008, 378).3 In referring to Colombian Afro-Pacific settlement as a “place of great exploits” (“escenario de gesta”), whose beginnings date back to the early 1700s and before, anthropologist William Villa sees this understudied and underappreciated history in terms that border on the epic (1998, 435). Along with other scholars, he stresses the increasing familiarization and accommodation of the formerly enslaved with and to the jungle environment over time, their recuperation of collective labor practices, and their extended family dynamics, along with their folkways and oral traditions, and emphasizes their ecological sensibilities and their nonexploitative approach to nature. This outlook stands in marked contrast to that of the recent array of national and multinational corporate interlopers in the region. The latter, in the name of progress and industrialization, and too often with the collusion of the state, pursue the production of shrimp, African palm, coca leaf for the drug

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trade, and timber and gold in the area’s inlets, swamps, rivers, and forests, with effects that are as deleterious to the ever-more-displaced populations as they are on the ecosystem (William Villa (1998), Arturo Escobar (2008), Dorinda Hernández (2012)). The grim reality of hundreds of thousands of displaced people or desplazados, forcibly uprooted from their homelands or ill equipped culturally for survival in Colombia’s large cities constitutes a human rights crisis of prime importance, one that has scarcely gotten the international attention it merits.4 The subjection of the zone, particularly since the mid-1990s, to the tyranny of capitalist expansionism, with the attendant degradation of the landscape and the pollution of the rivers, represents not only a brutal and possibly irreversible imposition of the coloniality of nature and power, as Arturo Escobar suggests, but also of knowledge, through its threat to eliminate a self-sustaining noncapitalist way of life that has survived for centuries in harmony with the environment. The degree to which these lands’ biodiversity might be preserved or restored, and the danger to the lives and livelihood of their inhabitants averted through the joint action of local and international agents, will speak as much to the national context as it will to the larger global one, both now and in the future. There is much importance, particularly for our purposes, in noting the role of traditional oral discursivity among the black Pacific communities as the vehicle for collective memory and as identitarian instrument. Similar to the First Time narratives of the Saramaka of Surinam, to which I have referred as a hypothetical Afro-diasporan New World Ur-text, Afro-Pacific narratives span the historical experiences of enslavement, of escape, of settlement of new territories, and of intercourse with indigenous communities. More recently, they speak of chainsaws, of chemical pollutants, of mechanical dredges, and of the armed incursionists who represent Colombia’s entrepreneurial elites and the interests of transnationals in Europe and the United States. Their stories also record their journeys up and downriver, as they meet and mobilize for self-defense and negotiate, not only with the state, but also with these other actors, the right-wing paramilitary groups, or the purportedly left-wing FARC or Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, who have caught them in a cruel historical crossfire. It is the oral source, again, from which the term that collectively identifies them by the ethnonym renacientes (the reborn ones) derives. Carlos Rosero of Buenaventura, another cofounder of the PCN and an anthropologist by training, recalls his own process of racial becoming as community elders shared with him the inherited episteme of collective selfhood, communicated through the rich polysemy of images embedded in the term, which establishes the vibrancy of the nonscribal and the quality of their alterity as a people. Renacientes is a plurisemic signifier that captures within it both the sense of source and space—Africa and the Americas—and of rupture and renewal. It signals the survivalism that has characterized the larger Afro-diasporan collective in its synchronic and diachronic interaction with a Euro-centered modernity.5 As indicated, its discovery helped ground the future leader in terms of racial

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blackness as a process of becoming and of activism.6 Against the racialized terror of the slavery regimen that inspired a renaciente mythological archive in which, as reported to Rosero, individuals “knew” how to make themselves invisible, to walk under water, or to take on nonhuman guises (2012, 160), or a contemporary scenario in which the specter of secondclass citizenship, police brutality, and mass incarceration haunts many black communities, Afro-Pacific displacement and all it connotes takes its place in the “genocidal continuum” (Costa Vargas 2008) that frames much of Afrodiasporan life in the Americas. In reading the two primary novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella, Chambacú, corral de negros (1963) and Changó el gran putas (1983), this chapter will focus on the theme of the vindication of the Afro-Colombian and black outernational collective in terms of its historic right to social inclusion and to full and equal citizenship in both its national and hemispheric contexts, that is, by way of a multilateral “marking” of these territories through narrative and performance. It is also interested in the writer’s coming to the consciousness of race, and what this means for his didactic transformative project against the backdrop of a hegemonic Euro-centered literary and academic canon and culture. The discussion is also interested in the current project Marcando Territorio (Marking Territory), by a group of young rappers in Buenaventura, which gives the chapter its title. Marcando Territorio uses the medium of hip-hop to, among other things, bring attention to and contest the crisis of displacement faced by the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods. Given the historic importance of Colombia’s Ley 70, by which the state in 1993 recognized the right to collective title for lands ancestrally occupied by black communities, the plight brought to light by these youths, as we will see, reveals a particularly stark contradiction between the lived reality of the region’s populations and the state’s obligations and promises as regards their protection and their material well-being. The juxtaposition of the crisis at Chambacú Island at Cartagena on the Atlantic Coast in the 1950s that Zapata Olivella’s novel explores, with that of the contemporary Buenaventura (island) community on the Pacific coast, denounced by Marcando Territorio in 2010 in “Que sientan miedo” (“Let them Feel Fear”), not only highlights the ongoing predicament that has characterized life for too many Afro-Colombians. It also presents an opportunity to assess two modes of black cultural discursivity, the written and the oral, which are at once contrasting and complementary, but which together constitute what I call a narrative of location because of their tenor of resistance and assertiveness, as they assume a place in and contribute to the larger national and diasporan archive. The value of Manuel Zapata Olivella’s work, which started in the 1940s and continued almost to his death at eighty-four years old in 2004, and which is an ongoing reflection on race, the self, and Colombian society, is enhanced by the fact that the writer’s concerns with the fragmented and highly hierarchized nation came decades before the unprecedented wave of

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constitutional reforms in Latin American states and their adoption of public policies of multiculturalism and pluri-ethnicity. In Colombia’s turn to multiculturalism, the Afro-descendant population(s), for the first time ever in the nation’s history, if we set aside their formal emancipation from slavery in 1851, acquired the kind of legal subjectivity that is evinced in their recognition by and their attention from the state, and their incorporation into its bureaucratized logic. But even this unprecedented move showed the enormity of the issue at hand in that it radically undercounted the Afrodescendant population. An initial estimate in 1993 of 502,343 individuals, or 1.5 percent, was upgraded under protest from the black leadership. They cited statist ignorance, deliberate invisibilization, as well as denial of blackness within the Afro-Colombian population, as the reasons for the low total, and a new census by the National Department of Statistics in 2005 produced an estimate of 4,354,180, or 10.5 percent.7 The new focus on Afro-descendants was extended to include a program of affirmative action, which in its various articulations between 1997 and 2004 has aimed at alleviating the conditions faced by the broad spectrum of black Colombians, but with particular emphasis on the poor and marginalized urban dwellers, and the growing population of displaced ones. The Plan Integral de Largo Plazo or Long Term Integral Plan, introduced in 2000, shares this general objective, as both are based on a generalized sense of blackness as an “at risk” component of the national polity because they are the group that generally shows the highest levels of poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality, and other indices of crisis (Grueso Castelblanco 2007). Central to the process of governmental uplift has been a sort of “ethnic” categorization of blacks under the auspices of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. The exercise in “ethnicization” has distinguished the black communities of the Pacific Basin from the Afro-Colombians of the offshore Caribbean islands, now called raizales,8 from those who live in the former palenques or maroon villages, now called palenqueros, and from those Afro-Colombians resident in Bogotá and other large urban centers. Indeed, it was on the ethnic premise of a common cultural legacy that the right to autonomy and collective title was conceded to the Pacific communities under the Ley 70 of 1993, as indicated earlier. In the area of culture, a Día Nacional de la Afrocolombianidad, or a National Afro-Colombian Day was introduced in 2001 to mark the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Colombia and to recuperate and celebrate the many aspects of the African cultural heritage. It is in the latter context that an impressive collection of eighteen volumes of prose, poetry, and essays, the Biblioteca de Literatura Afrocolombiana or Afro-Colombian Literary Collection, was produced in 2010, again, to celebrate two hundred years of the independence initiative. The collection was preceded in 2009 by a year-long celebration of the memory and legacy of nineteenth-century black poet Candelario Obeso and his twentieth-century successor Jorge Artel, and dubbed the Año Obeso-Artel.9 The introduction to the Biblioteca by the

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minister of culture was unambiguous as to its projected purpose within the official policy of Colombian diversidad, or diversity. Within a rhetoric of culture of everyone (Cultura de Todos) and culture for everyone (Cultura para Todos), conceived as intrinsic to a sustainable model of social and economic development, the collection, in the minister’s words, seeks to “create an archive within the nation’s cultural heritage by collecting, preserving and disseminating Afro-themed literature” (“constituirse en un acervo del patrimonio cultural del país al reunir, preservar y difundir la litratura de temática negra,” Moreno Zapata, 2010, 18). Manuel Zapata Olivella’s prominent place in the Biblioteca de Literatura Afrocolombiana signals at once his considerable literary output, his international reputation, and his overly delayed recognition at home. Multiculturalism, however, has avoided a confrontation with racism as a structure of power and privilege in Colombia, as many studies point out.10 Bearing in mind the supposed barbarism and illiteracy that justified the invisibilization of Colombian blacks in the nationalist narrative of the nineteenth century,11 and the purported rupture with a history of marginalization for black writers that the creation of the Biblioteca implies, the question arises as to how much real liberation might be found in the ethnicization and bureaucratization of blackness under the plurimulti premise. To what extent might not literature, as an expression of a “black” aesthetic, notwithstanding its noteworthy countercultural elements, become depoliticized and folklorized in much the same way that traditional Afro-cultural forms of song, dance, cuisine, and sports have been under statist intervention? Miguel Antonio Cruz González’s analysis of the nineteenth-century precedent argues that Emancipation often boiled down to nothing more than a ceremonial donning of the Liberty Cap on the heads of the formerly enslaved without significantly impacting their condition at the bottom of the inherited colonial caste system, while at the same time affirming the supposed philanthropy of their former masters under the Enlightenment pretensions of the new republic. This observation leads us to believe that statist performance under the contemporary rubric of inclusive democracy, in showcasing and celebrating black letters, might in similar fashion simultaneously encase or immobilize it also, without necessarily opening it as a field of free and unfettered creative discourse. The suggestion that a government-sponsored black collection might do less for the creativity of Afro-Colombian writers, and more for the state in terms of its own validation, is relevant, particularly given the potential of the state apparatus for cooptation of the newly created pockets of ethnic possibility, as black leaders have been brought into the country’s traditional politics of clientelism, as some studies have noted.12 Studying the early work of Manuel Zapata Olivella alongside Marcando Territorio shows the difficulties associated with racial becoming as a process of growing political awareness for the writer, within the context of Colombia’s Eurocentric postcolonial materiality, and offers a gauge of the demagogic content of the multicultural turn.

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CHAMBACÚ (CORRAL DE NEGROS): ON IDENTITY, INCLUSION, AND OBLIVION In an October 2000 interview, Manuel Zapata Olivella, in the face of his interlocutor’s insistence on employing the term negro to refer to Latin Americans of African descent after he had pointedly alluded to its racist content, its origin in the slave trade, and its use as a(n) (alienating) signifier in the coloniality of knowledge, was forced to repeat himself: “we have already stated that we are not negros . . . but Africans (“ya hemos dicho que no somos negros . . . sino . . . africanos”).13 The writer’s interjection here is significant. This is so particularly in the context of the decades-long efforts in the United States to evacuate the label of its negative connotations, beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’ work to capitalize the N in “negro” in the 1920s, through civil rights and post–civil rights era cognates like Afro-American and African-American, of which Zapata Olivella was aware, and the subsequent post-Durban consensus in Latin American Afro-activism that resulted in the replacement of negro by afrodescendiente in much of activist vernacular and many official publications. He expressed a similar sentiment on another occasion, this time with reference to the subtitle to the novel, “corral de negros,” or “black slum,” in a conversation with William Mina, in which he stated that he would change the label negro for afro-colombiano or afro-americano “not only in this novel, but in everything I have written” (“no solo en esta novela, sino en todo lo que he escrito” (2006, 223). In the earlier Krakusin interview, Zapata Olivella also imported the Afro-Cuban term ekobio, on account of its connotation with resistance, to use as a general equivalent to afrodescendiente. In his usage, ekobio would have a transracial application as well, so as to include freedom fighters like white abolitionist John Brown of the United States or Pedro Claver, the seventeenth-century Catholic missionary noted for his humanitarian work amongst new African captives on their arrival at Cartagena (20). Zapata Olivella’s admission of his early use of the derogatory term negro in his professional vocabulary as a writer is important. So too is his subsequent disavowal of the label. It speaks to his intellectual honesty as a (post) colonial subject vis-à-vis the alienating prism that was the source of the epistemic distortion effected under the colonial regimen, and to his evolution toward a more stable sense of racial selfhood. Although his assumption of both his blackness and his tri-ethnicity, particularly on the basis of his autobiographical text Levántate mulato, has been highlighted (Prescott 2007), his journey toward these states of understanding of the racialized self, and the degree to which the process of evolution and self-examination impacted and is reflected in his work, may yet shed light on the novels in question and help us understand them better. One finds in his early travelogues, Pasión vagabunda (Wanderlust) and He visto la noche (I’ve Seen the Night), based on his wanderings through Colombia, Central America, and the United States between 1943 and 1947, important instances of ambivalence and

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doubt, and of inspiration and affirmation, as he confronts the colonial system of race naming and attempts to situate himself in relation to the hegemony of whiteness and the place to which he was assigned in the racial taxonomy of the New World. His introspection and the comments derived therefrom show us differing situational responses to blackness both as a social condition and as presumed essence on the part of a speaking subject who is self-consciously in search of a (recuperative) “black” identity, but who often proceeds from a Euro-oriented intellectual and academic point of departure. In the former regard, it is noteworthy that when he leaves the port city of Buenaventura for a twenty-four-hour speedboat trip into the heart of the Chocó region where, as he observes later, the blacks were “yaws-ridden, pneumatic, and afflicted with malaria and parasites” (“pianosos, neumáticos palúdicos y parasitados,” 60), it is the prism of (heroic) Euro-agency through which he sees his actions. Accordingly, he describes his mission as one of “patience and self-denial” (“paciencia y abnegación,” 60). The trip to Nuquí would provide an opportunity for him to engage in a task comparable to that of the legendary Dr. David Livingstone in the interior of the African continent, he surmises, as he would be an “apostle for those sick Negroes, beaten down by inclemency and neglect” (“apóstol de aquellos negros enfermos, abatidos por la inclemencia y el abandono,” 60). Here, although undoubtedly well meaning, the comparison with the nineteenthcentury British physician, explorer, and missionary would seem to be much too evocative of imperial incursion in Africa and of the White Man’s Burden to be without meaning. Similarly, his constant references to Panait Istrati, Bolshevik adventurer and writer, and to Jack London, Bohemian activist and writer from the United States, as he later defies the jungle and his own physical limitations as a penniless but determined wanderer, speak more to a sometimes unquestioning infatuation with a white dominant narrative and an iconography that would substitute the local experience and culture with what was purportedly universal, in its articulation of humanity’s confrontation with nature and with society and the political. At Puerto Tejada, early in his trip, Zapata Olivella had further declared his intention to vindicate the downtrodden black collective by erecting appropriate monuments to such black icons as Candelario Obeso, Washington Carver, and Joe Louis, and to “seek out black people wherever [he] went” (“buscaré a los negros dondequiera que vaya,” 52). His quest for blackness, however, seen in terms of cultural performance or bodily somatics, turns out to be more of a challenge than the narrator anticipated, and on more than one occasion produces a curious “othering” of the black people whom he meets. While yet in Puerto Tejada he is struck by the, to him, “unequalled” (“no tenía igual,” 51) pigmentation of the residents, and “seemed to be seeing the same person everywhere” (“Me pareció ver a la misma persona en todas partes,” 51). And at Buenaventura he encounters an additional frustration as he realizes that he was wrong in his assumption that, being black, he too could naturally do the regional curralao dance: “I tried to lose

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myself among the brothers and sisters,” he reports, “but my feet could not follow the seemingly easy rhythm of the dancers. Many of them laughed at my stubborness” (“Traté de confundirme con aquellos hermanos, pero mis pies no podían trazar el ritmo, en apariencia fácil, de los bailadores. Mucho de ellos se reían de mi testarudez,” 58). The strange sense of belonging but not belonging returns at Ciudad Juárez. There he spends a sleepless night in, this time distanced, admiration of a group of African-Americans, carriers of what he deems to be authentic blackness, on account of culture and the somatic factor, as he recalls their air of “sensuality and sentimentalism” (“sensualidad y sentimentalismo”) and their apparently inherent happiness and joie de vivre as they hung out at a local bar. The association of culture and performance and dark pigment and physical fortitude with “real blackness” that he makes here (“I was in the presence of pure and robust Negroes”/ “Estaba en presencia de negros puros y robustos,” 17) further suggests a sense of a dislocated “othering,” and is reminiscent of the admiration and desire for Afro-derived subjectivity displayed by the white primitivists of the Modernism of earlier decades, in the Harlem that he was keen to visit.14 Zapata Olivella’s empathy with blackness as a social condition, albeit framed by the white heroic prism, and his sense of lack at a manifest cultural incompetence or the pigmentation associated with what he regards as “true blackness,” would seem to make him the opposite side of the colonial coin of raciality that propels aspirants to whiteness to be what Homi Bhabha famously dubbed as almost white, “but not quite.”15 As an “almost black” individual, and in the face of his difficulties with “passing,” as the currulao incident suggests, the self-proclaimed wanderer would nonetheless dispense with the superficialities of pigmentation and culture (language, in this case) when the realities of hunger on the road left no room for “brotherly” love or racial solidarity. In Mexico City he would distort the truth of his national origin and genealogy by claiming to be from Vera Cruz, and pointedly nudge a competing Afro-Cuban aside as he vied for a position that required a “black Cuban” (“negrito cubano,” 193). When the Cuban declares, as had the putative employer before him, that Zapata Olivella in his eyes was mulato and not negro, the writer was unequivocal in his response. “No, my friend,” he stated, [I’m] “pure black, almost African,” (“No amigo, [soy] negro puro, casi africano,” 199). In the United States, where the mulato/ negro dichotomy largely lost relevance on account of the black/white polarity of the one-drop rule, his credentials as an advanced medical student and his relative privilege as middle class Latin American mulato would both become unimportant as the dictates of Jim Crow segregation asserted themselves. Repeated exposure to penury, to the unemployment and homelessness of blacks as well as Latinos in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York help him to see a bigger picture of poverty in the hemisphere and to acquire a deeper appreciation for the conflation of race and social disadvantage. Not surprisingly perhaps, it is a concert performance in Harlem by Marion

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Anderson, and the inspiring conversations on politics and literature in which he participated at the home of Langston Hughes, the renowned Harlem Renaissance poet, that triggered his climactic decision to use his pen in the struggle against racial and social oppression. Within earshot of the applause that greeted the performance by Anderson, whose work for racial justice he also admired greatly, and who seemed to channel his own desire for what he called the “redemption” of black people (Pasión vagabunda, 52), he would review in his mind’s eye the geography of poverty that he had traversed over the preceding three and a half years and swear an oath to write in their defense. Even here, though, as he assimilates into the “nosotros” (we) of the multiracial multitude of the poor that he conjures up, one notes the “supplicant hands” (“manos suplicantes,” 102) and “inexpressive eyes” (“ojos inexpresivos,” 102) that his imagination attributes to them, and the melodramatic gesture of acquiescence on his part as he responds, as man of letters and putative race redeemer. Zapata Olivella’s Chambacú, corral de negros is undoubtedly informed by his travels and the associated experiences in racial and political consciousness raising. By the latter ’50s he had visited Communist China and written an extended essay on that country extolling the virtues of the political system he found there.16 The ensuing socio-racial paradigm of vindication would frame his narrative in Chambacú. The metaphor contained in his subtitle, notwithstanding his disavowal of the term negro, then, is pertinent on many levels. The colonial usage and application of the label, discussed earlier, is articulated literarily in his depiction of Afro-Colombians and their treatment in the marginal/ized space of the island off the coast at Cartagena. While the description of the settlement as a corral invokes images of animal husbandry, and of a place into which livestock are herded as they await sale, usage, or consumption, it also links the islanders’ availability as a less-than-human labor resource to the sense of restriction and distancing implied in their offshore location. Black Colombians’ prior nonstatus as slaves, their unpaid labor, their deployment as cannon fodder in the war of independence, and their neglect under the republic all contribute to making Chambacú an effective twentieth-century metaphor of the colonial past and a statement on how little positive change has come about since then. In the novel the emphasis of the military recruiters under Captain Quirós on rounding up “strong men” (“hombres fornidos,” 82) is as clear as any reference to the slave raid and the transatlantic trade in black bodies. And while the captain’s orders to get those who allegedly protested against the war “dead or alive” (“vivos o muertos,” 33) extends the trope of capture and objectification, it is also a statement on the logophobia of the state and its paranoia over the use of graffiti by the purportedly illiterate Chambacú residents as they protest in the novel against the regime’s public policy and its foreign policy. In Zapata Olivella’s narrative, his antislavery and anticolonial trajectory thus merges with his postcolonial demand, on their behalf, for the right of protest against Colombia’s participation in America’s

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anticommunist war in Korea. The novel simultaneously combines a material claim for Chambaculeros to stand their ground on the island, as the counterdiscourse of their spokesperson, the writer, pushes back against the exclusionary contemporary white/mestizo nationhood and establishes an epistemic claim or a right to signify within this national context. For him and for them, Chambacú is a territory to which its residents are morally entitled by dint of their efforts to convert the unstable mangrove swampland into a functional community, against the repeated efforts of the municipality to dislodge them on its own spurious and opportunistic pretexts. It is also a vindication of their rights, under the terms of their residency in a Western democracy, to their recognition as existing within the space of the nation and hence deserving of the quality of attention in terms of social services and amenities appropriate to their status as citizens. This would, in turn, rescue them from the risks inherent to the unstable and insalubrious offshore ecology, and amount to a reversal of the animalized status of the island as a “corral.” Instead, as discussed later, they would eventually be removed as causing an eyesore to Cartagena, a city desirous of constructing an image of decency and development befitting its self-projection as tourist mecca for the nation. Captain Quirós’ hunt for communist “agitators” (“agitadores,” Chambacú, 34) is congruent with the local and foreign policy of Colombia’s conservative regime under President Laureano Gómez (1950–1953). Indeed, Colombia was the only Latin American country to send a battalion to the battlefront as part of the US-backed UN war against North Korea. Other Latin American states offered such strategic metals to the war effort as copper, manganese, and nickel, or frigates, air bases, or money. The concern by the government to take advantage of its bilateral arrangement with the United States in order to simultaneously escalate its own offensive against communist guerillas at home even went to the extreme of requesting Napalm from the Americans as part of the deal. The 1950s Chambacú of which Zapata Olivella wrote, from which its young men were so unceremoniously harvested, shows all the depressing signs of the official abandonment and disdain to which the community had been subjected. By the mid-1950s, and after laborious decades of solidifying Chambacú’s soggy surface and filling in the channels between the contiguous islets that constituted the township with sand, rice husk, cement, and refuse, the population was approaching nine thousand in number. Predictably, perhaps, it was plagued by poverty, illiteracy, and a plethora of tropical maladies that included gastroenteritis, pneumonia, measles, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malnutrition, and syphilis, all of which justifies the comment by one of the novel’s characters that Chambacú was a “place of death” (“tierra de muerte,” 55). To be sure, most of its residents lived in one-room shacks of wood, tin, and cardboard and enjoyed only precarious and underpaid employment. In the family around which the story revolves, Cotena, the mother, took in washing, and Clotilde, her daughter, was also a domestic, fallen, in her case,

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to the unhappy colonial paradigm of sexual involvement with the (white) employer, who is conspicuously absent as she raises her mixed-race son, Dominguito, in the household of her own family. Of the four brothers, Críspulo was a shoeshine and a cockfighter, “Medialuna” a malnourished athlete, Máximo a sometime porter and watchman, and José Raquel a stevedore who lived in fear that his dealings with contraband might come to the notice of the proper authorities. The most glaring example, perhaps, of their hapless livelihood is to be seen in the failure of “Medialuna,” the professional boxer, whose defeat and subsequent mental instability is as much a result of his own hunger and dehydration as it is of his opponents’ skill in the ring. His brother Críspulo’s prize gamecocks are also “knocked out” and killed as hunger causes them to cramp up in the cockfighting circle. It is this unsustainable life world, with its genocidal contours, that provokes Máximo’s rebelliousness and his ultimate martyrdom. It is noteworthy that Zapata Olivella’s Máximo, as an intellectual and activist within a largely unlettered socio-ethnic environment, does not differ greatly from the profile of the artist himself as a young man. Even before his visit to China in 1952, Zapata Olivella, as he finished his studies in medicine on his return from the United States, had become involved in the Communist Youth Movement, in student protests, and in organized labor to the degree that in the tumultuous political climate of 1948 Colombia, he knew that his activities were putting his life at risk and thought it better to leave Bogotá and seek refuge in a small town on the Venezuelan border (Levántate Mulato, 286–288; Prescott, “Brother to Brother”). His own arrest and imprisonment under the dictatorial Laureano Gómez government on his return from China17 is not unlikely the biographic source for Máximo’s multiple arrests and torture at the hands of the police. The same may be said regarding the Marxist rhetorical frame of the protagonist’s public speeches and his activist drive. For the organizer and leader of the Chambacú’s Comité de Defensa (Defense Committee), the squatters on the overcrowded island had hard-earned “rights of possession” (“derechos de ocupación,” 57), for having painstakingly, and unaided by the municipal authorities or central government, converted a wasteland into a habitable space. From this standpoint, not holding legal title to the land was for them irrelevant. The underlying question regarding territoriality and the law emerges, therefore, as an important one. Because the idea of territoriality extends beyond the particular physical space in question and also involves social and economic relations, quotidian and cyclical community practices, and lived culture, its historically constructed nature points to its innate contestability and, in the final analysis, to the matter of who holds and can exercise determinative power over a given locality (Buitrago Villamizar, 2006). That Chambacú’s “ownership” could be traced back to one of Colombia’s nineteenth-century presidents, from whom it would pass successively on to members of the Cartagena elite, raises the question as to the original manner of acquisition and (en)title(ment) over an uninhabited and

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fragmentary space whose only apparent users had theretofore been groups of the previously enslaved for their religious rituals (Deávila Portuz, 2008). Chambacú’s contemporary inhabitants, many of whom had relocated over time from similarly impoverished sites, in their challenge to dominant legal precepts regarding ownership simultaneously assert their general citizenship rights to land and housing, as well as their specific rights to occupation through land reclamation, albeit from a position of weakness in a markedly asymmetrical relationship of power vis-à-vis Cartagena’s political and financial elites. Maximo’s public declamation against the police as they return to dislodge the settlers is clear to its antiaristocratic purpose and to the statist power structure that the officers represent. It is they, instead of the homeless and dispossessed squatters, who, in his estimation, are breaking the law: “We will defend ourselves” (“Nos defenderemos,” 184), he says. “The police are guilty of an atrocity. They are following the orders of those who claim to be the owners of this island. Not even the State has rights on the land upon which we stand. They well know that underneath this surface of rice husk and sawdust, there is only black people’s sweat. We did not come here on our own accord. We have been thrown out from everywhere else and now they want to take away the pit we have built for our bad death.” La policía comete un atropello. Cumplen órdenes de los que se dicen amos de esta isla. Ni siquiera la nación tiene derecho sobre la tierra que pisamos. Bien saben que bajo este basamento de cáscaras de arroz y aserrín, solo hay sudor de negros. No hemos venido acá por nuestra propia voluntad. Nos han echado de todas partes y ahora quieren arrebatarnos la fosa que hemos construido para mal morir. (184) Similarly, China, and quite possibly the new socialist revolution in Cuba, frame his appeal to human rights, the obligations of the state, and the sense of a legitimate defense as his oration continues: Enough! We will resist. Each hovel will be a trench. Each stick a weapon. Each child a reason to fight. We will go beyond resistance. We will demand justice. We will demand everything they have taken from us. The plan to throw us out of these hovels we call home instead of giving us the things we are denied: jobs, bread, education, health. We will organize a march on the city to claim our rights. Basta. Resistiremos. Cada rancho sera una trinchera. Cada palo un arma. Cada hijo una razón de lucha. Iremos más allá de la resistencia. Exigiremos justicia. Reclamaremos cuanto nos han quitado. Pretenden arrojarnos de estas casuchas que llamamos hogar en vez de darnos lo que nos niegan: trabajo, pan, educación, salud. Organizaremos una marcha sobre la ciudad para reclamar nuestros derechos! (185)

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If Zapata Olivella’s Marxist leanings are what are behind Máximo’s class-based public discourse and analysis, the writer’s incorporation of the class struggle may be seen as only one register of the book’s broader invocation of capitalism and slavery as the referential base of his demand for social justice. As a primary slave port during the colonial period, Cartagena had been the landing and distribution point for hundreds of thousands of captive Africans over the centuries. Much of the colonies’ expropriated wealth also left for Spain from its harbor. In this regard, it is significant that by 1586, a mere half century after its establishment, the city had already suffered three major attacks by interlopers, creating the necessity of constructing battlements and a wall for its defense. The massive wall and associated fortresses would eventually take more than two hundred years to complete, and cost the lives of countless enslaved blacks in its erection. Zapata Olivella would refer to Afro-Cartagenian oral tradition in evoking this history, to the belief that there was “a slave buried under every rock” of the wall,18 and that the souls of the enslaved had been stolen by their Spanish enslavers to make them numb to hunger and fatigue. At the premature death of the enslaved, according to local lore, their ghosts would be condemned to wail and wander across the ages, noisily dragging their chains behind them, until freed by the liberationist action of their descendants. The myth of zombification, discussed by Jean Casimir in relation to the history of slavery in Haiti, highlights the extreme alienation of the system of forced labor.19 It also accentuates the importance of Cartagena’s city walls as a material and symbolic inheritance for the slave descendants, and connects it to the question of recuperative justice and social change with which the novel is concerned. In this view, the contemporary attempts by the city’s elite to dislodge the residents of Chambacú and similar “black slums” in order to advance their plans for tourism and industrial development constitute a double dismissal. First, they reify the objectified status of the enslaved by ignoring their historical input, and second, they perpetuate this historical injury into the postcolonial present by banishing their descendants from the imagined community that would host the foreign tourists and benefit financially from their presence. Cartagena had been brought into the Caribbean cruise ship tourist circuit since the 1930s. The construction of the Hotel Caribe in 1946 and the establishment of the tourist casino accompanied plans for urban renewal for which the renovation of the centro histórico or historical center of the city played a major part. Integral to tourism’s racialized projection was the notion that Cartagena’s oldest and most infamous shantytown, at a mere one hundred meters distance from the city walls, was inimical to the image and trajectory of a tourist center, on account of its inhabitants and what they represented. The material efforts to dislodge the residents, described in the novel, were accompanied historically by a media campaign to discredit them. The ensuing discourse brought into evidence old racist stereotypes about black criminality and drug use, depravity and disease,

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and promiscuous sexuality, and even included a suggestion that a new wall be built that might shield the eyes of the tourists and the respectable citizens from the sight of the township. In the words of a young politician of the Conservative Party, the island had become; “an affront to hygiene, to morality, to the law, to aesthetics, and to civilization, it (Chambacú) is a horrible word that smells of misery, that connotes subhuman life, (and) that invokes criminality” (“Un desafío a la higiene, a la moral, a la ley, a la estética y a la civilización, es una palabra horrenda que huele a miseria que implica vida infrahumana, que suscita delincuencia,” Deávila Portuz 2008, 98). Male Chambaculeros in the prime of their youth and vigor were apparently good enough to sacrifice their lives for the nation in a foreign war, as the novel highlights. They were not good enough, it would seem, to live out their lives on their precarious perch on the nation’s seashore. In 1969, two years before the final relocations were effected, Cartagena’s mayor, Álvaro de Zubería, would announce the creation of a special government fund, in the sum of 25.5 million Colombian pesos, endorsed by the president of the Republic and to be managed through the Institute of Land Credit (Instituto de Crédito Territorial). This money would go toward the urban renewal plans mentioned earlier, with particular emphasis on the disappearance of the township, on the restoration of the historical center of the city, and on finishing Santander Avenue, a main artery. Two decades later, at the beginning of a febrile new process of real estate speculation, housing development, and the construction of luxury hotels and apartment and shopping complexes in Cartagena that would eventually involve the dislodgement of several other barrios of mainly poor blacks, the island would be sold to a private group in a process that was notorious for the fiscal irregularities involved (Alfredo Milano Bravo). Evidence of the complicated nature of the affair is to be seen in the fact that there exists at the moment only one office building on Chambacú, along with a decaying public park called Parque Espíritu del Manglar (Spirit of the Swamp Park). The building, curiously named the Edificio Inteligente (Intelligent Building), stands as a reminder of the putative investment in modernization, while the homeless and squatters slowly filter in as before on the surrounding premises. Given the trenchant moral condemnation of the island and its population by the political class and local media, it is noteworthy that, notwithstanding his defense of the Chambaculeros’ civil rights, Zapata Olivella is not impervious to the racist rhetoric that sought to invalidate their occupation of the island, and does not, it would seem, escape its powerful influence. The book, in fact, even taking into account its counterdiscursive intentionality, often reveals moral and philosophical distinctions in which race turns out to be a crucial vector and the racially inflected values of the dominant culture retain their standing as normative. Máximo’s heroism, his modesty, self-sacrifice, moral restraint, and intellectual and political cultivation are all easily recognizable for their symbolic value in establishing the contrast with his antagonist José Raquel. The brother’s theft, moral corruption,

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venality, drug and alcohol abuse, and abandonment of his wife to cavort with the local prostitutes complete the counterpoint, which ends in the dramatic murder of the former by the latter. There is a troubling element in Zapata Olivella’s depiction of his hero, however, that merits a second look. While the narrative is at pains to establish that the hero is endowed with the “natural” physical strength of his African forebears,20 one wonders if the intellectual and ideological fortitude that so distinguishes him from his siblings is not linked to what his mother and sister-in-law perceive as his “mestizo” ancestry (38, 174), and subscribes to the old colonial rhetorical formula that excellence in “mulattoness” is the product of the European (or non-African) fraction of miscegenated subjectivity. The binary opposition implied here and elsewhere in the narrative suggests that it is. The hero’s skepticism regarding the community’s religious beliefs and inherited medicinal practices leads us to infer that his passion for social change involves a departure from the barbarous ways of the African past, which are incompatible with the civilizational trajectory implied by his book learning and general intellectuality. Máximo seems impatient at his community’s apparent belief that liberation will come “miraculously” (“por el milagro,” 193), instead of through organized mobilization and unified action, and laments their “rustic customs” (“costumbres rústicas,” 160), as the fruit of a “long and fearful night of superstition . . . brought on the shoulders of their ancestors” (“noche larga y tenebrosa de supersticiones transportada en los hombros de sus antepasados”) from “old Africa” (“la vieja Africa,” 160). He is angered at what he deems his family’s ignorance in seeking out Bonifacio, the traditional healer, over and above the opinion of the trained physician, when his nephew is wounded by the poisoned spur of the fighting cockerel (177), and it is significant that Dominguito’s leg is not amputated following the diagnosis of the doctor, but is healed by Bonifacio’s treatment, due to the insistence of Cotena, the matriarch. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that a racialized notion of “civilization” would be represented by Inge, the Swedish wife of Máximo’s brother José Raquel, with whom the latter had recently returned from the Korean War. Máximo actually thinks as much as he shares a quiet moment of conversation with her and reflects on the backwardness of his community: “And now . . . civilization was coming in to share their misery” (“Y ahora . . . [la] civilización entraba a compartir su miseria,” 160). Inge’s role in the literacy campaign and her assumption of a position alongside Máximo in the work of community organization make her a clear embodiment of modernity and progress (“civilización”)—the solitary schoolhouse where she worked also stood “white and uncontaminated” (“blanca e incontaminada,” 150). But Euro-essentialist transcendence is most telling in the binary contrast to blackness as sexual brutality that her presence invokes. There is a markedly libidinous unhinging that takes place among the men of Chambacú from the moment of her arrival. It is evidenced in the lascivious gesturing of Arturo “el loco” (the crazy one) when he sees her for the first time (91). It is there

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among the adolescents who gather to gawk and masturbate as she bathes out in the open (187), and it is there again as the blind drummer surreptitiously gropes her when they meet for the first time (118). With Cotena’s demand that they not “eat her with their eyes” (“comérsela con los ojos,” 121), as she falls in a faint under the effects of the heat and rum and sweaty bodies at José Raquel’s welcome home party, we get a merging of two of the cornerstones of antiblack racist stereotyping coming out of modern colonial contact, that of black hypersexuality with that of cannibalism.21 Although it is to be noted that Máximo, on account of his ostensibly higher sense of ethics and morality, does not participate in the uninhibited sexual indulgences of his fellow islanders, this hardly frees him from the dynamic of black/white interracial desire as modern pathology. On the contrary, his sister-in-law turns out to be a quite troubling presence, particularly as their close working association also raises the specter of not only adultery were they to become involved sexually, but of incest. Eldridge Cleaver’s famous observations from California’s Folsom State Prison on the question of interracial desire has referred to the white woman, the universalized embodiment of the ideal of beauty, as “Ogre” on account of her ostensible power over the black (male) psyche and the danger that this represents. It is a danger whose public external aspect the erstwhile black nationalist saw represented in the infamous Emmett Till murder of 1955. Not only does Inge’s arrival obliterate any sense of a continuing black aesthetic and pride in traditional female hairdo among Chambaculeras (“Since José Raquel brought Inge, all the black women on the island wanted to straighten their hair and dye it blond”/ “Desde que [José Raquel] trajo a Inge, todas en la isla querían alisarse y broncear sus cabellos,” 193), Chambacú’s leading male figure, Máximo, falls as well to the “corporeal malediction” (Fanon 1968, 111), brought to life through the interracial black/white contact that her coming implies. Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks has spoken insightfully about the “third-person consciousness” produced as blacks, haunted by the expectations of an interiorized “civilization,” and hyperconscious of their shortcomings as catalogued in a derogatory mythology, allow the black body to become the site of their estrangement. His conclusion is that: “The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110). If the black women of Chambacú, catalyzed no doubt by their men’s obvious capitulation to white female beauty, attempt vainly to mimic Inge’s blonde comeliness, Máximo’s reaction to the Swede takes this complaisance further. Under the gaze of the white woman, and overwhelmed by fears of confirming the projections of the racist imaginary—he thinks she might be a spy, a painter, or a writer, all revelatory activities (160)—he breaks into a cold sweat and wishes that the earth would swallow him up there and then: “She denuded him with her blue eyes . . . Before her he felt his skin wrinkle back upon itself to block her enquiring look. His armpits flooding themselves in acrid sweat. . . . He wished all of Chambacú’s poisonous vapors to swallow

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him up” (“Lo desnudaba con sus ojos azules. . . . Frente a ella se sentía que la piel se arrugaba para cerrarle el paso a su Mirada exploradora. Las axilas se anegaban en sudores acres . . . Habría querido que todos los miasmas de Chambacú lo sepultaran,” 160). Inge’s presence, in other words, is neither value neutral nor impartial as might be suggested.22 She is, rather, a culturally overdetermined quantity who, in sharing transracial guidance of native Chambaculeros with an appropriately cultivated (civilized) Máximo, does so on the premise of the moral and philosophical subalternity of their “followers.” In the revolutionary trajectory of Chambacú’s leadership, albeit self-sacrificing and “horizontal,” there are sufficient elements of racialization to indicate a colonial trace in this stage of Zapata Olivella’s development. In this, his first novel that protagonizes the black slave presence, maroon leader Benkos Biojó as symbol of black rebellion and subaltern agency is given but cursory mention in the novel’s discussion of the history of Cartagena’s city walls. When Biojó returns in Changó, el gran putas, he will do so, as we shall see, in the presence of a plethora of other antislavery leaders, all meant to signify the growing black revolutionary consciousness in the writer.

Of Unity and “the Unities”: Changó, el Gran Putas Benkos Biohó, antislavery icon and putative hero in Colombia’s national narrative, comes back in Manuel Zapata Olivella’s highly celebrated magnum opus, Changó el gran putas (1983). Changó is the fruit of twenty years of research, and its historical span covers colonial time and space in the Americas and extends backward, through Bantu myths of origins, ostensibly to the beginning of civilization in Africa. With Biohó is a pantheon of African gods (orishas) and men and women, who, like him, in their individual roles on the stage of diasporan history in the Americas, are also representatives of a valiant tradition of struggle against forced labor and racial terror. In the US context, this struggle conspicuously includes the recent civil rights movement, while independence-era leaders in Latin America complement the earlier freedom fighters, the historical framework of whom was, more properly speaking, the colonial period. Accordingly, Benkos Biohó, whose story unfolds in Colombia at the beginning of the seventeenth century, is accompanied in the narrative by Ganga Zumba. The latter occupies the historical stage in Brazil’s northeast region a few decades later, to be followed by the Haitian antislavery epic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under the leadership of Mackandal, Dessalines, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. José María Morelos of Mexico, José Prudencio Padilla of Venezuela, and the famous Libertador, Simón Bolivar, also of Venezuela, are the mestizo and Afro-descendant leaders of Spanish-American independence in the nineteenth century, who also make an appearance, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, among others, lead the struggle in the twentieth-century United States. Likewise, Yoruba

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deities Odumare, Orunla, Changó, Legba, Yemanyá, Orungán, Ogún, and other orishas populate the narrative as invisible companions and helpers to these protagonists in the existential cauldron of exile, enslavement, and colonialism. If Zapata Olivella has chosen the framework of Yoruba myth and religion as background to his attempt to tell a totalizing tale of the history of the modern African diaspora to the Americas, it is because, as he states, of the mythical Oyo’s symbolic value as the “seat of the most highly developed of the ancient African civilizations” (“asiento de la más desarrollada de las antiguas civilizaciones africanas”).23 Formal devices in the narrative, which reproduce call and response structures in traditional African and Afro-American orality, and initiation rituals of invocation and libation, offer a peculiar epistemic stamp to the novel, especially considering the Bantu concept of the muntu, which serves as its philosophical backdrop. Muntu, as the author reminds us, refers to the life force that unites individuals to their ascending and descending genealogical lines and to the animals, plant life, and materials with which we interact (648). Projecting human life in terms of bantú (the plural of muntu) in which the lines between the living and the dead are blurred, and orishas and ancestors can be invoked and can communicate with incarnate human agents, allows for an abandonment of traditional principles in writing that govern characterization, action, time, and space. Zapata Olivella lays out his ostensible departure from (Western) precepts of logical reason in the preamble to the book, where he addresses the reader, his “fellow traveler” (“compañero de viaje,” 35), and states: “Whatever your race, culture or class, do not forget that you are standing on American soil, the New World, the dawn of the new Humanity . . . forget the Academy, verbal tenses, the frontiers that separate life and death, because in this saga the only footprint is the one that you make” (“Cualesquiera que sean tu raza, cultura o clase, no olvides que pisas la tierra de América, el Nuevo Mundo, la aurora de la nueva humanidad . . . Olvídate de la academia, de los tiempos verbales, de las fronteras que separan la vida de la muerte, porque en esta saga no hay más huella que la que tú dejes,” 35). From this metanarrative beginning, he hands the story over to Ngafúa, the real narrator, who ritualistically asks permission of the gods to tell of Changó’s fall from grace, his banishment, and the ensuing enslavement of his followers, the diasporan Afro-descendants, in the introductory section of the first chapter. The novel’s African mythical framework, its deployment of a multiplicity of Afro-Atlantic deities, the structural formalities, the glossary in which the deities’ origin and function are explained, and the overriding references to freedom all qualify the novel, for some readers, as an exemplary “Afro-centric” work. In this critical trajectory the figure of Changó himself, larger than life, has been particularly noteworthy. Changó is both a “historical” and a mythical figure. Once the ruler of the Yoruba empire of Oyo, he is banished by his royal family after they become weary of his military excesses and subsequently takes revenge on his followers

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who have abandoned him in his travails by condemning them to a similar exile in slavery, from which they are charged to free themselves. His profile is equally noteworthy in his guise as the god of thunder and lightning and fertility because he represents a quickening force that touches both the heavens and earth. Inherent to Zapata Olivella’s denomination of Changó as “el gran putas” is a redundancy because the term putas in the Colombian vernacular already points to awe-inspiring prowess in the individual. The (double) emphasis on the part of the author, therefore, is intentional. Critics as well as translators of the work into English have tried to capture the essence of the novelist’s meaning by seeing his protagonist alternatively as “Changó, the Biggest Badass” (2010), as “Changó, the Great SOB,” or as “Changó, the Holy Motherfucker.”24 And it is to be noted that both of the latter interpretations of the protagonist have garnered the approval of the writer himself, particularly insofar as they uphold the orisha’s enigmatic notability and undo the Judeo-Christian binary of the sacred and the profane to make room for a man/god who is good and evil and trickster and savior at the same time.25 But if Zapata Olivella’s protagonist as countercultural “badass” or “motherfucker” speaks to the what of the character, as attractive as the depiction might to those who endorse it, there are elements of the why of the character that are left unaccounted for in the critical lionization of both the presumed protagonist of the book and his literary progenitor. Revisiting them, albeit briefly, might help clear up what all agree is, in the final analysis, an enigmatic work. As with the earlier Chambacú, corral de negros, the words of the ever-reflective Zapata Olivella himself offer a guide to a fuller understanding of the novel. Given the wanderlust of the writer in his younger years, and his everexpanding pan-African awareness and concerns, in the context of the explosion of black internationalism, Black Power, and the independence movement in Africa and the West Indies that occurred in the intervening decades after Chambacú, it is not difficult to see the 1983 novel as an attempt to write a sort of “definitive” story of the diaspora. Zapata Olivella’s painstaking historical and anthropological research and his reference to the work as the Afro-diasporan “epopeya” (epic, Mina Aragón 2006, 181) make this intention clear. In this regard it is important to note that Changó, el gran putas is also a self-conscious narrative and authorial insertion, by the writer, into the Latin American canon of the second half of the twentieth century, in terms of both its aesthetic appeal and prestige and its international commercial success. To the degree that Zapata Olivella’s Latin American contemporaries like Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa wrote the so-called Boom novel as a “new” Latin American narrative characterized by modernist experimentalism and technical dexterity, often with an Amerindian mythical backdrop, they also reinscribed the narrative invisibility of Afro-Hispanics as a cultural and historical entity. One of the more glaring examples of this for Zapata Olivella would have been the novel of

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his compatriot Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (A Hundred Years of Solitude), in whose legendary Macondo the historical event of the Great Banana Massacre of the United Fruit Company at Ciénaga, Colombia in 1928 is retold, but whose thousands of black victims are not identified as such in the retelling.26 Interestingly enough, it is within the framework of esthetic hyperbole, or of marvelous realism, in which García Márquez’s famous Cien años de soledad is narrated, that Zapata Olivella opted to make his own statement of artistic (and ideological) difference. In contrast to the traditional narrative sidelining of black or Afro-creole subjectivity in Latin American letters, marvelous realism (“lo real maravilloso”) did actually make its entry, in part, as a literary response to black historical agency. Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist who wrote El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) (1948), and who introduced the term into the critical lexicon, addressed the epic occurrence of the only successful mass slave uprising in modern history under the rubric of those historico-cultural identifiers of Latin American culture that were too amazing to be true, but which, notwithstanding their extraordinary nature, were true. Alongside the Haitian Revolution, with its wondrous fortress at Milot, “a mountain on top of a mountain,” stood the feats of the first indigenous president in Latin America, Mexico’s Benito Juárez of the nineteenth century, in his estimation, and the ruins of Meso-American civilization. Carpentier’s incursion into the marvelous reality of Latin America by way of the dying days of the French colony of Saint Domingue, however, in focusing inordinately on the power and action of the African (voodoo) gods at the expense of the flesh and blood men and women whose bravery and agency made the revolution, only partially ruptures the literary invisibility of blackness in Latin American literature, as I have argued elsewhere (Branche 2006). In (re)writing the black diasporan epic in Changó el gran putas as a sort of Haitian revolution “writ large” for the will to freedom displayed therein (the book consists of five separate but interrelated chapters that hint at a teleology left incomplete), Zapata Olivella is at pains to establish his philosophical difference vis-à-vis his Latin American predecessors. Aesthetic hyperbole in Changó el gran putas is not to be read through the prism of marvelous realism, he insists, but through what he calls “mythical realism” (“realismo mítico,” Mina Aragón 2006, 54). It is an approach that he has developed from his reading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, he says, based on a view of the world by primitive man, which was both intuitive and founded on observation. Through Freud he discovers that this empiricalmagical worldview has been present in various cultures throughout human history, and connects it to a related notion of the involvement of the gods, many of whom have anthropomorphic characteristics, in human affairs (Mina Aragón 2006, 153). That Olodumare/Olofi the supreme Yoruba deity, through Orumila, the keeper of the sacred tablets of Ifá, would have issued the condemnation on Changó, who would in turn have conscripted the White Wolf (Loba blanca) to enslave Africans and their descendants in

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the Americas, is but evidence of this intrusion of the gods into the affairs of mortals. Given the autobiographical antecedents of Zapata Olivella, AfroColombian physician and anthropologist, discussed earlier, there is more than an implicit claim to “racial authenticity” here as he approaches the question of writing for an imagined transnational black community. Apart from the narrative invocation of black gods and men in Changó el gran putas, there is a reported event to which we might point as an illustration of this self-conscious grounding and validating of this authority. In a visit to Senegal in 1974, he participated in the conference on Negritude and Latin America organized by Negritude poet and president Leopold Sédar Senghor, and, impressed by the profound symbolism of the slave castle on the offshore island of Gorée, Zapata Olivella obtained Senghor’s permission to spend the night, “naked,” he recalls, in its dungeons. His objective was to vicariously feel the experience of the captive Africans bound for American slavery, as part of his cognitive and spiritual preparation for the novel. The event justifies the extended quote: I wished to spend the night asleep on the sharp stones, and naked, plunge myself into the ulcers and tears of my ancestors during the long wait for the slave ships that would take them to Cartagena de Indias, where I was born and where we preserve their breath, their memory. . . . That night, on the rock, humid on account of the rain from the sea, amongst crabs, rats, cockroaches and mosquitos, under the pale moon of a high latticework skylight, moon of corpses, young people, adults, women, children passed single file in front of me, all in chains, silent, to be lost in the ship’s hold. . . . The hours went by without stars to bring an end to the darkness. Someone, smiling, their eyes brilliant, detached himself or herself from the lineup, and drawing near, placed their chained hand on my head. Something like a tear rolled down their cheek. I felt the immeasurable and inexpressible sensation that my most remote grandfather or grandmother had recognized me. Quisiera pasar la noche desnudo sobre las piedras lacerantes, hundirme en las úlceras y los llantos de mis ancestros durante la larga espera de los barcos para ser conducidos a Cartagena de Indias, donde nací y donde preservamos su aliento y su memoria . . . Esa noche, sobre la roca, humedecido por la lluvia del mar, entre cangrejos, ratas, cucarachas y mosquitos, a la pálida luz de una alta y enrejada claraboya, luna de difuntos, ante mí desfilaron jóvenes, adultos, mujeres, niños, todos encadenados, silenciosos, para hundirse en las bodegas . . . Las horas avanzaban sin estrellas que pusieran término a la obscuridad. Alguien, sonriente, los ojos relampagueantes, se desprendió de la fila y, acercándose, posó su mano encadenada sobre mi cabeza. Algo así como una lágrima rodó por su mejilla. ¡Tuve la inconmensurable e indefinible sensación que mi más antiguo abuelo o abuela me había reconocido!

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Undoubtedly this “vision” of Zapata Olivella at one of the many sites “of no return” on West Africa’s “slave” coast, whose deep symbolic importance we have seen, and the immediacy of the reality of the blood connection to Africa that he shares with all the descendants of the continent’s expelled and enslaved millions, bolster his claim to racial and writerly authority. Even if we read through the lines and see where the emotional effect of the experience has dominated the narration by the seasoned raconteur, visiting history’s hallowed ground undeniably confers on him the kind of authorial cachet that he would have longed for since the anxious early days of his Afro-identitarian quest. The deployment of this symbolic capital is evident in the cultural framework of the novel. Whereas, in the telling of the story of the Haitian Revolution, for example, Carpentier his (white) predecessor had imported his imagined African gods from “the Other Shore” (la otra orilla) in El reino de este mundo, Zapata Olivella can not only claim the greater familiarity of having communed with them, at the source, as it were. He can also establish his genetic connection to the subjects in question and his muntu insidership first at a “racial,” and then at a broader human level. Accordingly, Makandal, the slave who had lost his arm to Lenormand de Mezy’s cane mill and to whom is attributed the historical prestige of striking the first spark of revolution in Haiti decades before its fruition in the 1790s, shows up in his novel under the protection of Ogún Balindjo, one of the seven orishas of war in the voodoo religion. Whereas for Carpentier he is a mere manco (one-armed man), who is withdrawn from the narrative once he is captured and punished by bonfire, in Zapata Olivella’s novel Makandal’s orisha restores his arm so that he can further prosecute the war, accounting eventually for a thousand heads of the enemy (254). His religious and ideological permanence is reaffirmed when we learn that despite the burning of his body at the stake by the colonial oppressors, Zapata Olivella’s Makandal reappears triumphant to his believers as Damballa’s serpent in the rainbow after every storm (153). Notwithstanding the energetic claims to revolutionary Afro-centricity in Changó el gran putas, based presumably on this and similar events— Ian Smart labels it liberationist in its intent and content (1996, 115) and Captain-Hidalgo thinks it is “profoundly Afrocentric” (1993, 135)—Manuel Zapata Olivella’s turn to myth in his Changó el gran putas seems to raise more questions than answers. Even where one grants him the poetic license to which he is entitled, first as an artist, and second as a bona fide Afro-diasporan engaged in transatlantic musing on what is a most relevant theme, following the Changó myth to its logical conclusion, as it is here deployed, presents not a few problems. Premising the primacy of the gods in the deracination and enslavement of the Africans who fell victim to this brutal early phase of transatlantic capitalism seems not only to reduce the determinative role of its European initiators, to whom he refers in the novel as the White Wolf; besides, if we are to believe the role of the Yoruba creation god through Changó, as advanced in the narrative, transatlantic

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slavery would paradoxically become just another instance of what contemporary conservative discourse flippantly refers to as “black on black” crime, albeit on a massive transgenerational and intercontinental scale. We have noted the scarcity of contemporary African writers and critics who have addressed the topic of the Middle Passage or of slavery in Africa. Ghanaian and Equatoguinean writers Ndongo and Opoku-Agyemang and diasporan historians Brathwaite and Rodney, in their reflections on the phenomenon, harbor few illusions as to the role of the local African intermediaries in the triangular trade, for instance. Zapata Olivella’s apparent reluctance to confront the full materiality of the event, in terms of its European protagonism, the internal social contradictions at the African source, or even in terms of a narrative foregrounding of the black bodies under the thrall of forced labor, which was the primary raison d’être behind their odyssey, in this “totalizing tale” leaves us with a narrative that, in spite of the author’s declared intentions as “race redeemer,” or his endorsement as liberationist by his advocates, seems to be more romantic than radical in the final analysis. As it turns out, slavery, as a trigger of black and white racial shame, is more palatable when read as a function of supernatural actors. The editor of the 2010 edition of the novel, produced under the auspices of the Colombian Ministry of Culture, has noted, regarding young adults at university, that: “Once they learn[ed] of the context of all the African mythology behind [the novel], students fell in love with the universe of Changó, el gran putas” (“Los estudiantes se enamoraron del universo de Changó el gran putas una vez conocen el contexto de toda la mitología Africana que lo organiza”) (Henao Restrepo 2010, 13). There is a noteworthy critique of the Afro-centric idea advanced by Clarence Walker in We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism, that takes issue with its often simplistic rendering of the past, in which, in order to displace white and European triumphalism, Africa, through Egyptian civilization (Kemet), and by way of Greece as its cultural successor, is re-narrated to be the source of much of the science, philosophy, and culture of the West. Walker censures the overemphasis of myth over historical rigor in this position and suggests that Afro-centrism’s attention to black self-esteem at the expense of black self-critique undermines the redemptive potential of the principle. He also highlights the incongruity of positing a “return” to the unquestioned glories of a homogenized and felicitous African past for subjects who exist in the contemporary postindustrial social order. We Can’t Go Home Again traces the Egypt-inspired idea of Afro-centrism through the works of such nineteenth-century black writers as Edward Blyden and Martin Delaney, and Carter G. Woodson and Cheikh Anta Diop of the early and mid-twentieth century, culminating in the writings of Molefi Kete Asante.27 Although the trajectory of Manuel Zapata Olivella’s thought is not of the Kemetic camp, there is no difficulty in locating it within this

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general schema, particularly in its cultural dimension. His link to Senghorian Negritude in terms of a universalist humanism destined to reintegrate “positive values into Western civilization” and reorient “contemporary life and love” (Washington Bâ 1973, 156), and to Cheikh Anta Diop’s Afro-oriented historicism, seems to be his most direct connection to the Senegalese intellectuals, and to what for Walker is the “contributionist” element in Afro-centrism. Indeed, although it is Oyo and not Kemet that is the point of departure in Zapata Olivella’s narrative, over and against such other powerful precolonial African states as Benin, or Ghana, Mali, or Kanem, there is nothing missing in the taxonomy of orishas and heroes that constitutes Zapata Olivella’s response to the Hegelian insult that Africa (and her descendants) have “no gods and no heroes; no epic poem and no legend.”28 Whether as a direct response to Hegel’s indictment of Africans’ misrecognition of God as the “highest commanding authority,”29 or by way of any of the many venues within dominant Occidental discourse where the idea has been relayed, Zapata Olivella’s counterdiscursive gesture through the Olodumare/Changó diptych is clear. So too is his idyllic depiction of precolonial Africa prior to the intrusion of the Europeans. According to the words of a babalao or priest as he addresses his following in colonial Colombia: “The muntu had already built cities and palaces with an abundance of food and gold at which the barbarians arrived with their armies and guns to kill and enchain us” (“el muntu ya había construido grandes ciudades y palacios con abundancia de alimentos y oro a donde llegaron los barbaros con sus ejércitos y fusiles a matarnos y encadenarnos,” 181). The notion here of royalty as “progress,” of large-scale societies, and of developmentalist materiality ignores the complex variety of social formations in Africa during the triangular trade, and the fact that most Africans of the period, as Rodney points out, “lived in small societies,” the worth of whose cultural values is too often overlooked by following the premise that (the Western notion of) size is the primary determinant in this respect.30 The picture of Benkos Biohó, the future rebel, is similarly tilted toward the mythical, thus we see his expectant mother, Potenciana, really an incarnation or at least a devotee of the goddess Yemayá according to the text, struggling through seven days of labor, and attended by seven midwives, all representatives of different African ethnicities (167). Around the infant head of the future king of the maroons at Palenque, who we are told is also the son of Legba, Changó’s instrument in this instance, there appears the curious and unexplained symbol of the halo. For the first protagonist of anticolonial freedom in the Americas, however, twice escaped from slavery, whose cunning and valor created an active intelligence network, and whose army dominated the Montes de María region and threatened the city of Cartagena to the degree that the governor sought peace through a peace treaty in 1605, Zapata Olivella’s readers only get a subdued image of kingly

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composure and serenity when he is eventually captured and betrayed by the colonial authorities: King Benkos remains serene, seated on his great throne. He could unsheathe his sword on the four of them and cut their heads off. Son of Changó, he could fly through the skies, and converted into thunder, burn them with his rays. He could disappear, become dust, smoke, breeze. But he prefers to remain seated on his royal throne. There’s where they made him prisoner. They hang chains around his neck. They tie his hands behind his back and escort him from his throne. They take his throne from his head and with the butt of a harquebus burst his eye. Not even then do they break his composure. He walks through the streets with the gait of an emperor. El rey Benkos permanence sereno, sentado en su gran silla. Pudo sacar su espada y a los cuatro cortarles la cabeza. Puede volar por los cielos, hijo de Changó, y convertido en trueno quemarlos con sus centellas. Pudo desaparecer, volverse polvo, humo, brisa. Pero prefiere quedarse sentado en su trono real. Allí lo pusieron preso. Le cuelgan cadenas al cuello, le amarraron las manos a la espalda y escoltado lo bajan del trono. Le quitaron la corona de la cabeza y con la cacha de un arcabuz le rompen un ojo. Ni aun así pudieron quebrarle su compostura. Camina por las calles con paso de emperador. (204) This apparent suppression of rebelliousness in the formerly enslaved freedom fighter and candidate for a hypothetical future national canon, whose final objective, besides, is to show and share with the world what freedom is as a transcending universal value, even if poetic, hardly makes for a convincing song of (Afro-centric) insurgency. The notable absence of the White Wolf as antagonist in this five-hundred-plus-page narrative about modern racial slavery is an equally telling omission in the logic of the conquest of freedom. If the absence of European actors is more implicit than explicit in the story of slavery and exile, it is just as elusive as the narrative addresses the question of the colonial libidinal economy and the continent’s mestizo demographics. Here colonial rape, presumably on account of the (Afro-)deific determinant, is curiously sublimated to upturn blanqueamiento or racial whitening as a dominant social feature. The (black) muntu thus becomes the primary agent in the process of New World miscegenation. In this view, it is whiteness that succumbs to an ascendant melanization, rather than the “whiter-is-better” tyranny that still haunts every walk of life for the heavily pigmented in Latin America. According to the same babalao: “[T]he muntu will mix his blood with the blood of the white master, with that of other races and in this way, blood of bloods, there will be no more whites to be enslavers, because just as how the muntu will lose his black color, so too will whites stain their color with ours” (“El muntu mezclará su sangre con la sangre del amo blanco, con la del indio y la de otras razas y que de

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esa manera, sangre de sangres, no habrá blancos que esclavizan, porque así como el muntu perderá su color negro, el blanco mancharía su piel con el color de los nuestros,” 181.) Zapata Olivella’s fanciful take on sexual power and race mixing in Latin American colonial history, his apparently sublimative approach to antislavery struggle and achievement in the Colombian national context and in other areas of the continent that are beyond the scope of the present discussion dilute, arguably, the liberationist thrust of his novel. Similarly, the deification of the historical process, particularly insofar as it subordinates the role of Europeans in modern slavery and capitalist expansion, mystifies the matrix of colonial and postcolonial power and the social, economic, and political relations deriving therefrom. In taking these relations off of the plane of materiality, his “mythical realism” makes them harder to recognize and hence dismantle. Changó el gran putas thus presents the paradox in that whereas in Chambacú, corral de negros, vernacular Afro-Colombian culture was practically bereft of recognizable African religious and philosophical content and the writer’s Marxian materialism presented a clear view of the contradictions of race and class coming out of colonialism, in Changó, it is religion that is overdone and social contradictions obfuscated. If we can speak here of a sort of overcompensation on the part of the writer in the turn to Africa, it can only be attributed to the cultural and psychological effervescence produced by Black Power and black internationalism as they emerged and took discursive shape across the diaspora in the 1960s and ’70s. Stuart Hall, in reflecting on this period, speaks of it in terms of a necessary “recovery of lost histories [in the service of an] imaginary political re-territorialization and re-identification, without which,” he adds, “ a counter-politics could not have been constructed” (1997a, 53). In doing so, he recalls a similar assessment made by Jean-Paul Sartre in relation to the politics of Negritude decades earlier, to whose ideological currents Zapata Olivella had also been exposed. Sartre saw Negritude as the discursive and cultural antithesis to the thesis of white supremacy, and part of a dialectical progression in whose eventual resolution racial difference would no longer matter (Washington Bâ 1973, 159). From this standpoint, the (over)indulgence in myth incurred by Changó el gran putas, particularly in relation to the Latin American novel and to the created absences in the Afro-diasporan cosmogony, need only be seen as an epistemic charting of space, that is, as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself.

M T: Home and Heritage In spite of the reservations that might be expressed in relation to Zapata Olivella’s novel Chambacú, corral de negros, the book remains an important documentation of the early 1960s politics of exclusion and marginalization of Afro-Colombians by private capital and by the Cartagena municipality and the Colombian national state, and a vindication of the

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islanders’ resistance and their claims to a living space. The trajectory of social and racial commitment evidenced in this and in his earlier works would be continued, in ensuing years, in his multigenred writing and his international advocacy of the importance of the cultural heritage of blacks in Latin America,31 all of which deserve a place in the larger discussion of multiculturalism and its historical antecedents in Colombia. Chambacú’s importance as an early literary expression of Afro-Colombian distress is relevant to the study of any of the many crises that emerged in the Pacific in the 1990s, as increased drug traffic, illegal mining, and megaprojects in agriculture and international commerce complicated Colombia’s already violent social landscape. In this context, the island port of Buenaventura on the Pacific edge of the country, ancestral home also to a mainly black population, and point of convergence for interior river traffic as well as the traffic of the littoral itself, is a fitting complement to the study of Cartagena on the opposite, Atlantic shore. Here the negative indicators of social existence in health, housing, employment, education, infant mortality, and life expectancy tend toward the extreme, as in the former example of half a century ago. But if the Korean War, as discussed in that case, might be seen as evidence of statist perceptions of disposability of the black bodies of the male Chambaculeros, the violent and uncompromising processes of recruitment of young men into the organized forces of drug trafficking operations and the neo paramilitarism, for example, point to an even more gory instance of the notion of cannon fodder, or to the equally brutal processes by which black ancestral homelands, whether upriver or in the city, are encroached on.32 Against this background, the track “Que sientan miedo” tells a story of confrontation and vindication and dignity in the face of the violence of expropriation. As narrative, it joins a larger archive of specifically black Colombian testimonials, which we can also see in terms of the Afro-Latino testimonio exemplified decades before in the recorded recollections of former enslaved Cuban Esteban Montejo, or those of other witnesses to social and racial terror under either the current neoliberal regimes in Latin America or the preceding period of military dictatorships.33 Both the aforementioned PCN leaders, Libia Grueso Castelblanco and Carlos Romero, have ties to Buenaventura, the former because she was raised there and the latter because prior generations of his family had lived there before moving to Cali. More important, in Grueso Castelblanco’s memoir, it is the 1994 assassination of community leader Francisco Hurtado of Nariño, in the southwestern department bordering on Ecuador, that stands out for our purposes. Hurtado had been involved in the local mobilization against the aggressive intrusion of African palm interests from outside, and had recently won a court victory restraining their advance on the basis of the new legal dispensations. The community’s resistance would eventually cost the lives of some three hundred of its members. Colombia, as is perhaps not so well known, is the largest producer of palm oil in the Americas, 35 percent of which is exported as fuel. The palm owners’ association, Fedepalma,

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whose owners are based in Cali, Medellín, with other associates in Bogotá, has as its objective the conquest and cultivation of a million hectares of land,34 on which the formerly independent population of black peasants would be reduced to the all too familiar regimen of exploitative low-wage labor. Coming so soon after the declaration of Ley 70 making collective title available to black Pacific populations in 1993, and in the context of his recent lawsuit, the public elimination of Hurtado makes clear the animosity aroused amongst outside investors, at the recognition of black ownership of territory that in official discourse had been labeled, since 1959, as tierras baldías, or “empty lands,” in casual disdain for its generations of black occupants. The inscription carved into the chest of the deceased Hurtado by his assassins could not be more vivid as an expression of this disdain. According to the sinister message, he was murdered “for fucking around with his Law 70” (“por andar jodiendo con su Ley 70,” 130). Marino Córdoba, another community leader north of Buenaventura at Riosucio in the Chocó region, who would eventually be driven to seek asylum in the United States after multiple attempts on his life, also highlighted the coincidence between official land titling and the military-style invasion of his village in December 1996, in furtherance of corporate interests in lumber and the government’s renewed plans to build an inter-oceanic canal. Córdoba recalls the prior infiltration of the various large lumbering operations into the economic life of the Riosucio river basin, their unregulated contamination and clogging of the local river networks with pollutants, and the direct and disruptive effect that this had on river traffic among small farmers trying to move their crops to market several days travel away. The December 1996 Riosucio invasion, called Operación Génesis, was perpetrated by a combined force of paramilitary foot soldiers and army helicopter gunships, and took the lives of some five hundred local residents, causing another twenty thousand to flee from the area. Both Marino and Rosero bemoan the impunity that has characterized these massacres as well as the many others in the Colombian Pacific, and which extends into the present. If Buenaventura has neither land nor space for coca, African palm, or shrimp cultivation, its strategic location as a port makes it a highly coveted prize for competing actors involved in contraband, illegal mining, the drug trade, and international commerce. While the specific source of the pressure has shifted from one to another of these actors over the past decade, what is probably most relevant from the standpoint of the victimized population are the direct and indirect pressures to which they are exposed, which add to an already difficult and deprived existence. According to varying estimates, the port handles some 12 million tons of cargo yearly, amounting to at least 40 percent of Colombia’s foreign trade, with a value calculated at more than a billion dollars for the first six months of 2013.35 Its proven success and future potential as a point of departure for access to other ports in Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, California, and across the Pacific in Japan and China has inspired plans by the municipality and the government for

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Figure 5.1

Dock with container vessel. Photograph by Augusto Gallo.

the so-called multiyear Proyecto Malecón (Seawall Project), aimed at maximizing this potential. It is also premised on the relocation of a hundred thousand Buenaventura residents (“Buenaventura lugar de Mas-Acres”). Proyecto Malecón envisions a deep sea port, free trade area, fishing dock, large commercial center, sports arena, and restaurants, at an investment of three quarters of a billion dollars. An integral part in this project is to be played by the Spanish-based companies Terminal de Contenedores TCbuen and Logística TCbuen (TCbuen Container Terminal and TCbuen Logistics), whose plans include expanding their current activities at Buenaventura by 2015 to handle 50 percent of the cargo that arrives in the thousands of containers that transit through the city (Weiss 2013).36 The rainforest in the hinterland behind the port city is also the source of a third of the coca leaf grown in Colombia, some seventy-two thousand tons annually, which, once processed, exits the country by speedboat and makes connections offshore to home-made submarines for transshipment, employing armies of foot soldiers for various facets of the larger enterprise. The discovery and seizure by authorities in January 2011 of a shipment of 6.4 tons of cocaine and the decommissioning of containers with $27 million in cash in 2009 are graphic indicators of the nature of the powerful forces surrounding the lives of the mostly black population of three hundred fifty thousand at Buenaventura. In the urban area, states a report from the local Servicio Jesuita a Refugiados (Jesuit Service for Refugees), the organized

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criminal organizations of the Rastrojos and the Urabeños, local derivatives of the earlier AUC and the FARC, in direct and indirect association with the regional drug cartels: “threaten leaders and social organizations, perpetrate homicide and attempted murder, establish rules of mutual coexistence, restrict the mobility of the people in the neighborhoods, regulate prices and exact taxes on legal businesses, extort, control micro traffic and prostitution, run the business of assassination and practice torture and beheading,” 13).37 It is a regime of terror under which in 2012, nine separate episodes resulted in some 5,242 residents being displaced from their homes, the city is divided into “no-go zones” determined by which band is in control of that particular “turf,” and a renewed spurt of violence for the month of October 2013 produced growing numbers of dismembered and decapitated bodies that have turned up on the seashore and in diverse places.38 The SJR would have the Colombian government recognize the victims of intra-urban displacement, occasioned by the bacrim, or “criminal bands,” in the same way as it does those from the interior who have suffered from the depredations of the larger armed opposition, as human rights violations according to national and international law, and make them entitled to protection and compensation under the Sistema Nacional de Atención y Reparación Integral a Víctimas (National System for Integral Attention and Reparations to Victims). In 2010, the group that would become Marcando Territorio came together, with the support and encouragement of the parish priest at Lleras, to use the spoken word and the medium of rap to protest against the three-headed monster of the bacrim, the foreign incursionists (TCbuen), and the municipal and state authorities that together underwrote the seemingly permanent state of emergency under which ordinary bonaverenses lived. After submitting individual entries to a competition for best rap lyrics on what Buenaventura means to them, and the importance of preserving the city as they knew it, the entrants opted to do a collective project instead, and set aside their individual differences in style and artistic direction. Three years later, with help from a local NGO, Fundescodes, and the UN High Commission for Refugees, they filmed the video for the track “Que sientan miedo” (“Let them Feel Fear”). Lleras, located in the third ward (comuna) of the city, along with wards four and five, is in the zona palafítica, the area that was re/claimed from the sea, over years, by the laborious filling in of the low-tide areas with an assortment of materials including seashells, garbage, and coconut husk, thus converting it, in stages, into terra firma. As the land was reclaimed, the huts on stilts at the water’s edge would be replaced by more solid structures and incorporated into the city proper. Effectively, it is this newfound “real estate” over which the transnational container company has been spreading, through a combination of third party actors that either buy out or bully the residents to give up their homes and land space.39

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Figure 5.2 The water’s edge and the local dwellings. Photograph by Augusto Gallo.

Figure 5.3

TCbuen warehousing area. Photograph by Augusto Gallo.

The other source of distress, as mentioned, is the turf war that through enticements or forced recruitment arbitrarily divides the city along the lines of the opposing parties and imposes “frontiers” and nighttime curfews. In the question of the production of the lyrics and the associated

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video, the first point to note, perhaps, is the fact that youngsters living under the influence of one or other extralegal force were persuaded to come together in the project of composing a common statement against all the external entities, and do so with conviction and a deep sense of transgenerational selfhood and regional belonging. As has been observed by commentators, American hip-hop culture, and the music videos through which it has been globalized, is burnished in the materiality of consumerism and triumphalist capitalism, in a way that has over the two and a half decades of its existence eroded much of the culture’s original critical orientation. It is important to note, however, that in the case of Colombian rap, the genre’s ethic of truth telling and social critique remains strong, perhaps precisely because Colombia’s politico-social reality is such a stark one. Groups such as Flaco Flow & Melanina, Profetas, and Sabú Martínez exemplify this position, even as the musical currents, local and regional, traditional and contemporary, enrich their creative repertoire in myriad and sometimes unexpected ways.40 Marcando Territorio’s video “Que sientan miedo” offers an arresting visual contrast of material poverty and of enthusiastic sartorial and performative approximations to American models by its cast of twenty. This is a testament to the global ubiquity of hip-hop through television and other mass media, to the port’s standing as a major entry point for international and mainly American pop culture realia, and to the decades of black internationalism that is channeled into the region through not only culture, but through political ideas and iconography as well. The multiple voices and their corresponding verses are grouped around two choral and narrative thematic pillars to which individual responses rapidly advance, retreat, and reappear as do the performers themselves in front of the camera, energetically proclaiming the (territorial) integrity of their community, their philosophical difference vis-à-vis their antagonists and oppressors, and their human right to life and a free and peaceful existence. In the first of the narrative axes, the lead singer proceeds from a point in medias res to tell his audience in quasi-epic fashion of the arrival of the oppressors and their unfeeling and inhumane behavior: “Unos que no quieren reclamar, otros que se llenan de valor/ Otros que se asustan y van porque alguien en el territorio mete presión/ Ellos no sienten lo que el pueblo sufre y llora/ Ellos no sienten” (“Some don’t want to protest, others are filled with valor/ Others are afraid and run away because someone puts on the pressure/ They don’t feel the suffering and the tears of the people/ They don’t feel”). In the second axis, the other lead singer reminds us that the struggle in question is an ongoing one, of their and the city’s determination to resist, and of the fact that that which is being attempted is an unjustified usurpation after the work and sacrifice by the legitimate owners to secure a living space: “Nos quieren sacar, pero no lo van a lograr/ Ahora que nuestro barrio está bonito, nos quieren reubicar” (“They want to kick us put, but they won’t succeed/ Now that our neighborhood is nicely set up, they want to relocate us”). The accompanying individual voices structure their rhymes around

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these declarations in an intriguing adaptation of African-derived call and response patterns. It is central to the intentionality of “Que sientan miedo” to communicate in loud, metatextual mode that the story of (heroic) struggle being told is taking place in Lleras. In the first lead singer’s repeated emphasis on the geographic location of their shout/grito (“Mira este grito que es de Lleras . . . este pueblo que hoy se rebela”) (“Hear this shout, it’s from Lleras . . . this town that today is in open rebellion”), he not only invokes and encourages other such cries of liberty along a synchronic axis in contemporary Colombia, he also makes reference to the history of black struggle in the country and across the modern black diaspora. The “grito” as well, is the well-known historiographic marker indicating the beginning of anticolonial insurgency and independence among Latin American nations. Arguably, it is an appropriation, by this marginalized group today, of this element of the dominant national rhetoric as it gives voice to the claim to integrity and autonomy within its own local space, one that was inherited from their ancestors. “Esto es herencia” (“This is our heritage”) declares one of the track’s refrains, in effect, and the earned ownership is underscored by one of the accompanying speakers, who proclaims in his contribution: “Nos paramos en la raya” (“We will stand our ground”). Beyond the claim to space, though, is the primary rhetorical objective of the piece. Marcando Territorio’s declaration to “let” or to “make” them “feel fear” deploys a double usage of the idea of “feeling.” Feeling is affect and empathy, on the one hand, and it is physical or emotional sensation, on the other. For the speakers in the first case it is an index of humanity, and a characteristic palpably lacking in their antagonists, they stress. In the second case, “feeling” is a projection of punitive sentience and anxiety onto their adversaries, brought about as the imagined community of listeners assumes agency and leaps into insurgent action. Embedded in the “us and them” dichotomy is the articulation of the other differences that characterize the speakers and their rhetorical antagonists. If the oppressors don’t “feel” the cries and suffering of the people, as already indicated, their callous and heartless nature is underscored in the assertion in the song’s lyrics that they are not afraid to kill and rob either, and are indeed an intrinsic element of the larger regimen of violence, corruption, and depredation, including the state, that is ruining the lives of the youth and the general citizenry. The speakers, on the other hand, define themselves in term of cooperation, love of community, and self-sacrifice, historically proven in their joint endeavors in securing their place on the seashore and by their unity and commitment to the principle of justice. It would be a mistake to interpret Marcando Territorio’s (hyper)masculine posture, as projected in “Que sientan miedo,” as an indication of an analogous, if oppositional, projection of the masculinity of their real and imagined adversaries, and the politics of conquest and cooptation that they represent. While mediatized rap and hip-hop “performance” and vestment is certainly a primary aspect of their delivery, it is important to stress that

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their weapons of confrontation pertain to the realm of ethics and philosophy, and not to that of military armament. After all, it has been by force of arms and multilateral statist power that the adversary has assumed and asserted hegemony. Indeed, what would awaken anxiety amongst their perceived adversaries has less to do with their youthful vigor and more with the knowledge that their full human potential defies and belies the superficial caricature of humanity to which the national racist imaginary would reduce them, as young black males, and that in this potential lies an immanence that is unsettling to the complacency of those in control, hence their determination to “luchar con la mente” (“fight with mind power”). As described in the beginning of this chapter, the sense of selfhood for Afro-Pacific Colombians is rooted in a historically evolved relationship with the environment and with each other, and represents a view of the world that is radically different from the logocentric order of control and conquest embodied in the state and in the avatars of capitalist speculation and accumulation and the machinery of modernity. This difference, in addition to the material landscape, also forms a part of the “herencia” or heritage that Marcando Territorio claims. To the degree that “Que sientan miedo” interpellates a polity of renascientes who, in the words of the song openly declare that it would be impossible to eradicate them all and that they are prepared to “levantarse después de morir,” or “rise up (again) even after death,” in defense of their just cause, it must give pause to their putative conquerors. If indeed the Colombian state is approaching, however tentatively, considering the ongoing contest over the Pacific frontier, and inscribing into the national register even those indigenous peoples who have been so isolated and undisturbed that they barely speak Spanish, as well as the lost and overlooked descendants of the enslaved Africans, it is logical to assume that physical withdrawal into “the hills,” according to the proposition put forward in the reference at the beginning of this chapter, is no longer a possibility. Equally undeniable, however, is the survivalist ethic and ethos of Afro-diasporan culture that the group and its emblematic title so vividly exemplify. The most recent minga at Buenaventura, which would build a playground for orphaned and displaced children from the river areas of Naya, Yurumangui, and Raposo, employing traditional precepts of neighborhood collaboration and cooperation, attests to this.41 Manuel Zapata Olivella’s novel on the displacement of the Chambacú population in the 1960s, and Marcando Territorio’s artistic statement, along with the collaboration of its allies and associates at Fundescodes in the diocese, in the PCN, and elsewhere, in defending the human rights of an endangered population in a dangerous city, speak to the prescience of the writer. In highlighting the struggle for what in this book I have called location, these works constitute, both before and after the fact, a noteworthy critique of the racial regimen in Colombia and of its more recent multicultural façade.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Lyrics from “Que sientan miedo,” Consulta Previa: Es un derecho fundamental, produced by MT Music, Buenaventura, Colombia, 2013 appear courtesy of Marcando Territorio. Reproduction of three aerial photographs by Augusto Gallo of Buenaventura, Colombia.

NOTES 1. “Bruca manigua” was reintroduced to the public by Ibrahim Ferrer in the Buena vista social club documentary and album in 1997. 2. There is an interesting generational counterpoint to be considered between Linton Kwesi Johnson’s recoil from turn-of-the-century Jamaica, where in “Reggae fi Dada,” poverty is such that “a dallah cyaan buy a likkle dinnah fi a fly,” and Damian Marley’s later exposition “Welcome to Jamrock,” from the trenches where the poor seemingly die “at random.” 3. Libia Grueso Castelblanco, a cofounder of the PCN, describes it as follows. “For us a palenque is an autonomous political organization that is defined by racial and cultural dynamics. Since it is also rural, a palenque extends beyond the river basin and brings together the body of social relations and productive dynamics that exist between basins. From the political point of view, a palenque is a group of river basins that negotiates its territoriality, that is, the management of the rules that govern them. The territory of a palenque is what we call a territory-region.” (“Para nosotros un palenque es una instancia organizativa y política autónoma que se define por dinámicas raciales y culturales. Como también rural, la delimitación de un palenque rebasa la cuenca de los ríos y reúne el conjunto de relaciones sociales y de las dinámicas productivas que hay entre cuencas. Desde el punto de vista político un palenque es una asamblea de cuencas que negocia su territorialidad, es decir, el manejo de las reglas dentro de ésta. El territorio de un palenque es lo que llamamos territorio-región.”) (2007, 134) 4. Colombia is the nation with the highest percentage index for displaced people per capita, in excess of 3 million, 40 percent of whom are Afro-descendant. See, for example, Nikolas Kozloff. 5. In a study that claims to be a first attempt at explaining the origin of the ethnonym, renacientes is associated with the historical practice of manumission that traditionally took place during the Christmas season. Oscar Almario García thus sees renacientes as a sort of resignification of the Nativity by the formerly enslaved Afro-Pacific community. The metaphor of rebirth also has a biological/genealogical dimension as well as an ecological one. See “Tras las huellas de los Renacientes. Por el laberinto de la etnicidad e identidad de los grupos negros o ‘afrocolombianos’ del Pacífico sur” (2001). 6. Rosero points out that for him: “Being black is not a question of race or skin color, but an attitude towards life, towards other people and towards what is going on in our communities across the country” (“Ser negro no se lleva en la raza o en la piel, sino en una actitud frente a la vida, frente a los demás personas y frenta a lo que pasa en nuestras comunidades en el país” (2012, 167). 7. This number, according to María Inés Martínez, is refuted by academics and by the black leadership. Their argument is that a figure that represents between

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

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20 and 25 percent of the population, some 10 million, would be more accurate (2012, 44). The raizales are the traditional occupants of the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Clara; they are of mixed Anglophone and Hispanic background. See http://cartagena.vive. in/cutura/Cartagena/articulos/ARTICULO-WEBNOTA_INTERIOR_ . . . Laurence Prescott has authored full-length studies on these poets (2001, 2006). E.g., Ulrich Oslender (2012) and Rosebelinda Cárdenas (2012). See Alfonso Múnera’s Fronteras imaginadas: La construcción de las razas y de la geografía en el siglo XIX colombiano. See Cruz González (2010), Oslender (2012), for example. Interview with Margarita Krakusin (2001). See Nancy Cunard (1934), Michael North (1994) in this regard. The Location of Culture, 86. China 6 a.m. (1955). He speaks of this in his interview with William Mina Aragón (2006, 212). “Debajo de cada roca está sepultado un esclavo” (Levántate mulato, 43). See Jean Casimir, La cultura oprimida. “Se hizo poderoso por su sangre de negro, porque nunca realizó oficios rudos,” muses his mother once on observing his body as he dressed. (“He grew strong because of his black blood, because he never did rough work”) (38). See Pieterse’s White on Black in this regard. The notes in the 1990 academic edition argue on behalf of her “outsider’s” approach (mirada extraña) and her “imparciality” (equidistancia) (243). Changó, 666. See Smart (1996) and Captain-Hidalgo (1993). See Captain-Hidalgo (1993), Smart (1996), Luis (2010), and Cabral (2001). Mina Aragón 2006, 186. From reading Laura Connor’s historical article “Entre la verdad y la realidad: Lo ‘real maravilloso’ de la masacre bananera en Cien años de soledad,” one would not know either that the majority of the victims of the massacre were black workers striking for better wages and working conditions. See, for example, Asante and Abarry, African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources. Quoted in Walker 2001, 14. See Eze, “Race, History, and Imperialism: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” 109–153. Groundings, 36. Also How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Mina Aragón documents his work as public intellectual, visiting lecturer in North American universities, and participant and organizer of international conferences (2006, 243–254). My reference to these recruits as “cannon fodder” has to do with the fact that they occupy the lowest rung of the hierarchy in militarized contests and as such are a) vulnerable to recruitment on account of their poverty, b) highly dispensable once recruited, c) have little choice regarding their recruitment once approached, save for physically leaving town, d) and their ultimate superiors in the respective criminal organizations are distant and unknown to them. Given the time of production of the life stories of Esteban Montejo, and of Maria Carolina de Jesus’ Cuarto de despejo, I feel that there is an argument for a particularly Afro-Latin American testimonio, especially because these works are not highlighted in the common discussions of the genre in Latin American literature.

172 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora Nikolas Kozloff, “The Congressional Black Caucus Fails Afro-Colombians.” See Weiss, “Buenaventura. La puerta del ‘Chapo’ en Colombia.” See the TCbuen Web page. “Profieren amenazas contra líderes, lidersas y organizaciones sociales, perpetran homicidios y atentados, establecen normas de convivencia, restringen la movilidad de los pobladores en los barrios, controlan los precios e imponen tributos al comercio legal, cobran extorciones, controlan el micro tráfico y la prostitucion, administrant las empresas de sicariato y practican la tortura y el degollamiento.” Also Cárdenas Delgado (2011) and “Un pacífico no tan pacífico.” “Buenaventura completa 23 días bajo la violencia entre “urabeños y ‘la Empresa.” Rodríguez Montaño, “Buenaventura lugar de Mas-Acres.” See Dennis, Afro-Colombian Hip-Hop in this regard. See “Minga por la paz.” The testimonies of both Marino Córdoba and Libia Grueso Castelblanco make pointed reference to the minga. In the words of the latter, “Esos intercambios responden a relaciones de solidaridad con la familia y con la gente de la comunidad. Si una familia cultiva arroz, la familia extensa le hace la minga en la finca y luego se le retribuye el trabajo a quienes le ayudaron. La minga implica un intercambio de trabajo por trabajo, sin que haya un interés monetario de por medio. La productividad del territorio tambien tiene que ver con los saberes tradicionales asociados a los oficios que la gente practica (2007, 131). (Those exchanges are a product of relations of solidarity with the family and with the people in the community. If a family plants rice, the extended family does a minga for them at their farm and afterward the labor is repaid to those who helped. The minga implies a work for work exchange, without monetary considerations. The productivity of the territory also is related to traditional knowledge held by the people and derived from their occupations.)

Conclusion

This book on the poetics and politics of the African diaspora in the context of modern racial slavery and its aftermath has proposed as the Ur-Text of the phenomenon the recollections of a community of captives outside, significantly, of the mainstream of critical attention in literary and cultural studies, in order to highlight their adaptation to deracination, their adaptation to the new environment, and their dreams of freedom, all on the margins of the national state. Although the destiny of the Saramaka, like that of the other groups of Surinamese maroons, would be to negotiate, over time, their spatial integrity and autonomy with the government, theirs is a rare text, in the sense that it memorializes not only (fleeting) independence, but also struggle and hope. Their difficulty in maintaining an alternate life world is paradigmatic of the phenomenon of maroonage in a larger sense, as is made even more evident by a study of the analogous experience of the formerly enslaved in Colombia, who for centuries inhabited lands that until recently statist discourse regarded as “empty.” The texts that await discovery and publication in the (Afro)-Colombian Pacific promise, along with the current testimonials and socio-biographical stories being told by young artists like Marcando Territorio, are equally significant, as items that contribute to what I have chosen to call a malunga archive of diaspora. They assume a place alongside writings and voicings, whether from within or without the world of so-called belles-lettres, that also speak to diaspora in terms of a discourse of location, or relocation, or of those that imaginatively reconstruct the original event of dislocation. If I have not addressed the question of the “integration” of Afrodescendants into their respective national-statist contexts, it is because that has not been my intention, particularly given the dominant tendency to see multicultural “inclusion” as the resolution to the question of race-based oppression. The narrative of a “post-racial” America in the United States, for example, ubiquitous in the wake of the unprecedented election to the presidency of an African-American, speaks loudly to this, even as the stark and ongoing structural imbalances in the racial and social roster suggest otherwise. This position is by no means a disavowal of Enlightenment precepts of liberty nor of the gains for civil society nor civil rights that have

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emanated from those struggles that have involved socially subordinated black people; on the contrary. It speaks, rather, to an ongoing discomfiture with the dynamic at the root of the rational order of Eurocentric modernity and the raciality that came with it. It is hardly coincidental that the islands that were traded back and forth as pawns on the colonial chessboard, and where the sugar plantation was both an industrial mill that crushed slave laborers as blithely as it did the sugar canes that were fed into it, as well as the place where the many Caribbean cultures met, would produce some of the most perceptive critics of the regimen. Besides the formal or informal channels of mentorship that linked, say, Aimé Césaire to Franz Fanon, C. L. R. James to Eric Williams, and all of the latter to Kamau Brathwaite and Sylvia Wynter, it was this larger determinant that stimulated an important critical, decolonial perspective on raciality and diaspora, in both the national and outernational registers. It was out of this critical “mass” that Wynter could propose a disavowal of political and economic “Man,” constituted in the Eurocentric code of being and thinking and materiality that we refer to as modernity, and propose a creative and radical break therefrom. While her disquisition “After Man” has little to do with any sort of latter day androgyny (Clovis Headley), it certainly points toward a more wholesome and transcendental possibility of the human and of new definitions of the universal.

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Index

African captives 12, 14, 27, 43, 46, 141 African diaspora: Bantu speakers and 4–5; Colombia’s Afrodescendant communities 136–52, 162, 169; conclusion about 173–4; elements of 12–17; First Time narrative and 8–12; humor as a weapon for 110; introduction to 1–4; malungos and 5–6; maroon community and 6–7; outernational concept and 7–8; see also dislocation; relocation Afro-centrism 158, 159 All African People’s Conference 48 Anglo-Ashante war 21 anticolonialism 23, 85, 86, 89, 168 anti-intellectualism 115, 118 Arab Spring 71, 101, 129 Arendt, Hannah 116, 117, 119 Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia 137 Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, The (Brathwaite) 13, 46 assimilation 59, 60, 102, 104, 114 Atlantic slave trade 22, 23, 34, 97 Ávila Laurel, Juan Tomás 98, 99, 100 Bantu speakers 4–5 “Bench by the Road” project 20 “black consciousness” 4, 55 Black People’s Day of Action 75, 76 Black Power movement 48, 50, 51, 54, 161 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 151 British Nationality Act of 1981 74 Brixton riots 76 Burnham regime 51, 52, 56 Bush Negroes 8, 9, 11, 12

cannibalism 35, 56, 63, 151 Cape Coast Castle 20, 21, 22 Caribbean Artists’ Movement 73, 97 Caribbean vernacular 15, 83, 113 Chalkstick, Charlie 60, 61 Chambacú, corral de negros 141–52 Changó el gran putas 152–161 civilizing mission 55, 59, 104 civil rights movement 15, 28, 48, 65, 152 Colombia’s Afro-descendant communities 136–52, 162, 169 colonial education 46, 57, 60 colonialism 22, 86, 113, 161 colonial rape 37, 160 Colonizer and the Colonized, The (Memmi) 122 community of suffering 5, 26, 167, 168 Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Brathwaite) 44, 45, 47 creolization 13, 14, 44, 47, 63 “Crossing, The” (Ndongo) 22–27 cultural performance 142, 143 D’ Aguiar, Fred 27, 34 Danish missionaries 36 Declaration of New Cross 75 dictatorship 15, 103, 116, 121 dislocation: Guinea-bird culture 14, 44, 55, 59–60, 62, 65; Guinea slave trade 19–27; Zong affair 27–40; see also relocation double consciousness 38, 46, 60, 65, 77 Du Bois, W. E. B. 46, 47, 48, 77 due process 14, 70 Duggan, Mark 69, 78, 79, 80, 81

190

Index

Emperor Haile Selassie 89, 91 England: urban riots in 69, 77; West Indian experience in 72 Equatorial Guinea 98–103, 105, 118–20, 129 exiles: Ávila Laurel 15, 102, 129; from Equatorial Guinea 13; Francisco Zamora 15, 103–13, 130

How to Be Black and Not be Killed in Aravaca (Zamora) 15, 108, 109 human rights issues 82, 101, 102, 115, 165 Hundred Years of Solitude, A (Márquez) 155 hunger strike 99, 100, 101, 129 Hurtado, Francisco 162, 163

Farred, Grant 114 Feeding the Ghosts (D’ Aguiar) 13, 27–40 First Time narrative 8–12 Five Days in August: An Interim Report on the 2011 English Riots 78 Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (Brathwaite) 44 forced labor 110, 112, 115, 120, 152 Franco dictatorship 114

immigration issues 74, 108, 109 Institute of Land Credit 149 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming) 56, 61

gang rape 37 Ghanaian moment 46–7 Gilroy, Paul 75, 80 Gómez, President Laureano 145, 146 Groundings with My Brothers, The (Rodney) 50, 54 Guinea-bird culture 14, 44, 55, 59–60, 62, 65 Guinea slave trade 19–27 Haitian revolution 3, 155, 157 half-life of exile 103, 130 Hall, Stuart 70, 97, 115 Harris, Cheryl 126 Hayes Edwards, Brent 2 Heart of Darkness (Konrad) 121 hip-hop medium 138, 167, 168 History of Jamaica: Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, The (Long) 44 History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905, A (Rodney) 50 History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (Brathwaite) 58 Holocaust 34, 51, 116 Howe, Darcus 69, 79 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney) 49, 99

Jamaican vernacular 54, 73, 77 Jesuit Service for Refugees 164 Johnson, Linton Kwesi 72 Jubilee (Walker) 20, 28, 29 Kenyan moments 46–7 Kingdom of This World, The (Carpentier) 155 Korean War 150, 162 La Rose, John 73, 76 “Let Them Feel Fear” track 165 Lewisham Way Center 74 “Liesense fi Kill” 72, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84 Macías dictatorship 116, 118 malungo community 5, 6 Man in the Hills (album) 135, 136 marginalization 1, 22, 79, 140, 161 Marking Territory project 138, 168, 173 Marley, Bob 87 maroon community 5, 6, 8, 9 maroon leader 20, 152 Marxist leanings 16, 146, 148 Máximo (fictional character) 146–52 Middle Passage 19, 26, 28, 33, 39 migration of Africans: Guinea-bird culture 14, 44, 55, 59–60, 62, 65; Guinea slave trade 19–27; through Zong affair 27–40 military coup 23, 48, 118, 119 moral panic 15, 70, 80 Morrison, Toni 19, 20, 29 Mother Poem (Brathwaite) 44, 58, 60, 64 multiculturalism 80, 84, 102–5, 139, 140 muntu 153, 159, 160

Index nam 53, 57, 59, 63 Ndongo, Donato 19, 23, 24, 25, 114–22 Negritude 3, 156, 159, 161 New Cross Massacre Action Committee (NCMAC) 75, 76 New World blacks 52, 58 Notting Hill carnival 75, 92 Nyabinghi ritual 89, 90, 91 Obiang Nguema, Teodoro 99, 101, 102, 130 Old Testament 86 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt) 116 Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement 74 outernational concept 7–8, 43 Pacific river basin communities 136, 139 pan-Africanism 22, 47, 48 People’s Progressive Party 49, 50 Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Hall) 70, 71 post-Emancipation environment 13, 47, 48, 72 postindependence period 14, 49, 117, 122 Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, The (Hayes Edwards) 2 Price, Richard 8, 11 Public Order Act 70 Race Matters (West) 11 race thinking 45, 50 Race Today Collective 72, 73, 75 racial blackness 124, 125, 142, 143 racial hostility 69, 108, 112 racial profiling 71, 79 racism 51, 90, 127 racist rioting 74 Rastafarian paradigm 53, 54, 55, 85–6, 89–91 relocation: Equatoguineans movement to Spain 97, 115; West Indian community in England and 72 Riots Communities and Victims Panel 77 Rodney, Walter 44, 49, 54, 99 Roopnarine, Rupert 52

191

Saramaka group 8–12 Seawall Project 164 sexual abuse 37, 127 shared suffering 5, 26, 33, 167, 168 “slave coast” captive 43, 157 slave ships 5–7, 12, 27, 31–4, 39 slave trade 21–3, 25, 30, 34, 72, 141 social justice 47, 48, 56, 148 Spanish Guinea 105, 106, 107 stop-and-search practice 70, 76, 79 “Street 66” 72, 84–6, 91–2 Tempest, The 59, 62 totalitarianism 114, 116–18 transatlantic musings: Chambacú, corral de negros 141–52; Changó el gran putas 152–61; “The Crossing” 19–27; Feeding the Ghosts 27–40; Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica 44; “Liesense fi Kill” 72, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84; Prisionero de la Gran Vía 103–108, “Street 66” 72, 84–6, 91–2 transracial “insurrection of the masses” 70, 79 triangular trade 13, 97, 158, 159 UN High Commission for Refugees 165 urban riots in England 69, 77 Valongo slave market 5, 7 vernacular culture and values 6, 15, 46, 47, 128 Villa, William 136, 137 Walker, Margaret 28 Walsh, Robert 4, 5, 6 We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (Walker) 158 West Indian community 14, 59, 69, 73, 89 Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity (Alcoff) 111 Working People’s Alliance (WPA) 52 Zamora Loboch, Francisco 98, 102–14 Zapata Olivella, Manuel 138, 140–50, 152–9 Zong affair 27, 28, 29, 31, 33