Fred d'Aguiar and Caribbean Literature : Metaphor, Myth, Memory [1 ed.] 9789004394070, 9789004391642

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Fred D’Aguiar and Caribbean Literature: Metaphor, Myth, Memory

Cross/Cultures Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English Edited by Gordon Collier †Geoffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent Co-founding editor †Hena Maes-Jelinek Advisory Board David Callahan (University of Aveira) Stephen Clingman (University of Massachusetts) Marc Delrez (Université de Liège) Gaurav Desai (University of Michigan) Russell McDougall (University of New England) John McLeod (University of Leeds) Irikidzayi Manase (University of the Free State) Caryl Phillips (Yale University) Diana Brydon (University of Manitoba) Pilar Cuder-Dominguez (University of Huelva) Wendy Knepper (Brunel University) Carine Mardorossian (University of Buffalo) Maria Olaussen (University of Gothenburg) Chris Prentice (Otago University) Cheryl Stobie (University of KwaZulu-Natal) Daria Tunca (Université de Liège)

volume 208 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cc

Fred D’Aguiar and Caribbean Literature Metaphor, Myth, Memory by

Leo Courbot

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: © Wifredo Lam, The Jungle, 1943, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2019. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Public­ation Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018060012

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0924-1426 isbn 978-90-04-39164-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-39407-0 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface: Reading Fred D’Aguiar  vii Acknowledgements  x General Introduction: Caribbean Orphic  1

Part 1 Tropicality: Fred D’Aguiar’s Poetry Introduction to Part 1  13 1

Tropical (Re)Visions (of Mythology)  21

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(An)amnesic Waters  60

3 Chronot(r)opes  106 Partial Conclusion: Resisting Entropy  137

Part 2 Orphanhood: Fred D’Aguiar’s Novels Introduction to Part 2  143 4

Literate Slaves  149

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Orphic Orphans  207 General Conclusion: Vatic Environmentalism and the Politics of Tropicality  281 Bibliography  291 Index  312

Preface: Reading Fred D’Aguiar Fred D’Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents. He was raised in Guyana by relatives in Georgetown, the capital city, and by his grandmother in Airy Hall, a rural village, from 1962 to 1972, a decade that he calls his “formative years” (D’Aguiar 2018), during which Guyana was ruled by the dictatorial figure of Forbes Burnham. That specific Guyanese context constitutes, in fact, the historical background to his novels Dear Future (1996), Bethany Bettany (2003), and Children of Paradise (2014), and his childhood memories from that period have served, along with world mythologies, as significant source material for his collections of poems Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989), Continental Shelf (2009), and The Rose of Toulouse (2013), and, virtually, for all of his novels. In 1972, D’Aguiar returned to Britain in order to train as a psychiatric nurse before pursuing Caribbean and African studies at the University of Kent, graduating with honors in 1985. His experience as a psychiatric nurse, combined with his interest in letters, was formative too, since it induced him to reflect upon the intricate connections that exist between history, ethnicity, trauma, and speech, written or oral. Novels such as The Longest Memory (1994), Feeding the Ghosts (1997), Bethany Bettany (2003), and Bloodlines (2000), his only novel in verse, result from these considerations. In 1985, in addition to graduating, D’Aguiar published Mama Dot, his first collection of poems. In 1986, he obtained a writer-in-residence position at the London Borough of Lewisham and decided to devote his efforts to creative writing, thus giving up plans to attend the University of Warwick and write a dissertation on the works of Guyanese author Wilson Harris – who would nevertheless remain a major influence on his writing. As a result, D’Aguiar’s first play, High Life, was produced in 1987. In 1989, after he had accepted another writer-in-residence position at Birmingham Polytechnic, his second collection of poems, Airy Hall, was published. From 1989 to 1990, D’Aguiar became a Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge University, and then a Northern Arts Literary Fellow from 1990 to 1992. In 1991 his second play, A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, was staged. From 1992 to 1994, he was a visiting writer at Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he completed his third collection of poems, British Subjects (1993), and spent time with the Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips who, like David Dabydeen, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Pauline Melville, belongs to the same generation of anglophone Caribbean authors. In 1994, D’Aguiar published his first novel, The Longest Memory, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. That

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same year, he became an Assistant Professor of English at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, until he took a position, from 1995 to 2003, as a Professor of English at the University of Miami. These eight years were very fruitful for the author, as he managed, during that time, to visit Ghana (Frias 2002, 418), publish three novels: Dear Future (1996), Feeding the Ghosts (1997), which was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and Bethany Bettany (2003); two book-length narrative poems; Bill of Rights (1998), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize, and Bloodlines (2000); and to compile An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems (2001). By 2004, he, like David Dabydeen (one of his Guyanese contemporaries), had won the Guyana Prize for Literature three times, for The Longest Memory, Dear Future, and Bethany Bettany. In 2003, D’Aguiar took a position as Professor of English, co-director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. In 2007 he was a witness of the mass shooting that took place there, and, as a means of mourning for the victims and trying to come to terms with the trauma, he composed a series of elegies that were included as the central part of his poetry collection Continental Shelf (2009), which was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot prize in 2009. He published another collection of poems, The Rose of Toulouse, in 2013. In 2014 he became a U.S. citizen and published his sixth novel, Children of Paradise, a narrative which, like Bill of Rights, deals with the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Since 2015, he has been working as a Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. D’Aguiar’s background is, thus, both typically and untypically Caribbean, given the migrations in his life and work. On the one hand, he was not born in the Caribbean, and he is now an American citizen. On the other, he is, like many Caribbean writers, a descendant of the African diaspora, and claims his ongoing attachment to Caribbean “land” – not in nationalistic terms, but in imaginary and affective ones that induce him to refer to Guyana as “home” (D’Aguiar 2007). These displacements, and that sensibility, coupled with D’Aguiar’s imaginative writings, seem to generate a poetics of migration characteristic of much of Caribbean writing, in which tropes play a central role, notably in translating cross-cultural experience with metaphor being the expression of displacement and transformation. The resulting predominance of diversity, movement, and change in D’Aguiar’s language precludes discussing his works with assumptions of literal sense and cultural essence. It follows that, in spite of its (implicit or explicit) recurrence in “postcolonial” studies, reliance on Sartrean philosophy is inappropriate as a theoretical framework for the study of D’Aguiar’s writings since, as will be shown, Sartrean ­approaches

P reface: Reading Fred D’Aguiar

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display ­limitations in their formulations of Manichean distinctions, for instance on the primacy of essence over experience (Wehrs, 765, Jacques, 9). On the other hand, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s contention that culture is not reducible to monolithic essence (Glissant 1990, 169), or the idea that absolutely nothing is essentially pure or original, as French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests, notably in his presentations of language as intrinsically Other and metaphoric (Derrida 1974, 1978, 1996), seem to resonate more harmoniously with Fred D’Aguiar’s cross-cultural and metaphoric language.1 This seems to be confirmed by Abigail Ward’s reading of D’Aguiar’s novels utilizing the ideas developed in Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Ward, 131–79; Derrida 1972), and it is as a result of these considerations that we have chosen Derrida’s writings as an ethically appropriate theoretical framework for an exploration of D’Aguiar’s writings. In this sense, this choice should by no means be viewed as Euro-centric, as it is simply pragmatic: Derrida’s works are more “all-encompassing” than those of Caribbean thinkers like Glissant, Wilson Harris, or Edward K. Brathwaite for that matter, although these intellectuals’ arguments converge. For instance, Glissant’s argument that there is no "prime element of culture" (Glissant 1990, 169) is a specific manifestation of the general fact, demonstrated by Derrida, that origin is prosthetic, always already decomposable (Derrida 1998). It follows that culture, time (presence/the present), and language are always multifaceted: Glissant’s claim that culture is always-already a “cross-culture” is only one aspect of the decomposable nature of origin. Other facets of this original impurity are Derrida’s idea of “différance” (Derrida 1982, 13) in particular – which is, indeed, comparable to Wilson Harris’ sense of infinite rehearsal (Harris 1987) – and metaphoricity in general (itself deeply related to Brathwaite’s notion of tidalectics). In addition, and as explained in the general introduction below, Derrida’s life attests to his non-Eurocentric status as a former (post)colonial subject and Algerian Jew. Perhaps, in this light, it is probably not even surprising that his ideas concerning the cross-cultural nature and origins of metaphor, myth, and memory are comparable to those being revealed through D’Aguiar’s writings, a reading of which now follows.

1 The suggestion that Caribbean identity is cross-cultural, if frequent, should not be read as a commonplace here: we, like Glissant and Derrida, imply that every culture (not only Caribbean culture) is, by definition, cross-cultural, although the core of our interest, in this book, is how this cross-culturality operates and/or is generated in Caribbean literature and, more precisely, in what Fred D'Aguiar does to the English language to make such cross-culturality palpable.

Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my wife Pauline and my entire family, more specifically, my father and mother, for always believing in me, and helping me out for everything. Fred D’Aguiar, thank you very much for your patience, kindness, and art. I am also very grateful to Marguerite Derrida for the gift, mediated by Thomas Dutoit, of beautiful editions of Jacques Derrida’s books. An enormous thank you to Thomas Dutoit, for helping me, through six years (and counting) of collaboration, to figure out what it is to read and teach literature. Huge thanks must also go to Fiona McCann for her patient reading of this work’s first draft. Many thanks to Bruce E. Graver for kindly sending me his wonderful work on Wordsworth and Orpheus. My gratitude also goes to Bénédicte Ledent and Isabelle Boof-Vermesse for unconditional support and kindness. Many thanks to Francis Gentry for his generosity, and for copy-editing this work. Last but not least, thanks are due to the École Doctorale de Lille – Nord de France, the Conseil Régional du Nord pas de Calais, and the CECILLE laboratory, without whose funding this monograph could not have been written.

General Introduction: Caribbean Orphic There’s a natural mystic blowing through the air – I won’t tell no lie; if you listen carefully now you will hear marley 1977

∵ In the title Fred D’Aguiar and Caribbean Literature: Metaphor, myth, memory, metaphor, myth and memory alliterate on the beats of a trimetric line, suggesting an implicit, yet unclear, link between the three notions. The entire title also constitutes a ternary pocket by way of which metaphor, myth and memory are related to a literature that is called Caribbean, and to which, perhaps, D’Aguiar may “belong.” What is literature? What is the Caribbean? What is ­Caribbean literature, and how does D’Aguiar relate to it? Is he even a Caribbean author, considering the facts that he was born in London, reared in Guyana, then sent back to London where he became a critically acclaimed poet, until he left in 1994 for the United States, where he has lived ever since, becoming an American citizen in 2014? As one focuses on them, the apparently tight pockets of meaning ­condensed in our book’s title unravel into a “woven complexity” (D’Aguiar 1994, 33), and need to be re-plaited into a smooth texture, to offer the sight of an enlarged, embroidered rug ornamenting the grounds on which the following study unfolds, without sweeping anything under the carpet or into the oblivion of “floorboard creases” (D’Aguiar 1985, 39). Let us examine that title again. Our subtitle reads Metaphor, myth and memory; not myth, metaphor and memory, as an implicit, yet expected designation of the role of myth in nation building as a shared, metaphorical memory of what unites a people into a nation or a cultural area. In other words, our subject is not “simply” mythopoetic. We write “Metaphor, myth, and memory,” thereby giving primacy to metaphor, because metaphor has the singularity of being inescapable, from a linguistic standpoint, as Jacques Derrida demonstrates in “The Retrait of Metaphor,” and thus necessarily conditions the telling of myths and memories:1 1 In this book, interpretations of Derrida’s work spring from the French versions of his texts. Citations from his work, however, are always drawn from consultations of the English translations of these books and articles. Original texts and their translations are listed in the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004394070_002

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[the] withdrawal of the metaphoric does not free up the place for a discourse of the proper or the literal [littéral], it will at the same time have the sense of a re-folding, of what retreats like a wave on the s­ horeline [littoral, my italics], and of a re-turn, the overloading repetition of a supplementary trait, of yet another metaphor, a re-tracing [Derrida’s italics] of metaphor […]. derrida 1978, 66

In other words, every attempt at speaking in fully literal terms is intrinsically bound to fail, because speaking is, by definition, making metaphors, undoing the fixity of the signifier into its displacement, translation or meta phorein (De Man 1978, 17), in diversions and reversions, singular rotations or tropoï, tropes. And what metaphor ultimately returns by re-turning to its speaker, according to Derrida, is memory of the metaphorical or, more precisely, catachrestic erasure, in Western metaphysical discourse, of the Indo-European (and hence, cross-cultural instead of exclusively European or, by extension, “Western”) mythological tenors on which the vehicles of that discourse (its words), and language in general, were founded. Such erasure, Derrida calls “white ­mythology” (1971, 11). “White,” not in the ethnic sense, or at least not openly and hermetically so, but as a designation of the “blank” that results from the whitewashing of a specific metaphorical representation of the past on which the nature of language is predicated. In this sense, “white mythology,” is always-already being undone by the palimpsestic retracing of mythic tenors from below the surface of presumed literal vehicles or signs, that is, by the (perpetual) return of metaphor as an intrinsic quality of language. In other words, the relationship that links myth and memory under the linguistic hegemony of metaphor, so to speak, is that metaphor is a mythological reminder. In more rigorous terms, metaphor is not a generator of absolute memory, or anamnesis, but a representation, a restoration of memory, that is, hypomnesis. Hence the “three M’s.” Metaphor, myth and memory. Metaphor is the hypomnesis of a mythology threatened with erasure – and, as such, points to moments of amnesia, the political implications of which, concerning the Caribbean context that is yet to be defined, are fundamental. Speaking of which, the relation of the current Derridean approach to the forthcoming definition of a Caribbean framework does not correspond in any way to the imposition of a reading-grid that would predetermine d­ iscussions b­ ibliography. When translations are cited, page references correspond to the anglophone versions of Derrida’s texts. When we refer to his works without citing them, page references and dates are those of the French editions. The same rule applies for references to Emmanuel Levinas and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

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of Fred D’Aguiar’s works and/or of texts by other, related authors. On  the ­contrary, reliance on Derrida is conditioned by logical and argumentative reasons that spring from a reading of the literary texts in question. The appropriateness of referring to Derrida’s thoughts on the above-mentioned themes in a Caribbean perspective is, moreover, supported by a great variety of historical and philosophical facts: as a Sephardic, Spanish Jew the expulsion of whose ancestors from Spain generated the money to finance the exploration, and colonization, of South America; as an Algerian (and hence African) Jew whose ancestors were given French citizenship in 1870; as a Jew dispossessed of French nationality by the French government in Algeria in 1942 until it was restored in 1945 after the victory of Allied Forces; as a French-Algerian Jew who emigrated to Paris in 1948 and who did his military service in Algeria (as an English teacher to French soldiers’ children) from 1957 to 1959; as the one child among three who single-handedly organized his family’s (two siblings, parents, relatives) departure from Algeria in March 1962; and finally as a scholar whose first book, published in February 1962, coincided with Algerian independence, with French decolonization, and conceptualized “différance” as a deep way of formalizing the relation of colonized and colonizer as well as colony and socalled “post-colony,” Jacques Derrida’s genealogy, family history, personal experience, and intellectual project are deeply entwined with the colonial and “postcolonial” experience of artists like D’Aguiar and others dealt with in this study (Nancy 2007, 65–70; Young 2001, 414). The aforementioned nature of language as an intrinsically metaphorical medium takes part in what Derrida’s work reveals of colonialism. As he explains in Monolingualism of the Other, the irresistible, yet, by definition, insatiable desire to master language, to control its literalness, and prevent its escape into the metaphorical, into Otherness, corresponds to a primarily imperial or colonial drive from which other, analogous wishes derive and become manifest, for instance, through attempts at imposing one’s language and culture on the Other so as to promulgate the “hegemony of the homogeneous” (Derrida 1998, 30, 40, 64). Such hegemony is, however, unachievable: because of, or rather, thanks to, the intrinsically decomposable nature of the literal into the metaphorical; of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous; of the cultural into the cross-cultural, or of presence into “différance,” by way of which origin is always-already prosthetic and, hence, unoriginal, non-universal, not totalizable (Derrida 1982, 13). “Inalienable alienation” (Derrida 1998, 25) is the fundamental property of language from which unsatisfiable colonial desires spring.2

2 As shown below, In Poetics of Relation, Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant corroborates this point by explaining that culture can never be reduced to primary elements, as these

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Derrida’s linguistic definition of colonialism is not intended, however, “to efface the arrogant specificity or the traumatizing brutality of what is called modern colonial war in the ‘strictest definition’ of the expression, at the very moment of military conquest, or when a symbolic conquest prolongs the war by other means” (39).3 Colonialism is not being defended here. However, the contention that the desire for linguistic mastery and cultural appropriation is essentially colonial invites one to risk the hypothesis that since cultural identification is always-already colonial, then colonialism cannot be new or posterior to itself and follow a chronological progression to postcolonialism and/or neocolonialism. Colonialism is neither new nor relegated to the past, but has assumed different forms, such as, roughly speaking, military conquest or conquest by settlement (so-called “colonialism”), insidious conquest (so-called “neocolonialism”), or colonial re-appropriation after Western “decolonization” as official political independence (so-called “postcolonialism”), to this day. “Postcolonialism” is then a paradoxical word, since there is no “after” colonialism, but different, and sometimes successive, forms of the same human colonial impulse. It is also too general in its usual acceptation as a designation of the form of colonialism that is posterior to Western colonization after, approximately, 1492. In fact, the word postcolonialism seldom conjures up, in the mind of its users, the idea of Europe, after the demise of the Roman Empire, as a body of postcolonial countries, while there is nothing in the word that prevents such a signification.4 I am not suggesting that what is generally accepted as a signified of postcolonialism does not exist, but that this signifier presumed “primary” elements are, in actuality, always divisible into other entities (Glissant 1990, 169). 3 “Il ne s’agit pas d’effacer ainsi la spécificité arrogante ou la brutalité traumatisante de ce qu’on appelle la guerre coloniale moderne et ‘proprement dite’, au moment même de la conquête militaire ou quand la conquête symbolique prolonge la guerre par d’autres voies” (Derrida 1996, 69). 4 Moreover, the word “postcolonial” may not only designate formerly colonized countries, but also the countries that colonized them until they became officially independent. In this sense, one may insist on the argument, albeit from a different perspective, that European countries such as France, Great Britain, and Belgium, or even the very special, and American case of the United States – as a former colony gone imperial (or “neocolonial”) – are postcolonial countries, to the same extent as countries such as India, Algeria, and Jamaica. But this definition does not correspond to the apparent, third-worldist (Young 2001, 428) received meaning of the term. Furthermore, if such a definition of postcolonialism fitted the word’s received meaning, the subsequent profusion of countries entitled to the “post” of “postcolonial” would cancel the presumed specificity that “postcolonial” designates, and dilute the “post” into the totalizing, yet diversified force of the “colonial.” The same argument functions with “neocolonial,” insofar as the resurgence of the colonial impulse, be it on the side of formerly colonizing countries or on that of previously colonized states (which, upon independence, try to recapture a once-lost hegemony over a determined territory), is a generalized

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is, if one chooses to follow Derrida’s argument, “inappropriate,” and encourages one to be suspicious of the term “postcolonial,” which will, hence, not be used again, outside of citations, in this book. In addition to this “colonial” aside, it must be noted that literature, because of its intrinsically metaphorical qualities as a linguistic medium, is, subsequently, also endowed with the potential for a hypomnesic restitution of ­specific pasts and mythologies (Derrida 1974, 11; 1978, 66). As will be seen in the course of the present study, examples of this abound in the literary history of the past two millenniums. Viewed from this perspective, then, written literature is doubly mythological, for, not only related to myth through the m ­ etaphoricity of language, literature, as written speech, has itself been mythologized. In other words, the linguistic, metaphorical inscription of the mythological into texts is, arguably, a mythological scene in itself. For instance, in the Phaedrus, ­Plato has Socrates locate the origin of writing in the Egyptian myth of Theuth, where Theuth presents his invention of written speech to Ammon, who rejects Theuth’s gift of writing as a remedy for memory, because Ammon believes that writing will induce readers to stop exerting their memory once they can be reminded by textual constructs: in Ammon’s words, Theuth has “discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding” (Plato a 62, 275a). In this sense, the memory of a myth leads to a view of writing that corroborates, yet through an argument other than that of inescapable metaphoricity, the idea that textuality, or literature in the broadest of senses, is a hypomnesic medium. In addition to that view of written speech, Plato explains that unlike spoken words, writing “always needs its father to help it; for it is incapable of either defending or helping itself” (Plato 63, 275e). Derrida, again, in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” quite justly identifies the “distress of the orphan [détresse de l’orphelin]” (­Derrida 1981, 77). Such a comparison of writing to orphanhood is not fortuitous, but discretely refers to another mythological scene, contemporary to Plato’s time, of the advent of written speech. For Plato’s “anxieties about the inability to control a message once consigned to paper” (Young 2008, 11) are a consequence of the rise of Orphism, that is, the cult of Orpheus, which, breaking with Greek tradition, did not spread by word of mouth and through public ritual, but through the consignment of Orpheus’ alleged words in writing, making the cult unusually dependent upon books, which was not to the taste of every classical thinker at the time, as demonstrated in the above-cited passages from the Phaedrus: “Plato [had] something to say on the topic” (Young 2008, 11). Considering the etymological link that relates the words “Orpheus” and “orphan,” through the Indo-European -orbh- root, which designates yet diversified phenomenon the “newness” of which is always-already relative, or unoriginal, and hence, never new.

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“­bereavement,” be it of an orphan’s parents or of Orpheus’ Eurydice, Plato’s ­definition of written speech as an orphan, at the very moment when Orphic texts became widespread, cannot be accidental. Hence, the definition of writing that Plato has Socrates speak in the Phaedrus, being formulated in response to Orphism and through the legend of Theuth, is made doubly mythological, and corroborates, again, the idea that written speech is endowed with hypomnesic power. But while these features made Socrates suspicious of written speech, they were used by Ovid, precisely through the metaphorical representation of the emergence of writing at the end of his rendition of the myth of Orpheus, to defend the value of written verse as a means to record and remember archaic Greek myths into a Greco-Roman, poetic, literary corpus (Young 15–7). In this sense, classical, orph(an)ic views of written speech strongly relate myth, metaphor, and memory to the world of texts and to literature.5 Moreover, Ovid and Plato’s inscription of the genesis of writing as an orph(an)ic scene is a fundamental feature of literary history, because it initiated a tradition of reading the myth of Orpheus that developed and enlarged across the centuries to the present through rewritings by countless authors, not only from the West, but from all over the world including the Caribbean, notably in Negritude poetry and magic(al) realism (Sartre 1948, ix–xliv; Zamora & Faris 1995).6 In sum, metaphor is a hypomnesic reminder and, being an inescapable feature of language, its interaction with myth and memory necessarily operates in literature too. Literature in turn, as written speech, is also related to myth and memory through the or(phan)ic history of the genesis of writing. In addition, the literary tradition that has flowed from this Orphic scene to the present has spread around the globe and into the literary works of American and Caribbean authors. In this sense, the idea that metaphor, myth, and memory not only interact in, but are fundamental to literature in general, can now be taken as clarified and confirmed. But what happens when literary genres that are presumed to be, originally, American-Caribbean (marvelous realism), or African-diasporic (Negritudinist writing), turn out to be Orphic, and hence, not essentially American-Caribbean, or Black,7 but cross-culturally related to Europe, a continent these genres thus 5 Another way in which literature may be related to myth is the history of the advent of the novel, which both Tzvetan Todorov and Homer Obed Brown describe as a self-orphaning genre that, by presenting itself as newness, as novelty, denies precedence or genealogy (Todorov 14; Brown 1996, 12). For more information, see Chapters 4 and 5 below. 6 Chapter 5 retraces this Orphic literary tradition and shows that Fred D’Aguiar’s work is d­ eeply anchored in its global legacy. 7 Moreover, the marvelous real, in one of its guises, that is, magic(al) realism, is a genre that has spread far beyond the boundaries of Latin America, from Canada to India, from Nigeria

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hypomnesically bring back to mind through the surfacing of their ­encrypted mythological, Orphic scenes of literary inscription? For instance, in literature produced by Caribbean authors, what happens when, in Guyanese author ­Wilson Harris’ magic(al) realist novel Palace of the Peacock, the Guyanese interior is presented through the dual psyche of a Dreamer/John Donne character that is Orphically summoned from the dead thanks to the poetic principle of the Arawak bone-flute (Harris 1960; 8, 20)? What happens when Calypso tries to retain Odysseus, like Orpheus Eurydice, on her Caribbean island, by singing a calypso song (Brathwaite, 48–50)? What if Derek Walcott’s backward rower is the same Orphic figure as that presented by Wordsworth in “Remembrance of Collins,” and his Achille (without an “s” in Walcott’s Omeros) an Afro-Caribbean fisher (Walcott 1986, 217; 1990, 45)? What is Caribbean about this? What happens with Caribbean literature? Well, precisely, this. Every time Caribbean literature turns in on a referent of regional cultural identity, Caribbean literature opens that referent to the world by revealing the multiplicity of geographical and textual places from which it springs, thereby undoing the “white mythology” that would posit the homogenous as hegemonic in language and culture (Derrida 1998, 30, 40, 64; 1974, 11).8 The culturally-coded referent, like Eurydice, like a metaphor, or a trope, always-already whirls away to embrace Otherness and return as a diversified world, as a cross-cultural prism of signification. And one of the main points made in the present study is that Fred D’Aguiar, as a writer of literature, can legitimately be defined as a Caribbean author only insofar as contemporary Caribbean literature is taken to correspond to a particular historical time and regional area that opens the Caribbean to the world, notably via the cross-cultural, metaphoric and or(phan)ic economies of language and writing just described. In other words, this study of D’Aguiar’s work will not only inscribe his writings within the legacies of a network of Caribbean writers, but show how his published corpus – six collections of poems, six novels, one play, and a multitude of articles – relates to literary traditions, mythologies, and histories from Europe, North America, Latin America, and Africa, through specific metaphorical riffs, intertexts, and problematizations of Orphism and orphanhood. to Belgium and on virtually all continents, as shown in Chapter 5. Since denominations of the genre abound and constitute the object of many critical debates, magic(al) realism is used in this book as an umbrella term for that diversity of labels. 8 In a chapter entitled “Orphic Explanations: Toward a Caribbean Heterocosm,” in The Other America, J. Michael Dash, in spite of relying on the word “Orphic” only once (Dash 1998 63), converges with our argument when he contends that the early twentieth century “yields to a new Caribbean theorizing of the modern, which is not future-oriented but built around an unearthing of a mythical past” (61).

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Furthermore, the above-described articulation of metaphoricity and the orph(an)ic history of textuality to myth and memory corresponds to how D’Aguiar’s verse and prose corpus can be, simultaneously, distinguished and related. In other words, while D’Aguiar’s poetry mostly relies on metaphor as a means of hypomnesic restitution of cross-cultural history through the undoing of white mythologies, it is in his six novels, all of which are replete with orphan characters who, more often than not, are endowed with supernatural powers, that the literary, or(phan)ic qualities of myth, metaphor and memory are most palpable. For that reason this book addresses D’Aguiar’s verse and prose separately, in two parts that, nevertheless, and understandably so, sometimes overflow into one another like two communicating vessels. The book’s first half thus explores, in three chapters, major themes and techniques that are mainly, but not exclusively, developed throughout D’Aguiar’s verse corpus, and which metaphorically and cross-culturally relate philosophical, theoretical, and critical ideas in a poetics of what this book tentatively defines as “tropicality:” a type of metaphoricity that is predicated on physical and cultural displacements across the tropics and their related spaces, by way of which a metaphorical or, hence, “tropical” presentation of the cross-cultural may be achieved.9 In order to show the tropical facets of D’Aguiar’s verse in a clear and helpful way for every reader, each of these first three chapters opens with the micro-reading of one to three specific poems by D’Aguiar, before ­addressing his numerous pieces of poetry in a more general (macro-)reading. Chapter 1 shows how tropicality functions as a lens through which D’Aguiar ­rewrites canonical texts and tropes, such as those of Roman mythology, in a way that is intertextually informed by other literary wefts, such as those of slave narratives, British and Irish writings, and Caribbean literature. D’Aguiar’s specific reliance on intertextuality also proves crucial to how the poet revises literary works into cross-tropical tales of interracial love. Furthermore, Chapter 1 explains that D’Aguiar’s reworking of Roman mythology in terms of ethnicity is effected through the infusion of renewed metaphorical meanings within classical mythological texts (by way of which myths are related to the tropics as a geographical and cross-cultural space), and through the injection of Caribbean voices within Roman tales, thereby turning them to cross-cultural tropes, or tropicalities. D’Aguiar also develops and expands this initial network of cross-tropical tropes in subsequent collections, not solely through intertextual references to other authors, but by revising his own, earlier texts. It will, 9 The introduction to Part One is fully dedicated to an in-depth discussion and clarification of this understanding of “tropicality,” which it also distinguishes from the profusion of terms designating the same types of phenomena in existing scholarship.

General Introduction: Caribbean Orphic

9

of course, not come across as fortuitous, considering the relation of Orphism and textuality to millennial Platonist and Ovidian literary traditions, to find that the revised myths that play a pivotal role in D’Aguiar’s metaphorical webs all come from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Pyramus and Thisbe, Icarus, and Medusa are recurrent figures in D’Aguiar’s poetry (D’Aguiar 1985, 1: 1993, 60–3; 1998, 73; 2009, 86–7), and the mythical revisions he operates through them have an impact on his entire work, as the tropes resulting from them melt, for instance, into his metaphorical riff on the oceanic theme. It is precisely the tropicality of that sea riff that Chapter 2 explores. More often than not, in D’Aguiar’s poems, water stands as a metaphor for uprootedness and the oblivion of history, but also for the retrieval and re-creation of lost history into memory and self-consciousness: for the most part, the ­history that is being (re)visited through D’Aguiar’s sea riff is that of the experience of p ­ eoples of African descent across the Atlantic, such as that of slaves who experienced the Middle Passage, in relation to that of contemporary members of the African diaspora traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, such as D’Aguiar himself. Yet, the tropicality of his sea riff does not only spring from the tropical, historical facts concerned, but from the way in which such facts are forgotten and remembered in D’Agiuar’s verse, as the (an)amnesic presentation of his sea riff is evocative of the cross-cultural parallelism that transpires through Barbadian poet Edward K. Brathwaite’s tidalectics as an oceanic v­ ersion of metaphorical “retrait” (Derrida 1978, 66). In other words, Chapter 2 explains how the mnemonic economy of D’Aguiar’s tidalectic metaphors serves his ­purpose of awakening historical consciousness in his readers, and to subvert white mythology: D’Aguiar’s sea riff fulfills the hypomnesic purpose of transcribing tropes of oblivion into the retrieval, or “re-treat,” of the historical knowledge he is concerned with, be it by playing with the economy of l­iquidity – that is, the language of capital and/as water that is a direct consequence of the triangular trade, yet barely acknowledged as such (as a metaphorical reminder) today, and has arguably become a white mythology that D’Aguiar’s verse undermines (DeLoughrey 2007a, 56–7; Derrida 1974, 11) – or dealing with the sea as a haunted limbo of sorts (Derrida 1993, 49–50, 202; Baucom 2001, 61–82). The “perpetual return” of metaphor, “like a wave on a shoreline,” so to speak (Nietzsche 1883–5, 236; Derrida 1978, 66), progressively leads, in ­Chapter 3, to reflections on the cyclical representation of time in D’Aguiar’s poems. ­Specifically, this chapter explores how history, dreams, and musical memories function as metaphorical and literal re-turns that cohere with Wilson ­Harris’ ­principle of infinite rehearsal, which itself corresponds to a cyclical understanding of time that resembles Nietzsche’s concept of perpetual return,

10

General Introduction: Caribbean Orphic

e­ xcept that which recurs with temporal cycles is not sameness, but différance (Derrida 1982, 13). Temporal considerations in Chapter 3 push the discussion into questions of legacy and genealogy in turn and, hence, into an exploration of the theme of orphanhood, which is related to textuality, as seen above, but is also etymologically connected to the notion of slavery, as detailed below, in the introduction to Part Two, where the articulation that operates between Orphism and the status of the foundling is investigated more thoroughly too. These themes, ­respectively, textual orphanhood and the Orphism of foundlings, are studied as such and in this order in that second part dedicated to Fred D’Aguiar’s novels. It is hoped that this thematic treatment of orphanhood, in Chapters 4 and 5, will show that D’Aguiar’s apparently Platonist treatment of orphanhood is supplemented by an Ovidian reliance on the Orphic that allows for the remembrance of presumably irretrievable pasts through writing and imagination as reliable poetic and mnemonic gateways to the past. More specifically, Chapter 4 contends that the intricacies of orphanhood function as a node between literacy and slavery that appears to constitute the core of D’Aguiar’s interest in novels such as The Longest Memory, Bloodlines, and Feeding the Ghosts. Chapter 5, on the other hand, investigates the ways in which D’Aguiar’s novels relate to the Orphic literary tradition, and show, again, that the author relies on Orphism through a cross-tropical variety of myths in his writings, in order to re-explore the transatlantic past of slavery and pre-slavery Africa in imaginative terms. In this sense, D’Aguiar also proves to be linked to the imaginative legacy of Early Enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes and Vico, rather than in the hypothetico-deductive rationality of Descartes. Furthermore, D’Aguiar’s knowledge of Caribbean literature and position as an Anglophone Caribbean writer from the African diaspora relate his imaginative backward glance (Lamming 32, 84) at the past to the legacy of Afro-Caribbean writings such as those of the Negritude poets, although he does not fall prey to the pitfalls of cultural exclusivism, but still manages to convey a sense of his awareness of the existing relationships that link colonialism to the or(phan)ic history of literature. Finally, his recourse to both Western and Caribbean literary canons partakes of his work’s cross-cultural nature, and appears, for instance, in the British romantic sensibility that, through Orphism, suffuses his magic(al) realist tales.

Part 1 Tropicality: Fred D’Aguiar’s Poetry

∵

Introduction to Part 1 We are therefore no longer dealing with a metaphor in the usual sense or with a simple inversion permutating places in a usual tropical structure. derrida 1978, 69–70, my italics

…

By the same token one cannot break each particular culture down into prime elements, since its limit is not defined and since Relation functions both in this internal relationship (that of each culture to its components) and, at the same time, in an external relationship (that of this culture to others that affect it). Definition of the internal relationship is never-ending, in other words unrecognizable in turn, because the components of a culture, even when located, cannot be reduced to the indivisibility of prime elements. But such a definition is a working model. It allows us to imagine. glissant 1990, 169

∵ “Trope” and “tropic” have related Latin and Greek etymologies. They come from the Latin and Greek tropus, tropos, and tropicus, tropikos respectively, which both translate as “turning, motion.” Moreover, if one operates morphological derivations of these words with suffixes, they become polysemous: one obtains tropical and tropicality, or even just tropic, which can stand for a noun – the tropic of Cancer or of Capricorn – and for an adjective – referring to the metaphoric. As a consequence, tropic-al-ity itself becomes a trope or, more precisely, a metaphor by way of which the “tropic” designates both linguistic tropes and topographic tropics. But the similarity which allows for the merging of trope and tropic into a metaphor is not, as one can already imagine, limited to etymology or polysemy. Trope, as a word, is a metaphor, in that it is the designation of any linguistic operation of version, of rotation, by way of

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Introduction to Part 1

which a thing is “turned” into something else; trope is a metaphorical mise en abyme, a metaphor of metaphor (De Man 1978, 17). As is well known, ca. 2,000 years ago the tropics, “Cancer” and “Capricorn” were so designated because the sun shone on these zones from the Cancer and Capricorn constellations at the Summer and Winter solstices respectively. Of course, the constellations were so named after the Greek mythological figures that were imagined to be outlined in their starry patterns. In other words, the tropics are metaphorical gatherings of stellar, mythological, and topographical images. Moreover, the tropics are a figuration, a construct, imaginary lines drawing the limits of a climatic zone and the metaphorical boundaries of one of the major loci to have been colonized by Western countries in the past, comprising the Caribbean, tropical Africa, and South Asia. Hence, the tropics have always been tropes and, as a consequence, tropicality can be considered as a metaphor of metaphors that brings tropes and tropics into proximity.1 But why such a linguistic play? Towards which goal, or rather, which turning point or conversion is this reflection orienting itself? The convergence between tropes and tropics can have a dramatic impact on critical and ­artistic approaches to cross-cultural phenomena: if tropicality is considered as a metaphor connecting tropes with the geographical zone of the tropics, then it effects a mapping of tropes, a t(r)opography. However, since the tropics themselves are a trope for a major locus of colonization, they indicate intercultural relations between themselves and the West, outside of them, above the tropic of Cancer, that necessarily withdraw any possibility for an exclusive t(r)opography that would confine tropes to a geographical strip on the face of the earth. By the same token, the imperialistic trace constituted by tropical lines as a global belt established by the West would be transgressed by tropical, cross-cultural relations that shape the sine qua non condition of their alleged “(post)colonial” sense (DeLoughrey 2007a, 56). Thus, any trope conditioned by a crossing of the cultural contexts of the tropics, any turning in linguistic signification translating a cross-tropical displacement – in a word, t­ ropicality – would necessarily be cross-cultural, and could not be appropriated in the name of an allegedly pure, hermetic, and permanent culture. Let us illustrate this statement with two examples. First, tropicality, in this sense, subverts the expectations of white Western readers, confronted with the idea of “the tropics,” of exoticism in its biased 1 I am very much indebted to Jacques Derrida’s “The Retrait of Metaphor,” in which he derives “trope” into the adjectives “tropic” (Derrida 1978, 67) and “tropical” (69, 71, 79), without openly dealing with the implications of the potential polysemy that has just been presented, as the epigraph to this introduction shows.

Introduction to Part 1

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signification of a prejudicial picturing of people of color as excitingly different because of their imagined primitivism, such as can be found in phrases like “exotic dancer.”2 The “exotic dancer” image translates a Western perception of tropical peoples as primitive due to their presumed nudity. It is a stereotype used – more or less unwittingly today – by the West to establish the tropics as its uncivilized Other. This is, in other words, an instance of geographer Pierre Gourou’s sense of “tropicality,” which Gavin Bowd and Daniel Clayton call “negative tropicality” (Bowd & Clayton 209), a tropicality that David Arnold identifies as a tropical equivalent to Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism: “a system of representation that constructs the Orient [or the tropics in Gourou’s case] as inferior to the West” (214). Paradoxically enough, then, “negative tropicality” is the West’s acknowledging its being culturally altered by tropical relations through a frightened refusal to admit the power of such cross-cultural encounters over itself.3 The cultures of the tropics necessarily had to have an impact on the West for it to come up with such a trope as that of the “exotic dancer.” The hypocrisy of that way of thinking is very clear, and what is formulated here as tropicality subverts such “negative tropicality” in that it is not designed to deny cross-cultural relations or defend the notion of a unified, hermetic, and permanent culture, but celebrates metaphorical traces of cross-cultural exchanges in language and art.4 Thus as opposed to negative tropicality, it could then be submitted that our sense of tropicality is “positive.” However, since tropicality is constantly moving, its essence cannot be fixed, hypostasized, positioned as positive or conceptual, all the more so since it is sometimes difficult to determine the sense of its rotation, as far as the different facts – sometimes of the most inglorious nature, such as colonization and slavery – that have contributed to its development into a variety of cultural riches are concerned. Tropicality is not positive or fixed, but can be versatile 2 In this sense, it is not surprising to find that biased expectations of exoticism have often been subverted thanks to the word “tropic.” This word was the title of the journal that Aimé Césaire, a major figure of the Negritude movement, directed. It is also part of the title of Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, and used to name the 1960s vanguard cinematographic and musical movement of Brazilian tropicalism lead by Hélio Oiticica (Suàrez 295). 3 In the chapter “Tropes and Tropicality” in The Other America that which Dash designates as tropicality corresponds to that definition of negative tropicality: “Tropes, then, are the basic units of discourse and tropics is the vital process that renders the unfamiliar familiar […]. For our purposes, tropics leads to a special encoding of the New World Tropics. It provides insight into the way in which Europe […] reemploys its experience of the Americas in order to render it less threatening and traumatic” (Dash 1998 26). 4 To this extent, tropicality helps to subvert cultural stereotypes: by reading stereotypes – which are also constitutive of negative tropicality – as tropes, as motions within signification, one subverts the aim of the stereotype, which consists in fixing essence.

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Introduction to Part 1

and controversial, that is, open to the fact that something might turn against its movement, even when it is well intentioned. Without controversy, tropicality would not require discussion, but be “out of place.” The other example also illustrates, in Bowd and Clayton’s terms, a negative perception of tropicality: what has generally come to be labeled “Black music.” Whether located in the Caribbean, the United States, or both, it is actually not essentially black, although virtually most of its performers are. Culturally speaking, this music is tropical: it necessarily depends, at least from a historical point of view, on cultural interactions between white and black peoples (among others) across the tropics, because of the heritage of colonization, slavery, and the Middle Passage experience, but also thanks to unavoidable cultural exchanges taking place between different peoples confronted with one ­another.5 It cannot be claimed that peoples of African descent, as a group, constitute the only cultural root of jazz or reggae, unless one does not acknowledge – in a “negative” tropicality – that a confrontation between themselves and several other groups has partly conditioned the advent of these musical genres. Their audiences should thus not confuse what they hear and what they are given to see. For instance, Ragtime and New Orleans (itself a highly cross-cultural place in the late 19th century) foundations of jazz clearly constitute associations of ­European tradition and African rhythmical patterns (Berendt 18–20), to the same extent as so-called “Negro” spirituals blend Christianity with pentatonic scales known to originate in Africa and Asia. In other words, musical genres commonly called “black” (and any other genre associated with a specific ethnicity) are not absolutely black or ethnically homogenous – there is, after all, no pure ethnic essence (Derrida 1982, 13) – from a cultural standpoint, since they do not precede, but spring from inter-ethnic and cross-­cultural contact (Berendt  25). These musical genres constitute tropicalities, that is, tropes, ­traces of interactions conditioned by a crossing of tropical spaces as permeable entities, representations of the cultural riches that can grow from such interactions, in spite of their violence or thanks to their friendly nature. 5 It is for similar reasons that we diverge from the notion of a cultural “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993), because although it is meant to “exceed racial discourse” (Gilroy 2) by designating cross-cultural transatlantic bonds within the African diaspora, it paradoxically and simultaneously – in the “postcolonial” wake of Sartre – suggests, with the adjective “black,” the possibility of associating cultural originality and ethnic essence (3). As a consequence, the Black Atlantic implicitly re-inscribes what it is supposed to question, that is, a classic binarism or partition between “black” and “white.” Conversely, in Henry Louis Gates’ discussion of ethnically coded tropes in Signifyin’ practices used by African-American people to subvert white hegemony, the binarism between black and white is not supplanted, but once more suggested through a distinction between an allegedly literal white discourse and a more metaphorical black language (Gates 48).

Introduction to Part 1

17

In this sense, tropicality could be thought of as comparable to what Homi K. Bhabha defines as the “cultural hybridity” resulting from cross-cultural confrontations in colonial contexts (Bhabha 296). However, even if Bhabha’s notion of cultural hybridity is intended to be a subversive celebration of the cross-cultural instead of its condemnation by a West defining itself as presumably non-hybrid, tropicality, as defined here, is more felicitous, for if it constitutes, like Bhabha’s hybridity, a subversion of “negative” tropicality, it does not function as a unilateral, third-world questioning of Western imperialist discourse, but as a taking into account of the impact of cross-cultural encounters on and by every cultural group involved, and this through the study of a more widespread linguistic phenomenon – tropes in general – than that which hybridity linguistically designates, that is, portmanteau words made up of ­elements coming from different languages (Young 2001, 348). Tropicality does not confront different discourses and their political hierarchies, but unveils the twists and turns that poetically weave them together. Moreover, and as opposed to “hybridity,” “tropicality” is free from the risk of leading to some potentially uncomfortable situations. For one thing, the etymological signification of hybridity, in addition to its original designation of the “offspring between a wild boar and a tame sow” is related to that of hubris. To this extent, “hybridity” has a pejorative etymological sense that could sound awkward in the treatment of some cross-cultural facts: for instance, Robert Young writes that raï, a musical genre mainly played by Muslim people – for whom porcine animals constitute a religious taboo – “has often been described as ‘hybrid’” (Young 2003, 79). Young’s intention is, of course, to celebrate the hybridity of this music, but etymology works at the author’s peril.6 Tropicality does not produce this kind of dissonance between cross-cultural relations and the way they are qualified. One might also think of tropicality as a substitute for Édouard Glissant’s re-appropriation of Patrick Chamoiseau’s concept of “creoleness” through the 6 Moreover, this erasure, or forgetting of the porcine etymology of “hybrid” amounts, in Derridean terms, to the making of “white mythology,” to which Young should be sensible, considering that he is the author of White Mythologies, a book questioning Eurocentrism in ­historiography (Young 1990). Hybridity as a subversive revision of hegemonic colonial discourse is also reproduced as tropicalization by Srinivas Aravamudan (1999), and re-used, criticized, and even announced as such by other scholars (Ha 2001, Aparicio 1994, Potkay 2001). Like Bhabha’s hybridity, tropicalization is presented by Aravamudan as the “tropological revision of discourses of colonial domination” (Aravamudan 6) by colonial subjects from the tropics, or “tropicopolitans” (here an actual hybrid, a portmanteau word) as “objects of representation and agents of resistance” (4) rather than as part of a larger group of potential intercultural representatives of cross-tropical Relation who might use “tropological revision” or embrace tropicality as a cross-cultural cement that would exceed adversarial relationships.

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Introduction to Part 1

word “creolization” (Glissant 2010, 89). Glissant chooses creolization as a process just as tropicality is understood here as metaphorical movement, because the cross-cultural is perpetually moving, or changing, and cannot, then and again, be hypostasized as a concept. By contrast, “creoleness” is a signifier that totalizes the moving process of creolization, a concept designating the tropical cultures of peoples from “formerly” French colonies of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, a result of the cross-cultural exchanges having taken place there between people of African, European, Asian, and maybe even pre-Columbian American descent (Bernabé, Confiant, & Chamoiseau 27–9). As a concept, “creoleness” cannot account for its own intercultural mutability. As a totality, it might neglect the singularity of the “inner life” of the individuals it designates as a group (Levinas 1969, 58).7 On the other hand, creolization is the perpetual process that generates a diverse and infinite number of instances of creoleness. As such, creolization is a Caribbean tropicality, out of the geographically wider array of metaphorical processes and instances that constitute tropicality in general as a trope of diversity in constant conversion, as a cultural ecosystem. Tropicality globalizes creolization. But there actually already exists a creolizing principle that embraces a global scale: Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the ­Other” (2010, 11), and as the “sphere of variations born of the contact among cultures” (57). Every single instance of such “contact among cultures” is defined as an “écho-monde” (202).8 Compared to Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, tropicality would consist in a metaphor for tropical échos-mondes within language and arts. Furthermore, by providing insights on how tropes can constitute specific “échos-mondes” that relate cultures across the tropics, tropicality also shows 7 Luso-tropicalism presents the same problems when conceived as the creoleness of peoples from former lusophone, Portuguese colonies, and constitutes an identitarian retreat into monolingualism and specific geographical zones that is at odds with the tropological nature of their (post)colonial tropicality (McNee 2012). The dead-end of essentialism in intercultural studies can also be found in Sartre, Negritude (Glissant 1990, 89), and Pan-Africanism (Young 2001, 237, 245), as explained in Chapter 5. 8 Kept in French in the English translation of Poetics of Relation. In her introduction to the book, the translator, Betsy Wing, explains: “The article clearly modifies the first element (la totalité, les échos, le chaos), but the second element (monde) is not a mere modifier, as it would appear to be if the normal English reversal of terms took place (that is, world-totality, world-echoes, world-chaos). In fact, in this third instance all the implications of ordered chaos implicit in chaos theory would slip away, leaving the banality of world disorder. Nor are these guises of the world (the world as totality, etc.); they are identities of the world. The world is totality (concrete and quantifiable), echoes (feedback), and chaos (spiraling and redundant trajectories), all at once, depending on our many ways of sensing and addressing it.” (Glissant 1990, xv). In this study, Relation will bear a capital “R” whenever it is used with Glissant in mind.

Introduction to Part 1

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how such tropes can be created on purpose. This, in addition to its more felicitous signification than that of other notions formulated by critics, constitutes its singularity and attests to its necessity, in spite of the already great body of literature and terminology that precedes it in existing scholarship. Tropicality is adaptable to a great variety of critical spheres and consists in an open creative principle – in the poetic sense of the term – without necessarily functioning as a tool or a method, since tropicality can be witnessed and its movement supported or even, to some extent, generated, but never fully mastered. In sum, tropicality is not destined to debase any ethnic group culturally, or to deprive them of any cultural heritage. However, tropicality contradicts any claim to allegedly original, hermetic, and permanent cultural qualities in actual tropical art forms made up of works including and creating cross-cultural tropes. Tropicality indicates that it is right and culturally healthy for a white German musician to be influenced by James Brown, for an Indian poet to find inspiration in African literature, or for an Afro-Caribbean Trinidadian man such as C.L.R. James to play cricket. These ideas might sound very banal, to the point of approximating truism, but they have not become common(-)places9 in the eyes of a lot of people, and it is thus necessary to keep on repeating them. Of course, it also, and inversely, cannot be ignored that tropicality was often coerced upon, for instance, African people who were taken across the tropics and the Atlantic as slaves, and on whom the culture of the West – such as Christianity and the Enlightenment ideals – was forced, while they tried and managed to preserve parts of their African cultures (Gates 129–30). The same thing was done to the West’s colonial subjects – including peoples of African descent – through acculturation (James 51, 212, 218). But slave-masters and colonizers could not resist tropicality either, since their contacts with African people and colonial subjects during a long period of time unavoidably ­engendered relations which altered them culturally as well. In a tropical perspective, such a past is not ignored. On the contrary, the ability to identify “échos-mondes” requires the knowledge of past cross-cultural relations as a form of historical consciousness which will be defined in Chapter 2. This consciousness shows that all the cultural riches that have sprung from such an inglorious past do not find their origin in cultural exclusivity, but in tropicality as a common denominator to different cultures. As such, tropicality clears the path for ethical and open-minded cross-cultural exchange. In the Caribbean for instance, and although they do not define their works in those terms, some scholars and­ 9 The phrase “common(-)places” refers here to the ambivalence with which Édouard Glissant plays in Poetics of Relation between “commonplace” as a truism and “common place” as a crossroad for cultures.

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Introduction to Part 1

artists – such as Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris or Bob ­Marley – rely or have relied on the generative motion of tropicality to produce critical and/or artistic works that counter cultural prejudices and carry a conciliatory message into highly racialized societies (Hintzen 106; James 65–7). Among these artists, Fred D’Aguiar is of particular interest, despite the relatively little amount of attention criticism has paid him so far, notably because his aforementioned migrations are suggestive of cross-cultural experience, and actually cast him as a tropicality. Although defining a human being as a tropicality may sound puzzling, tropicality, paradoxically enough, constitutes one of the most literal metaphors around. In fact, metaphor is supposed to designate a movement in signification, a translation in “sense,” a word which itself can designate the trajectory of a displacement. But signification does not move, at least not literally: this indicates, again, that the received meaning of metaphor induces a metaphorical understanding of signification. On the other hand, when it comes to tropicality, the metaphorical movement of signification is either coupled to or conditioned by another movement that is literal and physical; the displacement that is operated within signification depends upon cross-tropical displacements which always have a material dimension. Thus, tropicality approximates a type of metaphor where displacement within signification is accompanied by literal movement. In this sense, the trip implies the trope in the same way as the tropics that D’Aguiar crosses entail his tropicality. His status as a tropical author transpires through his works and opens up a space in which he can express himself through poems, novels, plays, and articles. This book’s first part focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on his works in verse, which constitute more than half of his published corpus so far, and ­investigates – through initial micro-readings and subsequent macro-readings – how tropicality transpires through them, by exploring their major themes and techniques, which tropically relate philosophical, theoretical, and critical sources in the process. Chapter 1 explains how the author uses tropicality as a lens through which he can revise canonical texts and tropes, such as those of Greco-Roman mythology, 17th-century British, and contemporary Caribbean literatures, with subtle inclusions and representations of interracial love and hate as factors of tropicality. Chapter 2 shows that tropicality also emanates from the vast sea riff that D’Aguiar has been building throughout his work, where water expanses stand as metaphors for both the oblivion and retrieval of the founding, cross-cultural scenes of modern history. Chapter 3 explores how history, dreams, and music function as tropical and mnemonic re-turns in D’Aguiar’s poems.

Chapter 1

Tropical (Re)Visions (of Mythology) Inter-racial love is just love in technicolor! An emblem of multiplicity, a plural trope, a potpourri of possibilities, a body’s quest for otherness, a symbol of transgression, love’s repair of inter-racial conflict and despair, eroticism’s attempt to shape the future, love’s exegesis of history’s hurt. Love! Love! Love! d’aguiar in Frias 2002, 422

…

In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards – ten cents a package – and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, – refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a footrace, or even beat their stringy heads. du bois 1897

∵ In its American sense, revision is often understood as rewriting history. However, revision serves here to designate Fred D’Aguiar’s specific use of intertextuality, in which he consciously rewrites literary works into tropical wefts. Such revision is best exemplified, in D’Aguiar’s verse, by his reworking of Roman mythology through the lens of inter-ethnicity and/or, as seen above, of “love in technicolor.” So doing, D’Aguiar manages rewritings of ancient myths by investing words from the original texts with new metaphorical meanings that relate them to the tropics as a geographical and cross-cultural space, and by

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Chapter 1

injecting Caribbean voices within Roman myths, resulting in deeply tropical verse. D’Aguiar does not limit this process to a single stage. His revisionary texts are not only the fruits of intertextual revision, but can be traced back intratextually throughout his works, showing that he rewrites the works of others as much as his own into a rich network of images. The revised myths that play the most important parts in D’Aguiar’s poetry all come from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Again, these myths are those of Pyramus and Thisbe, Icarus, and Medusa.1 “Pyramus and Thisbe,” probably the most prominent myth in D’Aguiar’s verse corpus, is thoroughly and openly revised at the end of the poet’s third collection of poems, British Subjects (1993), while the author’s most striking references to Icarus and Medusa respectively appear in Mama Dot (1985, 1), Bill of Rights (1998, 73) – a long meditative poem on the 1978 Jonestown Massacre – and Continental Shelf (2009, 86–7). 1

Pyramus, Thisbe, and the Tropics

Ovid’s Metamorphoses are as many transfers and changes of state as the rewritings and transformations they have gone through. It is, for instance, easy to claim that the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, as told by Ovid, is one of the tales that has been rewritten the most in the history of literature. One very famous revision is William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet where, as in “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the union of two lovers is thwarted by their respective families and leads to their untimely death. Pyramus, like Romeo, commits suicide because he thinks that Thisbe, or Juliet, is dead, and Thisbe kills herself in turn at the sight of her dying lover. What differs between Ovid’s myth and Shakespeare’s play is that in “Pyramus and Thisbe” Thisbe flees from a lioness’ blood-stained mouth and as she runs towards a cave for refuge, she inadvertently drops her shawl. The garment is torn to pieces and stained with blood by the lioness, subsequently leading Pyramus to believe that his lover has been killed by the predator. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet drinks a poison that gives her a temporary cadaverous aspect. Romeo is unaware of the subterfuge and tragically commits suicide besides what he believes to be his lover’s corpse. Apart from the “star-crossed lovers’” tale (Shakespeare 1981, 73), another, ­Surinamese or – at the risk of being anachronistic – Guyanese version of Ovid’s myth is found in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave, which is worth mentioning, considering D’Aguiar’s own Guyanese background and revision 1 Orpheus is also a very important figure in D’Aguiar’s work, but mostly in his prose corpus, as Chapter 5 shows.

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of the myth. Behn wrote Oroonoko in 1688, the last year of her life, not long before the Glorious Revolution deprived James ii of his throne to the benefit of William of Orange. In spite of the many poems and plays she had written before, this novella became her most famous work thanks to its adaptation to the stage by Thomas Southerne in 1696.2 Oroonoko tells the love story of two ­African characters, namely, Oroonoko and Imoinda, to which Oroonoko’s jealous grandfather objects, to the point of complicating it by arranging for the two lovers to be sold separately as slaves bound for what was, in the s­ eventeenth century, the British colony of Surinam, part of which later became a portion of present day Guyana. Oroonoko and Imoinda manage to meet again there, only to realize that they cannot love each other as plantation slaves, and Oroonoko subsequently kills Imoinda with her consent before failing to commit suicide in turn and being decapitated by his master a few days later. Oroonoko and Imoinda’s thwarted love and their suicidal deaths are reminiscent of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and suggest that Behn revised the myth into a short novel. In order to do so, she would have modified two important elements of the myth’s plot in addition to changing the place of the action. First, the protagonists’ African ethnicity is explicit in her text, while unspecified in Ovid. The interest of such explicitness in Behn’s text might reside in its transferring the story to her contemporary tropical colonial context and, as a consequence, in its contribution to the argument that Oroonoko might have consisted in a source text for eighteenth-century slave narratives (Gates 133). The second ­revisionary feature of Behn’s text consists in an alteration of the mythical predator: a lioness in Ovid’s text, and two tigers in Behn’s. Contrarily to Ovid’s lioness, the tigers’ gender cannot be determined, and the predators have no role in the lovers’ death. This difference is probably not accidental since, when read in relation to other passages referring to gender in the novel (such as Imoinda’s calm acceptance of death being contrasted with Oroonoko’s loss of courage when it comes to killing himself), it, contrary to Ovid’s version, leads to prefeminist interpretations.3 And although the novella is already known for its 2 Then, in addition the revisionary quality of Behn’s novel, Oroonoko has also been rewritten by Thomas Southerne as a play that has experienced, in turn, numerous adaptations – and, hence, as many revisions – from the 18th century to the present (Aravamudan 345). For instance, Anglo-Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele’s version for the Royal Shakespeare company in 1999 resets the play into a transnational perspective through the lens of Nigerian mythology (Kowaleski Wallace 266). Also of note is Grenadian author Joan Anim-Addo’s 2008 libretto imoinda or She who Will Lose her Name. For a broader discussion of Oroonoko in terms of theatricality, see Figlerowicz 2008. 3 Thoughts and actions in support of women are usually called pre-feminist if they occurred before 1837, when the word “feminism” was first accepted as féminisme into French dictionaries.

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pre-feminist tendencies (Todd in Behn xxiv) and for being a potential precursor to slave narratives (Aravamudan 250, 269–70; Gates 133), scholarly research has never, to our knowledge, established a parallel between its protagonists and Pyramus and Thisbe,4 while the reportedly precursory features of Behn’s narrative were probably predicated on her response to Ovid’s arguably sexist (a chain of events exclusively conditioned by feminine agents induces Pyramus to kill himself) and ethnically neutral myth. Tropical context and personal stance also inform Fred D’Aguiar’s take on the metamorphosis in “Pyramus to Thisbe” and “Thisbe to Pyramus,” two poems following one another at the end of British Subjects, his third collection of poems (1993). In this sense, it is already interesting to notice that D’Aguiar refers to Roman mythology in a book that deals with “British subjects,” be they themes, British people, or (post)colonial subjects of Britain, because it implicitly foregrounds the importance of the rediscovery of Greek and R ­ oman texts during the Renaissance in the construction of the West – and, by extension, of the idea of Empire – as a cultural unit. In other words, readers can already sense that intercultural transfers between Roman antiquity and modern Great Britain, but also between Great Britain and its former colonies, might be at stake, and these expectations are justified by D’Aguiar’s version of Pyramus and Thisbe, since its singularity resides in the transformation of the myth into a trope of inter-ethnic love, with a black Pyramus and a white Thisbe, and, again, in a specific use of words from the original text that renews their meanings through contemporary perspectives, where the movement of signification translates cross-cultural exchange, where tropes cross the tropics into tropicality. 1.1 Proleptic Rhythm Like Aphra Behn, and contrary to Ovid and Shakespeare, then, D’Aguiar’s version of Pyramus and Thisbe differentiates itself by specifying the ethnicity of characters.5 Nevertheless, it inscribes itself within the broader literary tradition of revising Ovid as well, and suggests that D’Aguiar’s revision adds a­ nother 4 In addition to the fact that no analogy appears to have been made between Behn’s characters and Pyramus and Thisbe so far, even Romeo and Juliet are rarely mentioned in relation to Oroonoko (Johnson 342), and, if ever mentioned at all, other plays by Shakespeare, such as The Tempest, Othello, or Henry v, are privileged in relation to Behn’s work, because of their inter-ethnic and/or colonial implications, or just because Behn’s and Shakespeare’s kings show comparable attitudes (see Andrade 192, and Pacheco 498). 5 Another parallel between Behn’s text and D’Aguiar’s poems is that the “lion”is no longer described as female in “Thisbe to Pyramus.” Yet, its continued presence reinforces a sense of intertextuality between Behn, D’Aguiar, and Ovid.

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layer to an already palimpsestic myth. His rewriting of the metamorphosis consists in the poems “Pyramus to Thisbe” (60–1), which stages Pyramus talking to Thisbe through the crack in the wall that separates the lovers’ houses, and “Thisbe to Pyramus” (62–3), voicing Thisbe’s last words to her dying ­lover before her suicide. Both lovers speak in lines that fluctuate between three and four beats, but these lines are gathered in sextets of rhyming couplets in Pyramus’ speech, while quatrains in alternate rhyme are preferred for ­Thisbe’s ­lament. Three-beat lines and four-beat lines, especially when gathered in quatrains echo one of the “commonest forms of popular verse” in English, the four-by-four formation that structures many medieval and romantic ballads, as well as nursery rhymes and popular songs (Attridge 62). D’Aguiar’s choice of trimetric and tetrametric lines for the poems might therefore refer to the great popularity of the myth he revises. However, a more precise scansion of both poems reveals that feet in these lines are very irregular, varying from trochee to iamb, requiring demotions and promotions for fluid utterance, and containing many falling inversions. In other words, if stanza form denotes popularity, contrasting rhythmical intricacies suggest that D’Aguiar does not really intend to tell the same old Roman story. And what readers learn in “Pyramus to Thisbe,” again, is that Pyramus is black, and Thisbe, white: I am black and you’re white: What’s the day without night To measure it by and give It definition; life. We’ll go where love’s colourBlind and therefore coloured. d’aguiar 1993, 60

D’Aguiar’s version of the myth is therefore a tale of interracial love. As a consequence, it relates D’Aguiar’s revision to that of Aphra Behn again or, more precisely, to Thomas Southerne’s theatrical adaptation of Oroonoko, in which Imoinda is a white woman – “thereby allowing English actresses to play the part without blackface” (Kowaleski Wallace 258). However, D’Aguiar does not present a white Thisbe for the same reasons, and keeps her as a protagonist, while Southerne makes her, as Imoinda, secondary, to the privilege of other characters of his invention (Southerne 1988; Aravamudan 49).6 In D’Aguiar’s 6 Biyi Bandele, in his staging of the play, restores Imoinda’s blackness and gives her a selfassertive and feminist role (Kowaleski Wallace 268–72).

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poems, ethnicity entails a complete re-interpretation of the story: Pyramus and Thisbe’s love for one another is thwarted because of racism, and their plan to meet on the outside, away from the wall that separates them, regardless of color lines, leads to their death. A first interpretation of the poem and of its form may be drawn from this interracial context: the wall that separates Pyramus and Thisbe, be it their ­houses’ or the metaphorical one of “death” (62), is represented in the “backto-back” separation of the two poems, on two sides of the same page in British Subjects. But readers soon learn, in “Pyramus to Thisbe,” that this “wall” of racism, this segregationist frontier, is, as in Ovid, cracked, and allows the protagonists to communicate through its “chink” where their breaths “link” (60) in an apt metaphorical rhyme, where the crack that parts the wall in two, is also a track by way of which the lovers’ breaths mix. In D’Aguiar’s poem, this flaw in the wall undermines any (racist) rejection of difference, as it becomes the constitutive element of meaning: through the wall, D’Aguiar manages to use Pyramus’ breath to subvert segregation in a Saussurian presentation of the myth. What is understood by “Saussurian” is, in Derrida’s words, that The elements of signification function due not to the compact force of their nuclei but rather to the network of oppositions that distinguishes them, and then relates them one to another. […] Now this principle of difference, as the condition for signification, affects the totality of the sign, that is the sign as both signified and signifier. derrida 1982, 10

In “Pyramus to Thisbe,” black and white are interdependent signifiers, just as “day” and “night,” to which Pyramus associates the two colors, because one is meaningful only through its differing other. Black is nothing without white “To measure it by and give / It definition; life” (D’Aguiar 1993, 60). The “face”7 of each of these adjectives’ signified, the colors on the skins of the lovers’ “faces” and bodies, along with their complementary nature, stand as a metaphor for Pyramus’ and Thisbe’s interdependence as people in love (Levinas 1961, 42). Difference is a factor of complementarity and contact, while the “wall” of racism that separates the lovers is a threat to “life” (D’Aguiar 1993, 60), to the lovers’ breaths, to language as a means of communication and understanding predicated on difference. The wall partly thwarts the interdependent relationship 7 In the original, French version of Derrida’s “Différance,” it is the “face” of the signified and the “face” of the signifier that are altered. We leave this slippage or non-identity (face/face; aspect/aspect; the Levinasian visage or face very nearby) apparent, here.

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of (interracial) love, but its chink allows for the circulation of amorous language and illustrates that, as Glissant and Chamoiseau explain in “When the Walls Fall,” an essay they co-wrote in 2006 to oppose the creation of a ministerial office of national identity in France, “no boundary remains uncrossed” (5, translation mine).8 The wall that separates Pyramus and Thisbe in – and between – D’Aguiar’s two poems is also comparable to the “identity wall” that Glissant and Chamoiseau describe in that essay, published thirteen years after D’Aguiar’s two poems: “It is the inability to live contact and exchange that creates the identity wall and denatures identity” (6, my translation).9 Just as the rejection of difference counters signification, the attempt at preserving a “pure” identity or a single cultural root prevents one from evolving through a relation with the Other: “the wall side of identity can be reassuring. It can then serve racist, xenophobic, or populist politics to dismaying extents. However, independently from any virtuous principle, the identity wall does not know anything of the world anymore. It does not protect anymore, gives way to nothing but the involution of regressions, the insidious asphyxiation of the mind, and self-perdition” (7, my translation).10 Thus, Fred D’Aguiar’s revision of Ovid, through the potential metaphoricity of the wall and ethnic specification, renews one’s reading of the myth. But the wall is just one example of what is generally happening, in D’Aguiar’s revision, in relation to the inter-ethnic link that the poems’ protagonists represent. The wall, inter-ethnicity, and the Saussurian interpretation that springs from them lead one to re-read D’Aguiar’s texts in tropical terms. 1.2 Sounding the Signs In both of D’Aguiar’s poems, then, although the quatrain and the three-beat line echo the traditional four-by-four formation, the difficulty of reading the poems aloud while simultaneously respecting their scanned rhythm foregrounds, from the onset, D’Aguiar’s revisionary intentions: D’Aguiar’s “­Pyramus to Thisbe” re-writes the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe as an interracial tale, which invites readers to consider inter-ethnicity as an element that infuses the myth with supplementary meaning. Such a way of reading enriches one’s

8 9 10

“Il n’est frontière qu’on n’outrepasse.” “C’est l’inaptitude à vivre le contact et l’échange qui crée le mur identitaire et dénature l’identité.” “Le côté mur de l’identité peut rassurer. Il peut alors servir à une politique raciste, xénophobe ou populiste jusqu’à consternation. Mais, indépendamment de tout vertueux principe, le mur identitaire ne sait plus rien du monde. Il ne protège plus, n’ouvre à rien sinon à l’involution des régressions, à l’asphyxie insidieuse de l’esprit, à la perte de soi.”

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experience of “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D’Aguiar 1993, 62–3), the second poem in D’Aguiar’s revision. In that poem, Thisbe explains to a dying Pyramus what happened to her: Pyramus, I swear I ran faster than You, into a cave. It fell from my hand… I would have turned back For that crucial shawl Risking my own neck, Than you find it mauled […] (62) The abundance of run-on lines, the absence of correspondence between syntactical constituents and the contents of lines, along with the ellipsis at the end of this excerpt’s first stanza are obstacles to a flowing reading that certainly evoke Thisbe’s voice breaking with sobs. But these details, when read with ethnicity in mind, turn out to mean much more. For one thing, the ellipsis invites readers to try and remember what it was that Thisbe lost, that is, the following verse paragraph’s “shawl,” the importance of which is strengthened in sense and sound with the adjective “crucial,” with which it forms an – albeit imperfect – internal rhyme. Moreover, given the inter-ethnic context in which the “crucial shawl” appears, one cannot help but think of it as the veil of race to which W.E.B. Du Bois refers in one of this chapter’s epigraphs in order to evoke double consciousness, which is, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. du bois 1897

Double consciousness is, according to Du Bois, analogous to a veil that would mediate his vision by dividing his perception of himself between the black man that he is and the idea of the man he should be according to the standards

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of the white people looking at him. In D’Aguiar’s poem, inter-ethnicity, along with the elliptic and sonic foregrounding of the shawl, incite one to associate Thisbe’s “shawl,” also present in Ovid’s text, with Du Bois’s racial veil of double consciousness.11 With the shawl, then, D’Aguiar adds nothing to Ovid’s version: rather, he elliptically withdraws the first occurrence of the veil through ellipsis so as to delay information and let readers remember and think about it. As a result, one discovers that D’Aguiar has turned the shawl to tropicality: the union of Pyramus and Thisbe, the fusion of their breaths through the wall that splits the revised myth in two poems, along with their final meeting, correspond to the metaphorical unification of an inter-ethnic double consciousness, which occurs once Thisbe sheds the shawl. Apart from delaying the fall of the shawl, so to speak, D’Aguiar actually adds one element to the myth, and that feature also leads back to Du Bois. In “Pyramus to Thisbe,” Pyramus teasingly questions Thisbe’s ability to sprint and challenges her to a race (D’Aguiar 1993, 61). This challenge does not exist in Ovid’s text. However, in a reading conditioned by ethnicity, the polysemous quality of the word “race” as a designation of both a footrace and what is racial is not lost on readers, all the more so since Du Bois capitalizes on it too in the epigraph I have drawn from his “Strivings of the Negro People,” where he explains that he had “no desire to tear down that veil” but “lived above it in a region of blue sky” that “was bluest when [he] could beat [his] mates at […] a foot-race” (Du Bois 1897, emphasis mine). This additional similarity with Du Bois’s text confirms the impression that D’Aguiar relies on “Strivings of the Negro People” for his revision of Ovid, and strengthens the idea that Thisbe’s “crucial shawl” (D’Aguiar 1993, 62) is a variant of the veil of race. In this perspective, when Pyramus challenges Thisbe to a race, not only does he teasingly question her abilities as a woman, but as a white woman, whose gender and race, Pyramus implicitly suggests, are unfit to compete with those of the male black sprinter he claims to be. Pyramus’ pretense partakes of tragic irony, since readers learn, in “Thisbe to Pyramus,” that Thisbe “ran faster than / [Him]” (62). Moreover, if the word “race” is understood as a polysemous signifier in “Thisbe to Pyramus,” the poem’s penultimate verse paragraph gains meaning.12 In it, after the footrace, Thisbe paradoxically asks Pyramus: “Who’s 11

12

Behn’s preference of the word “veil” (Behn 29) over Ovid’s “shawl” in English translations, in addition to Southerne’s white Imoinda, suggest, albeit tenuously, the possible mediation of these two British authors’ texts in D’Aguiar’s revision of the myth, in that Behn’s use of “veil” might have led D’Aguiar to connect Ovid’s “shawl” to Du Bois’ “veil.” In addition to the polysemous nature of “race,” and the metaphoricity of the “shawl,” the question of ethnicity in the poems even lead to the idea that the name “Thisbe” is also evocative of African-American parlance: this be Thisbe’s equivocal name.

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to win this race?” If this is an actual footrace, the finish line is death and Pyramus “wins.” But if the question is to know which ethnic group is to take over, the answer is “none.” The two lovers die because of the wall, or veil, of race, which prevents them from meeting in a safe place. 1.3 Reversal and Metamorphosis: Color Inversions There is no winner, neither hierarchy nor partition between the black man and the white woman anymore. There is exchange, a relation which c­ omplicates the poem, to the extent that double consciousness, the veil of race that Du Bois uses to define the predicament of African-American people is associated, quite equivocally, to a white Thisbe’s shawl in D’Aguiar’s revision. This entails two possible interpretations for D’Aguiar’s poems: the shawl that Thisbe drops unwittingly, as a veil of race, either altered Pyramus’ vision, or indicates that inter-ethnicity implies double consciousness for black and white people alike. In both cases, the veil’s being torn to pieces by the lion would then comprise an allegory of the necessity to overcome the binarism of ethnic distinctions in order to exceed the limitations of the identity wall into the cross-cultural. What is tragic about D’Aguiar’s Pyramus and Thisbe is that the price to pay for such colorblindness is death, and the poems imply that such an outcome could be avoided by borrowing cultural sideways and crossings, using the chinks as cross-cultural links to go beyond the boundaries of segregationist isolation until the murals fall. Pyramus says it all in the middle of his speech: “We’ll go where love’s colour- / Blind and therefore coloured” (60) enough to make the mulberry’s “fruit / Turn red” (63), rather than black or white: “red” is “read” as a trope of love unhampered by ethnic distinctions. 1.4 Other Ovidian Transformations In addition to “Pyramus to Thisbe” and “Thisbe to Pyramus,” several other poems by Fred D’Aguiar transfer the myths of Icarus, Midas, and Medusa into tropical contexts, albeit in a less sustained way. Nonetheless, these rewritings of other canonical Western stories with Caribbean features must be briefly mentioned here as well, insofar as they also share in the intratextuality of D’Aguiar’s work and relate it to other tropical writers who employ similar revisionary methods. References to the myths of Midas and Icarus first appear in D’Aguiar’s works in the opening epigraphic poem of the poet’s first collection, Mama Dot (1985), entitled “A Toast”: Who gwine tek we hope gaf fe be a Midas

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an rope de sun do wha Icarus neva done.

d’aguiar 1985, 7

Although reading aloud and scanning the poem give, at first, the impression of a varied and intricate rhythm, reading it without regard for line divisions regularizes the pattern: the first two lines, read as one, share a common metrical pattern with the poem’s third line by making up a trochaic trimeter. The two closing lines of “A Toast” constitute a trochaic tetrameter, and the poem’s only graphic and rhythmic rupture consists in the enjambment of the lines “an rope / the sun,” the metrical pattern of which corresponds to single iambic feet. Such a rupture relates to the place where the poem transits from one myth to the other, with the verb “rope” as a potential reference to the purple turban Midas used to hide his ears, which were turned into an ass’s by the god of Delos as a punishment for his lack of musical taste, while “the sun” clearly is Icarus’ chosen aim. The rest of the poem is made up of, roughly speaking, three-beat or four-beat binary units that are reminiscent of the popular rhythm of fourby-four formations again, a rhythm that is combined with a Caribbean patois, or even a Guyanese one, since Mama Dot deals with D’Aguiar’s childhood in Guyana and, more specifically, with an eponymous character who is none other than D’Aguiar’s grandmother (D’Aguiar 1985; Stade & Karbiener 127). By the same token, the association of popular rhythms and (probably) Guyanese inflexions to Ovidian references tropicalizes the myths. This tropicality not only draws from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but also connects D’Aguiar’s work to those of Caribbean writers from the previous generation, such as St Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott for instance, who, in his epic in verse Omeros, tropically revises Homer by displacing the war of Troy to the Caribbean, and achieves the same kind of vernacular tropicality as in “A Toast” by making Philoctete, a character from Greek mythology, participate in a creole conversation with Ma Kilman: ‘Mais qui ça qui rivait-‘ous, Philoctete?’ ‘Moin blessé.’ ‘But what is wrong wif you, Philoctete?’ ‘I am blest wif this wound, Ma Kilman, qui pas ka guérir pièce. Which will never heal.’ walcott 1990, 18

This passage uses translation from creole to English in order to let readers understand the conversation. However, translations are not fully faithful, and

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generate metaphors. For instance, “blessé,” which means “wounded” in French, is translated by an archaic form of its false cognate, “blest,” blessed, followed by the phrase “wif this wound.” In other words, Walcott turns “mistranslation” to poetic choice here, by capitalizing on the sonorities of “blest” and “blessé” to approximate a rhyme and to compare, metaphorically, “being wounded” to “being blessed with a wound,” while inserting an archaic form in the process (“blest”) so as to echo the ancient quality of the text being revised. Such a crosscultural, bilingual blend is comparable to that found in “A Toast,” which alludes to Ovid in creole, and functions as a tropicality, that is, again, as a metaphorical presentation of the cross-cultural. The tropical transfer of ancient myths into creole language does not, however, consist in the only revisionary technique D’Aguiar shares with other ­Caribbean authors. The tropical use of form and historiography constitute other features of D’Aguiar’s verse that can be found, for instance, in the poet’s reliance on the myth of Medusa (the gorgon with snakes instead of hair, whose look turns people to stone, and whom Perseus manages to petrify thanks to a reflective shield that also protects him from her gaze) in Bill of Rights (1998), a long meditative poem recounting the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide provoked by the religious zeal of the American, self-proclaimed Reverend Jim Jones. More precisely, Bill of Rights partly consists in a story narrated by a young man who has been convinced to follow Jones, but who progressively starts questioning the Reverend’s ways as he is being deprived of the woman he loves, Tikka, whom the Reverend has decided to take as a concubine. In the narrative, Medusa appears when Jim Jones cruelly orders the young man to shave his “untidy” hair – an “Afro” haircut he says he combs with a fork into strands that “resemble / Tagliatelle” (73), providing readers with a darkly ironic alimentary simile that translates hunger, a daily feeling at the People’s Commune (Naipaul 145–46) – with a broken bottle: I didn’t need those hairs They were forked with neglect I resembled Medusa But lacked her appalling power That bottle was no mirror He looked me straight in the eye I was the one who turned cold as stone He slithered away in the razor grass. d’aguiar 1998, 73

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These italics are original with D’Aguiar. In his Bill of Rights, almost every page is split in two parts thanks to spacing, and the second part is always italicized, as if to indicate a change of voice. More precisely, D’Aguiar’s use of italics here consists in a formal rendering of paralipsis, where the homodiegetic narrator, at the moment of narration, comments on the character he was at the moment of the story. This graphic literary device is another technical tool that D’Aguiar shares with authors such as Barbadian poet Edward K. Brathwaite and African-American novelist and poet Ishmael Reed. However Brathwaite uses italics in some poems of The Arrivants as a means to show that one line is a translation of the other: “we are addressing you / Ye re kyere wo” (Brathwaite 99). By so doing, Brathwaite effects a tropical call and response between Germanic and African languages that is, again, close to the translational and cross-cultural metaphoricity that is at work in D’Aguiar’s “A Toast” and Walcott’s Omeros. As for Ishmael Reed, his use of italics in his novel Mumbo Jumbo, which rewrites the 1929 stock-market crash as a side effect of the Harlem Renaissance and the viral spread of jazz, itself seen as a form of musical voodoo, is closer to D’Aguiar’s technique, in that it operates in a meta-fictional and historiographic text as well. In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed lets his “Reeders” visualize a doubling up of the narrative voice according to the principles of what Bakhtin calls “the Hidden Polemic” (Bakhtin 2002, 190), that is, the separation of the narrator’s voice into two contradicting voices – one of the two being italicized and, in Reed, a major source of irony – as a consequence of strong narrative dialogism.13 Thus, with his specifically double-voiced and translational use of italics, D’Aguiar apparently tropicalizes his verse and inscribes himself within a tradition of Caribbean writing. In the above-cited passage from Bill of Rights, then, the narrator, through italicized paralipsis, comments upon the fact that Jones, probably out of ­racial prejudice, forced him to shave his “Afro” by drawing on the Ovidian intertext of Perseus’ beheading of Medusa. The strands making up the protagonist’s hairstyle allow for a comparison with Medusa’s crown of snakes, but it is Jones who possesses Medusa’s petrifying power and, needing no protection against his own gaze, he is equipped not with a mirror shield but with a light-­ reflecting broken bottle he uses as a glass razor to shave, rather than behead, his victim, who is petrified by Jones’ looking him “straight in the eye” (D’Aguiar 1998, 73). Once the deed is done, Jones leaves “slither[ing] away in the razor grass” (73). This closing line is replete with a diversity of meanings. First, the “razor grass,” a South American species of plant, relocates Medusa and Perseus in Jonestown’s Guyanese setting and constitutes an apt pathetic fallacy for the narrator, whose hair has just been shaved, certainly not without bloody cuts 13

For a more detailed discussion of the hidden polemic in Mumbo Jumbo, see Gates 112–13.

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into his scalp. Second, Jones’ being compared to a snake, thanks to the verb “slither,” relates him again to Medusa or, rather, to the snakes that were born from the blood that dripped from Medusa’s head as Perseus was carrying it over the Libyan desert, subsequently infested with deadly serpents according to the myth (Ovid, Book iv). This fictional act of cruelty – as opposed to the actual acts of torture carried out by Jones on his disciples (Naipaul 146–47), some of which are recounted in D’Aguiar’s latest novel, Children of Paradise (2014), which also deals with the Jonestown massacre – leads to the metamorphosis of Jones into an animal, a transformation which, if more imagined and wished for by the narrator-victim than presented as “real” within the tale, is a degradation that reveals the protagonist to be having strong second thoughts about Jones, who is turned from a self-appointed mouthpiece of the Christian God to the snakes of Genesis and Metamorphoses. Moreover, the tropical transplantation of the myth of Medusa from Rome and Libya to Jonestown, Guyana, along with the metaphorical reshuffling of the African-American victim’s Afro haircut into Medusa’s snakes, make up a version of Ovid’s text that can again be defined as tropical, all the more so since the Jonestown commune also resulted from the cross-tropical migration of Jones and his disciples from Indiana to California to Guyana. Thus, from his earliest work onwards and in revisions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, D’Aguiar has been creating tropicalities that discretely subvert cultural (and racist) prejudices, and counter any type of belief in the potential for a hermetic isolation of cultures into fixed forms. Moreover, he achieves this without reestablishing an oppositional relationship between “the West and the rest” or creating a merely oppositional discourse. Such a tropical mode of revision regularly reappears in D’Aguiar’s works and, as suggested above, and shown below, indicates that the poet revises his texts as much as those of others. 2

Revised Revisions

Reading Fred D’Aguiar’s works in chronological order, it is clear that each reworks the books he wrote before. Evidence of that can again be shown thanks to the texts in which D’Aguiar revises the myths of Ovid. For instance, Medusa returns in D’Aguiar’s Continental Shelf collection (2010), in relation, as in Bill of Rights’ Jonestown, to a dark historical event, namely, the Virginia Tech mass shooting of April 16th, 2007. Icarus reappears in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death (D’Aguiar 1991, 229–80), a play inspired by Yeats’ poem “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” (Yeats 143). In the play, the Icarus figure, more than reiterating the tropicality of “A Toast” (D’Aguiar 1985), also gets involved in a

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love-story similar to that of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and may thus consist in a revision of the myth that paved the way for its rewriting, in verse, in British Subjects (1993), all the more so since this collection contains reworked fragments and images from the play in other poems. In addition to its reliance on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Yeats’ poems as intertextual sources, the play’s numerous passages in verse seem to exacerbate the poeticity of the text. It is in this mythopoeic light that we have decided to discuss the play in this first chapter dedicated to mythological revision in D’Aguiar’s verse corpus. Finally, the resulting images found in British Subjects – some of which were studied above – also are rewritten again in later prose and verse works by D’Aguiar, such as Feeding the Ghosts, Bloodlines, and Continental Shelf, confirming that the author re-writes his intertextual tropes recurrently in addition to revising other artists’ texts, thus continually inscribing himself within a literary network through a set of tropes that partake of the singularity of his writings. 2.1 Prelude to D’Aguiar’s Pyramus and Thisbe In addition to the intertextual dimension of D’Aguiar’s poems, an intratextual transition from Mama Dot’s Icarus to British Subjects’ Pyramus and Thisbe is revealed through D’Aguiar’s only published play, A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, which itself relies intertextually on other literary sources. This play tells the story of four Jamaican friends who join the British army during World War ii, and leave Jamaica for Scotland, where they hope to be trained as ­pilots. However, racial prejudices in the army lead most of them to be assigned menial tasks such as cleaning the toilets, washing dishes, cooking, or serving as barbers. For instance, Bruce describes his routine as a barber in three verse paragraphs, where he translates the patterns and shapes he sees on the heads he shaves in terms of life expectancy, explaining that a man with no pattern on his head is sure to die soon, and that shaving his hair is “clearing a wild plot to receive him,” as if it was an raf landing track and/or a burial ground (D’Aguiar 1991, 253). This passage is reproduced and revised in British Subjects, as the collection’s acknowledgment section specifies, to stand as a single poem, “The Barber.” D’Aguiar reworked it by omitting the details that related it to the play and altering its form. The war context, for instance, cannot be deduced from “The Barber,” and prevents the interpretation of the clearing as an emergency landing track for raf pilots. The passage’s somber atmosphere, however, is preserved, since its revision into a poem turns it into a barber’s address to readers, saying, not without dark humor, that if they cannot find bumps and holes on their heads, they can gullibly believe that their death is imminent. The revision of this passage is a first indication of the relation that exists between D’Aguiar’s 1991 play and British Subjects (1993).

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Furthermore, in one of the play’s final scenes, Alvin, the protagonist and only member of the Jamaican group of friends to become a pilot (D’Aguiar 1991, 252–54), inadvertently shoots down an raf plane he has mistaken for an enemy one, and is subsequently given a “dishonourable discharge” (274) which might, in its consequences, stand for a figural death. And Alvin’s death is actually foreseen in the play by his grandmother in the first scene, and by himself at the end of the play, as the title indicates, but Alvin never seems to literally die. In Act ii, Scene 4, as Alvin tells his grandmother that he joined the Royal Air Force, she is sewing as they speak and, worried by her premonition, she warns Alvin about the dangers of his newly-acquired position while asking him to help her to tie a thread to a needle, since her failing sight prevents her from doing it: You think you are a bird and your station is the sky? Lick the thread and feed it through the needle’s eye. When the Germans clip your wings explain how you’ll fly? Lick the thread and feed it through the needle’s eye. Are you an eagle or a hawk prepared to kill and die? Lick the thread and feed it through the needle’s eye. Have you done this just to see your old granny cry? Lick the thread and feed it through the needle’s eye. You hardly smell your sweat, don’t fall for the old lie; Lick the thread and feed it through the needle’s eye. d’aguiar 1991, 243–44

This excerpt’s penultimate line refers to Wilfred Owen’s 1917 war poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” where the poetic persona tells readers that if they had witnessed the horrors of war, they would not incite young men to go by telling them “the old lie,” that is, Horace’s aphorism, according to which “it is sweet and right” for a man to die for his country. This warning against sending men to war is coherent with Alvin’s grandmother’s reproach to her grandson that he is blinded by his joy of having been admitted into the raf and cannot perceive the dangers he is soon to face. Moreover, D’Aguiar also revises this passage from the play into an epigraphical poem, “Granny on her Singer Sewing Machine,” in British Subjects (8). “Singer” is a commercial brand, but it can also metaphorically refer to the poem itself, in which the recurring line functions like a song’s chorus.14 That poem (D’Aguiar 1993, 8) is a variation on the ­passage 14

This kind of anaphoric repetition is a technique that D’Aguiar often uses in his work. For instance, in British Subjects, “Ballad of the Throwaway People” (10) uses this device.

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quoted above, obtained by spacing every couplet, changing their order, and suppressing the fourth one. D’Aguiar also replaces the word “Germans” by “enemy,” in order to detach the poem from its original theatrical context. In this epigraphic version, the stanza’s recurring sentence can only be understood as a metaphor that says “this desire to fly is nonsense,” in which something of Mama Dot’s Icarus intertext might remain, all the more so since it is uttered by a grandmother and, again, Mama Dot refers to D’Aguiar’s grandmother. This additional intratextual transfer also contributes to placing A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death as a transitory text between D’Aguiar’s first collections of poems and British Subjects. In the play, Alvin’s desire to fly is a recurrent theme: Alvin has “always ­wanted to fly” (241) or, at least, ever since a childhood kite incident, as he explains ­during his enlistment interview, to prove his long-lasting dream to fly. He once had a kite that pulled too hard on his hands for him to hold it without the help of an adult, but he nevertheless decided to fly it alone one day: Just then a strong breeze hit the kite. Something pulled me so hard I had to look up. All I saw way up in the sky was this tadpole waving. I thought that small thing can’t tug with so much force, it must be the hand of God. I thought, if I could hold on long enough, I’d be hauled up to heaven. And heaven to me was all the things I ever wanted but could never have […] (242). Alvin ends up being “dragged into a fence” (242), but the experience leads him to the following conclusion: “[…] Inever doubted for a moment I had to fly. Not to God. But because in my head that kite still up there, waiting for me to pilot it to the ground” (242). The urge to reach a heaven-bound kite so as to come back to earth with it seems to echo Icarus’ desire to rise up to the sun, all the more so if subsequent death is “foreseen” as a fatality. Another important detail is the omission of the auxiliary “is” in “that kite still up there” or in other sentences uttered by Alvin such as “The pay good, the sleeping quarters like one of we best hotels” (244), in that it shows that Alvin expresses himself through Jamaican inflexions. This coexistence between a Caribbean parlance and an evocation of Roman mythology – and Christian religion, since “heaven” and “the hand of God” (242) are mentioned – creates the same tropicality as that found in “A Toast” (D’Aguiar 1985, 7). Moreover, the kite anecdote, in the play, turns out to consist in another prose rewriting of a Anaphora and the insistent repetition of entire sentences are also recurrent in D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights and in The Rose of Toulouse (2013), his latest collection, as suggested below.

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Mama Dot poem, entitled “Mama Dot Warns Against an Easter Rising” (17), narrated by the eponymous grandmother, who repeats, in italics and at both ends of the poem: “Doan raise no kite is good friday,” in vain, since her grandchild goes out against her advice, manages to fly the kite until the wind pulls so hard that it lifts the child up and lets him fall to the ground – just as Icarus’ wings do – leaving him injured and forcing one of his relatives to bring him to the hospital on the crossbar of a bicycle.15 Of course, the child’s rebellion against his grandmother’s injunction not to rise a kite on an Easter day, along with his subsequent injury, make up a tropical reference to the failure of the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 to achieve secession from Britain, and to the poetic beauty D’Aguiar might perceive in the endeavor, as in that of Icarus. Through Mama Dot and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, then, the kite is being turned into a tropicality that relates Alvin’s Jamaica and Mama Dot’s Guyana – former British colonies – to the Roman, Ovidian myth of Icarus as well as to the Irish anti-imperialist historical event that elicited William Butler Yeats’ emotional reaction in his elegy, “Easter 1916” (Yeats 193) a few years before writing “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” (143), the source poem for D’Aguiar’s play, as its title openly indicates,16 forming, along with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” another war-poetry intertext to the play. Considering that the source text for A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death is a Yeats poem, it is not accidental for D’Aguiar’s play to contain so much verse. Moreover, the author’s references to Yeats and to the Irish struggle for 15

16

In D’Aguiar’s second novel, Dear Future, Red Head, the protagonist, is brought to a hospital on the crossbar of a bicycle too after his uncle inadvertently swings the back of an axe into his forehead (D’Aguiar. 1996, 7–8). In Bethany Bettany, D’Agauiar’s fifth novel, the eponymous character and her aunt win a race to church against their relatives, with Bethany Bettany sitting on the crossbar as the aunt pedals (D’Aguiar 2003, 103–04). D’Aguiar’s revisionary methods thus also expand into his prose corpus. For a thorough discussion of these two novels, see Chapter 5. In the preface to his play, D’Aguiar explains that he loved Yeats’ idea in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” of letting the poetic persona, a World War i pilot-aristocrat, explain that his choice of joining the war effort did not result from “peer-group pressure” or “nationalistic drives,” but from an individual “impulse of delight” (Yeats 143; D’Aguiar 1991, 279). As a consequence, D’Aguiar was interested in reproducing the same kind of impulse in a Second World War Jamaican working-class man: “The colonial situation would still prevail for the Jamaican as it did for the Irishman, but both would respond to some private need and goal despite a burgeoning nationalism and an obvious but crucial difference between them of class” (D’Aguiar 1991, 279). The “impulse of delight” of an Irish aristocrat of the 1910s, in a period that evolved into Irish independence in the following decades, is then translated into a childhood dream coming true for a Jamaican man in the early 1940s, twenty years before Jamaican independence from Britain. In the process, D’Aguiar tropically syncretizes two periods leading to British decolonization (Torrent 302).

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i­ndependence through a metaphorization of the Easter Rising are significant in terms of anti-colonialism, since Ireland’s status as a colony, a dominion, or a part of the Commonwealth is an important subject of debate (Young 2001, 60, 302; Torrent 52–5). Less questionable is the important part Ireland played in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles directed against Britain, and the strategic importance of the 1916 Easter Uprising as “a blow delivered against the English imperialist bourgeoisie” (Lenin in Young 2001, 306) since, for such thinkers as Marx, the loss of Ireland could entail the end of the British Empire (Marx in Young 2001, 306), all the more so since what happened in Ireland at the time did not take place in isolation, but within the context of a period coinciding with World War One and anti-colonial unrest in many British colonies, including India (Young 2001, 304). Yeats, for that matter, was absorbed by the issues of Irish nationalism, anti-colonialism, and links with other colonies in the British Empire. In addition to the fact that “Gandhi […] consorted with the Indophiles of the Theosophical Society, the very same milieu frequented by Yeats” (Young 2001, 319), whose poem “The Second Coming” (Yeats 200) provided Chinua Achebe (1959) with a title for his well-known recasting of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), an important debate exists in literary criticism on the possibility for Yeats to have been an (anti-)colonial poet.17 Edward Said, on the one hand, claims that Yeats was, from the beginning of his career to the publication of “Easter 1916,” “a poet of decolonization” (Said 1988, 84) to the same extent as Aimé Césaire, Léopold S. Senghor, or Pablo Neruda (73), in that his nationalist implication in the late 19th century Irish Revival is comparable to the initial nationalist thrust of other anti-colonial artistic movements, such as Negritude. However, Yeats fell prey to one of the pitfalls of nationalism, that is, essentialism, which probably led him to defend fascistic ideals that, paradoxically, entailed the reproduction of colonial structures (Said 1988, 74; Young 415). It is precisely this fascistic bias, the poet’s return to mysticism (Said 1988, 80), and the alleged subsequent inconsistencies of Yeats’ late works that incite Seamus Deane, on the other hand, to interpret Yeats’ endeavors as attempts at nationalistic colonial re-appropriation (Deane 63). Recent criticism has been trying to come to terms with this opposition between Said and Deane on Yeats by qualifying both points of view, but without providing much more determining information (see Howes 2006 and Regan 2006). Hence, more than partaking of his play’s very strong meta-textual dimension involving Ovid, Yeats, and, by extension, Conrad, Achebe, and the history of (Roman, British, and Belgian) 17

For a reading of Things Fall Apart as a “con-text” to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, see Thieme 103–13. Conrad’s novel was also revised by Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris in Palace of the Peacock (Harris 1960).

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European Empires, D’Aguiar’s poetic reference to the Easter Rising in one of his early poems casts him, from the onset of his career, as an anti-imperialist poet. Simultaneously, his work’s cross-cultural and intertextual reliance on a diversity of tropical texts suggests that rather than establishing a dichotomy between former colonies and the West as an intrinsically imperialist locus the cultural productions of which must be subverted, D’Aguiar draws inspiration from the best every “world” has to offer in an inclusive cross-cultural poetics. This tropical inclusiveness of D’Aguiar’s writing can also be observed through his use of Western and West Indian English dialects in the other story that is told in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death: during his stay in Scotland, Alvin falls in love with a Scottish woman, Kathleen Campbell. Their ­dialogues blend Jamaican inflexions and the Scottish accent “on a continuum,” where “There is no sense in which the dialects are at war: all are marshaled to articulate the complexity of the characters involved, as well as being a testimony to the ornate relationships borne out of colonialism” (D’Aguiar 1991, 280), in a baroque and cross-cultural diversity expressed by characters in love, rather than in an oppositional presentation of different cultures.18 As a result, culturally exclusive characters in the play, such as Kathleen’s parents, who disapprove of their daughter’s love affair with Alvin because he is black, are cast, to some extent, as its villains. For instance, Kathleen’s father is happy when Alvin is facing d­ ishonorable discharge, for it provides him with an argument to oppose Kathleen and Alvin’s relationship. It is obvious here that, in addition to the obstructing father’s resemblance to Oroonoko’s grandfather, the love affair being staged also resembles that of D’Aguiar’s Pyramus and Thisbe, with a black Pyramus and a white Thisbe and suggests that the author’s revision of the myth in British Subjects (60–63) was prepared through the story of ­Kathleen and Alvin. The revisionary relationship between Ovid, British Subjects, and D’Aguiar’s play is confirmed by the fact that, at some point, John, Kathleen’s father, imagines what is happening between his daughter and Alvin: “They’re talking to each other, they’re so close their breaths are mixing” (D’Aguiar 1991, 262). This description, of course, is very similar to that of Pyramus to Thisbe, who “whisper through a chink. / [Their] mixed breaths is [their] link” (D’Aguiar 1993, 60). Moreover, shortly thereafter, John has an argument – in verse – with his wife about Alvin and their daughter, and he blames his wife for making Kathleen colorblind: She wears a blindfold You knitted on her eyes 18

On language in A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, also see Wallart 2008.

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With your tales of a world Where black is worn with pride. d’aguiar 1991, 263

The image of the “blindfold” that John uses to discuss his daughter’s colorblindness is analogous to the implicit designation of Thisbe’s “shawl” as Du Bois’ veil of race in “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D’Aguiar 1993, 62–3), all the more so since Alvin defines how he feels in Scotland in a way that resembles the idea of double consciousness: You ever feel like you on the outside of something and no matter how hard you try you can’t get in? Excluded from it though to all intents and purposes in it? That’s how I feel in bonny Scotland. You might well ask, how can you be in a place, under its skin, at the centre of its activity, yet as remote from all that equals its life as if you watching a screen. d’aguiar 1991, 266, italics mine

Inside yet outside, on the margins of a predominantly white society, Alvin feels like he is being made an eccentric against his will. “Skin” is metaphorically at play in the passage, as blackness is the reason why Alvin is excluded, and he compares this sense of being marginalized with “watching a screen,” an image that can easily be likened to those of the identity wall (Glissant & Chamoiseau 2007) and veil of race (Du Bois 1897) which, again, also appear in D’Aguiar’s version of Pyramus and Thisbe. In sum, the image of a Caribbean Icarus, first evoked in “A Toast” and “Mama Dot Warns Against an Easter Rising” (D’Aguiar 1985; 7, 17) is revised in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, which itself tells a story of interracial love, colorblindness and double-consciousness, that finds its counterpart in D’Aguiar’s subsequent revision of the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe in British Subjects (D’Aguiar 1993; 60–3). Therefore, from his earliest works on, D’Aguiar creates a network of images involving inter-ethnic relationships, mythology, and cross-cultural intra- as well as intertextual bonds that often entail, through such metaphorical elements as Thisbe’s shawl or the rising of a kite on Good Friday, the generation of tropicality. These revisionary tropes are constantly being rewritten in D’Aguiar’s work,19 since the images gathered from his first writings into British Subjects are actually revised again in later works, as shown below, in this stitching together of the weft of D’Aguiar’s corpus. 19

For instance, in Continental Shelf, one of D’Aguiar’s latest collections of poems, the image of “Grandma on her Singer sewing machine” reappears: “[…] the needle / my ­grandmother made me thread / with a lick of frayed cotton […]” (D’Aguiar 2009, 118).

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2.2 Postlude to British Subjects In his verse corpus, D’Aguiar also revises his version of the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe in Bloodlines, his only novel in verse, written from beginning to end in ottava rima: octaves of iambic pentameter rhyming abababcc and “used, among others, by Byron in Beppo and Don Juan” (Frias 2002, 680–81).20 Bloodlines tells the story of Christy, the son of a slave-master, and Faith, a female slave in a neighboring plantation. Quite unexpectedly and despite this violent beginning to their relationship, Christy and Faith fall in love during Christy’s rape of Faith, and are subsequently banished by Christy’s father. Without home or destination, they leave their plantations and stop at a crossroads when a storm breaks, to be rescued by Tom and Stella, two runaway slaves participating in the Underground Railroad, the secret American network that helped slaves to escape. With Tom’s help, Christy and Faith attempt but fail to become free, and Christy is bought and indentured as a boxer while Faith is sold as a slave to the Mason family, where she soon dies giving birth to a child, Sow, the protagonist and main narrator of the story who, subsequent to his parents’ misfortune, cannot die until he makes the races equal.21 The time frame of the novel extends from a few years before the American Civil War to the 21st century. Once again, a thwarted interracial love story is told, and seems to echo D’Aguiar’s version of Pyramus and Thisbe (D’Aguiar 1993, 60–3). Moreover, the figure of the obstructing patriarch that appears in Oroonoko and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death resurfaces in Bloodlines as Christy’s father, a plantation owner. Other passages in Bloodlines, like the following stanza, confirm the novel’s link to D’Aguiar’s revision of Ovid’s myth in British Subjects, through potential references to double consciousness and the chink in the dividing wall of the lovers’ houses: You guessed correct. My earthly father was white, my mother, black. Two trains on one track thundering towards each other at night, neither willing nor able to stop and back the fuck up regardless who more right than who, each looking through a crack

20 21

For a detailed discussion of form in Bloodlines, see Chapters 4 and 5. Also see Addison 2004 and Birat 2018. These characters’ names are obviously filled with a variety of significations, which are dealt with below in Part Two.

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at the other and seeing only one gesture, the old, backwards facing two-finger. d’aguiar 2000, 1, italics mine

The two lovers are separated but irresistibly attracted to one another, and they see themselves through a “crack” which actually echoes the “chink” in the wall that constitutes the “link” between the breaths of Pyramus and Thisbe (D’Aguiar 1993, 60), and could correspond, again, to a metaphorical avatar of the identity wall or of the veil of race. The “backwards facing two-finger,” as the British variant of the raised middle-finger, used on an American plantation, might confirm the idea that Bloodlines and British Subjects are related in a triangulation – a form that may be perceived in the sign – that is reminiscent of the triangular trade, through which Africans were sold as slaves to America to produce rough materials that would be turned to manufactured goods in E ­ urope. The hand sign also consists in another “crack,” or “chink” that separates the lovers, and this rift is a racial one again, in that it separates black people and white people in antebellum America, and might consist in a p ­ roleptic image – in the same way as the train-crash image adumbrates the failure of the lovers’ escape – of the violence that characterized the initial encounter of the two characters. Such an improbable story, where a woman falls in love with her rapist, is, to say the least, hard to believe.22 Nonetheless, and without trying in any way to ­legitimize rape, it is the role of the critic to try and find meaning in texts, no  matter how shocking or unwieldy they may be, and I will therefore suggest tentative readings of this rape scene. One might consider that the rape, after which the two characters fall in love, as an instance of what Gilroy calls the “Hegelian impasse,” where two persons such as a master and a slave confront one another violently, only to realize that they are both putting the same amount of strength in the struggle, leaving no possibility for one of them to take over, and such a dead-end situation leads them to “mutual respect” and the realization that they are equals (Gilroy 62). However, this explanation is unsatisfactory as far as Bloodlines is concerned since, throughout the

22

This issue invited strong reactions in criticism, notably from Bruce King (King 2001), as explained by Abigail Ward (Ward 164–72). In private correspondence with me (Skype, March 17th 2014), Fred D’Aguiar argued that such facts have actually happened through history, no matter how hard it is to find a reasonable explanation for such an outcome to rape. Other (tentative) interpretations of the scene are provided here and in Chapters 4 and 5.

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rape scene, Faith never benefits from “mutual respect,” and her strength does not equal that of Christy. Levinas’ ideas in Totality and Infinity lead to a more ­convincing interpretation. He explains that true relation to the Other is relation to the other’s face, because the face expresses itself constantly and therefore resists totalization, as opposed to an object used to satisfy one’s need or urge (something which satisfies someone and preserves their sense of being total by becoming them, like digesting food). The Other’s face or opacity (Glissant 1997; 190, 194), the Other’s irreducible singularity as an individual, enters one through expression, without one being able to assimilate the whole of it, so much so that the Other’s face constantly overflows one and gives one a sense of infinity, which Levinas also calls desire (as opposed to need, desire relates to what one keeps on wanting, looking at it again and again, “re-specting” it because every additional expression provides additional satisfaction). Moving from need or urge to desire is moving from economy to ethics, from slavery to freedom, from war to love. The need is Christy’s sexual urge, the “face to face” with Faith is a revelation of infinity, leading to true desire for her Otherness, culminating in Christy’s realization that Faith overflows him, and that he cannot “contain,” “possess,” or “totalize” her through the ignominy of rape: he throws up (D’Aguiar 2000, 7). After realizing that he is in love with Faith, Christy has difficulties reconciling this feeling with his status as a slave-master’s son: “He walk[s] the town / in denial with the two faces of a clown” (8). As in D’Aguiar’s revision of Pyramus and Thisbe (D’Aguiar 1993, 62), the white lover might be subjected to a form of double consciousness here as well. Moreover, his “two faces” evoke various mythological figures, one of them being Janus, a divinity who also appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the two-faced God who organizes chaos, looks both to the present and the future, and presides over paths and gates between ­human beings and the gods. Esu-Elegbara is a divinity that plays the same role as that of Janus in African Yoruba mythology, and is also present in the American voodoo cults of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States as Papa Legba or Papa La Bas (Gates 5): The Fon call Legba ‘the divine linguist,’ he who speaks all languages, he who interprets the alphabet of Mawu to man and to the other gods. Yoruba sculptures of Esu almost always include a calabash that he holds in his hands. In this calabash he keeps ase, the very ase with which Olodumare, the supreme deity of the Yoruba, created the universe. We can translate ase in many ways, but the ase used to create the universe I translate as ‘logos,’ as the word as understanding, the word as the audible, and later the visible, sign of reason. It is the word with irrevocability, reinforced

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with double-assuredness and undaunted authenticity. This probably ­explains why Esu’s mouth, from which the audible word proceeds, sometimes appears double […]. Gates 7, italics mine.

Arthur and Dash complete this description of Legba as the logos and as a counterpart to Janus by writing that Haiti’s Legba is the “keeper of gates, crossroads and paths” (Arthur & Dash 264), a divine interpreter. In Bloodlines, Christy’s “two faces of a clown” (D’Aguiar 2000, 8) are reminiscent of representations of Janus and of Legba’s two mouths, all the more so since Legba, as a trickster, is a figure that can be likened to a two-faced clown. Moreover, Christy and Faith take shelter at a crossroads during the storm (19), and Christy is buried at that same crossroads at the end of the novel (148), and his tomb, like Legba, is thus made to keep “crossroads and paths” (Arthur & Dash 264). Finally, apart from the fact that Christy is “in two minds” about what he has done to Faith and the unexpected love that sprung from his action, a reading of his “two-faced” description as a double reference to Legba and Janus might be supported by the facts that D’Aguiar must be familiar with Janus since he read Ovid, and with Legba through his knowledge of the Guyanese version of “Obeah,” to which he refers in Mama Dot (D’Aguiar 1985, 13). Such a metaphorical and simultaneous evocation of Janus and Legba also amounts, of course, to tropicality. Another passage from Bloodlines, where Tom’s thoughts are expressed, also reinforces the idea that D’Aguiar is using images from Yoruba mythology in the novel: Would a sane person actually choose to be a slave? Tom’s unequivocal answer is yes, if it means being those empty halves of calabash. Why so vocal on the subject, Tom? Is it because calabash have no features, are unequal, divided and gutted? Slaves scheme to be free. Calabash do not dream. d’aguiar 2000, 134

This octave comes across as ironic when readers know the calabash is what contains ase, or the logos in Gates’ interpretation of the myth of Esu: “empty halves of calabash” contain no logos, no system of complementary differences to constitute the basis of signification. As a consequence, the only meaning Tom is willing to concede to slavery is the abolition of meaning (the emptying of Esu’s calabash), so that choosing slavery would entail the end of signification

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and, hence, the abolition of slavery, since “slavery” and every other sign would no longer be meaningful. Roughly speaking, if Tom chooses to become a slave, then he is not a slave, since he has chosen his condition freely. In this sense, he is unequivocal about his choice, yet he is double-voiced in his way of putting it since he relies on the calabash metaphor to explain that he can choose slavery because such a choice abolishes slavery by depriving it of signification. Tom is thus likened to Esu through the image of the calabash, which confirms D’Aguiar’s knowledge of the Yoruba deity as well as the fact that Christy’s two faces may evoke both Janus and Legba. However, if Christy is the trickster, he is also tricked, since he, unlike Tom, faces the unforeseen consequences of his actions, which lead him deep into double-faced doubt. In addition to these tropical evocations of double consciousness, colorblindness is, as in “Pyramus to Thisbe” (D’Aguiar 1993, 60), also invoked by Faith in Bloodlines: […] drunk on the image of us two in some color-blind country I’d only dreamed of before now, knowing in sleep it had still to be won. (22) The now/won palindrome rhyme suggests that the victory of inter-ethnic love, like the “race” between Pyramus and Thisbe, is not owned now but still has to be won.23 The tale’s representations of inter-ethnic love, colorblindness, doubles and double-consciousness, confirms that D’Aguiar revised his earlier versions of Pyramus and Thisbe again to write Bloodlines, thus creating a sense of

23

The first occurrence of a palindrome rhyme in D’Aguiar’s works actually appears in “Thisbe to Pyramus”: “Death’s the wall between / Us now; the wall seen / From life, none can see / Unless death agrees” (D’Aguiar 1993, 62). The see/agrees rhyme is palindromic. It also is an agreement in sound that relates words with different meanings into a metaphor (Ricks 32) by way of which the gaze (see) is related to authority (death’s agreement) and evokes another Ovidian intertext, that is, the myth of Orpheus, where the eponymous character convinces the keepers of Hades to let him bring his deceased lover, Eurydice, back to life, as long as he does not look back until Eurydice is out of the underworld. Orpheus looks back through “the wall of death” anyway, and loses Eurydice permanently for not respecting his deal with the keepers of Hades: his backward gaze subverts authority in the same way as the verb “see” reverses “agrees” in D’Aguiar’s poem. The see/agrees rhyme appears in a similar, mythological and subversive context in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, when Adonis’ horse disobeys its master after being tempted by a mare (Shakespeare 1992, 1077, 287–88). On Orphism in D’Aguiar’s novels, see Chapter 5. Palindromic rhyming is relied upon again on a regular basis in posterior works, such as here, in Bloodlines.

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c­ ontinuity from one book to the other through tropical images of inter-ethnic love and hate.24 2.3 Medusa Re-Turns Apart from this additional revision of Pyramus and Thisbe, the figure of Medusa which, in Fred D’Aguiar’s verse, first appears in Bill of Rights, also returns in a series of elegies in the poet’s Continental Shelf collection which also contains a rewritten version of the sewing grandmother found in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death and British Subjects. The “Elegies” consist in a sustained mournful meditation on the shooting that happened at Virginia Tech University on April 16th 2006, where a student killed thirty-two other students before committing suicide. There is an autobiographical dimension to this part of Continental Shelf, since D’Aguiar was at Virginia Tech during the event, and taught there until he moved, in 2015, to ucla, where, in a dark coincidence, shootings also occurred in 2016.25 D’Aguiar is the “melancholic and grief-­ stricken ­teacher” narrator of several parts of the “Elegies,” as in those concerning Medusa that are analyzed in the following.26 It is from the end of the sixth (D’Aguiar 2009, 86) to the seventh poem (87) of the tenth section of “Elegies” (59–121) that a Medusa-like figure is being depicted in ways that are reminiscent of her Bill of Rights avatar. Her description thus overflows from one poetic unit to another, intensifying the continuous quality of D’Aguiar’s meditation on the massacre: One dead student walked in my shoes, I continue in thought where Her death left off that April morning. There is no better work in life than Taking up the slack of someone Whose grip was forced to slip and slide.

24

25 26

Feeding the Ghosts is a novel that contains yet another D’Aguiarian revision of Pyramus and Thisbe, since Simon, the cook’s assistant on the slave ship Zong, falls in love with Mintah, an African slave, but their relationship is thwarted by their immediate Middle Passage context (D’Aguiar 1997, 103) and later separation, by way of which the Atlantic ocean becomes the wall that separates “Pyramus and Thisbe” (D’Aguiar 1993, 60–3). For more information, see D’Aguiar’s article in the Los Angeles Times, entitled “I was a professor at Virginia Tech during the Shootings There. Then Violence followed me to ucla” (June 2nd, 2016). Private correspondence with the author (Skype, January 26th, 2015).

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The work, just as hard, feels twice As sweet as any job foisted on me. And that’s what I tell myself every Morning as I approach my desk And face its reproach that I dare To advance on anything but my belly: Prostrate before a being who with one Look turns living things to cold stone. 7 Not one with snakes for dreadlocks, That’s too easy, but a woman […]. d’aguiar 2009, 86–7

And the image keeps on being extended throughout the seventh section. The stanzas’ rough four-beat rhythm, recurrent in Anglophone poetry (Attridge 62), evokes the routine that is “as sweet as any job,” while paradoxically maintaining, through its irregularities, something of the weariness with which the poet initially compares the same routine in the first poem of “Elegies,” and not without dark irony and political equivocation, to slavery, where his occupation “Chain[s him] all day to tenure’s incremental advance” (51). This change of perception on the part of the poet corresponds to the moments before and after the shooting, and evokes the strengthening of his sense of duty toward his students, whose untimely deaths he feels the irrepressible need to counter by speaking on their behalf or, rather, letting them speak through him as their ghosts walk “in [his] shoes.” As always, hard work immobilizes the poet at his desk, where he is “chained all day” (51), typing on his computer’s keyboard to “cut and paste coupons of [his] achievements and press Save” (51), but this quite ironicallydescribed immobility also relies, this time around, on allusions to Medusa, and the reason why work is hard has changed. In fact, when the narrator wakes up to his “worst nightmare” on the day of the shooting, the catastrophe has not happened yet, and what he describes as his worst nightmare is his “academic grave,” his office, where he feels bored by his daily writing activity, “press[ing] Save” at the end of the day to record his work as much as to imply that he cannot wait to be “saved” by that working day’s final action, which indicates he will soon leave his “academic grave” for home (51). By contrast, the actual nightmare of the shooting leads the poet to stop complaining about his routine as a tenured professor – after all a rather comfortable academic position – and to experience it as something far “sweeter” than the cold-blooded murder of

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thirty-two students, whom he now feels compelled to commemorate in poetry as a means of preventing the dead from being forgotten, as well as to aid himself in getting over the shock of witnessing such a “nightmare” (51). In order to do so, in the stanzas quoted above, he imagines a student has stepped into his shoes, and it is her reflection that he sees on his computer screen as he is writing poetry about her, and it is such a “reflection,” such a thought process conditioned by his impersonation of a “ghost,” that immobilizes him, “Prostrate before a being who with one / Look turns living things to cold stone” (86). This being is the student’s ghost indeed, not a literal Medusa “with snakes for dreadlocks, / That’s too easy” (87) if it is not a metaphor for what actually petrifies him at his desk. The evaluation of a literal reference to Medusa as “too easy” deepens the poet’s sense of a renewed taste for genuine hard work and refinement, while the metaphorical comparison of Medusa’s hairstyle to dreadlocks corresponds to his sense of tropicality,27 attributing Jamaican, Rastafarian features to the gorgon from Greek mythology at the beginning of the seventh section, which, as will be demonstrated, conjures up the ghosts of other texts as well: Not one with snakes for dreadlocks, That’s too easy, but a woman who Turns heads in a mall just by how She puts one foot directly in front Of the next and creates a pendulum Swing of the hips and balances an invisible Fruit basket on her head, her long neck Like a vase made by a Grecian with an Eye on an ode to his work and posterity. She comes toward me and I should Keep my blindfold on as instructed, But I feel her near and rip it off my eyes: The rest you know, how she turns a population Down, like a chambermaid, a bed, at the Hilton. d’aguiar 2009, 87

27

The inscription of a tropical Medusa in that Elegy is not accidental, and is evocative of the fact that the student being described is the victim that D’Aguiar lost from his Caribbean Literature class (D’Aguiar, June 2nd 2016). The comparison between dreadlocks and snakes also reappears in Bethany Bettany (D’Aguiar 2003, 274).

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Here, the poet is thus not petrified by Medusa, but by the reflection of his female student on his computer screen, turning the poem he writes into a metaphorical portrait of that student who, instead of being a monstrous gorgon, is depicted as beautiful and in sensual terms, when the poet alludes to the “pendulum / swing of [her] hips” (87), a hypnotizing charm that induces men, like charmed snakes, to turn around and look at her rather than remain motionless like stones. As a mirror image of Medusa, she also is an inversion of the mythological figure, with a beauty that entails movement rather than a monstrosity that petrifies.28 Sensuality also transpires through the description of the soft curves of her neck, which evoke the shape of a Greek “vase” and, hence, Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats’ poem is a meditative ekphrasis of a painted vase, where the poet deals with the same themes as those evoked by the above-cited seventh poem of the first part of D’Aguiar’s “Elegies.” In addition to the two poets’ shared taste for works of art from ancient Rome and Greece, sensuality is evoked in Keats’ poem too when he describes the urn’s painted scene of a man chasing his lover. The two characters, being painted, will never move, as if petrified by Medusa, and the man’s desire for the woman will be preserved forever as a consequence, since it will never be satisfied. Conversely, his running – or the prospect of sexual intercourse – will keep him “panting” (Keats 1820) for eternity, possibly like the men who turn around to watch the curves of the student described in D’Aguiar’s poem. Keats’ ode ends with the thought that the moments fixed in painting on the urn will survive his generation: “When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours.” The urn, as the poem’s subject, leads to a reflection on posterity, which explains why D’Aguiar describes the urn as a “vase made by a Grecian with an / Eye on an ode to his work and posterity” (D’Aguiar 2009, 87). Moreover, and despite Keats’ initial statement about the urn: “Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,/ Sylvan historian, who canst thus express /A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme,” his ekphrasis reproduces the urn, along with its power to reach posterity, in poetry, thus creating a model that D’Aguiar follows, by painting his other “model,” the student’s reflection in the frame of his computer’s screen, in lines that turn her into a work of art and prevent her from being forgotten.29 Posterity is Keats’ concluding thought in “Ode,” and D’Aguiar’s initial intent in “Elegies.” 28

29

The “pendulum/ Swing of the hips” is an expression that D’Aguiar also uses in a series of poems entitled “Notting Hill” (D’Aguiar 1993, 39–41), which deals with the Caribbean carnival taking place there each year near Portobello Road, where people dance, and those “on your sides bump to your hips’ / pendulum swing” (41). This intratextual link indicates again that D’Aguiar constantly revises his texts. One may note, in this perspective, that D’Aguiar does relate his poetry to painting in the acknowledgments section of Continental Shelf, where he explains his choosing a painting

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Hellenistic intertextuality also transpires in D’Aguiar’s poem when readers learn that the poet has been describing his student while wearing a “blindfold” that is reminiscent of the shawls and screens of A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death and British Subject’s “Thisbe to Pyramus” as tropes of colorblindness and/or double-consciousness, like Du Bois’ veil of race. However, interpreting this ribbon hiding the poet’s eyes as another mythological reference to Homer and to Ovid’s Orpheus appears to make more sense in the poem, since by commemorating his deceased student in poetry, D’Aguiar conjures up her ghost in the same way as Orpheus brings the specter of Eurydice back from the underworld. D’Aguiar’s student is a Eurydice indeed, since men, like Orpheus in the myth, cannot resist turning around to look at her, just as D’Aguiar cannot help tearing off his blindfold to watch her: “The rest you know, how she turns a population / Down, like a chambermaid, a bed, at the Hilton” (87). The mythologized figure of the student vanishes back into the underworld to let the poet face his contemporary reality, back from Roman myths into American hotels, where this seventh elegiac section ends, bringing closure to the student’s portraiture. In “Orpheus’ Gaze,” Maurice Blanchot reads that moment, when Orpheus turns back to look, as an allegory of artistic creation, where artistic inspiration corresponds to the desire that makes Orpheus turn back as he draws the work of art (Eurydice) out of darkness, which entails Orpheus’ loss of “his work” to the benefit of the work itself, the essence of which is freed from the artist’s grasp and thus consecrated into permanence (Blanchot 175), while the artist is driven back to the “origin of the work” (173). Following that argument, one reading of the poem could consist in the idea that D’Aguiar’s deceased student is consecrated into posterity through the poem as a work of art when D’Aguiar tears off his blindfold to look at the ghost he has just conjured up from the dead, thus freeing the student from his “concern” in a cathartic way that nevertheless leads him back to base reality, where he is to continue to try to come to terms with the Virginia Tech tragedy in other elegies. This passage from “Elegies” might thus be thought of as an Orphic allegory of D’Aguiar’s poetics of “re-membering the dismembered,” a phrase he often uses to explain his artistic endeavors dealing with tragic historical events (D’Aguiar in Kocz).30

30

as a cover illustration for the collection: “So much of the great art of Frank Bowling suited this collection but I could only pick one painting” (D’Aguiar 2009). For a discussion of the place of D’Aguiar’s works in the literary traditions of reading the myth of Orpheus, and of how, like Ovid, D’Aguiar “Orphically” connects memory to the imagination, see Chapter 5.

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The poet’s blindfold evokes that of Homer too, all the more so since this excerpt also draws from a passage in Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and where the childhood memories of Achille are represented: From here, in his boyhood, he had seen women climb like ants up a white flower-pot, baskets of coal balanced on their torchoned heads, without touching them, up the black pyramids, each spine straight as a pole, and with a strength that never altered its rhythm. He spoke for those Helens from an earlier time: ’Hell was built on those hills. In that country of coal without fire, that inferno the same colour as their skins and shadows, every labouring soul climbed with her hundredweight basket, every load for one copper penny, balanced erect on their necks that were tight as the liner’s hawsers from the weight. The carriers were women, not the fair, gentler sex. Instead, they were darker and stronger, and their gait was made beautiful by balance, […].’ walcott 1990, 73–4

In these stanzas, Walcott describes the women in terms that resemble those with which D’Aguiar describes his student. For one thing, attention is paid to the “rhythm of the spine.” In D’Aguiar’s poem, one finds a “swing of the hips.” Conversely, the necks of women are objectified as ropes in Walcott’s text, and as a vase in D’Aguiar’s poem. In both D’Aguiar and Walcott’s works, these women are “made beautiful by balance” (Walcott 1990, 74). Moreover, the sense of danger that Medusa gives as a mythological figure finds its counterpart in ­Walcott’s writing that the women he describes work in an “inferno,” a hell, which actually is a coal mine. These women are “Hel-ens” working in “hell,” carrying baskets of flammable ore on their turbaned, “torchoned” heads, which risk being turned to “torches” in this hellish scene: through these puns, Walcott revises Homer’s Iliad into a tropical tale by re-staging the Greek story in the Caribbean islands, and making Helens black as the coal they carry all day in a picture that is evocative of slavery. As seen above with, for instance, the image

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of a dreadlocked Medusa, D’Aguiar, like Walcott, revises ancient texts through the lens of ethnicity, and refers to the above-cited passage from Omeros – which he also studies in an essay (D’Aguiar 2005, 223) – in “Elegies.” Thus, mythological figures from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (re-)appear in at least five of the writer’s books from Mama Dot to Continental Shelf, where they are constantly being intratextually rewritten and intertextually revised thanks to the texts of other Western and Caribbean authors. In this perspective, British Subjects and Bill of Rights establish themselves as pivotal collections in the intratextual progression of D’Aguiar’s work, since they either constitute the result of preliminary revisions of Ovid in Mama Dot and A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, and/or provide the grounds on which subsequent ­re-writings are based. Such a revisionary process regularly entails the generation of tropicality, which D’Aguiar sometimes uses as a means to overcome racist prejudices. The fact that such tropicality springs from intertextuality also leads readers to interpretations that draw from both Western and Caribbean critical and philosophical texts that are, hence, tropically paralleled in turn to exceed West/Rest binary discourses that too often tend to address cross-cultural relations in adversarial terms. 3

Syncretizing Love and Hate

This tropicality in D’Aguiar’s highly revisionary verse regularly involves nonOvidian intertexts that also serve the purpose of turning metaphors of (racial) hatred to images of love, inviting readers to think on the nature and implications of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic relations in the process, notably in British Subjects, Continental Shelf, and Bloodlines. 3.1 The Rose, the Iris & the Bruise In “A Gift of a Rose” (D’Aguiar 1993, 11), in British Subjects, D’Aguiar creates a metaphor that describes hate in terms of love. This poem in free verse is made up of four quintets, has no specific rhyme scheme, and is narrated by a poetic persona who starts by explaining in the following terms that s/he was beaten up by police officers: Two policemen (I remember there were at least two) stopped me and gave me a bunch of red, red roses. I nursed them with ice and water mixed with soluble aspirin. The roses had an instant bloom attracting stares […]. (11)

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The bruises the narrator got from the beating are described as roses that were offered to him/her. In other words, bruises as traces of violence are the tenors of a metaphor the vehicle of which is “roses,” not any kind of gift, since roses are the flowers one traditionally offers to one’s lover and, as such, are tropes of love. As a consequence, bruises as traces of unjustified violence or hate are turned to metaphors of love and generosity, forming an equivocal correlation of opposites. The same sort of trope appears in Derek Walcott’s Omeros, where the bruise on Philoctete’s shin is metaphorically described as an “anemone” (Walcott 1990; 19,274) which he is trying to heal by “soaking [that] flower on his shin / with hot sulphur” (235), and confirms the existence of a strong intertextual bond between Walcott’s and D’Aguiar’s works. While Philoctete cures an anemone with sulfur, the poetic persona in D’Aguiar’s poem dabs his/her roses with water and aspirin. Later in “A Gift of a Rose,” the narrator is also asked if s/he has done something wrong in order to receive blows from policemen, and answers that s/he “was simply flashed down and the roses / liberally spread over [his/her] face and body to epithets / sworn by the police in praise of [his/her] black skin and mother” (11). The statement is euphemistic in its use of litotes, with “roses” standing for bruises, “epithets” for curses and “praise” for insult, and contributes to the poem’s darkly ironic tone. Furthermore, the narrator’s reply clarifies why s/he was assaulted by the police: s/he is black and the police officers beat her/him because of racism. In addition, the resulting roses, as tropes, may evoke more than love in the context of British Subjects since England, a part of Britain constituting the setting for many of the collection’s poems, is ­often symbolized by the Tudor rose. In this sense, the flowers that blossom on the narrator’s body may well be Tudor roses laying their imprint on black skin to constitute a tropological reminder of the history of British imperialism in tropical regions such as Africa, which is itself related to other historical facts such as slavery and the triangular trade, the legacy of which D’Aguiar defines as racism (D’Aguiar 2000, 150). Then, the officers’ racist use of force amounts to the colonial violation of the integrity of a black man’s body that is perpetrated in Britain because of the attackers’ physical claim to hegemony as white British subjects over a black-body-as-commodity-or-colonial-territory. Thus, it is actually images of racist violence as a feature of white-supremacist attitudes that the poet turns to tropes of interracial love in this context, and such a poetic gesture translates a refusal to acknowledge the brute force of racist hate. It also makes sense, in this perspective, to know that roses in the poem stand for welts, and that “welt” means “world” in German. Conversely, “Gift,” a present, comes from the German “gift,” for poison, so that “A Gift of a Rose” is translatable as “A Poison of a World” with poison being, in the context of the poem,

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racism.31 But if “A Poison of a World” becomes “A Gift of a Rose,” it turns, like the poem, the poison of racism into interracial love as its antidote. D’Aguiar might not be that familiar with German, but the etymology of the words he uses support the ambivalence of the (poem’s) “gift,” which can always be a poisoned present.32 Although the narrator does not respond to police brutality with physical violence, s/he is tempted to do so, and “fancies [s/he has] a bouquet of [his/her] own for them” (11). The narrator’s relatives also advise him/her to take pictures of the bruises and to sue the police: “that the policemen should be made a return gift / crossed several minds – a rose for a rose” (11). The flower metaphor is extended in that stanza, and enriches its meaning. “A rose for a rose,” as an expression, brings an additional, Biblical reference to mind: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, […], wound for wound, bruise for bruise” (Exodus 21:24, italics mine). The same kind of statement appears in Leviticus 24:20 and in Deuteronomy 19:21 as an apparently figurative command uttered by God which, if understood literally, could equate justice with revenge. But the narrator does not wish to retaliate, be it through violence or by informing judicial institutions, because s/he does not want to be a “statistic,” which suggests that cases of racial violence are, unfortunately, frequent. As a consequence, what the “eye for eye” reference designates is not a desire to retaliate, but an additional metaphor: if one of the narrator’s bruises is a “black eye,” the rose/bruise is superimposed to the eye’s iris, “iris” also being the name of a flower. Another floral metaphor thus appears, and indicates that the violence that is implied in an “eye for an eye” can be turned into a trope of love again, with an “iris for an iris,” standing for a “generous” exchange of flowers. Therefore, D’Aguiar invites readers to notice that the Biblical law of “an eye for an eye” may be read as an implicit and flowery simile that may be interpreted as “A Gift of a Rose” or iris that one offers as a means to exceed racial prejudice. Thus, the poetic persona does not retaliate, because it would amount to the production of a mirror image of inter-ethnic opposition, of racist binarism. As a consequence, the Tudor roses that colonize a black man’s body no longer 31

32

“Gift (n.): mid-13c. “that which is given” (c. 1100 in surnames), from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse gift, gipt “gift; good luck,” from Proto-Germanic *giftiz (source also of Old Saxon gift, Old Frisian jefte, Middle Dutch ghifte “gift,” German Mitgift “dowry”), from pie root *ghabh- “to give or receive” (see habit). For German gift, Dutch, Danish, Swedish gift “poison,” see poison (n.).” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_ frame=0&search=gift (June 6th, 2016). Also see Derrida 1972, 162–65, note 51. According to the series of poems entitled “gdr (for Wolfgang Binder)” in British Subjects, in which some poems are titled “Erlangen,” or “Essen,” D’Aguiar has, at least, some rudiments of German (D’Aguiar 1993, 54).

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r­ epresent white-supremacist violence at the end of the poem, but metaphorize the possibility for inter-ethnic encounters guided by love, rather than hate, in spite of historical and institutional violence. “A Gift of a Rose” is also important in that its use of floral tropes to translate violence is revised by D’Aguiar in Continental Shelf, in relation to the Virginia Tech. shooting again, and in a way that points to a mediating part played by Bloodlines in the process.33 3.2 Boxing in the Name of Faith In Bloodlines, D’Aguiar also turns an image of hate into a trope of love, albeit without using the flower metaphor. When Christy and Faith are captured by six men while they are trying to flee up North to the Free States via the Underground Railroad, and before they are sold separately, the six men take turns and rape Faith while Christy is forced to watch. In a desperate attempt to take revenge, Christy, before being indentured as a boxer and sent away from Faith forever, challenges these men to take turns and fight with him. Christy then manages to beat the six men in a row. During the fights, blows are represented as follows: “The man’s punches became kisses sprayed / over Christy’s body literally” (D’Aguiar 2000, 69). Kisses “literally” become a metaphorical vehicle for punches, which are thus designated in terms of love, in the same way as bruises become flowers in “A Gift of a Rose” (D’Aguiar 1993, 11). Later in the ­novel, Christy’s vision of boxing is also discussed through the lens of love: “In his fights he must be Faith’s champion,” and “became one trembling nerve pressed into love’s service” (78). The violence of Christy’s blows are made to convey his love for Faith, and draw attention to the potential metaphorical meanings of the lovers’ Biblical names, which suggest that “Christ” is fighting for a beloved “Faith” he “has lost” because of the intrinsic racism of slavery, which lets one see that like D’Aguiar’s Pyramus and Thisbe, “Christ” and “Faith” are just as complementary as black and white. 3.3 Floral Bullets Another image from Bloodlines also re-turns in the twelfth part of “Elegies,” in Continental Shelf, where D’Aguiar actually dedicates three poems to a dream of the Virginia Tech massacre, in which he sees the murderer as a man distributing flowers as gifts to every student he meets (91–2). In the first section, D’Aguiar describes his dream: “In my dream I see a man who hands / Out flowers to everyone he meets. / People accept his roses […]” (91). The dream ­image persists when s/he wakes up and hears that “all the talk’s about / How 33

The metaphorical designation of wounds as flowers is also recurrently used in D’Aguiar’s fifth novel, Bethany Bettany, whose protagonist gets repetitively beaten by her relatives, as explained in Chapter 5 (D’Aguiar 2003; 2, 46, 172, 288).

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a man thrusts flowers at everyone, / And before they thanked him he moved on” (91). The dream is a pretext to turn the killer’s bullets to roses. This image is reminiscent of the late 1960s, when students put flowers in soldiers’ rifles to ­protest against the war in Vietnam. It is also very (and morbidly) apt, since the roses evoke the “blossoming” (92) blood stains on the bodies of victims, and intratextually connect the poem to “A Gift of a Rose” (D’Aguiar 1993, 11), while simultaneously relating it intertextually to Pyramus’ and Thisbe’s blood coloring another plant, the mulberry tree, in Ovid’s text and D’Aguiar’s revision of it (1993, 60–3). D’Aguiar is thus rewriting in Continental Shelf what he first created in British Subjects, that is, the translation of an instance of violence into a metaphor of love and generosity. He also extends the metaphor in the second poem of the twelfth part of “­Elegies” and, so doing, differentiates it from the metaphor from “A Gift of a Rose” (11). He achieves this by making the murderer stand for a bouquet of flowers, of which the pollen represents the numerous bullets he fires: Here comes a bouquet in the form of a man All that pollen makes him a magnet for bees, They trail this ambulant garden campus Wide as its stocks deplete and spreads Joy for free, if someone says no to a flower It’s because this simply too kind act Must come with a price tag, just as a bee Swings with a sting in its tail, so a rose Recalls a funeral parlour papered with petals […] (91). “A bouquet in the form of a man,” not “a man in the form of a bouquet,” since the poet is not describing or exposing how he built his metaphor, but starts from a dream image that is a metaphor the tenor of which is the reality he will progressively wake up to. The price of the pollen is the death of its receivers, the thorn hidden beneath the rose petal, and a bee’s sting.34 The internal, “swings/sting” rhyme also sends readers back to Bloodlines, where Tom thinks about Stella, his “honey bee,” in the following terms:

34

These allusions to the rose’s thorns and the bee’s sting are also made by Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece, when he explains that he knows his crime will not go unpunished, but bring its “crosses”: “I know what thorns the growing rose defends / I think the honey guarded with a sting” (Shakespeare 1992, 1092, 492–93).

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as bees get on with business and sing despite the poison in their tail that’s a crutch and a weapon, since it kills them if they sting: for love to survive in this woman this long, she must have laboured all her life with a song. d’aguiar 2000, 89

As seen in “A Gift of a Rose,” a gift can designate both a present and a poison, and Stella’s soothing musical gift is an antidote to the hate and violence that racism could generate in her as a runaway slave, hate and violence being lethal poisons for the love and kindness she tries to preserve, through song, as some of her characteristics. Stella’s inner struggle between love and hate is then compared, in a simile, to the necessity for bees not to sting, or use violence, if they want to sing on, that is, to keep on living.35 D’Aguiar reworks this bee simile in the above-cited passage from “Elegies,” where the murderer’s pollenlike multitude of bullets is a gift for “bees,” that is, busy – or bee-sy – students, in that pollen is the sustenance of bees as much as it can entail, as bullets, their death as students, who are therefore suspicious of the “bouquet’s” pollen gift. The flowers might constitute a poisoned present, since a retribution could be asked from students, in the same way as a bee’s use of its poisonous sting entails the withdrawal of its ability to “swing,” which creates another musical metaphor that is reminiscent of Stella’s songs as much as of a flowery trope where a gift of a rose evokes “a funeral parlour papered with petals” (D’Aguiar 2009, 91) or a bruise (1993, 11). The description of a funeral parlor also indicates that flowers are not only used as presents but as signs of mourning, and red roses and irises, in addition to red carnations and chrysanthemums, actually are traditional mourning flowers too. D’Aguiar thus develops and enriches his imagery in “Elegies” by effecting a revision of tropes from “A Gift of a Rose” that is mediated by Bloodlines. The third poem of the twelfth part of “Elegies” also conjures up different floral signs in its evocation of regret on the poet’s part, a wish to go back in time to prevent the massacre from happening, and thus to avoid a sense of guilt for not having been able to save people, a guilt he seems to experience: Before the stems of roses switch to gun barrels Aimed at everyone in sight and blossoms red When grounded in flesh, before police tape 35

For a different reading of this passage, see the discussion of Bloodlines in Chapter 4.

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Fences lots he devastated, let me keep Hold of my student late with her Assignment, […] […] in a marathon conversation Neither of us ends for no reason we can name, Other than the fact that outside a man wishes To take her life that she’s not ready to relinquish. d’aguiar 2009, 92, italics mine

Although the poet is afraid that he will come out of his almost pleasant dreammade metaphor when he wakes up, the trope returns in reality to describe the bullet which “blossoms red / When grounded in flesh.” The dream was a metaphorical return in memory to the massacre, and getting out of the dream brings the poet back to the reality of the days following the Virginia Tech murders, but the description of this reality is itself colored by images from the dream. In other words, the dream operates as a metaphorical return to a past event36 and, hence, as a means of intratextual revision through which D’Aguiar conjures tropes from “A Gift of a Rose” back again (D’Aguiar 1993, 11). Thus, a vast and tropical weft expands throughout Fred D’Aguiar’s works. It is enlarged and enriched by the intertextual revision of works by Caribbean poets such as Walcott and Brathwaite, British and Irish authors such as Behn, Yeats, and Keats, and by Ovid. D’Aguiar’s revisionary practice also conjures up philosophical connections with thinkers such as Du Bois, Saussure, Derrida, Glissant and Levinas. Furthermore, and as a consequence to D’Aguiar’s intratextual, self-revision, a deeper understanding of his texts is obtained when one looks through them as if they were palimpsests. Finally, and again, in order to grasp the tropical nature of D’Aguiar’s poetry, a certain knowledge of the history of interracial and tropical cultural relations is necessary, and shows that tropes may only exist as tropicalities by being reminiscent of cross-cultural historical facts such as, for instance, transatlantic slavery and colonization. The mnemonic nature of tropes is, again, and by the same token, brought to the fore, and it is historical memory that allows D’Aguiar to open Feeding the Ghosts with such a simile as “The sea is slavery” (3). The infusion of history into oceanic tropes is, by the way, a major feature of D’Aguiar’s work, and its tropical implications now require sounding, that is, a critical dive into D’Aguiar’s sea riff. 36

This problematic of the “re-turn” is addressed in Chapters 2 and 3.

Chapter 2

(An)amnesic Waters The interdiction is not negative; it does not incite simply to loss. Nor is the amnesia it organizes from the depths, in the nights of the abyss, incited to perdition. It ebbs and flows like a wave that sweeps everything along upon shores that I know too well. It carries everything, that sea, and on two sides; it swells, sweeps along, and enriches itself with everything, carries away, brings back, deports and becomes swollen again with what it has dragged away. The pigheadedness of a capital without a head. derrida 1998, 311

...

My sea riff comes from Walcott who said in a poem, “The sea is history” and from Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectic” notion of island poetics, that says the sea works on the body of islanders like a dialectics (as in Marx), except that the sea rhythms (tides) influence thought and movement and shape creativity and political activity. D’Aguiar2

∵ As mentioned above, tropicality, as a metaphor, as “carrying across, over,” indicates the impossibility for tropes to belong in the tropics only (unless the “tropics” constitute the place of losing one’s place), in the same way as it is impossible for the tropics to be other than cross-tropical tropes. To this extent, tropicality may designate transnational, and hence cross-cultural m ­ etaphoricity. As such, in Fred D’Aguiar’s tropical (re)visions of Roman mythology (at least), it 1 “L’interdiction n’est pas négative, elle ne provoque pas simplement à la perte. Ni à la perdition l’amnésie qu’elle organise depuis le fond, dans les nuits de l’abîme. Elle roule, elle se déroule comme une vague qui emporte tout, sur des plages que je connais trop. Elle porte tout, cette mer, et des deux côtés, elle s’enroule, elle emporte et s’enrichit de tout, elle remporte, rapporte, déporte et se gonfle encore de ce qu’elle arrache. L’entêtement d’un capital sans tête” (Derrida 1996, 57–8). 2 Private correspondence with the author (e-mail, December 7th, 2011).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004394070_005

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­ ndermines racism as a belief in yet another myth according to which ­ethnic u and cultural purity – if such a thing ever existed – can be preserved.3 In this sense, D’Aguiar’s infusion of inter-ethnicity in Roman mythology arguably foregrounds inter-ethnicity as that mythology’s ­decomposable origin, and therefore, retrospectively, insists on inter-ethnicity as something that would have already been there but which would have, in Roman mythology, been made to have become unapparent, turning Roman mythology to white m ­ ythology, “metaphysics which has effaced in itself that fabulous scene which brought it into being, and which yet remains, active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible drawing covered over in the palimpsest” (Derrida 1974, 11).4 Hence, by exacerbating metaphoricity in Roman mythology through the infusion of tropicality, D’Aguiar reminds readers of the fundamentally ­cross-cultural ­nature of so-called “Western” culture. The resulting recollection of an “impure,” cross-cultural and decomposable origin (Derrida 1974, 72) corresponds to what was described, in this book’s first chapter, as the “historical consciousness” that is necessary for one to identify tropicality. This sort of remembrance, sparked by D’Aguiar’s tropes, corresponds to a form of metaphorical restitution, a return of interest, in a type of tropical economy through which the metaphysical “wear and tear” (usure) of metaphor erases its figural nature only to reassess it emphatically as a “surplus value,” in a linguistic usury (usure) of sorts (Derrida 1974, 7). This economy, or “return of investment,” also is the problematic of Derrida’s “The Retrait of M ­ etaphor” (1978), itself a return, a “note” on “White Mythology” (1978, 53), where he often uses, again, the word “tropical” to designate the “metaphoric” (70), and where, as shown in our general introduction, a maritime metaphor serves as a means to explain that economy of metaphorical re-treat:5 the erasure of the tenors of metaphysical discourses imply their being retraced in a way that makes metaphorical amnesia, or the retreat of memory, return as tropical hypomnesis, or recollection “like a wave on the shoreline” (1978, 66). 3 Again, as soon as origin is decomposable into supplementary elements, it becomes secondary, and purity no longer exists, except as a myth, or as the purity of impurity (Derrida 1996, 78–9; 1967, 98; Glissant 1990, 169). 4 “Mythologie blanche – la métaphysique a effacé en elle-même la scène fabuleuse qui l’a produite et qui reste néanmoins active, remuante, inscrite à l’encre blanche, dessin invisible et recouvert dans le palimpseste” (Derrida 1971, 254). 5 I use the word “retreat” to translate “retrait” because it conveniently evokes what the French word can designate: something that both retreats and re-treats, that treats again when it is withdrawn, although I am aware that Derrida’s discussion of the “trait,” as a “tracing,” a “fold,” later in the same essay, is partly lost in the process. In Kamuf’s translation of “Le Retrait de la Métaphore,” “retrait” is either kept in French or translated as “withdrawal.”

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Interestingly enough, this triangulation relating metaphor, economy and tides finds its counterpart in Edward K. Brathwaite’s portmanteau notion of “tidalectics,” or tidal dialectics (Brathwaite 1983) which, according to D’Aguiar, corresponds to a poetic take on how the political and artistic activities of islanders are conditioned by tidal movements.6 Conversely, Elizabeth DeLoughrey understands tidalectics “as a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (DeLoughrey 2007a, 3), as a tide that connects art to a dialectics of time and space, and comes to deconstruct a certain white mythology: In Brathwaite’s definition, this “tidal dialectic” draws upon “the movement of the water backwards and forwards as a kind of cyclic … motion, rather than linear.” As a methodology, this foregrounds historical trajectories of migrancy and dispersal, and highlights the waves of various emigrant landfalls to the Caribbean and the process of settlement and sedimentation. This approach is vital to complicating colonial myths of island isolation because it engages local space in relation to temporal duration. To engage island tidalectics is to historicize the process by which discourses of rootedness are naturalized in national soil, and to establish a series of external relationships through transoceanic routes and flows. deloughrey 2007b, 164, italics mine

The Western myth that tidalectics bring to the fore is that of insulation, which was an argument in support of colonization for such countries as Britain, the limited, insular territory of which was claimed to call for the acquisition of new land, while the problems of its spatial limitations actually corresponded to the inner issue of inequitable territorial distribution (DeLoughrey 2007a, 7). Moreover, colonized islands such as those of the Caribbean archipelago were viewed by the West as separate and isolated units because of a lack of knowledge about the oceanic routes that related these islands culturally and economically, and in spite of their being susceptible to (indigenous and/or colonial) migration and settlement, since peopling an island requires the crossing of water ­expanses: “The myth of the remote isle derives from an amplification of the nautical technologies of the arrivant and an erasure of islanders’ maritime histories” (DeLoughrey 8–9). However, and in the same way as Derrida decodes Western metaphysics as white mythology, the Western myth of insulation can be identified as such – as a myth – only by retrieving the historical and cultural facts it 6 See the second epigraph to this chapter.

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conceals. Brathwaite’s tidalectics retrace these facts by metaphorically relating islands to overseas parts of the world through the history of what DeLoughrey describes above and (inescapably) with tropes, in terms of migrational waves and sedimentation – not as the superimposition of sediments on beaches, but as the successive (coerced or not) arrival of different settler populations there – that turn cultural roots to transoceanic routes (Gilroy 19) and emphasize the diasporic nature of island cultures. In this sense, tidalectics are a metaphorical designation of the erasure or amnesia that characterizes myths such as that of the remote isle which, by the same token, retrace hypomnesically, or remind eroded pasts.7 In other words, tidalectics consist in a transoceanic, and hence transnational and transcontinental equivalent of metaphorical retreat. And in the same way as Derrida combines wear and tear and usury to the dialectics of memory and amnesia, metaphorical retreat, and the movement of waves, economy, at least as far as the Atlantic is concerned, is implicit in tidalectics too. Tidalectic “economy” is, for instance, obvious in relation to the slave trade, where the crossing of the Atlantic entailed, for Africans, being severed from their motherland and made to forget, in part, their native culture through acculturation, that is, the forced “acquisition” of a new (European) language and of a new (Christian) religion.8 This history of acculturation induces G ­ lissant, in Poetics of Relation, to describe the Atlantic abyss as a “tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green” (1990, 6). In other words, landing in America is described as an “origin,” as the farthest moment in the past that the descendants of African slaves can reach back to through anamnesis, yet that “origin” is decomposable as the result of a displacement traces of which remain at the bottom of the sea in the form of “balls and chains gone green” that hypomnesically remind one that, prior to slavery, there was “Africa.” In this sense, the transatlantic slave trade is connected to remembrance, economy, and tides, and the ocean is turned to a metaphor in which these issues’ dialectic implications operate. In this sense, the Derridean epigraph to the present chapter, where acculturation is compared to tidal movements that are, in turn, associated with “the pigheadedness of a headless capital,” may also inform our Caribbean, ­tidalectic 7 Again, hypomnesis designates reminiscence, the bringing back to mind of a memory, or anamnesis (Derrida 1972). 8 As far as slaves were concerned, access to literacy was also often forbidden. For a discussion of the relationships between slavery, literacy, and anamnesis, see Chapter 4.

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context: if one reads Derrida’s words with the Atlantic ocean rather than the Mediterranean sea in mind, the “headless capital” can be reinterpreted as the profits of slavery, rather than as those of colonization in general. “Headless” then becomes equivocal and may refer both to the irrationality of the economy at play and to the faces of a coin, head and tail, one of which has been erased, in the same way as, in “White Mythology,” Derrida describes Western metaphysics as the coin of Western mythology, one face of which has been worn out, and hence brought to the fore (1971, 6). In other words, as far as the slave trade is concerned, this headless “hardheadedness” would refer to the unreasonable nature of capitalism and to its partial erasure of its transatlantic, inter-racial, and colonial facets, so as to defend, for instance, myths of cultural exclusivity and island isolation which also subsequently served, paradoxically, to promote the white mythology according to which plantation slavery was very practical on islands, because slaves could allegedly not escape – a thesis the history of marronnage (slaves escaping to the island’s hostile interior of “forested hills”) also strongly contradicts (DeLoughrey 2007a, 8; Glissant 1990, xxii). In this context, tidalectics, as a transatlantic, tropical equivalent of metaphorical retreat, may serve to deconstruct tropes of Western colonial economy as white mythology, and to understand such claims as Derek Walcott’s “the sea is history” (Walcott 1986, 364). D’Aguiar’s sea riff, that is, the body of aquatic tropes that appear throughout his work, achieve such tidalectic deconstruction, and coherently so with his insistence on inter-ethnicity in his revisions of Western myths: the main part of history that is being (re)considered through his sea riff is that of the African diaspora, such as that of slaves who experienced the Middle Passage, in relation to that of contemporary people of African descent traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, such as D’Aguiar himself. In sum, the history that D’Aguiar’s sea metaphors bring into play is that of a variety of travels across the tropics. His sea riff therefore implies tropicality, which also springs from the parallelism that exists between tidalectics and metaphorical retreat as two comparable tropical phenomena leading to the idea that D’Aguiar’s sea riff consists in metaphorical retreats of “amnesia” into hypomnesic tropes which, being rendered oceanic, are also tidalectic. The following chapter shows how the mnemonic economy of D’Aguiar’s tidalectic metaphors serves his purpose of awakening historical consciousness in readers and subverting white mythology: after representing, in British Subjects again, a revelatory, mythological ­moment connecting the sea to history, D’Aguiar has in fact built a sea riff that achieves the hypomnesic purpose of transcribing tropes of oblivion into the retrieval of historical knowledge, be it by playing with the economy of liquidity or dealing with the sea as haunted limbo.

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Tidal Epiphany

It is in an impressive, myth-like tropical epiphany that D’Aguiar’s interest in the history of the African Diaspora is transcribed the most strikingly, in a ­British Subjects poem, where the author stages a poetic persona’s realization that the Middle Passage, the scene of inscription of this tropical history has tended to be forgotten instead of being retrieved and remembered as a foundational cultural and historical moment, not only for people of African legacy, but also for everyone involved in these transoceanic movements to the Caribbean and the Americas. 1.1 Transformational Tropes Although sea metaphors appear earlier in Fred D’Aguiar’s work, the revelatory moment that links history and the sea in his verse corpus is indeed dramatically described in a poem called “Dread” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16).9 This poem is in free verse and made up of five stanzas which vary in length. Its lines do not rhyme, except for the closing, final couplet. These formal and sonic features are crucial in the poem, as they exacerbate its meaning, and reveal the poet’s intentions. For instance, what first strikes readers is the varying length of verse paragraphs and lines in “Dread.” The first stanza is a quatrain, the second, a quintet, the third is made up of nine lines and the fourth of ten lines, while the last one shrinks to seven lines. The variation in the length of lines is also obvious, from the poem’s first stanza on: I saw these waves roping off into strands that combine to make a fat rope breaking on mud banks and turning pebbles. D’Aguiar 1993, 16

The progressive aggrandizement – and shrinking in subsequent stanzas – of lines and verse paragraphs, suggest from the onset, that D’Aguiar makes the form of the poem cohere with the meaning of its contents by evoking the movement, or shape, of waves. A scansion of the third stanza confirms this idea, but attention must first be paid to the second verse paragraph:

9 Being, like the Pyramus and Thisbe poems, part of British Subjects, “Dread” suggests once again that the collection is pivotal in the evolution of D’Aguiar’s writing.

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But the strands formed ropes of their own and before I could name what they were the ingenius10 head to which they were plaited reared up from the tide, widening rings that marked new heights on the South Bank (16) In this second stanza, the absence of capital letters at the beginning of lines, and their presence at the beginning of sentences suggest that an emphasis is placed on the importance of run-on lines, and that in spite of the line-by-line divisions of verse, one is invited to read the poem rapidly, without pausing at line ends, as if it were prose. Suspense has the same effect on readers, for the two first stanzas delay information and invite one to rush through their lines in order to get to know who or what is rising out of the water. In other words, the use of capital letters, like suspense in the poem, induces fast reading, and supports the idea that the form of the poem reflects what it conveys in terms of information and feeling. The reader also learns in these two stanzas that the narrator is standing in front of a tidal river, on the Thames’ South Bank. As for the word “rope,” it is repeated three times, once as a verb and twice as a noun, to describe the waves on the river’s surface metaphorically. The liaisons in these lines reinforce the metaphoricity of the ropes through the sonic evocation of the word “tropes,” with “fat ropes” as “fa-tropes” and with “formed ropes” as “forme-dropes” in its near homophony with “form tropes.” The form of the poem has in fact a metaphoric significance, as it represents the waves which are “troped” in turn as ropes, ropes constituting yet another trope for gigantic strands of hair, or plaits, which are linked to the head of the figure who, like a Neptune, is supernaturally rising out of the water, “mark[ing] new heights on the South Bank” (16) in a supernatural flood. The fact that the shape of waves on the surface of a tidal river might condition the form of the poem, in addition to the waves’ belonging – as hair – to someone, metaphorically appear to indicate that water is here endowed with, or connected to, a certain form of agency over the narrating observer as well as over the writer and, as a consequence, it already suggests that the poem might be governed by a “tidalectic” approach that, as D’Aguiar defines it, “shapes creativity” and conditions what happens in the poem. The supernatural transformation of water into a person’s features is also reminiscent of the mythological atmosphere of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as an intertext that keeps on transpiring through D’Aguiar’s work. 10

If this is not a typographical error, “ingenius” might consist in a portmanteau word referring both to ingeniousness and ingenuousness as two of Marley’s attributes.

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1.2 Mythical Appearance This figure rising up from the waves is revealed, in the third stanza, to be Bob Marley: the plaits are dreadlocks that color the British river Thames with ­“Rastafarian” shades, in the same way as they alter the hairstyle of an otherwise “Western” Medusa in Bill of Rights (73) and Continental Shelf (86–7), turning Thames and gorgon alike to cross-cultural tropes, or tropicalities. In D’Aguiar’s poem, Marley’s unmistakable smile shone through the wash released over his face by the matted locks. He shook them free and it was like the Crystal Palace Bowl all over again: Bob under the lights, when, between chanting down babylon he rattled his dread and in shaking them a tremor ran up and down the city knocking points off the stocks and shares at the Exchange and noughts off some dealers profits. (16) That Marley “rattled” his dread in this stanza is reminiscent, again, of the ­“rattle-snake” dreadlocks on the heads of D’Aguiar’s re-presentations of ­Medusa (1998, 73; 2009, 86–7). Moreover, such a resemblance also helps to understand the title of the poem, as it underscores the link between dread and the myth of Medusa, who was so dreadful that she turned her victims to stone: this kind of petrifying “dread” is what the observer feels as s/he watches the waves turn to “dreads” in D’Aguiar’s poem. The title is therefore a metaphor, and maybe a tropical one in that fear is either related to the West – through the Medusa figure – or considered as universal – it can be experienced everywhere by anyone – while dreadlocks connote Caribbean culture; and if such a hairstyle has now spread worldwide, it constitutes yet another cross-cultural trope, or tropicality.11 11

Plait metaphors are also crucial in Fred D’Aguiar’s Bloodlines, as explained in Chapter 4, and a similar, yet inverted trope appears in D’Aguiar’s sea riff, in Feeding the Ghosts, where Mintah, the protagonist, imagines what will become of her when she is thrown by slavers into the Atlantic, and pictures its currents “sweep[ing] the floor of the sea and inadvertently comb[ing her] hair from [her] skull and arrang[ing] it in a pattern of waves” (D’Aguiar 1997, 214). The metaphor from “Dread” is reversed here: it is not rollers that turn to plaits, but hair that turns to waves which then become a trace of her “passing,” as passage and imagined death. Marley’s oceanic appearance also intertextually inscribes D’Aguiar’s work within a tropical and intertextual network of Caribbean and American writers, since Walcott conjures Homer from surf in Omeros (Walcott 1990, 280),

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As far as plaits and hair are concerned, it is also interesting to note that Marley’s shaking his “wavy” dreadlocks has an impact on British economy in its “knocking points off / the stocks and shares at the Exchange / and noughts off some dealers profits” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16). Marley’s impact on the City consists in yet another tropicality, because it evokes the economic relations that have existed between the West Indies and Britain over a long period of time and involving the history of colonization and slavery which, through seafaring and the “rigid disciplining of nautical time and labor,” brought “Europe, Africa, and the Americas into uneven social and economic relations” through which the homogenous, empty time of capitalist modernity was constructed. As Connery explains, ‘Movable capital is liquid capital.’ This suggests the most compelling reason why, in the late eighteenth century, ‘flow’ and ‘liquidity’ suddenly became the ‘dominant metaphors’ for the circulation of capital, information, ideologies, and power. deloughrey 2007a, 56–7

Marley’s dreadlocks being waves having an effect on the “tidings” of B ­ ritish economy, and therefore on British people, who are islanders as well, this trope also indicates that the hair of a Jamaican islander produces a tidalectic effect on the British isle through “international waters,” and that tidalectic current works against any conception of island life as insulation or isolation ­(DeLoughrey 2007a, 164): rather, and again, it represents it as tropicality. In sum, D’Aguiar relies on the codes of Western mythology to stage Bob Marley, a Jamaican songwriter, “rearing up from the tide” of the archetypical British river Thames. Such a tidal image consists in a tropicality – a cross-cultural ­metaphor – that reminds readers of the historical and economic relationships that have existed between Britain and the Caribbean – the former owing a significant part of its capital to its exploitation of the latter – and lets one identify any n ­ otion of Caribbean insulation with what Derrida would call, as explained above, white mythology. D’Aguiar’s metaphorical representation of Bob Marley returning with waves thus tropicalizes Western mythology in a tidalectic way that reproduces the anamnesic economy Derrida perceived in metaphorical retreat, and reminds readers of the conditioning, by a cross-cultural historical ­ rathwaite represents a “Negro Noah” sailing the sea of the Flood (Brathwaite 1973, 82), B Wilson Harris’ narrator, in The Infinite Rehearsal, explains how the character called “Ghost appeared out of the sea” (Harris 1987, 3), and Elizabeth Bishop, one of D’Aguiar’s favorite poets, personifies water in “The Wave” (Bishop 217).

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past, of Britain’s contemporary (economic and cultural) position, in a way that subverts white mythology. The tidalectic nature of D’Aguiar’s poem is also confirmed by the rhythm of its climactic third stanza, where the number of beats per line increases and decreases in the third verse paragraph: 4, 5, 5, 7, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4. As a consequence, rhythm in the stanza has a progression that reproduces the regular frequency of waves and evokes the varying lengths of tides, which consolidates the impression that D’Aguiar has let tidalectics “shape [his] creativity.” The stanza, as a tide or wave, would then rise up to its highest at line four: “and it was like the Crystal Palace Bowl all over again.” This line is actually the climax of the stanza, if not of the poem, since Bob Marley has, again, made a mythical appearance which has an economic, tidalectic effect on Britain, and an anamnesic impact on the poetic persona and readers: while readers are being reminded of the links that have been established between the Caribbean and Britain through history, Bob Marley’s emergence conjures up the memory, for the poetic persona, of a concert Marley gave at the Crystal Palace Bowl, a venue which, both as a place and as a name, is central to the implications of “Dread” in relation to additional historical teachings that Marley provides. 1.3 History in a Divination Pool Bob Marley’s return is reminiscent of his Crystal Palace Bowl concert for several reasons, the most obvious of which being, as the fourth stanza shows, that Bob Marley is made to re-deliver, in the poem’s fourth stanza, the messages he transmitted through his songs: He spoke through that smile at me. ‘I and I don’t need anyone to speak for I. Though you see dust where there was a tongue I man still loud and clear on platinum. Check your history and you will see throughout it some other body speaking for we; and when they talk they sounding wise and pure but when you check it all they spouting is sheer lies. Look in the river it’s a crystal ball; shout about the pain but don’t shut out the bacchanal.’ D’Aguiar 1993, 16

Marley speaks to the poet in a Jamaican, Caribbean English, and the phrase “I and I” is used as a means for the singer to introduce himself in Rastafarian terms (Frias 2002a, 682). After stating his pride that his message made it

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into posterity thanks to the sound waves preserved on records so successful and widely sold they have been labeled “platinum” (16), Marley addresses the poetic persona, as if s/he were part of the same community as him, with the pronoun “we.” This pronoun, the communal sense it conveys, and its use in a speech with Caribbean inflexions is reminiscent of “A Toast” (D’Aguiar 1985, 7), and suggests that the poetic persona is, like Marley, of anglophone and Caribbean descent. Marley uses this “we” to persuade his addressee to believe in his cause, which sets the resulting community in opposition to another group, “some other body speaking for we,” that would have abused “we” throughout history.12 Marley’s “we” has been deprived of power over history because it was written by others, who certainly are indeterminate agents of Western imperialism, to which the group of allegedly anglophone Caribbean people gathered in the poem’s “we” have been subjected, according to the poem’s fictionalized Marley. This other community is “speaking for we,” depriving Marley’s people of its voice “throughout history,” so that the “other body” is the only one left to give any version of events. Such a muting of a community resulting in a single informational voice is dangerous in that its (historical) accounts, being the only ones to be found, incite following generations to receive them as facts or truths, while they actually consist in subjective constructs, in what the poem’s fictionalized Marley radically defines as “sheer lies.” If understood as the deformation or dissimulation by a Western community – that is nevertheless still “sounding wise and pure” – of historical facts involving the poem’s “we,” these “lies” might consist in a designation of Western historiography, which the ­poem’s Marley would then perceive as “white mythology” again, as a metaphysical and metaphorical discourse that has partly and catachrestically erased the cross-cultural, tropical scene that allowed for its development, that is, slavery and colonization by the West (Derrida 1974, 11). However, Bob Marley seems to be claiming, in a way that resembles Derrida’s remarks about metaphor, that what was erased or withdrawn can be retrieved, or even return. But before going further in that direction, it must be shown that the lexicon that is employed in the stanza really gives the impression that it is Marley talking: again, a Caribbean English is used, and Rastafarian identity is transcribed with the doubling of the first-person subject. In addition, phrases from Marley’s songs are actually used. For instance, the 12

The phrase “some other body” can be understood both as “some other community” – o­ pposed to Marley’s “we” – or as a separation of “somebody,” a person, into “some body,” a physical entity devoid of reason. These two interpretations can be related in the context of the poem if “body” is understood as an allegory of the community concerned: a group of potentially unreasonable people who are ready to lie about the history of others for empowerment. I am indebted to Fiona McCann for this tentative interpretation.

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falsely “wise and pure” speech of others echoes the “Three Little Birds” who sing “sweet songs / of melodies pure and true” on Marley’s doorstep (Marley 1984, 4), and his saying “check your history” in “Dread” (D’Aguiar1993, 16) can be likened to lines from “Rat Race,” where Marley sings: “Don’t forget your history” (Marley 1978, 5). “Buffalo Soldier” insists on the importance of knowing one’s history too: “If you knew your history / Then you would know where you’re coming from” (Marley 1984, 5). D’Aguiar makes Marley speak by reformulating or revising lines from his songs.13 Moreover, in “Buffalo Soldier,” the sea is involved as well, in an i­mplicit way, since a crossing of the Atlantic is implied in the history Marley and most African-American and Afro-­Caribbean communities spring from, since his maternal ancestors – his father was of British descent (MacDonald 2012) – were “Stolen from Africa” and “Brought to America,” certainly as slaves. Bob Marley defines himself as a “Buffalo Soldier” (italics mine) in the song, while D’Aguiar, in the last verse paragraph of “Dread,” depicts Marley getting back into the river dancing the “dance of the warrior” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16, my italics). Finally, D’Aguiar also transcribes Bob Marley’s inviting people to acquire a certain knowledge of their history. This exhortation is of great importance for many Caribbean artists. For instance, Walcott, like D’Aguiar, refers to it in Omeros too, when Achille sings “‘Buffalo soldier.’ Thud. ‘Heart of ­America,’” until he sees himself as the song’s soldier (Walcott 1990, 161). ­Marley’s posthumous impact appears to reside partly in his spreading this injunction to know one’s history, and in the awareness it tried and managed to raise for many people. The necessity for one to remember one’s history springs from the idea that oblivion allows other people to control historical records and to make them lie and/or erase them, in part at least. As a consequence, and in the imperative mode, Bob Marley tells the poetic persona that in order not to be left with a partial – incomplete and/or biased – knowledge of history, s/he should do as 13

Fred D’Aguiar’s poetry refers to a great diversity of musicians, which might also constitute another tropical feature of the poet’s work. In British Subjects, direct references to B.B. King, Muddy Waters (33) and Motown music (31) are made, in addition to Bob Marley. Bill of Rights mentions Bob Marley again (38, 51, 75, 77), but also Salif Keita (89), Cassandra Wilson (16), Burning Spear (77), Tapper Zukie (77, 127), Linton Kwesi Johnson (119), James Brown (42), Nina Simone (90), Michael Jackson (92), Ray Charles (115), P-Funk (105), ­Brian Eno (35), George Gershwin (28), and Bob Dylan (24, 103). Gospel is also mentioned (62). Bloodlines contains implicit references to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel’s “Ain’t no mountain high enough” (9) and to Tom Young’s “Stella by Starlight” (96). Continental Shelf alludes to James Brown (67, 101), George Clinton (106), Bob Marley (17), Tapper Zukkie (106) and calypso music (8). Calypso music is present in The Rose of Toulouse (48) too, the first poem of which describes the sun as a “great ball of fire” reminiscent of Jerry Lee Lewis’ rock and roll hit (9).

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follows: “Look in the river it’s a crystal ball / Shout about the pain but don’t shut out the bacchanal” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16). The fact that these two lines constitute the poem’s only rhyming couplet emphasizes their importance, and the description of water as a “Crystal ball” does turn out to be crucial, because it is sonically linked to a name in the fourth, climactic line of the poem’s third ­stanza, which says, again: “and it was like the Crystal Bowl all over again” (16, italics mine). Moreover, pictures of the concert actually show what the poetic persona must be remembering, that is, that the Crystal Palace Bowl stage stands in front of a pond. In other words, when Marley played there, he was standing before a pool, and pictures of the concert could almost give the impression that Marley was standing over water.14 As a consequence, it can be inferred that the venue is what conditioned the poet’s idea of Marley’s “rear[ing] up from the tide,” and Marley’s message on transatlantic historical knowledge, in addition to the concert hall’s name, conjured up the sense that water is a “crystal ball,” a lens through which one can gain access to a people’s history. Moreover, the sound of “Crystal Bowl” conjuring up the idea of a “crystal ball” helps to explain the paradoxical use of a “crystal ball” as a means to gain access to an allegedly unadulterated, “crystal clear” perception of the past in the poem, while a crystal ball – or a divination pool for that matter, since water is at stake – is usually used to see the future. Another way of seeing through the “surface” of this apparent paradox would consist in reading it as an evocation of what Glissant called a “prophetic vision of the past”: The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore this obsession, to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate present. This exploration is therefore related neither to a schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward in the ­future, without the help of those plateaus in time from which the West has benefited, without the help of that collective density that is the primary value of an ancestral heartland. That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past. 1989, 63–4

Expressing himself, like Marley in “Dread,” through a communal, Afro-­ Caribbean “we,” Glissant alludes to the Middle-Passage experience again as the (an)amnesic abyss to which numerous members of the African diaspora are c­ onfronted, as it prevents them from enjoying the “collective density” of an “ancestral heartland,” that is, Africa, and from having at their disposal an 14

http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/crystal%20place-1980.html (June 4th 2017).

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­ nbroken, chronological, and linear historiography – a thing “from which the u West has benefited.” However, knowing about the history of the Middle Passage, and writing poetically about its present day “relevance” to descendants of the African diaspora may, according to Glissant, help them to follow the thrust of time into a desirable future by perceiving the route, hidden below the surface of Atlantic waters, to their African roots, but also to the decomposable, inter-ethnic origins of Western modernity – in other words, colonization and the slave trade (Gilroy 15) –, which allows for a cross-cultural historical consciousness and for the dismissal of euro-centric constructions of modern Western history as white mythologies. Such a prophetic vision of the past might then be what transpires, in D’Aguiar’s “Dread,” through the injunctions uttered by a fictional, Neptune-like Marley, who invites us to look into historical waters as if they were crystal balls.15 Thus, the simultaneous presence of Bob Marley and water at the Crystal Palace Bowl has conditioned the creation of “Dread”: the mythical appearance is a trope for Marley standing before a pond, and the “crystal ball” was derived from both Marley’s message of historical awareness and the name of the venue where he played. Water is endowed with metaphorical and anamnesic power as it shapes the poem, where its economic effect on Britain when Marley appears through the waves progressively becomes a metaphorical gateway to tropical history, leading back, for instance, to the Middle Passage, through Marley’s equivocal speech. In sum, a Marley concert has served as a pretext to the creation of D’Aguiar’s first fully tidalectic poem, in which he stages the notion that the retrieval of the transatlantic and tropical “scene which brought [Western modernity] into being” (Derrida 1974, 11) can be achieved, although such a retrieval brings back painful memories: “shout about the pain but don’t shut out the bacchanal” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16) – remind people of the pain of history, but do not relinquish the pleasure of poetry.16 2

The Economy of Liquidity

In “Dread” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16), and as suggested by Bratwhaite and Derrida, economy, mythology, metaphysics, memory, and water can then be related to concentrate around the pivot constituted by metaphor. In addition, Fred 15 16

For a more thorough discussion of the “prophetic vision of the past,” see Chapter 5. The same kind of historical perception is given to another poetic persona in D’Aguiar’s “At the Grave of the Unknown African” (D’Aguiar 1993, 21), where a dead slave tells the poet that forgotten slaves who were carried across the sea must be written into posterity: “bring back the water canon,” the canonical, historical text that could remind people of Middle Passage history.

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D’Aguiar’s use of tidalectics is apprently related to the history of the African Diaspora and the Triangular Trade, and quite aptly so since, to quote Elizabeth DeLoughrey again, the metaphorical designations of capital in terms of “flow” and “liquidity” derive from the cross-tropical displacements involved in the economic organization of the triangular trade, slavery, and colonization by the West (DeLoughrey 2007a, 56–7). In other words, the trope of money as liquidity may lead back to a specific historical past in the same way as Derrida sees Western metaphysics as catachrestic gateways to Western mythology (1971, 11). This hypomnesic quality of the trope of liquidity also exacerbates Derrida’s sense of the economy of metaphor amounting to a (tidal) dialectics of (an) amnesic re-treat/withdrawal, “like a wave on the shoreline” (Derrida 1978, 66). Moreover, the trope of money as liquidity has been used so often that it has entered common parlance and “barely stands out as a metaphor at all” anymore: it is a “dead metaphor” (Punter 146) that seldom brings back memories of the triangular trade when it is used. It is, then, arguably, a white mythology too, in that it is a Western expression the tropical origins of which have almost been forgotten, although they remain tractable (Derrida 1974, 11). Liquidity is a metaphorical vehicle the worn, almost erased tenor of which is colonial money and its human cost and, as explained below, D’Aguiar uses his sea riff, that is, the actual lexical field of liquidity, to retrace, re-turn, or re-trope this erased historiographic and economic vehicle of an imperial past by way of tidalectic or metaphorical retreat. In the process, liquidity becomes a rich informational medium one must, yet, remain suspicious of. 2.1 Silvery Surf(aces) In addition to “Dread,” British Subjects offers yet another poem, entitled ­“Silver Song” (29) where water and economy are explicitly related, and although “Silver Song” never openly refers to the Middle Passage, its being placed a few pages after such poems as “Dread” (16) and “At the Grave of the Unknown ­African” (21), in the same collection, invites readers to keep this potential historical subtext in mind, all the more so when water is in question: I know little about water, even less about light; all I see is quick silver dancing there day and night. I want it all in my pocket. I wish it was my bank. In dream after dream I lock it up like fish in a tank.

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The form of the poem’s two first quatrains is reproduced in the three other verse paragraphs that follow, and evokes ripples on a stream. These undulating lines describe the interplay of water and light through the lexical field of economy. For instance, the surface being “quick silver” simultaneously evokes the “rapid” accumulation of wealth and warns about the potentially mercurial “tidings” of financial speculation, the busts and booms of which can be described in terms of “peaks and troughs.” Yet, and in spite of that implicit warning, the swift anapestic rhythm of the lines’ trimeters and the casual language of sentences like “I want it all in my pocket. / I wish it was my bank” seem to suggest the calm evocation of wishful thinking. In this sense, the poem’s second stanza is more evocative of the tranquility of tone of a poem such as Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” which, like “Silver Song,” capitalizes on the polysemous quality of the word “bank,” as a monetary institution and as a riverbank: in “Tintern Abbey,” the poetic persona – Wordsworth here, since he directly addresses his sister at the end of the poem – “revisit[s]” (or pays a second visit to) the banks of the river Wye (Wordsworth & Coleridge 156), and re-collects, as he has often done at “unprofitable” times (158), the first occasion on which he went there, without “any interest / unborrowed from the eye” (159, emphasis mine), and reflects upon the “Abundant recompense” (159) he earned from what he saw. Wordsworth’s use of the lexical field of investment and interest in relation to memories of the banks of a river may have caught D’Aguiar’s eye and been put to use again by him. In this perspective, the title of the collection, British subjects, might then also designate British canonical texts, such as Wordsworth’s poems, from which D’Aguiar would have drawn in order to weave the contents of his collection. However, D’Aguiar’s fluency with the language of liquidity denotes a cultural background that highly differs from Wordsworth’s pleasant memories from the Lake district.17 For one thing, after having told readers that s/he does not know why s/he is so mesmerized by the “quick silver” interplay of water and light, except maybe for the fact that both elements “looked through [him/her] / Like [s/he] wasn’t there, or dead,” as if s/he were a ghost (D’Aguiar 1993, 29), the poetic persona further describes what s/he sees on water during his/her walks: Miles clocked up on city bridges dawn and dusk by those shores, countless flat stones found and skidded on water’s polished floor. (29) 17

I am indebted to Thomas Dutoit’s 2012 course on the Lyrical Ballads for this thought. For a discussion of the relationship between Wordsworth’s romanticism and magic(al) realist features of D’Aguiar’s novels, see Chapter 5.

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The “flat stones found and skidded / on water’s polished floor,” are strongly evocative of an actually transatlantic context, first of all because, as shown below, D’Aguiar uses the description of water as a floor to represent the Atlantic in his novel Feeding the Ghosts (D’Aguiar 1997, 9), a narrative that unfolds, for the most part, on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic. Second, the lines apparently blend phrases from two other poems by other authors, namely, Barbadian poet Edward K. Brathwaite’s “Calypso” (Brathwaite 1973, 48–50) and American poetess Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” (Bishop 162–66). Brathwaite’s four-part poem “Calypso” (1973, 48–50) deals with displacement and diaspora in ways that invoke mythology and economy, by retracing the history of the Caribbean from its imagined beginnings to the present, via plantation slavery. Its first part proposes a myth of origins for the Caribbean archipelago which, according to the poem, and like the “flat stones” of water and light “found and skidded” in D’Aguiar’s poem (1993, 29), would have risen out of the sea when a “stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands,” in what Brathwaite calls the “bloom of the arcing summers” (48). Hence, by partly reproducing these lines from Brathwaite in “Silver Song,” D’Aguiar infuses a sense of Caribbeanness into his poem. The poet also seems to have found inspiration for “Silver Song” in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England” (Bishop 162–66) since, like Brathwaite’s “Calypso,” which inscribes the Caribbean, from its very origins, in a history of displacement (in ricochets), Bishop’s poem also deals with movement and, albeit from a non-mythological perspective, with the birth of an island (162). Moreover, the narrator of Bishop’s poem dreams of innumerable islands: “nightmares of other islands / stretching away from mine, infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands” (165).18 In “Silver Song,” the line about “countless flat stones found and skidded,” in addition to revising Brathwaite’s verse, also arguably echoes these “infinities / of islands” (italics mine), because of the “countless” adjective that D’Aguiar adds to Brathwaite’s line (D’Aguiar 1993, 29). 18

Bishop’s image of insular infinities provides a picture that is intriguingly evocative of ­ ntonio Benitez-Rojo’s more hopeful “vision of diaspora and resettlement” through the A image of the “repeating island” resulting from his use of “chaos theory to imagine the fractal expansion of the culture of the Caribbean across the globe, transported by contemporary migrants” (DeLoughrey 2007a, 7; Benitez-Rojo 1996, 9). Interestingly enough, to the question “What is it that repeats?,” Benitez-Rojo answers “Tropisms” (Benitez-Rojo 1996, 4, 24), that is, in the author’s words, a series of “movements in approximate directions,” repetitive reflexes or motions which, in Caribbean literary contexts (and the fractal expansions they may imply), may be designated as tropicality. This unforeseen proximity in nomenclature between tropicality and Benitez-Rojo’s chaotic tropisms had an uncanny effect on me when I first noticed it, after reading, in the acknowledgments to the second edition of The Repeating Island, about the author’s indebtedness to Fred D’Aguiar.

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Additional intertextual links between “Silver Song” and the poetry of ­ lizabeth Bishop strengthen this argument, as a contextualized reading of the E last quatrain in “Silver Song” shows: Water and light, I must decline your invitation to me to dive and dive for coins that you two mint for free. (29) Intertextuality with Brathwaite’s “Calypso” and its subsequent evocation of the Caribbean, along with the suspicious mercurial and tidal interplay of w ­ ater and light and the aforementioned evocation of death, which derive from the language of economy as liquidity (DeLoughrey 2007a, 57), suggest that the water expanse the poetic persona faces in “Silver Song” either is the Atlantic Ocean or, again, the (tidal) river Thames, as in “Dread” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16), that is, important loci of colonial and/or triangular trades. Hence, in the poem’s last stanza, if the poetic persona “declines” the invitation of such watery surfaces to dive for the metaphorical coins – sparkling ripples – they display, it might be because s/he well knows that the money water and light appear to “mint for free” actually must be the result of some labor, or the substitute of some other product, to have any value at all: in the context of British Subjects, the dubious presence of coins flipping on watery surfaces – again, probably the Thames or the Atlantic – provides readers and the poetic persona with the sense of a superficial and treacherous dissimulation of a source-value that was potentially constituted by slavery and colonial economy.19 In this sense, the images described in “Silver Song” are playing a hypomnesic role, in that they rely upon the (an)amnesic economy of (the) metaphor (of liquidity) and its retreat to (tidalectically) operate as historical reminders of cross-tropical trades ­(Derrida 1978, 66) and, by the same token, function as tropicalities. This mnemonic role of water as a suspicious medium, in the last stanza of “Silver Song,” is an aspect of D’Aguiar’s sea riff that also transpires through Bishop’s poetry and a strikingly similar passage from Derek Walcott’s Omeros. More specifically, in Bishop’s verse corpus, D’Aguiar’s silver tropes also appear to echo poems such as “The Unbeliever” (Bishop 22) and “At the Fishhouses” ­(64–66). In “The Unbeliever,” a dreamer thinks “The spangled sea wants [him] to fall. / It’s hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all” (22). The sea is 19

Brathwaite also talks about the light that “shimmers on water” (Brathwaite 204), and the only appreciation of “silver” he gives in the Arrivants trilogy is pejorative, in that it is described as what was earned from slavery and sugarcane (48).

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“­ spangled” with sparks of light, and its being “hard as diamonds” conveys, as in “Silver Song” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29), the sense of a treacherous interplay between light and water since, like silver coins, diamonds are both visually attractive and potentially dangerous: they are used to cut the hardest materials. The adjective “spangled” is also evocative of the “star spangled banner” of the United States of America, which played a central part in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, a commerce that might be evoked in Bishop’s poem too, albeit tenuously, through the presence of diamonds, which can be viewed as emblematic of the mineral wealth of the African soil. Apart from this h ­ ypothesis, in “The Unbeliever,” one may note that the sea is personified, since it “wants” the dreamy unbeliever to “fall” (Bishop 63), and personification is another feature that the poem shares with “Silver Song,” where water and light are characters who “invite” the poetic persona (D’Aguiar 1993, 29).20 In “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop 64–6), the poetic voice explains that light gives the impression that “All is silver,” from “the heavy surface of the sea […]” to “benches,” “lobster pots,” “masts,” “wild jagged rocks,” and “wheelbarrows […] similarly / plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail” (64). “Silver Song” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29) provides a similar description of water expanses. Moreover, the closing lines of “At the Fishhouses” explicitly describe water as historical: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, […] flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Bishop 66

20

The personification of water is actually recurrent in Bishop’s verse, where she describes, for instance, a “somnambulist brook” (Bishop 63) and a sea that is “off somewhere, doing nothing” (110). Conversely, D’Aguiar produces a pejorative personification of water in Feeding the Ghosts, where he describes the sea as a monster with a “limitless capacity to swallow love. slaves, ships, memories” (D’Aguiar 1997, 17), that is, an ability to absorb and conceal what contributed to the historical significance of transatlantic water expanses, a power to generate the white mythology that the poetic persona of “Silver Song” aptly suspects to be hidden in the “quick silver” invitation coined by the interplay of water and light (D’Aguiar 1993, 29). Walcott, in Omeros, also personifies the sea as a mother through the homophony of the French words mère – mother – and mer – sea (231). Homer, whose name, in French, sounds like an apostrophe to the sea(s) and/or mother(s) – “O mer(s)! O mère(s)” – is also nicknamed “Seven Seas” in many passages of Omeros,which amounts to representing the seas as a metaphorical storyteller who can share his memories and knowledge: here, as in D’Aguiar’s sea riff, water is endowed with hypomnesic qualities again (Walcott 1990; 12, 14, 35, 53, 105, 111, 145, 147, 153–54, 160, 162–64, 177, 232, 274, 286–88, 300, 310–11, 314–17).

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If, according to Bishop, the sea is what “we imagine knowledge to be,” and if “knowledge is historical,” then the sea can be associated, through syllogism, with history again (Walcott 1986, 364–66), which may be viewed, retrospectively – that is, thanks to memory – as functioning like tides and waves, with the ebb and flow of past migratory and/or revolutionary waves that have registered, among other things, the history of the African diaspora that D’Aguiar re-presents in his sea riff. Moreover, Bishop’s description of knowledge as “dark” and “salt” in “At the Fishhouses” is intriguingly reminiscent of the prologue of Feeding the Ghosts, where the sea is the history of its “salt” eroding the “dark” skins of slaves thrown overboard (D’Aguiar 1997, 4). The movements of water are then tidalectically related to knowledge, history and the past in “At the Fishhouses,” and confirm that Fred D’Aguiar has woven the textures of his sea riff with threads from Bishop’s verse as much as with those of Brathwaite’s poems. Walcott’s Omeros is yet another major intertext to D’Aguiar’s “Silver Song” or, more precisely, to its final stanza, where the poetic persona declines to “dive and dive for coins” that water and light suspiciously “mint for free” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29). In Omeros, Achille succumbs to such temptation as he dives towards the Atlantic seafloor to “fish” coins there: In the corals’ bone kingdom his skin calcifies. In that wavering garden of huge fans on hinges swayed, while fingers of seaweed pocketed the eyes of coins with the profiles of Iberian kings; […]. The shreds of the ocean’s floor passed him from corpses that had perished in the crossing, their hair like weeds, their bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes watched him, a brain-coral gurgled their words, and every bubble englobed a biography, no less than the wine-bottle’s mouth, but for Achille, treading the mulch floor of the Caribbean Sea, no coins were enough to repay its deep evil.21 walcott 1990, 45 italics mine

21

This passage from Omeros is also related to the song “Two Fathom Five” sung by Ariel in The Tempest, as the following lines show: “Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth

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Achille views the sea floor as a “road of bones” (D’Aguiar 1997, 213) that belonged to slaves who “perished in the crossing” (Walcott 1990, 45) of the Middle Passage, and the “bubbles” emanating from these “coral” bones contain the “biography” of each and every one of them (45). The bottom of the sea is therefore a historical register of Middle Passage deaths, which echoes D’Aguiar’s notion that “the sea is slavery” (D’Aguiar 1997, 3), drawn from Walcott’s claim that “The Sea is History” (Walcott 1986, 364–66). As in “Silver Song” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29), the silver of “coins” is present in this passage from Omeros, but this time in a more “literal” way, in that it can be identified as that of Spanish and/or ­Portuguese currency, coins the heads of which represent the faces of “Iberian kings” (Walcott 1990, 45) and evoke the colonial history of the Caribbean basin and Americas. Walcott’s narrator claims that these symbolically imperialist and European coins cannot redeem those who lost them while selling and killing slaves across the Atlantic, in the same way as the poetic persona, in “Silver Song” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29), rejects water and light’s invitation to dive for coins they “mint for free,” while the suspected human cost at the “origin” of their value is huge. In this sense, in Omeros, Walcott’s narrator describes literally and explicitly, at the bottom of the sea, the reminders of the Middle-Passage experience that Fred D’Aguiar’s poetic persona represents metaphorically and implicitly on the surface of water in “Silver Song,” and these reminders are coins, currency, and liquidity. In both cases, water expanses stand as metaphors that re-treat into the historical memories of colonial, cross-tropical routes where liquidity, again, becomes equivocal tropicality. Thus, D’Aguiar’s poetry, like that of other authors such as Bishop, Brathwaite, and Walcott, to which it is intertextually related, re-traces, through the language of liquidity, the transoceanic scene that brought it into being, yet was partly erased from it, to the extent of becoming almost invisible, such as in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” another intertext to D’Aguiar’s work. The ­Atlantic, or the Thames for that matter, are prey to white mythology, unless one perceives them as historical registers of such facts as the slave trade, for instance. Furthermore, the interplay of water and light found in “Silver Song,” is re-presented in later works by D’Aguiar, where, once it has been understood as such, functions as an immediate reminder of transatlantic history everywhere it appears, in addition to being evocative of the diverse intertexts from whence it came. In “A Clean Slate” (D’Aguiar 2009, 4) D’Aguiar describes “Coins on the sea pressed by light” (4). In Bloodlines, one can find a sustained, h ­ istorically-loaded, and potentially tidalectic passage that strongly and i­ntertextually relies on suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare 2008, i.2.397–402). For a more detailed discussion of this intertextual link, read the General Conclusion.

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“­ Silver Song” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29) and “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop 64–66), when Tom describes, in the novel, the moment when his raft capsized and he almost drowned, trying to flee from an ambush set against him and the interracial couple he tries to lead up North via the Underground Railroad. At that specific moment, Tom perceives the river as a “road of silver laid on ­water” (D’Aguiar 2000, 79), which reads as a heavy-handed revision of the silvery interplay of water and light in “Silver Song” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29), all the more so since that description is made, in Bloodlines, from within the historical context of slavery that “Silver Song,” evokes. Moreover, during their journey upriver, the runaways try to put their trust in water, which is described as “gushing current news / of itself at them” (D’Aguiar 2000, 30) – a pun reinforcing the sense of water being an informational medium in D’Aguiar’s verse. However, just before the ambush, they mistake the light they see, reflected and multiplied on the stream’s surface, for a guiding light that will lead them to freedom and, hence, for a “written on water covenant” (32) they should follow. That the “covenant” leads them into an “ambush” (34) is reminiscent of the treacherous invitation of water and light in “Silver Song” again (D’Aguiar 1993, 29). Tom’s description of river and moonlight as a “road of silver laid on water” may also be viewed as an intertextual reference to the silver scene of “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop 64), all the more so since Tom explains that, after capsizing, he “somersaulted under water, immersed / [himself] in the element that’s [his] sign” (D’Aguiar 2000, 80, italics mine). Water as an element-sign is a religious reference to baptism, and Tom is implying that he is a baptist below waters that are, then, both lethal and lustral, which is relevant in relation to Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” insofar as Bishop’s poem describes an animal seal that swims in the water by the fish-houses, and is “interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him baptist hymns” (Bishop 65, italics mine). The “seal” itself might contain a religious meaning in its homophony with the “seals” of apocalypse, and the likeness in sound between “him” and “hymn” frames and, thus, foregrounds, baptism which, along with the description of water as silver, is then an additional trait that the above-­ mentioned passage from Bloodlines shares with “At The Fishhouses” (64–6). Baptism also makes Tom’s relation to water paradoxical, for if Tom “immerse[s] / [himself] in the element that’s [his] sign” (D’Aguiar 2000, 80), then he is in a place where he, as a baptist, belongs. On the other hand, he needs to escape that lustral milieu in order to survive, which indicates that he belongs elsewhere.22 Of course, immersion and emergence are two ­successive phases of 22

The correlation of baptism and drowning also echoes Seamus Heaney’s “Limbo” (Heaney 1972, 70) as well, and is revised later on in Bloodlines (155) and other works by D’Aguiar.

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baptism, and are coherent with Tom’s status in that regard. Yet, the simultaneous sense of being both at one’s place and out of place in the same element, and displacements from one milieu to another, to and fro water and air, disrupt presumptions concerning the positionality of belonging into a belonging in displacement. In other words, being routed in water, for Tom, implies being rooted in displacement (Gilroy 19), in the same way as the ­Caribbean archipelago, in Brathwaite’s “Calypso,” is founded on transatlantic skidding (Brathwaite 48–50). Such a shifting sense of place is in keeping with tidalectic retreat, which operates through permanent and simultaneous reversions and returns, and is further evoked in D’Aguiar’s sea riff through the lexical fields of t(r)opography and home. 2.2 The Homes Sea Roams Let us proceed with the reading of Tom’s “immersion,” in Bloodlines, when he realizes that he is drowning: I could be bait for fish now, water In my lungs. My flesh scraped off the bones, the bones stripped of their marrow after the current has sucked them smooth as stones. I saw my porous bones break and scatter far from what was once their home. The river put its lips to my ears and hissed I should resign myself to its wet kiss. D’Aguiar 2000, 81

This stanza’s images are drawn from many other works by D’Aguiar. For instance, the presentation of a human being as “bait for fish” appears in Bill of Rights (1998, 12) and is re-used in Continental Shelf (2009, 76); the sense of ­water eroding bones as stone is also present in Feeding the Ghosts (1997, 4), along with the image of bones broken by water (214), that can be encountered in British Subjects too, in the ninth and last poem of “Sonnets from Whitley Bay,” where “When those waves wreck in despair on sandstone, / It’s my back breaking with my need for home” (1993, 34). Be it in the above-cited passage from Bloodlines (2000, 81), or in the sonnet just mentioned, then, water disjoints For instance, in Bloodlines, the paradoxical nature of water as a lustral medium and a deadly world is echoed by Sow, who warns readers as follows: “Stay away from water. Do not listen / However closely it approximates / to your name. Forget you were Christened” (D’Aguiar 2000, 155, italics mine).

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the poetic persona’s body, breaks its skeleton away from a corporeal envelope that is either described as “home” or that harbors a painful longing for “home.” In both cases, the role of water, its economy, consists in replacing “home,” the place of belonging, with displacement and/or diaspora or exile. The economy of liquidity, then, consists in dispersion through aspersion (1993, 34) or immersion (2000, 81). In this perspective, it should be noted that the etymological signification of economy derives from the Greek, oikos (home), and nomia (rule, law, and distribution or sharing) (Derrida 1991, 17), for such a definition clarifies D’Aguiar’s correlation of home and water by implying, again, that the rule of water-as-home or place, the economy of liquidity, is re-treat, circulation, displacement and replacement. Hence, D’Aguiar’s use of the metaphor of home is not accidental, but in keeping with the (tidal) economy of (the) tropes (that constitute his sea riff). And although the economy of liquidity, the circulation of water and tides, might not benefit the texts’ poetic personae, their interest, the surplus value that is brought about by tidal retreat, consists in a reminder, for readers, of the transoceanic (the Atlantic) and fluvial routes (the Thames and its relation to the sugar industry; the Mississipi and the Missouri for Tom’s Underground Railroad) that were founded on triangular and slave trades, and conditioned the African diaspora (DeLoughrey 2007a, 56–7; Derrida 1976, 66). As a consequence of having been taken away from Africa to serve as a slave in America, Tom also tries to imagine his way back to African land, across ­water, in Bloodlines (128–29). He pictures a road “not on any map,” as if it were printed on the shore: “The sea holds still long enough for him to draw / a map” in his “cartographer’s dream” and, as he subsequently starts the journey back, “His body twitches in recognition of the rhythm / of ship on sea” (129). The lexical field of cartography serves to describe Tom’s dream where the sea – on which Tom depends to find his way, and with which he experiences some kind of osmosis as he feels the rhythm of its tides with his estuary-like neck (128) – once again seems to have a tidalectic role that corroborates, in addition to Tom’s aforementioned relation to baptism, the character’s partial sense of belonging in water. Moreover, the correlation of the lexical field of cartography with oceanic movements is reminiscent again, of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry since, in “The Map” (Bishop 3), interaction between sea and land is evoked through the description of a world map, and destabilizes localizations by explaining that “names of seashore towns run out to sea,” and that water, more than land, is a “native” place – a description that is, in turn, of course, evocative of the maternal, amniotic liquid. Bishop then insists (through homophony) that the sea is “where land is,” and that “Mapped waters are no more quiet than the land is / lending the land their waves’ own conformation,” to conclude the poem with the following line: “More delicate than the historians’ are

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the ­map-maker’s ­colors” (3). The role of the historian is to retrace and tell the ­history of a specific group of people living on a precisely delimited piece of land, be it an island, a nation, a continent, or a linguistic area. In this sense, one may understand Bishop’s last line as a designation of the “boundary” as the foundation of historiography, while topography, in her eyes, and through the actual subversion of such fundamental limits as those between sea and land, is indicative of the mutability of such boundaries, of an economy of movement, of liquidity rooted in displacement: the motions that subvert the historian’s enterprise. Conversely, Tom’s tuning in to the rhythm of water allows him to write a map, to poetically retrace his way to a lost Africa, and imaginatively reconstruct a past that is not otherwise available in primary historiographical sources on the slave-trade, which often designate slaves not as individuals endowed with sensibility, but list them in numbers as male or ­female cattle, without further description (Baucom 11). In this perspective, it is not surprising to find that Brathwaite is concerned with cartography too. In the fourth part of a poem called “The Cracked M ­ other” (Brathwaite180–84), the poetic persona is confused by the actions of tides and waves on the seashore: why do [waves] come as they do: white hoofs beating high water on sand leaping our smashed-in wish that they halt that they keep the boundaries clear? […] After this breach of the sea’s balanced treaty, how will new maps be drafted? Who will suggest a new tentative frontier? brathwaite 183–84

The movements of waves on the shoreline make the limit between sea and land unclear again, and lead one to wonder how the cartographic distinction between land and sea is effected. If signification operates thanks to a network of differences (Derrida 1982), can land and sea lose all meaning if their difference is not clear-cut, but always-already subjected, again, to the economy of liquidity? Through such questioning, Brathwaite’s poetry, like his tidalectics, incites comparison with Derrida’s thought: in Brathwaite’s topography, the littoral cannot keep the sea at bay any more than the so-called “literal,” in ­Derridean thought, can ever escape metaphoricity which, again, only recedes to return “like a wave on the shoreline” (Derrida 1978, 66). The supplementary

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trait that Brathwaite, however, provides, through the Caribbean context, and the notion of “white hoofs” of surf committing an infringement on “the sea’s balanced / treaty” – a treaty or law which, by the way, necessarily consists in infringement, in the overstepping of boundaries, insofar, again, as the economy of liquidity amounts to displacement – is a sense of colonial conquest coming from the sea, that makes the Atlantic, again, function as a potential historical reminder.23 Considering the fact that, as shown above, D’Aguiar was partly influenced by the works of such authors as Bishop and Brathwaite, it then makes sense to find that D’Aguiar, inscribing himself within the tropical legacy of these ­poets, pictures the sea as the locus of dislocation in works such as Bloodlines or ­British Subjects. Moreover, D’Aguiar has been sustaining that sense of watery dispersion up to some of his latest verse work, for instance, in his “Elegies”: No place to go after I perish But the grave or my ashes sown Over the Demerara which catapults Into the Atlantic which flows Back, back, back, to Africa Where ancestors walked head-in-air, But earlier they dragged knuckles There, and were captured there, And packed in ships in shackles: An old story without a loving God A bone I throw to polemic, my dog. D’Aguiar 2009, 81

Origin decomposes into a series of displacements: when the poetic persona dies, if his/her ashes must be spread over regions which metaphorically represent his/her descent and roots, then these ashes must travel from the Guyanese region of Demerara, across the Atlantic that part of his/her ancestors were ­presumably forced to cross as slaves, to Africa: again, roots make up routes (Gilroy 19), localization is dislocated as in Bishop’s “The Map” (Bishop 3), and 23

Brathwaite’s poem “Islands” openly reformulates this point by staging a poetic persona who, by “Looking through a map / of the Antilles,” is reminded of slavery and colonization (Brathwaite 1973, 204–05).

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the sea is a trope for historical and cross-cultural remembering. This excerpt from Continental Shelf also challenges the existence of “a loving God,” since there is “no place to go” for the poetic persona after death, but a trip to take across the tropics as if they were a purgatory of sorts.24 Moreover, in one of his most striking palindrome rhymes, D’Aguiar metaphorically relates “God” and “dog” (Ricks 32). These two words are literal inversions of one another, and they are supposed to designate opposite entities, but rhyming these words together suggests that a metaphorical likeness – emphasized by sound and spelling – exists between the two, and displaces the comparison between polemic and a dog to an analogy between God and a dog, which is another polemical idea that is in keeping with the sense of helplessness subsequent to a presumed lack of love from “God,” springing from the perspective of the experience of slavery in the poem. Less controversial is the religious image related to the sea that appears elsewhere in “Elegies,” when the poetic persona’s mother visits her son not long after the Virginia Tech shooting, and is described as a savior who metaphorically reproduces the miracles Jesus and Moses effect in the Bible: “Mother, who multiplied loaves and fish, turned / Waters of distress into wines of ­contentment, / Mother, who parted the sea of despair for dry land” (D’Aguiar 2009, 70).25 Water has a predominant role as a mnemonic trope again, in that it corresponds to the “distress” and “despair” of mourning the Virginia dead, a melancholy that is temporarily made to re-treat, like a tide, to leave room for “dry land” on which to make libations with “wines of contentment.” Moreover, for a Caribbean author interested in diaspora and the Middle Passage to rely on Mosaic imagery apparently corresponds to Gilroy’s sense of the “central place of the metaphors of journey and exile in both [Jewish and African-diasporic] political cultures” (Gilroy 211), and points to the tropicality resulting from the expression of a Mosaic image in English and from a Caribbean-American perspective. Another instance of that sort of tropical blend may be found in Bob Marley’s Exodus, along with his multiple references to the evils he saw in the Western world as “Babylon” (Marley 1984, 13). Derek Walcott describes a metaphorical partition of the sea too in Omeros, where both tropicality and the economy of liquidity are at stake. This partition is effected by a ship: 24 25

Conversely, Wilson Harris, a Guyanese novelist and friend to D’Aguiar (D’Aguiar 2009a), described the Middle Passage as a limbo gateway (Harris 1970, 157). See this chapter’s third part for a discussion of the Middle Passage as limbo. As explained in Chapter 4, the character named Whitechapel, in Fred D’Aguiar’s first ­novel, The Longest Memory, is another Mosaic figure for whom, at some point, people part “like the sea” (D’Aguiar 1994, 127).

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I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text; her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking basins of a globe in which one half fits the next into an equator, both shores neatly clicking into a globe; except that its meridian was not North and South but East and West. One, the New World, made exactly like the Old, halves of one brain, or the beat of both hands rowing that bear the two vessels of the heart with balance, weight and design. Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa, she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line, the rift in the soul. walcott 1990, 319

The complementarity of the two parts of vital organs such as the heart or the brain is transplanted to the sea and the world, where East and West are reconciled and joined across a line drawn by a ship between two complementary halves. This agreement is also made rhythmical through meter, and through the image of a call and response between two cardiac hemispheres, a heartbeat. This image actually allegorizes what Walcott perceives as the stance of those he calls mature New World writers in his essay, “The Muse of History”: “Their philosophy, based on a contempt for historic time, is revolutionary, for what they repeat to the New World is its simultaneity with the Old” (Walcott 1974, 36), which renders the Old and New dichotomy that separates the cultural West and Rest irrelevant, but proposes a cultural synchronic gathering that is a guise of tropicality. The stitching together of the “Old” and “New” worlds is operated, again, on the Atlantic, which then turns from rift to junction, bringing two hemispheres into a cross-cultural and transoceanic simultaneity that Walcott describes, in Biblical terms again, as “Eden” (64), that is, as a heavenly home. Such a “soldering” of two worlds is effected by a ship that, in a “wingbeat,” also restores a link, across the Middle Passage, between the ­Caribbean and Africa (Walcott 1990, 319), and thus plays a hypomnesic part as well, through an imaginative retracing of a bond with Africa as one out of several “homes,” or places of belonging for many members of the African diaspora. As in the above-cited lines from Omeros, the historical past that readers retrieve beneath the surface of D’Aguiar’s sea riff is, then, and more often than not, that of the Middle Passage experience. Such a past relates the ­infamous

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economy of slavery to the transatlantic flow of “liquidity” and, in Fred D’Aguiar’s verse corpus, even if the Atlantic is not always explicitly mentioned, the general framework of the poet’s collections almost always induces readers to relate images of migration and watery tropes to that historical background, mostly thanks to the metaphor of the home as a shifting locus for descendants of the African diaspora (D’Aguiar 2000, 81). For instance, in “Home” (D’Aguiar 1993, 14), a British customs agent at Heathrow airport makes the poetic persona – who has an “afro” haircut – feel unwelcome, as a “British Citizen not bold enough / for [his] liking and too much” (14) for that of customs officers. It lets him know that “home is always elsewhere” (14) for a “British Subject” of African descent traveling between continents, and that his right as a British citizen to consider Britain his home is not acknowledged by everybody there. In addition to the fact that the officer’s dislike of the poetic persona is reminiscent of “A Gift of a Rose” (11) where, again, racism manifests itself more violently as police brutality, the poetic persona’s sense of never being at home reminds readers again of how much displacement characterizes the history of the African diaspora.26 Since the poetic persona is an Afro-British citizen whose genealogical origins might be found in a formerly colonized part of the West Indies or in Africa, where people of African descent have often been reduced to minority status under white hegemony, his ancestors may have been uprooted from Africa and taken across the Middle Passage as slaves to the “New World,” or subjected to European colonialism in Africa, that is, in a “home” or homeland that used to be “theirs” but was conquered and ruled by “some other body” (16). In this sense, it is not surprising to find the same impression of uprootedness in “Home” and in Feeding the Ghosts, where slaves are claimed by the sea, which wants them to “Learn that home is always some other shore” (D’Aguiar 1997, 117) once it has swallowed them up to make them move constantly with oceanic currents, which have become their “home” (4). This “rule” of this then Atlantic “home” is, again, a law of displacement that is reminiscent of the tidalectic economy of metaphor, which always retreats to return in a way that may help to prevent amnesia thanks to the hypomnesic quality of metaphorical retreat.27 In other words, the discomfort of uprootedness, or of being re-rooted in displacement may prevent a certain past (here, that of the Middle Passage experience) from being forgotten. 26 27

Concerning Fred D’Aguiar’s “poetics of displacement,” also see Manolachi 2012. Again, the rule of the home, or the law of the home and, by metaphorical extension, the law of the land, is the etymological signification of economy, from the Greek, oikos (home), and nomia (rule) (Derrida 1991, 17). In a colonial context, it is then also interesting to perceive anti-colonial activists asking for home rule as a way of re-claiming control over, among other things, the colony’s economy.

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The same designation of non-fixity as the “locus” of historical memory for members of the African diaspora appears in Walcott’s Omeros again, when Achille – a Western mythological figure tropically displaced to the Caribbean – watches his reflection in ripples and thinks it seems “homesick / for the history ahead, as if its proper place / lay in unsettlement” (Walcott 1990, 140). The resemblance that exists between D’Aguiar’s sense of home being elsewhere (D’Aguiar 1993, 14; 1997, 117) and Walcott’s impression of “proper place” as “unsettlement,” in addition to the images of oceanic partition that both authors share, confirm that Walcott is one of D’Aguiar’s crucial Caribbean forebears.28 Furthermore, be it through “uncoerced or recreational travel experience[s]” or through “the very different types of traveling undergone by refugees, migrants and slaves” (Gilroy 133), the poetic persona in “Home” and drowned slaves of the Middle Passage in Feeding the Ghosts are all inscribed, like ­Walcott’s Achille, in a history of tropical and transatlantic displacements that is brought back to mind, once again, through the economy of the metaphor of the home-as-being-elsewhere. The economy of home and sea do not differ in Airy Hall, Fred D’Aguiar’s second collection of autobiographical poems dealing, like Mama Dot, with his childhood in Guyana (Stade & Karbiener 127). In fact, “A Great House by the Sea” also engages with issues of memory by conveying a peculiar sense of perdition related to the ocean: Our first smell of the sea Is dead flesh we mistake For poisonous farts; this night air is shitty. We race indoors for body odour, for air fired by central heating. Our voices carry so well It takes forever to find ourselves. D’Aguiar 1989, 42

The sea smells of rotting corpses that might be those, in a D’Aguiarian context, of slaves who were thrown and drowned in the Atlantic – if the poem’s shore is 28

The intertextual link between “Home” and Omeros is reinforced by the paradox of Achille’s “homesickness” – that is, a feeling of nostalgia for something that is supposedly past – for “the history ahead,” which conveys the same sense of a “prophetic vision of the past” (Glissant 1989, 63–4) as that perceived in Bob Marley’s designation of water as a crystal ball in “Dread” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16).

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the Guyanese littoral, as the collection’s autobiographical dimension suggests. Moreover, the fact that “voices carry so well” is also expressed in ­Feeding the Ghosts, where the voices of dead slaves is sometimes heard in Atlantic winds: “When the wind is heard it is their breath, their speech” (D’Aguiar 1997, 4), traveling over a poisonous sea (172). But the movement of sounds over water makes their source hard to localize: “It takes forever to find ourselves” (D’Aguiar 1989, 42). “Ourselves” conveys an impression of disorientation that is exacerbated by the repeated fricative alliterations in “f” throughout the stanzas, which evokes the dispersion of the characters’ voices over water as much as the sound of wind over sea. Furthermore, the line, “It takes forever to find ourselves,” might not literally mean that it is hard for several persons to find one another, for it may also function syntactically as a plural version of “it takes forever for one to find oneself.” In other words, every person on the beach might be facing the sea and its sounds in an introspective quest to know oneself.29 In this perspective, the quest seems unproductive, since the wind that brings odors of “dead flesh” to the shore is another “voice,” or significant trace, that the living (standing on the shore) fail to recognize and understand as that of potential forebears (dead at sea), since the smell coming in with sea winds is mistaken for that of “poisonous farts.” If, as said above, the place where the scene takes place is the Guyanese, Atlantic littoral, and since looking for oneself can correspond to looking for one’s legacy, for one’s ancestors, some of which (if, again, the poem’s characters are assumed to be Guyanese people of African descent) may have been forced to cross the Middle-Passage, or even to drown there, then, the smell brought by the wind has a hypomnesic potential that is not initially understood by the poem’s “we,” and the dispersal of odors and voices over water destabilizes the fixity of individual identity into transoceanic movement again. As a result to the depersonalizing nature of these geographical trajectories, the poem’s narrators – on shore, at sea, or both – “race indoors for body odour”: as seen above in our reading of “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D’Aguiar 1993, 62–3) the polysemous quality of “race” may function quite equivocally in “A Great House by the Sea” (D’Aguiar 1989, 42) too, and actually adumbrate D’Aguiar’s revision of Ovid in British Subjects. Racing indoors may amount to putting one’s race indoors in order to preserve it from the wind as a reminder of transatlantic history (bringing the sea’s “smell of dead flesh” to shore), a past that one’s “race” was once subjected to, and that the poem’s “we” is first confronted with in its attempt at “finding ourselves,” in a potentially genealogical 29

The presumed Guyanese context could then be tropically related to Greco-Roman culture again, since the line “It takes forever to find ourselves” is reminiscent of the oracle of Delphi.

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quest, all the more so since genealogy is addressed from the beginning of the poem, as a theme that is first presented in a factual, yet Biblical tone that is reminiscent of Ecclesiastes 1:4: in the poem, “One man dies, another steps into his shoes; / a ­mother’s final cry / begins her child’s” (D’Aguiar 1989, 42). This apparently unalterable quality of the genealogical chain, as presented here, is questioned by the fact that the poem’s characters cannot “find” or localize themselves in a house where “There are books to outlast life,” and before which (both spatially and temporally) there is a sea over which breaths from the past are undecipherable, carried over, and dissolved, only giving way to an unpleasant hypomnesic smell of putrefying corpses that is not recognized as such by “we,” and, hence, functions as the representation of a genealogical break – relative to the Middle Passage experience – that is symptomatic of historical “amnesia,” a void that exhorts readers to remember. It is the uncanny, ­unheimlich, “un-homely” re-turn, or resurfacing of a submerged past, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known” (Freud 1917, 9), the ­olfactory oceanic reminder of the Middle Passage experience, that induces the poem’s characters to “race” inside, where it is yet still impossible for them to “find” themselves in the mansion’s books, which do not seem to register the history of the Middle-Passage, not the names of its victims (Baucom 11). Here, the house by the sea, as in “Home” (D’Aguiar 1993, 14), still does not enhance one’s sense of place, but reinforces the idea that African-diasporic history is rooted in displacement. 2.3 Water Writing If books are not appropriate reminders in “A Great House by the Sea,” D’Aguiar, in his verse corpus, nevertheless develops a thematic relation between water and textuality in collections such as British Subjects and Continental Shelf. For instance, in “Caribbean” (D’Aguiar 2009, 17), one reads: Let the galvanized zinc Of the sea write on sand Erase what it writes and pull Away fast from this place (17) The sea is compared to the metal of a nib that writes on the shore, but its inscriptions are subjected to erasure as the sea retreats over and from them. However, since the sea is bound to write on the shore again as a pen that drifts with currents and tides, what is erased will necessarily be retraced, albeit, maybe, in another form: the metaphor for the sea erasing its writings always already implies a (tidalectic) retracing of these writings (Derrida 1978, 66).

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This ­correlation of the sea and textuality also appears in “Domestic Flight” (D’Aguiar 1993, 26): “The river is sanskrit in black ink / scribbling away into the dark, / turning over with each tides” (26). The poem’s river is the Thames, and it is being compared to sanskrit. The poetic voice also specifies that this is “sanskrit in black ink” ( italics mine). The specification is not accidental, since one of the poems preceding “Domestic Flight” in British Subjects is entitled “Black Ink,” and deals with the poetic persona’s ebony hands. In this context, readers cannot see the phrase “black ink” in “Domestic Flight” without thinking of “black skin,” which also bears an anagrammatic relation to “black ink.” To this extent, the idea that “The river is sanskrit in black ink” may syncretize British place, Indian writing, and African descent in a tropicality. The then tropical text’s tidalectic turning “over with each tide” conveys, in turn, and as in “Carribean” (D’Aguiar 2009, 17), the idea that the erasure of texts in water presupposes their being retraced there according to the rhythm of tides or, if they are not retraced identically, their writing and reading is at least resumed, as the metaphorical evocation of the turning of pages through the turning over of waves suggests. Finally, since Sanskrit is an ancient text understood only by a select few scholars today, describing water as Sanskrit does amount to making water retrace a text that is under the constant threat of unreadability and erasure, in the same way as metaphor returns the eroded tenors of white mythology. Such textuality, in the poem, tropically restores a dispersed sense of belonging, a “domestic flight” that undermines any understanding of “turning the page” as “choosing to forget.” The images of writing and erasure in “Caribbean” and “Domestic Flight,” do not escape the ruling influence of Omeros over D’Aguiar either, since Walcott also describes the sea as a “crumpling parchment” (Walcott 1990, 282), “an epic where every line was erased / yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf,” and as a text in verse that “never altered its metre / to suit the age, a wide page without metaphors” (296) – lines to which D’Aguiar responds, confirming their argument. In that last citation, however, it is hard to determine whether the “wide page without metaphors” is “the age” or the ocean. The internal rhyme seems to gather “page” and “age” into a metaphor commenting upon the downto-earth nature of reality, but since it is the ocean that is being compared to a text throughout the passage, it is more likely for the sea to be the “page.” But how could such a metaphorical sea write texts “without metaphors” if metaphor always returns (Derrida 1978, 66)? It seems that the ocean is presented, here, paradoxically enough, both as a historical register under constant rewriting and as its own amnesic author, a personified sea forgetful of its perpetual retreat. The sea-as-author does not realize that the sea-as-text it writes alwaysalready is a revision: metaphoricity springs from the “crumpling parchment” of

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the sea to the eye of the viewer, while the personified sea-as-author does not remember the text its last wave wove, and rewrites a version of it as if it were an original, rather than a revision. Thus, the sea writes, and the erasure of its text as it meets the shore does not necessarily amount to total loss of information, since a text will be re-written there, maybe over traces of former texts, if erasure is not complete: the superimposition of oceanic texts deposits, again, a sedimented palimpsest that is conditioned by the rhythms of tides and waves in metaphorical retreats that are left for viewers to peer through. In order to draw meaning from oceanic textuality, D’Aguiar also displaces the text from the shore to the surface of the sea in Feeding the Ghosts, when he deals with the corpses of slaves who were thrown overboard: “Those bodies have their lives written on salt water.30 The sea current turns pages of memory. One hundred and thirty-one souls roam the Atlantic with countless others. When the wind is heard it is their breath, their speech. The sea is therefore home” (D’Aguiar 1997, 4). The sea is both a source of restlessness, of uprootedness, and a home to the restless. It metaphorically contains the traces of slaves and migrants, and constitutes the shifting locus where the last cultural traces of Africa can be remembered in the histories of numerous African-diasporic peoples. It also becomes a historical and imaginative threshold toward the African past as soon as it is viewed as haunted. 3

Specters of Liquid Limbo

An analogy between the hypomnesic nature of the economy of liquidity, or tidalectic re-treat, and Derrida’s notion, in Specters of Marx, of “hauntology,” designating the being/non-being of ghosts (Derrida 1993, 10, 63, 202), can indeed be drawn, insofar as Derrida defines hauntology as an ontology of conjuring (202), conjuration consisting in both a sending away of being, or “exorcising” (ibid. 58), and a summoning, a convocation, a conspiration of spirits or ghosts (49–50). In other words, it is tempting to contend that hauntology, or conjuring, from a Derridean perspective, is, like the withdrawal, or re-treat of metaphor, a riddance of being that calls into being (Derrida 1978, 66), a s­ imultaneous

30

This idea that “salt water,” like a text, is a hypomnesic reminder of the Middle Passage is repeated in Feeding the Ghosts when Mintah, in old age, dreams she meets her only companion from the Zong again: “My ears fill with the sea, brought to me by a breeze I don’t feel. My eyes flood with salt water.” (D’Aguiar 1997, 220). In this citation, the salt water of tears functions as a reminder of Middle Passage salt water.

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dismissal and convocation.31 Furthermore, if, as shown above, tidalectics consist in the tuning of metaphorical re-treat to the rhythm of tides and waves, tidalectics, then, illustrate the frequency of re-treat, that is, its specter: “The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible” (Derrida 1993, 125). Thus, that waves recede as they return, that metaphors simultaneously retreat and re-treat, and that ghosts disappear by re-appearing, also points to rhythm, or specter, as the shared feature of tides, metaphors, and ghosts.32 In the introductory comments of her article “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S and Latin American Fiction,” Lois Parkinson Zamora confirms the presence of this link between tropes and ghosts: “[Ghosts] are always double (here and not) and often duplicitous (where?). They mirror, complement, recover, supplant, cancel, complete. Which is to say: literary ghosts are highly metaphoric. They bring absence into presence, maintaining at once the “is” and “is not” of metaphorical truth” (Zamora & Faris 497, emphasis mine). In this perspective, correlations of the spectral and the tidalectic – that is, again, the oceanic version of metaphorical retreat – are not accidental in D’Aguiar’s works, but coherent with the economy of his sea riff.33 And it is 31

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Derrida also adds that “No justice […] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility […] before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of extermination” (xviii): responsibility before the specter is the ethical acknowledgment of the other as a non-totalizable being, insofar as the singularity of otherness is intrinsically characterized by an economy of becoming, conjuring, or hauntology (Derrida 1993, 26; Levinas 42–4). This is why Derrida, elsewhere, defines responsible philosophy as the (Orphic) art of mourning (Derrida 1999, 26–9). As far as D’Aguiar is concerned, his conjuring of the specters of the African diaspora, such as victims of the transatlantic slave trade, from the present perspective, corresponds, then, to a responsible relation to that past, effected through the hypomnesic representation of its victims in metaphorical, tidalectic, and spectral terms, that is, in an ethical hauntology. On responsibility and specters, also see Zamora & Faris 297 and Rice in Misrahi-Barak, Ed. 2005. In this sense, specters and metaphors also share the characteristic feature of pointing to the decomposable nature of origin: language is inextricably metaphorical, always already subjected to the re-turn of the (double-voiced) trope, and a ghost is always a revenant, a duplicitous specter that always “begins by coming back” (D’Aguiar 1993, 11). Speaking of economy, it is also clear that the spectral is related to speculation, and not only in etymological terms, for, as Derrida shows, financial speculation corresponds to a phantomalization of property (Derrida 1993, 51), that is, to the magic conversion of currency and property (56). Such considerations make a lot of sense when applied to the historical background of the transatlantic slave trade, which haunts D’Aguiar’s sea riff: the commerce of slaves, their inclusion into a system of equivalences and currencies (“currency” being yet another word pointing to the tropical flow, or “current” that characterizes

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such ­correlations, found in images of haunting and dilution, or in recurrent, spectral allusions to the presumably ghostly realms of (oceanic) limbo and death, that are to be inspected now in D’Aguiar’s verse corpus, but also in prose works such as Feeding the Ghosts and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, the spectral themes of which call for their inclusion within the present discussion, although their prose is thoroughly studied in a different, yet related light, in this book’s second half. 3.1 Images of Haunting & Dilution Feeding the Ghosts (1997) certainly is the work in which D’Aguiar works the most on sea conceptualizations related to specters. It tells the true story of the Zong, a slave ship the captain of which, in 1783, decided to throw one hundred and thirty-two allegedly sick slaves overboard, for they would be more profitable in insurance as goods or livestock lost at sea than if they were sold at auction. A trial followed between the ship’s crew and the insurers, the latter being unwilling to pay for the slaves’ loss, and the ensuing verdict turned out to favor the Zong’s crew – thus creating a precedent allowing for the treatment of African people as livestock rather than as human beings.34 The novel’s title comes from a Mama Dot poem bearing the same name (D’Aguiar 1985, 39) and is thus endowed, from the onset, with a spectral quality, insofar as it is recurrent.35 The narrative it designates also has, of course, a revisionary link to the poem: the novel’s initial description of the Atlantic, on which the slave ship Zong sails, as an ensemble of “loose floorboards” (D’Aguiar 1997, 9) echoes the poem’s final line, which states that “Generations of dust, in floorboard creases, stir” (1985, 39). Knowing that the crew of the Zong threw more than a ­hundred so-called “sick” slaves overboard, and since the sea is depicted as being made up of “loose floorboards” which actually represent the peaks and troughs of waves, one can imagine that the poem’s “generations of dust” consist in the eroded remains of slaves thrown to the sea, and whose presence there is,

34

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the economy of liquidity) arguably turns slaves to ghosts, to phantomatic property. This argument loads the presentation of slaves as ghosts in Feeding the Ghosts (Baucom 2005, 308–33). For a thorough study of the Zong story and the court cases that followed, see Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. For another “spectral” reading of Feeding the Ghosts, read Walters 2013. For a more detailed account of the Zong story and its literary treatments, along with a listing of the instances in which D’Aguiar riffs on the “floorboard creases” image, see Chapter 4 on Feeding the Ghosts. The phrase is actually so recurrent that it might actually come from Wilson Harris’ novel The Infinite Rehearsal which, as shown in Chapter 3, has deeply influenced D’Aguiar’s work, and where the narrator, at some point, forgets to feed ghosts (Harris 1987, 4).

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a­ rguably, represented as having been forgotten as one omits to sweep the dust between the boards of one’s floor. Yet, such an oblivion, or conjuring away of their memory leads to their being conjured back up as ghosts: in between the regular spacing of floorboards and/or the frequent peaks and troughs of waves, they spectrally “stir” over an Atlantic seafloor that erases their passing – both passage and death – as much as it retraces it in a tidalectic hauntology by way of which, in spite of being silt, they are not still. However, before all 132 slaves are thrown into the Atlantic, and after Mintah, the protagonist, has managed to climb back on board after being sent to the waters, one slave, a distressed, old woman, recites the following plea: We are on the sea Not in the sea Over the sea Not under the sea Apart from the sea Not a part of the sea Show us mercy Mintah’s mercy And show us land Mintah’s land.

D’Aguiar 1997, 94

Being “Apart from the sea,” according to these lines, means being alive, and ultimately distinguishes land from sea in terms of life and death. “Land” is exposed as a correlative of “mercy,” which itself, apparently, implies being spared by the crew and, hence, from the waves. On the one hand, the wish for land, in addition to translating an obvious desire to survive the Middle Passage, implies that it might be preferable to die on dry land than in the sea, presumably because dying on land as a slave entails a chance of being buried (or, maybe, cremated), and gaining posterity by leaving the trace of a tomb (or funeral urn), while being thrown into the Atlantic may not grant such sepulchral traceability. On the other hand, D’Aguiar is also punning on “mercy” as “mer/sea,” a gathering of the French and English translations of words having a similar signification. With this lexical fusion, “mercy” becomes not only a portmanteau but a metaphorical and physical correlative of land, a “translational and transnational” (Bhabha 7) or cross-cultural, Anglo-French

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merci-mercy/mer-sea. In this sense, in the plea, it is then the sea, rather than land, that is correlated with mercy: if the sea is mercy, if the Atlantic may, quite paradoxically, spare the people it drowns, it might be by restoring them with posterity, but a posterity that can never be effected by the fixity of a tomb, and is only granted by the tidal translational movements of mer/sea as tropical mercy, that is, the tidal and metaphorical retreat of the erasure of slaves into a hypomnesic trace of their passage/passing. Then, what the old woman is asking for might not be the temporary deferral of a death that is always coming, but the exemption from oblivion thanks to spectrality which, if she is to die at sea, will be granted by waves as metaphorical reminders, so much so that “Mintah’s mercy” actually is the mer/sea that allows for her spectral return (as memory). The effect of such ghostly restoration, again, is the undoing of white mythology, the act of preventing one from ignoring and/or forgetting one’s responsibility to remember that the erased side of the modern coin, the hidden sign of its calculated value, the language of capital, liquidity, and financial “liquidation,” derive from the actual, murderous “liquidation” of innumerable African men, women and children during or after their experience of the Middle Passage. Again, such restoration is crucial, because justice is not conceivable if one fails to remember, that is, to look back at or re-spect one’s retro- and prospective responsibility before past specters and ghosts to come (Derrida 1993, xviii). That process of erasure and restoration is described in the prologue of Feeding the Ghosts, which explains that slaves who die at sea leave no trace but the sea itself, because the sea erodes their bodies until they are diluted as its salt. Yet, by the same token, “the sea becomes them, becomes their memory” (D’Aguiar 1997, 4), their spectral reminder. The same description of dilution may also be viewed in the passage where Mintah, in a mirror image of Marley in “Dread” (D’Aguiar 1993, 16), imagines that sea current “sweeps the floor of the sea and inadvertently combs [her] hair from [her] skull and arranges it in a pattern of waves […]” (D’Aguiar 1997, 214). In this perspective, in the poem entitled “Colour” (D’Aguiar 1993, 17), which follows “Dread” in British Subjects, the dilution of the poetic persona’s pigmentation also appears to be endowed with hypomnesic power: I woke with the last of my colour on my gums. The rest had melted from me and coated the sheets mattress and both pillowcases. I cursed myself for sleeping nude as I stood before the mirror. This pale somebody stared right back and right through me, he looked so hard, I had to glance behind myself.

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An involuntary shiver took me over. Ghost after ghost hurdled my grave. […]. 17, italics mine

In spite of this excerpt’s humorous sixth line, color liquefying itself and leaving the body is an unpleasant, uncanny experience for the person concerned (Freud 1917, 9). Sweat, which, like the sea, is a form of salt water, has melted the poetic persona’s pigment away from his body. As a consequence, he, like Freud not recognizing his image in a mirror when traveling on a train, almost fails to recognize himself in the mirror, staring “right back and right through [him]” (D’Aguiar 1993, 17) in the same way as the treacherous water and light of “Silver Song,” as shown above, “look through” the poetic persona as if s/he “wasn’t there, or dead” (29). Color loss may appear, then, to have made the poetic persona translucent, to the point of matching the stereotypical image of an ethereal specter one can “look through,” all the more so since, upon seeing his colorlessness, the poetic persona almost immediately conjures up the picture of phantoms “hurdl[ing his] grave” (17). And if one can see through ghosts, readers may surely sea through the poem’s phantoms and protagonist as specters, as resurgences of a haunting Middle Passage imagery, when the poetic persona decides to take “a bath deep enough to float in” (17): in addition to the lead provided by intertextuality with “Silver Song,” which, again, is evocative of Middle Passage history, the bath where a formerly black man floats is inextricably reminiscent, in the present context, of the somber image of a slave’s corpse drifting in the Atlantic. The withdrawal by dilution of the poetic persona’s pigment is a hauntological re-treat, a conjuring of the historical past of his African forebears.36 3.2 The Middle Passage &Limbo As in “Colour,” a representation of a contemporary poetic persona’s reminiscence of the past of slavery is evoked in “At Sea,” in Continental Shelf: Blame that two-week crossing of the Atlantic By boat back in ‘62 from England to Guyana, 36

The past also returns at the end of the poem, when the poetic persona looks at himself in the mirror again, and watches the “usual patches where [he]’d lost parts of [himself] / in guest houses, from Land’s End to John O’ Groats / gloat[ing] back, familiar, ghosted and ghosting” (17). “Land’s End” is the extreme South-West of England, and “John O’ Groats,” in addition to being Scotland’s North-Eastern equivalent of Land’s End, evokes a past that was long before the poetic persona’s time: while color is lost, scars still operate as hypomnesic markers of a historical past and a (potentially racist) personal experience that are, again, “ghosted and ghosting” (17), showing that remembrance, if spectral, is inescapable.

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When I learned to rock and roll effortlessly, And the world, the whole liquid enterprise of it, Seemed to be going some place, leaving me Behind or in the middle of nowhere, […]. D’Aguiar 2009, 6

That D’Aguiar, as a child, was sent from England to be reared in Guyana in 1962 (Stade & Karbiener 127), suggests the poem has an autobiographical dimension. Yet, the “crossing of the Atlantic” from England, a formerly imperial force, to Guyana, a former British colony, is not only significant on a personal, biographical level, but points to specific historical facts, such as European colonization of the Americas, the triangular trade, and transatlantic slavery. In that context, crossing the Atlantic from England to Guyana may also conjure the inverted image of a Middle Passage trajectory. In other words, through a childhood memory, that is, thanks to personal anamnesis, the poetic persona reminds readers of a broader historical past. An additional evocation of the Middle Passage experience consists in the poetic persona’s description of the Atlantic as the “middle of nowhere” (6), for such a description is first uttered, in D’Aguiar’s work, by Mintah in Feeding the Ghosts, while she is “at sea” (D’Aguiar 1997, 61). There, she tries to come to terms with her position, as she has been taken from Africa on a slave ship to a destination unknown to her, but which seems unpromising, according to the way she and her companions are treated on board: “I remain between my life that is over and my life to come. The sea keeps me between my life” (199). The “life that is over” is the African one, and the other is unpredictable for Mintah. Her thinking that one of her lives is over conveys a sense of death and of an ongoing process of ominous transition towards another kind of existence. That passage also correlates time and space, as it links the past to Africa, while the future will necessarily happen elsewhere, but not in the sea, where life, and therefore time and space in Mintah’s thinking, are suspended. To the heroine, “Water promise[s] nothing. A life on water [is] no life to live, just an in-between life, a suspended life, a life in abeyance, until land present[s] itself and enable[s] that life to resume” (61). Like the poetic persona who is left “Behind, or in the middle of nowhere” in “At Sea,” Mintah feels lost “in the middle of nowhere” (61). In that somber context, corresponding to an in-between and uncertain position for both characters, it is not accidental for the poetic persona of “At Sea” to explain that it is over the Atlantic that he learned to “rock and roll effortlessly” (D’Aguiar 2009, 6): this comparison of the movement caused by rollers to a dance, in relation to the poem’s sense of doubt and in-betweenness,

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gives the impression that the Atlantic is being compared to limbo. Limbo, as a dance, consists in the crossing of a threshold symbolized by a stick under which dancers must pass until they can no longer dance through the symbolic gate. The allegorical rite of passage that limbo constitutes is, then, also comparable to Christian limbo as the designation of the purgatorial place between heaven and hell where unbaptized children are, according to some Christian beliefs, made to wander, like ghosts. This Christian signification is, presumably, at the origin of the common use of “limbo” as a metaphor for doubt. As a consequence, limbo may be viewed, thanks to its polysemous quality, as a tropicality and, in the contexts of “At Sea,” as a metaphorical description of the purgatorial – “blame that […] crossing” – and choreographic – “rock and roll” – transatlantic experience of a limbo-like gap the parallel limits of which could either consist in the continents on each side of the Atlantic or the imaginary lines of the tropics. This sense of a transatlantic limbo is also explicit in Feeding the Ghosts, when the narrator predicts that slaves dying at sea or away from Africa will not be “laid to rest but in limbo. Each spirit [will] have to find its way home over this sea” (D’Aguiar 1997) and retrace steps back across the Atlantic “limbo” threshold. Wilson Harris confirms the idea of a link between limbo and the Atlantic in his essay entitled “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas,” where he explains that although limbo is a dance “originating” in Africa, its present day Caribbean form “was born, it is said, on the slave ships of the Middle Passage” (Harris 1970, 157). He also indicates, alluding to Anansi, the ­African spider trickster-deity, that getting through the cramped “limbo gateway” of the seas towards the Americas in spidery contortions is an experience that, to some extent, African slaves share within a broad cross-cultural context across history with “the refugee flying from Europe” and the “indentured East Indian and Chinese from Asia” (157). It is then clear that, as a tropicality, limbo may simultaneously bring back the specters of transatlantic historical pasts and lead forth into metaphorical, poetic possibilities: again, both of these directions coexist in Feeding the Ghosts and “At Sea.”37 Furthermore, Harris goes so far as to legitimize a “pun on limbo as a kind of shared phantom limb which has become a subconscious variable in West Indian theatre” (Harris 1970, 157, italics mine). In medical terms, a “phantom limb” relates to one’s continued impression of feeling one’s amputated body part, as if it were a specter, simultaneously exorcised and recurrently coming 37

Brathwaite’s poem “Caliban,” also cited in Harris’ essay (Harris 1970, 157), capitalizes on the tropicality of limbo too: “Stick is the whip / And the dark deck is slavery. / Limbo / Limbo like me” (Brathwaite 1973, 194).

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back (Derrida 1993, 49–50, 58, 202). A “pun on limbo” as a phantom limb would then be indicative of the spectral nature of limbo as something that was cut off or away, but that keeps resurfacing: in the present context, and as suggested above, limbo is a haunting reminder of the Africa from which the victims of the transatlantic slave trade were severed: it crystallizes both the link and the break with Africa for African diasporic peoples. In this sense, limbo plays a crucial role as an imaginary, metaphorical gateway to an “amputated past” that cannot be otherwise retrieved. Such an idea of limbo as a tropical phantom limb, as an intertextual “subconscious variable in West Indian theater” is ­clearly identifiable in D’Aguiar’s A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death. In that play, limbo is mentioned when Alvin’s grandmother recounts her premonitory dream about her grandson: “he was dead, but living; he looked older than me. I was face to face with my grandson who looked older than me. It could only mean one thing. He wasn’t in this world and he couldn’t leave it: he belonged to the next world but he couldn’t enter it. He was in limbo” (233). This description has a progression that resembles that of the ­above-cited passage where Mintah describes her in-between situation on the Atlantic (D’Aguiar 1997, 199): while Alvin is locked in limbo, between worldly life and afterlife, Mintah is trapped on the sea between her African life and her life to come. In this sense, be it through Christian imagery or the contortions of a ­Caribbean dance in the making, the limbo trope appears in transatlantic contexts – again, Alvin and his friends have crossed the Atlantic on board a steamboat to join the raf – in both Feeding the Ghosts and A Jamaican Foresees His Death. However, Mintah’s situation is expressed within a conscious internal monologue, while Alvin’s status is related to the unconscious through the dream his grandmother had (Freud 1899, 7). This unconscious quality, in addition to its being staged, may confirm Harris’ claim that limbo is a “phantom limb,” a “subconscious variable of West Indian theatre” (Harris 1970, 157), and suggests that Fred D’Aguiar supports Harris’ view, all the more so since D’Aguiar knew Harris personally, and has dedicated much thought and ink to his forebear’s works (D’Aguiar 1993, 35–6; Birbalsingh 135).38 Moreover, while the sea is likened to limbo through Mintah’s altered perception of time at sea as arrested in Feeding the Ghosts, time accelerates in Alvin’s limbo, where he grows older than his grandmother in her dream. Mintah and Alvin’s analogous relations to limbo through singular timing comes in addition to their comparable – yet very dissimilar in their respective conditions and outcomes – experience of the Atlantic. Alvin crosses the sea from Jamaica to ­Scotland with his friends in order to join the British army, a trip 38

For more information on D’Aguiar’s relation to Harris, see Chapter 5, Part 3.

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that ­constitutes, as in “At Sea” (D’Aguiar 2009, 6), an inverted image of the Middle Passage journey, and possibly conjures up the specter of the triangular trade. In addition, Gerry, one of Alvin’s friends, explains that the ship’s movements remind him of his mother: “this ship rocking me like my mother used to” (D’Aguiar 1991, 243).39 Gerry’s description of the sea “rocking” him is comparable to that of the ocean where the poetic persona “rock[s] and roll[s]” in “At Sea” (6), and may thus contribute to a sense of limbo (dance and contortions), all the more so since the crossing of the Atlantic by Afro-Caribbean men on a ship is reminiscent of Middle Passage history. Furthermore, the correlation of a ship to a mother, contrasting with the tomb-like image of slave-ship hulls, is also evocative of the simultaneity of becoming and disappearance, of life and death that characterizes (limbo) hauntology. It is also reminiscent of Glissant’s description of the Atlantic “abyss” as a womb-tomb “tautology” ­(Glissant 1990, 6). The resulting syncretic simultaneity of these antithetical i­mages – life/death, ­beginning/legacy – in descriptions of a transatlantic experience conjure a sense of Mintah’s limbo stance between a “life that is over” and “to come” (D’Aguiar 1997, 199), by way of which D’Aguiar apparently corroborates, again, Harris’ definition of limbo as a phantom limb in Caribbean theater (Harris 1970, 157).40 3.3 Watery Re-presentations of Death Apart from being evocative of limbo, Mintah and Alvin’s transatlantic displacements suggest the risk of death, respectively by drowning and at war. And 39

40

From a psychoanalytical perspective, one may infer that Gerry’s not unprecedented correlation of mother and oceanic movements, of “mère” and “mer” (Walcott 1990, 231), translates an unconscious wish for Thalassal regression, for a return to one’s initial and secure aquatic mode of existence (Ferenczi 129). In addition to the above-mentioned references D’Aguiar’s play makes to Yeats, these tautological images, along with Tom’s “baptismal drowning” in Bloodlines, find their counterpart in Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s “Limbo,” where fishers find a dead baby in their nets. The infant’s being “netted,” like fish, and its having been “thrown back / to the waters” (Heaney 1972, 70, italics mine) evoke, like Gerry’s description of a ship on water as a cuddling mother, a sense of Thalassal regression to the amniotic liquid (Ferenczi 129). The place where the infant died is then tautologically associated to the locus of its conception. The paradoxical nature of the poem also resides in the suggestion that the mother sent her unbaptized baby to limbo by drowning it, that is, by immersing it in water, as in baptism. D’Aguiar’s play also contains a humorous tropical dialogue where Marcus Garvey is compared to Odysseus, who is then compared to Joyce’s Ulysses (D’Aguiar 1991, 235). Walcott creates analogous tropicalities in Omeros, where he displaces Homer’s tale to the Caribbean, which he then links to Ireland: an Irish couple, the Plunketts, in the novel, take a metaphorical trip back across the Atlantic from the Caribbean to Ireland, and this trip is described with the same words as those used to depict Achilles’ journey back to Africa (Walcott 1990, 215–16).

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death, as such, is yet another recurrent, spectral theme that is repeatedly being related to water in D’Aguiar’s verse. For instance, in Bill of Rights, Jonestown children die eaten by piranhas: Chump chump went the piranhas On the children who jumped Unthinkingly into the river During a spell without supervision Oh red river Howls under water Blood signaling miles downstream For more, more piranhas to come feast. D’Aguiar 1998, 12

The alliterative correlation of “children” and the “chump” sound of jaws is a very strong and sinister sonic evocation of what occurs in the scene: the children accidentally dive into a school of piranhas during a “spell without supervision.” The absence of “supervision” is equivocal, in that it may s­ imultaneously designate the parents’ lack of attention and a moment of freedom for the children who, for once, are allowed to play instead of being given tasks to contribute to the well-being of the Jonestown commune. They thus enjoy a “spell” during which orders are not “spelled out” to them, which leaves them with time to play, a possibility about which they are so excited that, as if “under a spell,” they blindly jump into deadly waters (Derrida 1993, 122). Hence, the pro-spect of a lapse of spare time operates like the casting of a spell, like the conjuration of a spectral image that makes the children spellbound and vulnerable to water which, in D’Aguiar’s works, is yet another conjurer. The stream subsequently turns red as the children die, and gives visibility to the dilution of their bodies into the river’s current, which conjures a shifting, spectral and hypomnesic trace of the children in turn. Death hiding under water, waiting to kill children, is also represented in “Elegies,” when the poetic persona goes fishing with his children and watches the line which From the rod formed a perpendicular angle of solid Steadiness, and it was there that my eyes revolved In my head to make me switch places with the fisher In the water, who fished for men as the men chased Fish, but who seemed to settle for my boy’s face. D’Aguiar 2009, 76

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Again, the “Elegies” in Continental Shelf consist in the poet’s mourning for the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. In this sense, the poetic persona might be viewed, once more, as the poet himself and, most importantly, the above-cited passage suggests, as a consequence, that the massacre has had such a traumatic effect on the poet that his imagination is being stirred towards the morbid even in leisurely situations: the speaker mistakes his own reflection in the water for death personified as a fisher who threatens to kill his son. Haunting is at play here again, then, for it is the recurrent, spectral memory of the Virginia dead that induces the specular inversion (on a treacherous watery surface again) of the speaker with his reflection on the stream, and makes him fear for his boy’s life. This image of the river as a deadly fisher, in “Elegies” also consists in a re-casting of a spectral figure from a British Subjects poem, namely, “Greenwich Reach” (27): The Fisher of Men is Old Nick who wields a big death-dealing stick, he wishes to rejuvenate the Thames, not with scaly fishes. He means to relocate people. D’Aguiar 1993, 27

As in “Elegies,” death “winks at you in the water” (27). However, instead of undulating on the presumably Virginian waters – possibly the James River, via which slaves were distributed across the United States – of “Elegy,” in “Greenwich Rich,” it is the Thames that is personified into a devilish “Old Nick” who intends to “relocate people” into the river to “rejuvenate” it.41 Considering the fact that much of the sugar produced by slaves in the triangular trade transited on the Thames, the description of Old Nick’s desire to rejuvenate the Thames by relocating people into it is comparable to the historical British and ­European quest for the accumulation and renewal of wealth through the “relocation” of Africans via the Middle Passage: the hypomnesic economy of liquidity resurfaces here again. 41

Brathwaite relates water to somber legendary, or mythological figures too in “The Cracked Mother,” where “on the seas / three nuns appeared / black specks stalked the horizon of my fear / Santa Marias with black silk sails” (Brathwaite 180). The three nuns are clearly the three Fates or Parcae, who control the thread of everyone’s life in Greco-Roman mythology. They are, of course, simultaneously correlated to the Christian figure of the Virgin Mary and (as “sails”) to Columbus’s three ships, one of which was the Santa Maria.

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Thus, through spectral images of ghostly dilution, limbo and death, water is, again, turned to tropes which, by definition, re-treat, retrace what they erase (Derrida 1978, 66), in an aquatic hauntology that hypomnesically restores the very past that the historical waters of D’Aguiar’s sea riff may seem, at first sight, to have erased. The poet manages to bring such restoration about by undoing the economy of liquidity as white mythology, and by summoning the specters that were conjured away, partly erased or written over on the palimpsests of Western historiography (Derrida 1971, 11). In the process, D’Aguiar invokes a great many cross-cultural images that are, more often than not, accompanied by networks of intertextual references ranging from Caribbean poetry to Greco-Roman mythology via the Irish literary canon. Among these intertexts, Brathwaite’s tidalectic poetry is crucial, and Walcott’s Omeros plays a central role, probably because, like D’Aguiar’s works, Omeros, in addition to drawing on Irish literature and Western mythology, also retrieves the past by “chang[ing] History to […] metaphor[s]” (Walcott 1990, 270). Now, be it through tidalectics, metaphors, or hauntology, recurrence is the thread that allows for the weaving of such diverse subjects as ghosts, water, and language into a coherent texture. Such recurrence, in turn, is indicative of a cyclical, rather than linear, understanding of time in Fred D’Aguiar’s works, and suggests that a link may operate between the circularity of tropes and the passing of time. This link is discussed in the following chapter.

Chapter 3

Chronot(r)opes Something happens to time itself. Time switches from a linear n ­ arrative to a lyrical sense. Rather than seeing a past that is gone and out of reach, and the fact of a future always presenting itself, there is, instead, a ­defiance of the linear. The march forwards may be stalled. The backwards gaze proves not only useful but capable of altering what happened in that past. This idea of time as a continuous present — that is, no past, present, and future continuum, but somehow the past and the future in the present — appeared in Harris’s first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), and continued as an imaginative procedure through twenty-five novels to his latest, The Ghost of Memory (2006). d’aguiar 2009a, italics mine

∵ The argument that a trope is a linguistic movement of rotation, and that a cross-cultural trope, insofar as it is conditioned by geographical displacements, functions as a tropicality, as a tropos the movement of which actualizes, in language, the physical crossing of a topos, has been repeatedly made in this study. Moreover, and as shown above, tropicality is, in D’Aguiar’s work, often related to literary revision, (tidalectic) retreat, and hauntology which, in themselves, are characterized by repetition: again, metaphor, waves, and specters begin by coming back (Derrida 1978, 66; 1993, 11). Furthermore, what metaphorically re-turns with these elements in D’Aguiar’s poetry is, more often than not, a reminder, a hypomnesic trace of the past. Such spectral, frequent, or temporaltropical recurrences, as a consequence, induce one to wonder whether the circular movements of tropes, in these contexts, may be correlated to a cyclical perception of time, as “chronot(r)opes,” so to speak. Of course, the term is punning on Bakhtin’s notion of the literary chronotope, but not in a simply playful way, for, being reminiscent of chronotope, the word chronot(r)ope, is evocative of the present hypothesis that tropicality could operate as a space-time conglomerate. In addition, the association of “trope” and “chronotope” functions, in itself, as a reminder of the literary, that is, linguistic, and hence, inescapably metaphorical nature of the chronotope

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(Derrida 1978, 66) – hence the bracketed (r), which becomes superfluous as soon as the metaphoricity of the chronotope is acknowledged. Bakhtin’s definition of the chronotope in The Dialogic Imagination is, indeed, intrinsically literary: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, and becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1981, 84, italics mine). This definition leads Elizabeth DeLoughrey, for instance, to designate the slave ships of the Middle Passage as chronotopes, because it is on the transatlantic trade routes delineated by the spatial movements of these vessels that “our modern and global measurement of time” was perfected (DeLoughrey 2007a, 55). For the slave ship to operate as the nexus of such “time-space compression” implies, for DeLoughrey, that the origin of modernity is decomposable into intercontinental, tropical transactions, and thereby undoes the white mythology according to which our modern, globalized world would be the exclusive brainchild of a hermetic West (52). In this sense, and as DeLoughrey explains again, citing Walcott, “localizing time space [also] is the process by which one establishes that ‘the sea is history’” (53). In other words, the aforementioned function of tidalectics as a poetic mode of recollection, its metaphorical restoration of hypomnesis, is founded on the chonot(r)opic nature of the transatlantic routes of slave ships. Moreover, this chronotopic quality reinforces the aptness of Derrida’s comparison of the hypomnesic movement of metaphor to that of a “wave on the shoreline” (Derrida 1978, 66), by infusing it with a supplementary historical trait. In this light, it might, then, not be accidental to find that Bakhtin’s notion of a time that thickens into space and of a space that mutates into time to form a chronotope has a counterpart in Derrida’s definition of différance: It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called “present” element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present. An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself,

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thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). And it is this constitution of the present, as an “originary” and irreducibly non-simple (and therefore, stricto sensu non-originary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protentions (to reproduce analogically and provisionally a phenomenological and transcendental language that soon will reveal itself to be inadequate), that I propose to call archiwriting, archi-trace, or différance. Which (is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization. derrida 1982, 13

The simultaneity of spacing and temporization, or “becoming-space of time” and “becoming-time of space,” into différance coheres with Bakhtin’s description of the chronotope. However, when Bakhtin derives the chronotope from an exploration of prose, Derrida’s source is linguistic signification as a whole, in Saussurian terms. In other words, if Bakhtin’s chronotope is an avatar of différance, then chronotopy is not specific to the novel or even written speech, but to language itself. Différance, as the condition of signification through difference, the fact that every single sign always-already refers us to the signs it is not in order to become meaningful, implies that a deferral, a time differential, no matter how infinitesimal, is necessary for the sign to make sense. The presence of the sign is hence intrinsically split into its past and its future, and conditions the decomposable nature of origin, or the impossibility to divide any speakable thing into prime elements. That is why Derrida favors hauntology over ontology and the metaphoric over the literal.1 But if origin is naturally prosthetic, if a word is intrinsically chronot(r)opic or différanciel, then time cannot proceed from a single origin onward into the future in a linear way: if nothing is absolutely original or present, then everything is prosthetic and re-presented, everything is a recurrence from the past and a trace of its future, and time, like tropes, must necessarily circulate. Such a hypothesis on the cyclical progression of time, although not formulated in these terms, is probably what led Nietzsche to devise the notion of perpetual return, most clearly described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 1 Derrida’s “favoring” them might also consist in his merely not erasing them, as, according to him, the Western metaphysical tradition does (Derrida 1971, 11).

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all things recur eternal and we ourselves with them, and […] we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us. […] there is a great year of becoming, a colossus of a year: this year must, like an hour-glass, turn itself over again and again, so that it may run down and run out anew: so that all these years resemble one another, in the greatest things and in the smallest. nietzsche 1883–5, 236

That the present always already splits into cyclical recurrence is, again, conceivable. However, one may have reservations as to the necessity for perpetual return to preclude change, by making every cycle the same “in the greatest things and in the smallest,” for différance2 shows, as explained above, that the presence of the present is conditioned by the possibility of its absolute ­other, by its differing deferral. In other words, repetition entails difference and, hence, the cyclical recurrence of time is not the perpetual return of the same, but the perpetual return of the same as different: recurrence is a variation, a differed and deferred version. In this sense, one may specify that the ­cyclical qualities of time could, thus, be more specifically represented as a three-dimensional spiral. Such a claim to différance as a response to Nietzsche’s argument is palpable in the idea of “infinite rehearsal,” a variant of perpetual return that is not hermetic to difference, and that was developed by someone who exerts a major influence over D’Aguiar’s works, namely, and as suggested above, Wilson Harris (Harris 1987). What Harris retains from the idea of the perpetual return is the potential for events to recur infinitely. However, instants repeat themselves as variants in Harris’ conception of infinite rehearsal, and the strict similarity in the reproduction of every “great year” is not maintained from Nietzsche.3 As D’Aguiar explains in this third chapter’s epigraph in terms that are strongly reminiscent of Derrida’s description of “time out of joints” (Derrida 1982, 13), cyclical time turns the present to temporal syncretism, to an infinitely recurring version of presence into différance. Harris further implies that such a

2 We keep the word in its French spelling, but we do not italicize it, thereby “naturalizing” this supplement to the English language here. 3 Finding that Harris imagined infinite rehearsal subsequent to his survey of the Guyanese interior (D’Aguiar 2009a) and in relation to Nietzsche’s notion of perpetual return suggests that Harris’ poetic vision of time and space is founded on a synthetic response to European philosophy and Caribbean nature, and may, hence, be understood as a tropicality. As a consequence, D’Aguiar’s reliance on infinite rehearsal implicitly partakes of such tropicality too.

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reception of time endows the subject with (poetic) agency over it, with the ability to “alter” (D’Aguiar 2009a) past and future in the present-as-rehearsal.4 D’Aguiar, in his exploration of Harris’ idea, suggests some of the literary ways in which one may capitalize on the poetic possibilities of infinite rehearsal (as the perpetual return of différance): For Harris, each return to a memory, image, or dream yields new insights, and each time the viewer or thinker participates in the recall or act of gazing — from a necessarily partial because particular viewpoint — that person changes a little. […] The artistic compulsion to look and keep looking at this rich source of self-knowledge creates the sense of a revisionary potential […]. d’aguiar 2009a

Rehearsal operates through remembrance and imagination, that is, through re-presentation and/or, possibly, metaphor, which, again, may operate as a hypomnesic recurrence, like dreams for instance, since, according to Freud, dreams are the unconscious and metaphorical revisions of past, lived experience (Freud 1899, 7). In this sense, the literary treatment of infinite rehearsal can rely not simply on recurring tropes and tropes of recurrence, but on various revisionary means, and provide different perceptions of the pasts and ­futures of presence (D’Aguiar 2009a). From a musical perspective, for example, infinite rehearsal would correspond to the principle of theme-and-variations pieces, where an initial theme is played over and over, and each repetition of the initial melody line contains a variation that produces an emotional effect that differs from the preceding version of the theme. The possibilities of such a musical game are virtually endless, and in keeping with the principle of infinite rehearsal: the musical analogy has not escaped D’Aguiar’s attention any more than the recurrence of dreams, and those are the themes that the present chapter emphasizes in its exploration of D’Aguiar’s reliance on infinite rehearsal, after having further clarified the poetic nature of such a conception of time through the study of two poems that openly capitalize on Harris’ vision.

4 For a discussion of that type of “magic” agency of the backward gaze in Orphic terms, see Chapter 5 in general and, more specifically, its third part, which discusses the Orphic features of Harris’ Palace of the Peacock and D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise. For more information on infinite rehearsal and Harris’ philosophical views, see Delfino 2016.

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Revisited Falls & Flights

The two pieces in which Fred D’Aguiar most openly relies on Harris’ infinite rehearsal both come from series of poems. The first poem is “The Trench Revisited,” and belongs to the “Frail Deposits” part of British Subjects (D’Aguiar 1993, 35), made up of poems narrating moments D’Aguiar shared with H ­ arris on the occasion of a trip to Guyana (D’Aguiar 2009a). The other, “Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return,” can be found in the “American Vulture” series from the author’s latest collection, The Rose of Toulouse (D’Aguiar 2013, 54). The “Trench Revisited” recounts in verse a life anecdote Wilson Harris told to D’Aguiar during their trip to Guyana (D’Aguiar 2009a), and to which the poet reacted by suggesting rehearsals of the story to Harris. The latter corresponds to the description, through a vulture’s eyes, of its spiraling flight down to the ground, and relies on many literary techniques which serve to produce meaning through chronot(r)opic circulation and recurrence. 1.1 Trench Trip The anecdote that provided D’Aguiar with the source material for “The Trench Revisited” consists in a memory that came back to Harris as he and D’Aguiar, in the late 1980s, “walked in a tree-lined street divided by a trench in Georgetown,” the Guyanese capital (D’Aguiar 2009a). Harris explained to D’Aguiar that the then dry trench used to be full of water in the 1930’s, when he, as a schoolboy, pushed a friend into it, and pretended not to have done a thing as his friend rose back, drenched, from the waters. The friend, as a result, believed he could only blame himself for his ridiculous fall, and decided from then on that he was incorrigibly clumsy. Harris subsequently felt terribly guilty for having caused such an alteration of self-esteem in his friend, and for not having managed to confess that he had actually nudged him into the trench. In that same street in the 1980s, D’Aguiar responded to the story by suggesting that Harris should push his friend, again, since this time, meaning right then and there, no harm would be done in what was now a dry place. Second, [D’Aguiar] speculated that he, Harris, might look at his friend, falling, back then, from the vantage point of the present, and somehow reach back in time and grab his friend’s arm, just in time to save him from ­getting soaked. And third, should both those methods fail to appeal, or the rescue not work out, somehow Harris could confess to his friend what he had done, again across time, the moment his friend climbed out of the

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trench. Of course, he might opt simply not to push his friend at all, by suppressing the awful adolescent impulse with the restraint of an adult sensibility, again exercised across time in this shared space. d’aguiar 2009a

Harris, “laughed and nodded in recognition” (D’Aguiar 2009a) of D’Aguiar’s use of infinite rehearsal, that imaginative technique Harris had been developing from his first novel on, and openly so in The Infinite Rehearsal (Harris 1987). Thus, the trench anecdote, during the conversation with Harris, was first rehearsed by Harris as a reminiscence, then re-presented as a tale to D’Aguiar who, in turn, repeated, as shown in the above-cited excerpt, four varying summaries of that same story which, as a result, was made to recur into différance. A few years later, D’Aguiar revised the anecdote again, along with his moment with Harris, into the sonnet – that is, in one of the most “rehearsed” poetic forms of literary history – entitled “The Trench Revisited,” which reads as follows: We’re being driven past when you point to Where you’d pushed in a friend long, long ago, Into what was a trench, to test its depth. You say it taught you how a civilisation, Feeling a blow or tug may still not know A hand’s involved, so can’t feel indebted. I was falling, horizontally, just To keep up and lucky to win your trust. Push him again, he’ll fall on land that’s dry This time and think nothing of it, and you’ll Bank all that knowledge lifted from the sight Your friend made clad in mud, convinced totally That he slipped and your hand on his ribcage Was your brave, unlucky, one-hand-clap save! d’aguiar 1993, 35

In spite of numerous inversions, all of the poem’s lines approximate iambic pentameters that “can be read with just sufficient rhythmic heightening to bring out the organization of the meter, but without giving any additional stress to the unstressed syllables functioning as beats” (Attridge 161) such as “to” and “was.” In other words, the iambic pentameter was probably chosen so as to convey the “expressive naturalism” of Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s conversation

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(Attridge 161). Moreover, metrical regularity itself is a pattern of r­ecurrence through which D’Aguiar may make form and sense converge in a poem the theme of which precisely is recurrence: “The Trench Revisited,” as its title ­indicates, is an evident revision – again, an additional recurrence – of a talk he had with Harris. Still in formal terms, the poem’s first stanza transcribes the context of that conversation, while the second verse paragraph recounts the first revisionary suggestion D’Aguiar made to Harris. The space between these stanzas could represent the pause in the conversation that was necessary for D’Aguiar to think of how he would respond to Harris’ anecdote: the beginning of the reply, “Push him again,” is a falling inversion that rhythmically repeats the consequence of Harris’ gesture (a fall), culminating with the word “again,” the last syllable of which, “gain,” falls on the beat, and suggests, again, that repetition may come as a gain. But before making his suggestion, the poetic persona, presumably D’Aguiar here, progressively embodies, in the 1980s, the friend who fell in the trench fifty years before, by depicting himself as “falling, horizontally” in order to keep up with Harris’ walking pace, probably slanting his body forward so much that it approximates a horizontal posture that is, in turn, reminiscent of the friend falling flat into the trench. Yet, in spite of the poet’s impersonation of the fallen friend, differences abound: while the unlucky man in the trench did not know that a “hand was involved” and that Harris was “indebted” (italics mine) to him, that is, owed him a confession and/or an apology that he did not make, D’Aguiar feels lucky for Harris’ trust, expressed through the selection of the poet, who subsequently feels grateful and/or indebted, as the recipient of the confession.5 As my italics show, the poet is not the identical double of the fallen friend, but his inverted image, contrasting luck with bad luck, confession with secrecy, and debt with credence. Furthermore, the scope of the event is distorted by being broadened from the intimacy of the two friends to “a civilisation” which, “Feeling a blow or tug may still not know / A hand’s involved, so can’t feel indebted” (35). Knowing that the two friends are Guyanese, and that the moment of the action corresponds to the late 1980’s, along with the lines just cited, are elements that conjure memories of Forbes Burnham, who was the dictatorial leader of Guyana from 1955 to his death in 1985. For indeed, “a hand [was] involved” in ­Burnham’s 5 “Trust” is foregrounded in “The Trench Revisited,” as it forms, with the word “just,” the poem’s only line-end rhyme, conveying a sense of D’Aguiar’s feeling indebted to Harris for “just” a mere expression of “trust” from a literary forebear he admires. This affection for Harris is corroborated by the poem’s final and only internal rhyme between “brave” and “save;” words associated to Harris’ rehearsed, corrective gesture, and endowed with meliorative connotations.

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rise to ­power in the Cold War context of the 1950s, although “­civilisation” did not know it, since he was backed by the cia and the British Colonial Office (Naipaul 34–5) to keep Guyana in the Western block and thwart the communist ambitions of Burnham’s former friend and subsequent opponent C ­ heddi Jagan. Yet, Burnham did not “feel indebted” to the US or, for that matter, ­entrenched in the West, since he broke with the usa in 1958, declared ­Guyana a communist cooperative republic in the years that followed, and created bonds with Cuba and the Pan-African movement (Naipaul 37). Thus, in the poem, the very event of the conversation is, along with the tale it contains, driven by the principle of infinite rehearsal, and expands from a private, microcosmic ground to recur into a political and macroscopic past. The poem is “driven” indeed, as the two writers, in the poem’s first line, are “being driven” past the trench. That in the actual story, as told by D’Aguiar in “Prosimetrum” (2009a), the two authors were walking, might suggest that the stride is rehearsed into a cruise. However, since the poetic persona’s self-­ portrayal is that of a person “falling horizontally” to keep up with Harris’ rapid gait, the two characters are actually still walking, and “driven” should then be understood in its metaphorical sense, as a designation of the two authors as “inspired” persons the expression of whose thoughts are guided by outside inspirational forces. The poem’s clear reliance on infinite rehearsal shows that Harris’ imaginative principle is the “Muse” that dictated D’Aguiar’s revisionary poem, along, perhaps, with the more somber, dictatorial figure of Forbes ­Burnham (Derrida 1991, 7). On the other hand, the poem’s third line more implicitly conveys a sense of what “drives” Harris: that line specifies that Harris pushed his friend into the trench to “test its depth.” Harris’ motive is added to the initial story by D’Aguiar functioning as a reference to Harris’ first occupation as a land surveyor of the Guyanese interior. There the puzzling and irregular data he gathered from repeated soundings of rivers and observations of meteorological phenomena occurring in the rainforest led him to devise an imaginative conception of time and space, namely, infinite rehearsal, a principle which, in turn, incited him to write novels translating his vision (D’Aguiar 2009a). Hence, while Harris is driven by nature to the formulation of a theory of infinite rehearsal, D’Aguiar is guided by infinite rehearsal for the formulation of poetry. Such an initial chain of causality, in the poem, is representative of D’Aguiar’s connection with Harris, confirmed on the page following “The Trench Revisited” (D’Aguiar 1993, 35) on which D’Aguiar writes that “The flute [he’s] trying to blow a tune on / Belongs to [Harris]” (36). D’Aguiar’s poem thus refracts, disjoints the present into recurrent pasts and futures thanks to Harris’ theory of infinite rehearsal, to which he feels “indebted” (35). In order to pay back his “debt,” D’Aguiar serves Harris’ ideas back

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to him through the suggestion of rehearsing the trench anecdote, by way of which Harris may gain new insight and confess to his friend, subsequently unburdening himself of his sense of guilt, and “bank all [resulting] knowledge” (35), as the poem’s final stanza explains.6 Another obviously recurrent poem from which readers may “bank” new insights figures in Fred D’Aguiar’s latest collection of poems, The Rose of Toulouse. 1.2 Vulture Culture That poem is, as indicated above, “Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return,” the title and opening lines of which actually function as a poetic definition of ­Harris’ imaginative principle: “I fly up and float on one wingbeat for as long as I can make circles / in the circling winds, I see the same things all the time and all that time / I see those same things differently” (D’Aguiar 2013, 54, emphasis mine). The circular movement of the hovering vulture is analogous to that of the “circling winds” of warm air on which its wings rest, doubling up the circular image into a varying recurrence that is also evoked through sound, with the wing/circles pair of words becoming circling/winds, and with the alliteration in “fl” that illustrates both the flapping of wings and aerial flotation. As the vulture’s flight follows its repetitive, circular trajectory, the bird’s recurrent perception of the same elements of landscape, contrary to what perpetual return suggests, and, perhaps, because of variations in altitude, changes its perception of the scenery, as lines two and three, in the above-cited tercet, explain (through a second syntactical mirroring that again, makes form and sense converge). In this sense, the vulture’s view of perpetual return comprises altering factors, and thus coheres with the definition of infinite rehearsal as a variant of perpetual return that is inclusive of variation itself: infinite rehearsal is a “Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return.” The five tercets that follow these opening lines are built on the same type of chiasmatic constructions produced in the poem’s first stanza. In them, the vulture describes the recurrent sights offered by its trajectory, and how rehearsed visions impact its thoughts in the process. For instance, in the poem’s fourth line, the narrator-bird explains that “The maze in the trees keeps [him] counting the trees in the maze” (54). The syntax may simply sound playful, and the line could come across as tautological. However, the grammatical play through 6 That Harris may “bank” knowledge from the “bank” of a water trench is, as seen above in “Silver Song” (D’Aguiar 1993, 29), reminiscent of Wordsworth’s punning on the economy of liquidity in “Tintern Abbey.” The subsequent possibility for a triangulation between ­Wordsworth, Harris, and D’Aguiar, and for the operation of links between the Orphic tenets of romanticism and magic(al) realism is discussed in Chapter 5, part 3.

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which the same thing is presented twice, yet differently, provides the reader with an enhanced perception of that thing: the interstices of shade between the trees that are offered to the vulture’s aerial eye form a maze between the trees that induces the vulture to count the trees constituting such a labyrinth. However, if the trees are “in the maze” as much as they shape it, they may be viewed not only as its walls but as corridors walled with shade. Finally, the “maze in the trees” might designate the same maze being repetitively found in the pattern of every tree’s ramifications, that is, a fractal labyrinth of geometrical repetitions that makes any part look like a miniature replica of the whole, infinitely expanding into a dazzling rehearsal that keeps the vulture “counting the trees in the maze,” while it can never be sure that it is not mistaking the forest for the trees as it hovers down over them. As far as descending is concerned, the downward spiral of stanzas on the page progressively fills with ominous evocations of death, as if the vulture were to crash, and suggests that the bird’s trajectory is not only spatial, but also temporal, corresponding to the amount of time the animal has left to live: the death of a vulture in the series’ preceding poem corroborates that impression (D’Aguiar 2013, 53). The first description that might come across as dark in “Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return” appears in the third stanza’s final line: “My shadow rides the plains below and thinks it shadow rides the winds” (54). While the vulture’s imagining that its “shadow rides the plains” is possible, the reciprocal, mirrored proposition that its shadow “thinks” it imitates the vulture in the sky is presumably impossible. For while a light source shining on an object casts its shadow, a shadow cannot be cast on its object to produce light, according to physics. Yet, the imaginative mediation of infinite rehearsal calls those ideas into question, suggesting that rational, physical rules might flow forth from thoughts as solipsistic as those from which apparently unreal pictures come.7 The spectral image of the thinking shadow may be neither real nor unreal, but could consist in the re-presentation of a becoming-specter of the vulture as it is being silhouetted against the light. In other words, if, in keeping with the theory of infinite rehearsal, the bird’s spatial trajectory corresponds to its movement across time, its shadow may adumbrate – adumbrate actually meaning, etymologically, “to cast a shadow on” – the coming into existence of a future recurrence of the vulture’s flight. In that sense, what the bird is perceiving is the making, syncretized to its past, of its own future, maybe even of its posterity and/or assumed next life cycle, superimposed on its legacies and past lives, if time is indeed cyclical. .

7 Such a questioning of reality is, of course, one of the tenets of magic(al) realism. See Chapter 5 for more information.

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It is no wonder, then, to find that from the fourth stanza on, the vulture begins to think of death, for instance, by comparing the loss of a feather to that of a “tooth in a human dead head” (54), an allegorical, skull representation of vanitas that induces the bird in turn to ponder the fact that, if it was a human being, it would be “destined for a hole in the ground if lucky, / luckier still, to grace a table for vultures” (54): the inversion between vulture and men creates yet another mirror image, and is reminiscent, again, of the death of a vulture under the wheels of a truck driven by a man in the preceding poem in the series (53), suggesting that death too recurs in the poems from “American Vulture.” In “Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return,” the vulture also imagines the moment of its death at the hands of an imaginary lamplighter: “The lamplighter who lights all the lamps above / lights the lamps of my eyes and how that lamplighter douses / those cold flames so too my eyes turn dark” (54). The macrocosm of a starry night is reduced into the microcosm of glittering eyes, which then expand again into a starless sky. Such a metaleptic description, by way of which the eye becomes its own planetarium, is a form of bi-directional recurrence that is coherent with the solipsistic impression conveyed by the shadow that “shadow rides the winds,” and suggests that when an individual dies, an entire universe passes with him or her. Yet, the vulture predicts the impact of its death in the following terms: “I belong to no one and no one wants me when I am gone, / to where I do not know, except for the sound just before / silence and the silence just after sound” (54). These last words, forming the poem’s closure, complement the experience of a last breath, or sound before the silence of death, with the presentation of posthumous silence as yet another experience, which implies that someone is there to witness that absence of sound. If not the lamplighter or anybody else at the moment of the vulture’s death, the poetic voice suggests that it is the bird itself that is to experience an afterlife, or a life in death as it were. Through that suggestion, the vulture lets readers imagine that its circular and recurrent experience of life has led to the formulation of a “theory of infinite rehearsal” according to which every m ­ oment ends only to recur, albeit in a different form. In this sense, the vulture’s last words, in a dark prophecy, foreshadow recurrences that still await the bird. Such a sense of the regular, almost rhythmical resurgence of life is actually evoked by Harris, too, in The Infinite Rehearsal through intertextual reliance on musical zombie figures that D’Aguiar also rehearses in parts of his work. 2

Themes & Variations

Harris’ novel The Infinite Rehearsal is, not unexpectedly, repetitive. The whole book keeps repeating what it tells in constantly changing ways and, so doing,

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progressively creates and enriches its meaning by becoming a metaphorical network. Its structure is reminiscent of a musical “theme and variations,” and one instance of such an incremental development of signification through repetition in Harris’ novel actually relies on a calypso song that D’Aguiar also cites in his work, while relying on anaphoric techniques that are also characteristic of Harris’ style. 2.1 Zombie Jams The calypso that Harris and D’Aguiar cite in their works is first sung, in The Infinite Rehearsal, by Don Juan Ulysses’ mistress Calypso, “a black, white woman” who “belonged to the band of Tiresias Calypsonian Tigers whose fame had spread through many worlds,” and is repeated several times later in the novel by other characters (Harris 1987, 4). One may first note that the two characters just mentioned have highly syncretic names: Don Juan Ulysses obviously evokes, on the one hand, the legendary figure that inspired Molière, Byron, and Mozart and, on the other hand, the mythical character, also present in ­Walcott8 (1990, 201) and D’Aguiar (1991, 60–3), of Odysseus as presented by Joyce in Ulysses. Furthermore, like Homer’s Odysseus, Ulysses is loved by the sea nymph Calypso, whose name, again, stands as a tropicality, insofar as it is evocative of both Greek mythology and Caribbean music. Such tropicality is reinforced in Harris’ novel, since Calypso is described as both “black and white” (4). Finally, the illicit nature of her private relationship with Ulysses, away from other people’s eyes, in the novel, might have been imagined by ­Harris as an unveiling of the etymological meaning of her name, corresponding to the Greek verbs meaning “to cover, conceal.”9 Hence, Harris’ novel is, from its onset, m ­ aking multiple references to an intertextual network that contributes to the text’s tropicality as much as to its revisionary nature, by way of which characters from preceding works are rehearsed into new novelistic personae. Of course, the name of Calypso’s band is tropical too, since it contains her name, albeit derived into an adjective, framed by the substantive “tigers” – an Asian animal – and the name of the Greek mythological prophet Tiresias. The recurrent, alliterative sounds of the band’s name, along with the oracular undertone with which it is suffused through the mention of Tiresias, suggest that the band’s songs might have something to do with recurrence and the prophetic, that is, with infinite rehearsal. The first song Calypso is said to sing in 8 One of Walcott’s most popular plays with Caribbean audiences, The Joker of Seville, is also about Don Juan. It is a musical that tropicalizes the original Spanish Don Juan play, Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Sevilla, by making extensive use of Trinidadian folk forms. 9 Online Eymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0 &search=calypso&searchmode=none (August 1st, 2017) All subsequent etymological information is derived from this source, except where indicated.

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The Infinite Rehearsal is entitled “Stone Cold Dead in the Market.” Yet readers are not immediately given a sense of what the song sounds like, since it is presented at the moment Calypso stops singing it: […] Calypso began to hum ‘Stone Cold Dead In the Market’. Then she stopped. Began afresh in a deep undulating voice: Belly to belly Back to back Ah don’t give a damn Ah done dead already. harris 1987, 10

What Calypso sings is actually a rehearsal, since the first time her song is cited is when she resumes singing – a re-presentation that is evocative of Derrida’s sense of an always-already prosthetic presence (Derrida 1982, 13). Moreover, the repetitive lines Calypso sings actually do not come from “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” but from the chorus of an equally popular song that was first performed by Lord Intruder in one of the 1953 Trinidadian pre-Carnival calypso tents, and then by The Kingston Trio, Rockapella, and Harry Belafonte called “Zombie Jamboree,” which deals with zombies coming back to life in New York City and having a dance party. The song has then been recurrently sung before reaching Calypso’s lips, and suggests again that Harris relies on intertextual revision and recurrence in order to evoke infinite rehearsal. Moreover, the calypso itself also deals with recurrence as resurrection, since Calypso, adopting the voice of the song’s zombie persona, sings that she is “dead already.” Besides, the zombie is a figure of recurrence not only through resurrection, but because, as a Caribbean myth, it has been represented countless times in art and culture, such as in American and European movies, which arguably turned the Caribbean legend to a tropical character. Hence, this short passage from Harris’ novel teems with rehearsals, be they linguistic, intertextual, or tropical. The chorus of “Zombie Jamboree” evokes the promiscuity of a crowded dance-floor, where the zombie does not care about the potentially indecent character of his/her physical proximity with others which, in a rhythmical, dancing context, may also be erotic. However, when Calypso sings the song a second time, one page further into the novel, the chorus’ evocative quality is preserved, but leads readers to completely different interpretations. During that second performance, Calypso sings “more deliberately – as if to supply longer intervals or spaces between lines than on the first occasion. This was astonishing as her song seemed to arise from the bowels of a slave ship becalmed a million light years from home” (Harris 1987, 11). Calypso rehearses the q­ uatrain in a way that is, again, not directly witnessed by readers, but described, through

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locutions designating both spatial and temporal measurements – spaces, intervals (also used in musicology to designate the distance between two notes), light years – as different from the “first occasion.” The difference of delivery is evocative of a slave ship to the narrator, and, retrospectively, changes the meaning of the physical promiscuity described by the chorus: the proximity of bodies corresponds, in Harris’ words, to the cramped situation of slaves in the hulls of ships in the Middle Passage’s “limbo gateway,” where “There was so little space that the slaves contorted into human spiders” (Harris 1970, 157). In this sense, Calypso’s rehearsal functions as a historically charged recurrence by way of which her calypso is further tropicalized through the evocation of another dance, namely, limbo, and, hence, according to Harris, the superimposition of the Anansi trickster onto the song’s dancing zombie. If the specters of slaves are being brought back, it is then not accidental for the character named Ghost, in the Infinite Rehearsal, to speak for the first time by uttering the “Zombie Jamboree” chorus – the third resurgence of the song in the novel: ‘Is there anybody there? Said the Traveler, Knocking on the moonlit door. Belly to belly Back to back Ah don’t give a damn Ah done dead already. And I Tiresias who have foresuffered all I who sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead. I could not believe it. Ghost was speaking at last. No formal message. A repetition of familiar texts become however strangely cross-cultural, the strangest subversion, where one least suspected or expected to find it in hollow convention or solemn usage. harris 1987, 32

The lines “Is there anybody there? Said the Traveler / Knocking on the moonlit door,” as the quotation marks indicate in Harris’ text, cite the opening lines of Walter De La Mare’s poem “The Listeners,” in which a horseman visits a castle, apparently, to hold a mysterious promise, and knocks at its door. No one ever answers his call, as the castle is only peopled with ghosts, who listen but never

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respond to the traveler, who then leaves at a gallop (De La Mare 1912). In this perspective, the reference to specters as mute listeners, being specifically made by a speaking ghost in Harris’ novel, is ironic, all the more so when correlated with the quatrain from “Zombie Jamboree” that follows the citation from De La Mare, which is then made to evoke the ghosts’ complete indifference to the traveler’s call. At the end of the quote, and citing (in an inexact rehearsal) The Waste Land (Eliot 243–6), Ghost calls himself “Tiresias.” Again, Tiresias is a mythological prophet – hence his having “foresuffered all” (Harris 1987, 32) – from Thebes whom Odysseus, in Book ix of the Odyssey, conjures back from the dead for guidance to return to Ithaca. Tiresias then warns Odysseus, in oracular terms, of the ambushes that await him and his crew. Thus “Zombie Jamboree,” which is turned to a Middle Passage reference in its second occurrence in the novel, is related to Odysseus’ transoceanic journey in a third rehearsal which, then, apparently suggests that Odysseus travels on a slave ship: such a transatlantic version of the myth in The Infinite Rehearsal is comparable to Walcott’s revision in Omeros (Walcott 1990), and foregrounds Odysseus and the Middle Passage as comparably recurrent intertextual themes. By the same token, and as the narrator explains, “familiar texts” become “strangely crosscultural” (Harris 1987, 32), forming a tropical conglomerate the meaning of which twirls with the spirals of Harris’ infinite rehearsals. Another reference to the Odyssey appears in an additional citation of “Zombie Jamboree” when a character named Peter feeds “on the lotus, belly to belly, back to back death wish in Calypso’s and Tiger’s band” (Harris 1987, 58). The mention of “lotus” as food is, in the mythological context of Harris’ novel, reminiscent of the lotus eaters encountered by members of Odysseus’ crew, who also eat from the flower, which drugs them into a state of indifference and inertia that echoes, in Harris’ novel, De La Mare’s unresponsive listeners, and suggests that this occurrence of “Zombie Jamboree” is, again, a rehearsal of the previous one.10 Thus, Harris’ novel reminds readers of Western, Caribbean, and African mythologies and evokes Middle-Passage history through a literary reliance on infinite rehearsal that capitalizes on the equivocal potential of a popular calypso song.

10

In “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” Derrida describes the threats of the lotus as “oblivion and the surrender of will” (Derrida 2003, 40). He also mentions and agrees with Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s readings of the mythical episode, the eaters of which are compared to contemporary drug addicts whose attitude subverts Western rationales of productivity: “the sufferer who cannot bear to stay with the Lotus-eaters […] opposes their illusion with that which is like yet unlike: the realization of utopia through historical labor” (quoted in Derrida 2003, 40).

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In several works, Fred D’Aguiar prolongs Harris’ rehearsals of the song by citing it in relation to dark historical pasts. For instance, the first occurrence of “Zombie Jamboree” in D’Aguiar’s work appears in an Airy Hall poem entitled “El Dorado Update,” and translates one of the poetic persona’s responses to his/ her witnessing dire poverty, food shortages, and corruption in 1960s Guyana (D’Aguiar 1989, 30–4). The poet uses the song to describe the same Guyanese context again in his long meditative poem dealing with the 1978 Jonestown massacre, Bill of Rights: Back to back In the face of adversity Belly to belly Rub your love all over me We don’t give a damn This country dying slowly I done dead already Don’t bother bury me d’aguiar 1998, 39

Italics mark this passage as the second, critical half of the page, as they do on every page in Bill of Rights. The singularity of the present excerpt, however, is that the italicized lines are passages from “Zombie Jamboree” which alternate with non-italicized lines that respond to the song and develop its meaning, following, again, Harris’ principle of infinite rehearsal. The first half of the page contains a verse description of Stabroek market in Georgetown, Guyana, in the late 1970s. The first lines explain that “Stabroek market has a broken clock. / The time it tells is always right” (39). Such a comment on one hour always being the right hour is equivocal, in that it may suggest that Stabroek is a 24/7 market, and that the time at which it is visited does not matter, or that any moment is always already the recurrence of an infinity of future and past instants that make, in cyclical time, the hour irrelevant in any case.11 Another 11

The symbol of the clock is ironically echoed in D’Aguiar’s latest novel, Children of Paradise (2014), which, like Bill of Rights (1998), retells the Jonestown massacre: in the 2014 novel, a visiting “watch repairman,” whose clocks are broken by bullets shot at him by the bored guards of Jones’ commune, tells the guards that they are both literally and metaphorically “trying to kill time” rather than himself by shooting at his cart (D’Aguiar 2014, 58).

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potential meaning is that the Guyanese market’s clock is, during the Burnham years (from the late 1950s to 1985), like the dictator, “always right.” The rest of the lines preceding the above-cited passage explain that market sellers and dwellers do “not give a damn” about the hour as long as the clock “tells time,” and are more preoccupied by the food shortages Guyana suffers from. In this perspective, the lines from “Zombie Jamboree” are evocative of a crowded market the population of which is indifferent to the metaphysical notion of time because their main concern is the more pressing need to find the basic means of physical sustenance. D’Aguiar’s revisionary lines are then charged with political criticism concerning the Burnham regime.12 Fred D’Aguiar cites the song again further into Bill of Rights, but only in part: “Back to back, belly to belly, / Confusion of the deathbed transfer, [...]” (D’Aguiar 1998, 69). The original line divisions of the song are no longer respected, and only the beginning of the chorus is cited. The sense of death in “Ah don’t give a damn / Ah done dead already” (Harris 1987, 10) seems to be “transferred” into “Confusion of the deathbed transfer” (D’Aguiar 1998, 69), and forms yet another varying recurrence of the song. The third and last revision of the song in Bill of Rights develops this alteration in that it finally does not even retain words such as “death” or “dead:” “I drank from the cauldron / But I am not back to back, / Belly to belly” (120). The cauldron that is being described is actually the vat, containing Kool Aid mixed with cyanide, which Jim Jones invited his disciples to drink in order to achieve what he called “revolutionary suicide” against the visit of a US delegation to the commune (Naipaul 151). Then, readers may understand, by remembering the rest of the chorus, and through the narrative context, that not being “back to back / belly to belly” means being alive. In other words, the narrator of the passage is saying that, although he has drunk the poison, he is not dead, not yet addressing readers from the other side, like a zombie from the song or a ghost. Thus, in the same way as Harris’ rehearsal of the song spurs the narrative on in The Infinite Rehearsal through the construction of syncretic meaning, so too does D’Aguiar enhance the significance of the song’s lines in order to fit with the Jonestown story Bill of Right contains. Finally, a citation from “Zombie Jamboree” appears in Bloodlines too, when Sow realizes that he is dying: 12

D’Aguiar’s mention of “Zombie Jamboree” in a market context is reminiscent of the fact that Harris’ Calypso, in The Infinite Rehearsal, first sings “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” in the novel, before singing the zombie song (Harris 1987, 4). The repeated mention of a market seems, then, to corroborate the idea that Bill of Rights engages in a revisionary commerce with The Infinite Rehearsal.

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I ask myself if I am ready to die and leave Slavery and feel no regret that white remains white and black is black and the two, belly to belly, back to back. d’aguiar 2000, 159

The song is still evoked in relation to death, but does not constitute a deadly metaphor this time around. Maybe, if “white” and “black” remain “belly to belly, back to back” for Sow, it must be because their opposition has still not been resolved into Relation, but strikes a tense balance between the initially loveless interracial eroticism (belly to belly) that led to Sow’s birth and inter-ethnic segregation (back to back), among the victims of which Sow’s parents may be found, along with countless others in what Sow sees as the legacies of slavery (D’Aguiar 2000, 150). 2.2 Anaphoric Rhythms Fred D’Aguiar, thus, does not only rely on Harris’ infinite rehearsal in theoretical terms, but also by intertextually drawing citations from The Infinite Rehearsal that Harris himself rehearsed from a calypso song the chorus of which owes as much to rhythm as to the repetition of lexemes: these repetitive devices are recurrently present in Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s works too, and serve the progressive development of meaning. For instance, the following, anaphoric passage from Harris’ The Infinite Rehearsal resembles lines from D’Aguiar’s work, and further suggests that Harris’ novel has played a part in D’Aguiar’s use of repetitive literary techniques: “One is afraid to drown before one’s time (yet live), one is afraid to glimpse the age of the earth (yet descend into the womb), the age of faltering economies (yet arise into the spirit of value), the age of the tides, the age of ageless fall into apparent nothingness … all before one’s time … the age of terrifying responsibility [...]” (Harris 1987, 45, italics mine). Every italicized fragment in this excerpt is repeated at least once. The passage’s structure itself is repetitive in its alternation of bracketed and unbracketed constituents which also differ semantically: correlating opposites of death and life, aging and reverting to a prenatal state, economic loss and spiritual value. Such paradoxes are only conceivable through the assumption, again, of infinite rehearsal, or cyclic variation of time, by way of which presence is always a “before” and an “after.” The “age of tides” phrase, being rehearsed into “the age of ageless fall,” aptly illustrates the infinite, unoriginal diffraction of presence, and is ­reminiscent of Derrida’s description of metaphorical retreat in oceanic terms (Derrida 1978, 66), while the notion of a “terrifying responsibility” sends

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one back to responsibility before ghosts of the past (Derrida 1993, xviii). The correlation of the spectral and the oceanic is, in turn, comparable to what D’Aguiar does, as seen above, in his sea riff. Such themes and repetitions also seem to be reworked from the above-cited excerpt from The Infinite Rehearsal (Harris 1987, 45) in this quatrain from Bill of Rights: Down to the bottom of the deep blue sea Down to the centre of gravity Down on our hand and on our knees Down on our luck unluckily d’aguiar 1998, 74

The lines describe the ways in which commune members “fall down” (74) under Jim Jones’ authority in Jonestown. The image of getting down on one’s “knees” evokes submission as much as prayer, conveying the sectary context’s religious atmosphere. The line “down on our luck unluckily,” while achieving the kind of mirror effect D’Aguiar reproduces in “Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return” (2013, 54), formally indicates the ultimately unfortunate unfolding of time for commune members being led to their (suicidal) deaths. Furthermore, the word “down,” in that fourth line, is no longer positional, as in the preceding lines, but is rehearsed into the indication of a feeling of bereavement. However, the passage’s first line, “down to the bottom of the deep blue sea,” does not seem to cohere with the Jonestown story, and is closer to an implicit description of the fate of Middle-Passage victims. In other words, D’Aguiar apparently suggests that the position of Jones’ disciples has become one of enslavement, and might thus posit Jonestown as a twentieth-century recurrence of slavery. In sum, the passage achieves rehearsals through anaphoric and metaphorical variations as much as through an evocation of historical recurrence, which makes it comparable to the aforementioned “One is afraid” passage from The Infinite Rehearsal (Harris 1987, 38, 45), all the more so since the mention of a “center of gravity” (D’Aguiar 1998, 74) is reminiscent of Harris’ comparison, in his novel, of a “glimpse at the age of the earth” to a descent into the “womb” (1987, 45). Thus, Harris’ literary implementation of infinite rehearsal apparently consists in one of the matrices from which D’Aguiar draws to elaborate themes and variations within his works. In addition to serving as a metaphorical means of conveying the idea of infinite rehearsal, anaphora is also used in D’Aguiar’s verse to transit from one image to another in successions that summarize – and therefore rehearse – preceding

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passages. For instance, in Bill of Rights, lines, before anaphoric reduction, read as follow: If a man acquired a cart, without a horse, To sell mauby, shaved ice, coconut water, By walking Georgetown, would it be a case Of out the frying pan into the fire, On account of Georgetown’s choke and robbers Lethal as coral snakes? A man could do worse Than roam the capital blowing his own trumpet Like stay here and end up in a hearse. But that would put Descartes before the Hobbes We know and love; and that would put an end to verse. d’aguiar 1998, 41

D’Aguiar is punning on Descartes and Hobbes with cart and horse, and privileging Descartes over Hobbes is presented as an illogical gesture, comparable to putting a cart before a horse, “that would put an end to verse.” Here, D’Aguiar is implying that, unlike Descartes and his strict rational logic, Hobbes (like Vico) includes imagination, myths, and dreams within the realm of rationality, by designating them as guises of memory (Hobbes 14, Banchetti-Robino 122).13 In this sense, favoring Descartes over Hobbes would entail a sharp reduction of the “rational” scope of poetry, so much so that the poetic persona in D’Aguiar’s poem claims that it would “put an end to verse” (D’Aguiar 1998, 41). Furthermore, on the same page, this passage is followed by an italicized section the first half of which repeats words from the passage’s lines and uses them in an anaphoric succession that builds images and connections while simultaneously summarizing the poem, as follows: “Cart horse / Horse ice / Ice water / Water fire […],” and the lines go on, using the words “fire,” “choke,” “robbers,” “snakes,” “coral,” “man,” “love,” and “verse” that are all present, in that order, in the above-cited lines. The progression from one word to another in the first half of ­italicized section metaphorically reproduces the way the beginning of 13

For more information on Descartes, Hobbes, and Vico’s thoughts concerning reason and the imagination, see Chapter 5. There also is an allusion to Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” in Bill of Rights (D’Aguiar 1998, 95).

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the poem unfolds, and subsequently appeals to the reader’s memory of what s/he has just read as in a kind of summary.14 The second half of the italicized passage then reverses the process by going back through the poem’s first ten lines with the same words and additional words in a cyclic but varying structure: “Verse hearse / Hearse trumpet / Trumpet love [...]” (41). As such, the italicized section of the passage could consist in yet an additional technique that D’Aguiar designed to convey the idea of infinite rehearsal. In this sense, it is also interesting to note that the only rhyme in the passage’s first ten lines – “horse,” “worse,” “hearse,” “verse,” – could itself rhyme with the word “rehearse.” The idea of infinite rehearsal is consistent with these rhymes, which function as sonic rehearsals, and the imperfection of the rhyme that is effected between “horse” and the three other rhyme-words, in addition to their differing meanings, suggests the idea of variation through recurrence also conveyed by Harris’ notion of infinite rehearsal. Intertextual revision is at play here as well since, if this passage may be described as a metaphorical representation of the idea of infinite rehearsal, it also consists in a variation of Harris’ use of repetitive techniques. Finally, and again, the first half of the excerpt corresponding to a thematic exposition, and its second half amounting to a rehearsed variation of that theme, in addition to the changes of rhythm metrical rewriting entails, are in keeping with the musical definition of infinite rehearsal as theme and variations. Such a musical analogy is apparently corroborated by another, openly musical poem Fred D’Aguiar wrote. 2.3 Portobello Islands That poem is “Notting Hill” (D’Aguiar 1993, 39–41), a triptych the theme of which is the famous Notting Hill Caribbean carnival taking place in London every year during the last weekend of August in the vicinity of Portobello Road. First of all, in the present perspective on repetition and cyclical time, it might not be accidental for the poem’s subject to be a recurrent event. As far as form is concerned, the poem’s first part consists in three pairs of fairly regular four-beat couplets that resemble four-by-four formations and are framed by the two-line chorus, made up of two respectively dactylic and trochaic trimeters: “car-nival car-ni-val car-ni-val / this is car-ni-val” (39). The poem’s second part has a structure analogous to that of the first section, in that it consists in three trimetric tercets interspersed with three identical choruses in West Indian slang: 14

The same technique is implemented by D’Aguiar in A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, as lines of paired words are used to summarize a conversation that has just taken place in the same scene: there, one can read “world pearl / pearl sentence / sentence necklace / necklace gesture [...]” and so on (D’Aguiar 1991, 233).

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“come let we wind and grind no girl / carnival not once a year / come let we wind and grind” (40). Furthermore, these first two parts are thematically related since, between the choruses of the first part, the stanzas successively deal with, roughly speaking, “rainbow” carnival outfits (39), Caribbean musical instruments, and dancers, while the corresponding verse paragraphs in the second part describe, in the following order, “rainbow” carnival outfits (40), Caribbean musical instruments, and West Indian food. In other words, the forms and theme of part one and two are comparable, except for the final theme of part two. Such correspondence suggests, in turn, that part two is a variation on the (musical) theme established by part one. Finally, the poem’s third part deals with song, dance and the pervading sense of communion that arises from the carnival, in five tetrametric sextets: the theme is, again, altered but similar, and the tetrametric rhythm corresponds to part one, while the six-line stanzas share their ternary structure with part two, suggesting that part three revises the preceding sections as well. Furthermore, this theme and variation along the streets of Notting Hill comes across as patterned upon Wilson Harris’ principle of rehearsal, because the poem’s third and fourth lines are evocative of Harris’ first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), in which the main character, at the end of the novel, is described as ascending a waterfall to the Palace of the Peacock, “where the light’s rays decompose” as if refracted in a rainbow (Benitez-Rojo 1996, 188), and where he can resurrect and get through a similar, yet varying life experience (Harris 1960, 100–17). At the beginning of “Notting Hill,” one reads: “peacock with feathers of the rainbow / wings’ spread all day” (D’Aguiar 1993, 39, italics mine). Hence, in addition to being formally and thematically reminiscent of the pattern of theme and variation, “Notting Hill” turns one of Harris’ tropes of infinite rehearsal (the palace of the peacock) to an outfit for yearly carnival dancers and, from the first lines on, intertextually specifies that the poem’s recurrent patterns may be interpreted as infinite rehearsal. So doing, the poem also apparently legitimizes the idea that infinite rehearsal is the space-time equivalent of the sonic pattern of theme and variations, audible in the rhythms of carnival music. Following Harris’ principle, rehearsal in “Notting Hill,” is, then, supposed to enrich meaning through repetition. While song and dance constitute the threads that sew the poem’s three parts together, the three sections also convey a repetitive, yet changing sense of the carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense, that is, of open-endedness and heterogeneous communion, by way of which the distinction between bodies become indistinguishable, and through which the order of things is subverted (Bakhtin 1984, 7–8). For instance, in the poem’s

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first part, “the robes of kings drag yards behind / head-above-their-own crowns sway” (39). Carnival kings are unofficial kings, dressed up in regal robes that fit the occasion, but “drag yards behind” for others to either lift them in support or step on them so that the kings may “fall.” The equivocal nature of the line “head-above-their-own crowns sway” corroborates this potential for the symbolic subversion of authority, since the phrase may both designate Caribbean kings dancing upside down and indicate that “heads” higher than those of carnival kings make their crowns sway, or have sway over their crowns, and thus take over as kings of the carnival. The carnivalesque sense of physical proximity and continuity, in turn appears in the poem’s second part, through the chorus “come let we wind and grind no girl / carnival not once a year / come let we wind and grind” (40), and is clarified in the poem’s third part as follows: You’re rubbing up another body in front, one rubbing you from behind; two on your sides bump to your hips’ pendulum swing. Wherever your arms stretch for balance you grab a shoulder or waist; when they jump you take off too. (41) Crowd communion is so strong that the people form a single, coordinate body that moves in synchrony to the music. Yet, such bodily continuity is not only being rehearsed from the poem’s second section, since the rhythm of the “hips’ / pendulum swing,” as indicated above, is also evoked in Omeros (Walcott 1990, 73–4) and revised by D’Aguiar in “Elegy” (D’Aguiar 2009, 87). Rehearsal is not only thematic and intratextual, but intertextual here again. Finally, the crowd, presented as a multifarious British and Caribbean body within London streets may be viewed as a tropicality, and reminds one of the historical past that relates Britain to the Caribbean, as the poem’s closing stanza suggests: Never mind street names, they’re postal conveniences. Life is a honeycomb made to eat; just sort out the sting from the honey and the choreography comes with ease, grace; so rock on, but mind that island in the road! (41) The vague injunction for one not to mind street names actually makes one curious about such “postal / conveniences,” and reminds readers that the main

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artery in Notting Hill, on which the carnival procession passes, is Portobello Road, which is itself related to the colonial history of the Caribbean basin, since the road was named after the local Porto Bello farm that was called thus on the occasion of the 1739 British capture from Spain of Porto Bello, in Panama.15 In other words, the pretense that a street name is just a postal convenience actually brings to the fore a historical fact that partakes of a background which, in turn, relates the Caribbean to Britain, and corresponds to the tropical conditioning of the existence of such events as the Notting Hill carnival. Hence, it is as important to mind “street names” as to beware of that “island in the road,” which actually designates three things, simultaneously: (1) a traffic island on which a dancer may trip; (2) a troop of dancers on Portobello road representing a Caribbean island, yet melting into other islands’ choreographic bands, as the above-described carnivalesque and physical continuity suggests; (3) an allegoric description of the presence of Caribbean islanders on British soil as an integral constituent of the cross-cultural identity of Britain. “Tripping” on a traffic island in Britain is a hypomnesic metaphor for the cross-tropical “trip” that integrated Caribbean “islands” with Britain, a tropicality then minded and reminded by the poetic persona in the poem’s final rehearsal. Thus, Harris’ idea of infinite rehearsal, as a literary device, has influenced D’Aguiar’s writing in its conception of time and in its technicality, enriching his verse’s poetic and philosophical depth as a tropical construct that always implies returns to the past through history, intertextual revision, and repetition, and induces one to reflect upon the nature of time and presence, past and future. Infinite rehearsal, then, also has an impact on memory, and (hence,) on D’Aguiar’s representations of dreams. 3

Recurrent Dreams & Nightmares

In On Dreams, Freud clearly identifies dreams as altered memories of consciously lived experiences, insofar as a “dream is far shorter than the thoughts which [he] hold[s] it replaces,” and “analysis discovered that the dream was provoked by an unimportant occurrence the evening before the dream” (Freud 1899, 7, emphasis mine). Freud, in the paragraph preceding this quotation, also italicizes his definition of a dream as a “substitution.” He further explains that what the dream “replaces,” in condensed form, is a past event, from “the evening before.” In this sense, if a dream is a substitution, or replacement, by way of which one thing is translated into an equivalent other, then a dream 15

Www.portobellorroad.co.uk/history/ (July 27th 2016).

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f­ unctions like a metaphor. Moreover, if, according to Freud, a dream metaphorizes a past event, it then has, like a metaphor again, a hypomnesic quality (Derrida 1978, 66). The language of dreams would thus produce unconscious, mnemonic tropes. Furthermore, and as a consequence, since dreams are repeated, yet differing pasts, their function is analogous to (infinite) rehearsal, all the more so since dreams can be recurrent, and operate as successive variations over a specific theme. Fred D’Aguiar also includes dreams within his discussion of Harris’ principle of infinite rehearsal: “For Harris, each return to a memory, image, or dream yields new insights, and each time the viewer or thinker participates in the recall or act of gazing — from a necessarily partial because particular viewpoint — that person changes a little” (D’Aguiar 2009a). In this sense, it is, then, not accidental to find that both Harris and D’Aguiar apply literary techniques that are evocative of infinite rehearsal to the description of dreams and nightmares, and endow such phenomena with memorial value, as the following pages show. 3.1 Dream Descriptions This correlation of dreams and infinite rehearsal is suggested, for instance, in the title of D’Aguiar’s poem “Guyana Dreaming Wilson Harris” (D’Aguiar 2009, 44–5). The poem is made up of five free-verse octaves in which, as the title indicates, a personified Guyana apparently dreams of Wilson Harris or dreams him into being. However, as the poem unfolds, the distinction between dreamer and dream becomes porous, and allows for the formulation of mutually enriching metaphors that mirror and invert one another, and affect memory. Here is the poem’s first stanza: An explorer, he deposited me in his skull, folded, tucked me away at the back part, deep in a closet or bottom drawer in a chest full of such drawers. I felt sure he buried me just to forget me. Occasionally, light flicked my way, or he’s mind’s eye brushed past me. Most times I lay surrounded by more useful things he had more time for. The “explorer” is, of course, Wilson Harris who, as explained above, was a land surveyor before he became a writer. The poetic persona, speaking in the first person, is, presumably, the title’s personified Guyana. And what Guyana dreams is, apparently, Harris’ consigning Guyana to the back of his mind, as if it were a notion he wished to repress deep into a chest of drawers that stands as a

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metaphor for Harris’ brains and the ideas they contain. The dreaming c­ ountry deduces from such a behavior that it is willfully, if partly – for occasionally, “his mind’s eye brushed past [Guyana]” (44) – being dismissed into oblivion by Harris. As a result, “Most times [Guyana] lay[s] surrounded by more / ­useful things [Harris] had more time for” (44). These lines accentuate the closure of the poem’s first stanza through rhyme, and their progression from “time” to “more” and back from “more” to “time” create a mirror effect that also enriches meaning because, through such symmetry, one may infer that the designation of things as “useful” is subjective, in that it translates one’s choice of dedicating “more time” to the said things. Finally, Guyana’s sense of being forgotten by Harris is evocative of the fact that, in 1959, the Guyanese author left his country for England, where he spent the rest of his life. In this sense, the presentation of “Guyana Dreaming Wilson Harris” then consists in a re-presentation (represented as such, that is, as a dream), of a biographical fact about Harris. In other words, biographical data permeates an imagined and imaginative poem in the same way as memory feeds into dreams, and the two phenomena are presented syncretically in D’Aguiar’s poem, where recurrence is, then, already palpable. In the poem’s second stanza, Guyana explains that in its dream of being forgotten by Wilson Harris, it tries to get Harris to dream of it, thus enclosing a dream within a dream that is its inversion, a mirror-like recurrence that also reinforces the sense of mise en abyme the poem conveys: I almost gave up reasoning why I came up short in his world, set aside for the time being for the right time, but for now in my night time waiting for the ripe time to make my entrance. Something to do with his sense of himself as casting shadows, instead of living under them, made him remember me in his prison; or else he dreamed me while he dozed in his lover. d’aguiar 2009, 44

The first four lines of the stanza show recurrent patterns that are, again, evocative of infinite rehearsal. For instance, the preposition “for” is repeated four times with an alternation of temporal and causal significations, all related to four other occurrences of “time,” which progressively designate a nightly moment when Guyana, in its dream, will supposedly manage to enter Harris’ world. In the remainder of the stanza, Guyana does come back to Harris’ mind, either as a ghostly shadow – the presentation of which is revised in “Vulture’s Theory of Perpetual Return” – or as a dream, both of which fulfill the h ­ ypomnesic function of making Harris “remember” Guyana, of making Guyana recur in his mind.

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However, and in spite of Guyana’s intention, the country has no direct a­ gency in its being reminded to Harris, but does not “mind,” as long as, one way or the other, it is being remembered: “Both suited me, twin reminders of him in two / minds about everything. He made me his ensign” (44). The mention of “two reminders of him,” is unsettling at first, because the reminders (the shadow and the dream) are supposed to be reminders of Guyana for Harris. Yet, the inversion progressively makes sense in the text’s poetics of reversal, and retrospectively so, thanks to the suggested reversibility of the casting of shadows expressed in the second stanza, and because of the mirror effect of Guyana dreaming of Harris dreaming Guyana. Harris and Guyana are, here, implicitly being equated as reflections, “ensigns” of one another, suggesting that if Harris no longer lives in Guyana, a dream-like Guyana leaves through him as the landscape that provided him with so strong a poetics (of infinite rehearsal) that it granted him with a lifelong career as one of Guyana’s most prolific novelists. The mirror effect that operates between Guyana and Harris becomes so strong in the poem that, by the end of the fourth octave, Guyana “remind[s Harris] that [it] was the dream and he / The dreamer (or the other way round, or not)” (44). The tension being felt, resulting from the progressive blurring of boundaries that are supposed to allow readers to distinguish who is (dreaming) who as Guyana dreams of Harris dreaming Guyana, is then progressively resolved into the poem’s closure, in which Harris “dreamed [­Guyana] up and put [Guyana] away then [Guyana] made / [its] entrance; his exit; [their] contiguous worlds” (45). To paraphrase Derrida (1982, 13), the poem represents the becoming-dream of space and the becoming-space of dream into a “contiguous world” that concentrates into the decomposable presence (in the form of a poem) of a fractal image of mirroring symmetries: the resolution of the poem is, thus, infinite rehearsal itself. Another, earlier D’Aguiar poem has recourse to dream imagery to refer to a specific historical past, in a way that is comparable to “Guyana Dreaming ­Wilson Harris” and its allusions to biographical data on Harris’ past. That poem is “Flying to Nowhere” (D’Aguiar 1993, 19), and begins as follows: A four-seater airplane I’m in drops low over the Thames Barrier, moved to some jungle-type setting, by which I mean transplanted as places tend to be in dreams. Jungle or not there’s a cathedral – don’t ask how – in the middle of it, guarded by an army you’d be foolish to meddle with; […]. d’aguiar 1993, 19

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The first stanza compares the setting to the type of scenery one may see in dreams, with places transplanted to other lands. Moreover, these translations operated by dreams are analogous to metaphoric transfers again in the poem, where place is both literally and tropically evoked: the “Thames” is openly named, while the “jungle-type” setting is evocative of a tropical rainforest. In the same way as the Western river is “transplanted” into the sylvan landscape, so too is a cathedral imported into the scene. Although the poetic persona intervenes in a dismissive, neglectful way, through the second stanza’s “Jungle or not” and “don’t ask how,” the evocation of the jungle, in correlation to Britain and Christianity, are condensed into a tropicality that is evocative of colonialism (the “how” readers are supposed not to ask, in the same way as they are told, in “Notting Hill” (41), not to “mind” significant colonial street names), all the more so since it is the Thames and the church that come to the jungle, and not the jungle that comes to them. The description of an army in the jungle is indicative of a possible conflict taking place in the southern hemisphere. Moreover, considering the facts that D’Aguiar’s Guyanese background transpires through many of his works, and that Guyana, from the eighteenth century on to the late twentieth century, has repeatedly engaged in border disputes with Venezuela concerning the possession of the rainforest interior, one may infer that the setting is Guyanese.16 The poem’s penultimate stanza confirms the Caribbean setting, for, when the plane’s passengers land, they go into a shop “where the one language is a French patois,” that is, créole, and where “the currency is English pounds” (19). Hence, the poem unfolds in a Caribbean and colonial (war) context. Yet, and then, quite unexpectedly, by the end of the poem, the poetic persona compares the setting to a haven I’ll call for argument’s sake heaven, since it is a paradise in the sense that we’re all of us dead; we don’t know or we know and don’t care; both feel the same. (19) The passage does not cast paradise in the usual, meliorative light, but describes it as a colony of the dead, so to speak, which suggests that, in addition to the belief, repeated here, that life in paradise is a posthumous, second life, what recurs with lives is history: here, that of a colonial past. As a consequence, what makes heaven pleasant in the poem is not its setting, but the indifference of its dead 16

Again, Guyana is the setting for collections such as Mama Dot and Airy Hall. Moreover, Dear Future, Bethany Bettany, and Children of Paradise (D’Aguiar 2014, 321), three out the six novels D’Aguiar wrote, narrate stories taking place in Guyana, and all three mention the border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, as shown in Chapters 4 and 5.

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dwellers, which is reminiscent in turn of the recurrent “ah don’t give a damn / ah done dead already” chorus from “Zombie Jamboree” (D’Aguiar 1989, 31). Such an impression is also evocative, again, of the fact that dreams or metaphors may hypomnesically retrace historical pasts, albeit in varying forms, as with infinite rehearsal. Yet, if history is repeated, or repeats itself under different forms through rehearsal and/or cyclical time, then it implicitly suggests, as in D’Aguiar’s poem, that somber historical events may recur in different guises into the present, and be represented as such in verse to warn about their insidious legacies. This, D’Aguiar does in “Flying to Nowhere,” but also through the representation of nightmarish reminiscence. 3.2 Nightmarish Depths One striking instance of a bad dream/memory appears in D’Aguiar’s “Elegy,” in relation to the Virginia Tech shooting (D’Aguiar 2009, 58), when the poetic voice describes, through recurrence, a nightmare that turns out to be deeply hypomnesic: I sleep on a mattress stuffed with bones, Human bones; My head on a pillow filled with hair, Human hair A bed made with black and white sheets of skin, Human skin; Floats down a river of soup-like blood, Human blood; Flows into a sea of dead flesh, Human flesh; Sinks to the bottom of that soulless sea, Human sound. Settles there with me grafted to it, Human dark. d’aguiar 2009, 58

In addition to the recurrence of rhymes consisting in the repetition of the same words, until the pattern breaks in the excerpt’s two final couplets, repetition is emphasized through the incantatory “Human” anaphora. The nightmarish context is made clear from the first line on, as the grieving poet says he is sleeping “on a mattress stuffed with bones” (58). The image of skeletons f­illing an entire mattress is evocative of the alarming number of defunct people the poet has on his mind, and these people presumably are the Virginia dead. However, in a first reversal, the “black and white sheets of skin,” unlike what occurred

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at Virginia Tech, float “down a river” and “into a sea of dead flesh.” In a Virginian context, the river being described may be the James River which, again, is the waterway through which thousands of slaves were dispatched into North America, and which flows into the Atlantic and the tropical historical past it conveys. Hence the dream operates a confluence, within the poet’s mind, between the victims of slavery and those who died at Virginia Tech, and accumulates, rehearses death into overwhelmingly varying proportions within the poet’s nightmare, the final phase of which is presented through lines that no longer rhyme, and fall apart at the seams to actually “graft,” or stitch the poet’s skin together with that of those who died, subsequently making him feel their presence in his flesh as much as in the “human dark” of his infinitely rehearsing soul, correlating dark thoughts and sensations in an evocation of his “black bile,” or melancholy (Aristotle 83), an emotion that deeply coheres with the pervading mourning atmosphere. Thus, in order to corroborate the cyclical nature of time that is implicitly conveyed, as seen in Chapter 2, by the hypomnesic qualities of tidalectics and metaphor, Fred D’Aguiar relies on Harris’ principle of infinite rehearsal, which he evokes not only through the recurrence of waves, but also thanks to various literary devices and chronot(r)opes.17 From a technical standpoint, rhyme and anaphora are central to the evocation of such recurrence. Intertextuality complements these techniques by allowing for the rewriting of tropes from other works, and by inscribing D’Aguiar, again, within the Caribbean literary cannon to which Brathwaite, Harris and Walcott also belong, and within a tropical philosophical framework relating him and Harris to thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche and Derrida. The contiguous tropical worlds of Harris and D’Aguiar are actually constructed through these philosophical and literary connections, since it is through a Freudian conception of dreams and a Derridean vision of metaphor as (tidaletic) retreat that infinite rehearsal can, more often than not, be represented into poetry, be it through remembering (D’Aguiar 1993, 35) or the imaginative spiral of a bird’s eye view (2013, 54).

17

Harris actually openly relates infinite rehearsal to wave patterns by capitalizing on the theatrical sense of rehearsal. For instance, in the novel, the character called Aunt Miriam asks Alice “to come on stage on the crest of a wave – the name I have given to our little theatre.’ (Aunt Miriam ran a school of drama (called The Crest of a Wave) in her home beside the sounding sea. It was but half a mile or so away from Alice’s house in which many rehearsals were conducted)” (Harris 1987, 28). In the same novel, Harris also describes the sea as the “theatre of remembered/forgotten history” (Harris 1987, 81–2), the place of retreat, hauntology, and (transatlantic) (an)amnesia.

Partial Conclusion: Resisting Entropy We have always known that it is impossible to form an idea of the human totality, for men have an inner life closed to him who does, however, grasps the comprehensive movements of human groups. levinas, 58

∵ Tropicality is thus present throughout Fred D’Aguiar’s verse corpus and well into some of his prose work, tropically relating him, in the process, to a multitude of other authors, be they from the West, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. In D’Aguiar’s works, tropicality takes on different guises, ranging from the revision of tropes from musical and literary canons into versions of interracial love, to the poet’s reliance on intertextuality, dreams, tidalectics, metaphorical retreat, and infinite rehearsal as means to hypomnesically deconstruct white mythologies by re-presenting language and cultures as fundamentally decomposable and cross-cultural and, as a consequence, by invalidating any totalizing and illusory conception of culture, race or nation as hermetic, homogenous and unified. In order to enrich his verse, the poet also constantly revises his previous works, and subsequently turns his poetry into a sophisticated network of images that never fail to be pregnant with philosophical and historical depth, and that help to describe and remember the (diasporic) pasts of populations and cultures through their displacements around the world, with reference to historical facts such as, for instance, the transatlantic slave trade and colonization. But more than the epistemology, or the presumably infinite list of ways in which tropicality can materialize, one might wish to question this notion’s ethics and its limits of use (Levinas 33): for one thing, despite its inclusiveness, tropicality might seem to address intercultural relations that imply a crossing of the tropics only, and therefore not be appropriate as a means of dealing with all kinds of cross-cultural tropes. Yet, it must actually be clarified that, from scientific and poetic standpoints, tropicality actually can designate linguistic and cross-cultural tropes predicated on the crossing of diverse longitudes and latitudes that are not necessarily restricted to the conventional, topographic tropics. As explained above, the tropics are tropes endowed with both physical and metaphorical mutability: they were named Capricorn and Cancer because the sun respectively shone on them from the constellations bearing the same © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004394070_007

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names, two thousand years ago, and these names originally belonged to the texts of Greek and Roman mythology – cultural tropes from outside the tropics. However, the earth’s axis of rotation has been changing, and the sun, at the two solstices, no longer shines on the tropics from the Cancer and Capricorn constellations: the tropics, like tropes, are in permanent translation, and they are constantly being crossed by other tropical or metaphorical movements. The tropics are always-already elsewhere, and their displacement is perpetual. To this extent, all metaphorical – and, hence, linguistic and cultural  – ­exchange that entails a physical movement on the surface of the earth could partake of tropicality. And in this sense, the linguistic, tropical, or metaphoric transgressions of latitudes, longitudes, and national borders,1 be they parallel, transverse, or related in any geometrical way to the axes drawn by the poles or the Equator, would partake of a fully global and inclusive – rather than total, hermetic, and universal – understanding of tropicality. But has the problem really been solved or has it, through metaphor again, been displaced? For if tropicality generalizes itself as a form of cultural ­exchange on the finite space constituted by the earth’s surface, then, ­theoretically speaking, the day will come when each and every possible exchange has taken place, subsequently leading to global cultural uniformity or homogeneity: that will be the death of diversity, the cultural entropy that Claude Lévi-Strauss feared (Lévi-Strauss 2001, 66) until he, like Édouard Glissant for that matter, figured out ways in which the world could actually resist the threat of cultural entropy. On the one hand, in Race and History, Lévi-Strauss explains that when intercultural diversity shrinks, intra-cultural diversity grows, for instance because of social inequities. On the other hand, he indicates that inter-cultural diversity and cross-cultural relation are not subsequently lost, but keep recreating themselves through all types of transnational coalitions, be they resulting from good will or from coercion. Cross-cultural exchange generates itself through the enlargement of international coalitions of all kinds, and does not stagnate thanks to the new cultural forms that spring out of opposite social claims originating from within each group forming a part of these coalitions. In sum, the “intro-versions” of individual communities grant, to some extent, the perennial of cultural diversity and, as a consequence, the perpetuation of an indefinite 1 These topographical features do not, however, translate an assumption that every culture is exclusively related to a specific territory or nation: the decomposable nature of origin, by definition, indicates the irreducible diffraction of culture into the cross-cultural and a diversity of places. Moreover, in the case of African-diasporic culture, which is central to this book, the territory that gathers the diaspora into a sense of shared cultural identity (lost Africa) is, arguably, not retrievable in concrete terms, but through the imagination, and is, hence, as an “imagined homeland” or “identificatory myth,” intrinsically metaphorical (Boutros 13, 25): an Africa born out of tropical (physical and metaphoric) translation.

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number of combinations in which diverse and perpetually renewed cultural contents can be shared between different populations. Then, “a world civilization could, in fact, represent no more than a world-wide coalition of cultures, each of which would preserve its own originality” – “originality” being decomposable and renewable as a singularity generative of diverse identities (LéviStrauss 1952, 45). This idea of “originality” is also implicit in Glissant’s notion of “opacity” as the “subsistence within an irreducible singularity”, “the thing that would bring us together forever and make us permanently distinctive” as individuals (Glissant 1997, 190, 194). The necessity for cultures to p ­ reserve their originality entails, for Glissant, the individual’s right to opacity, that is, the unalienable singularity of every person, the expression and nature of which cannot, be lost to Otherness: opacity is what Levinas quite aptly calls the face (Levinas 42). Thus, tropicality is not bound to become entropic and total, as long as movements of introversion and extroversion between opacity and Otherness are preserved (Lévi-Strauss 1952, 95). And this precisely is what tropicality preserves, it is its secret. As Frantz Fanon shows in The Wretched of the Earth, the cultural triumph of a community can operate through the revelation of one’s secrets in order to secrete one’s own light (Fanon 50). In other words, introversion as secrecy actually is what secretes the cultural diversity that allows for the perennial of cross-cultural relation. This tropical secrecy (introversion/ secret and extroversion/secretion) is palpable in Brathwaite’s uses of the word calypso which, as suggested above, designates the intrinsically tropical identity of the Caribbean in his poetry. In Brathwaite’s “Calypso” poem (Brathwaite 48–50), calypso as a trope of the cultural identity of the Caribbean is being danced by people who are trying to keep a member of their community from leaving their island, but they fail and the man migrates towards the Western world in order to find an occupation there. These people are, thus, like the nymph Calypso in the Odyssey, since they try to keep their Afro-Caribbean ­Odysseus on their island, until they are forced to let him go, as in Homer’s tale: ­introversion on a trope of Caribbean identity – calypso dancing – induces extroversion towards another place on earth, through the European intertext this word also contains. The attempt at turning in on a referent of regional cultural identity entails the discovery of the multiplicity of its geographical and textual references that tropically open the referent to the world: in “Calypso,” one leaves the literal as one leaves the littoral (Derrida 1978, 66). To put it in a relative, if not Saussurian, perspective, there is no Calypso without Phaeacians,2 2 The Greek etymology of “calypso” designates, again, dissimulation, whereas that of “Phaeacia” refers to light, the color gray, and the island Odysseus will go to after leaving Calypso in Homer’s Odyssey.

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no shade without light, no veil without unveiling, no secret without secretion, no metaphor without re-treat (Ibid., 66), no de-territorialization without reterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 6), and it is this secret of introversion as a condition of extroversion that conciliates here and elsewhere into what, from now on, we will singularly3 call tropicality, without altering the nature of here and elsewhere into an undifferentiated totality.

3 The manner, the twist that is given to something, and hence, its singularity, is “another” etymological “sense” of trope.

Part 2 Orphanhood: Fred D’Aguiar’s Novels

∵

Introduction to Part 2 I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper “history,” for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men, your fellowman and tribesman not moved or hovering with hesitation about your common race any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you, inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange thanks, I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift. walcott 1974, 64

∵ Considering that time and origin have been central to the discussion contained in the first part of this book, the issue that now cries out is, of course, genealogy. Etymology shows that a genealogy is a line of descent or a pedigree, the “tracing of a family” or of one’s bloodlines. It is a logos, discourse, or language on the genus. Genus refers to category, class, family and, by extension, to race, stock, kind, offspring, descent, and birth or origin as characteristics through which classification or characterization may operate. That birth and origin are pivotal events of genealogy is clarified by the fact that genus also relates to Greek, Roman, and pre-Indo-European roots referring to producing, procreating, becoming, and happening. The genus is thus inseparable from the germ, the embryo, the seed and the biological nature of filiation. Genealogy is, hence, the coupling of language and philogeny, and as such, it is dependent on culture (its linguistic expression) as much as on nature: to cite Michel Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” genealogy does not only designate the evolution

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of species (Foucault 81); it is an “analysis of descent,” an “articulation of body and history” (83). The articulation of Foucault’s article, for that matter, also provides a mirror image of the logical progression that has been followed so far to study Fred D’Aguiar’s works. While our discussion of tropicality was initiated through a sense of the decomposable nature of origin that ultimately led to Nietzsche, time, and now genealogy, Foucault, in his essay, begins with Nietzsche and ­genealogy to criticize the metaphysical assumptions of single origin and “traditional history,” that is, history as a linear, unbroken, and teleological progression (75–80). Foucault then distinguishes “traditional history” from “effective history” – as a translation of Nietzsche’s wirkliche Historie1 (86) – by describing “effective history” as a genealogy that may include the discontinuous and the non-teleological in history, the breaks on the time-line that function as decomposable original moments of emergence for new genealogical/effective-­ historical phases. These breaks, Foucault calls “accidents” (81), and they correspond to a definition of emergence as a play of contradicting forces, as the struggle for domination in which violence and law have their part (84–5). ­Effective history, according to Foucault, functions as a “countermemory” (93) that foregrounds the accidental nature of events rather than their inscription within the linear progression of the “memory” of “traditional history,” the institutionalized historiography of official records which, as suggested above, D’Aguiar has reasons to doubt, considering the relative erasure of the history of slavery from Western archives (Baucom 2005, 11). But if the “accident” is the irruption of a contradicting force, where does this force come from? What is its geneaology? Foucault explains, almost in Darwinian terms, that “species,” groups, people fight against one another, until one species takes over. Then, within that “victorious species,” conflicting interests create inner differences that provide newly opposite forces (84).2 In other words, this interplay of exogenous and endogenous forces corresponds to our definition, formulated above in cultural terms, of the dialectic of introversion and extroversion. Hence, in “effective history,” in genealogy as filiation and affiliation, the “accident” is the irruption of dissent between or within groups, 1 Given the German term, we must signal here awareness of an important, although for our immediate purposes marginal, point: Historie in German (translated as “history” or histoire) is not Geschichte (also translated as “history” or histoire). Their difference is extensively explained in Jacques Derrida's study of “history,” his 1964–65 lecture course entitled Heidegger: la Question de l'Être et l'Histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2013). 2 Philogeny and filiation are hence, from that moment, complemented by culture and affiliation, confirming Foucault's argument that genealogy cannot simply be reduced to the evolution of species (Foucault 81).

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changes of allegiances, breaks with hegemonic forces. But when one breaks from one’s own homogenized species or genus, is not one orphaning oneself from one’s own genealogical inheritance? Is not the genealogical “accident” a claim to orphanhood, the decomposable origin that presents itself as parentless or unprecedented? If so, it does not sound fortuitous for Foucault to claim, without further explanation, that genealogy as “effective history” is “strictly anti-Platonic” (93). By so doing, he “orphans” himself from Platonist philosophy, probably because Plato and Socrates, again, distrusted the “accident” of writing, since the spread and dispersal of written texts away from their authors made written speech unreliable, with no paternal/authorial figure to stand on their behalf, no “traditional history” or continuous genealogies to speak of and rely upon (Plato a 63, Derrida 1972, 96; Young 2008, 10–11). In other words, Socrates and Plato rejected written texts as “parricidal orphans” that threatened traditional filiation by breaking the linear progression of the logos as oral speech proceeding sensibly from the patriarchal, authorial voice (Derrida 1972, 95–6). Hence, following Foucault’s argument, the crux of “effective history” would consist in a genealogy that is aware of the contradicting force of (parricidal) orphanhood, of the foundling that breaks filiation with the father, patriarchy, or traditional history. It is then quite stimulating, having reached such a conception of genealogy, to find that it precisely is the theme of orphanhood that appears with striking recurrence throughout Fred D’Aguiar’s six novels. In that corpus, each work presents at least one of its main characters as bereft of a father or a mother: in Bloodlines, again, the narrator and main character, Sow, is the son of Faith, a slave who died giving birth to him, and of Christy, who never meets his son. Dear Future and Bethany Bettany are novels the protagonists of which are children who live with relatives but are deprived of father and mother from their early childhood on. In Feeding the Ghosts, Mintah, the protagonist, never returns to the African parents she was severed from. The Longest Memory narrates the story of Whitechapel, the oldest slave on an American plantation who, like Mintah, had to leave his motherland and parents behind. Finally, in Fred D’Aguiar’s latest novel, Children of Paradise, which narrates the communal years leading up to the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, each child is forced into orphanhood by having to sever filial bonds – or at least pretend to do so – for the privilege of (af)filiation to a surrogate spiritual “Father” Jim Jones, who is presented as an orphan too. In that novel, even the commune ­gorilla was captured away from its mother, and no mention of its father is made. One of the “children of paradise” is the main character Trina, a fatherless six-year-old girl who often plays a flute, thinking of waterfalls and the jungle’s

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trees, making melodies pleasing to the commune people and their gorilla’s ears (D’Aguiar 2014, 96, 108, 249). Her ability to interact musically with nature is evocative of Orpheus’ musical skills, and draws attention to the fact that ­“Orpheus” and “orphan” share the same Indo-European “orbh-” root, which designates a change of allegiance, the passage from one status to another, and was derived into “orbho-,” which signifies both “fatherless” and “deprived of free status,” to give the Greek “orphos” for “deprived” and “bereft,” and “orphano,” orphan. The notion that “orbho-” means “deprived of free status” and that the Slavic word for “slave” sprung from the same root – while the name “Slav,” in a cultural crisscross, gave way to the word “slave” after Slavs vanquished by Otto the Great during the 10th century were sold into slavery – then also suggests that the correlation of orphanhood and slavery in such works as Bloodlines, The Longest Memory, and Feeding the Ghosts is not accidental. The idea of a “change of status,” in addition to being reminiscent of Orpheus’ ability to animate natural elements, also coheres with the fact that orphans such as Sow, Red Head, and Bethany Bettany undergo events that make them, respectively, immortal, clairvoyant, and able to achieve near-invisibility, and that Trina acquires her flute after her forced performance of a sham resurrection – or mockOrphic metamorphosis. But orphanhood does not only partake of characterization in D’Aguiar’s novels, since, again, and like written speech (Plato a 63, 275e), the novel either conceals its genealogy or, at least, has no clear, arborescent one (Brown 1996, 12; 1997, 7).3 If the novel was an orphan form in the 18th century, it now corresponds to a secular tradition endowed with genealogical history, although this history might be that of a perpetual breaking of allegiances, of orphaning itself, since, if a novel is to be a novel, it has, as its name indicates, to come across as unprecedented. Furthermore, that every protagonist in all of Fred D’Aguiar’s novels is, to some extent, orphaned, suggests that D’Aguiar is aware of that tradition, initiated in the 18th century with such foundlings as Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and that orphanhood is of particular interest to him, maybe as a specific device in the making of the “genus” of his prose corpus. Thus, in order to unveil the singularity of D’Aguiar’s novels, one should also find how these novels orphan themselves. 3 Tzvetan Todorov reinforces this argument in Genres in Discourse by stating that “the narrative mode is characterized by the insistent search for its own place of origin – which the novel mode effaces and conceals,” (Todorov 14, my emphasis), as its name indicates. In this perspective, a novel would constitute a logos that problematizes its own generation (genea-) in terms of orphanhood.

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Also of interest here is to note that, in his reading of Plato, and s­ ubsequently to his identification of writing as “a desire for orphanhood and parricidal ­subversion” (Derrida 1972, 77), Derrida wonders if this gift of writing, “this pharmakon,” is not “a criminal thing, a poisoned present” (77). The phrase “poisoned present” is, again, not fortuitous, for the English word “gift” (a present) derives, from the German “gift” (poison) (130–2, n. 56) and illustrates the ambiguous signification of “pharmakon” – here used to designate written speech – as both a remedy and a harmful potion (132) prepared by a pharmakos (a medicine man, magician, enchanter, poisoner, or even writer, if writing is a pharmakon) who, in spite of his potential malevolence, has qualities analogous to those of Orphic4 orphans such as Redhead or Bethany Bettany. Finally, the status of D’Aguiar’s orphan/slave characters, who are sometimes punished because of their literacy, is comparable to that of the pharmakos too, since the word, in Greek culture, also served to designate a scapegoat to whom the privileges of the city were denied (Derrida 162). But then, what kind of “drug(s)” or pharmaka would Fred D’Aguiar, who started writing at the same time as he began to train – as a pharmakos – in psychiatric nursing (D’Aguiar in Joseph-Villain & Misrahi-Barak 276),5 store in and with his novels? To which type of pharmacy or library does this corpus belong? To doctor which diction and addictions (Derrida 1991, 7)? In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida also identifies writing as a pharmakon because it is presented, in the myth of Theuth, as a remedy for memory, but rejected by the king or father of gods, Ammon, who sees it as a poison for memory insofar as it is a means of re-collection that renders the exercise of one’s memory unnecessary (­Derrida 1972, 113), and it is precisely these questions of (­historiographic) memory and remembrance that correlate orphanhood with slavery and 4 Orphism is used in its broad sense here, that is, basically the musical, the prophetic, and the supernatural. For a more thorough discussion the term and its literary history see Chapter 5. 5 With Derrida's description of writing as a pharmakon, a drug, in mind, it is intriguing to learn about this coincidence, even more so when it is to notice the proximity in which Fred D'Aguiar could use drugging and writing when he was a nurse often asked to soothe distressed black patients (the staff hypothesized that D'Aguiar's blackness instead of their whiteness might consist in a more reassuring element to these patients who, perhaps, had experienced trauma at the hands of “white authority in the despotic form of the police”): “I talked the person into a degree of calm and then drugged them into compliance. When they woke up they met the same person, me, with more meaningful talk, more of a willing and inclined ear to what they had to say (all duly noted) and more of that grueling drugs regimen.” (D'Aguiar in Joseph-Villain and Misrahi-Barak 277, emphasis mine). It is also interesting to note that, another famous anti-colonial writer-psychiatrist of African descent, Frantz Fanon, reportedly influenced Fred D'Aguiar at the time (275).

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l­iteracy and/or l­iterature in three of Fred D’Aguiar’s novels, namely, The Longest Memory, Feeding the Ghosts, and Bloodlines, as shown in Chapter 4. On the other hand, it is the presentation of orphan characters as Orphic magicians or pharmakaï that appears to predicate D’Aguiar’s other novels, and also, to some extent, Bloodlines. Such an articulation of orphanhood in D’Aguiar’s works shows, as Chapter 5 demonstrates, that the author’s apparently Platonist view on the subject is supplemented by an Orphic input that, contrarily to Socrates and his scribe, grants the possibility of ascending presumably broken genealogical trees through writing and imagination as reliable, poetic gateways to the past.

Chapter 4

Literate Slaves Sometimes I feel like a motherless child A long way from home. Traditional Negro Spiritual, 19th century

∵ A strong relationship has established itself, through history and signification, between literacy and slavery, and plays a major role in three out of the six novels Fred D’Aguiar has written so far. In fact, access to literacy for slaves was forbidden by plantation owners and feared by most slaves because of the threat of severe punishment if they were caught reading or writing. However, and as slave narratives testify, some slaves used literacy as a means to prove their humanity and, subsequently, their being unfit as slaves. Such reliance on literacy as a source of freedom was, of course, what slavers feared. Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains: “After Descartes, reason was privileged, or valorized, over all other human characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason. Blacks were reasonable, and hence ‘men,’ if – and only if – they demonstrated mastery of ‘the arts and sciences,’ the eighteenth century’s formula for writing” (Gates 129). If people of African descent could write, they could no longer be relegated to “a lower rung on the Great Chain of Being” (130), to a debased genus that slavers would use to legitimize their trade. The hypocrisy of slavers transpires here, since they knew slaves could write, but prevented them from doing so in order to keep on pretending that people of African descent had no “reason,” and therefore no claim to freedom.1 Such a bond between writing and slavery is, again, etymologically and philosophically reinforced by the notion of orphanhood (Plato 63, Derrida 1972, 95) which, as a node between literacy and enslavement, constitutes the core of 1 Writing, as a means both of liberation and enslavement may, here again, be viewed as a pharmakon, or poisoned present. The attempt at acquiring liberty through literacy is also interesting in that it seems to have lived on until the Harlem Renaissance (and later, the Black Arts movement), during which black intellectuals – such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, or W.E.B Du Bois – hoped to obtain “civil rights by copy rights” (Lewis xvi): recognition from the white majority thanks to the creation of cultured art and criticism.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004394070_009

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Fred D’Aguiar’s interest in The Longest Memory, Bloodlines, and Feeding the Ghosts. In The Longest Memory, literacy is an indirect cause of the whipping to death of Whitechapel’s son in the novel’s first chapters. In Bloodlines, Sow, the orphan-narrator, is taught how to read and write by Mrs. Mason, his owner’s wife. Finally, Mintah’s literacy allows her to register, in a book, what happened on the Zong, and this text plays a climactic role during the trial opposing the ship’s crew and investors to their insurers at the end of the novel. Mintah’s journal is also important as a testimony to the history of the Zong and of the transatlantic slave trade. Within D’Aguiar’s work, comparing the relation Whitechapel’s son has to writing to Mintah’s use of writing as a means of obtaining justice and psychological relief also is indicative of the ways in which writing can work as a pharmakon, as a drug that may both heal and hurt, since it causes Whitechapel’s son to be beaten, while it partly unburdens Mintah as she preserves the memory of slaves who died in the Atlantic. The present chapter explores these interconnections between orphanhood, slavery, writing, and medicine in each of the three above-mentioned novels. Abigail Ward studies these same three novels by D’Aguiar, also relying on “Plato’s Pharmacy” as a theoretical background (Ward 131–79).2 However, she chooses not to provide a sustained “pharmaceutic,” Derridean reading of the novels, and quickly veers from such considerations into questions of counter- and post-memory derived from Holocaust theory, and into gender issues, through her macro-readings of the novels in question. Thus while this chapter’s formal organization is, considering this book’s overall Derridean framework, unavoidably analogous to that of Ward’s chapter on D’Aguiar (Ward 131–79), it maintains Derridean exploration and micro-readings from beginning to end, and enters into a dialogic relation with Ward’s work. 1

The Longest Memory

In The Longest Memory, the story of two successive generations of people on a Virginian plantation is told by some of its members – such as slaves, overseers, and the latest master – who give their respective names to the chapters they narrate. The oldest man on the plantation, the slave Whitechapel, is the only one to have lived through both generations, and he therefore has “the longest memory” on the plantation, which explains his status as the main, and almost eponymous, character, if the novel’s title is accepted as a metonymy for him: here, we already mark a difference with Ward, who does not interpret 2 Abigail Ward, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery (2011).

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the title as a designation of Whitechapel, but as a name primarily given to a written text that is, following Derrida’s reading of the Phaedrus, a title given to something that is “not the memory of a moment of slavery but an imagined remembering of, or repeating monument to, the slave past” (Ward 137). In other words, Ward says that “The Longest Memory” is the name of a text that is, by definition, hypomnesic (a re-collection, or remembering), and hence not an actual anamnesis, a “living memory” of slavery. As a consequence, she argues that the novel’s being titled “The Longest Memory” instead of “The Longest Remembering” (149) amounts to its being “mis-named” (137). It must be kept in mind, however, that Whitechapel, as a protagonist, is illiterate and suspicious of writing, in addition to being the oldest slave on the plantation. Moreover, he is the only one to keep an actual living memory, or anamnesis, of Africa, where he lived as a child (D’Aguiar 1994, 122–25). Thus, if the novel, as a text, is a fictional and hypomnesic monument, its title nevertheless aptly alludes to its main character’s anamnesis as the longest. Ward perceives that Whitechapel epitomizes a living memory, albeit fictional or prototypical, that is to die with him unless it is consigned in writing, but apparently fails to associate this idea with what the novel’s title actually designates (Ward 141). The novel begins with the whipping to death of Whitechapel’s runaway son, Chapel, while the rest of the book, as a sort of analepsis, progressively reveals why Chapel fled from the plantation, namely he had fallen in love with Lydia, the master’s daughter, who secretly taught him how to read and write. Forbidden to love one another on the plantation, they decide to escape to the North, where mixed-race couples are said to live. However, Chapel gets caught soon after his escape, and is executed by the overseer, Sanders Jr. who, as readers later learn, turns out to be Chapel’s half-brother. None of the two brothers know they are kin because, when Sanders Jr. was a child, and soon after his mother died (thus making him a maternal orphan), his father and predecessor as an overseer, Sanders Sr., raped Whitechapel’s wife, a slave named Cook (after her function), who got pregnant with Chapel as a result (D’Aguiar 1994, 45–6). The slave-master, Mr. Whitechapel, only fines Sanders Sr. for the rape, and Whitechapel accepts to raise Cook and Sanders Sr.’s baby as his son, while every person involved agrees to keep Sanders Jr.’s genealogy secret. Only after the day of the whipping does Sanders Jr. learn, from Mr. Whitechapel, that he has committed fratricide (33). The narrative ends with a chapter entitled “Forgetting,” consisting in Whitechapel’s internal monologue just before his death. Throughout this intricate plot, the themes of secrecy, memory, literacy, slavery, and orphanhood intertwine and give the novel its singular texture, made up of genealogical substitutions, teaching scenes, and dreams to forget that, as will be shown below, all relate to the ambivalence of the pharmakon.

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1.1 Experiencing Genealogical Substitutions Miscegenation is thus the germ of a story that leads to a tragic and unwitting fratricide. In addition to the fact that the killing might not have taken place if Sanders Sr. had told Junior about Chapel, the tragedy of the whipping is exacerbated when readers understand, retrospectively, that if Whitechapel, who knew a fratricide was being perpetrated, had not been restrained from interfering and, maybe, revealing the secret of Chapel’s filiation, Chapel might have been spared. But although Whitechapel feels responsible for the beating – and is held as such by slave relatives – because he denounced his son to the master, Mr. Whitechapel (for reasons given below), the whipping actually occurs because of an intricate pattern of flawed or failed substitutions. First, on the day Chapel gets caught, Mr. Whitechapel has to leave the plantation, and asks his deputy to rule in his absence, after telling him that Chapel’s punishment should not occur before his return. However, when Chapel is brought back to the plantation, the deputy has gone, without permission, to visit his wife (19), and Sanders Jr., Chapel’s unwitting half-brother and overseer, is the only representative of the master’s sway on the plantation. As the only repository of authority left in the absence of master and deputy, and being angry for having spent his day chasing Chapel down, Sanders Jr. disobeys Mr. Whitechapel and whips the fugitive to death. Hence, ineffective (master and deputy) and illegitimate (master and overseer) substitutions play a role in the killing. Furthermore, knowing that Sanders Jr. is an orphan on the day of the beating – both his parents are dead – and following the argument that an orphan is independent from paternal authority (Plato 63; Derrida 1972, 95), it was predictable, metaphorically speaking (that is, speaking in terms of substitution again), that Sanders Jr. would disobey the patriarchal figure of the slave master, Mr. Whitechapel. Conversely, considering the analogy that etymology, again, suggests between slave and orphan, it was logical for Chapel, as a slave, to disobey the patriarch as well by running away, all the more so since Chapel, although he does not fully know it, is an actual orphan too, since his biological father, Sanders Sr., is dead, and since his mother, Cook, has actually died on the day of the beating. Never does Chapel learn, in fact, that Whitechapel is not his biological father, but rather his foster one: another substitute. And although Whitechapel tries to interfere with the whipping, he, as a surrogate father and orphan/slave, is deprived of all authority over his adopted son’s fate on the plantation (Derrida 1972, 95): during the beating, Chapel “stop[s] screaming ‘father’ because he [can] see [Whitechapel is] being held down and [is] no good to him” (D’Aguiar 1994, 6, italics mine). In addition, Whitechapel’s interference with the whipping is ineffective because although Mr. Whitechapel has ordered – which amounts to a law on his plantation – that the punishment be put off until his

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return, he is absent, and Whitechapel, as a slave-orphan, needs Mr. Whitechapel, the master-patriarch, to “defend and help” him to give weight to his voice (Derrida 1972, 95).3 Finally, even the master-patriarch’s orders are without power and will not be “carried out to the letter” (19) in his absence, since he is not present to give authority to his words and since writing the orders down might have been inefficient as a substitute for his voice, considering, again, that writing is yet another subversive pharmakon, a parricidal orphan with no “father” to control it (Plato 63, Derrida 1972, 95).4 After the whipping, when Whitechapel attends the (hopeless) nursing of Chapel (by slaves acting as pharmakaï), the latter gives the cold shoulder to Whitechapel who explains: “He turned his body and face away from me and I knew he must have heard I’d given him up” (21, emphasis mine). The use of the verb give up is intentional and consists in an equivocal statement here, since it puts abandon and denunciation of one’s son on the same plane, but with a degree of dark irony, for Whitechapel did not really “give up” Chapel but, rather, adopted him. Nevertheless, Whitechapel’s slave relatives and friends hold him responsible for Chapel’s death. He divulged his son’s possible whereabouts to Mr. Whitechapel because he counted on his master’s leniency, so that Chapel might not be killed but disciplined into remaining on the plantation, where Whitechapel believes life to be safer than in the rest of America, which he does not know. Whitechapel, as the oldest slave on the plantation, also admits that he feels guilty for having “killed [his] son because [he] wanted him next to [him] when [he] died” (26) and for not having held his promise to his dying wife that he “would not be long” to join her, sending his “son in [his] place less than a full day later” (11) instead: every substitution, be it voluntary or not, apparently amounts to failure in the novel.

3 Abigail Ward explains that Whitechapel and his son, designated by the diminutive “Chapel,” bear the same name as that of Mister Whitechapel, “because of the practice of naming slaves after their owners” (Ward 139). Conversely, considering the novel’s patterns of substitution, and knowing that “slave” and “orphan” share the same “orbh-” root, which designates a “change of allegiance,” these names corroborate Whitechapel and Chapel’s forced break, as slaves, from father to the patriarchal figure of the slave-master. Antonio Benitez-Rojo reads these nominal substitutions in The Longest Memory in particular, and in the Caribbean in general, as a facet of creolization (Benitez-Rojo 1998, 167–70). 4 In this regard, Ward writes that “The punishment administered to [Chapel] upon his recapture can be seen as an attempt at reminding him of his place as a slave” (Ward 150, italics mine). In sum, she suggests that Chapel’s amnesia, his “forgetting” he is a slave so to speak, is corrected by the master’s substitute with a surrogate for anamnesis, that is, a hypomnesic text, or reminder consisting in the whipping wounds that will remain, as scars, to remind Chapel of his position. Derrida also relates writing to scars through etymology, in Circumfession (Derrida 1989, 91–2, 192–93).

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Whitechapel’s wife, Cook, is the victim of a horrid attempt at substitution too when, after the atrocious deed of raping her twice, Sanders Sr. has the nerve to pretend to be rewarding Cook by offering her one of his defunct wife’s dresses. Cook rebukes him by saying she refuses to “step into a dead woman’s shoes” (46). She, however, becomes Whitechapel’s second wife and bears him daughters, but never a son. This absence of male progeny, in addition to the fact that Whitechapel’s relatives accuse him of having “killed his only son” (126), Chapel, is reminiscent of the Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah, with Chapel as an Isaac no angel saved from the altar. Whitechapel, along with the master, would then be, as Abraham, another patriarchal figure. In sum, although Whitechapel has also reared thirteen children, a number that echoes the Last Supper, and in spite of his being compared, after Chapel’s death, to the traitorous Judas (8) by his slave relatives, Whitechapel is mostly comparable to an Old Testament, Abraham-like figure, all the more so since Whitechapel’s relatives do not try to prevent him from informing Mr. Whitechapel of Chapel’s whereabouts, but part “like the sea for him” (127) as if he were Moses (another, mythical orphan), and do not think twice before being reproachful to him afterward. In other words, intertextuality operates between the novel and the Old Testament through the figure of Whitechapel as an Abrahamic father who experienced the Middle Passage and parts the plantation crowd like a Mosaic orphan-slave.5 Thus, fatherhood, orphanhood, slavery, and the other orphan that “scripture,” as written speech, is, intersect through Whitechapel who, however views this syncretism exclusively in terms of slavery: Killer of children. Protector of the worst fate of your people or any people. Is that what I have become? The master of my fate. No longer in need of control or supervision. One so accustomed to his existence that he impinges on his own freedom […]. A master of his own slavery. Slave and enslaver (27). His self-portrayal as the “protector of the worst fate of [his] people” is another reference to Moses, who is said to have killed a slave-master, demanded the 5 Brown also compares the self-orphaning of the novel to the story of Abraham breaking with his father to found a new nation (Brown 1997, 19). Derrida further contends that literature in general is Abrahamic (Derrida 1999, 77). As a consequence, the comprarison between Whitechapel and Abraham engages Whitechapel again in a metonymic relation to the novel in which he figures. For a more thorough discussion of the story of Abraham and its relation to responsibility and literature, see Derrida’s Donner la Mort (1999), and Chapter 5, concerning Bethany Bettany’s family: the Abrahams (D’Aguiar, 2003).

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emancipation of slaves, and led his people to the Promised Land before dying with that land in sight. By contrast, Whitechapel does not question slavery, harm his master, or free his community, but leads his son to an untimely death, soon before dying far from Africa. Moreover, Whitechapel depicts himself as both master and slave, father and orphan, strong enough to sacrifice a son to a slaver but insubordinate enough to try and intercede in a whipping he cannot stop, partly responsible for the welts caused by the two hundred lashes on Chapel’s back, but also the man who tries, as a pharmakos would, to dress his dying son’s wounds. Whitechapel is simultaneously deadly, healing, and protective, a pharmakos in a pharmakon novel that paradoxically reminds one of the facts of slavery through the fictional tale one discovers as one reads. Whitechapel also believes that Chapel shares this ambivalent, s­ lave-enslaver status with him: at the end of the novel, in an imaginary address to Chapel, Whitechapel describes his adoptive son as “half a slave, half the master of [his] own destiny” (135). Corroborating what was said above, Whitechapel, believes that, as a foster father, “what [he] say[s] can never be enough for Chapel” (135). He has no authority over Chapel because of “blood,” genealogy (135), and his status as an orphan-slave (Plato 63). Conversely when he “gives up” Chapel, he thinks: “I am wrong, I say to myself, as I see myself doing it, wrong to tell the master that my son is gone and say I want him back under my guidance and protection. […] I ask myself, after I see the entire scene, what guidance? What protection? […] I have been wrong all my days” (136, my emphasis). Hence, while Whitechapel describes himself as the “master of his fate,” that is to say, a slave who “impinges on his own freedom” (27), Chapel is described as “half the master of [his] destiny” because of his mixed bloodlines flowing from a slave mother and a white slaver, which predispose him for neither slave nor master status. Whitechapel subsequently explains that his words “as a slave” could only work for a “total slave” (D’Aguiar 1994, 135). But what is a total slave, or a total orphan for that matter? Whitechapel expects a total slave to have no white descent and to act as a slave, as someone who “impinges on [their] own freedom” (27), who enslave themselves. This presupposes a performative view of slavery, which in turn entails, although Whitechapel does not see this, that no one is ever fully a slave until one is made to accept their condition, their role, as such.6 One is not a slave, but as a slave. Chapel’s orphanhood is performative too: he was not born a “total” orphan, and he even benefits from the affection of his mother during his youth, but his desire for freedom is ­comparable to a 6 I am not trivializing slavery as role-play. Yet, being a slave is a horrible role one is forced to perform, and reaching the point where one does not need coercion anymore to work as a slave amounts to performative resignation.

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“desire for orphanhood and parricidal subversion” (Derrida 96) – all the more so since his father worked for a slaver – that leads him to flee from the plantation on the eve of his mother’s death, and to disobey Whitechapel, whom he believes to be his biological father. Whitechapel’s warning to “total slaves,” then, does not work for his adoptive son, who is racially mixed and rejects bondage: There are two types of slave: the slave who must experience everything for himself before coming to an understanding of anything and he who learns through observation. The slave in the first category behaves as if he is the only slave in the world and is visited by the worst luck on earth. That type of slave is agitated, brings much trouble on his head and he makes the lot of every slave ten times worse. It is generally accepted that the slave in the second category is brighter, lives longer, causes everyone around him a minimum of worries and earns the small kindness of the overseer and the master. I realized my son was in the first, troublesome category, that day he walked away from my advice D’Aguiar 1994, 15, my emphasis

Whitechapel expresses his point of view through genealogy, the language of filiation as descent from a specific group, category or (pheno-)type, to designate two subclasses of slaves: “type” appears twice, and “category,” three times (15).7 His opinion is intrinsically genealogical also because his associating his adoptive son with the first category is predicated on Chapel’s mixed genus. Chapel’s category is that of “the slave who must experience everything for himself” and “behaves as if he is the only slave in the world” at his own peril, when he “walk[s] away from [his foster-father’s] advice.” Experience and peril share the same pre-Indo-European root peri, or “passing over,” and led Derrida to describe experience as “the voyage that crosses the boundary” (Derrida 1991, 9). In other words, the category of slaves who learn through experience and end up in trouble really fits with Chapel: he blurs racial boundaries, walks away from his father’s advice and, after having trespassed the limits traced by Whitechapel’s authority and advice, he leaves the plantation and passes over into freedom at his own peril, until he gets caught and killed. Chapel belongs to the category that disobeys category, genealogy and, by extension,

7 For a reading of the novel as an attempt to complicate the stereotypical opposition between the active, rebellious slave (Chapel) and the compliant, “Uncle Tom” counterpart (Whitechapel), see Gunning in Misrahi-Barak, Ed., 2005.

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­ atriarchal figures: he behaves like “the only slave in the world,” like the orp phan he is. 1.2 Writing to Commemorate & Reciting from Memory Chapel even blurs Whitechapel’s above-mentioned distinction between “experience” and “observation,” since observation is the experience through which Chapel learns, as he watches over Lydia’s shoulder when she reads, which proves again that he subverts (Whitechapel’s) categorization and crosses the boundary of what was generally accepted as a slave’s behavior, befriending a white slaver’s daughter and attempting to acquire literacy. However, he always observes a security distance that is yet just small enough for him to get closer to the one he wants to learn from, as Lydia explains: “I begin as his big sister. […] This is after I watch him for days out of the corner of my eye, edging his way into the reading room. The scratching at the door is him, half-in, half-out” (79). Neither inside nor outside the master’s library, Chapel is right at the boundary, until Lydia takes him by the hand “without thinking” (79) into the room and teaches him how to read and write.8 She specifies beginning “as his big sister” because, as readers already know from preceding chapters (the present, seventh chapter is an analepsis narrated by Lydia), she falls in love with him as she teaches him. Accordingly, Lydia, describes their reading sessions in sensual terms: “I recline in my chair and let his voice cascade over my body. He watches me as he reads so I close my eyes to let him look without my gaze meeting his […]” (81). Chapel describes the same scene in verse, and explains that he is unsure of whether he is getting “lost in the image of her / Or the story of two starcrossed lovers,” (60) in an obvious reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Fred D’Aguiar actually riffs on the celestial theme every time the two lovers are 8 She also teaches Sanders Jr. for that matter, which is not to Mr. Whitechapel’s taste, who believes his daughter is being “distracted.” However, Sanders Sr. is happy that Lydia has befriended his son, because “she has taught him counting games and rhymes which have taken the place of the usual slave songs he strains to memorize” (49). D’Aguiar’s pun on “strain” and “slave song” is evocative of the different situations of slaves and masters on a plantation: a strain is a song, and Sanders Junior, to the satisfaction of his father, sings Lydia’s (whose name evokes the Lydian musical mode) teachings in order to remember them, which has the effect of making him forget the “work songs,” or songs of straining as hard work, he has learned from slaves. Apart from this, the resemblances between Sanders Jr. and Chapel as maternal orphans with analogous approaches to literacy and a striving to remember verse, in addition to suggesting, through slight atavism, that they are brothers, induces readers to wonder whether Sanders Jr. does not also kill Chapel out of jealousy, as Chapel has become Lydia’s lover. The novel, however, does not openly state whether Sanders Jr. knows about Lydia and Chapel’s relationship.

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t­ ogether: after Lydia’s father discovers that she has taught Chapel how to read, he forbids them to meet again, but Cook, who knows about Lydia and Chapel, helps them to plan secret meetings at “a special place to sit and look at the heavens,” “when the stars sh[i]ne” (89). On one of these nightly meetings, they talk about the children they will have: “Our children. We stop. The words hang in the air. Two stars that have dropped from the heavens to a point just above our heads and as bright as two suns. Our children. Yes” (103). Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed and meet secretly under the stars during the balcony scene, just as Pyramus and Thisbe, in the Ovidian metamorphosis that inspired both Shakespeare and D’Aguiar, run away from their respective homes at night to see each other, without knowing that tragedy awaits them. Conversely, Chapel and Lydia do not expect that their escape plan will lead to Chapel’s death as a runaway slave, to a tragedy conditioned by racism.9 The terms in which Cook actually describes how she found out about Chapel and Lydia’s reading sessions, when she heard a voice that was her “son’s and not [her] son’s” (83), is of interest in the present perspective on writing too. Intrigued by her son’s inflexions, she comes to the reading-room door and spies on Lydia and Chapel, “with a book in his hands, reading. Chapel, reading. Chapel speaking, not from memory but lifting words from a book with his eyes. My Chapel. […] I have to cover my mouth to catch the scream that parts my lips” (84, emphasis mine). This scene is evocative of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls the trope of the Talking Book in African-American literature, a trope present in many slave narratives where “making the white written text speak with a black voice is the initial mode of inscription of the metaphor of the double-voiced” (Gates 131) the decomposable origin of what he calls, again, the Signifyin’ tradition. Chapel makes “the white written text speak” and gives voice to an author’s logos the way the master would, in a tone that is both his own and not, making his reading aloud a double-voiced moment of empowerment: through this scene, D’Aguiar might be acknowledging the AfricanAmerican literary canon by inscribing his work in its lineage. But such a sight worries Cook, because slaves do not have the right to read, and C ­ hapel’s experience in literacy might bring him trouble. Nevertheless, all she feels is pride when she thinks of the strength of her son’s voice (86) and of the fact that he “can open a book and sound like the master” (86), so she first decides to act as if she did not know, and not to tell Whitechapel, who would ­subsequently 9 Ward notices the erotic quality of Chapel and Lydia’s relationship (Ward 149), but does not mention the Shakespearean intertext. Nevertheless, her reading of Chapel’s relation to writing, to the pharmakon, as accompanied by his falling in love with Lydia, allows Ward to show that the pharmakos can be a love philter (Ward 144) as much as a dangerous elixir, causing Chapel’s punishment by Mr. Whitechapel when he finds him reading with his daughter (145).

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put his son in his “first category” of troublesome slaves and punish him accordingly (86). Cook also specifies that Chapel is not speaking from memory, not reciting, but reading aloud and, so doing, corroborates Derrida’s interpretation of the Phaedrus as Ammon’s demonstration that the invention of writing is not a remedy for true memory as anamnesis, but an elixir of re-collection or hypomnesis (as a repetition or imitation – a bastard orphan in Plato’s mimetic view of mnemonic genealogy – of anamnesis) that leads readers, in the long run, not to exercise their memory anymore, as they supplement it through writing as hypomnesis (Derrida 1991, 4–5). Writing would then be a death-blow to anamnesis, and its qualities as an anamnesic poison and hypomnesic present justify the designation of written speech as a pharmakon gift, and of its users as pharmakaï. Although Chapel sounds as if he is reciting from memory, as one would do with a poem, he is actually reading and, in this perspective, when Lydia tells him that he is not supposed to be literate and should not tell anyone, his reaction sounds double-voiced: She said I was the son of slaves and it was forbidden For a slave to know how to write and read. I said it was a mighty waste of a good head. She reminded me that I took a pledge Not to tell a soul. I watched her and felt grudge. D’Aguiar 1994, 60, emphasis mine

This passage, corroborates, not without irony, the nature of writing as described in the Phaedrus and understood by Derrida (Derrida 1972, 135; 2003, 23–4), notably because the context and the use of the neutral pronoun it open up the potential for at least three interpretations of Chapel’s statement. First, the “mighty waste of a good head” might correspond to Chapel’s realization that his efforts to acquire literacy are vain, since he is not allowed, because of his slave genealogy, to use his newly acquired knowledge. Second, this line could indicate that segregationists, through such restrictions, are foolishly wasting the intellectual and creative potential of enslaved people, to the detriment of the whole community and of such poets as Chapel – all the chapters he narrates are in verse. However, “knowing how to read and write” might also consist in what the “waste of a good head” designates: in this sense, writing would be useless or, at least, harmful to one’s “good head,” just as Ammon in the Phaedrus indicates that writing is a poison for good memory as a­ namnesis. It might be wasting Chapel’s memory indeed and, in this light, it is not f­ ortuitous

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that Lydia, who teaches him how to write, has to re-mind him of his promise not to let others know about his literacy.10 The same mnemonic and textual implications transpire when Mr. Whitechapel, Lydia’s father, catches Chapel and Lydia reading, as Chapel explains: And we were statues with dropped jaws Waiting for her father to release the curse With his words. He ordered Lydia out. He drew his belt, signaled me to bend and shout At my peril. As he lashed, he spoke. Do not, I repeat, do not let me ever catch you reading […] and tell no one of this. d’aguiar 1994, 61

Chapel is whipped for being literate, in a scene that proleptically announces the other whipping that will cause his death. Moreover, that Chapel and Lydia are “waiting for her father to release the curse / With his words” is also reminiscent that, while writing is an orphan, with no father to stand on its/his behalf, the “father” here is the father of his logos, the master patriarch or figure of authority that – this time around – stands on behalf of the orders he formulates. Mr. Whitechapel also reminds Chapel of his will through repetition – “Do not, / I repeat, do not let me ever catch you reading” – just as Lydia did a few pages before. As a father and master, Mr. Whitechapel claims monopoly over the logos and its written avatar on the plantation, and Chapel’s literacy amounts to slander in his eyes. Mr. Whitechapel tells Chapel to “shout at his peril” too as he is being whipped, and the word peril, through its aforementioned etymological link with experience, with what crosses boundaries, confirms Chapel’s status as a crossover who defies categorization (D’Aguiar 1994, 14–5). Chapel

10

Ward cites the same “waste of a good head” lines as a sign of Chapel’s thwarted use of literacy because of slavery, and as a reminder of the fact that writing is the pharmakon that gratifies him with Lydia’s love as much as that which plagues him with the knowledge of being a slave (Ward 144). Following this remark, I would suggest a fourth, provocative and erotic reading: if Chapel’s relation to Lydia is conditioned by his access to literacy, his not being allowed to read and write prevents him from gaining Lydia’s love and the sexual gratifications it may entail. Then, if Chapel’s being denied access to Lydia is “a mighty waste of a good head,” Chapel might be implying that it is a pity for him not to be allowed to get “good head,” or fellatio, from Lydia.

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thus crosses boundaries twice: first, with literacy, second, through his escape, both of which subvert patriarchal authority.11 After Chapel’s second trespassing of plantation law, when Whitechapel asks the master to spare his son, Mr. Whitechapel interrupts him and asks him “what [he] would have him do with a runaway among his good negroes, poisoning their minds on a daily basis” (15, emphasis mine). To the same extent, a journalist from The Virginian, another narrator who intervenes in the novel through fictional newspaper clippings, suggests in medical terms that runaway slaves are “poison” among other slaves, as they are evocative of the possibility for escape and freedom, and that in order to “remedy any dissatisfaction” slaves find in bondage, a runaway must be punished so as to “act as a living reminder” of his/her failure to escape (107–08) – the sense of a performative view of slavery is discretely conveyed here again through the verb “acting.” In other words, runaway slaves are designated here as parricidal orphans who function as pharmaka(i) that consist both in poison(er)s and remedies or healers for slaves and their ability to re-member, their hypomneme. Basically, runaway slaves, and literate Chapel in particular, have the functions that Plato and Derrida attribute to texts. This confirms the above-mentioned idea that Chapel’s literacy and first whipping foreshadow his future escape and deadly punishment. It also indicates that The Longest Memory is a mise en abyme, a text, a novel, an orphan pharmakon about orphan pharmakai, about poisonous slaves and their influence on hypomnesis. The Longest Memory is, in this sense, a text on textuality. Textuality, as written speech, is what Chapel is forced to forsake after being caught: I promised never to open a book or pick up a pen. I compose in my head or aloud. I write nothing down. I told this to the trees, the well, the stars. They memorized it. Besides me. I told her. He said Lydia was never to see me again. We meet at night, back to back, without pen Or paper. We talk. We speak from memory: What she has remembered from books for me, 11

Ward mentions, but provides no thorough (micro)reading of this passage, in spite of its importance in relation to “Plato’s Pharmacy” and to Chapel’s characterization through transgression and experience (Ward 145).

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What I have composed in my head for her, Back to back, in the darkness, at this hour. D’Aguiar 1994, 6212

Chapel gives up reading and writing, but not verse: he composes poetry without writing it down and memorizes what he creates, just as he remembers the punishment he has had to undergo for being literate, which he recounts to natural elements and Lydia, whom he secretly continues to meet on clear nights to “speak from memory,” as Lydia learns books (from the Western literary canon) to recite them to him, so that they can inspire him with new lines that she will memorize and consign in writing. These literary references, when read along with Chapel’s singing poetry to the stars and the trees (D’Aguiar 1994, 62) that will fall silent during his execution, away from a lover he failed to join (26), do not serve to convey received remembrance (Ward 147) in the form of an institutional Western canon that is neither subverted nor subversive, but express the Orphic nature of Chapel’s endeavor. For what is Orpheus, if not a subversive “orphan” who upturns the rules of nature and disobeys the gods?13 The corpus Chapel actually revises, including Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Homer, Virgil, Goethe’s Faust “(Part 1),” Chaucer and Donne’s poems, and William Langland’s Piers Plowman (D’Aguiar 1994, 96–7) confirms this Orphic impression since, apart from Homer and Langland, every author referenced in Chapel’s list relates to the myth: Virgil’s Georgics (iv 453–527) tell the tale of Orpheus. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde mentions and revisits Orpheus and Eurydice (Chaucer 1971, iv. 791). In the Faerie Queene, Spenser compares himself to a British national Orpheus (Cain 28, 30) and creates a genealogy that goes from Isis to Queen Elizabeth (Delsigne 203, 206), and Isis’ mysteries are sometimes said to have served for the initiation of, among others, Moses, Orpheus, and Plato (205). Donne is viewed, like Milton, as one of the Orphic poets who mourned for Elizabeth I’s death (Gros Louis 1969, 70). As far as Shakespeare is concerned, Thomas Cain signals, in his article “Spenser 12

13

This passage contains, again, an intertextual reference to the calypso song “Zombie Jamboree” through the phrase “back to back,” which, correlated with the Orphism of Chapel’s endeavor, suggests again that a tropical and intertextual poetics blending Caribbean and Western literary canons is constitutive of D’Aguiar’s works. The muting of nature when Chapel gets whipped and falls “silent as the grass and the trees” (D’Aguiar 1994, 26) and dies away from his lover, Lydia, after being lacerated by a furious overseer consists in an additional evocation of the myth of Orpheus, who is wept for by trees and animals after being decapitated by mad Bacchanals, away from his (defunct) lover.

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and the Renaissance Orpheus,” that Northrop Frye claims Orpheus is, to some extent, the hero of all of Shakespeare’s romances (Cain 24). Lines 62 and 63 of Milton’s poem “Lycidas” mention Orpheus’ head floating down the Hebrus, and Charles Martindale shows that these lines are revised in Paradise Lost (Martindale 322). Goethe’s Faust, “Part 1” (D’Aguiar 1994, 97), presents Faust and the devil trying and failing to rescue Margaret from a death sentence by taking her out of prison, like Orphic figures trying to draw Eurydice out of Hell (Goethe Part 1, Scene 25). In other words, D’Aguiar takes the pain of making a precise description of Chapel’s tastes in order to liken his – subversion of the rules of slavery through his – becoming a writer to an Orphic process that is (etymologically) coherent with Chapel’s status as an orph(an)ic slave.14 Chapel’s shift from written speech to spoken word also equates a shift from the pharmakon and hypomneme to anamnesis and the logos. However, since the logos is informed by written texts that were memorized as a “treasure of recollection” (Plato in Derrida 1972, 194), as hypomneme which exacerbates anamnesis, or true memory, until it helps Chapel to compose verse, writing seems to be less condemned than rehabilitated as something more than a source of recollection, as the originator of new things to be created thanks to anamnesis, and memorized by listeners-scribes such as Lydia. Thus, it appears that Chapel and Lydia’s memorizing scheme entails a designation of writing as a remedy that renews the logos rather than as a poison that causes amnesia in the long run, as long as it is not only consulted as the copy of the author’s actual speech, but as a means of regenerating one’s own logos through revision of written speeches. Writing as hypomneme might excite anamnesis into the production of new logoï. Of course, a text is, therefore, still a double-edged pharmakon, and revision could be perceived as a bastardization, an illegitimate reproduction of an original text. But as far as Chapel is concerned, it allows him, an orphan, to restore genealogy and legitimacy to his speech through affiliation to chosen canonical literary forefathers and, as a consequence, to legitimize his revisions as his own, inherited logos, as a legacy: thanks to literacy, Chapel finds his poetic voice. Yet, Chapel still relies on writing by using Lydia as his scribe, because the decision not to use a pen or open a book only consists in temporary obedience to Mr. Whitechapel, the father and patriarch, before Chapel finally escapes. In the meantime, Chapel believes he is allowed to compose aloud (D’Aguiar 1994, 62): if writing is forbidden, composing aloud might be allowed, without risking breaking one’s promise to the Master, a thing Chapel, as Lydia explains, does not want to do: 14

For more information on Orphism in D’Aguiar’s works, see Chapter 5.

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‘Memorize something for when we meet next time.’ ‘And what will you do?’ ‘I will compose something in my head.’ He says he cannot disobey my father. He gave him his word. He refuses my offer to bring him books and paper. He asks me to be his eyes and read for him and be his pen and write down what he says to me on clear nights. Chapel, I want to say, all my memory is yours. (90–1) Just before this passage, on the same page, Chapel tells Lydia that his “father is always right” (90), which sounds quite ironic, knowing that Chapel disagrees with Whitechapel’s understanding of slavery and disobeys both his father and the patriarchal figure of Mr. Whitechapel in the end. Here, obedience to the father corresponds to the status of the logos rather than to that of the parricidal orphan that writing is said to be, and it is coherent with Chapel’s forced change of behavior15 from disobedient slave to conciliatory son – “He gave [the patriarch-master] his word.” Chapel’s shift from writing to telling is accompanied by a change from a textual to a temporary “logical” and oral – abiding by the father’s logos and creating one’s own language – relation to language. That Lydia remains a writer/pharmakos at Chapel’s service corroborates the temporary nature of that change. Moreover, and although Mr. Whitechapel told his daughter that she has done a “grave injustice” (88) to Chapel by making him literate, she then decides to offer him her memory as a gift: “Chapel, I want to say, all my memory is yours,” as far as memorizing books is concerned. Although the word is not mentioned in the text, the idea of the gift is present here and, again, creates a sense of pharmacological oscillation between its respective functions as ­poison and present. If such a gift is harmful, it is so to Lydia, who plans to dedicate her entire anamnesic potential to serve as hypomneme for Chapel, as a means of reminding him of the contents of the canon, so that his own anamnesis can be exacerbated. But such an anamnesic sacrifice on Lydia’s part is effected out of love and contributes to the rehabilitation of written speech as a source of inspiration for Chapel, who will in turn create “treasures of recollection” (Plato in Derrida 1972, 194) in verse that he will not write down, but let Lydia memorize – and thus, return her with anamnesic exercise – so that she can write them down and complete an actually healthy exchange where one lover always returns or remedies what the other has sacrificed for his/her sake. 15

Again, “change of behavior” and of allegiance is the shared etymological meaning of orphanhood and slavery.

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And both lovers actually plan to go on with composing verse to recite if they succeed in eloping, as Lydia explains: Chapel says he will write verses for a living. Verses for the birthdays of dignitaries. Verses for the death of prominent citizens. Verses to commemorate the anniversary of this or that institution or brotherhood. Verses for a gentleman to woo his lady. Verses on religion. Verses on the bounty of nature. Verses, verses, verses. […] Chapel, you will write verses and make our lives and the lives of our children rich. D’Aguiar 1994, 103, emphasis mine

The subjects Lydia suggests for Chapel’s poetry, such as birthdays, religion, outstanding citizens, and institutions, or love, are the same subjects as those of the poems of Phillis Wheatley, the first female slave to have published a collection of poetry in the United States (Gates in Wheatley x). In other words, Chapel’s poetic themes have not been chosen fortuitously, but establish another intertextual parenthood, or genealogy, between D’Aguiar’s characters (and hence, his work) and other writers. Finally, the idea that Chapel could write “verses to commemorate the anniversary of this or that institution” indicates again, and tautologically so, that written speech consists in hypomnesic support.16 1.3 Dreams to Forget Written speech, as anamnesic nurture, may then be rehabilitated through Lydia and Chapel’s scheme. By contrast, Whitechapel has been led to reject memory, in its broad sense, as readers learn at the beginning of the novel, when he explains that the last time he cried was over Chapel: That was me over the whipping of a boy who had to know better somehow and would have learned with a good talking to, or even a beating in these circumstances but not this, not this. I don’t want to remember. Memory hurts. Like crying. But still and deep. Memory rises to the skin then I can’t be touched. I hurt all over, my bones ache, my teeth loosen in their gums, my nose bleeds. Don’t make me remember. I forget as hard as I can. D’Aguiar 1994, 2

He wishes he did not remember Chapel’s punishment and death, because such memory is painful, all the more so since it might have been avoided “with a 16

Ward does not address these aspects of Lydia and Chapel’s memorial poetic practices.

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good talking to” that Whitechapel, although he tried, had no power to give as a slave and surrogate father since, theoretically speaking, in a patriarchal system, only the father has power over his son and his logos (Plato 63, D ­ errida 1972, 95). Whitechapel’s memories from an existence of bondage hurt so much that they affect him physically, to the extent that he has transcribed the pain onto his face, and subsequently earned the nickname “Sour-face” from his relatives. He cannot forget and alleviate the pain, since his body is a living reminder/ hypomnesis of his past. Even his dreams linger on his face: “The bags under my eyes are sacks of worries, witnesses of dreams, nightmares, and sleep from which a man should not be allowed to wake” (3). His face and body function as a page on which his past experiences are superimposed into a palimpsest which, as a harmful text, might partly be viewed as an auto-immune pharmakon: “Worry cut these paths in my face. I let it happen because I didn’t feel it happening and only knew it was there when someone called me Sour-face one day and I looked in the mirror for evidence and found plenty staring back at me” (7). However, the idea of Whitechapel as the anamnesic author, as the pharmakos of his body-as-psychosomatic-text is complicated by the fact that his condition as a slave is, in spite of its performative features, not of his own doing, but maintained by characters such as Sanders Sr. who, for different reasons, also designates Whitechapel as a pharmakos in his journal, when discussing the cause of a runaway slave’s death: “Mr. Whitechapel enquired if it was his wounds that caused his death. I said no. Apparently Whitechapel, lately changed from slave to Physician, had said, not fever, but the whip killed the runaway” (51, emphasis mine). This statement is very cruel and disdainful, since Whitechapel is no physician and his request for someone to cure his dying wife is refused in the novel, and because it suggests that for a slave to be a physician or a pharmakos, someone literate (Gates 129), is an absurdity: Whitechapel’s experience and textualized body, along with Chapel’s literacy, contradict that argument. Sanders Senior’s son also disregards Whitechapel’s experience as a slave and potential ability as a pharmakon, and is oblivious about the history of the institution of slavery, and of the orders given by Mr. Whitechapel, who reminds him of them when reprimanding him for having unwittingly killed his half-brother: “This whole mess cannot be ended anymore than it can be made as simple as it may have been at its inception. Your father’s action and that of countless others before him and since ensure that. Whitechapel’s longevity and living memory ensures that” (35). “This whole mess” resulting from “inception” is the racially mixed and illegitimate genealogy of miscegenation that blurred, with children like Chapel, the ethnically hermetic categories that plantation conventions tried to maintain. But the phenomenon, as

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Mr. ­Whitechapel ­indicates, is a recurrent historical fact of which Sanders Junior’s actions are a single version, as an old man like Whitechapel can testify, being all memory, with an illiterate but anamnesic mind that writes hypomnesic texts on his skin. On the plantation, he really is the longest memory, the bearer of a past that gets heavier with time.17 Yet, although it is very hard for him to substitute memories for oblivion, Whitechapel actually forgets elements from his past, but those are not necessarily the ones he wants to forget, as memory is not easily made selective. For instance, Whitechapel explains that he has forgotten what he was like before he became “sour-faced.” He remembers the last time he cried, but not the last time he smiled, so much so that laughing has become foreign to him, and he associates it with an animal feature, a “donkey braying,” saying that “there is nothing in his past to make [him] bray” (7). Whitechapel does not recall: there are no hypomnesic traces, no text of a happy past written on his body to remind him of a time when he wasn’t sad, but a sour face. Whitechapel’s past is, in fact, so painful that he wishes to die after wondering, having lived for so long, if he will outlive the sun: “Stare and sneer and (hopefully) die. But no, the mornings repeat after snatched sleep. […] The sun begins because it must. When will it die? Will I witness the death? Sun, see me out of this world” (27).18 Readers do witness his death and last words at the novel’s end: “Forget. Memory is pain trying to resurrect itself” (137). The description of memory as resurrectional, or returning, is evocative of hypomnesis, and the mention of pain is reminiscent of the inscription of a life of slavery on Whitechapel’s features and, since Whitechapel’s textualized body makes it impossible for him to forget a life of slavery, his imperative to “forget” is another performative wish for death, as he dies voicing it. It “takes a life” to forget for Whitechapel who, in old age, remembers many things, even from before slavery. At some point, his great-granddaughter’s asking him about the difference between African and New-England lice induce him to share his childhood memories from Africa and his experience of the Middle Passage, where “Women and men were like children in the hands of those who held them captive” (D’Aguiar 1994, 123). The importance of these 17

18

Ward relates “this whole mess” to an extended weaving metaphor of “carpet,” “thread,” and “knotted mess” in the novel (D’Aguiar 1994 33, 136–37). Ward traces this image (shared between Mr. Whitechapel and Whitechapel’s utterances) in order to show that Whitechapel’s “knotted mess” is an apt counter-remembrance trope that, unlike Mr. Whitechapel’s “carpet” metaphor, does not fail to convey the violence that slavery entails (Ward 142). It is not accidental for Whitechapel to address the sun, as this star is a pharmakon: it is both indispensable for earthly life and endowed with the capacity to blind, burn, and kill in many ways.

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memories reside in their retracing the experience of Africans who were captured and brought to America through the Middle-Passage as slaves, and thus could still remember Africa. Whitechapel, as a representative of this generation of slaves born free and in Africa, epitomizes the novel’s title again as “the longest [attainable] memory” for African-Americans. Moreover, the transatlantic crossing coincides with Whitechapel’s becoming, simultaneously, an orphan and a slave, since he was alone and with no parent to help him when he was at sea, and the adults on board with him could not take care of him because they were made child-like by their loss of freedom in the Middle Passage according to Whitechapel, who thus corroborates the shared etymology of “orphan” and “slave.” Subsequently, although his great-granddaughter never knew Africa, she gains imaginative access to it through Whitechapel’s tale, and through dreams. Toward the end of the novel, she tells Whitechapel she “had a dream about Africa,” where she met Whitechapel’s parents, who recognize her as their son’s great-granddaughter when they give her something to eat which she thinks “may be some potion that will turn [her] head” (the pharmakon is never far), and, having inherited Whitechapel’s left-handedness—like all his descendants (124), she serves herself with her left hand. She then wakes up shouting “I am the third grandchild of his twelfth daughter: his youngest great-grandchild” (125). In other words, this dream suggests a hopeful closure where Africa and genealogy can be reconstituted poetically through dreams for descendants of the slave trade, and prevent them from losing the past to the exclusive knowledge of those who, like Whitechapel, survived the Middle Passage.19 That dreams constitute a type of memory, of access to the past, would not, as shown in Chapter 3, have sounded unconvincing to Freud (Freud 1899, 7), who thought of dreams as the results of substitutions through which past experience is condensed and rearranged in metaphors that are, by definition, translatable. Of course, this only suggests that dreams grant access to one’s individual and lived past, and the idea that Whitechapel’s great-granddaughter, who never knew Africa, can dream about it and her ancestors either suggests that her dream is a reworking of Whitechapel’s tale, or goes further than Freud by suggesting that, through dreams, one can reach further back than to one’s lived experience. In this latter case, more than implying, like Hobbes, whom D’Aguiar 19

In this sense, dreams and, by extension, the imagination, are liberating means of gaining access to the past for Whitechapel’s great-granddaughter, as they constitute a form of anamnesis that is not necessarily submitted to the condition of physically-lived experience. Fred D’Aguiar also defends “Imagination as Emancipation,” as a means of challenging “mental slavery” (D’Aguiar 2018). On attempts at retrieving the past in The Longest Memory, also read Chifane 1994.

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read (D’Aguiar 1998, 41), that dreams, like “Imagination and Memory, are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names” (Hobbes 14), this trans-generational dream corroborates the idea that According to the new insights of behavioral epigenetics [since the 1990s], traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our dna. Jews whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; adults of every ethnicity who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents – all carry with them more than just memories. hurley 2013

Or is it precisely “just memories” that they carry around with their dna? Here, science can lead to the drawing of an analogy between the experience of descendants, for instance, of the Holocaust, to that of the descendants of victims of the transatlantic slave trade, through their shared epigenetic mode of memorialization, or inscription – as an innate hypomnesis, an “original prosthesis” (Derrida 1996) that corresponds to anamnesic re-presentation.20 Whitechapel does not, however, give such credit to his great-­granddaughter’s dream and tells her she dreams about things she does not really know (D’Aguiar 1994, 125). However, one must be suspicious of Whitechapel’s opinion, since he suggests that he might be “wrong” when he considers Chapel’s dreaming (aloud) of Lydia as “fantasy” – a dreamed thing that cannot be achieved in real life rather than a real experience that Chapel is rehearsing through sleep (136) – and says at the end of his life that he has “been wrong all [his] days” (136). Whitechapel is actually suspicious of dreams because he associates them with hypomnesis: “I forget if I’ve dreamed an experience or really remember it. I put most recollection down to fantasy” (4). He disbelieves dreams because they consist in reconstructions of the past that are not consciously guided: dreams are re-inscriptions that, like texts, orphan themselves from their ­father/­dreamer by not giving him his (conscious) say in the ­revisionary process. In Whitechapel’s opinion, a dream is not ­anamnesic, not a reliable type 20

Ward makes the same comparison, thanks to Holocaust theory, through Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, designating “the belated ‘memories’ experienced by those who did not directly witness traumatic events,” the “‘second generation’ of trauma witnesses” (Ward 132). For a more scientific discussion of behavioral epigenetics, see Powledge 2011. Also see Ferenczi’s argument that our bodies, behavior, and dreams are mnemonic traces of the evolution of our species (Ferenczy 34–5).

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of memory, but a mischievous agent of recollection. This opinion is what distinguishes him, again, from his adoptive poet-son and his great-granddaughter, who see dreams as imaginative gateways to the past. In other words, through them, D’Aguiar might be pointing out the possibility that dreams, and more generally, the imagination, could consist in anamnesic means of remembering what could not be retained otherwise, such as African ancestry.21 Thus, The Longest Memory presents anamnesic access to the past as available to all at the same time as it reminds us, through fiction, of historical facts of the deepest importance such as, again, the Middle Passage, slavery, miscegenation, the African diaspora, and the inter-ethnic and intercultural relations that ensued to bear on the world to this day. The novel does this by problematizing genealogy through substitution, and by relating it to issues of memory, literacy, and slavery in ways that can be understood through the lens of Plato and Derrida’s designation of written speech as both an orphan and a pharmakon. This construct allows for a reflection on the forms memory may take in its anamnesic and hypomnesic guises for better or for worse, on a page, on a human body, and in one’s dreams. Memory and its expression on the body, in dreams, and other media is actually at stake for Mintah too in Feeding the Ghosts, where it is said that “Her dreams were a harbour for the past” and that the past “used her body as such” (223) too. Moreover, as we will demonstrate below, genealogy, slavery, and literacy play a major role in this novel as well. 2

Feeding the Ghosts

Feeding the Ghosts itself, as a title, is not an orphan since it is also the name of a poem from Fred D’Aguiar’s first collection (D’Aguiar 1985, 39), the last line of which states that “Generations of dust, in floorboard creases, stir” (39) and is evocative of ghosts. In Feeding the Ghosts, the poem’s last line is revised in the first pages of the novel, where the Atlantic is described as an ensemble of “loose floorboards” (D’Aguiar 1997, 9) making up the peaks of waves spaced with their troughs or creases, in which the dissolved bodies of slaves thrown overboard may appear to “stir” (4). D’Aguiar riffs on this floorboard-creases image in Feeding the Ghosts, where the Zong is “noisy as a rocking chair over loose 21

In spite of his openly claiming that he is probably wrong, Ward seems to follow Whitechapel’s incredulous arguments more than those of other characters, which leads to her interpretation of the novel as more pessimistic and “perplexing” than what we infer from it as a polyphony of viewpoints (Ward 151).

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floorboards” (9), and “Along with creaking wood and some loose items crashing to the deck, shouts and screams climbed up the stairs leading from below and escaped through the barred hatches or else managed to squeeze through the grooves between the planks of the upper deck.” (15) Through the creases, the cries of slaves are audible, just as they are said to be when the wind blows in the troughs of waves (4). Later in the novel, Mintah and a few slave companions, after having rebelled, are tied together in the rain on the upper deck, which is described as follows: The wood was rough and its grain barely discernible under a thick sheet of water. Where each plank met another there was a groove filled with wax, tar, dirt, and now water using it as a path to somewhere. The grooves across the deck looked like lines, but the writing could not be read though it was there in that history of dirt and dust, in the wood worn by footsteps and chipped and scratched by the passage of barrels and bags and boxes and the etchings of salt. (123) The planks make up a miniature, allegorical sea floor the interstices of which constitute the lines of a hypomnesic text where the past of slavery is metaphorically recorded, and may thus be retrieved, in spite of its near invisibility under transatlantic waters. The image of dust between floorboards also appears in The Longest Memory, but designates former generations of slave-masters between the planks of the plantation owners’ club, as Mr. Whitechapel thinks: “The floorboards under your feet welcome you with their familiar creak. Dust between those boards is yours as well as your father’s” (D’Aguiar 1995, 67). The dust can also be read as that of slaves too, since it is designated here as a slaver’s property: “your father’s,” and this intratextual network of spectral images echoes slavery as a haunting memory that has led D’Aguiar to write the three novels studied in this chapter.22 22

Abigail Ward also refers to the poem in relation to the novel (Ward 158). However, apart from suggesting a potential mythological link between Africa and Guyana that would precede the slave trade, and in spite of her claiming that the poem has been overlooked, Ward does not see that it is precisely the poem’s final line about “floorboard creases” that D’Aguiar riffs upon in his work, as shown here and above, to depict the persisting legacy of slavery. The image reappears in D’Aguiar’s verse as well, in “Key West” (and hence in an evocation of the Atlantic again): “floors with creases / full of trapped dirt / only light squeezes through” (D’Aguiar 2013, 11). The “loose floorboards” are also present in Dear Future (D’Aguiar 1996, 32), Bethany Bettany (D’Aguiar 2003, 190), and Children of Paradise (D’Aguiar 2014, 50, 107, 186), and although they are not directly evocative of the history of

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The idea of the lines of a text as “loose floorboards” between which “generations […] stir” also forms an apt metaphor for the intertextual nature of D’Aguiar’s work and its inscription within a tradition of writing on the Middle Passage too, since the subject is also addressed (and often through the Zong story) in texts produced by his Caribbean forebears, such as in Walcott’s Omeros and Brathwaite’s The Arrivants, and by his contemporaries, including M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!, Margaret Busby’s An African Cargo (Unpublished, Greenwich Theatre 2007), Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River, and David Dabydeen’s Turner.23 Dabydeen’s Turner is, as its name indicates, a reaction to J.M.W. Turner’s infamous painting of the Zong, named Slave Ship (Gilroy 13, 16), which was bought, sold, and commented upon by John Ruskin, who meticulously wrote on every aspect of the painting, except for slavery, its subject matter, which is “relegated to a brief footnote in Ruskin’s essay. The footnote reads like an afterthought, something tossed overboard” like the slaves in the foreground of Turner’s painting, and leads, in turn, Dabydeen to suspect that Turner “in private must have savoured the sadism he publicly denounced” (Dabydeen 7–8). Paul Gilroy further explains that although the painting was exhibited to coincide with the world anti-slavery convention held in London in 1840,” it is as controversial as the apparently hypocritical reception it was granted by Ruskin in Modern Painters, since although Ruskin only studied the painting “in terms of what it revealed about the aesthetics of painting water,” conceding a mere footnote to the theme of slavery, it is said that he actually sold it because he found it “too painful to live with” (Gilroy 14).24 For Caribbean writers and African-diasporic artists to take up the subject of the Zong is, then, not surprising, because what it represents and how it was viewed by authoritative nineteenth-century intellectuals calls for a re-exploration of the event and

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the Middle Passage or of the Atlantic, they always evoke either the concealment of the past or the expression of its legacy. Ward offers a convincing explanation regarding these authors’ interest in the slave past: she explains that amnesia concerning the existence of a significant Black British population before the Windrush – the wave of immigration coming from the West Indies after the 1948 British Nationality Act, that granted British citizenship to British Commonwealth and colonial “subjects,” was passed – leads to misconceptions of immigration as invasion and to misguided discourses on national hierarchies and identities in terms of race, and incites Caribbean authors to revisit the slave past as part of the history of British civilization and culture in order to counter such ill-informed contemporary interpretations and discourses (Ward 5). Also, for a reading of D’Aguiar’s and Phillips’ novels through the lens of polyphony (as cross-cultural catalyst), see Ledent in Misrahi-Barak, Ed. 2005. Paula Burnett makes the same remark about Ruskin’s relation to Turner’s painting (Burnett 18). Also see her article for comparisons between Feeding the Ghosts and Turner (22–3).

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its representations in ways that, unlike Ruskin’s, restore the memory of slaves who perished at sea.25 Accordingly, Fred D’Aguiar makes the ghosts of slavery occupy a crucial position in Feeding the Ghosts, a novel peopled with many foundlings and slaves, including the protagonist Mintah, an orphan, a slave, and a fictional embodiment of the Muse behind D’Aguiar’s text, an inspirational, spectral, and authorial figure guiding the author’s hand, as shown below. Moreover, many orphan characters in the novel are comparable to the figure of the pharmakos through their relation to writing, nursing, sickness, and slavery. It is the articulation of these themes in Feeding the Ghosts that we propose to analyze here. 2.1 Transatlantic Foundlings Since they have undergone a change of status by being deprived of their freedom and becoming slaves, every African on board the Zong could be designated as an orphan in the Middle Passage. In other words, these men, women and children chained below deck are characterized by the shared etymologies of orphanhood and slavery, which point to genealogical bereavement and loss of freedom. These orphans/slaves have also been severed from their African families and their motherland, a place that has been orphaned, or deserted subsequent to their capture: “Village squares were empty, huts vacant. Acres of land had gone neglected, accountable to the hands and feet chained below” (D’Aguiar 1997, 26). In actual history, as in the novel, the orphaning process is also prolonged by the fact that, after weeks at sea, the Zong’s captain decided after the spread of sickness on board (caused by a bacteria, virus, or pharmakon) that sick slaves should be thrown overboard in order to keep the others healthy, assuming that British insurance companies involved in the ship’s venture would refund the slavers for their lost “pieces of cargo” at a better price than if they had been sold at auction (12).26 This calculation of profit based on the 25

26

Ward further shows that “Even twentieth century [scholarly] writing about Turner’s painting has overlooked its involvement with slavery” (Ward 99). She also explains that, from the early nineteenth century, when the “Zong became notorious […] because of its significant role in the cause of abolition,” to the present, “the case of the Zong has become infamous – a true ‘ghost ship’ of mythical proportions” (155–56). However, she warns against the dangers of such mystification, because she suggests that “mythologising the Zong enables its legend to obscure the early years of [British] slavery” (156) by privileging the commemoration of British abolitionism over that of slavery itself. According to Ward, such mystification leads D’Aguiar to question official historical accounts, or “received history” (Ward 156; D’Aguiar 1997, 170). In other words, Ward warns, like D’Aguiar, against turning the Zong to “white mythology” (Derrida 1971, 11). Neither is the crew spared by the sickness (D’Aguiar 1997, 12), which causes them to throw up, foreshadowing the throwing overboard of slaves into the Atlantic (Lafargue in MisrahiBarak, Ed., 2005).

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reification of living beings already represents the most horrendous illustration of what capitalist thinking may be, and corroborates the idea that slaves were not categorized as human beings, but as stock, in racist Western phylogeny.27 What makes it worse, in the sense of “rational” de-humanization, is that the quest for profit supplanted the categorization of sick and non-sick, and led to the throwing overboard of 132 slaves of all ages and sexes, some of whom were actually healthy, since one of them – and this is part of the actual, historical, story (Baucom 2005, 129) – managed to climb back on board. The decision to throw slaves overboard extends the orphaning process because parents are thrown overboard, leaving children “cry[ing] and call[ing] for [their] mother” (40). Deprived of freedom and relatives – who are either chained below deck or in Africa – and speaking in a language the crewmen do not understand, the slaves’ pleas and screams, like those of orphans, are deprived of power over the crew. The children are first orphaned by becoming slaves, and then again through the murder of their parents, from whom they were already separated on the ship. The future of these children on board is further compromised when the captain orders his crew to “get some children” (39) to throw to the waves. Mintah has also recurrently experienced orphanhood, since she was separated from her father as a child, but captured and taken from her mother to become a slave only years later, becoming an orphan in every (etymological) sense of the term: foundling and slave. Readers learn how Mintah became an orphan as she dreams of her past, sleeping in the Zong’s storeroom, out of exhaustion from having climbed back into the ship after being thrown overboard. In her dream, she is “running behind her mother, leaving her father standing, chisel in hand, at the gate of their compound after her parents had argued about the gods. After the missionaries were welcomed among her people, their work had come to this: choose between gods” (D’Aguiar 1997, 56–7). That dreaming leads Mintah back to her past corroborates, once again, the argument that dreams are hypomnesic (Hobbes 14–8; Freud 1899, 7). Mintah remembers that her father refused to believe in the possibility for one God to be in charge of everything, while his wife was convinced by the monotheistic proselytism of European missionaries. He therefore tried to negotiate with Mintah’s mother by proposing to renounce all gods except hers and that of wood but she refused to compromise, and the religious debate ultimately lead to their breakup and Mintah’s fatherless existence: “When it was time for the missionaries to leave for the coast Mintah’s mother and a small group decided to follow. Her father refused to uproot” and “Mintah ran to keep up with her mother” (57), hoping 27

For a thorough attempt at reconstructing a historical account of the Zong massacre and a reflexion on what it implied, along with the transatlantic slave trade, in terms of justice and economy, see Baucom 2001 and 2005.

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her father would change his mind. Mintah thus becomes a paternal orphan because of her parents’ religious disagreement. In this sense, Mintah’s orphanhood begins with her mother’s break with, or orphaning herself from a plurality of gods to privilege a single one. This implies that when Mintah’s mother chose another (religious) “Father,” she selected a new affiliation that orphaned her daughter from her polytheistic biological father. Mintah’s memory of parting with her father has had such an impact on her that she repeatedly deals with her dreaming the event, and consigns it in writing at the beginning of her book, where she registers what happened on the Zong:28 The second my eyes clamp shut the dreams start to run. I see not me but this girl who is just like me. I don’t think Mintah, that’s me. I think that girl is Mintah. And I see her father holding a chisel in front of him. He carves goodbye out of air. Goodbye, Mintah. Small strokes from left to right. Goodbye. Again and again. Waves. D’Aguiar 1997,183

This passage is deeply equivocal: the telling of the dream starts with “The second,” which both designates the immediacy with which the dream starts and reminds readers that it is “the second” time the story contained in the dream is told. Moreover, the dream itself is being narrated in a transcription Mintah has made of it in her journal. Thus, from an extradiegetic point of view, the dream is written twice. From an intradiegetic point of view, the dream is first experienced, and then consigned in written form in Mintah’s journal. In both cases, readers witness the repetition of a repetition, since the dream is a rearranged unconscious past (Freud 1899, 7) that is twice reproduced in writing in the novel. Hence, the dream, as a hypomnesic trauma written into Mintah’s mind, is repeated to readers through the hypomnesic medium of Mintah’s written text on the story of the Zong within D’Aguiar’s written text on the story of the Zong, suggesting a pattern of doubles where Mintah’s book is embedded into Feeding the Ghosts like a Russian nesting doll, a miniature version of what the novel is. And here is the purpose of “Mintah’s book[:] She had given it to [Simon] when he had offered to buy her her freedom, and she had made him promise that he would make sure people heard about what happened on the Zong, that the book contained everything they needed to know” (152). Mintah gave her 28

The book is embedded in the novel as its eleventh, ante-penultimate chapter, following the chapters where it is produced in an English court by Simon, the cook’s assistant, who befriended Mintah and could not put up with the murderous proceedings that took place on the Zong.

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book as a “treasure of recollection” (Plato in Derrida 1972, 194) for their contemporaries to know what happened. It is a fictional book that Fred D’Aguiar creates as a fictional pretext to write an extended version of the same book and remind his contemporaries of the historical facts.29 In other words, D’Aguiar partly30 creates Mintah, an orphan who (will) survive(s) slavery, as his Muse. Mintah is the Afro-Caribbean minter – the spelling of her name is evocative of a Caribbean pronunciation of the word, in the same way as “never,” to imitate that accent, can be spelled “neva” or “nevah” – and D’Aguiar’s diction in the novel deals with his (ad)diction to the haunting past she represents and mints, coins, or dictates to him in Feeding the Ghosts (Derrida 1991, 7). In this light, it is no wonder that Mintah’s book is defined, towards the end of the novel, as “penned by a ghost” (169), a “ghost-book” (173), although pejoratively so, by the crew and investors’ attorney during the trial scene.31 Neither is it surprising to read that Mr. Wilkes, the insurers’ attorney, “picked up Mintah’s book and waved it at the captain and crew and at the public gallery” (156): this is another embedded representation of what D’Aguiar does with Feeding the Ghosts: reveal the story of the Zong to the public by “brandishing” Mintah’s book. The rest of the above-cited passage from Mintah’s journal accentuates the textual doubling initiated by the phrase “the second,” as she perceives her dreamed self as her double (183). Moreover, the passage’s final word, following two occurrences of “goodbye” and another indicator of repetition – “Again and again” – is “Waves.” This designates, in the third person, her father’s gesture as she leaves, a repetitive gesture in itself, but it is also proleptic of the experience she will have of Atlantic waves, the tidalectic pattern of repetition par excellence, as seen above. Mintah, as a slave, meets the Atlantic after being captured by the Dutch at the Danish mission where she lived with her mother. Already a paternal

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Again, according to Abigail Ward, D’Aguiar reminds his contemporaries of slavery in order to counter received, official historical accounts (or white mythology), which tend to privilege the memory of European abolitionists over that of slavers and slaves, and to counter racism, which D’Aguiar perceives as the legacy of slavery (Ward 151, 156). The slave who climbed back on the Zong has existed and is a historical character (Baucom 2005, 129), but his/her characterization as Mintah is fictional. Mintah partakes both of ­fiction and reality, and this in-between position coheres with her situation on the Atlantic and her being depicted as a ghost who, again, both is and is not. Apart from that interpretation, Ward points to the suggestion that the book was written by someone else than Mintah, that is, a ghost-writer (160), which would hence translate the attorney’s assumption that people of African descent cannot master writing (Gates 129). It is also interesting to note, in this context, that a “ghost-writer,” in French, was called “un nègre,” (a negro), before it became disused, for obvious reasons.

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orphan, she then becomes a complete orphan and a slave, by being separated from her mother on the day of her capture: her mother’s parting words are that she “should keep [her] learning a secret since it would get [her] into trouble” (D’Aguiar 1997, 194), meaning that her literacy makes her a living refutation of the argument according to which Africans would be fit for slavery because of their alleged irrationality and inability to master written speech. For it is ­precisely because the Mission subverts the institution of slavery that the Dutch attack it and enslave its African members: the Mission was conducting an experiment where Africans were paid for their labor and on their land rather than transported to America, and European slavers were shown that the project was more ethical and profitable than slavery. However, by making European activities based on slaves and their transportation useless, the project threatened these businesses with bankruptcy, a thing the Dutch disapproved of as much as the education of Africans. Mintah is then captured, sold into slavery, thrown into the Atlantic before climbing back on board the Zong and hiding in its storeroom, where she finds writing material and Simon’s support. Her ability to write and her treasure trove of ink and paper in the storeroom actually – and fictionally – allow for the composition and climactic eruption of her (hypomnesic) book during the trial between the Zong’s crew and investors and their insurers, and, still fictionally speaking, for the novel itself, Feeding the Ghosts, to be written as a contemporary reminder of the Zong through which Fred D’Aguiar operates a self-reflexive tour de force where both his inspiration – Mintah – and its result (the novel) are part and parcel of the same text. For the text to be completed, it is also crucial that Simon, does not, to use Whitechapel’s words, “give [Mintah] up” (D’Aguiar 1994, 21) to the crew, but helps her to hide, provides her with the means to wash and nourish herself, falls in love with her although she gently rebukes him because of her feeling unable to love as a captive on a boat where her companions are being killed (D’Aguiar 1997, 103), offers to emancipate her thanks to his pay, and brings her journal to bear against the Zong’s crew in a British courtroom, although the crew and their investors win the case against their insurers in the end. Simon, as a character, also is the scapegoat of the crew, most of all of the cruel cook, and is believed to be a “simpleton” (80) – he often proves to be absent-minded – but he is the only one to understand the cruelty and injustice of slavery and of what is happening on board, and later feels the weight of a tormented conscience over the story of the Zong and the investors’ and crew’s victory in court. Finally, and interestingly enough, given the general argument here, he is the only crew member to be openly described as an orphan:

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The cook had always told him he had no father and that he had killed his mother at birth. […] he had been silent beside her for an age with her fluid still in his lungs until an old woman as foolish as he would become had taken pity on him and bitten through the cord, holding him upside down to drain and take in air. Then she had swaddled him in rags off her shoulders and he’d been silent throughout, and on account of all that he was irreparably stupid. (174–75) Qui accuse s’excuse. To categorize Simon this way conceals the gesture of the categorization itself. Moreover, the cook may well be lying, as it is impossible, in the novel, for Simon and readers to verify the cook’s tale. But if the cook’s version of events, regarding Simon, is of any reliability, Simon’s “silence” from the moment of his birth is of interest: as an orphan, Simon has no parent “to help and defend him” – and literally so since he was left alone in the street beside his mother’s corpse until he was rescued – and he is mute at birth, with no logos acquired yet and without his parents’ voice to speak on his behalf (Plato a, 63; Derrida 1972, 95–6). With an orphan’s voice, he is helpless at court too, despite his being in possession of the evidence of Mintah’s journal, which is deprived of power as much as he is in that it is a text, or orphaned speech, with no Mintah to claim and defend it as her progeny. Simon is, with Mintah, one of the novel’s main transatlantic foundlings, animalized through the story of his mother’s giving birth standing up (D’Aguiar 1997, 74–5), muted, illiterate (169), and persecuted by the cook, who subjects him to recurrent beatings and always calls him “simple” (175). Beaten, orphaned, and illiterate, Simon is treated like the slaves, and subsequently feels compassion for the slaves on board the Zong, understanding, through experience, the injustice of their treatment. He also is the only crew-member with whom readers might empathize.32 Finally, the unverifiable nature of the Cook’s above-cited tale, in addition to the designations of Simon as simple, and his helplessness in a court of justice, are reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “Simple Simon,” also known under the title of “Jack the Dullard” (Andersen 64–7). In Andersen’s story, Simple Simon has two brothers who respectively epitomize the scholar and the lawyer – one knows the dictionary by heart and the other can recite the laws – while he is thought of as being stupid. The three brothers leave their father’s castle to participate as suitors in a contest organized by a princess, who claims she will marry the suitor who masters speech best, and Simon wins and marries the princess thanks to the idiosyncratic nature of his speech (on cooking), 32

His mother having died giving birth to him, Simon is also comparable to Sow in Bloodlines, and Sanders Jr. in The Longest Memory.

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which had so far been mistaken as idiotic by his brothers, who lack eloquence in spite of their textual knowledge of dictionaries and laws. At the end of his narrative, Andersen invalidates his tale by saying it is unreliable, because he holds it from “printers” and, so doing, suggests that like Simon’s brothers, we should have been suspicious of knowledge derived from texts (67). In Feeding the Ghosts, Simon, like Simple Simon, has cooking skills (he is the cook’s assistant) and, in spite of his illiteracy and helplessness in court (because Mintah’s orphan text is judged unreliable too), he is the only one to gain friendship from the novel’s main female character, Mintah. Hence, Fred D’Aguiar draws from Andersen’s tale – a story that weakens the power of written speech – in Feeding the Ghosts, and the resulting intertextuality helps to strengthen the questioning of writing that occurs throughout D’Aguiar’s novels.33 2.2 All Duly Noted Mintah’s and the captain’s relations to writing, for instance, are significant in the novel. The captain, with a purpose quite opposite Mintah’s, registers the proceedings occurring on the Zong in his ledger in a way that contrasts with Mintah’s journal, and the two characters’ respective texts are set against one another during the trial chapters of the novel’s second part,34 where a third text, namely, the law, is also central. The Zong’s crew learn of the conditions in which Mintah acquired literacy long before the trial, when she is taken out of the slave-hold by Kelsal, the captain’s first mate, and explains the cause of her fluency in English.35 The revelation of her being educated worries the crew, for it implies she is “not like other slaves,” must be “familiar with whites,” and able to write, while the sailors can “barely sign their names” (31). Again, the reality of an illiterate white crew and a literate black woman directly contradicts the argument that Africans are not human because they cannot write. Mintah’s literacy and probable Christianity also unsettle the crew’s sense of superiority. The boatswain voices 33

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There also exists a nursery rhyme entitled “Simple Simon,” which consists in a dialogue between a “pie man” and Simon. The relation to cooking, here, can again be related to D’Aguiar’s Simon’s being a cook’s assistant, but is of little import for our discussion. Bénédicte Ledent also notes that Simon, in D’Aguiar’s novel, is reminiscent of Simple Simon, but does not relate that feature of the text to D’Aguiar’s problematic presentation of written speech, as her interest leads her into other, polyphonic considerations (Ledent in Misrahi-Barak, Ed. 2005). The book’s first part narrates the story of the Zong, the second part stages the trial between the Zong’s investors and their insurers, and the final part is made up of Mintah’s book and the narration of the latest moments of her life. This triptych is framed by a prologue and an epilogue that deal with the sea, memory, and slavery. The real, historical chief mate’s name was Kelsall (Baucom 2005, 10).

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this ­impression during the trial: “The African female had more than eyes to see. She could read and write. That’s a lot to have in this world. She had more than me” (162). However, he denies that literacy could entail her emancipation. Quite contrarily, he contends that “She was sold in Maryland at a price unlike anything she would have fetched were it known that in addition to her having a good command of English she could read and write as well” (161). The boatswain is lying under oath here, since the crew could deduce that Mintah was literate (31), and even dares suggesting that, had they known, “She could have helped the captain keep his ledger!” (160), which is very cynical because the captain’s ledger is the register listing the slaves he ordered overboard, Mintah included. Captain Cunningham36 is, maybe with the exception of Kelsal, the only literate crew member, and he is introduced accordingly as a reader in the novel, peering “at the dawn-lit sky and his assembled crew with the squint he reserved for reading,” with “the frown he ordinarily deployed against untidy writing or unrealistic instructions from an investor. […] How to begin? He wondered. […] ‘At the beginning, of course’” (9). Cunningham is cunning, if anything, and concentrates, trying to see through his crew as if he were reading between the lines of a text, hoping to find, written there, the argument thanks to which he will convince them to obey the “unrealistic order from an investor,” guided by a logic of profit-making, to throw a tremendous number of slaves overboard. Cunningham’s introduction is, hence, loaded with proleptic information when readers, contrarily to Kelsal, manage to “read [his] mind” (13). And just after his utterance of a highly self-reflexive speech for a novel’s incipit – “How to begin? […] ‘At the beginning, of course’” (9) – the captain gets his crew to take slaves from the hold, bring them in front of him to be registered as “lost” in his ledger, and throw them to the waves: “[…] slaves were presented to the captain, who opened a ledger which he shielded against the light and made […] strokes in it” (21). The captain’s setting his book against the light, more than a posture allowing him to see the pages, symbolically indicates that the ledger eclipses the truth, thwarts “enlightenment,” adulterates history by not registering the fact that many of the slaves were killed in spite of their good health. The ledger, as a text, then, corroborates Plato and Derrida’s idea that writing is an unreliable hypomnesic register too, albeit for different reasons.

36

Luke Collingwood was the name of the actual, historical captain of the Zong (Baucom 2005, 8). Abigail Ward argues that D’Aguiar’s decision to change the name partakes of his refusal to abide by the necessarily partial nature of official historical accounts (Ward 156). Furthermore, D’Aguiar prefers imagination as a gateway to the past, as shown below.

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Composed with the same writing material, Mintah’s journal is revealed by Simon to characters and readers during the trial scene as a piece of evidence that contradicts the Captain’s ledger, and judges have to decide which of the two accounts provides the most reliable version of events. However, at the beginning of the trial, only the captain’s account is available for judges and attorneys. Consequently, “The counsel for the investors carrie[s] himself as if he had a watertight case and Lord Mansfield’s ruling were merely a formality. There [is] the captain’s ledger, evidence in black and white and a clause to match concerning the action” (138). For the case to be called “watertight” is darkly ironic as far as what happened on the Zong is concerned, and so is the qualification of evidence as “black and white,” since black ink on white pages from the captain’s ledger is black skin thrown by pale hands to white surf. As for the law matching the action, “it states quite categorically that any measure deemed necessary by the captain can be taken to protect his stock from further loss or damage” (140). In other words, the captain might legitimize his action, make it legal, by stating that it was necessary to throw 132 Africans overboard to prevent the complete destruction of what the law categorized, at the time, as “stock,” that is, African slaves. And if the judge, Lord Mansfield, decides that this argument is legitimate, it will then create a precedent, as the insurers’ counsel, Mr. Wilkes, explains: A ruling in favor of the investors would grant permission to every captain to use these extreme measures if his stock were threatened with sickness instead of taking action to see that they are returned to health. This would turn the trade into a use of stock in the most barbaric way where their deaths in great numbers would not matter and all that would govern their conveyance from Africa to the plantations in the Indies or America would be profit. (142) Mr. Wilkes, despite his sensing the horror of the Zong, is not free of his times’ prejudice that African people may be considered as stock and treated accordingly. However, he clearly sees that if a ruling in favor of the investors was granted, it would mean – as it did for Cunningham – that only profit rules the triangular trade. Such a ruling would set a precedent, meaning, it would consist in the first application of a law that would pave the way for the legality of other mass murders predicated on profit-making. There lies the dangerous legal genealogy that could flow from such a ruling: legality and legacy share a common etymological genealogy pointing to the notion that a “precedent” actually is an “unprecedented,” orphan ruling the legacy of which would consist in the legitimation of what it legalizes through its written inscription as a

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found(l)ing text-law (Derrida 1972, 95). In other words, and in the Zong case, if Cunnigham’s false account, consigned in his ledger, is legitimized by law and allows for a ruling in favor of the Zong’s crew, it will create a genealogy of bastardized legal rulings that will not answer the condition of justice. Hence Mr Wilkes’ claim that the law, a pharmakon in itself, must be “remedied” (157). This much is at stake, but only Simon (hidden in the public assembly so far), seems to care – Wilkes only wants to win the case because he has been hired to do so, and the judge’s sole wish is to have a meal (137) – and the investors win because of the court’s racist bias, which also entails the privileging of the captain’s ledger over Mintah’s journal. At the beginning of the trial, without the evidence of Mintah’s book, Simon realizes that the truth is far from being established. He subsequently goes to the insurers’ counsel, Mr. Wilkes, and shows him Mintah’s journal to change the odds, which causes an interruption of the trial (152). Simon’s action is revelatory for readers, after pages of suspense where information concerning the nature of the book he brought is delayed (144), although this new piece of evidence is consulted in private by Lord Mansfield, Mr Wilkes, and Simon during the interruption, and its contents are only reproduced for readers to consult after the trial scene in the novel: when the trial resumes, Lord Mansfield seems disappointed by the crew, reminds them that they are under oath, and asks them to come a second time to the witness box. He explains, however, that Simon “does not wish to speak, and the court has no desire to force him to do so. He maintains that everything that he would say is said ten times better in this slave’s book” (154). The only time he speaks during the trial is when he is not invited to do so, and in reaction to Kelsal’s claim that Mintah was mad and that her testimony is unreliable: “Simon jumped up to his feet and shouted at Lord Mansfield ‘He is lying m’ lord! He is lying!’ Lord Mansfield hammered his desk and silenced Simon” (158). When Simon speaks, his voice as an orphan (both a foundling and Mintah’s sole true defender) is denied power. Moreover, as explained above, Simon’s status as a muted foundling-witness and Mintah’s position as an absent slave whose orphan book cannot be defended implicitly announce that despite its reliability, Mintah’s account has little chance of supplanting the captain’s ledger as the most accurate version of events, Cunningham being present to defend his text. However, when Cunningham is called to the witness box, he feels that since Mintah’s book has emerged, the law that he thought guided his actions on the Zong is no longer on his side, and finds himself unable to speak, while one of his intentions was, as expected, to show that “He failed to see how they could weigh his ledger and the testimonies of the crew against that slave’s ramblings” (164). Knowing that Mintah’s journal opens with a dream, Kelsal’s argument

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that Mintah was mad and the captain’s perception of Mintah’s text as “ramblings,” in addition to the Boatswain’s description of the account as a “foolish book full of fanciful claims” (161), are reminiscent of Whitechapel’s erroneous dismissal of dreams and recollection as fantasy in The Longest Memory (D’Aguiar 1994, 136). The Second Mate goes even further than that by stating that everything told in the trial about Mintah must have been invented: An African female who can speak English, who is thrown overboard and climbs up the side of a sailing ship and to crown it all finds the time to write in her hideaway on board! Not possible. I think she must be able to be in two places at the same time. I look and I see not one woman but a lot of people playing the part of one woman. I see insurers cooking up the whole plot […] (162) This statement is both sexist and racist, questioning the physical abilities of a woman, and her intellectual potential as an African. That she “turns up again” and might “be able to be in two places at the same time,” in addition to her relation to writing, which itself is a repetition or a copy of a logos some believe to be inspired by genial agents (Derrida 1991, 7), helps again to relate Mintah to the image of the “ghost,” of the phantom-pharmakos who inspired D’Aguiar to write the novel. The investors’ counsel, Mr. Drummond, takes up the second mate’s argument in his last statement, convinces the judge and wins the case over: “‘It is my contention that this slave’s account is a fabrication by the insurers and as such it should not have been admitted as evidence because a slave could not have written it” (168) for, still according to Drummond, the captain would not have treated Mintah, a literate African woman, as a slave. Cunningham actually did mistreat Mintah, but denies it at court. As a consequence, the crew’s lies win over the honesty of Mintah’s account because of her absence and her status as an enslaved African woman. As a result, Simon regretfully thinks: “He should not have given up Mintah’s memory and that of the other slaves to Mr. Wilkes. […] Simon grabbed the book and ran from Chancery Lane. (173–74, 176). The designation of Mintah’s book as her memory indicates again that her text is a valuable means of recollection that provides a reliable, albeit imaginative, gateway to the past. Mintah’s memory is also of great importance for Simon, since in addition to her book as the hypomnesis of her experience of slavery, Mintah’s memory actually supplements Simon’s absent-mindedness on the ship. For instance, during Simon and Mintah’s first encounter, Simon reproaches Mintah for making him forget what he is supposed to do and, subsequently, risk being punished by the Cook. Mintah replies: “I’ll help you remember” (59). The answer is, of

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course, equivocal since, as a writer, Mintah masters a hypomnesic craft that may alter one’s actual memory or anamnesis. In this sense, it is not accidental for Mintah, as a writer/pharmakos, to be both a source of oblivion and recollection for Simon. Furthermore, her statement that she will “help you remember” can be considered, in a second reading, as foreshadowing the writing of her journal, the aim of which is to remind its readers of what happened on the Zong.37 2.3 Pharmakaï Both as an author and ambivalent reminder, Mintah can thus be considered a pharmakos, all the more so since, as the end of the novel’s first part reveals, she was Kelsal’s nurse at the Danish mission (131). Such characteristics, for one thing, strikingly reinforce the analogical relation, suggested above, that operates between Mintah and Fred D’Aguiar as authorial figures: both are (psychiatric) nurses who became authors of reminders of slavery. Moreover, it is Kelsal’s amnesia subsequent to a fit of yellow fever that Mintah cures, as she explains in her book: “I know him from his days as a thief at the mission when he had to work for his freedom and he did not know his name and had to be told who he was time and again” (187). Ironically, Kelsal got sick and amnesic working hard to recover his freedom after stealing from the mission. In this sense, he has experienced a form of slavery as forced-work, and lost memory as a result: Mintah, his nurse, constantly reminds him of his name and whereabouts (195). Thus, as a writer and a nurse, she is a pharmakos who, like texts, provides hypomnesic cure by restoring memory.38 But Kelsal ungratefully denies her role at the mission during the trial: “My lord, I accept that this Mintah may have remembered me from the fort, but I do not remember her” (158). Ironically enough, Kelsal denies that Mintah cured his amnesia by saying he does not remember, although he does, and his meeting her again on board the Zong is described as follows: “She had returned into his life like a recurring fever” (131) In other words, she, like writing, operates as a pharmakon that cures recurrent fever and amnesia. Yet, Kelsal does not want to remember this part of his past as a kind of slave who fell sick and was cared 37

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In her book, Mintah relates another, similar dialogue she had with Simon: “‘I forgot to lock the door again.’ ‘I know. But you remembered and came back and locked it, that’s good.’ ‘Why is it good, Mintah, if I forgot to lock it?’ ‘Because you remembered and corrected your mistake.’ ‘But I forgot’” (201). The interplay between remembering, reminding, forgetting, and repetition echo again the nature of writing – epitomized by Mintah as an authorial figure – as both hypomnesic gift and anamnesic poison. Ferentz Lafargue believes that, more than acting as a nurse, Mintah plays a maternal role for Kelsal, because she is the woman who teaches him how so say his name (again) (in Misrahi-Barak, Ed., 2005).

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for by African people (whom he alleges to be inferior), because it is humiliating in his eyes, and he does not want anyone to know. This explains why, during the Zong’s crossing of the Atlantic, Kelsal is so suspicious of Mintah and afraid of what she might say, when he realizes she is in the hold, shouting his name, that he beats and gags her (33). Later, he watches her being punished and does not intervene, despite the cruelty of her punishment, consisting in the horrible violation and torture of putting pepper in her eyes and genitalia (215). ­Finally, when she gets back on board, organizes a mutiny among slaves (87), and ultimately gets caught, the crew shackles her and her companion mutineers on deck and make them watch the other slaves being thrown overboard (87). Subsequently to these acts of torture, Mintah gets “near to distraction,” and subjected to spasms, so much so that the members of the crew have to act as pharmakaï in turn, to wash her and force-feed her to restore her health – and value for auction (132–33). The crew also act as pharmakaï because the doctor has died when the epidemic of “vomiting and diarrhea” spread from slaves to crew, leaving everyone on board panic-stricken (12). The professional pharmakos being dead, the captain decides to get rid of the epidemic – and hence act a pharmakos in turn – by throwing all the sick overboard rather than trying to nurse them,39 appointing Kelsal as yet another pharmakos, whose task consists in identifying the sick from the non-sick: “[…] he was here to identify the severest cases when many picked at random would easily qualify as such” (20). The difficulty of identifying the victims of the pharmakon that kills everyone on board is exacerbated by the darkness of the ship’s hold, which makes Kelsal unable to “distinguish between man and man” (19). As a consequence, and quite tragically, soon after the killing starts, the crew no longer tries to make distinctions and healthy children and adults are thrown overboard, including Mintah who, as a literate, nursing pharmakos, might actually have been able to save her companions had the crew accepted to listen to her as a nurse despite her status as an orphan-slave. Instead of designating her as a healer, Kelsal, at the trial, tries to legitimate the attempted murder of Mintah by saying “she was not a doctor” (49), not a good pharmakos, but a mad, disobedient person, a bad pharmakon whose ailment “infects the others into similar disregard for authority” (158, emphasis mine). Kelsal is lying because he threw Mintah, his former healer overboard just to avoid the revelation of his past to the crew. Conversely, and in the same way 39

In the historical version of the story, Captain Collingwood actually was the Zong’s surgeon (Baucom 2005, 10). It is also darkly ironic to find out, in this context, that the ship’s name was the result of a misspelling, for she was supposed to be called the “Zorg,” which means “care” in Dutch (Philip 208).

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as Mr. Whitechapel designates fugitive slaves as poisonous (D’Aguiar 1994, 15), the captain describes Mintah’s dissent as viral: “Behavior liable to fuel discontent and promote an insurrection among the slaves was the worst sickness of all” (D’Aguiar 1997, 48). By the same token, the captain’s association of Mintah with sickness legitimizes, in his eyes, her being thrown overboard. Moreover, the captain is a pharmakos who writes texts that bastardize the past and, hence, alter the memory of the Zong’s slaves: Cunningham “doctors” the truth in his ledger which, however, is not a fully orphaned logos since he stands on its behalf at the trial, and on board, by pushing his men “at their wits’ end” until he has traced the appropriate number of “strokes” for dead slaves to make the Zong’s venture profitable. Such a fathering of his book – “He looked as if he was nursing a baby and trying to soothe it the way he had his arms clasped round his ledger” (96–7) – induce “the crew [to] regard him as the progenitor of all their discontent” (D’Aguiar 1997, 128). Two pages before in the novel, the captain is even described as a mischievous magician, and his pen as a wand (126), which confirms that he is the novel’s evil pharmakos, set against Mintah as an actual nurse and reliable writer.40 To a lesser extent, even the Zong’s cook stands as a pharmakos, since his food is described as poison: “He faced eternal abuse from the crew for his concoctions. Many of the ship’s ailments were often blamed on the unidentifiable contents of his pot. When the surgeon was alive he took some of the abuse, but with his death the cook faced twice the invective overnight” (43). Conversely, when Mintah comes back on board and tries to plan a mutiny among the slaves, she tells them to “eat all their food, even if it taste[s] like poison” (93). The cook is thus the crew’s scapegoat/pharmakos (Derrida 1972, 62), held responsible for the problems of the Zong because of his food, which is designated as a bad pharmakon. However, as the Cook explains, he does not cook pharmaka, but is actually forced to make do with what food there is, and believes his dishes for slaves are “wasted on them” as they need “medicine or a miracle” (44). In the absence of medicine and miracle, only Mintah can preserve these victims from oblivion in her journal. But writing is not the only element that exacerbates Mintah’s status as a pharmakos, for, after her traumatic experience of the Middle Passage, she spends most of her time nursing herself, or rather, her mind, relying on the healing powers of other activities, such as sculpting in wood the slaves who have died at sea: after having been sold in Maryland 40

Of course, his “nursing” of books and his being described as a magician also suggests that Cunningham’s characterization might be intertextually related to that of Prospero in The Tempest (Shakespeare 2008), “a text often claimed as a founding (masculine) narrative of Caribbean literature” (DeLoughrey 2007a,79).

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and living there as a slave, she runs away because slavers found out she was helping other slaves to flee via the Underground Railroad (207), and arrives in Jamaica, to actually live in the type of wooden house she has been wishing for (63), and calls it her “hold” (208). Not a mere pun on household, her calling her house a hold is a dark reminder of the slave-hold in which she crossed the Atlantic. There, she stores the wooden sculptures: “There are 131 of them. A veritable army. And I have been working on another for months now […]” (209). The number 131 corresponds to that of slaves who were thrown from the Zong and drowned, while the 132nd is, of course, Mintah herself. She has been working on “it,” on herself actually, for months and years, trying to consign in material form the memory of what happened in order to get over it. The activity of sculpting is therefore therapeutic for Mintah, a good pharmakon through which she fights “against forgetting with wood as her guide” (210).41 However, most visitors do not understand the sculptures: “If only they could see that what they lay their hands on is a treasure, that it harbours the past, that it houses the souls of the dead […]” (208). Some of them actually understand and see “figures reaching out of the depths,” but such a past “unsettles their stomach” (209), just as ghosts would, and makes them unwilling to take the figurines home. Abigail Ward argues that Mintah’s sculptures have a hypomnesic role that prevents Mintah from forgetting her experience of slavery, to the extent that her memory of it recurs to re-traumatize her, ultimately killing her, as the hypomnesic traces of her trauma – the wooden sculptures – feed the flames that burn her “hold” and kill her at the end of the novel, which is then a pessimistic closure according to Ward, because it implicitly suggests that the weight of the traumatic memory of slavery cannot be alleviated (Ward 161–62). However, Mintah’s failure to forget is not so clear-cut. First, Mintah might actually not keep notes in a personal diary to compensate for “her failing memory” (D’Aguiar 1997, 222), but to free her anamnesis from the weight of the past, since she designates writing as “forgetting on paper” (196), and becomes amnesic in old age (222).42 Second, she does not seem to experience her death by fire – it is unclear whether it is suicidal or not – as a painful resignation into 41 42

With the same purpose, she plants a coconut grove, “one tree for each soul lost on the Zong” (219). In this sense, Ward’s suggestion that writing offers no relief from the memory of slavery is debatable (Ward 163–64). Moreover, her contention that “Because [Mintah’s] previous attempt at writing her story was discounted [by a British tribunal], rather than narrating her story again, she instead carves figures of those that were jettisoned” (161–62), is tenuous, because the novel does not state whether Mintah knows what has become of her book and if it has been of any help for the commemoration, by others, of those who

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despair, but as a liberating moment: instead of panicking, as she burns, she thinks of the fire as a hand that carves her body in the same way as she carved wood, and compares the sensation of heat burning her lungs to that of water choking her when she was thrown into the sea. Conversely, she compares the flames as a transubstantiation of her sculptures that is analogous to the dilution of slaves in water. In this sense, she is ultimately being reminded of her past, but delivered – sculpted by fire – from it in the same way as the ghosts of her slave friends are freed from the wooden sculptures: “The spirits carved in those figures fled into the wooded hills” (226) of Jamaica, like maroons, slaves fleeing from the plantations to live freely in the island’s interior. In sum, Mintah progressively, albeit partly, loses memory (222), and is then delivered from the remains of her terrible past through death, which may only be viewed as a “pessimistic” closure if that closure is considered final. Yet, since the “shadows,” or ghosts resulting from the fire are “freed” and leave, the novel does not suggest death as a definite closure and, to use D’Aguiar’s words, in this sense, the novel’s ending is pessimistic “save your belief in ghosts” (D’Aguiar 1989, 8).43 Furthermore, not content with freeing as many American slaves as those who died on the Zong, sculpting 131 figurines and planting the same number of trees, Mintah sews, reads, writes, and teaches these skills to others. She sews as she waits for Simon to show up one day on Jamaican shores, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return, except that Mintah, although she burns her statues, never undoes her weft, and keeps on having a close relationship to texts – ­texture is fabric (Derrida 1972, 79), and it is not fortuitous for Mintah to write as much as she sews. Like Lydia in The Longest Memory, she also teaches people how to read and write by “counting in song, the alphabet tied to animals, multiplication tables in rhyme, spelling contests, places in the world, dates, recipes for certain illnesses, hygiene” (204, my emphasis): once again, Mintah uses her abilities as a pharmakos to teach how to produce pharmaka,

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drowned in the passage, and because Mintah relies on writing until the end of her life. She does not favor carving over writing, but uses both. Fatim Boutros views Mintah’s creative endeavors not as failures, but as successful attempts at “elevat[ing] her memories from trauma to symbol” (Boutros 39) through the generation of hypomnesic work too: “Her artistic expression is her ultimate victory against her life-defying environment” (131). See his book for a study of self-representation and trauma in Feeding the Ghosts and The Longest Memory. Also, if Mintah’s death by fire is reminiscent of Bertha’s – Mrs. Rochester’s Caribbean first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – climactic and desperate passing, Mintah’s death differs from it in intent. For more information on Jane Eyre’s relation to the Caribbean, and to its revision by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, see Thieme 2001. Paula Burnett sees Mintah’s death by fire as reminiscent of the Greek myths telling the stories of nymphs and women turning to trees in order to escape rape. She also suspects that Mintah’s death is an evocation of the Hindu ritual of sati (Burnett 23).

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both as writing and as home-made remedies. The importance she gives to hygiene is relevant too, considering the horrendous conditions in which she and her companions had to live on the Zong. The fact that, in the last years of her life, she becomes amnesic and cannot write anymore, are also compensated for by the children she has made literate, and who can thus act as pharmakaï in turn and “harbour the past” in a written, collective memory for following generations to remember, and prevent the Atlantic from becoming a “sea of forgetting” (191) while it actually stands, in the novel, and as seen in Chapter 2, as another pharmakos-text, an eraser-reminder where the Zong victims “have their lives written on salt water,” in transatlantic bloodlines.44 3 Bloodlines45 A bloodline, basically, is a line of descent. However, adding a plural suffix to the word complicates the notion. And more than an indication that two parents and, hence, the genealogies of two families (consanguinity apart) coming forth from countless other couples of families, are required in the conception of an individual, Bloodlines, as the title of Fred D’Aguiar’s fourth novel, also designates the two ethnic geni at play in the making of Sow, its protagonist. He, like Chapel in The Longest Memory, was born of miscegenation, after Christy, a Southern slaver’s son, raped Faith, one of his neighbor’s slaves. Once again, the unexplainable happens when Christy and Faith fall in love during the initial rape episode, and are subsequently banished by Christy’s father. Like Chapel and Lydia, they then try to go North via the Underground Railroad with the help of Tom and Stella. However, they are captured, Faith is sold back into slavery to the Mason family and separated from Christy, who is forced to work as an indentured boxer. Faith is pregnant and will choose to be operated on – by a surgeon/pharmakos – and die giving birth to Sow, who will never meet his father, rather than to live on and let Sow die.

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This sentence, or others like “The sea current turns pages of memory” may be viewed as a romantic intertextual node, insofar as it is reminiscent of Keats’ epitaph “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” pointing to the fragility of posterity. In this context, it is also unsettling to find that Shelley, who mourned Keats in the poem “Adonaïs,” died by drowning, a collection of Keats’ poems in his pocket. (Stacey 2016, Shelley 1829). Ward’s reading of Bloodlines relies on theories of post- and counter-memory more than on “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and contends “that the trauma of slavery can never entirely be ‘worked through.’ Slavery, [D’Aguiar] repeatedly tells us, persists in the racism of today” (Ward 178). The present reading differs from and complements that of Ward by developing the argument concerning the mnemonic and orph(an)ic structure of writing.

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Hence, like Sanders Jr. in The Longest Memory and Simon in Feeding the Ghosts, Sow becomes a maternal orphan at birth. Again, Sow’s mother had the choice – if such a dead-end situation can be called so – to survive through abortion, or to die giving birth to Sow, who explains that Faith “died that [he] might live. A mother’s gift / of life to her son” (D’Aguiar 2000, 44, emphasis mine), a present that is both a blessing and a curse, a pharmakon for Sow, who has to bear the burden of his mother’s self-sacrifice. Also, because of the racial hatred involved in the separation of his parents and his orphanhood, he cannot die until he cures America from racism, which he calls slavery’s “offspring” (150, 152), the “two-hundred-year-old headache” he is subjected to and does not manage to “nurse” (156), until he apparently gets stabbed by the end of the twentieth century, when “Somehow black people free themselves” (160) but manages to “make it to the other side of the century” (160) and die in 2000, “the new millennium” (150), when Bloodlines was published. Slavery and its progeny are thus related diseases or bad pharmaka that Sow, pharmakos against his will, has to cure to become mortal. His mission forces him to live on for approximately 140 years, from 1861 (60) through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement, to the dawn of the 21st century, and Bloodlines thus stands as a fictional account of late African-American history, suggesting that the title also designates lines “written in the blood of martyrs” (155), of those whose (interracial) love was thwarted and/or who died at the hands of racists, verses tracing a genealogy of inter-ethnic love and hate in the United States, making Sow, rather than Whitechapel, the character with “the longest memory” in Fred D’Aguiar’s novels. 3.1 Plaited Plots From its onset, Bloodlines is strongly related to The Longest Memory as a story told by multiple narrators and dealing with miscegenation. But while Whitechapel, an orphan’s adoptive father, is the main character in D’Aguiar’s first novel, it is the orphan, Sow whom readers follow in Bloodlines. Moreover, in Bloodlines, all narrators, Sow included, tell the story in verse, like Chapel in D’Aguiar’s first novel. In this sense, both Sow and Chapel are mixed-race orphan narrators born of miscegenational unions and expressing themselves in verse, suggesting that Bloodlines is related to The Longest Memory as one of its parents in the genealogies of Fred D’Aguiar’s novels. They share genes that have been plaited into different phenotypical textures. Plait imagery is actually recurrent in Bloodlines, and designates the union of Christy and Faith, along with Sow as the child resulting from it. For instance, when Christy and Faith make love, their tongues are described as “two writhing cup- / snakes trying to make a reef knot” (D’Aguiar 2000, 10). The erotic image

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of their tongues forming a plait of intertwining snakes is not fortuitous, according to their names, and suggests that temptation – symbolized by the snake, as in Genesis – is what relates Christy, or “Christ” as he is once nicknamed in the novel (69) to “Faith.” At this point in the novel, Christy and Faith are in love and their intercourse no longer amounts to rape. Christy’s being erotically tempted by Faith can be metaphorically read as a temptation free of sin, in that it is natural, and recommended, for “Christ” to be tempted by “Faith,” and counters the ideas that not resisting temptation is necessarily sinful for Christians, and that interracial love is a sin according to the Southern white Christians among whom Christy and Faith live (38). But the image of the “cup-snake,” in relation to Christy and Faith, does not necessarily require Christian interpretations: the “cup-snakes” are evocative of the snakes surrounding the respective staffs and cups of medical symbols deriving from Hermes’ caduceus and the rod of Asclepius, the god of medicine in Greek mythology, whose daughter, Hygieia, goddess of hygiene, is often represented with a cup from which a snake is about to drink: the “cup of Hygieia,” is now known as the emblem of pharmacists. Thus, on the one hand, if the tongues of Christy and Faith intertwine like “cup snakes” into a knot, they could be viewed as representing the scepter of the messenger of gods, Hermes’ caduceus, and contribute to a metaphorical definition of the characters’ (interracial) love as divine, which would converge with the religious nature of Christy’s and Faith’s names. On the other hand, if their tongues erotically join to evoke Asclepius’ staff or Hygieia’s cup, they might be indicative of the healing nature of interracial love in a world poisoned by the racist system of slavery. In other words, the two characters’ love is depicted as a good pharmakon, in spite of its being forbidden, and risks being condemned and punished by plantation authorities.46 Both lovers are aware of these risks, and if their love is a present to them, it will indeed be seen by ­others as 46

In this perspective, Ward’s sense of “a pervading cynicism regarding the potential of relationships between mixed-race couples” (166) in Bloodlines, along with her contention that D’Aguiar “questions the simplicity and idealism of the transformative power of love” (Ward 172) and that “hopes for a harmonious future for black and white are dashed in Bloodlines” (170), since Christy and Faith are separated because of slavery and Faith dies giving birth to Sow, showing “the ultimate failure of interracial love as a vehicle for transforming the legacies of [slavery]” (170), may be qualified: although slavery and racism do condition the tragic deaths of Christy, Faith, and Sow, it is only to make interracial love more desirable in the present, as a means to avoid the pain deriving from the legacies of slavery, and such love is idealized as a heavenly – and hence, enviable – situation at the novel’s close. Of course, the ending is sad, since only in death can Christy and Faith freely love one another, but it is not presented in a cynical tone at all. Ward does not study the novel’s end in her book, and only mentions that “D’Aguiar declines to provide a happy ending” (170).

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poisonous: it is a pharmakon. The two lovers want it to “infect” them (8), but as they make love, they are not worried by the potential consequences of their actions, for they are “Not thinking about diseases […] / Nor white redress; a sickness in itself.” (69). In these two lines, sexually transmissible diseases are compared to “white redress,” or the punishment Christy and Faith might face if caught, because of the racist codes of slavery, here defined as bad pharmaka. But the lovers are not afraid, even the next day, when Faith […] lay on her stomach with her knees bent, her crossed bare feet swaying, pieces of straw plaiting in her neat hands in an absentminded fashion, but not idle: she saw those plaits as them under last night’s big tent punctured by stars […]. D’Aguiar 2000, 12

Her thinking about them on a starry night is reminiscent of Chapel and Lydia’s nocturnal meetings to read to each other in The Longest Memory. The plait metaphor is extended with the image of Faith’s “crossed bare feet” and the straws she plaits in her hands as a trope of how her body and Christy’s intertwined the night before. Sow takes up the metaphor later on too, explaining that his parents “wove two threads, a black and a white life, / into one bolt of cloth shredded by their time” (38). But before being torn apart, they are banished from the plantation, and wander until a storm breaks and forces them to take shelter at a crossroads below a tree where they sit “on roots / spiraling above ground from that oak tree, / the tangled roots of their confusion if the truth / be told” (19). Christy and Faith are at a crossroads – where roads intersect like threads in a weft – sitting on “tangled roots,” which extend the plait metaphor again. In further plaiting, the image of the “tangled roots” leads back to Wordsworth’s poem “Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman” in the Lyrical Ballads. In “Simon Lee,” the poetic persona is secluded in his poetic consciousness as he watches an old man struggle to rid his plot of land of a bad root, an objective correlative of his swollen feet (Bonnecase & Porée 92), which forces him to face his human condition as an aging, mortal being. Feeling sympathy for Simon Lee, the poetic persona exits poetic consciousness into a sociable state of being, takes the old man’s tool and breaks the “tangled root” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 108) with an ease that accentuates the old man’s weakness to the point of finally making the poetic persona feel ill at ease (Bonnecase & Porée 95). “Simon Lee” is a homo-social scene that shows men are related by their common struggle against helplessness (98), and that another human

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being’s help, though kind, might just contribute to the helper’s own sense of helplessness. Such “participatory pathos” (96) is repetitively alluded to in the poem’s four last stanzas thanks to derivatives of the word “kind”: one reads “kindly” (Wordsworth & Coleridge 107) and “unkind, kindly” (108). The end of the poem thus draws attention to the plural signification of “kind” as well, in that it is a poem about being kind to one’s kind, or kin, in times of helplessness when human beings are made to face their fragile condition. Thus, one kind of thing that relates human beings into a common genealogy – genealogy being the language of kinship, of grouping kin kinds – is their helplessness and their power (at their consciences’ peril) to invoke another person’s kindness in sharing one’s potentially helpless condition.47 As far as Christy and Faith are concerned, in Bloodlines, the “tangled roots” they are sitting on, like the “tangled root” Simon Lee tries to cut, are openly described, in a pathetic fallacy, as relative to their confusing situation, in the above-cited lines (19). The two lovers are quite helpless too, alone to face the storm. But helplessness and confusion are not the only things to link them: their love is another kind of link through which they become kind to one another and made kin in spite of the racist prejudices that surround them: Christy is described as “stranger and kin” to Faith (150), because they do not have the same bloodlines, but share the same human condition and love one another, and D’Aguiar’s discrete allusion to the “tangled root” of Wordsworth’s poem of kindness shows that black people and white people are kin whatever racists say, by infusing new meanings in a romantically rooted trope. Hence, in addition to the Bible and images where physical elements intertwine, a romantic thread weaves itself and adds to the texture of Fred D’Aguiar’s novel, all the more so since it is written in ottava rima, a form famously used by another romantic poet, Lord Byron, in Don Juan. Ward argues that D’Aguiar chooses verse over prose in order to avoid writing a slave-narrative “simulacrum,” and to exceed the “normalizing” and/or stereotyping vogue of writing (fictional) accounts of slavery in prose (Ward 172–73). She also explains that ottava rima is an appropriate form for the 19th century narrative, since it was first used in that century by the likes of Byron (165). Considering the romantic intertextuality the novel shares with Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, as has just been shown, one may confirm that form coheres with contents. However, Ward persists in finding the form “awkward,” with a “faltering rhythm” and a language made “unwieldy” by “anachronisms,” since the narrative voice makes twentieth-­century references to mtv (Ward 172; D’Aguiar 2000, 15, 17). Ward in turn explains that such an 47

The significance of Wordsworth’s influence on D’Aguiar’s works is clarified at length in Chapter 5.

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intricate language is deliberately used by D’Aguiar to prevent easy access to the difficult past of slavery, and to avoid its simplification, its over-­appropriation through fiction and over-identification with the story, which could foster retraumatization through its dark tale of slavery. Although Ward’s argument is justified, some reservations must be formulated about it: the rhythm of the text, mainly made of hexameters, appears to be more regular than “faltering,” and the anachronistic relationship between nineteenth-century form and twentieth-century language translates the period covered by Sow’s supernatural longevity, in addition to blending serious and comic elements in the same way as Byron does in the ottava rimas of Don Juan.48 In this sense, the reception of the text as “unwieldy” might be based on a subjective impression rather than founded an objective factors. Moreover, the relation between form and contents also makes a lot of sense in terms of magic(al) realism and historical inversion, as shown in Chapter 5. At the crossroads, and like Simon Lee, Christy and Faith end up being helped by kind Tom, who takes them on his cart and into the Underground Railroad that helps slaves to escape, in order to give them a chance to live together up North. But the trio is ambushed, the lovers captured and separated never to meet again: their love-plait risks being undone. Or so it seems, for the “tangled roots” are not only a trope for Christy and Faith’s state of mind or situation, but also a metaphor via which the plot of land on which they sit comes to represent the knotting of the novel’s plot, in that it invokes the intertextual genealogy of Bloodlines as much as it is indicative of what is to come forth from the lovers’ inter-ethnic union, that is, Sow, the double-helix of whose dna is yet another plait that the weft of the novel begets to become its main, mixed-race narrator: “this body with two bloodlines in its veins” (D’Aguiar 2000, 2) which, at birth, was “folded like plaited dough” (41, italics mine). Moreover, all of the initial, plaited events of the story are narrated, bound together by Sow in an incipit that bears the same title as that of the novel’s last chapter, as if to frame the tale being told: “I and I.” This title blends the novel’s Biblical intertext with a Caribbean, Rastafarian reading of it (Frias 2002a, 682), by way of which Sow, as the inter-ethnic offspring of Christy and Faith, becomes a tropicality. Conversely, and graphically speaking, the two “I”’s in the novel, two vertical linear letters, evoke the two bloodlines that have been plaited to conceive Sow as the first offspring, or gen(i)us, of Christy and Faith’s inter-ethnic genealogy. 48

In addition, Kathie Birat argues that ottava rima aptly exacerbates the narrative’s relation to the past, and allows for the use of different “figures of rhetoric to expresss the paradoxical nature of slavery.” Moreover, she explains that, in Bloodlines, the qualities of the poetic voice help one to explore, through sound, sense, and rhyme, the emotional implications of the tale (Birat 2018, 56–68).

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However, Sow’s self portrayals and his relations to other characters in the novel might call for a designation of him as “hybrid” rather than as a tropical. I prefer tropicality to Homi Bhabha’s definition of hybridity because, as explained above, tropicality is not about the confrontation of one cultural element to another, but deals with the rotating, tropic movement of the one becoming the other, becoming the one in turn again in the making of a crosscultural identity that is always-already in the making, and not necessarily in a conflictual way. Moreover, Bhabha’s use of hybridity operates as white mythology insofar as it disregards the – potentially offending – bastard and porcine etymology of the word. However, considering that Faith’s son is designated as a “Sow,” a non-white-mythological and cross-cultural understanding of hybridity may aptly serve to designate Sow’s tropical characterization: [Mrs Mason] called me, a boy, ‘Sow,’ and ‘Sow’ stayed with me among everybody on the plantation. I was a sombre child, morose, sour-faced No mother and no father to speak to anyone about […]. D’Aguiar 2000, 45

It is unclear what Sow’s official name is. Sow only “fancies,” or imagines, that Faith “said the name Mrs Mason / consented [him] having” (43), but the name is unspecified.49 Readers can only know that Mrs. Mason nicknamed him “Sow” and that if “sow” designates the animal, when capitalized, it both animalizes and feminizes Faith’s son and, as far as the animal is concerned, it makes Sow’s name a pejorative, hybrid designation of his tropicality as a mixed-race baby, as the substantiation of Christy and Faith’s inter-ethnic love. For Sow is such a substantiation indeed, as his self-depiction as a “sombre child, morose, sourfaced” (45) shows: sombre and morose evoke dark mood as much as Sow’s dark skin. The prefix mor- evokes the darkness of the “moor” and his being 49

Ward believes Sow was named Christy after his father, and decides to call him “the narrator” in her study, so as to avoid confusion (Ward 214, n. 53). It is true that, in the novel, Sow claims once, to Mr. Mason, during his childhood, that his name is “Christy Mason,” but Mr. Mason, who does not want the child to bear his name, directly tells him he is a “liar,” and nothing confirms that “Christy Mason” is Sow’s official name (D’Aguiar 2000, 48). And if “Sow” is only a nickname that came from Mrs. Mason’s comparing Christy’s son, as shown below, to a “spoiled sow” just before Sow states that “She called [him], a boy, ‘Sow,’” the nickname nevertheless “stayed with [him] among everybody” (45), while his real name is never clearly specified. As a consequence, this book shall call Christy’s son Sow, so as to differentiate him from his father, and because of the novel’s metaphorical riffs on the porcine and the seed that are used to designate Sow and his parents.

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“more” too, both black and white, yet neither of the two. It also is reminiscent of Plato and Derrida’s description of written speech as a moribund logos and orphan, both of which Sow is as he speaks through the pages (Derrida 1972, 95–6), sometimes describing himself as a “blank book” (47). Sow’s being “sourfaced”50 also presents his body as textual, by analogy with Whitechapel, and is indicative of the fact that Sow might have somatised or transcribed his story (or History for that matter) and the emotions it caused onto his body: he bears the weight of a racist past that orphaned him, and his skin color symbolizes the inter-ethnic union of Christy and Faith. Just before he deals with his name and personality in the above-cited passage, Sow talks, at the end of the preceding stanza, about Mrs. Mason’s51 bad opinion of him: “Mrs Mason said it to me once in anger, how she would be better off with [Faith] instead of me, how / [Faith’s] death was a waste for this spoiled sow” (45, emphasis mine). Although Sow believes the designation is porcine (45), Mrs Mason’s use of the word “sow” may both refer to the animal and to a bastardized seed(ing). Conversely, when Christy finally finds Faith’s grave at the Masons,’ “He castigates himself for planting the seed / that cost Faith her life” (140, emphasis mine).52 In this sense, Sow’s name does not only designate the animal but the hybridized seed born from the fecundation of his black mother and white father’s gametes. The name, being polysemous, is thus a hybrid signifier designating a signified – Sow – viewed as hybrid, all the more so since “sow” is used as a name while it actually is a verb the metaphorical use of which mainly serves to introduce feelings or ideas causing trouble, that is, the problems Christy and Mrs. Mason blame on Sow. In the same way as Whitechapel thinks that his adopted son, being of mixed-race, is half the master of his destiny and belongs to a category of trouble-making slaves (D’Aguiar 1995, 27), 50

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The adjective “sour” also evokes bitterness, bile, and, by (metaphorical) extension, anger. In conjunction with Sow’s dark mood, this attribute contributes to a more precise vision of Sow as melancholic, prone to the effects of “black bile” which, when constant, according to Aristotle, is a factor of genius (Aristotle 83): as shown in Chapter 5, racism is the source of Sow’s melancholy as much as that of his supernatural powers. Of course, “Mason” is onomastically significant, as explained below. “Castigation” and “castration” share the same Latin root castus, “cut off, separated; pure.” In this sense, Christy’s self-punishment corresponds to a desire for self-castration in order to prevent painful (his)stories from happening again, since his “seed” partly caused Faith’s death and Sow’s orphanhood and subsequent enslavement to the task of cutting slavery and its legacies off in order to lose immortality. Moreover, Sow, being part of this legacy, needs to die for the legacy to disappear, and for death to reunite him with his parents and abolish his orphanhood at the novel’s end. The wish for metaphorical castration also coheres, then, with D’Aguiar’s stated desire – also cited by Ward in a different context – to “kill slavery off” (Ward 169; D’Aguiar 1996b, 125).

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Sow is seen and considers himself as “master, / slave and overseer bringing disaster” (152), “wrong-doer and wronged” (153). The last lines of the novel’s first stanza, where Sow introduces himself, now take on their full sense: I could see clearly the moment I popped out how my life would be because I had two seeds between my legs and a pointer due South. I must mention my two seeds brown; in this time brown did not stick around. D’Aguiar 2000, 1

Sow’s genitalia, the means of transmission of his genus, is marked by the conditions of his birth in the Southern, pro-slavery states of America, as a mixedrace child defying, with his in-between shade, the black and white categories ruling the society he grows up in. Like Chapel, Sow is the category that defies (Southern) categorizations. Unlike Chapel, his adoptive “parents,” Mr. and Mrs. ­Mason, are slavers. Mr. Mason, like Whitechapel, is quite helpless faced with Sow’s hybridity, as he explains to the child: “you’re nobody, neither black nor white! / You occupy a no-man’s-land! […] We don’t quite / know what to do with you, so nothing’s done!” (48). As for Mrs. Mason, she, like Mintah at the end of Feeding the Ghosts, is old, with failing sight and in need of someone to help her to walk and to read to her. As a consequence, she teaches Sow how to “write and read,” which “save[s him] from a life of slave labour; / [He]’d be freed when she went to her Saviour” (46). In other words, Sow is given a role that fits with his hybrid status: he is a “reed” (46) that reads to Mrs Mason, and he is not a slave but still Mr. Mason’s property: Sow is the bastard orphan par excellence, all the more so since he reads and writes, and has a strong relation to written speech, an orphan in itself, but finally privileges the logos to writing, as he “spout[s] / poetry from memory – the best suitcase / [He] ever packed” (154). Chapel is a mixed-raced adopted orphan, a free slave, and a writer who hypomnesically reminds readers of African-American history through verse that he says he utters rather than writes, and anamnesically so: it is then no wonder that the segregated bar in which he gets mortally stabbed, at the end of the novel, is called “Forget Me Not” (157). The form in which Sow expresses himself in the novel, written poetry, is thus in keeping with the protagonist’s hybridity too, and may be understood as another reason why Bloodlines was written in verse. But Sow’s hybridity also transpires through his non-racial descriptions of his parents in the novel. For instance, when his mother, away from Christy, undergoes a fit of madness, she has to be mastered by the overseer and slaves, and is compared to a pig:

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[…] two men tried to grab her and failed, then four used ropes to bring her down, a slave like them, a young woman, and they trussed her up like a pig that had escaped its pen. […] She lay there in her own piss and vomit, orphaned by her trouble, in this sense: not a single relative wanted to admit that they were related to a nuisance. D’Aguiar 2000, 15–6

This description of Faith as a “pig in a pen” is reminiscent of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay’s famous poem “If we must die,” the two opening lines of which are “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot” (McKay 177, italics mine).53 Apart from this potential intertextual reference, the fact that Faith is penned – written about and restrained – as a pig dehumanizes her into a hybridized being, like Sow. Like her son again, Faith is described as an orphan, not only because she is a slave, but because she is mistreated by her slave-relatives, who help the overseer and deny kinship with the “nuisance” she is to slavers, thus pointing her out as a bad pharmakon in the same way as the Mason’s designate Sow as a source of trouble (45, 48). As for Sow’s father, Christy’s relation to his son is characterized by the lexical field of the seed, as seen above (140). Moreover, after their separation, Christy spends all of his spare time looking for Faith and Sow, and finds Faith’s grave but never meets Sow, although “He criss-crosses four time zones / in search of [him]” (147) before dying below the oak tree with the tangled roots where he once was with Faith, and where his son will find his grave before going on to “criss-cross four time zones looking / for faults to do with race” in turn (152). Sow and his Father spend their late life wandering in the wilderness, like Moses and Jesus are said to have, or like Orpheus in Thrace, maybe getting 53

This description is also reminiscent of Ernest J. Gaines’ novel A Lesson Before Dying in which Jefferson, a young African-American, is sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit after a trial in which his own attorney compares him to a “hog” (Gaines 8). Shocked by this comparison between him and a porcine animal, Jefferson, “penned” in his prison cell, repeatedly acts as a hog in front of relatives who visit him, until Grant, a local teacher, convinces him to refuse being categorized as anything but a man, and face death as such, for it would correspond to a heroic way of resisting injustice and racism. Hence, the porcine reference may correspond to a sign through which Bloodlines and A Lesson Before Dying, two contemporary novels, relate the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, and of its use of literature as a means to oppose racism.

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Oedipus’ or Simon Lee’s swollen ankles on the way. Sow, having never met his father, also imagines him as follows: “If he wanted me he ranked / highly, he qualified, I licensed him: Holy Father incapable of sin” (49). Christy, or “Christ,” is thus defined as the Holy Father, or God of Christianity, while, according to his name, he should be the son. This apparent contradiction makes sense in a metaphorical perspective for, as Derrida explains, the figure of the father has traditionally come, mainly in Western philosophy, to represent value, origin, and the source of the logos, while that of the child, as tokos, embodies the offspring, the fruit of what is sewn, or the interest of a capital (Derrida 1972, 101). In keeping with such representations, Sow, the son, evaluates his father as God, or the origin of creation, as much as a wandering Johnny Appleseed who has sewn him. However, he did not inherit mastery of the logos from his biological parents, nor could he return to his parents their “investment” in love: it is Mrs. Mason who, seeing Sow as the son of a “property” she invested in, that is, Faith, gains “interest” (D’Aguiar 2000, 39). The economy of the family is taken over by that of slavery, genealogy is erased by orphanhood and constitutes the problem Sow tries to solve throughout his life/the novel, his parents’ haunting story in mind. 3.2 Haunted Heads Like Sow, Tom and Stella, who try to help Christy and Faith to reach the Free States via the Underground Railroad, occupy a significant part of the novel, and have been traumatized and haunted by stories of racial hatred. For instance, Tom finds Christy and Faith at the crossroads, hides them in his cart, puts them up in Stella’s house, and embarks in a row-boat with them on a journey down river where they are ambushed, the lovers captured, and where Tom almost drowns before reaching the bank. Moreover, Tom is a former slave who fled from his plantation and was found on the road by Stella, who was already a cart-driver on the Underground Railroad then (87). Tom and Stella fell in love soon after and decided to share the same mission of leading runaway slaves to the North.54 Stella once was a slave too, and a traumatizing memory from slavery led her to work against it: Stella remembered the moment she died as a woman and person and the shell of the rest of her days took over her insides. 54

Ward argues that “the unsteadiness of [Christy and Faith’s interracial] relationship is in direct comparison with that of Tom and Stella, who are portrayed as starting off on a more even level; both are ex-slaves and able to find happiness, despite hardship” (Ward 170).

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She was nine or ten, she wasn’t sure, you couldn’t tell, carrying a message for her master with pride but with a child’s bearing and on a child’s stroll At the crossroads she saw a man in a cage hoisted from a tree, barely a man’s age; a battalion of flies; a mass of bones and flesh; D’Aguiar 2000, 99

What Stella remembers from her childhood as a slave is the corpse of a fugitive slave who was lynched. Stella is depicted as her master’s messenger, in the same way as the logos is its father’s emissary. As an orphan-slave, she was sent to bear the message – a speech orphaned on paper – of the plantation’s patriarchal figure, but at the sight of a dead slave, she was scared into running back to the plantation without having carried the message: the father-master should have stood on behalf of his speech. Conversely, Stella’s thinking that she “died” corresponds to this moment when she was appointed to act as the transmitter of a moribund logos. The sight and smell of the dead slave shocked her so much that she spent days washing herself and refusing to eat: she had to be forcefed and nursed with “sleep medicine,” a pharmakon, but it led her to dream the traumatizing moment again, as “It made her sleep but her eyes refused to close; / still seeing the cage with that man in no clothes” (100). Her nightmares are hypomnesic reminders of a horrible past that ultimately induces her, like Mintah, to join the Underground Railroad. On this road, Stella meets and rescues Tom, who helps her to hide runaways, including Faith and Christy (24–5). When Tom does not come back from his journey with Christy and Faith, Stella goes in search of him at night to find him lying naked and numb on the muddy bank. This time, she is not the patient but the nurse, as she acts as a pharmakos (92) to help Tom to get over the traumatizing loss of Christy and Faith. Tom is impressed by Stella’s courage and kindness in spite of the dangers of the segregated South and, as shown above, compares her to a bee who sings “despite the poison in [her] tail” (89). Bees are pharmakaï, pleasant when they sing and harmful when they sting. Life is a pharmakon for them too, since their safety resides in a weapon that causes their death when used. Stella is described as a good pharmakos-bee (she nurses Tom) who gets on in life despite memory’s hurt by spending her time singing, not any tune, but “field ditt[ies]” (131), slavery’s strains that Sanders Jr. strains to remember in The Longest Memory. Finally, that Stella saved Tom at night twice, and that she is related to music through her singing routine, might also

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provide a plausible interpretation of her name as a reference to the famous jazz standard “Stella by Starlight,” in addition to the obvious fact that her name relates her to night and stars. Moreover, the narrative voice explains that Stella did not see Tom until she almost walked on him, when she found him on the bank, because she had “her face turned more / to the stars than anything under her nose” (92), and did not even hear Tom’s “heaven-sent chords” or cries for help, hoping to see “Her face outlined by shifting stars” (96). Apart from sweet tunes and despite hurtful memories, Tom and Stella have more pleasant thoughts after the American Civil War, when they (day)dream about Africa and their ancestry. For instance, in a meditative chapter named “Peace,” coming just after the “War” chapter in which Stella and Tom are forced into wartime hiding, Stella thinks about her genealogy as she and Tom confront their imagined visions of Africa: She wonders when she stopped being African in this land. Born here to a mother whose mother came from Africa, were not regions of her, however remote, fashioned after those strange parts? (125) Like Whitechapel’s great granddaughter at the end of The Longest Memory, Stella thinks about her African forebears and wonders if some of their African selves have been genealogically transmitted to her. This is important because tracing her family tree would help her to locate individual roots outside slavery: “In old age she would choose / to be African rather than the nothing / that a slave is. Africa is something” (125). As she goes on thinking of Africa, she pictures herself living in a hut with Tom and storing empty calabashes: “This is Stella with her phantom lineage; / the flesh and blood she dreams she’ll meet” (133). The image of the phantom, combined with that of Stella shelving calabashes as relatives, is reminiscent of Mintah’s “hold,” where she stores the sculpted figures of her transatlantic companions. Moreover, Africa also is a thing Mintah dreams about in Feeding the Ghosts, in relation to her father, making her dreams genealogical explorations of her African past. Conversely, Stella and Tom hope that the hypomnesic qualities of dreams might help them “bring down the ghost of Africa from dreams, down through history, /and up up up through flesh and blood stories” (127) into far reaching bloodlines. Again, Mrs. Mason is comparable to Mintah too, since, in old age, she cannot write anymore. Conversely, Christy uses his hands so much as an indentured boxer that he can no longer write either:

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His hammer hands – always healing – are a boxer’s dream, hard and quick and numb, but he can’t straighten his fingers or draw or write since he can no longer hold a pen. His brain is numb. He sleeps with his eyes open. (64) Christy’s hands, “always healing,” do not need any pharmakon, or are attentively nursed by the man who bought him as an indentured boxer (72), but they cannot produce textual pharmaka anymore: his boxer’s hands cannot even write a “punch-line.” Moreover, the numbness of his boxer’s hands is also attributed to his brain, indicating that the repeated shocks of fighting have deadened his senses. Yet, despite his being unable to act as a pharmakos through writing, Christy considers his fists as pharmaka that act on his adversaries’ bodies: when he trains, he “farm[s] /muscles pounding a bag until the shape / of that bag for a body is a death-charm” (74, emphasis mine). His fists can no longer produce a moribund logos, but they may surely function as philters of death, as the epic-fight he has with the six men that captured him and Faith show (64–72). Christy actually trains thinking of that fight, sending “the ghosts of six men into oblivion” (74) before going to bed to repeatedly dream of his separation from Faith. This tragic moment haunts him obsessively, addicts him to a past that dictates his present behavior, just as Mintah’s terrible memories of the Zong lead her to spend her time remembering her companions, sculpting their figures and planting one tree for each of them. Conversely, Christy and Mrs Mason plant tulips around Faith’s grave: one for each hour Christy and Faith lay in love’s tight grip: a puzzling, grand total of ninety-four. (142) Mintah’s cathartic sculpting, writing, and gardening find their heterozygous twins in Christy’s boxing and memorial flowers, and suggest that Mintah, in addition to being the muse of Feeding the Ghosts, also haunts Bloodlines. Sow, as a narrator-poet, actually invokes or refers to the Muses several times in the novel: after visiting his father’s tomb, he hopes for a time when inter-ethnic love would not be opposed by hate but “sanctioned by the muse of love” (149). More strikingly, Sow exhorts an outside force to act when Christy and Faith are helpless in the storm, at the crossroads: “Fortune lend a hand. Intervene for me. / They are as low as you can get, two youths / against the times; two shoots, no, three, […]” (19). This passage tells the story of Sow’s parents, and Sow is supposed to be its narrator. In other words, either another narrator (the poet? a

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poetic persona?) is taking over Sow’s voice unannounced, or Sow is calling on fortune to intercede in an event that has already happened, as if he could alter the past. And Fortune does intercede in the form of Tom. Hence, Sow might be acting as a narrative trickster, knowing what is going to happen and pretending not to, or he, in addition to his immortality, can influence the past, which draws attention to his supernatural qualities, to be addressed in Chapter 5. Before that, an array of textual forms, embedded in the plot Sow partly weaves, are represented in the novel, sometimes as pharmaka, and must be dealt with. 3.3 Special Scrolls In Bloodlines, various embedded texts appear, and always in connection with memory, which corroborates the argument that written speech is a hypomnesic pharmakon. For instance, and again, the segregated bar where Sow is mortally stabbed is called “Forget Me Not” (157) which is quite ironic, since Sow’s 139 years of life experience and his task to rid the world of slavery and racism give him a historical awareness that is unlikely to let him forget anything, all the more so since he cultivates his anamnesis by reciting poetry. But the message is also one that Sow might be sending to readers as an injunction not to forget him, or rather, what he represents, namely more than a century of African-American history. Finally, “Forget Me Not” is highly self-reflexive, in that it is writing advertising itself as a reminder, that is, writing advertising itself as writing, written speech being intrinsically hypomnesic. Before going to that bar, Sow has spent a night in jail for washing himself at a stand-pipe reserved for white people: “My crime? I only / failed to read the sign, Whites Only” (156). This is darkly ironic again, since Sow says he “failed” to read a reminder of segregation, while he has spent a life being reminded of racism, which he struggles against, and he might actually have decided not to respect the sign after reading it. Other legal texts such as the law and the Bible also are reminders to Christy and Faith that public opinion and legal discourses in the South consider their love as illegal: “Faith and Christy reached beyond their skin. / The law said no; the church – their love’s a sin” (38). Christy and Faith are indifferent to these “laws” by which they will not abide, because their legality lies in the legacy of racism and slavery and in a segregated reading of sacred texts, which Faith and Christy reject. Hence, when Christy’s “Father reads him the riot act” and tells him to “Stay away from those niggers, they’re dirty” (16), Christy opposes him and gets banished, with Faith, from the plantation. In other words, Christy’s father relies on Southern law to support his statement that his son should not befriend Faith. He also cites deprecating stereotypes – “they’re dirty” – that, both in Bloodlines and in real history, are generative of racial hatred, the h ­ istory

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of which D’Aguiar morbidly registers as “shelves of human spines in the dark” (121). It is no wonder, then, that the American Civil War, which, roughly speaking, opposed supporters of slavery to abolitionists, is described in the novel as a period when “Sun and moon kept journals, / building a library of dead nametags” (108). Bloodlines argues that these historiographic traces of the violence generated by slavery must be remembered. In the first chapter, just before narrating the rape scene between Christy and Faith, the narrator metatextually addresses readers to tell them that such events have “happened / countless times, will happen countless more. / Let the record show, for too few are penned” (6). At the end of the novel, Sow draws a similar lesson from his quest: “you can’t side-step or throw out history; / and the past is present in future stories” (152). In both passages, a temporal syncretism operates where past stories are repeated in writing in the reader’s present, and such a present also consists in both the narrator and the reader’s future, where those remembered (hi)stories might help to avoid the perpetuation of a genealogy of racial prejudices. Bloodlines, as a hypomnesic text, counters historical oblivion. Apart from its direct address to readers on this issue, the novel also fights forgetful textuality in the form of water, as in Feeding the Ghosts. Again, when Tom, Christy, and Faith are ambushed on the river, Tom almost drowns and recounts his fight for survival, hoping to live to save Christy and Faith by taking “them above the thirty-ninth parallel / to a safe place far from the race peril” (80). The 39th parallel certainly is a reference to the Mason-Dixon line that separated the South (Dixie) from the Free States, although its parallel actually was the 36th. This line, another American bloodline, is the boundary that is to be crossed for Christy and Faith to be safe, “far from the race peril” ( emphasis mine), the frontier below which the crossing of ethnic boundaries is perilous.55 Water works against Tom’s mission, and hence for the perpetuation of life in a world of racial hatred for Christy and Faith. Moreover, water, threatening Tom with drowning, also works against the memory one could keep of Tom as one of these historical characters who risked their lives working on the Underground Railroad, since no fixed sepulchral trace of him could remain in water which, as in Feeding the Ghosts, threatens historical memory with erasure. The river in 55

Again, both peril and experience are etymologically related to the crossing of boundaries. Also, the fact that Sow’s adoptive parents are slavers named “Mason” is evocative of the Mason-Dixon Line. On the other hand, Mrs. Mason’s religiously motivated good actions, taking care of Sow, educating him, and freeing him might also echo the alleged ethics of free-masonry. Finally, one cannot avoid reading “Ma” and “Son,” in “Ma-son,” and it is through a failure to go beyond the Mason-Dixon line that “Ma” (Faith) and her “Son” (Sow) were separated. The Mason household is the last place where “Ma” and “son” were together, until maternal role was, then, taken up by Mrs. Ma-son for Sow.

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which Tom almost drowns is actually described as such when the trio sails on its ripples: The river bared its back to the keel making its incision. The river knew, as the keel made its cut, that it would heal, heal without a scar, heal and renew, cure and remember how wood feels hard as stone, and how stone is reduced by water to dust, then less than dust; that’s why water turns the other cheek for us. (31) The river, personified as a sentient being whose back is being cut or written upon by the boat, is its own pharmakon: it heals itself, erasing every trace of the boat’s wake, and only remembers its own ability to dissolve elements into oblivion. The passage – and potential passing – of the characters on board is inconsequential to the river, which does not seem to remember, and hence finds it easy to apply the Christian principle of turning the other cheek. Water and Scripture are once again related in a passage where some readings of both could either harm the characters or, at least, their potential posterity, unless, as Mintah does in Feeding the Ghosts, someone knows about water and converts it into a hypomnesic text. Tom, with his knowledge of water, achieves this conversion as he daydreams about Africa: “An African sea-bed is not littered with bones / But a bright alphabet of scattered and jumbled / letters in yellow seaweed and yellow sponges […] hieroglyphics/ of coral” (123). The genealogy of an oceanic text is retraced thanks to the yellow color of sand and aquatic vegetation. Through this elemental filiation, Tom shows that the hieroglyphics – ancient African texts – can be deciphered at the bottom of the abyss. Water expanses may thus function as pharmaka, authors of their historically loaded depths, “too porous to be read” unless readers are led to understand their hypomnesic nature. Thus, Bloodlines is verse that deals with color-lines and boundaries of racial hate, geographically materialized by the American North and South separated by such scars as the Ma(/)son-Dixon line. But its texture, its plot, uses hope to weave them into inter-ethnic plaits of love and generate Sow, who tries to vanquish the historical hurt of racist genealogies, where racism is both the genus and offspring of slavery, since slavery perpetuates and exacerbates racist prejudices as racism’s interest, as a tokos to its logos. Sow also reminds readers of the importance of understanding and reading about horrors of the past so as not to reproduce them, even if it involves deciphering an ocean’s pharmakon-like

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“jumbled alphabet.” Finally, in addition to relying, as in The Longest Memory and Feeding the Ghosts, on the nature of written speech to remind readers of the past, D’Aguiar, in Bloodlines, also endows Sow with magical powers, in the same way as he attributes other orphans with (quasi-)supernatural features in other novels. The following chapter discusses, in Orphic terms, the marvelous nature of these foundlings.

Chapter 5

Orphic Orphans So let the praise fall with the dew I’ll make the mountains weep for you.

keziah jones, “All Praises,” Black Orpheus, 2003

∵ As shown in the preceding chapters, Fred D’Aguiar is not only very familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, but also with the European, American, and Caribbean cultures and literary canons, to the extent of being able to track descriptions of Orpheus in them, as the composition of the library – described in Chapter 4 – from which Chapel draws in The Longest Memory reveals (D’Aguiar 1994, 96–7). As a consequence, studying Orphism in D’Aguiar’s novels requires an assessment of the history of representations of Orpheus in these canons and cultures, in order to better situate D’Aguiar’s work in them, and to fully grasp the Orphic qualities of his novels. The myth of Orpheus owes its longevity to a millennial tradition of artistic and philosophical representations that is as rich as it is diversified, since versions of the myth started to differ with Ovid and Virgil and went on being revised to the present, in many cultures from Europe and, arguably, Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Gros Louis 1967, 245; Belmont, 60). According to the myth,1 Orpheus is the son of the god Apollo and the nymph Calliope, and endowed with supernatural musical abilities, as he can, with his song, induce inanimate elements – trees, water, stones – to move at will, and animals to temper their bestial instincts, gather around, and listen to him. His music also allows him to seduce the nymph Eurydice, with whom he lives happily until her untimely death, when she is bitten by a snake. Refusing the fact of his lover’s death, Orpheus, thanks to his skills as a bard, crosses the rivers surrounding the underworld, or Hades, tames the three-headed Cerberus guarding its doors, and persuades Pluto and Persephone to restore Eurydice back to him. Orpheus’ success stops there, for, having sung Eurydice back to him, he still has to lead her out of Hades and into the realm of the living. Pluto and Persephone allow him to do so under the condition that he shall not look back 1 The ancient Roman versions of the myth of Orpheus referred to in this chapter are drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (x 1–111, xi 1–84) and Virgil’s Georgics (iv 453–527).

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until Eurydice and he are fully out of the underworld. Orpheus cannot, however, resist the temptation of looking back, and subsequently loses Eurydice a second time. As a result, he ends up wandering Thrace, an unwelcoming region of Greece, until he dies at the hands of “devoutly mad” female bacchanals (Ovid xi, 3) who, having been neglected by him, literally tear him to pieces and throw his remains into the Hebrus river. His severed head, floating downstream, still sings, lamenting the loss of Eurydice, until it reaches the shores of the island of Lesbos, while his specter is reunited with that of his dead wife in Hades. As far as Ovid’s rendition of the Orpheus story is concerned, Young contends that it is a direct response to the reception of writing that is illustrated in the Phaedrus and the Republic, a reception that was itself conditioned by the spread of Orphism at the time (Young 2008, 10–11). More precisely, and as suggested in the present study’s introduction, while the textual spread of Orphism made Socrates suspicious of writing, notably of written speech as an elixir of memory, Ovid, through the metaphorical representation of the emergence of writing at the end of his rendition of the myth of Orpheus (whose song gets magically printed on the leaves that gag him), defends the value of written verse as a means by way of which archaic Greek myths can actually be recorded and re-membered into a Greco-Roman, literary corpus (Young 2008, 15–17). Following the classical era in which Plato (c. 428–348 bc) and Ovid (43 bc–c. 17 ad) successively lived, the advent and spread of Christianity, from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, led to the formulation of analogies between Jesus Christ and Orpheus as a means to induce pagan communities of the Mediterranean (including Greece and Egypt) to convert to Christianity. This progressively gave way to a moralizing interpretation of the myth in Europe, notably in the wake of the publication of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, in works such as those of Henryson, Chaucer, and the unknown author of Ovide Moralisé (Gale, 334; Gros Louis 1966, 652–53, Chaucer 1971). This Christian, syncretic way of reading the myth, which Gros Louis calls the “textual tradition,” developed into a “popular tradition,” as oral poets took up the Christian version of the myth as a subject for their song, by way of which the myth of Orpheus was popularized and integrated to the world of chivalric romance (Gros Louis 1966, 645). Although the “popular tradition” came to supplant the “textual” one, both followed their course well into the Renaissance. The “textual” trend, for instance, gained importance in Britain under Elizabethan rule, when Orpheus was favored as a moral poet-philosopher who could temper the base, bestial instincts of animals and men with his song (Gros Louis 1969, 64–71). This view of Orpheus as a civilizing force was capitalized upon by humanist ­preceptors of rhetoric who, prolonging Ovid’s muting of Orpheus’ song into written verse,

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privileged Orpheus’ speech over his music as an instrument of power. This favoring of rhetoric over music was then used by Elizabethan poets such as Shakespeare, Sidney, John Rainolds, Henry Vaughan, Henry Reynolds, Francis Bacon and Spenser to legitimize written verse as an art form in its own right, and confirm the importance of their social role as poets (Cochrane, 11). For instance, Spenser, in the Faerie Queene, secures his position as a national poet by creating for himself a (literary) genealogy positing Orpheus, via Virgil, as one of his ancestors,2 and invents, for Elizabeth, a line of descent relating her to feminine forebears such as Britomart, the Virgin Mary, Eurydice, and Isis, by way of which the poet creates a “translatio imperii” that entitles Elizabeth to the inheritance of the Roman Empire (Delsigne, 199, 212). Furthermore, Spenser relies on the legend according to which Orpheus was the Argonaut who outplayed the sirens and brought order to the watery world in order to defend British overseas claims to waters and lands that Britain was trying to wrestle from the Spanish at the time: by the same token, Spenser not only reinscribed Orpheus within the literary legacy of the Roman Empire, but recreated the Thracian bard as an imperial civilizer in the imagery that promoted modern colonial conquest.3 Apart from this Elizabethan expansion of the “textual tradition” of the Middle Ages, a revival of the “popular tradition of reading the myth of Orpheus occurred by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, at the same time as the rise of Puritanism, the advent of Enlightenment philosophy, and the accession of James i to the throne (Gros Louis 1969, 70). The death of Elizabeth and the changing times had a disorienting effect on poets of the period, such as John Donne (Gros Louis 1969, 70), and led to a shift in representations of Orpheus, which started to lean toward the morbid, for instance with Milton’s description of the bard’s severed head floating down the Hebrus in Lycidas (Milton, lines 58–63; 2 Conversely, Spenser’s French contemporary, Ronsard, staged himself as the French Orpheus (Cain 28). 3 That Orpheus became part of the colonial imagery that served to corroborate the idea that “Britannia rules the waves” might consist in a way through which the myth spread around the world, via colonial routes. Fred D’Aguiar might also be aware of Spenser’s relation to the history of colonization, since he alludes to the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” that closes every stanza in the Prothalamion (Spenser 1596), in the title of an unpublished poem – only broadcast on the bbc “Worlds on Film” program in 1992 – addressing the link between slavery, colonization, and the British sugar industry, ironically entitled “Sweet Thames” (italics mine). The persistence and popularity of the myth on all continents is also due, of course, to its cross-cultural adaptability, as thousands of Orpheus-type myths can be found all around the world, for instance in India, Japan, New Zealand (in Mahori mythology), Hawaï, Samoa, Melanesia, the New Hebrides, in American Indian mythologies, and in Egyptian and West African tales (Gros Louis 1967, 245; Gonzales, 153–64; Bricault, 261–69; Delsigne, 205; McDaniel, 28; Misrahi-Barak and Joseph-Villain 2012, 36).

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Martindale, 322–23). Furthermore, the Puritans’ desecration of myths, in addition to the insistence of Enlightenment philosophers on the importance of pragmatic rationality, ultimately led to “Restoration and eighteenth-century burlesque and mock-heroic treatments of mythical heroes” where Orpheus was “travestied and used as mere decoration” (Gros Louis 1969, 80). Only with Wordsworth and the subsequent rise of Romanticism in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries would Orpheus again be taken seriously. For it is during the summer of 1788, in Cambridge, while mourning for his deceased parents, that Wordsworth, then an orphan, translated two hundred lines from Virgil’s Georgics, a hundred of which were dedicated to the myth of Orpheus. It is through this translation, in his formative years, that Wordsworth developed his portrayals of grieving (wo)men and worked out his lyrical sense of a man’s relationship to nature and time – for instance through the figure of the rower in his “river” poems (Graver, 137; Wu, 360). Lord Byron and Percy Shelley would soon follow suit, the former by recurrently composing scenes of Orphic leave-taking in Manfred and other works (Stratham, 364–65, 371), the latter by claiming, in “A Defence of Poetry,” and in keeping with the textual tradition of the Elizabethan period, that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley 1821). At the same time, and well into the Victorian age, Mary Shelley’s Frankestein would remind readers of the dismemberment of Orpheus as much as of the re-membering of Osiris – an Egyptian deity to whom Orpheus is often syncretically related, as a disciple of Isis, Osiris’ wife (Delsigne, 206) – and Dickens would allude to the bard in his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and to Eurydice through the character of Agnes in David Copperfield (“David” himself being a Biblical figure that has also often been compared to Orpheus) (Bauer, 309; Gros Louis 1966, 644). Meanwhile, the myth of Orpheus lived on into French literature, notably through the syncretic vogue that followed the 1789 Revolution (Cellier, 146; Spiquel, 542) and into the nineteenth century in the works of Gérard de Nerval and Victor Hugo. In “El Desdichado,” Nerval represents himself as an Orpheus of sorts while, in “Aurelia,” he laments upon the loss of Eurydice and uses the Rhine as an allusion to Faust, Goethe’s Orphic tale (Fairlie, 155; Cellier, 147). Hugo recurrently mentions Orpheus throughout his work as well, compares him to Job, Jacob, Moses, and Dante, and relies on the Thracian bard as much as on Isis – as the goddess who initiated Orpheus according to syncretists – to preserve mystique in poetry while remaining free of the oppressiveness of Catholicism in France at the time (Cellier, 151-2, Spiquel, 546). Most of all, it is by citing Hugo’s poem entitled “Horreur Sacrée,” that Sartre would later claim that “Orpheus is Black”4 (Hugo, 355; Sartre 1949, ix, translation mine). 4 “Orphée est noir.”

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As far as France at the turn of the twentieth-century is concerned, Apollinaire certainly was one of its most Orphic poets: his pseudonym related him to Apollo (Orpheus’ father), his first collection of poems was entitled “Le Bestiaire d’Orphée” and, in “Alcools,” he repeatedly claims being from Orphic lineage, in addition to comparing himself to (the Christian) God (Grojnowski, 94–100, Dekens, 42). Furthermore, he used to designate his artistic project of coupling poetry to music and the visual arts, notably cubist painting, as Orphic (Grojnowski, 103). Only after seeing Parade, the ballet composed by Eric Satie and written by Jean Cocteau – whose Orpheus film trilogy also relates him to the bard (Cocteau 1930, 1950, 1959) – would Apollinaire coin the term “surrealism” to re- christen what he had so far been calling “Orphism.” The term would soon be taken up by André Breton to write his Surrealist Manifesto (Grojnowski, 103, Bowers, 133). Hence, Surrealism was, from its beginnings, haunted by the specter of Orpheus and, although the artistic movement was short-lived (it is commonly accepted that it lasted from 1919 to 1939), two other forms of Orphism arguably rose from it, and were particularly related to the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa (Bowers, 133). First and foremost, it is actually through his exchanges with French Surrealists that Alejo Carpentier discovered Franz Roh’s description of a new form of expressionist painting as “magic realism,” a term he re-appropriated as “lo real maravilloso Americano),” as a means to describe what he viewed as the intrinsically marvelous nature of the American (and Caribbean) landscape that European Surrealists were forced to reproduce, artificially, through the inclusion of exotic elements in their works. Furthermore, Carpentier’s use of the term is an open reference to the “French Surrealists’ exhortation that reality should be considered as marvelous” (Chanady in Zamora and Faris, 137). This American “territorialization of the imaginary” (137) can be viewed as Orphic insofar as it corresponds to an enchanting and enchanted reception of landscape by way of which “‘magic’ images are borrowed from the physical environment itself, instead of being projected from the characters’ psyches,” as Jeanne DelbaereGarant puts it in her definition of one of the most widespread variants of marvelous realism in literature, which she calls “mythic realism” (Delbaere-Garant in Zamora and Faris 253, emphasis mine). Such an infusion of lyrical sense and supernatural motion in a natural landscape is, indeed, highly comparable to the mythic response of trees and streams to Orpheus’ laments.5 By the same token, marvelous reality provides a first, Orphic gateway into American and/or Caribbean literature(s). 5 This chapter’s third part strengthens that point and argues, in addition, that magic(al) realism is a literary response to landscape that is comparable to the early (Orphic) romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

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The other movement that Sartre, in “Black Orpheus,” claims is an Orphic heir to Surrealism, is Negritude (Sartre xxii).6 More precisely, in “Black Orpheus,” which was published as a preface to Senegalese writer and President Leopold Sedar Senghor’s 1948 Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache de Langue Française, Sartre argues that Negritude poetry is Orphic, in the Ovidian, vatic – poetic and prophetic – sense of the term, for two reasons. First, because Afro-Caribbean Negritude poets such as Césaire, being part of the African diaspora, are in exile, away from a lost Africa, like Orpheus in Thrace, away from Eurydice (Sartre xvi–xviii). Second, Sartre claims that ­Negritude poetry corresponds to the black poet’s introspective search to retrieve and capture his black essence and bring it out of spiritual depths and into the light for all the world to see, as if it were a Eurydice (xvii). However, and in spite of Sartre’s Orphic interest and primordial influence in twentieth-century French anti-colonial theory, through “Black Orpheus” (1948) and his 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Sartre in Fanon, ­17–36), many aspects of “Black Orpheus” sound very awkward today. For instance, critics have repeatedly shown that Sartre mistakes ethnic essence – which is a fallacy – with historical experience (which is factual) (Sartre xii, xiv), and does so in order to promote the argument that Negritude is the second part of a dialectic, an antithesis to European colonialism, that will be synthetically resolved when black men fully integrate the contingents of the world’s proletariat (Wehrs, 765, Jacques, 9). This argument, apart from revealing Sartre’s Marxist bias, is invalidated by the fact that Sartre’s designation of Negritude as the violent appropriation of the hegemonic language of masters and colonizers (French in the present case) (Sartre xviii) corresponds, as seen above, and according to Derrida, to a colonial desire that is, hence, not absolutely antithetical to ­European colonialism, and necessarily unsatisfiable, as language ­always-already escapes into Otherness (Derrida 1996, 44, 47, 68–70). Furthermore, Sartre’s contention that “black consciousness” will become “historical” through such a­ ppropriation 6 Magic(al) realism and Negritude are focused upon here because of their particular relevance to Caribbean literature and, by extension, to the work of Fred D’Aguiar. However, such a “privilege” is in no way intended to eclipse other twentieth-century ways of reading the myth of Orpheus, as can be found in the writings of modernist authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus or the “Hades” and “Circe” episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses (Lanson, 255). It must also be noted that Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Wright also revised the myth in The Man Who Lived Underground (Cappetti, 41). Later on, in the 1950s, Tennessee Williams would publish Orpheus Descending (1957), which was adapted to the screen as The Fugitive Kind (1960) by Sidney Lumet (Traubitz, 57–66), one year after Marcel Camus had won the Palme d’Or in Cannes for his Orfeu Negro, transplanting the myth to Brazil (Villeneuve, 105–22).

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(Sartre xxix, xxxvi), in addition to being misguided, presupposes, following Sartre’s recurrent Hegelian binary distinctions, that “black consciousness” has been lacking historicity, which is highly debatable. Finally, Sartre is so blinded by his argument that the language of Negritude poets is essentially “black,” that he fails to see how Negritude poetry is replete with allusions to Western mythology, for instance to Homer (Sartre ­x xvii–viii). Furthermore, he remains strangely evasive about a citation he makes from Fernand Brierre (Sartre xxxvi), where the poetic persona claims that his memory exceeds the limits of lived experience and expands back in time to the era of slavery, while it is precisely via such a type of memory that “black consciousness” is proven to be already fully anchored in the history of modernity, and through which the Orphic quality of Negritude poetry is confirmed, as the poet’s supernatural memory brings a lost past into the present in the same way as Orpheus’ song conjures the dead back from the underworld. Such a view of the imagination as a gateway to an apparently inaccessible past is, moreover, crucial in the (magic(al) realist?) literature produced by descendants of the African diaspora, and emanates from a rich diversity of philosophical and scientific practices, from Renaissance thinkers such as Hobbes and Vico – who respectively believed that the imagination was a form of memory (Hobbes 14) and that, as a consequence of the mnemonic quality of the imagination, myth was formative of history (Banchetti-Robino, 122) – to Holocaust theories of postmemory (Ward, 132) and contemporary scientific discoveries in behavioral epigenetics, according to which memory, in some cases, can be genetically inherited (Hurley 2013; Powledge, 588–92; Ferenczi, 34–5). Another, non-Sartrean philosophical and cultural way of looking at Orphism in world literature is, thus, necessary. Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is, arguably, clearly aware of that, as he criticizes racial essentialism in Sartre, to whom, according to several critics, he responds by creating, in The Man Died and Season of Anomy, African versions of the Orpheus myth that are not ethnically or culturally exclusive (Barber, 91, Whitehead, 29). Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Stuart Hall and, as seen above, Édouard Glissant have also formulated theories thanks to which cultural identity would no longer be thought of as hermetic and static, but as mutable and open to Otherness (Hall, 225–26; Glissant 1990, 169).7 In France, during the second half of the twentieth century, and as Donald R. Wehrs shows, thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and, most of all, Emmanuel Levinas promulgated conceptions of sameness and difference, of identity and otherness that exceeded Sartre’s essentialist logic 7 Stuart Hall does not give a definite name to his theory of identity, but tentatively, and quite aptly suggests Derrida’s notion of “différance” (Hall, 228–29). Again, we propose “tropicality.”

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as well (Wehrs, 771) and which, quite interestingly in the present perspective, turn out to be Orphic too: in Levinas’ discussion of ethics in Totality and Infinity, for instance, the Other, or rather, his/her face, is not, contrarily to what Sartre suggests, essentializable as an undifferentiated whole, but always-already, infinitely escapes any totalizing gaze, because the face constantly expresses itself (Levinas, 42–4), and forces one to respect – that is, watch again, and therefore never congeal or petrify the Other’s face with a Gorgon’s stare – the Other’s différance. Thus, Levinas presents “the face-to-face [as] the starting point […] of the ethical relationship” (Poirier, 107). In other words, the constant expression of the face is what makes a human being absolutely other, untotalizable, in the same way as, according to Derrida, the withdrawal of metaphor makes it absolutely impossible to appropriate language (1996, 44). As Patrick Poirier explains, Levinas’ representation of the face-to-face, by way of which the Other escapes into infinity, actually corresponds to a reading of Ovid’s description of how, when Orpheus turns around to face Eurydice, she inescapably evades his grasp (Poirier 108-9). Poirier further explains that it is through this Orphic conception of the ethic relationship that Maurice Blanchot, a famous friend of Levinas’, rewrote the myth of Orpheus in “Orpheus’ Gaze,” in The Space of Literature, and in The Infinite Conversation (Blanchot, 171–77; Poirier, 109). Thus, late-twentieth century French conceptions of ethical relation to Otherness also happen to be predicated on a reception of the myth of Orpheus and cohere with the above-mentioned definition of metaphor which, then, may be viewed as deriving from an ethical understanding of language and, by extension, of literature. Several conclusions may thus be drawn from this Orphic “retrospective,” if the pun is acceptable. The myth has benefited from sustained artistic and philosophical interest for over two thousand years, and can be found in a great variety of analogous narratives from all over the world. It has had such impact that it contributed to the legitimation of written verse, unaccompanied by music, as an art form in its own right, and Fred D’Aguiar belongs to this Orphic literary tradition in a variety of ways. First, his Orphism is vatic, because in the same way as Ovidused mythography as a means to retrieve a lost, overseas Greek past, D’Aguiar relies on myth in his writing in order to re-explore the transatlantic past of slavery and pre-slavery Africa thanks to the imagination. In this sense, he also places himself in the philosophical lineage of Renaissance philosophers such as Hobbes and Vico, rather than in that of Descartes, which certainly explains his play on words on Descartes and Hobbes and “cart and horse” in Bill of Rights where, again, the poetic persona says that placing “Descartes before the Hobbes / we know and love” would “put an end to ­[imaginative] verse” (D’Aguiar 1998, 41). Conversely, and in addition to having read Ovid, Fred D’Aguiar’s erudition in Caribbean literature and position as

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an Anglo-Caribbean writer from the African diaspora relate his imaginative treatments of the past to the legacy of Afro-Caribbean writings such as those of the Negritude poets, although he is aware of the pitfalls of cultural exclusivism, and his tropical treatment of cultural identity is closer to Stuart Hall’s and Édouard Glissant’s more inclusive theoretical approaches, and to the thoughts of French philosophers from the second half of the twentieth century such as Levinas and Derrida. His knowledge of Negritude, but also of imperial Western treatments of the myth of Orpheus, such as Spenser’s verse, presumably entails his awareness of the existing relationships that link colonialism and Orphic traditions. Finally, Fred D’Aguiar’s knowledge of both Western and Caribbean literary canons provides him with a vertiginous Orphic poetic database that contributes to the tropicality of his work when, for instance, his magic(al) realist treatment of Caribbean worlds is informed by British romantic poetry. The present chapter proposes readings of his novels that bring to light the ways in which Orphism pervades his texts, paying particular attention to Orphic orphan characters such as (false) prophets and Isiac women, but also to the role of nature as the setting for Orphic hellish and underground journeys. 1

Prophetic Figures

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the word prophet derives from phé, phànai, “to speak,” and pro-, which is evocative of all the meanings of the preposition “for” as well as of a forward movement. A prophet, therefore, is someone who speaks forth and on behalf of someone, hence the word’s signification as the designation of someone who predicts the future thanks to his/her being inspired by a deity on whose behalf s/he speaks. Furthermore, the oed describes prophets as inspired teachers or bards, when the word in question does not refer to “the prophet,” Muhammad, the founder of Islam, or “the prophets” as the authors of the Old Testament, thus indicating that prophets may be professors as much as preachers or musicians, that is, Orphic figures in the supernatural, religious and musical senses of the term. Prophets are dictators as well, and literally so, in that they dictate messages, and predict the future, but these messages owe their authority to their potentially being dictated by deities and/or supernatural powers. Prophets are inspired, possessed authorial figures, oracular instruments, or genial spokesmen subjected to supernatural authorities in the same way as artists have been said, across history, to derive their diction from Muses or drugs (Derrida 2003, 20). This correlation of artistry and prophecy has a strong significance in the history of literature, as the legacy of the myth of Orpheus, described above,

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shows. As far as the novel is concerned, prophecy may also be related to the genre through Bakhtin, who explains that the “plenitude of time” is effected in the novel when the present is perceived in its relation with the past and the future (Bakhtin 1978, 293, my translation).8 Such a “plenitude” can be effected through the process of historical inversion, by way of which “one represents as past something that, in reality, can or must only be achieved in the future,” such as the golden age, Arcadia, or, later, the state of nature (294, translation mine).9 In these cases, representations of the past are drawn for posterior generations and serve as a “future memory of the past” (454, translation mine).10 In this perspective, Bakhtin perceives the specificity of the novel to reside in the fact that the objects of historical inversions are presented in “a zone of maximum contact […] with the present in its imperfection and, as a consequence, with the future,” rather than in an absolute and isolated past, where the plenitude of time is contained and distanced (464, translation mine).11 Bakhtin differentiates novelistic historical inversion from other literary historical inversions – such as epic prophecy which, according to him, is relegated to an absolute past – by calling it “prediction” (prédiction), and defining it as a “distinctive feature” (trait distinctif) of the novel that operates through “permanent reinterpretation and re-evaluation” (la réinterprétation et la réévaluation ­permanentes) by way of which “the center of the dynamics of perception and justification of the past is transferred into the future” (464–65, translation mine).12 Moreover, and again, from a contemporary Caribbean standpoint, historical inversion or prediction is re-conceptualized to specific ends by Édouard Glissant, in Caribbean Discourse, as a “prophetic vision of the past” (Glissant 1989, 63–4). For instance, according to Glissant, the Middle-Passage experience, the crossing of this abyss that members of the African diaspora in search of the past come to face as a tautology, a “vast beginning marked by […] balls and chains gone green” (1990, 6), represents a dramatic cultural loss as much as a significant poetic source of prospective identification for those who were severed from their African “ancestral heartland” (1989, 4), but makes a linear reconstruction of the past, such as in European historiography, unachievable:

8 9 10 11 12

“La plénitude du temps.” All of my translations are from French to English. “[…] on représente comme ayant déjà été dans le passé, ce qui, en réalité, peut ou doit se réaliser seulement dans le futur […].” “[…] la future mémoire du passé […].” “[…] une zone de contact maximal […] avec le présent dans son imperfection et, par conséquent, avec l’avenir.” “[…] le centre de la dynamique de la percéption et de la justification du passé est transféré dans le futur.”

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“And so, in Glissant’s work, the prophetic voice puts tradition and the single root in question precisely in the interest of breaking with colonial and authoritarian habits of thinking. In the place of what is authoritarian, we find the affirmation of a multiplicity of roots, the mangrove, the rhizome as a figure for both composite culture and the meaning of subjectivity” (Drabinsky, 10). As John Drabinsky suggests, Glissant’s use of the word “plateaus” to designate clear-cut Western cultural legacies in his definition of the prophetic vision of the past is not fortuitous, and refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 6), which offers a poetic, creolizing way for Afro-Caribbean people (at least) to recreate their past, a re-constructive mode that writers must, according to Glissant, make relevant “in a continuous fashion to the immediate present” (1989, 64), in the same way as Bakhtin claims that the presentation of historical inversion in maximum contact with the unfinished present is a prerequisite of novelistic prophecy (Bakhtin 1978, 464). In this sense, and with words that are reminiscent of Bakhtin’s “future memory of the past,” it might neither be accidental, nor original, for Glissant to write that American writers, “from Faulkner to [Alejo] Carpentier,” “are prey to a kind of future remembering” where all chronology is too immediately obvious, and in the work of American novelists we must struggle against time in order to reconstitute the past, even when it concerns those parts of the Americas where historical memory has not been obliterated. It follows that, caught in the swirl of time, the American novelist dramatizes it in order to deny it better or to reconstruct it; I will describe us, as far as this is concerned, as those who shatter the stone of time. glissant 1989, 145

Nevertheless, Glissant’s suggestion has the merits of re-contextualizing novelistic prediction in a “New World,” American perspective, and of suggesting a productive way of reasserting one’s identity. Moreover, his definition of a prophetic vision of the past, insofar as it apparently draws from Wordsworth’s poetry and reportedly adapts to Carpentier’s marvelous reality, reinforces again the tentative hypothesis (verified below) that the Orphic, in its backward gaze and prophetic echoes, is a common denominator of (American) magic(al) realism and (British) romanticism. Glissant’s definition, including of himself, of American novelists (in French, romanciers), as those who “shatter the stone of time” may indeed be read as a romantic reference to Wordsworth’s “spot of time” in The Prelude, which is foreshadowed in the poetic persona’s “shattering” of Simon Lee’s “tangled root”

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in Lyrical Ballads, itself revised by Fred D’Aguiar in Bloodlines, as seen above. As far as D’Aguiar is concerned, in a 1992 interview, he actually appears to link, consciously or not, Wordsworth’s poetry and Glissant’s prophetic vision of the past on an autobiographical scale, about his early poetic endeavors: “I was preoccupied with childhood as an experience that was lost and replaced by adult life. I knew from Wordsworth’s Prelude, and other similar works, for instance, Derek Walcott’s Another Life, that writers appear to go through a period where they have to assess their early years in order to move on […]” (Birbalsingh, 139, emphasis mine). This chapter’s first section argues that children such as Sow in Bloodlines, or Red Head in Dear Future act out a poetic and prophetic engagement with the past that evokes Bakhtin’s definition of novelistic prediction but which, instead of mainly focusing on the interaction of social classes in its representations (Bakhtin 1978, 455–56), insists on the cross-cultural in transnational and interracial modes, in the same way as Glissant’s prophetic vision of the past does to reconstruct a culturally and historically rhizomatic “plenitude of time.” While Sow’s temporally syncretic narration and quest for his parents as an irretrievable avatar of the past appear to represent a striving for a future under the sign of interracial love in Bloodlines, Red Head, in Dear Future, is openly presented as clairvoyant, and reassesses a thinly disguised Guyanese “ever-present past” (D’Aguiar 1996, 180), partly in an epistolary correspondence with the future. Finally, true oracles and false prophets in Children of Paradise are also central to D’Aguiar’s reassessment of the Jonestown Massacre. 1.1 Red Heads “Red Head got his name and visionary capacity at age nine when he ran behind an uncle chopping wood and caught the back of the axe on his forehead” (D’Aguiar 1996, 3). Such are the opening lines of Fred D’Aguiar’s second novel, Dear Future, introducing the protagonist through his acquisition of a supernatural power and a nickname referring to the color of his hair. Retrospectively, supernatural power and red hair instantaneously lead one to make connections with D’Aguiar’s later novel Bloodlines and its main character, Sow, who, among other things, is endowed with extraordinary longevity, prenatal memory, and red hair, as if he were kin to Red Head. Red hair is perceived as an otherworldly feature by Mrs. Mason, who reacts superstitiously to Sow’s birth: “‘Teeth in a newborn bring bad luck – pull them out; shave the little devil’s head before that cord is cut” (42). As the midwife pulls Sow’s teeth out with pliers, Sow “holler[s] / for mercy to spare [him]” (42). His narrative voice describes the rest with precision:

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Next the midwife grabbed a razor and attacked my curly, devilish-red hair. […] In thirteen deft strokes from front to back – that made my hair grow backwards and caused me to comb my hair in that direction ever since – she cleaned my scalp and cleansed me of my sins. 42, emphasis mine

Sow describes his birth – through phenotype, superstition, and subsequent cleansing – in mythical, Biblical terms. He mystifies himself by designating the color of his hair as a devilish feature, cut in “thirteen deft strokes” evocative of beliefs concerning the (bad-luck) number thirteen, in relation to the Last Supper, and he indicates, on the following page, that he is a premature child, his gestation having lasted seven months only (43). Seven, of course, is not an accidental number either, considering the frequency with which it appears in the Old and New Testaments, from the seven days of Genesis to the seven seals of Apocalypse, through the seven deadly sins, the story of Cain and Abel (on sevenfold revenge), and so on. In addition, the emphatic indication that his hair is shaved in backward strokes, grows backwards and is combed backwards as a consequence apparently turns Sow’s hair to an objective correlative of his obsession with the past, and of his curse of not being allowed to die until the legacies of slavery disappear: his backward stare at the past, told through the musicality of verse, and presented in a mythical mode, also make him an Orphic orphan. However, since “ever since” forms an imperfect rhyme with “my sins,” the passage also suggests that Sow’s supernatural longevity and access to the past are reprehensible or, at least, condemned in their physical manifestation by Mrs. Mason, who tries to deprive Sow of his extraordinary attributes through superstitious and violent cleansing: the narrator does not specify whether the cleansing ritual has any effect on his powers, but his designation of his features as “devilish” and sinful, if not ironical, also implies a sense of guilt on his part through which he may imply that, in addition to the fact that he gets born at the expanse of his mother’s life, he, as a narrator, might not be as innocent as a newborn child. In other words, his self-mystification through the birth scene is so obvious, his insistence on having supernatural powers so strong (while they might have been “cleansed” away from him), and his sense of guilt so thinly veiled in the passage that they may induce readers to be suspicious of him as a narrator. Further they might wonder if he is as supernatural as he claims to be, or if he is just implicitly asking readers to suspend their disbelief and take

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his singularity for granted, for the sake of the subsequently and presumably ­singular telling of his tale, which is specifically conditioned by his extraordinary longevity and prenatal and premature knowledge.13 For instance, in the same passage, if it were not for Sow’s supernatural powers, he could not possibly tell of his “hollering for mercy to spare” him at a time of life (birth) when he is not supposed to know what mercy is, all the more so since human beings, rarely, if ever, remember their early life (42). Yet, if Sow has no supernatural powers, if one refuses to suspend one’s disbelief, one could choose to perceive his narrative voice as that of a mixed-race man from the twentieth-century engaging with the historical past of slavery in an imaginative – and hence, to some extent, transformative – way. This view seems to be supported by Sow’s meta-textual addresses to readers which, when drawing attention to the unbelievable and/or gruesome nature of the events that are to be told (“Don’t ask me how […]” [6]; “This is not for the faint-hearted. If you are, / skip this page and the next” [37]), or asking for a lenient critical reception (“wait, / he doesn’t have to rhyme every other line” [17]), are too direct and obvious to be taken exclusively in a serious way. In this sense, these metatextual addresses forestall a complete suspension of disbelief, that is, an agreement between readers and narrator to concede to accept fictional features of the narrative as conceivable. For instance, the following passage, where Sow describes his parents sleeping in the barn after their shipwreck and Tom’s apparent drowning, combines both an address to readers and an imaginative reconstruction of the past: What if they shared the same dream, but from each other’s point of view? Would you raise your hands and scream? Would you give up on me and them too? The fact is they both conjured the same stream shallow enough for the old man to pull through. (36) Sow’s defense of the supernatural or, here, the telepathic – as part and parcel of a deliberate metatextual presentation of the tale that repetitively thwarts a lenient suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader does not require that the novel be dismissed as unconvincing, questioning the necessity for 13

As an orphan who never knew his parents, and only learned about them from Mrs. Mason, Sow could not know the story of Christy and Faith as precisely and in so much detail as can be found in his telling of their tale. An obvious instantiation of Sow’s “prenatal” knowledge can be found when he listens and cries to his mother’s complaints while still in her belly (D’Aguiar 2000, 39).

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i­ncredulous response. Instead, the text suggests that Sow’s presumably hypomnesic autobiography actually corresponds to anamnesic imagination. Moreover he, as a twentieth-century narrator, draws from what he is supposed to know and remember, in order to imaginatively represent an otherwise irretrievable past and places elements of his present in the past which is, as a consequence, directly connected to its future.14 By so doing, Sow also presents imagination as a mnemonic faculty that exceeds the temporal limits of lived experience – which, again, is an Orphic feature (Young 15–7, Sartre xxxvi). The past that Sow imaginatively re-constructs is not entirely fictional, but prototypical of recurring historical facts of slavery and their legacy in the present, and, to this extent, functions as imaginative memory: “and the past is present in future stories” (152). Of course, Sow’s resistance to death in the twentieth century, when he cannot die by jumping from the roof of a skyscraper (2), or be burned to death by racists (156), is clearly described as supernatural. Nonetheless, these events, although they serve as evidence of Sow’s immortality, are only accessories to the tale. His jumping from a skyscraper after his lover leaves him is anecdotal, and his surviving a racist mob’s attempt at burning him is given both a supernatural – he is “too stubborn / to catch alight” – and a realistic (he is soaked in water, washing beneath a standpipe) explanation. Sow’s immortality is a pretext for his twentieth-century anamnesis to reach the 1860s, in case readers would refuse to view imagination as memory. Finally, twentieth-century references in a nineteenth-century context may be understood as an attempt at historical inversion that brings contemporary legacies of slavery to the fore, to try and propose, in the past, the image of a different, desirable future. Sow’s powers over the past are not without bounds, as his vain invocations for Muses to change the course of his (his)story show (19–20, 149). However, he hopes that slavery and its legacies (rape, racism) will be exceeded after the “new millenium” (150). In this sense, the surreal scene of Christy’s rape of Faith turning to mutual love might not be meant to be taken at face value but rather, as an allegorical representation, in the past, of a desirable, future change, by way of which the legacies of slavery would be exceeded by interracial love. Such a representation is not naive wishful thinking, nor is it utopian, and the claim that interracial love is desirable must not be disdained as a truism. As the novel explains, slavery’s “offspring, Racism, still breeds” (150), and messages of

14

This explains his apparently anachronistic language, describing nineteenth-century scenes through references to “skyscraper[s]” (D’Aguiar 2000, 2), 1970s funk music (23), “mtv jams” (15) and contemporary slang (16–7).

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i­ nterracial love are ­necessary to counter it: Bloodlines offers such a message in the guise of a prophetic vision of the past (Glissant 1989, 63–4). Such a relation to the future, again, appears to be corroborated by the intertextual links that make Red Head (D’Aguiar 1996) Sow’s intertextual, “eldest brother.” Both are red-haired orphans with alleged supernatural powers: Red Head can see the future, Sow can reach a distant future and past through longevity akin to immortality. Moreover, both are premature children born after seven months of gestation (D’Aguiar 1996, 21; 2000, 43). In addition to this array of resemblances, and as shown below, Dear Future, like Bloodlines, provides a singular prophetic vision of the past. However, in that novel, in spite of its initial disclaimer stating that “this novel bears no relation to any places or persons living or dead” and that “[a]ny resemblance is entirely coincidental” (D’Aguiar 1996, v), the historical past being described is not that of slavery. Dear Future, Fred D’Aguiar’s second novel, presents, in strikingly proleptic, prophetic and poetic terms, the intricate historical and political past of 1970s Guyana. The disclaimer actually incites readers to try and unveil the actual facts concealed in the text, and to look for potentially metatextual features in the novel. Such facts and features are numerous in Dear Future.15 For instance, the novel starts at the Santos’ household in Ariel, “formerly Percival, Cooperative Republic Village number –” (11) near the country’s capital, where Red Head lives with his older brother Bash Man Goady, his cousins, aunts and uncles, grandmother and grandfather. In spite of the erasure of its number, the village’s name, “Ariel,” sounds close to “Airy Hall,” the place in Guyana where Fred D’Aguiar grew up, from 1962 to 1972 (Stade & Karbiener 127). Moreover, the country where Ariel is found being called a “Cooperative Republic,” is reminiscent of Guyanese president Forbes Burnham’s increasingly dictatorial and, officially, communist break with the Western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by privatizing foreign exploitations in Guyana, practicing an isolationist policy – the import restrictions of which are mentioned in the novel (D’Aguiar 1996; 103–04, 111) – and declaring, on February 23 1970, that the country was a socialist Cooperative Republic.16 The impression that the novel takes place in Guyana is confirmed by the description of the country’s surroundings: the Amazon and Orinoco rivers, and Surinam (8). Finally, borderwar references and scenes in the novel evoke the continued ­Guyana-Venezuela 15

16

This search for Guyanese facts, as shown by the following discussion, qualifies Heather Hathaway’s argument that “D’Aguiar’s decision not to mention a specific location universalizes the plot, thus making the novel’s political commentary applicable to a number of postcolonial Caribbean nations” (Hathaway 506). Information on Guyanese history is drawn from www.guyana.org (June 27th, 2016), except where indicated.

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border dispute over the resources of the rainforest interior (100, 105–06).17 It can thus be assumed that, in spite of its disclaimer, the novel takes place near Georgetown, Guyana, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, under the Burnham regime. However, D’Aguiar is not writing a fully faithful and chronological account of Guyana’s historical past, since Red Head’s orphanhood is due to his father’s leaving his mother, and to his mother’s being recruited by Burnham as an overseas senior campaign secretary to increase and falsify the number of votes from England in support of his party. These electoral practices are those that granted the executive to Burnham in 1968, two years before Guyana was made a Cooperative Republic. Hence, the designation, presumably in 1968, of the country as a “Cooperative Republic” is anachronistic in the novel, or, perhaps, foreshadowing a near future.18 Foresight is, indeed, the main characteristic of the novel, first and foremost because of the fact that its Orphic-orphan protagonist, Red Head, becomes clairvoyant in the opening scene, when his uncle Beanstalk accidentally hits the child’s forehead with an axe as Red Head runs behind him while he is chopping wood: Red Head falls down and enters a state of delirium in which he has a vision that is both prophetic – it metaphorically announces the country’s future – and proleptic, in that it is tropologically connected to events taking place later in the narrative. Of course, the presentation of a historical past in prophetic terms is not neutral in Dear Future, but full of dark irony and, hence, critical, warning readers about ominous Guyanese futures through Red Head’s prophetic vision of the past (Glissant 1989; 63–4, 145). Red Head’s vision contains four figures, although only three are initially presented. He first recognizes himself mounting a russet horse, and then sees a presidential figure dressed in “purple regalia” and mounting a white horse. Both characters are riding “in full gallop” on a red beach and simultaneously focusing on a chess board levitating between them. Then, Red Head perceives a man “wrecked by polio” cycling on a jetty, diving into the sea and swimming away into the distance (D’Aguiar 1996, 5). The fourth image is not fully seen at once: Red Head describes a kite flying without anyone steering it. It is then a 17

18

The dispute has virtually been lasting since 1830, when Venezuela won independence from Spain, to the present, and concerns the region at the West of the Essequibo river, that is, five-eighths of the Guyanese territory’s surface. The threat of a border war, in Dear Future, certainly refers to the 1966 Venezuelan intrusion on Ankoko island, leading to the positioning of soldiers from both Guyana and Venezuela on the banks of the Cuyuni river, locus of the disputed island. The 1973 re-election of Burnham was rigged too, but did not involve falsified overseas votes: “the Army simply seized ballot boxes and did with them as they wished” (Naipaul 22). On the subjects of rigged elections through overseas votes, communism, and corruption (notably by the cia and the British colonial office), see Naipaul 21–2, 34–7, 85.

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small creature – subsequently and alternately named “Pint Size” and/or “Half Pint” – emerges from the wound on the protagonist’s forehead and tortures him by stomping on the welt from whence he came, and insisting that there was a fourth figure, and that “There will be red, then there will be black” (6, 10). Because of Pint Size’s telepathic insistence – he communicates with Red Head without needing to speak, and only Red Head can see him – Red Head later focuses on his memory of the vision’s fourth phase, while simultaneously playing a game of chess with his grandfather, or rather, pretending to do so, as it is Pint Size who guides the protagonist’s hand. Red Head realizes that the kite is tied to a limousine riding on the red sand road that goes from Ariel to the capital. That limousine is “emblazoned with the presidential seal” and, when Red Head concentrates on a box that is tied to the tail of the kite, “his eyes on the bundle” act “like a detonator” and “an explosion shatter[s] the limousine and its prized contents, not with a bang, this was soundless, but with blackness” (62). This initial vision, now fully reconstituted, is, retrospectively, prophetic in relation to the novel’s plot and historical background, as shall now be shown. The first figure with whom Red Head is confronted in his vision is that of a presidential figure dressed in purple and mounting a white stallion. These colors – purple and white – come as additional hints to the fact that the novel is alluding to the Burnham regime, since Burnham’s presidential flag is made up of three vertical stripes, two of them purple, and the middle one white. The central, white stripe consists of a background on which a black alligator lying at the foot of a palm tree is represented.19 The amphibian, if missing from Red Head’s vision, soon appears in the novel. After his accident, Red Head is prone to epileptic fits, and an Obeah medicine woman, Miss Metage, whom the Ariel children nickname Ole Higue, subsequently advises him not to look at strong sources of light, and to eat the “heart of young coconut trees” to “mend his mind” (27–8).20 As a consequence, the Santos family soon goes on 19

20

The opening short story in contemporary Guyanese author Pauline Melville’s latest collection The Migration of Ghosts, entitled “The President’s Exile,” uses the colors, and alligator of Burnham’s presidential standard too (she also mentions the president’s white horse), to suggest that the dead leader, Guyanese President Hercules (Melville 1998, 20, 22), is not entirely fictional (Melville 1998, 7, 15–6). This similarity also suggests intertextuality between Dear Future (1996) and Melville’s short story (1998). Ole Higue, as a mythical figure in Guyanese folklore, is a reclusive old woman who, at night, turns to a ball of fire and visits houses to suck the blood of young children. Mama Dot, which is supposed to deal with D’Aguiar’s childhood in Guyana, also contains a poem entitled “Ol’ Higue,” describing a woman comparable to Miss Metage, whom, in the poem as in the novel, children pelt with sand stones (D’Aguiar 1985, 40; 1996, 28). The poem, like the novel, mentions a red sand road and contains the same playful song Guyanese children use in D’Aguiar’s work to designate the catcher in their “catcher”

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an ­expedition in the coconut grove to find the young growths the children call “growee,” until they reach a water trench which uncle Beanstalk tries to cross on what he believes to be a log, but turns out to be an adult alligator. Beanstalk, with his brother Bounce’s help, escapes death and captures the alligator (53–4) which, except when placed and baited in a fenced field by the uncles to divert the children (who have baptized it “Bubble Back”), is most of the time tied with a rope to a “guava tree devoid of fruit” (56), with enough slack to go and hide underwater in a nearby pond (56). Although this detailed account of Bubble Back’s capture appears well into the narrative, it is actually briefly foreshadowed on the novel’s first page, where it serves for the characterization of Beanstalk, who is, again, the uncle who hit Red Head with his axe: This was the uncle who, when leading a party hunting for the unbelievably sweet young shoots of coconut plants they’d christened ‘growee’, began to cross a trench on a log that bucked and flung him off, and who, as everyone scattered and fought to climb the nearest tree, lassoed the log’s head and tail before the word ‘alligator’ had formed on anyone’s lips. (3) Hence, the alligator incident actually is an initial event that is completed by Red Head’s vision, and translates Burnham’s presidential flag into an imaginative narrative.21 Its full description, later in the narrative, is thus elliptically announced – readers are not told yet that growees are being looked for as

21

game (D’Aguiar 1985, 40; 1996, 57, 62). Airy Hall, which similarly relates memories from D’Aguiar’s childhood, also describes a red sand road crossing Airy Hall (D’Aguiar 1989, 2). Finally, D’Aguiar’s Continental Shelf likewise contains poems dealing with the poet’s childhood, one of which is entitled “Sabbatic,” and describes a strange character who “Drank methylated spirits and spat fire” (D’Aguiar 2009, 32–3). The same character, Old Sabbatic, does the same thing in Dear Future (D’Aguiar 1996, 30, 86). Still in Continental Shelf, in “Bring Back, Bring Back” (3) and “H2O” (11), children fetch water from standpipes and come back home with bucketfuls of water they try not to spill: the same anecdote is rehearsed in Dear Future (D’Aguiar 1996, 34), Bethany Bettany (2003, 6, 15), and Children of Paradise (2014, 1). These details, in addition to the fact that it is during the Burnham years (1964–1985) that D’Aguiar spent time in Guyana, from 1962 to 1972, allow one to suspect that D’Aguiar embroiders autobiographical data into his novels. A similar alligator accident is recounted in the poem “Caiman” (D’Aguiar 2009, 21). The event is also reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s instantiation of de- and re-territorialization in “Rhizome:” “The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk any more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings,” they are not miming, but forming a rhizome with the world (Deleuze and Guattari 6, translation mine). Conversely, Dear Future, as a narrative, is not simply imitating the flag, but derives from its fabric a metafictional and intertextual rhizome.

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­ harmaka for Red Head22 – in the novel’s first paragraph. On the presidential p flag, however, the alligator is not tied to a barren tree: these details are politically subversive additions that echo the Santos family’s strong opposition, described below, to the party in power, called the “People’s Party” in the novel (38), and referring to Burnham’s People’s National Congress (pnc). In the novel, the alligator is female, and gives birth to a young alligator that the children first perceive as a threatening presence, a “dark shadow” (57) below the surface of the shell pond where they swim. As a consequence, the patriarchal figure in the Santos household, “Grandad,” decrees that the alligator and its progeny, in spite of being dangerous, shall be returned to the coconut grove and freed after the presidential elections (58), thus confirming the metaphorical association of the amphibian’s survival to the confirmation of Burnham’s total power in 1968. In this sense, since the alligator is ultimately freed with its progeny – a replica of Bubble Back, named “Double Back” (58) – it might also implicitly indicate that Burnham and his legacy still threaten the Santos children as representatives of a Guyanese future or “next generation” descending from opponents to Burnham’s pnc.23 Reverting to Red Head’s vision, the chessboard reappears in the novel when the protagonist deciphers the prophecy’s fourth phase while playing chess – with the help of Pint size – against his grandfather, who trains Red Head, hoping that his grandson will win the game’s national championship. Although it is against the president that the protagonist, in his delirium, plays, the game with Grandad – as he is called in the novel – makes sense, since the grandfather is depicted as constantly trying to involve his relatives in national ­contests so as to symbolically make the opposition win against national institutions and champions bribed by the pnc, which is sponsoring popular events in order to win upcoming elections. For instance, when Grandad brings Red Head to play chess with adults at a local rum shop, there is a talk going on that Singh, the Indian wrestler (a true, historical character, included in Dear Future as a definitely metafictional work), is coming to Ariel and is looking for a challenger. 22 23

As far as the relation between orphanhood, textuality, and the pharmakon is concerned, it must be mentioned that Red Head, again, an orphan, hones his handwriting during his convalescence (D’Aguiar 1996, 22). The ominous emergence of Double Back from the pond might itself be foreshadowed by another, earlier incident in the novel, when Red Head almost drowns in the pond because of a fit following Pint Size’s insistence that there is more to Red Head’s vision than he wishes to admit (D’Aguiar 1996, 25–6). This idea reinforces the impression that the poetics of Dear Future is conditioned by prolepsis and prophecy. Moreover, the same incident is recounted in Continental Shelf – again, a collection that is partly autobiographical – in “The Shell Pond” (D’Aguiar 2009, 34–5).

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The novel makes it clear, elsewhere, that Singh initially wrestled for the opposition party, but changed sides, as Burnham’s party made him “an offer he [could not] refuse” (72, 108). As a consequence, Grandad proposes his son Bounce as a contestant for Singh. A few moments later, when he leaves the bar to go home and announce to his son the fight that awaits him, a truck of pnc ­supporters rolls past him and its passengers throw a bucketful of urine and feces at him (38). Up to the wrestling match, political tension increases, as the Santos’ neighbors and friends get attacked at night by gunmen, and are rescued by the Santos uncles, who report that the aggressors shouted “coolie lover” (48), indicating that the attackers were (“black”) pnc supporters opposed to the (“Indian”) People’s Progressive Party (ppp) of opposition leader Cheddi Jagan (Naipaul 85). When the fight comes, Bounce magically wins against Singh by staring him down with eyes that look like “two red sources of light which sh[i] ne with menace” (D’Aguiar 1996a, 80) even when closed, so much so that “It [is] like day from the light that [shines] behind his clamped lids” (79). Singh’s vision and focus are subsequently disturbed and Bounce turns it to his advantage by sending him into a coma with a single blow after several rounds of stillness and sustained staring. Such insistence on the supernatural powers of an individual’s gaze, sending someone else into a death-like state, is reminiscent of Orpheus’ backward gaze returning Eurydice to Hades. And as a consequence of Singh’s defeat, pnc supporters and the audience in general, like the Bacchanals, are disappointed by the show and work themselves into a fury against the Santos family, known for opposing the pnc, and decide to go to the Santos home, where the family has presciently retreated in anticipation of the public’s reaction. The entire Santos family is locked up in their house, and (Orphic) Bounce, soon followed by his brothers, turns around and goes back out to face the mob. Inside the house, Red Head interprets his vision of “red followed by black” as red blood pouring out of black skin and causing deaths that, he explains, only Bounce could prevent by going out to meet the crowd. However, Bounce’s self-sacrifice proves ineffective, since the narrative suggests that he dies at the hands of the crowd, and the house is set aflame with the children locked inside, leaving no hope for their survival (86–90). Earlier in the novel, Red Head provides another potential interpretation for the succession of red and black: “The red sand road will be a river of blood. The river will dry but the red sand will not reappear. A hard, black road will run through the heart of the land” (25). Later in the book, although Red Head’s grandmother explains that the construction of a road linking Ariel to the capital would bring them more people and electricity, Red Head panics when he learns that, confirming his vision, the road replacing red sand will be made out of black bitumen (33). However, the making of the road by the “road gang,” as

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the novel designates the inter-ethnic crowd of workers gravitating around the construction of the road in question, has come to a standstill, as the government cannot pay anybody, except with coffee beans (8–10), and tries to negotiate “more loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World bank” (68). Readers later find out that the road-building funds were partly looted by a minister to “dig a garden swimming pool and build a U-shaped drive leading in one gate up to the said minister’s front door and out another” (125).24 Because of political corruption, the road is not finished, and remains full of bumps and potholes when the National Cycle Championship – in which another of Red Head’s uncles, aptly named Wheels, participates – takes place. Although, for the most part of the race, taking place on the red sand road from which a “dust storm” is raised by the competing cyclists, Wheels remains in the leading pack, the transition to bitumen is so fast, surprising, and rough that all leading cyclists fall, causing most of them to abandon the race, either for want of a second bicycle, or because they are too badly injured.25 Wheels is thus forced to give up, and brought back to Ariel by his father and his neighbor, to be treated, nevertheless, as the village champion (63–71). Thus, the transition from red to black, when related to the road, keeps on being viewed pejoratively, as it seals a dark fate for one of Red Head’s relatives, and is directly connected to the wrong-doings of the political elite. Yet, Wheels’ defeat, like the other elements of the novel, was predictable and predicted, since one of the cycling uncle’s trainings, rolling around on a track behind the family house, is described, where Wheels raises a “floating mountain” of sand on his trail after falling because of a bird that plunged into his racer’s wheel. As a result, “His left side, from his hip down to his ankle, had no skin; it had ripped off as 24

25

The road is related to politicians in another, more direct way, as the presidential limousine passes Wheels and Red Head on the red sand road as they cycle back from the hospital where Red Head’s wound was stitched up: the limousine slows down, a window lowers, and the president exchanges looks with the two cyclists, cordially waves at them, and zooms away (D’Aguiar 1996, 14–5). It is when Wheels and Red Head get back home and tell of their meeting with the president (again, foreseen by Red Head in his vision) that readers learn about the electoral context, as Granny tells them: “He only stop because election coming up” (17). The black presidential limousine on the red sand road also corresponds to Red Head’s preceding vision. Road construction, electoral context, and supernatural elements are features of the novel that are also reminiscent of Nigerian writer Ben Okri’s 1991 novel The Famished Road. The same story is told in two poems by D’Aguiar, respectively found in the autobiographical collections Mama Dot and Airy Hall (D’Aguiar 1985, 36; 2009, 36–40), attesting to the significance of that specific tale for the author. Red Head’s and Bash Man Goady’s brothers are also metaphorically related to Wheels through a bike incident in the novel (D’Aguiar 1996, 169).

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he slid to a stop on the track. […] A single, black condor feather fringed with white protruded from his lower calf” (43). Not only is the “sand cloud” present both during training and race, but Wheels, re-Christened “Winged Feet” by Red Head after the training incident (the bike is named Wings), is clearly being associated to Hermes, the messenger of the gods: a prophet. Wings is thus connected to prophecy, after a training accident that, again, foreshadows what happens next, that is, his defeat at the championship which, contrarily to Bounce’s short-lived victory, clearly is a defeat against governmental powers. Wheels also has a direct counterpart in the novel: the president’s “right-hand man” (111), “the capital’s best-known polio victim” (95), aptly named Brukup – a name that is very close to “broken up” and, hence, apt for a man “wrecked by polio” (5). He actually is Wheel’s inverted image since he, because of his illness, has weak legs and sore wounds on his bottom that prevent him from sitting comfortably on his bicycle. Moreover, instead of taking care of children in the same way as Wheels does for Red Hair by carrying him on Wings to Miss Metage to be cured, Brukup abuses children, as he takes pleasure making the young daughter of a prostitute cry in front of the brothel he regularly visits – in which underage, barely pubescent prostitutes are found as well (98–101). Most of all, while Wheels falls during the championship because of the transition from red sand to black road, Brukup almost falls, and finally hurts himself as he leaves bitumen for dirt track on his way to the crowded bordello (97), where he is unhappy to meet colleagues from the Ministry of Defense: “‘We have a border war on our hands and the Ministry of Defense is having a ball,’ he muttered to himself” (100). Thus, Brukup, as a civil servant on the government’s side, functions as a contrastive mirror image to Wheels. Yet, his import to the narrative mostly resides, of course, in his being the man ruined by polio that Red Head perceives in the penultimate phase of his vision (5). It is obvious, from the moment he appears, that Brukup is the man from the vision, because he is described cycling to the beach and swimming away from the shore with a suitcase full of government papers revealing the fact that overseas votes were “invented” (96), and getting rid of them away from anybody’s sight, into the sea: “all the papers about the overseas-votes initiative were indeed now undersea. The seabed would be their archive” (97).26 This event, (fore)seen by Red Head in his vision, is of great significance for him, 26

The notion that the (Atlantic) ocean is an archive is reminiscent of Feeding the Ghosts, which was published just one year after Dear Future, and where, again, the Atlantic “turns pages of memory” and absorbs the body of slaves “without the evidence of a scar” (D’Aguiar 1997, 3). Once more, the sea is the (an)amnesic eraser/writer par excellence, and D’Aguiar uses it to remind readers of pasts threatened with erasure, such as slavery and Burnham’s dictatorship.

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although he might not know it, for the falsified lists of overseas voters that Brukup is disposing of were forged by Red Head’s mother herself. As readers are made to understand, Red Head’s mother, deserted by her children’s father, was seduced by Burnham’s rhetoric (140), and Burnham used her as a consequence as a sexual object until he no longer found her sexually gratifying (103), and sent her to London as a senior campaign secretary to help him rig elections. Her falsification of the lists not being dimmed credible by Brukup and the President, Red Head’s mother (who remains nameless in the novel) is forced to start making up lists again without further government funding, and is thus led to live in a slum with the three children she took along, and prevented from getting back to Guyana to reunite the three sons with their two elder brothers, Red Head and Bash Man Goady.27 Hence, the novel implicitly blames the breaking up of familial links and the maternal orphanhood of two brothers on the government too, and when Red Head foresees Brukup’s disposal of his mother’s overseas list, what he foresees is the continuation of his own orphanhood: he dies at the hands of government supporters and disenchanted villagers without ever seeing his mother again. This part of the tale also reveals, again, how disrespectful of women the novel’s political figures are.28 Red Head’s mother, as far as she is concerned, is the assistant of the president’s dentist – dentist Richmond – when she meets the country’s leader, and Richmond actually is a mole working for the opposition: he uses Burnham’s well-known taste for diamonds (Naipaul, 40), sometimes serving as tooth-fillings, to place a bug within a cap he fixates in the president’s mouth, so as to enable the opposition leader to spy on the president and know his plans in advance (D’Aguiar 1996, 107). In other words, Richmond installs a prosthetic device that endows the opposition leader with short-term prophetic powers. Due to the device, on election day, the opposition leader sonically witnesses the president’s morning ride on his white stallion, and his beating of the “infantile mistress” (126) that accompanies him for the ride on the beach, as the 27

28

Living in the slum, she takes up a sewing job and falls in love with Ahmad, the man of Pakistani descent who teaches her how to sew (146–48). As their love affair lasts, the mother is convinced to convert to Islam and to circumcise her children (152–54) – one of whom willingly slows his breathing and cardiac pulse down to relax during the operation, to the point of frightening the doctor, who believes he might have lost the child, until the same child performs what looks like an Orphic resurrection (153). Hence, in the novel, Red Head’s brothers are away from their clairvoyant relative (whom they liken to a parakeet, the repeating bird most comparable to a mouthpiece [149]), but related to another type of prophet, that is, Muhammad, the prophet of Islam according to the Koran. The mistreatment of women reportedly is a current problem and a harsh reality in Guyana. See Trotz 2004, 1–20.

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president does not seem to be content with having abused her at will over the preceding night (122, 124). When he tries to get back onto his horse, the stallion goes mad and rears onto its hind legs because of the sounds – inaudible to a man’s ear – made by the bug in the president’s tooth, which leads the president to suspect the presence of the device on everybody around him except for ­himself, as he fails (because of hubristic pride) to admit that he could be carrying the noisy bug: not finding any microphone, he shoots the horse dead and goes back home (126–27). Since the president does not find the bug, the opposition leader remains safe, and believes he is going to win the election. As a consequence, he decides to dress up for the occasion and, as his wife hands him a shirt, she mutters “something about how the closer he [gets] to presidency, the more pungent his sweat be[comes]” (128), suggesting that the opposition, with its questionable spying practices, might not be more promising than the party in power, leaving no real hope or place for promising prophecy. And it is with an absence of signs from the future that the novel ends, as the last, eponymous part of the book consists in Red Head’s series of unanswered letters to the future, all starting with the “Dear Future” phrase. Red Head writes to the future from his newly-acquired position as an unbaptized child who died and landed in limbo, accompanied by his elder brother, Bash Man Goady (181, 186). In addition to its Christian subtext, the two brother’s presence in limbo implicitly indicates, following Harris’ interpretation, the transitory nature of the brothers’ in-between experience, since Harris, again, describes limbo as a dance symbolic of the Anansi-, spidery-like passing of a threshold, through contortion, into another world that might, in D’Aguiar’s novel, consist in a more desirable Guyanese future (Harris 1970, 157).29 On the other hand, the two brothers’ being stuck on such a threshold, with Red Head writing letters to “Dear Future,” might be allegorical, and imply that their position in limbo, with a past, but no future to speak of, illustrates the inescapable nature of the present. Conversely, the letters that start with “Dear Future” are by definition letters that never arrive at their destination, and are thus kept in limbo, in the same transitory state as that of Red Head and his brother. Brothers in limbo, like 29

An Anansi story actually appears at the very beginning of Dear Future, in the first chapter, named “Axe and Anansi,” a title sounding close to “Asking Anansi,” as if a conjuration of the trickster into the tale was intended and, hence, performatively effected, through the mention of the trickster’s name. The story told in that chapter is that of Anansi bringing home a hand of bananas, and distributing them to his wife and four children, leaving no fruit for himself. As a consequence, in a gesture of solidarity (cunningly predicted by the trickster), each member of the family gives him a third, or even a half, of their banana, ultimately making Anansi’s meal the biggest one (D’Aguiar 1996, 12–3). That story is then echoed thrice in the London-based part of the story (139, 144–45, 165–66).

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letters to the future, are still always on their way, always being “sent” from one world to another, only to end up stuck between the place of sending (past) and the place of arriving (future). Moreover, as a consequence, the “Dear Future” that is on the cover of the book makes the entire novel into a huge postcard, exposed to all, and therefore addressed at once to everyone and to no one. Everyone, since the letter does not reach its intended destination (“Future”) because it is read by anyone who sees the book, but also no one because the future, by definition, has never been lived. No one has ever or will ever be in the future. We, like the two brothers and the letters to “Dear Future,” are always only in the present, before which what is to come always recedes, like Eurydice escaping Orpheus’ grasp. But the future has the structure of anticipation. In one of his last letters, Red Head accepts that his future be lived on his behalf by someone else, since he can never see it himself (D’Aguiar 1996, 200). The possibility for one to live what Red Head perceives as his future, and potentially resolve the conditions of social unrest and political tension that dearly cost him (the price was his life), is what makes “his” future “dear,” that is, expensive, valuable, insofar as it allows for prospects of betterment.30 It is up for next generations to make up for the lost futures of children like him by bettering conflictual situations into brotherly love. In this sense, the Orphic, backward gaze on the Guyanese past that the novel offers in oracular terms through Red Head’s clairvoyance is, again, Orphically projected into the future as a hopeful prophetic vision of the past (Glissant 1989, 63–4). 1.2 Aping Oracle & Prophetic Ape Like Bloodlines and Dear Future, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar’s latest novel (2014), features Christian intertexts, prophecy and an otherworldly closure. The novel tells the story of the 1978 Jonestown massacre and is, thus, like Dear Future, related to the Burnham years. This, in addition to the fact that D’Aguiar has also written on Jonestown in Bill of Rights (1998), suggests that 1970s Guyana is of particular interest to the author.31 Finally, Dear Future and 30

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More generally, what the novel might thus indicate is that the future is, perhaps, by definition a “dear” future, both in the sense of a vocative, an addressed, an apostrophized, unattainable thing (but structurally necessary as such), and for that very reason, “dear” in the sense of precious, costly, of infinite value. Speaking of which, I am indebted to Thomas Dutoit for this argument. The Burnham government gave a “warm welcome” to Jones’ commune, along with other religious and agricultural groups, and backed them financially. The government also used these communes’ members to break strikes or do unpaid work for high-ranking civil servants (Naipaul 63–4).

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Children of Paradise share the similarity of partly articulating their plot through pairs of antagonistic characters: in the same way as Wheels and Brukup are inverted images of one another in D’Aguiar’s second novel, two relatively prophetic figures, Reverend Jim Jones and the commune gorilla, are ­mirrored and ­contrasted in Children of Paradise. It is that antagonistic couple that we propose to study in the present section. In Children of Paradise, both Jim Jones and Adam, the commune gorilla, are orphans: Adam lost his mother to hunters (D’Aguiar 2014, 14, 22), and Jim Jones’ father died in the United States, blown away by a tornado, when Jim Jones was a child (46, 136–37).32 Adam played no part in his mother’s death, and can, thus, be considered as a victim foundling. On the other hand, Jim Jones views himself as a parricidal orphan because he asked his father to leave their underground shelter and rescue his dog from the tempest. The father went out and died as a result (136–37).33 Adam and Jones are also turned to an inverted image of one another when, one evening, Jones gets out of his house to go to Adam’s cage, against the bars of which Adam leans his back for Jones to scratch it. Jones does what Adam asks for, then turns around and leans his back against the cage in turn. After a moment of surprise, Adam understands and starts scratching Jones’ back, but with so much strength that he makes Jones bleed, causing the Reverend to back off “smiling. Adam returns a mirror image of that smile as if his face looked exactly like Father’s face” (39). The apparent reciprocity illustrated by a literal representation of the “scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” proverb is subverted by the opposition of Adam and the preacher’s respective pleasure and pain, and roles as captive and captor. The effusion of blood also foreshadows the fact that Adam will shed blood in turn when rebelling against the priest’s authority. But Adam does not interact with Jones only, and feels related to everyone in Jonestown: after the scratching scene, Adam “watches the entire commune’s comings and goings,” and “Looking at the people going about their business leaves him feeling he is all of them rolled into one” (39). His identification with the commune foreshadows again the fact that Adam will die fighting commune guards who prevent commune members trying to 32

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The commune did have a pet “chimpanzee (or some other kind of primate)”, who lived in a “sumptuous roofed cage,” that contrasted with the “primitive” buildings that accommodated Jones’ disciples (Naipaul 65). D’Aguiar thus uses an anecdotal fact concerning Jonestown to create a character that, as shown below, proves crucial for the unfolding of the novel’s plot. Adam will be designated as “he” instead of “it,” following the novel’s designation and the anthropomorphism with which the gorilla is treated, as his name (that of the first man according to the Bible) indicates. The conjunction of natural catastrophe, underground locus and Jones’ unwittingly sending a loved one to death are, of course, evocative of the myth of Orpheus again.

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escape from Jonestown. In other words, Adam, as his name suggests, functions as a Biblical figure who, like Jesus according to the New Testament, sacrifices himself for the sake of others (352). What serves to contrast with Adam’s self-sacrifice occurs at the beginning of the novel, when Adam almost kills Trina, by grabbing her as she inadvertently reaches his cage during a game with other children, although it is made clear that Adam has no evil intention when he grabs her: he “simply opens his tree-trunk arms and clasps them around the child,” who soon lacks air and swoons (6). Jones then hurriedly pronounces the child dead – while he knows Trina is alive – and has her sent to the infirmary. The next day, he summons all of the commune to Trina’s open coffin, placed near Adam’s cage, and “resurrects” the child (16–20), reinforcing his authority as the commune leader in the process.34 Yet, during the resurrection, Adam is unsure of his senses, does not immediately believe in Trina’s death, and characters involved in the ceremony, including Trina’s mother and guards, seem to be acting (16–8). Later in the novel, the preparations for the show are actually unveiled, and every actor, including Trina, turns out to have been sworn to secrecy after learning their parts overnight (68–72). This false resurrection, at the beginning of the text, is contrasted with a true miracle, of which Adam is the object, at the end of the novel: when he tries to secure the children’s escape from the commune, he prevents guards from catching them by blocking their way, saying “Stop” and, pounding on his chest, “God.” He utters these words several times, and the effect of his miraculous ability has different effects on the guards: some run away, some kneel before him and pray, and others ultimately shoot him dead (349–52). Hence, if there is any true extraordinary mouthpiece in the novel, it is not Jim Jones, but Adam, whose supernatural acquisition of speech is itself proleptically announced in various places of the novel, for instance when he is described as being endowed with thought, when the narrator explains that he listens to the children at the commune school and “absorbs the stories of sinners redeemed and the lost found” (52). Later in the chapter, the narrative voice openly announces that Adam is an extraordinary subversive force in becoming: although “His place in the world is narrated in the creation stories read aloud by the children seated in a semi-circle in front of a teacher and sheltered from the flames of the sun under the inclusive canopy of a tree,” he will, “prove destiny wrong” (59). 34

Relying on dubious healing sessions and false miracles was a specialty of the actual, historical Jones (Naipaul 59–60). The resurrection scene is clearly Orphic, as explained below.

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In addition to these oppositions, between a beginning where Jones is a resurrectionist and Adam an alleged killer, and an end where Adam acts as a “savior” against a murderous Jones gone mad (336–40), the correlation of Adam’s evolution, throughout the story, with the worsening of Jones’ sermons also helps readers to view the two characters as an antagonistic couple. In fact, the priest preaches through a twisted logic by way of which he turns every fortuitous event to his advantage and self-empowerment as the commune leader, as if every accident of life were to prove him right, while Adam’s feelings of communion and predisposition for sacrificial love come spontaneously as natural impulses that grant him with a form of clear-sightedness and make him, rather than Jones, the novel’s actual prophetic figure. For instance, during his first sermon, Jones wishes to convince his disciples of the necessity for them to have “absolute trust and absolute faith” in him (73). In order to show them an example of trust, he summons Trina – whose faith is so strong, says Jones that she came back from the dead – and her mother to the pulpit. He then has Adam brought into the church, gives a banana to Trina, and asks her to give it to Adam. Trina obeys and Adam eats. However, when Jones hands a banana to Joyce, the gorilla inadvertently grabs Joyce’s hand along with the banana, does not understand why the banana is not freed into his hand, and starts tearing Joyce’s clothes off, until guards intervene and lead Adam out of the church. Although the event is clearly accidental, Jones immediately asks his audience “Who trusts me? And who does not?” (75), and the audience designates Joyce as the unbeliever. Jones is the opposite of a prophet: he does not predict, but interprets every occurrence of the unexpected on the spot so as to suit his purpose. Soon after the sermon, readers learn that Adam had been drugged into compliance, did not fully control his movements, and did not “like the way he [was] put to use” (129). During his second sermon, Jones has his guards distribute sticks to the ­children, and orders them to beat their parents (135). The children reluctantly follow his orders, and Jones “justifies” the beating by telling the story of his ­father’s death, and of how something he had not sensed in his stare made his father go out into the tempest. He explains that the (Orphic?) power of his  searching look at his father is the same as that of an adult’s gaze when searching for divine salvation: “That look,” he proceeds, “is the rich man, ladies and gentlemen. That expression wants to enter the kingdom of heaven, but we may as well be a camel and try to stream through the eye of a needle. We must suffer the children because we are the children” (137). Jones’ convoluted logic disorients the disciples into compliance. And his sermon is, again, improvised through the connection of images that he made earlier that day, when he was

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woken up from a drugged sleep by the screams of children being beaten for playing in the rain, the sound of which reminded him of a tornado, and then of his father’s death (45–7). He then uses his evening sermon to have children punish their parents for this unpleasant moment. After that sermon, Adam, who is within hearing distance of what happens in the church, starts digging into the ground of his cage, planning his escape (141–42). By the time of his third sermon, the commune’s old seamstress has died, and in order to try and cheer up his disciples, Jones orders the commune doctor to force the premature birth of a child (172), the immediate consequence of which is the death of the baby’s mother (180–81), who is too weak to bear surgery, and is then secretly buried below the old seamstress’s coffin. The baby survives and is – quite horribly, then – presented by Jones as a “miracle child” that God has provided to compensate for the seamstress’s death. Jones also claims that the mother is alive and well, but has actually forced a nurse to pretend the baby is her biological child (176). Finally, when Jones learns that he has lost governmental support and that an American delegation is coming to the commune (325, 339), he organizes suicide drills and harasses his disciples over the commune loudspeakers, ultimately telling them of a childhood vision he had, and which his mother had told him not to recount, because it “blasphemed against all known teachings of the Lord” (339). Jones views the vision as a prophetic dream in which he thought he was led by God, who actually turned out to be a hydra-headed, Cerberus-like version of the devil, whose faces were those of his disciples. Jones then explains that the image indicates that he lives in a world of his own making, and that “the devil operates out of [him]” (337–40), finalizing his downfall, in the novel, from would-be prophet to devilish interpreter, a downfall the counterpoint of which is Adam’s rise from animal to divine mouthpiece (348). Thus, while Orphic orphans such as Sow and Red Head serve D’Aguiar’s purpose of providing “prophetic visions” of diverse historical pasts, the author’s return to the history of Jonestown through the antagonistic Adam-Jones couple is a warning against the deceptive promises of false prophets. More than that, his preference for Adam, a wild, jungle animal, as a supernatural (speaking) savior, over Jim Jones as a fraudulent priest prone to madness, is implicitly indicative of a magic(al) realist favoring, inspired by romanticism, of the importance of nature as the most effective of churches for the safekeeping, and health, of the soul.35 This romantic and magic(al) realist view of nature is also corroborated by Trina in the novel, as shown below. Moreover, Trina’s womanhood is presented in magical terms too, in the same way as the femininity of 35

The link between romanticism and magic(al) realism is discussed more thoroughly below.

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other women in D’Aguiar’s novels is depicted as supernatural, and evokes the Orphic, or rather, the Isiac. 2

Isiac Women

The Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris is, as suggested above, related to that of Orpheus and Eurydice – which may have developed out of a Greek-Egyptian syncretism in cities such as Alexandria under the Ptolemies. The myth, again, tells of how Isis, (un)like Orpheus, successfully resuscitated Osiris – thanks to a metamorphosis involving the acquisition of life-giving wings – after he was torn to pieces, some of which thrown into the Nile, by his brother Seth, in the same way as Orpheus was decapitated by Bacchanals, and his head thrown into the Hebrus river. While Orpheus tried to tear Eurydice away from Hades, Isis made the resuscitated Osiris the keeper of the underworld, and bore him a child, Horus.36 In addition to such analogies, Antonio Gonzales also explains that the pagan, Isiac cult was later assimilated to that of the Virgin Mary: the early Christian church reclaimed significant features of Isis in order to motivate southern-European pagan populations to convert to Christianity (­Gonzales, 154). For instance, Horus, Isis’ son, is reminiscent of Jesus, in that both divine sons “occupy a similar position in relation to the tutelary god, be it God or Ra” (154, translation mine). Moreover, the description Origen Adamantius provides of Mary as the Mater Dolorosa, grieving for her murdered son, is comparable to Isis suffering the death of her dismembered lover Osiris (155). As a consequence, one may find, in Isis, a cross-cultural symbol for Orphic, transformative, and motherly suffering and love, and it is in this sense that the term is used in this chapter. It must also be noted that the figure of Isis has been related to nation building and to an allegory of knowledge in the English Renaissance through Spenser’s designation of Isis as an ancestor to Elizabeth i as well as in French Romanticism, and through the poetry of Hugo and Nerval (Spiquel, 545, 548; Fairlie, 164). To recapitulate: femininity, motherly love and suffering, Orphism, metamorphosis, rites of passage, and nation building converge in the figure of Isis. In this sense, although feminist critics dealing with the Orphic theme tend to focus on the silence of Eurydice (Sword 408–09) and her position as follower or leader of Orpheus (Cixous & Jeannet, 251), or on the Bacchanals as hysteric poet killers (Coughlan, 34), also of interest is the potentially subversive figure that Isis could represent in an Orphic context, since, by lying at the f­ oundations of 36

To that extent, as the wife of the god of the underworld, Isis is also comparable to Persephone.

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the myth of Orpheus, Isis contradicts the Greco-Roman conception of poetry as an originally masculine craft. In Fred D’Aguiar’s novels Feeding the Ghosts (1997), Bethany Bettany (2003), and Children of Paradise (2014), the relation of women to suffering, fertility, and the supernatural or the mythical operates in Orphic ways that may, then, best be described as Isiac.37 In Feeding the Ghosts, Mintah becomes sterile because of her experience of the Middle Passage and, she believes, because of the moon rituals she performed on the Zong. Her sterility leads her to alternative, artistic modes of (pro)creation. In ­Bethany Bettany, the eponymous character acquires the power of becoming so flat as to achieve near invisibility subsequently to her being repetitively beaten up by members of her family, who accuse her of being a parricidal orphan. Familial relations are progressively smoothed over, and recourse to supernatural powers becomes less frequent when Bethany Bettany reaches puberty. Finally, in Children of Paradise, Bethany Bettany’s flatness – allowing her to slip below doors, remain unseen, and escape from her house – is reworked into Trina’s identification, simultaneously to her pubescence, with the Anansi trickster, whose limbo-contortions serve as a means to get through thresholds and into other worlds. Trina’s maturity and identification with Anansi announce her attempts at escaping Jonestown violence. In sum, these three characters’ supernatural powers are Isiac, because they are directly related to their feminine condition and bodily transformations as well as to the violence and suffering they face. 2.1 Mintah’s Moons As seen above, Mintah plays an important role in Feeding the Ghosts, not only as the novel’s protagonist, but as its muse, and as a crucial orphan-slave with a complex relation to writing and artistic creativity as hypomnesic media. Moreover, her navigating between the underworld of the Zong’s hold and the surface of the deck and her involvement in the American Underground Railroad to help slaves to escape from a hellish South may be seen as Orphic. However, some of her features come across as specifically Isiac in their relation to her femininity and the supernatural. For instance, when she is introduced to readers by being taken out of the hold for the first time, because she was shouting Kelsal’s name, Mintah is soon ridiculed by Captain Cunningham, who forces her to skip and jump from one foot to another to entertain his crewmen as he lashes at her feet with a whip. Mintah then decides to “dance the dance of fertility dance,” “fertility’s temporary death and eventual rebirth” (31) not out of compliance (even if she knows 37

Bloodlines’ Faith could also be viewed as Isiac, being a mother grieving for lost love and giving birth to an extraordinary child.

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sailors will mistake her dance for obedience), but because, in spite of her unwillingness to seem submissive, she ceases the moment as an opportunity to carry out a ritual she has been feeling the urge to perform: Now here was her chance. To transfer the pain of the whip around her legs to that of her womb. To placate the fertility god. To touch imaginary soils with the balls of her foot, bow her head, contract her shoulders and throw her open palms to the heavens in half-steps that would complete a circle of her own following the direction of the moon, a circle within the circle made by these alien men. And be cleansed by the rain […]. d’aguiar 1997, 31–2.

After associating rain with baptismal, lustral water here, Mintah abruptly stops dancing to tell captain and crew that she not only speaks English, but was baptized – facts which, again, question the legitimacy of making her a slave. ­Displeased by the information, Cunningham asks Kelsal to beat her and send her back below deck. While the Captain heads back to his quarters, and before Kelsal starts beating Mintah, “The boatswain [kneels] before her and [begins] to unbuckle his trousers. Kelsal [pushes] him away from her so hard that the man [falls] on his side and [looks] up at Kelsal astonished. Rain on the deck pooled red between Mintah’s thighs” (32–3). This event was predictable insofar as the temporary “death of fertility” and the subsequent return of fecundity described by Mintah beforehand corresponds to a metaphorical, invocative designation of a woman’s menstrual cycle, which Mintah reproduces in her dance and relates to the moon, a well-known symbol of menstruation as much as of artistic creation, and an astrological correlative of Isis. This suggests, as Mintah explains, that menstrual blood, saving her from rape, is not necessarily coincidental but, perhaps, (supernaturally) related to the arguably Isiac ritual – also indicative of fertility and rebirth – she has performed: Kelsal changes his mind about my body: he pushes the boatswain away. What has brought about the change? My dance. My blood in the rain. He has me turned on my stomach and he begins to beat me. Not with his open hands or his fists. He uses a stick. My flesh and bones must pay for my tongue or my blood. This hurt is not for crying. I cry because a dance I hated doing has saved me. The moon rescued me. Blood, my blood, is my saviour. (186) Again, the correlation of blood and moon is symbolically Isiac, and, according to Mintah’s book, its supernatural effect has prevented her from being raped, this time around at least. For after her failed mutiny, her punishment amounts

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to such a torture, and is instigated, again, by Kelsal and the boatswain who, not content with daubing pepper on her eyes, “rubbed more pepper between [her] legs and pushed some into [her] body” (215). Mintah feels so desperate about her worsening condition on board that she, somehow, regrets having performed the sacred dance while being ridiculed: Mintah thought about her performance above deck not so long ago. She felt ashamed. What fertility gods? Fructification for whose benefit? Her womb ached and her blood flowed for nothing. Her benediction to the gods was for what? None of it could save a single hair on the head of a child. She wanted the blood to run dry and for the intricate apparatus that she harboured inside to dislodge from its moorings and drift out of her; to expel it and never feel that particular pain again and never bleed for any god, for any dance. (40) Mintah is so overwhelmed by the Zong massacre that she wishes for sterility and death, as she relates her inability to save the children on board to the absence of motherly qualities in her character, and as she fears the children she could get might become victims of slavery.38 Moreover, Mintah actually does become barren after her crossing of the Atlantic: “On land I waited to bleed. […] But the moon failed as a bribe. I remembered the dances but refused to perform them. […] The sea had taken my blood from me and my ability to bleed. Yet I was surrounded by my progeny. The figures came from me. My hands delivered them” (210, emphasis mine). Of course, Mintah has certainly become sterile subsequently to the psychological and physical forms of torture she went through. Yet, as if they could restore her with fertility, Mintah refuses to perform ritual dances again, which also remind her of the traumatic Middle Passage experience, and suggests, in addition, that the Isiac silver disc, the coin of the moon, the bribe, or the cycle that is the cost of fertility, no longer grants her with the ability to bear children. In other words, it is as if her wish to become barren had been heard by the fertility gods, who would have decided to curse her with sterility subsequently to her turning away from them. As a consequence, and in order to make up for the lives she could not save on the Zong, she has recourse to various arts, such as writing and carving, and she calls the resulting works her “progeny” (210), as if artistic creation corresponded to procreation, because she “delivered them” (210), freeing the dead from oblivion through a process comparable to that of 38

Not without dark irony, then, it is a “superstitious pregnant woman” who, taking Mintah for a ghost, and being afraid of her, tells the crew that she is back on board (97).

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giving birth, which Mintah carries out to alleviate the weight of her past without forgetting it. Such artistry can be viewed as Isiac too, since it is not newborn beings that Mintah thus brings to the world, but the recreated figures of her slave companions rising again from watery depths (208–09), in the same way as Isis brings Osiris back to life from the depths of the Nile, and in the same way as Orpheus manages, but only in a temporary and spectral way – and it is precisely to this temporal insufficiency, amounting to partial failure, that the Isiac is resistant, thereby granting what it (hypomnesically) brings back with durability – to be reunited with Eurydice thanks to his artistic, musical skills. Mintah’s wooden figures, in addition to having the hypomnesic function of giving permanent posterity to those who died in the Atlantic, also play another role, when they are compared to living beings who, performing dances ­deriving from African culture to celebrate the abolition of slavery, revisit the rituals Mintah used to practice and subsequently transform the meaning of her statues in regenerative ways, as Mintah understands during the celebration of emancipation: I thought the shapes were trying to rise from the sea, but I know now they were dances. Each figure made by me was in this square. A man, woman or child in some movement to the music. Not movements to the music of the sea, as I had thought. These were dances of freedom. The faces were not scared on those figures, but excited. I had made them then read them wrong. Now they were here before me showing me their meaning, and I had helped to shape it. They were dancing not struggling. Ecstatic not terrified. A young woman moves in front of me in a pattern I recognize. I see myself at her age on the deck of the Zong in the throes of the fertility dance. (218) As Mintah points out, the dance is being performed on solid ground rather than on a shifting sea, and, as a result, is more promising than what Mintah’s prospects on the Zong were (218–09). Thus, although Mintah never gets over her memories of the Middle Passage experience, and ultimately dies, possibly through suicide, the novel, through the transfiguration of slaves and sterility into liberating regeneration, does open a space for hope in dear future (Ward, 179). 2.2 Foundling Flatness: Bethany Bettany Bethany Bettany (2003), Fred D’Aguiar’s fifth novel, is, for three reasons, as ­complete as it is complex in its relation to orphanhood. First, this novel complicates the orphan theme through its references to textuality, the novel

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genre, and nation building. Second, Bethany Bettany also points to the links that ­operate between orphanhood and Orphism by endowing the eponymous protagonist with supernatural powers. Finally, by making the loss of ­magical ­powers simultaneous to the main character’s pubescence and her effective “adoption” by the family that has been mistreating her for eleven years, D’Aguiar creates Bethany Bettany, along with Mintah and, as shown below, Trina from Children of Paradise, as one of his works’ female, Isiac orphans. The following pages explore, in further detail, how these three orph(an)ic threads intertwine in Bethany Bettany. The novel tells the story of its eponymous protagonist, from her childhood to the months following her seventeenth birthday, and from the respective viewpoints of most of the novel’s characters: every chapter is named after its narrator, except for Bethany Bettany, who sometimes narrates chapters entitled “Dream One” up to “Dream 3” (D’Aguiar 2003, 55, 74, 159) and “Georgetown Calling” (113, 132, 161),39 and whose double-barrel name is almost always split in two, with chapters entitled “Bettany” (the spelling favored by her father and his Guyanese family, used for chapters taking place in Guyana), “Bethany” (the spelling she uses at school, promoted by her mother when they were together in London for the first five years of her life, and functioning as a title to chapters the action of which takes place in London), except in the novel’s last chapters, four of which are entitled “Bethany Bettany” (287, 290, 306, 310), suggesting some sort of resolution for the protagonist’s transcontinental experience. In the novel’s first, italicized paragraph, the main character explains that she is a paternal orphan, and that her mother has left her in her father’s large family where she attracts “spit, slaps, jabs, curses and sneers from adults and their offspring,” which have led to her acquisition of the supernatural power of becoming flat and, hence, able to glide under doors and become almost invisible (1). In addition to sparking interrogations concerning the reason why the protagonist is subjected to violent reprimands from her relatives, suspense also arises from the mention of a mysterious letter from Bethany Bettany’s father to her daughter, “a letter he left for me that I must see one day, a letter that will tell me everything I need to know about my early life with him and about his death and whom to blame for taking him from me” (1), suggesting that Bethany Bettany’s father was murdered. Readers soon learn that uncles and aunts from the paternal branch of Bethany Bettany’s family believe that her mother killed her father Lionel, that is, 39

Probably a nod to The Clash’s “London Calling” and, maybe, an allusion to the Windrush generation and bbc radio too.

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their brother, and they and their children punish Bethany Bettany for it (2), all the more so since she looks so much like her mother that they say she “is her mother” (1) and functions, then, as an unbearable “daily reminder” (2, 102, ­emphasis mine) of Lionel’s alleged murderer.40 The uncles and aunts also refer, albeit suggestively, to two attempts at parricide made by Bethany Bettany during her time in London: one with a razor, and another by fire (4, 84–7, 255–56). The novel later reveals that after the protagonist’s parents migrated to London – Bethany Bettany’s mother is a high ranking civil servant in charge of government census and sent to the English capital – their relationship degenerated into violence, partly because of their being confronted with British racism, on which their opinions diverge (261, 301), and partly because Lionel, the father, cheated on the mother – unnamed in the novel – before they left Guyana for England. Bethany Bettany’s mother actually used her knowledge of Lionel’s adultery in Guyana as a means to make him feel guilty and pressure him to move with her to London, while he wanted the family to remain in Guyana, where he was a land surveyor. In England, feeling exiled from the land he loves, he feels unhappy, in spite of his job as a river surveyor on the Thames.41 Traumatized by conjugal violence and the image of her father hitting her mother, Bethany Bettany tries twice to kill her father before she can “face five candles on a cake” (4). Thus, Bethany Bettany is a parricidal orphan who can become as flat as a page, and who is designated as a “daily reminder” of her father’s death. In this sense, the protagonist obviously serves as an allegory of textuality, since, again, according to Plato and Derrida, written speech is a hypomnesic, parricidal orphan (Plato a, 63; Derrida 1972, 95–6). Moreover, in addition to having tried to kill her father, Bethany Bettany refuses to call her paternal relatives by their 40

41

Lionel actually jumped off a bridge, imitating the birds he loved to watch while working on the Thames, after separating from his wife and Bethany Bettany (a breakup he could not bear) subsequently to his daughter’s double parricidal attempt (308–09). Lionel’s suicide is also evocative of the myth of the flying Africans, described below. The Anglo-Guyanese context, the mother’s namelessness, and her function as a civil servant evoke intertextuality with Dear Future. Also, the family’s experience of British racism appears in the novel when Bethany Bettany and her mother witness a demonstration in which people shout the slogan “Niggers out!” (261). In his article entitled “Six Views of Britain,” D’Aguiar describes a similar demonstration he saw in London in 1979, after which he was, for no apparent reason, arrested by the police and sent to trial, only to be declared innocent of any charge (D’Aguiar 2015, 490). In this sense, autobiographical undertones constitute a feature that Bethany Bettany and Dear Future also share. For an in-depth study of the relationship of Bethany Bettany’s parents in terms of gender, see Cecilia Acquarone’s 2011 doctoral thesis (to which this book refers) or its published version. For a discussion of British racial problems in D’Aguiar’s writings, see Sarikaya 2011.

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names because of their violence and cruelty towards her, and thus gives them nicknames corresponding to their ways of harming her: “The Sneer,” “The Jab,” “The Slap,” and “The Spit” (2). Hence, Bethany Bettany denies any genealogical affiliation with her paternal forebears, because of their brutality towards her. But although she refuses to call them by their names, another narrator, the headmaster of the village school, reveals that the last name of the paternal branch of Bethany Bettany’s family is Abrahams (23). In the novel, the Abrahams are known all over the country for their founding role, as a family, in the making of Guyana as an independent nation, because they belonged to one of its first governmental coalition parties, from which they broke in order to form the party that won independence, took power, and kept it until the moment of the action (50). Considering that the novel repetitively alludes to an ongoing border war with Venezuela (7, 48, 161–62, 207–12, 267–82), one can infer that, as in Dear Future, the story unfolds in the Guyana of the 1960s–70s, and that the Abrahams’ founding party probably was the People’s Progressive Party, from which they broke, according to the novel, in the same way as Forbes Burnham did to create the People’s National Congress in 1958 and win the favors of the West to ultimately gain Guyanese independence in 1966.42 Finally, along with the novel’s border war context, it must be specified that Bethany Bettany’s village is called Boundary, and it is by going to the war front near the border, at the end of the novel, that she is finally reunited there with her mother – a Guyanese minister – and her grandfather, patriarch Reginald Abrahams. Her grandfather had left his family for the country’s interior to search for diamonds, both because he had gambled and lost all of his money and because he refused to condone his children’s mistreatment of Bethany Bettany as a means to punish her mother for the death of their brother. ­Further, he

42

The “ham” ending of “Abraham” is evocative of the “Burnham” name too. That the Abrahams are a numerous family living in a Guyanese village and putting up an orphan whose mother is a civil servant is reminiscent of Red Head’s family, the Santos, in Dear Future. However, the Santos, as shown above, are clearly and fiercely opposed to the pnc. D’Aguiar changes perspective in Bethany Bettany by telling the story of a similar family that is, this time around, supportive of the pnc. The headmaster and only schoolteacher in Boundary works in the school that was funded and built by the Abrahams, but belongs to the ppp, which has become the “permanent and powerless opposition” (50) party since the pnc broke from it and assumed power. Hence, at one point in the novel, the Abrahams mindlessly decide to burn down the school – thus ruining their children’s education – and beat the headmaster away from Boundary for having punished the Abrahams children and telling them that their “name will be [their] ruin […] and it will poison the land” (175), in an almost prophetic aphorism that is, as in Dear Future again, highly critical of Burnham’s – in the novel, the Abrahams’ – pnc.

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has embraced her political convictions (294).43 Reginald also blames his family for supporting a party (the pnc) that is “obviously bankrupting the country” (294). Needless to say, “Abrahams,” as a name, cannot have been chosen accidentally, when used to designate a founding national family in a novel the main character of which is an orphan. As Homer Obed Brown explains, the history of the advent of the novel is compared by Jean-Luc Nancy and Sir Walter Scott to that of the myth of the patriarchs, that is, of Abraham, who is asked by God to leave his country, his people, and his “father’s household” to found a “great nation” (Genesis 12: 1–2; Brown 1997, 15). In the same way as the story of Abraham’s break with, or orphaning from, his father, progressively was turned into a myth within monotheistic scriptures, the novel progressively became an institutionalized genre long after the dawning of its first, prototypical avatars deriving from the differentiation of Romance languages from one another, and from their Latin forebear, into national languages (Brown 1997, 19). In other words, and roughly speaking, what both the myth of Abraham and the genesis of the novel translate is nation-building through self-orphaning: a break with the patriarch’s land and language. Such an intersection between orphanhood, nation-building, and the Abrahamic precisely is what Bethany Bettany, as a then deeply novelistic literary work, recounts to its readers, using 1960s Guyana, the scene of a newly independent nation, as a setting.44 In actual history, the pnc’s break from the communist coalition of the ppp led to official (rather than effective) Guyanese independence, because the initially less openly communist practices of the pnc, along with its leader’s corruptibility, temporarily reassured Western nations such as the usa and Britain in the Cold War atmosphere of the times into relinquishing, in appearance at least, their colonial hegemony over Guyana. In the novel, it is clear that the Abrahams belong to a faction analogous to that of the pnc, in that the family broke from a ppp-like coalition (50) that, among other things, led the grandfather, Reginald A ­ brahams 43

44

Bethany Bettany’s mother’s status as a high ranking civil servant who broke with the Abraham’s party is reminiscent of Jessie Burnham’s break from her brother Forbes’ faction to join Cheddi Jagan’s opposition party in 1958. She, at the time, had warned the Guyanese people about her brother’s unquenchable thirst for power, in an article entitled “Beware, my brother Forbes Burnham,” published in 1958 for the People’s Progressive Party by the New Guiana Company (Burnham, 1958). Jessie Burnham’s split with her brother also is a climactic moment in Pauline Melville’s “The President’s Exile” (Melville, 9–11). In the same way as the orphan nature of the novel is extended to written speech as a whole by Derrida through Plato (Derrida 1972, 63–4), in Donner la Mort, Derrida also explains, for reasons too numerous and intricate to be described here, that not only the novel, but literature itself is Abrahamic (Derrida 1999, 177), notably, because of its relation to genealogy and secrecy (179, 191, 205–09).

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(whose first name is etymologically related to rex, regis, or king, indicating his patriarchal role), to break with them in turn and leave for the wilderness of the Guyanese interior. As a parricidal orphan that denies her paternal uncles and aunts their very names, Bethany Bettany also challenges national patriarchy from within the microcosm of her family of “founding fathers.”45 Moreover, when Bethany Bettany escapes to the capital to find the central post office, because she suspects the weekly letters she sends to her mother are, along with her mother’s mail, being withheld – probably by her uncle, the only postman in Boundary (14) – the district manager there asks her, before checking if such withholding is the case, if she has proof of her name, to which she answers: “I am living proof of my name” (161). Of course, if it is in the nature of an “Abrahams” to orphan oneself, her presence as a foundling, without a father to speak on her behalf and confirm her genealogy, is “living proof” of her identity. In the capital, Bethany Bettany also meets Fly, a foundling who guides her around the city – and whom she incites to learn how to read and write – that is, to learn an orphan skill (120). Just after her visit to the post office, Fly tells her that he considers joining the war effort at the border with Venezuela, partly out of gratitude for the Abrahams, who funded his orphanage, and who support border defense. Bethany Bettany subsequently warns him that he does not realize how dangerous war could be, to which he replies, according to the protagonist: War with whom? The border dispute with Venezuela is a national fixture, nothing new. I [Bethany Bettany] do not know. This surprises him. He thinks my name determines the course of the country. I tell him I come from a house in the countryside and that I know nothing about the running of the nation. He tells me I need to look into the true meaning of my name. 162, emphasis mine

Fly’s recommendation to Bethany Bettany is also one metatextually made to readers, who should, more than halfway into the novel here, have understood 45

In addition, the protagonist is able to reach the sea or get to the capital, Georgetown, respectively through a one-day walk and a simple bus-ride from a village near Boundary, called Mable. Although Boundary and Mable are fictional places, looking at the nearby villages surrounding Georgetown on a map of Guyana, one finds that a village named Land of Canaan – the first country that Abraham inherits in Genesis 12: 6 – can be located on the East bank of the Demerara river, approximately ten miles away from the capital. Perhaps the connection was not lost on D’Aguiar, and functioned as one of the inspirational inputs to his novel, all the more so since that village and Georgetown are almost equidistant to Airy Hall, where D’Aguiar grew up.

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that it is no accident for the protagonist’s family to be named Abrahams. As explained above, the border war with Venezuela is indeed a “national fixture,” a Guyanese characteristic dating back to the 1830s. Yet, if the making of a nation depends upon the delimitation of land and the violence such gesture implies, the border conflict suggests that Guyana, at the time of the action, is still in the process of making itself, of orphaning itself by drawing an imaginary line demarcating it from the rest of the world, to which it nevertheless belongs. In this sense, and in addition to her last name, Bethany Bettany’s ability to become flat and almost invisible, in addition to her designation as a parricidal orphan, might metaphorically turn her to a representation of the boundary (at which she is reunited with her mother and Reginald at the end of the novel) as the condition for the founding of a new nation, all the more so since it is p ­ recisely boundaries that form paths across different landscapes – constituting other boundaries and worlds – in the same way as Bethany Bettany’s flatness allows her to cross into, or experience, the intimacy of the relatives who beat her, which brings us to the Orphic, or Isiac nature of her orphanhood. Bethany Bettany’s ability to become flat and almost invisible can be designated as Orphic, or even Isiac, for at least three reasons. First, as a parricidal orphan who entertains a relation to myth – that of the patriarch, comparable to the history of the novel genre – Bethany Bettany allegorizes a Platonist conception of written speech that derives from the textual spread of Orphism (Young 2008, 10–1). Second, her flatness makes her comparable to a very small amount of mist (D’Aguiar 2003, 45) that is reminiscent of Orpheus’ and Eurydice’s spectral condition when they are reunited in Hades. Finally, like the supernatural powers that allow Orpheus and Isis to go back and forth between two worlds, Bethany Bettany’s flatness is a supernatural ability that helps her to pass thresholds from one (public) world to another (private one) and, most of all, to heal from wounds inflicted to her body: when her uncles and aunts furiously beat her like mad bacchanals attacking Orpheus or like Seth (the epitome of the cruel brother/relative) trying to cut Osiris to pieces, Bethany Bettany is irrepressibly led to enter her flattened condition to intrude upon her aggressors’ intimacy, and her wounds magically heal from such voyeuristic intrusion into their secret world, while it is made clear that she should have died from the overwhelming violence of some of her beatings (108). In other words, her power is almost a resurrectional ability that is comparable, again, to the powers of Isis and Orpheus.46 Throughout the novel, Bethany Bettany 46

Moreover, Bethany Bettany is highly comparable to two of D’Aguiar’s Orphic orphans, namely, Sow (D’Aguiar 2000) and Red Head (D’Aguiar 1996), because, in addition to having supernatural powers, she, like them, has red hair (D’Aguiar 2003, 3), and although, unlike her two male counterparts, she was not born prematurely after seven months of

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­ ndergoes such metamorphoses five times, out of which four lead her to witu ness the erotic intimacy of her uncles and aunts which, as readers discover, almost always consists in non-procreative acts, as if sterility were a punishment for their violence towards children and a regenerative compensation for Bethany Bettany. For instance, the protagonist’s first transformation occurs after a horrible beating by Uncle the Jab. The uncle had hidden a marble in one of his hands, and promised to give it to Bethany Bettany if she found the hand in which it was concealed. Unable to get over the dilemma of choosing one hand at the risk of losing the marble, Bethany Bettany, somewhere between five and twelve years of age at that point in the novel, decides to point at both hands, which unpleasantly surprises the uncle, who brings her to her father’s tomb, blames his death on her, and beats her there with branches that break with the blows and force him to break other branches from a nearby tree until he loses patience and hits the little girl with his feet and fists until he is restrained by his sister Joyce, the only person on the estate who seems to like Bethany Bettany (and whom the protagonist accordingly calls Kind Aunt), leaving the child with a bleeding face and contusions all over her body (28). Shortly after, Bethany Bettany undergoes her first transformation, which allows her to enter the room where The Jab has retreated to cry, and where he finally masturbates until he ejaculates, all of which Bethany Bettany witnesses unnoticed. As she sees – her power forcing her to be there and watch – her Uncle going through the act, all of her bruises magically heal (38).47 After another beating by aunt The Slap, who is also responsible for Bethany Bettany’s stutter, since she slaps her every time she tries to speak (16), Bethany Bettany watches her aunt cry herself to sleep after an abruptly interrupted sexual intercourse with her husband and heals (52–3). After the third beating that threatens her with death – her bleeding ear suggests severe cranial injury (108) – she witnesses Joyce’s husband giving a cunnilingus to another aunt, and survives (108–11). Finally, after Aunt Ethel has repetitively lashed and slapped her, Bethany Bettany undergoes metamorphosis again to find out that Ethel goes so far as giving fellatio to the village Priest to convince him to perform an exorcism on Bethany Bettany, who, Ethel claims, is possessed by the devil (136, 139–40). In order to exorcise the protagonist, the Priest has her restrained on a

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gestation, her mother had to flee from an iguana by literally running through a hedge when she was seven-month pregnant (44). Acquarone associates the persecution of Bethany Bettany to that of Cinderella, and compares the precision with which D’Aguiar describes the beatings to that of French naturalism (Acquarone, 133–34).

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table so that he can peer at her genitalia while praying for her soul. Although such “exorcism” is evocative of the Priest’s perversity, his conclusion that the child is not possessed incites the family to stop mistreating Bethany Bettany (143–44). The event that really brings an end to Bethany Bettany’s predicament, however, takes place not too long after the exorcism, when the family grandmother (Reginald’s wife, who had so far been living as a recluse in her room subsequently to her husband’s desertion and her son’s death) intervenes during a persecution scene by opening her window and ordering her relatives to “leave the child alone” (156). Hence, all of Bethany Bettany’s violent relatives have a non-procreative relation to sexuality, except, notably, for Kind Aunt, who gets pregnant and gives birth to a son in the novel (127).48 Her being the only person to give birth and be good to Bethany Bettany in the novel suggests that the violence of elders is barren, and that, contrarily to the violence with which a child may break from a father to found a nation, a person threatening his or her younger relative with death goes against the order of things and contradicts generative (national) potential. In this sense, it is not surprising to find that the uncles who beat Bethany Bettany also arguably fail to serve their country’s prospects when they desert from the war front soon after having enrolled in the border conflict (210, 216) to avoid facing trial for burning the village school, also an action that, arguably, runs counter to nation-building (194).49 But the necessity for Bethany 48

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There actually is another exception in the novel, when Bethany Bettany heals through revenge, by throwing a stone at the latrines while an aunt who has beaten her is urinating there: the aunt goes out and does not see Bethany Bettany, who is invisible, and punishes other (innocent) children. If that un-named aunt is the Sneer, however, the novel explains that the only sexual intercourse she has with her husband corresponds to his sodomizing her against her will (101) which, in addition to being another form of non-generative sex, amounts to conjugal rape. Moreover, when the family learns that the uncles have deserted, Bethany Bettany suspects that they are hiding in the garden barn and, once, she has a nightmare in which she sees them dead in the barn, one of them nailed to a cart wheel, evoking Christ on the cross, except that the cross has become a cycle, which is reminiscent of the Orphic wheel of birth, the regenerative symbolism of which is subverted by the corpse nailed onto it. In other words, the uncle’s desertion, along with his other barren actions, suggests that his presence on the wheel allegorizes the unproductive nature of the family’s incentives, related to war and violence, rather than Christian self-sacrifice and Orphic regeneration. Another passage evoking the same wheel of birth also appears in Dear Future (D’Aguiar 1996, 23). The presence of such references in D’Aguiar’s writings reinforces both the cross-cultural nature of his work and the notion that his supernatural characters have an O ­ rphic and/ or Isiac dimension. These features of D’Aguiar’s texts show that he, then, consciously inscribes himself within the orph(an)ic literary tradition expanding from Plato and Ovid to magic(al) realists.

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­ ettany to transform into an invisible being and spy on the intimacy of others B is also built into the novel so as to lead to yet another discovery, by way of which the novel’s Abrahamic intertext is further confirmed. The last metamorphosis Bethany Bettany undergoes takes place after a battle breaks out – sparked by an insult thrown at the protagonist and concerning her orphanhood – among the village’s children, who throw stones at each other. The protagonist receives a stone on the forehead50 and is led to follow and spy on the child who threw it at her, only to learn from the child’s mother, who soothes her son (he feels guilty for having pelted a stone at Bethany Bettany), that she is his half-sister, and that he was born out of Lionel’s (again, Bethany Bettany’s father) adultery with her when his wife was in England, on a mission for the state. In other words, Lionel Abrahams is comparable to the Old Testament Abraham, insofar as he, like the patriarch, had two children from two different mothers too (181, 301). Finally, and apart from Bethany Bettany being a tale that implicitly addresses the novel genre’s relation to orphanhood and the making of a nation, it must be noted that Bethany Bettany starts being treated kindly by her kin, not only after a scene of exorcism and the unexpected intervention of her grandmother, but also simultaneously to the moment of her puberty, which is related to yet another myth in the novel, namely, that of the spider trickster, Anansi. From that moment of the story onwards, when Bethany Bettany is sixteen, no manifestation of her supernatural powers ever occurs again, nor does her stutter subsist.51 In other words, Bethany Bettany’s loss of her supernatural powers do not only correspond to their superfluousness subsequent to her good treatment, but are also associated to the mythical presentation of her puberty in 50

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Bethany Bettany gets bruised on the forehead twice in the novel: the passage in question relates the second occasion, while the first one occurs when she tries to hit her father with a razor and, as her father throws her away, she inadvertently cuts her forehead with the blade (86–7). For Bethany Bettany to get bruised by the young boy on the same part of her body as when her father bruised her might foreshadow the upcoming revelation that the boy is her half-brother, Lionel’s illegitimate son, acting like his father. Finally, Bethany Bettany’s transformation subsequent to a blow on the forehead is reminiscent of how an axe hitting Red Head’s forehead makes him clairvoyant in Dear Future (D’Aguiar 1996, 3). A precedent to such symbolization and/or announcement of revelatory moments through the image of a forehead wound exists in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, when Tia pelts a stone at her friend Antoinette, wounding her forehead, and making white Antoinette and black Tia grow conscious, for the very first time, of the racial tensions suffusing their 19th century, post-emancipation Jamaican context (Rhys, 23). She realizes she has lost her stammer while fluently (and quite ironically) asking questions on the function of punishment to the headmaster. Acquarone also associates Bethany Bettany’s puberty to her magical change of status, and claims this feature of the novel is in keeping with the conventions of the fairy tale (Acquarone 148).

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the novel. For instance, before puberty, when she cannot escape being savagely beaten by The Jab, the uncle explains that although “she turned her back and shielded her head, crotch, and ribs,” “she needed the arms and legs of a spider to shield herself from [his] blows” (28, italics mine): it is only later, during puberty, that Bethany Bettany is (implicitly) identified with the spider trickster. For example, when she gets her first period, it is not accidental for her to find out about her menstrual blood while hiding in the limbo-like interstice – a space only accessible through Anansi-like spidery contortions (Harris 1999, 158–59) – that separates the house from the ground, where she is afraid of meeting other spiders and scorpions, but does not mind spiderwebs as long as it is her hands that touch them, since only there do they feel “tolerably silky” (199). Moreover, the only two women related to fertility in the novel, namely, Kind Aunt, through her pregnancy, and Bethany Bettany, through puberty, successively trick one another in the novel, with subterfuges involving the presence of a scorpion, an insect that evolves in the same places as those where (Anansi) spiders thrive. When Bethany Bettany exits the room where she sees Kind Aunt Joyce’s husband having sex with another aunt, Bethany Bettany is almost caught red-handed by Joyce and, as an explanation to her nightly wanderings around in the house, and in order to prevent Joyce from entering the room where her husband is cheating on her, she lies to Kind Aunt who, she realizes, is pregnant, by telling her she has seen a scorpion. However, a “large scorpion” magically materializes on the ceiling and tries to jump on Joyce, who throws a towel at it. When she picks up the towel from the corridor floor, the scorpion has – magically again – disappeared (111–12), but her shrieks have had the effect of summoning her husband to her side while the other aunt uses the instant as an opportunity to sneak away (111–12). Bethany Bettany is left wondering “how [she] made her see that scorpion” (112). Later in the novel, Joyce implicitly tells Bethany Bettany that she saw through the Anansi-like trick she played on her by reproducing it: when the protagonist asks her aunt if her mother killed her father, the aunt answers: “Yes and no. Is a scorpion you say there in front of your eyes any less real because I can’t see it?” (158). Yet, and of course, Joyce’s question is also metatextually addressed to readers to incite them to think upon the delimitation – another boundary in the novel – between reality and magic, or the supernatural. As Acquarone explains, that question, along with the presentation of Bethany Bettany’s powers, which are never confirmed or denied in the novel, corresponds to typical feature of magic(al) realist fiction, in that “without flouting the rational frame that marked the Enlightened West, magical realism,” like Bethany Bettany, “subverts [the rational frame] from within by including other forms of grasping reality and striving for meaningful expression” (Acquarone, 131).

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Acquarone’s argument contributes to defining Fred D’Aguiar’s fifth novel as a magic(al) realist work, and is in keeping with the idea that, again, D’Aguiar privileges Hobbesian imagination over Cartesian reason, because he, unlike Descartes, believes in the empowering potential of relying on imagination as a mnemonic gateway to the past. For instance, in Bethany Bettany, supernatural elements allow D’Aguiar to revert to Guyanese history in an imaginative way that is also close to myth and, so doing, provide a Platonist-Abrahamic problematization of the novel genre and of written speech in addition to an Ovidian-Orphic, magic(al) realist reflection on the powers of the imagination. Finally, D’Aguiar’s reliance on the Abrahamic and the marvelous real might corroborate a sense of the novel as national literary expression through which the author makes an attempt at writing a truly “Guyanese” novel, not by enclosing Guyana within an immutable boundary – the border is ironically still being disputed at end of the novel – but by defining it through the openness of the marvelous reality through which Carpentier territorialized American imagination (Chanady in Zamora and Faris, 125–44). 2.3 Trickster Trina Affiliation between Bethany Bettany and Trina, the protagonist in Children of Paradise, can first be sensed through Trina’s mother who, like Bethany Bettany’s aunt, is called Joyce, and plays the role of the protagonist’s main accomplice in the novel. Moreover, both Bethany Bettany and Trina are paternal orphans with arguably supernatural qualities. Although Trina’s obviously Orphic qualities are detailed further below, another, Isiac characteristic that Trina shares with Bethany Bettany, namely, the apparent link between Trina’s pubescence and the supernatural qualities of the mythical Anansi trickster, must be described here. Very early in the novel, Trina’s affinity for insects is represented. For instance, when she agrees to perform a false resurrection for Jim Jones, she is sent to choose a flute in the commune school. There, she casts admiring looks at wooden masks carved by native Caribbean tribes, until she pauses in front of a glass case “divided in four compartments housing two tarantulas and two scorpions” (21–22), until “an assistant appears and hands her a wooden flute” (22). Hence, from the novel’s beginning, Trina’s Isiac, albeit sham, resurrection, and her acquisition of a flute that, as explained below, she will use in Orphic ways to try to lead the commune children out of the hell Jonestown progressively becomes, is directly connected to Trina’s relation to spiders and dangerous insects.52 The next appearance of a spider in the novel occurs during Trina’s 52

She even daydreams of Anansi while playing her flute (54) and, later on, when her friend Ryan manages to sneak into the commune bakery to steal a loaf of bread, Trina compares

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first journey with her mother on Captain Aubrey’s boat – Trina and Joyce are regularly sent by Jones to run money-laundering errands in the capital – where Trina learns about Anansi, whom Aubrey describes to her as a “spider character” who “likes to play tricks on everyone” and “comes all the way from Africa” before telling her the story, also told in Dear Future (D’Aguiar 1996, 12–3), of Anansi sharing a hand of bananas with his relatives (D’Aguiar 2014, 32–3). As Trina grows up and reaches puberty, she discovers her menstrual blood as she wakes up one morning on the lower part of the bunk bed in which she sleeps – an in-between locus that is symbolic of limbo, Anansi’s home according to Harris (Harris 1999, 158–59), to whom D’Aguiar acknowledges his indebtedness for encouraging him to write the novel in question (D’Aguiar 2014, 363). Upon such a discovery, Trina directly goes out of the dormitory to find her mother, but swoons because of slight anemia, and wakes up being carried to the infirmary, where her mother and the nurse explain her new condition to her (147–48).53 Soon after, Trina goes out to play, “dreams herself a spider,” or rather, daydreams her transformation into a spider, growing eight legs that “operate like spokes on a wheel,” and, as she watches, “Joyce sees the transformation of Trina over and over” (150). In addition to the association of Trina’s menstrual cycle with myth, and subsequently to the synchronicity of Trina’s puberty with the worsening of the situation in Jonestown, Joyce uses the spider image to warn Trina about her suspicion of food poisoning: The spider Trina becomes in front of Joyce’s eyes turns Trina into exactly what Joyce thinks her daughter needs to be at the commune, a trickster just like Anansi. She reminds her daughter to be alert at mealtimes, to chew her food before she swallows, and to look carefully at what is on her spoon before she puts it into her mouth (152). Of course, the warning foreshadows the ultimate forced suicide that the commune members, in actual history and in the novel, are made to go through, by ingesting Kool Aid mixed with cyanide. The quick worsening of the situation, as suggested above, transpires through the increasing eccentricity of Jim Jones’ sermons, the sixth of which, later called the “insect sermon” (325) by commune members, relates Trina again to the figure of the spider. For during that sermon, Jim Jones plays with the commune members’ self-esteem by implicitly

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him to Anansi, the spider that “defies all odds and defeats many foes” to bring food home to his children (85). After these explanations, respectively by Aunt Joyce and mother Joyce, both Bethany Bettany and Trina are afraid that others may smell blood on them (D’Aguiar 2003, 204; 2014, 159). This suggests, again, that the characterization of Trina is partly operated by D’Aguiar through a reworking of Bethany Bettany’s features.

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challenging them to a test of faith, consisting in coming to the pulpit for him to lower dangerous insects onto their arms, which he claims they will not fear if they trust him and have faith in salvation (292). After several disciples fail – one of them is a teenage girl-prefect who, when Jones places a tarantula on her neck, panics and runs out of the church in the dark, subsequently falling into the commune well (292–94) which is, unfortunately for her, “full of spiders” (73) – Trina successfully passes the test, with a spider on one arm and a scorpion on the other (298–300). After the sermon, Adam turns out to have escaped, and is found the next day with the prefect girl, whom he rescued from the well. The girl, because of the preceding evening’s shock, has become mute, and Trina takes it upon her, after having asked for Jones’ permission, to heal the girl-prefect from her experience, that is, to symbolically, and hence completely, get her out of the nightmarish well full of Anansi-like spiders (313, 325–26).54 Trina succeeds as the first person to manage to recreate a social intercourse with the girl (313). But most important of all is that Trina’s self-appointment as a psychiatric nurse is part of a trick she plays on Jones: she has planned to escape from the commune with her mother on Aubrey’s boat, and intends to bring as many people as she can along with her. The permission that allows her to take care of other children helps her to bring four friends along with her to the pier. Although Trina has been, so far, a successful, Anansi-like trickster, this (and every other) attempt at escape fails (326–30). After one of these failed flights, Joyce gets off Aubrey’s boat, then turns back to him to tell him “Aubrey, you owe my daughter an Anansi story, remember?” to which he answers “When shall I come back?” (330). In other words, and in the presence of commune guards, Joyce uses an equivocal, trickster’s language to tell Aubrey that since her “little miss spider” failed as a trickster this time around, they must try out another escape scheme which will, unfortunately for them, end up in failure again (344–52). Nevertheless, Aubrey pays his “debt” of an Anansi story, when he reappears in the novel’s last chapter as the captain of a ship leading the children who died at Jonestown to the spirit world (358). In order to avoid the children’s reluctance or questioning, he distracts them, or rather, tricks them, with an

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Although the prefect’s fall into the well is not ordered by Jones this time around, the novel indicates that it is a place of punishment (D’Aguiar 2014, 73, 78). That well existed in actual history, and was used to perpetrate acts of torture: “refractory children” sometimes, “were taken into the forest, to a well not far from Jones’s bungalow. Two people would already be in the well, swimming around. The child was tossed in. He would be grabbed by the feet and pulled down into the water. All over the commune they would hear the child’s terrified screams and pleadings for forgiveness” (Naipaul 146).

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­ nansi story, until they reach their destination.55 The last child to go is Trina, A who explains again that “Sometimes [she] thinks [she is] Anansi, the spider,” just before she “shape shift[s] and escape[s],” albeit through death, with the other children (361–62). Thus, Trina’s relation to her puberty coincides with her identification with Anansi, a figure that in turn becomes symbolic of one of her characteristic, trickster’s features, through which she ultimately i­magines escape plans that help to maintain the quick rhythm of the narrative and provide a path for the plot to unfold. Trina’s failure to escape makes her, along with the other children, get through the threshold of death into a limbo-like space on Aubrey’s then otherworldly boat in an ending that, in addition to relying on diverse myths related to Anansi and limbo, suggests a sort of afterlife, or resurrection in another dimension for the children who, like Orpheus on the Hebrus, end up floating posthumously on a river. Interconnections between the Orphic and the fluvial are actually numerous in Fred D’Aguiar’s novels, and discussed in the following section. 3

‘Many Rivers to Cross:’ Orphic Confluences

As this study has attempted to make clear, no one ever fully masters a language, no matter how fluently one speaks, because escape from the metaphorical is never fully achievable (Derrida 1978, 66; 1996, 44). Language is under the influence of metaphor, it is affluent with metaphor, and metaphor itself consists in the confluence of a syntagm with an unusual paradigm. The word fluency (and its above-mentioned linguistic derivations) is itself imbued with metaphorical signification as soon as it is used to describe linguistic abilities, since its primary meaning, as etymology shows, designates what is fluvial, watery fluxes and flows. Then, fluency and, by extension, its derivatives, can simultaneously designate a confluence between a watery pattern and a linguistic phenomenon: again, the flowing together of two rivers and the weaving together of a metaphor may each instance confluence, while each being related to the other also through the word confluence. And if the flowing together of two rivers, springing from different topoï, themselves potentially populated with different cultural groups, is translatable into metaphorical confluence, it is likely that topographical confluence lead to cross-cultural tropology: fluid topos and fluent tropos, tropics and tropes would merge into tropicality again. 55

This otherworldly ending is reminiscent of those found in Bloodlines and Dear Future. It also presents analogies with a passage from Feeding the Ghosts, and is related to the prose of Wilson Harris, as shown below.

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Despite the numerous possibilities that fluency-related metaphors may o­ ffer for the study of the cross-cultural, thinkers and artists focusing on this question tend to do so through the lenses of unpredictable determinism, rhizomatic sea routes, or hybridity, rather than through a language derived from fluvial topography. One may think of Benitez-Rojo’s fractal model of the ­repeating island to discuss Caribbean culture, or of Glissant’s échos-monde and chaosmonde. As for oceanic principles, Brathwaite’s tidalectics, Gilroy’s Bla­ck Atlantic and Derek Walcott’s idea that “the sea is history” (Walcott 1986, 364–66) come to mind. Lastly, Chamoiseau’s creoleness and Bhabha’s hybridity focus more on language as a cultural vehicle. Chroniclers of the cross-cultural thus rarely openly deal with the fluvial in relation to fluency and confluence, which may seem strange,56 considering that many cities around the world owe their cosmopolitanism, at least in part, to their having been founded on riverbanks and seashores, navigable waterways via which, among other things, foreigners could come. In the Caribbean, two exceptions exist: Wilson Harris and Fred D’Aguiar, both of anglophone, Guyanese upbringing. Guyana, meaning “land of many waters” in the language of the Caribs (D’Aguiar 2003), owes its name to the dense fluvial network of its interior, a gigantic tropical rainforest. It is not too surprising for these writers to belong to the small number of cross-cultural intellectuals whose attention is drawn by fluency. Moreover, the two authors were friends, and D’Aguiar acknowledges the influence Harris had over him. As mentioned above, although he renounced writing a doctoral thesis on the works of Wilson Harris when he started being a successful poet, Fred D’Aguiar, in articles such as “Prosimetrum” (2009a) or “Wilson Harris, the Writer as Surveyor” (Misrahi-Barak and Joseph-Vilain 2012), has written on how Harris’ poetics of time and space – which, again, he progressively came to designate as infinite rehearsal – is derived from his exploration of the Guyanese interior, and of soundings of its rivers, in novels such as Palace of the Peacock and The Four Banks of the River of Space. D’Aguiar has also dedicated a series (D’Aguiar 1993, 35–8) and a collection (2009) of poems to Harris, and acknowledged Harris’ work as a source of inspiration for Children of Paradise, the plot of which gives crucial importance, like Harris’ Palace of the Peacock, to a Guyanese river,

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This is actually only partly strange, because it is often the Atlantic, an ocean that many of these thinkers perceive as the main point of confluence, because of its relation to colonization and the triangular trade.

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while dealing with the 1978 Jonestown massacre (D’Aguiar 2014, 363), a theme Harris himself explored in 1996, in his novel Jonestown.57 In addition to friendship, the influence of Harris over D’Aguiar also leads one to reflect on confluence as intertextuality, especially since Harris’ interest in Guyanese rivers and the Atlantic finds its counterpart in three out of the seven novels by D’Aguiar: Children of Paradise (2014), Bloodlines (2000) and Feeding the Ghosts (1997). Each of their plots give crucial importance to waterways. Further, the main characters are all orphans with more or less supernatural qualities indicative, once more, of intertextuality with the myth of Orpheus – sailing on the rivers of the underworld – as a potential point of confluence for these three novels. Again, we rely on the adjective “Orphic” to designate all the features that are constitutive of and related to the myth of Orpheus, such as (magical) music or art, enchanted or enchanting nature, the underworld, resurrection, and ghostliness.58 It is through a sounding of such features in the fluxes of Harris’ Palace of the Peacock and D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise that this final section explores the network of cross-cultural, intertextual, and metaphorical confluences that operate on, in, and between their works. 3.1 Palace of the Peacock Wilson Harris’ fiction presents such Orphic characteristics that critics tend to deal with it in terms of magic(al) realism (Bowers 60; Zamora and Faris, 167, 258, 371), a literary genre in which magic elements are presented as an integral part of reality, a narrative trend the diverse theories of which are generally developed from Franz Roh’s 1925 discussion of post-expressionist 57

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In an article entitled “How Wilson Harris’s Intuitive Approach to Writing Fiction Applies to Writing Novels about Slavery,” D’Aguiar openly confirms that Harris’ “texts supply [him] with an intuitive approach to history, myth, landscape and to the writing of fiction” (D’Aguiar in Misrahi-Barak 2005). However, doing this does not translate any intention to posit Ovid, or Western mythology, as the single source or origin of the works in question, although it is clear, as shown above, that D’Aguiar is familiar with Ovid and Greek or Roman myths. The word Orphic only serves the purpose of the present argument insofar as it designates several features of Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s works at once, and leads back, at times, to one of their intertexts. The description of both novels as Orphic does not necessarily always entail Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s indebtedness to European mythology for their writings. Rather, it is indicative of the fact that the mythological genealogies underlying every language cannot be circumvented, no matter how desirable it can appear to be (Derrida 1971, 11). One cannot use English, or French for that matter, and avoid using the word Orphic to designate what is Orphic (subterranean, fluvial, musical, supernatural yet in communion with nature, resurrectional, and prophetic, all at once) according to that/these language(s) and its/ their Greek and Roman mythological backgrounds.

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painting (Zamora and Faris, 15–31), and/or from Alejo Carpentier’s claims that Latin-American landscapes are endowed with a baroque, marvelous reality in the essays “On the Marvelous Real in America” (1949) and “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (1975) (Zamora and Faris, 75–88, 89–108). As Harris oxymoronically suggests, if magical realism is an “innovative tradition that has become fashionable,” it was “scarcely articulated or considered in 1960” (Harris 1960) when he published Palace of the Peacock, his first and most famous novel. Harris insists, in an interview with Fred D’Aguiar, on the more crucial importance of “myth” over magic in his novels and in general, as “a term we have undervalued” (D’Aguiar 2003a). In a later essay, D’Aguiar also brings to the fore the “myth-making imperative” of Harris’ work (Misrahi-Barak and JosephVilain, 29–44). In this respect, Jeanne Delbaere-Garant wrote an essay “with a view to making the concept a little less confused and certainly more teachable” (Zamora and Faris, 249), proposing to split what is called “magic(al) realism” into more specific categories, such as “mythic realism,” which she associates with Harris (255, 258), and where “‘magic’ images are borrowed from the physical environment itself, instead of being projected from the characters’ psyches” (253). Hence, rather than reading through the lens of magic(al) realism, one might gain more insight from studying Harris in mythological terms and in relation to the “physical environment,” or landscape, particularly given that Harris experienced the epiphany that led him to become a writer while a land surveyor, as D’Aguiar explains: Traditional biographical data about Harris tell us he was born in New Amsterdam in 1921, trained in Georgetown as a surveyor, and from the late 1930s took part in, then led, expeditions into the interior of Guyana, to survey rivers and the areas around them. Armed with theodolite, pen, and notepad, the rational surveyor encountered a dense rainforest interior which belied the measurements and readings of his rational instruments and sequentially trained mind. What he discovered on these trips forced him to search for a method to match his encounters with sudden rainfall juxtaposed with blinding sunshine, river depths of such marked difference in such close proximity that he doubted his instruments, local Amerindian tribes who historicised the place in purely mythical terms, and, ultimately, a landscape imbued with qualities of a powerful character and God or gods, able to mould perception and resist categorisation. Harris’s language altered as a result. Landscape became instructive not simply in terms outlined by the Romantics, whose great legacy remains that landscape is a thing we can benefit from by knowing about, a

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c­ athedral of sorts for spiritual renewal. But for Harris that landscape enacts perception, governs it, steers it into new mental terrain. This transformative aspect of landscape was bound to alter Harris’s language, since the way he talked about place had to be part and parcel of his discoveries about the power of Guyana’s rainforest interior. When allied with time, this sensory reception of a place turned out to be a literary practice, a theory about fiction, an account of the intuitive imagination, and therefore a new type of fiction. d’aguiar 2009a

This passage gains from being cited at length because, more than showing D’Aguiar’s admiration for Harris, it provides crucial information on Harris’ relation to Guyanese nature, romanticism, Carib mythology, and scientific ­survey that are all part and parcel of the author’s works. While the description of Harris’ puzzlement in the Guyanese interior is evocative of what Carpentier perceived as the natural, marvelous reality of the American continent, it is also related, by D’Aguiar, to the Romantics’ mystification of nature as a “cathedral of sorts,” such as in Wordsworth’s poetry, to which we shall return. Such links perceived between lo real maravilloso, romanticism and indigenous South-American mythology in relation to Harris’ astonishment in front of the many rivers and lush vegetation of the Guyanese interior point to a “cross-culturality” the literary expression of which Harris defines as a “task [he] could not evade” (D’Aguiar 2003). One way for Harris to achieve this task consists in relying on the Carib myth of the bone flute or spirit-bone: when he was sounding rivers of the Guyanese interior, Harris perceived a rhythm, a “word-less music” in the landscape and in its waterfalls which, according to his 1988 preface to Palace of the Peacock, he could transcribe thanks to the bone-flute as a trope he deems “pertinent to the entire body of fiction [he has] written” (Harris 1960, 8). D’Aguiar explains the myth as follows: The bone of the enemy is hollowed by the Carib into a flute and tunes played on that flute in order to learn the strategies of the enemy. This war ritual involves consuming a morsel of flesh of the enemy as a similar act of habitation, of becoming the enemy in order to better understand him/ her. If a conflict might seek such resolution, by crossing over to the other side, might it not be applicable to an outlook mired in partiality and badly in need of additional viewpoints? This is Wilson Harris’ big claim and one on which he staked his approach to fiction writing […]. misrahi-barak and joseph villain, 36

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Hence, the music of Guyanese rivers has a rhythm that Harris perceives and transcribes through the indigenous bone flute, the playing of which constitutes a threshold through which one may access the Other’s knowledge.59 Such a gateway to Otherness allows for a cross-cultural syncretism that differentiates the bone-flute from the Romantics’ Eolian harp, while both instruments are in tune with nature. It must be noted that the Other, from whom knowledge is acquired, is dead, and his/her flesh is consumed. This, more than being reminiscent of the 1920s Brazilian art movement of Antropofagia that “took cannibalism as a metaphor for the process of cultural assimilation” to respond to euro-centrism and Western imperialism (Bastos, 102), is evocative of the power of partial resurrection that the bone flute is endowed with. Marvelous nature, music, and resurrection are all related through the bone flute, just as if it were played by Orpheus, who moves nature and the underworld with his lyre, to resuscitate his defunct lover. This allows for a designation of Harris’ prose as Orphic, as can be seen in novels such as Palace of the Peacock. Palace of the Peacock takes place in the Guyanese interior. Its main character, Donne, a planter and the homonym of the famous Renaissance poet, embarks on a journey upriver to retrieve his native workers, who have fled his plantation because he has mistreated them. When he and his crew, “made up of diverse races and mixtures” and historical characters (Benitez-Rojo, 188), reach the village where they believe the workers are, the villagers take flight on canoes as soon as they see them, because Donne and his crew, readers learn, are actually supposed to have died during a similar expedition in the past.60 The crewmen embark on a seven-day journey to their second death, which Donne and surviving crew members experience while ascending a gigantic waterfall to the Palace of the Peacock – a place Antonio Benitez-Rojo reads, as does Gareth Griffiths, as El Dorado (Benitez-Rojo, 189, Griffiths in Lewis, 83). The characters finally gain spiritual rebirth there, confirming to readers that the journey was a “psychic” expedition as well (Benitez-Rojo, 190), an Orphic rite of passage. The ascension of the waterfall to a palace where “the light’s rays decompose” (188) is comparable to the “Orphic doctrine” which, Douglas J. Stewart explains, included a belief in the ‘pillar of light,’ a metaphorical description of the progressive stages of enlightenment through which the faithful initiate could pass – and that this was symbolized in the ritual by climbing a ladder” (Stewart, 258).

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On Harris’ sense of landscape music, also see Joseph-Vilain 2014. Of course, Donne’s repetitive expedition and recurrent ascent of the waterfall, in Palace of the Peacock, foreshadows Harris’ idea of infinite rehearsal (Harris 1987).

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In Palace of the Peacock, Dreamer, the I-narrator and Donne’s brother, has the frequent impression of seeing through Donne’s eyes as much as through his own, as if he had blown into a bone flute carved out of his dead brother’s skeleton: “And we looked through the window of the room together as though through his dead seeing material eye, rather than through my living closed spiritual eye” (Harris 1960, 20). Hence, in the novel, a tropical and metafictional crew goes on a journey upriver for seven days, a duration reminiscent of the Biblical myth of Genesis. This quest leads to (metaphorical) resurrection or regeneration rather than to Donne’s retrieval of his workers. The narrator, Dreamer, has gained bone-flute-like access to his (br)other’s senses in the novel’s opening scene. Marvelous reality, river navigation, bone flute, and resurrection or regeneration through a rite of passage involving the climb of a ladder-like waterfall, all are features of the plot that contribute to the Orphism of Harris’ prose.61 These features from Palace of the Peacock are also elements that D’Aguiar alludes to in Children of Paradise. Before turning to D‘Aguiar’s novel, it is worthwhile returning to a link between Harris’ prose and Romanticism. Intertextual echoes can be perceived between Palace of the Peacock and poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads, namely, “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” and “Tintern Abbey,” poems related, at some point, to sailing and to rivers. In “Tintern Abbey,” a poetic persona – the poet here, since Wordsworth addresses his sister in the second half of the poem – relates his thoughts on his revisiting the banks of the river Wye, in England. Wordsworth can hear a waterfall in the distance, just as he did when he was wildly roaming the area as a younger man, and compares his memory of the place to the way he perceives it on this second visit. When Wordsworth was younger, “The sounding cataract / Haunted [him] like a passion” (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 158). However, as an older man “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of Harmony, and the deep power of joy, [he sees] into the life of things” (157). Wordsworth favors the latest mode of perception over his bewilderment as a younger man. The “sounding cataract” is an apt pun, since it designates the tumult of a waterfall as much as a sight ­impairment – which, paradoxically, usually develops in old age. These lines may be translated as Wordsworth’s way of explaining that, during his youth, his overwhelming, passionate response to landscape altered his vision, whereas on his second 61

John Thieme perceives this psychic journey upriver and the Donne/Dreamer pair of characters as grounds on which Palace of the Peacock can be perceived as a revision of ­Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its Marlowe/Kurtz couple. This, in turn, suggests yet another confluence, between Harris’ novel and Chinua Achebe’s famous responses to Conrad in the novels Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart (Thieme, 27–37).

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visit, to use the words of Coleridge, he is an older and “a wiser man” (78) who, having calmed down and tampered his passion, has a “quiet eye” that allows him to “see into the life of things” and, possibly, their rejuvenating power. Now, just as Wordsworth revisits Tintern Abbey, Donne, in Harris’ novel, returns to the Palace of the Peacock, and both Palace and Abbey are located near a waterfall. Nature, be it the Guyanese interior or the British countryside, seems to be preferred to , respectively, a local village the crew passes by to reach the waterfall in Palace of the Peacock and a religious temple in “Tintern Abbey.” Lastly, in Palace of the Peacock, just as Wordsworth does in “Tintern Abbey,” Harris prefers one mode of vision over another, between a “dead seeing material eye” and a ”living closed spiritual eye” (Harris 1960, 20). As Fred D’Aguiar explains in relation to a quote from Harris’ The Four Banks of the River of Space, the privileged bird’s-eye view, which sees the invisible natural currents of the ebb and flow of tides relates to the closed (dreaming) and seeing eye of the narrator in Harris’s first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960). The continental map shrinks to a view of earth as if from outer space as that imaginative eye soars. misrahi-barak and joseph-vilain, 157

The privileging of a “living closed spiritual eye” over a “dead seeing material eye” then amounts to supporting an unconscious and imaginative, or dreamlike response to one’s sensory reception of landscape, more than a conscious, more objective and down-to-earth vision, in the same way as Wordsworth would favor emotion “recollected in a state of tranquility” (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 307) rather than a fit of passion. The “state of tranquility” may be equated with rem sleep, with the dreams that Harris evokes through the trope of the “closed spiritual eye” that looks inward. Through this intertextual bond, one may perceive Harris’ indebtedness to Wordsworth and Romanticism, and witness time and space being compressed, the Wye forming a confluence with the Cuyuni river, as well as the Palace and the Abbey being syncretized into a scene one could picture through a quiet, dreaming eye.62

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D’Aguiar also compares Harris’ novel The Mask of the Beggar to Wordsworth’s verse, more specifically, “The Prelude,” as he argues that climactic moments of that novel – which also is one of Harris’ rewritings of Palace of the Peacock, according to D’Aguiar – “bear similarity to Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’” (D’Aguiar in Misrahi-Barak 2005). More than strengthening our point, this piece of information suggests that both D’Aguiar and Harris have attentively read Wordsworth, whose poetic vision of nature, as we contend below, is comparable to Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s magic(al) realist treatment of landscape.

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Tintern Abbey is relatively absent from the poem as a religious temple, inviting readers to identify nature as if it were a church, in the same way as Coleridge’s “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” invites readers to compare trees to the pillars of a cathedral.63 On the stump of one of these trees, an orphan child is said to have been found and, when he grew up, readers learn, he “went on ship-board / With those bold voyagers, who made discovery / Of golden Lands” (81, emphasis mine), just as Donne, in Palace of the Peacock, sails to the ­Guyanese interior, ultimately reaching the Palace of the Peacock and/or the gold city of El Dorado (Benitez-Rojo, 189: Lewis, 83). Harris might then have chosen to call his main character “Donne” because, in addition to his historical homonym’s being contemporaneous to the time of great Western expeditions to the “new world,” the fictionalized character’s pastoral quest for El Dorado as an American utopia, an Arcadia of sorts, corresponds to the Classical thrust of Renaissance artistry to which the actual Donne belonged. Further, Harris relates El Dorado and Donne through the portmanteau word “ElDoradonne” (Harris 1960, 11) in the novel’s preface.64 However, this Classical contiguity is evoked only to be cast aside, since reaching El Dorado leads the fictional Donne through a spiritual resurrection that appears both to fictionalize Harris’ own epiphanic experience in Guyana’s rainforest and to shift from a classical quest to a more Romantic approach. In this sense, the trajectories of Wordsworth’s Romantic verse and Harris’ prose form yet another tropical confluence where nature, with its forests and waterfalls, becomes a fountain of youth, “a cathedral of sorts for spiritual renewal” (D’Aguiar 2009a) and artistic reinvention.

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As far as intertextuality with Coleridge is concerned, a scene from Dear Future might be drawn from the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In Coleridge’s poem, an old sailor atones for having killed an albatross with a crossbow by recounting his “sinful” gesture to those who will listen (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 10–78). In Dear Future, when Red Head, an unbaptized child, dies and is sent to limbo, he shoots down a bird there with his slingshot, and has to pay for the deed by burying the weapon in the earth or, more precisely, in clay – which also conjures up the Old Testament story of the Creation of Man (D’Aguiar 1996, 187). Gros Louis explains that Donne lived at a pivotal moment in British renaissance – the end of the Elizabethan reign and the advent of Enlightenment philosophy – that also entailed a shift in the ways literary treatments of Orpheus were oriented, since the character arguably went from being used as the epitome of the pastoral ideal and a utopian allegory of civilizing force to standing for the melancholic persona par excellence, singing his sorrow even after his dismemberment, as if the death of Elizabeth spurred melancholy in the poets of her time as much as Eurydice’s passing did in Orpheus. (Gros Louis 1969, 70).

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3.2 Children of Paradise The Romantic idea of nature as “a cathedral of sorts” (D’Aguiar 2009a) is also close at hand in Children of Paradise, since it tells the true, tragic story of the Jonestown massacre, the ultimate consequence of Jim Jones’ decision to relocate his religious commune from the urban United States to the Guyanese interior, a move that is reminiscent of the church that replaces the forest in “The Foster-Mother’s Tale” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 79). However, in the novel, the Jonestown commune pollutes the river adjacent to its site with waste and chemicals from its pigsty65 that prevent the indigenous-Indian population from a downstream village to fish and bathe there: “The indigenous tribes who depend on the river cannot ignore the commune’s pollution. Fish are dying; the water irritates the eyes and causes rashes on the skin of the children who bathe in it at the wrong time; it stains clothes yellow and orange; and at ­different times of the day, the water stinks like a pigsty” (D’Aguiar 2014, 272). This ecocritical dimension,66 represented by the man-made confluence of a natural river and a stream of toxic waste, subverts the idyllic, pastoral setting of the action and any potential progression to a sense of Romantic harmony with a wilderness that D’Aguiar nevertheless depicts, in Children of Paradise, in the same terms as he describes Harris’ expeditions to the Guyanese rainforest in the above-cited passage from “Prosimetrum,” mentioning Harris’ “encounters with sudden rainfall juxtaposed with blinding sunshine,” and “local Amerindian tribes who historicised the place in purely mythical terms” (D’Aguiar 2009a, emphasis mine): If the commune located beyond the reach of history sought to give history the slip and start from scratch, there could be no better setting than a realm where myth rules the order of night and day. In a place where trees big and plentiful create their own rain cloud and downpour and it is possible to walk in a stride through a wall of rain into a bright room of sunlight. d’aguiar 2014, 119, emphasis mine.

In addition to this representation of the marvelous reality of the Guyanese interior, the presence of an indigenous village on the riverbank in Children of Paradise is reminiscent of the Arawak village Donne and his crew sail by in Harris’ first novel. In fact, D’Aguiar refers recurrently to Palace of the Peacock 65 66

In its 1977 brochure, the commune claimed possessing “130 pigs” and a chicken hatchery, but did not mention dairy, although twenty-two bovine corpses were also found after the massacre (Naipaul, 128). Concerning the “ecologies” of Children of Paradise, also see Fehskens 2017.

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in Children of Paradise, and more often than not in Orphic ways, as suggested by the myth-inspiring setting of both the novel and Harris’ expeditions, and confirmed by other features of D’Aguiar’s prose that we shall now study. Children of Paradise rewrites some scenes and reactivates tropes and themes from Harris’ prose. It uses the same forest as that of Harris’ surveys and the location of Palace of the Peacock; it deals with the 1978 Jonestown massacre as in Harris’ Jonestown (1996) – and D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights –; and it mentions the bone flute. Again, the spirit-bone is interesting in an Orphic perspective since, like the Orpheus myth, it conjures up the themes of music and magical resurrection and, thus, creates a cross-cultural confluence between SouthAmerican and European mythologies.67 As indicated above, D’Aguiar first uses the ­bone-flute image in “Frail Deposits,” to tell Harris that “The flute [he’s] trying to blow a tune on / belongs to [Harris]” (D’Aguiar 1993, 36), thus positing Harris’ work as an influence. In Children of Paradise, the bone flute reappears when Jim Jones offers a flute to Trina after she has performed her false death and resurrection under his orders (D’Aguiar 2014, 21, 68–72).68 In this sense, Jones stands as an Orpheus, bringing Trina, then a young Eurydice, back to life. Harris had mythologized Jim Jones in Jonestown, by representing him as a Jonah who was “disgorged by the whale” (Harris 1996, 23). Jonah’s being swallowed and thrown up by a whale constitutes another resurrection metaphor and, in Harris’ Jonestown, the whale’s being white (87) also evokes, intertextually, Melville’s Moby Dick. More importantly, when Harris compares Jim Jones to Jonah through the nickname “Jonah Jones of the Whale” (166, 167) he suggests that, as a pastor preaching suicide, Jones, like Jonah, betrays his disciples and his God. Yet, it is actually Trina, with her flute, who appears to be the most Orphic of characters in the novel. In addition to her aforementioned Isiac features, she improvises music with her flute in a Romantic way, as if it were an Eolian harp, an instrument played by the wind: “Trina makes up a tune that comes from listening to the wind in the trees and then the rain made by the trees and the arrival of sunshine through that rain” (D’Aguiar 2014, 97). The (religious) music she plays, along with the commune’s school band, has an impact on nature: “The music teacher calls out the hymn for the class to begin, and the 67

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The bone flute is present in Jonestown too (Harris 1996, 16, 156, 215), sometimes along with the resurrectional figure of Lazarus, (39–41). Moreover, according to its epistolary opening, the novel is a “dream book” that was sent to “W.H.” for edition by its author, whose pseudonym is Francisco Bone, who claims to be the only survivor of Jonestown. Achieving false miracles really was one of Jim Jones’ “specialties,” and played a significant role in establishing his reputation in the United States before the Commune flew to its “agricultural mission” in Guyana (Naipaul, 59–60).

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instruments chime in synchrony. The entire forest of wildlife draws nearer and grows quite still. Some of the birds join in with their own musical improvisations. Trina takes the lead with a flute solo” (108). Interestingly enough, nature’s responsiveness to music is also a feature that is added by Wordsworth to Virgil’s version of the myth of Orpheus in the English poet’s 1788 attempt at translating the Roman poet’s Georgics (Wordsworth 1788, 646, l. 49a–49c). In other words, the power of Trina’s flute could be informed by a romantic treatment of Orphism. Moreover, Trina’s instrument, a flute from which she draws music inspired by the wind, could function as a Carib Eolian Harp or romantic bone-flute (it was offered to her after her mock-resurrection), as a tropical confluence which, in addition to being Orphic, plays an important role in the unfolding of Children of Paradise. It serves in one of Trina’s attempts at having the commune’s children follow her and escape by taking a riverboat at the commune’s pier, one of many incentives to try to flee from the hell the commune has become (D’Aguiar 2014, 357–62; Naipaul, 132–35). Escaping from the commune on a river and thanks to music is also evocative of the myth of Orpheus, all the more so when one realizes that Trina’s attempts at escape fail, one time because of her turning back. Before dealing with the failed escapes themselves, attention must be paid to the boat that allows for such attempts, because it is reminiscent of the boat used by the cross-cultural crew of Palace of the Peacock, and because this boat, in Children of Paradise, epitomizes the cross-cultural. For instance, Trina and her mother, Joyce, often sail up and down river, to and from the capital, Georgetown, on Captain Aubrey’s boat. That a character called Joyce sails on a river to a capital is evocative of an intertextual and tropical allusion to her homonym, the Irish modernist, and his “Ulysses on the Liffey” (D’Aguiar 1991, 235), making a Guyanese river virtually flow with the Liffey for a second in the reader’s mind. The conversations that Joyce has with Aubrey on board the ship often deal with such mixed genealogies. When Aubrey inquires about Joyce’s ethnicity, “She says she has yet to meet someone who is not tainted with some mixture or other. Her father came from Spain to Florida on business and met her mother, a Micosukee, in an illegal casino at West Palm beach” (D’Aguiar 2014, 56). Later in the discussion, Aubrey wonders if she feels an affinity to nature. He says everyone knows that the tribes in this forest have lived there for thousands of years without interfering with the place, while the Europeans with their enslaved Africans and indentured Indians from South Asia ruined the place in just four hundred years. Right on cue, a barge floats by with a red flag warning them that logs would follow […] (56).

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Aubrey historicizes his eco-criticism by relating deforestation, represented by a multitude of floating logs, to the history of colonization and the African slave trade, at the end of which indentured servants from the Asian subcontinent were brought to the Caribbean to replace and/or work alongside freed slaves. The captain conjures up a picture of the cosmopolitanism resulting from this process, as in today’s Guyanese population, made up of people of European, African, Asian, and indigenous descent, and of all possible genealogical blends deriving from these groups. Conversely, in Palace of the Peacock, the boat’s crew is made up of Renaissance poet John Donne, Schomburgh, a man of GermanArawak lineage whose name is reminiscent of the Schomburgk69 brothers who explored the Guyanese interior (Benitez-Rojo, 188), an Arawak woman, and the Portuguese DaSilva twins. As Benitez-Rojo argues, “There is also mention of the subsequent arrival of the Africans, and of the Asian Indians and of the Portuguese, as consequences of the plantation economy” (188). He then contends that “the men who make up the boat’s crew, whose blood is profusely mixed, represent, along with the aged Arawak woman (The Great Arawak Mother), Guyanese society as it now exists” (188–89). Harris confirmed this statement in an interview with D’Aguiar, as the names of the crewmen, in his novel, are given to “plumb an illustration of the cross-cultural figuration the entire party implicitly maintain[s]” (D’Aguiar 2003a). Hence, the riverboats of both Children of Paradise and Palace of the Peacock constitute metaphorical vessels of cross-cultural confluence. The intertextuality of such confluence in Children of Paradise is openly emphasized when Joyce and Trina, who start planning their escape, try to find a code name for Aubrey. Trina conjures all the famous historical and literary captains: “Hook. Ahab. Kirk. Drake. Blackbeard. Raleigh. Morgan. Cook. Silver. Bligh. Columbus. Cabral. Vasco da Gama” (D’Aguiar 2014, 252). The tropicality of the ship can also be read as Orphic in passages when Aubrey’s first mate makes implicit and ironic commentaries upon what is happening on board by whistling famous songs from both sides of the Atlantic: when the boat leaves the commune, the first mate whistles Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” When they drop Joyce at the Pier, he comes up with Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” Finally, when the commune guards become stand-offish with Aubrey, following orders from Jones, who has learned that Joyce has befriended someone outside the commune, the first mate offers the Beatles’ “Let it Be” (215–17). When Jones manages to get the Guyanese authorities to prevent Aubrey from sailing to the commune, Aubrey buys a false license, repaints his boat, and renames it with a musically ­evocative 69

The spelling of the historical name is apparently anglicized in Harris’ novel.

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name: “Many Waters,” which “immediately gets nicknamed Muddy Waters, not after the American bluesman but due to the nation’s seawater” (267). Even the narrator has to clarify the name because of the musician it evokes, and s/ he does so by relating the boat to Guyanese features: Guyana means “Many Waters” in the Carib idiom, and muddy waters border the country’s shores. Yet, the sense of an Orphic relationship between music and land persists, all the more so since the phrase “Many Waters” is also evocative of Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross,” to which D’Aguiar alludes in relation to Guyana’s many waters in Bill of Rights: “Many rivers to cross but I ­quibble / Over names: the Courentyne, Essequibo, / Potaro, Mazaruni, Demerara …” (D’Aguiar 1998, 57).70 Before things fully go wrong at the commune, during one of their trips up and down the river, Aubrey and Joyce, who seem to progressively fall in love as the novel unfolds, also climb up a waterfall: “She watches him, his legs, his back, his arms and shoulders, to keep from craning at the height of the cataract. At the top of the ledge, he holds out his hand and helps her up beside him, and they step through the falling water and end up behind it and simultaneously move into a cave – just air and mist […]” (D’Aguiar 2014, 156, emphasis mine). For D’Aguiar to specify that the atmosphere of the cave, because of the waterfall, amounts to “just air and mist,” to a “river somehow lifted into space” (279), is not accidental, since “air and mist” are the main components, in Palace of the Peacock, of the waterfall Donne climbs after “the river, which is horizontal, alters to a vertical waterfall – the same river but plunging free of the strictures of its banks and depths and rising as voluminous mist,” in D’Aguiar’s words (D’Aguiar 2012, 37, emphasis mine). As Donne ascends the marvelous waterfall, he can see a carpenter working in a “room” that is “as old as a cave and as new as a study” (Harris 1960, 103, emphasis mine). In other words, the misty cave that Joyce and Aubrey reach after climbing the waterfall conveys an additional sense of the intertextuality that operates between Children of Paradise and Harris’ novel, and of the crucial importance both novels attribute to nature as a place requiring one’s attention. Another powerful signifier in the above-mentioned passage from D’Aguiar’s novel is, of course, “cataract,” which designates the waterfall as Joyce tries to look away from it so as not to be frightened by the height to which she has climbed. Again, the polysemous quality of the word “cataract,” helped Wordsworth, in “Tintern Abbey,” to contrast the dissipated gaze characterizing his wanderings as a young man in the vicinity of a waterfall with the calm, riverside “quiet eye” that designates the mode of perception by means of which he, as an older, initiated man, allows nature to 70

Bénédicte Ledent suggests that the title of Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River also refers to Cliff’s song (Ledent in Misrahi-Barak 2005).

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sink in (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 157–58). In this sense, Joyce’s decision to divert her eyes from the waterfall may amount to choosing a better mode of sensory perception within a natural framework. If so, her decision to fix her gaze on Aubrey’s muscular body, being suggestive of the proximity of erotic fantasy, may correspond to her diving inward into desire and imagination, to a figurative plunge sparked by the actual, phenomenal spring she cannot look at anymore. Such a correlation of a Wordsworth-like interplay with nature and an inward looking, “dreaming eye,” appears to fuse, as in Palace of the Peacock, a romantic conception of sensory perception with Harris’ Orphic response to the marvelous Guyanese interior (Stewart, 258). In spite of its being located in that marvelous rainforest, the commune becomes so hellish that Joyce and Trina progressively plan their escape. Their scheme always involves Aubrey’s ship which, before being renamed “Many Waters,” is called the Coffee, after “an eighteenth-century enslaved African who ran away from his plantation and led a slave rebellion. He lived in the interior and evaded capture,” as Aubrey explains to Joyce, who reacts by saying: “Sounds like my kind of guy” (D’Aguiar 2014, 54). Knowing that the ship’s name refers to marooning, and hearing Joyce’s equivocal statement on board, alluding both to her having been deserted by her husband (57) and to the “escapist” pleasure she feels sailing with Aubrey, “Coffee” could be read as proleptic of Joyce, Aubrey, and Trina’s plotting for evasion later in the novel. Onomastically, “Trina” is also paronomastically close to “tryin’a,” slang for “trying to,” which is evocative of the main character’s three failed attempts at escape (305–07, 329, 344–45). After having chosen to work at the pigsty, the part of the commune that is closest to the river, and after having let the pigs loose as a sign to let Aubrey, who stopped at the jetty, know that they want to escape (275–76), Joyce and Trina indeed try and fail three times to run away from the commune. While their first escape is thwarted by the commune’s pet gorilla, the second one is ruined by Trina, who makes the last minute decision to turn back to get the other children from the commune and the gorilla, as she says she dreamed it as the only way to make it: Trina then “breaks from her mother’s embrace, runs to starboard, and leaps into the water and disappears” (D’Aguiar 2014, 329) until she is rescued by the first mate and Aubrey, who finally “pulls Trina out of the river” (330). That Trina sacrifices her second chance by diving into the water to fetch the other children is reminiscent of Christian self-sacrifice as much as of Orpheus’ plunge into the underworld,71 while her being brought back from below the surface by Aubrey and his first mate makes an Orphic/Baptist pair 71

Again, Christ was actually compared to, and sometimes named Orpheus by early ­ hristians (Gros Louis 1966, 644–45). C

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out of the crewmen. Furthermore, Trina’s decision, which preferred her dream vision to reason, constitutes yet another evocation of the privilege given to imagination over rationality in D’Aguiar’s works (D’Aguiar 1995, 26; 1998, 41). However, Trina’s third and final attempt at escape also fails, although it unfolds the way she (almost prophetically) dreamed it, because the captain arrives too late to rescue the children. More precisely, the mission resembles pandemonium at the end of the novel, when Jones harasses his followers over the commune loudspeakers, pretending their haven is under attack, and forcing them through multiple suicide drills. As a consequence, Trina takes advantage of the atmosphere and organizes a parade of which the leader and dressed-up king is the commune gorilla, while she dictates the pace at which the parade should progress by playing her flute, like a “Pied Piper” (345).72 Hence, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the folktale, another intertextual reference in D’Aguiar’s novel, Trina’s music almost has the power of leading the children away from the hellish commune, in the same way as Orpheus’ musical skills almost allow him to bring Eurydice back from the underworld. Such (Orphic) tragic irony, and the horror of the suicide scene, are, however, partly alleviated by an imaginative ending where the children (on their way to Paradise?) sail on captain Aubrey’s boat until they all “shape-shift and escape,” as in an Ovidian metamorphosis, to a place where light is summoned to splinter (D’Aguiar 2014, 362), as in the “rainbow’s spectrum,” the “place where the colors’ identities are generated as the light’s rays decompose,” in other words, the Palace of the Peacock (Benitez-Rojo, 188). Thus, the romantic and Orphic ways in which Wilson Harris responded, in life and in fiction, to the marvelous reality of the Guyanese landscape, find their counterpart in Fred D’Aguiar’s latest novel, drawing a network of tropical and intertextual confluences between Palace of the Peacock and Children of Paradise, as a reflection of the confluences one might perceive in Guyana’s many rivers. For in these novels, it is along rivers and near, or even in waterfalls that intertextual confluences between the myth of Orpheus, Wordsworth, Harris, and D’Aguiar appear. It follows that Wordsworth, Harris, and D’Aguiar, being such artists, might themselves be viewed as Orphic figures. The Orphic subtext seems to condition, to some extent, D’Aguiar’s vision of his work, when he claims that his writings are “out of [his] hands” (Frias 2002, 423) as soon as they are published. In other words, D’Aguiar appears to mean that once his works are made available for the public, he leaves his texts and what they may become in the hands of critics and readers in general, in the same way as

72 In Bill of Rights, the Carib bone-flute and the Pied Piper are related (1998; 59, 80).

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­ rpheus loosens his grip on his lover’s ghost. In this sense, one may suggest O that his ideas also form another, ideological confluence with Blanchot’s reading of the myth of Orpheus as an allegory of the artist’s yielding his or her work, freeing it from his or her grasp (Blanchot, 175) and into the world. 3.3 Underground Railroad & Flying Ships Bloodlines also shares some of its features with Harris’ novels, the myth of ­Orpheus, and early Romanticism. Sow is, for example, an Orphic orphan. Moreover, as shown above, the “tangled root” over which Christy and Faith sit before being picked up by Tom (19) suggests that an intertextual link operates between the novel and Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 108). Of course, the presence of a “tangled root” might just be a verbal echo, but another, analogous resonance can be found in the novel and strengthens the impression that D’Aguiar borrows phrases from Wordsworth’s ballads. Soon after narrating his own birth, Sow says: “woe was me, / I was without a mom and dad, have pity” (D’Aguiar 2000, 45, emphasis mine): although the phrase is frequent in literature, it is specifically Wordsworth’s use of “woe is me,” in the poems “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy” that springs to mind, for three reasons. First, and once again, the features of Wilson Harris’ novels that D’Aguiar revises in Children of Paradise partly derive from D’Aguiar’s interest in Harris’ relation to Romanticism, as characterized by the “Eolian” role of the bone flute and a binary mode of perception that is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” Hence, it is likely that D’Aguiar studied the Lyrical Ballads in order to decipher what Harris might have drawn from the British Romantics in the making of his Orphic novels, all the more so since D’Aguiar intended to write a doctoral thesis on Harris’ works. Moreover, D’Aguiar has read Wordsworth’s Prelude, and is interested in how the poet assessed his early years (Birbalsingh, 139). Second, both Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” and “The Thorn” tell the story of mothers who, like Faith in Bloodlines, find themselves in a real predicament concerning the life of their only child. In “The Idiot Boy,” Betty Foy, unable to heal her neighbor, Susan Gale, sends her (“idiot”) boy Johnny to find a doctor. Not seeing him come back, she fears for his safety, and leaves Susan on her own to go out in the country at night and try to find her son. When she arrives at the doctor’s and learns that he has not seen of Johnny, she cries out: “O woe is me! O woe is me! “Here will I die; here will I die; “I thought to find my Johnny here, “But he is neither far nor near, “Oh! What a wretched mother I!”.

wordsworth and coleridge 139, l. 272–76, emphasis mine.

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Betty blames herself for having sent her boy on such an errand and says she is to die; the poetic voice then lets readers know that Betty Foy “has lost all hope” of finding Johnny, and thinks of “deadly sin,” that is, suicide, as she hurries past a pond “Lest she should drown herself therein” (140, l. 306). In Bloodlines, Faith dies by suicide so that her boy, Sow, may live. As a consequence, the son, rather than the mother, blames himself: “woe [i]s me” (D’Aguiar 2000, 45). Conversely, in the “The Thorn,” the main character, Martha Ray, is seen sitting between a pond73 and a “heap / That’s like an infant’s grave in size,” and repeatedly cries “Oh misery! Oh misery! / Oh woe is me! oh misery!” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 116, l. 65–6, 76–7; 123, l. 252–53, emphasis mine). All that is known of Martha Ray is that she got pregnant by a man named Stephen Hill, who promised to marry her, but deserted her for another woman instead, resulting in Martha’s madness. In Bloodlines as in “The Thorn,” a man’s mistreatment of a woman, that is, Christy’s rape of Faith, and subsequent rumors on the plantation, also result in Faith giving in to a sudden fit of madness. While gossiping villagers believe Martha went crazy when Stephen Hill left her, loquacious slaves believe Faith “has gone mad (they thought) as a result” of Christy abusing her (D’Aguiar 2000, 13). Although the rape scene has already been dealt with, it must be brought up again here in relation to Abigail Ward’s discussion of it, as it yields additional Romantic insight. Ward mentions Bruce King’s pejorative review of the book, citing the following passage: “We are to believe that a black slave raped at knifepoint by a lusty young white man will fall in love with him and he with her. It seems more like Sade than the romantic tale that follows” (King 2001 in Ward, 167). This citation’s first sentence is hyperbolic, as D’Aguiar knows well that for a woman to fall in love with her rapist is highly unlikely, and does not require that readers believe that any slave woman would fall in love with her master-rapist. The narrator states: “Don’t ask me how the worst moment she knew / switched on the best thing life can give to you” (D’Aguiar 2000, 6), and suggests that the author knew he would not easily obtain his readers’ “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge 1817), which leads to King’s definition of Bloodlines as a romantic tale in which the sadistic rape scene is a jarring element. Yet, considering how much Wordsworth, a founder of Romanticism, seemed inclined to describing grieving women in his poems (Betty Foy in “The 73

The fact that, in addition to the “woe is me” phrase, the idea of drowning in a pond is present in both “The Thorn” and “The Idiot Boy” reinforces our argument that D’Aguiar draws ideas from Wordsworth’s work, since he also repetitively revisits a pond incident in Dear Future, Bethany Bettany, and the poem entitled “The Shell Pond,” where a child almost drowns and is saved in extremis (D’Aguiar 1996, 24–6; 2003, 26; 2009, 34–5).

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Idiot Boy,” Martha Ray in “The Thorn,” “The Mad Mother,” or “Ruth”), maybe describing sadism and romanticism as opposed entities is a little dubious (see Pinch 1988). In a first interpretation of the rape scene, Ward clearly explains that she finds the emergence of love unconvincing, and warns that D’Aguiar risks corroborating the “myth that women essentially enjoy the masochism of violent relationships” and that “black women are sexually depraved” (Ward, 166–67), and she reinforces her argument by saying that Christy actually “dreams of [Faith] ’in an orgy instead of her trials’” (Ward, 166, D’Aguiar 2000, 73, italics mine). However, Ward is forcing D’Aguiar’s text, for Christy actually has nightmares, not dreams, and it terrifies, rather than excites him, to imagine Faith enjoying gang rape (D’Aguiar 2000, 73). Hence, the gendered bias might not concern Christy’s stereotypification of black women as sexual fiends, but that Christy patriarchally wants Faith to be his and only his (in essence like a slave). Reverting to “The Thorn,” the rest of Martha’s story is uncertain, as it is gleaned from the gossips of villagers: no one knows if the child was stillborn or not (120, l. 160–61), and there are rumors that Martha “hanged her baby” or “drowned it in the pond,” before burying it “beneath that hill of moss” (122, 214–20). The hesitation of gossipers as to whether the child was stillborn or murdered constitutes an additional thematic confluence with Faith’s predicament in Bloodlines since she, too, is forced to decide between letting Sow die before birth or agree to die following a surgical operation to save her son’s life. In other words, in “The Thorn” and Bloodlines, the possibilities for the child to be stillborn, and for the mistreated mother to (have) “let” her baby live or die, are also present. Again, while, as in “The Idiot Boy,” it is the mother who blames herself in “The Thorn,” D’Aguiar’s tale differs in that it is the child who curses himself for the loss of his mother and subsequent orphanhood (2000, 45). Sow’s suffering because of his mother’s death may, then, also be viewed as Orphic, since his grief constitutes an intertextual transposition of the sorrow of Wordsworth’s Martha Ray and Betty Foy, whose voices themselves are translations of Orpheus’ grief in Virgil’s Georgics (Graver, 146–47). Finally, and as in Bloodlines, there is something supernatural, and hence Orphic, about the children of Wordsworth’s above-mentioned poems: while Sow survives deadly incidents in his life, such as jumping from the roof of a skyscraper and crashing into the ground only to get up and walk away (D’Aguiar 2000, 2), Johnny, in spite (or maybe because) of his alleged mental deficiency, is not prey to the dangers of night and nature since, contrary to what his mother fears, he does not drown by hunting “the moon that’s in the brook” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 138, l. 225). Johnny suffers from idiocy, not from lunacy, and nature magically cures him of his speech impairment, as he finally

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­ anages, at the end of the poem, to tell his mother what he saw and heard m while she was looking for him (Wordsworth and Coleridge 145, l. 459–63). In addition to such potentially (super)natural healing, Betty also considers the possibility for her son to have met with mythical and fantastic creatures, such as a goblin in his cave or ghosts in a castle, unless he was “playing with the waterfall” (138, l. 237–41). The waterfall and cave are of course reminiscent of those found in Children of Paradise and Palace of the Peacock (Harris 1960, 103; D’Aguiar 2014, 156), and of “Tintern Abbey’s” cataract and surrounding wilderness that Wordsworth, like Betty Foy’s son, roams in youth. The poetic persona also speculates on what Johnny might be doing while his mother is looking for him, and makes the (marvelous) hypothesis that Johnny, like the man in the moon, might have gone picking stars (141, l. 327–31). In “The Thorn,” it is Martha who is “known to every star / and every wind that blows” (116, l. 69–70), and who might be a lunatic, since it is when the moon is out that she utters her repetitive complaint, Orphically accompanied by the music that springs “when the little breezes make / The waters of the pond to shake” like an Eolian harp’s strings (121, l. 205–06).74 Yet, Martha is sometimes “sober sad,” and one of the rumors mentioned by the poetic persona is that it is her child who magically saved her from madness during her pregnancy: “in her womb the infant wrought / About its mother’s heart and brought / Her sense back again” (119, l. 150–51). Such interaction between mother and child during pregnancy is also evoked in Bloodlines, when Sow, in utero, listens to stories his mother tells: “[Sow] froze at the sound of her voice and inclined / to the nearest wall of her belly and stuck [his] ear / and found [his] thumb for comfort when he cried” (D’Aguiar 2000, 39). Thus, Bloodlines is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s poems not only because of verbal echoes such as the “woe is me” complaint and the image of the “tangled root,” but also because D’Aguiar’s novel addresses, like many Wordsworth poems, the predicaments of suffering women who have to solve matters of life and death concerning their children, who are in turn related to the supernatural, be it through personal power or marvelous landscape. Such magic, along with the fact that both D’Aguiar’s novel and Wordsworth’s poems tell 74

The Romantic, Orphic quality perceived in the association of music with landscape and the breeze is reinforced, in the poem, by the rumor that the winds coming down from the mountain carry the “voices of the dead” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 120, l. 174), spectral voices that Orpheus also heard in the underworld. In “The Thorn,” the poetic persona might actually be an Orphic figure since, when he is surprised by a storm while on a mountain hike, he runs towards a “jutting crag” – like Orpheus walking down into Hades – that turns out to be Martha Ray (121, l. 197–98), who could then stand for a Eurydice, all the more so since upon this sight, the poetic persona “turns about,” albeit in order not to look at Martha (121, l. 201).

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the stories of characters who, at some point, are painfully bereaved of their loved ones, connect the novel and poems to orphanhood and the myth of Orpheus (Graver, 146–47). These resemblances, far from being coincidental, lead to a strong sense of intertextuality between the Lyrical Ballads and Bloodlines which points, in turn, to generic confluence between magic(al) realism and the early Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Once again, magic(al) realism consists in a genre of fiction where the supernatural is considered as an integral part of reality. In other words, magic(al) realism requires that readers temporarily adopt a definition of reality that is broader than, or that differs from, their sense of what reality is. For instance, Alejo Carpentier explains that the intrinsically marvelous quality of American landscapes led European explorers to conceive of what they thought supernatural as part of nature, and that such a conception (the supernatural as integral to the natural) led to a specific type of literary production, now called magic(al) realism.75 Bloodlines may be thought of as a magical realist novel insofar as Sow’s supernatural powers are not doubted or questioned, but presented in a matter-of-fact way by himself as a narrator (D’Aguiar 2000, 2), and is a condition of his telling the tale as it is told. He is the witness of more than a century of American history, has survived death, and remembers the stories his mother told him when he was still in her belly. Yet, that a novel requires readers to accept the presentation of such facts as reality in order to be (emotionally) receptive to the rest of the work also appears to operate in the same way as what Coleridge calls the “willing suspension of disbelief” in his Biographia Literaria, when he discusses the Lyrical Ballads project, in which it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to promote for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet not see, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.76 75 76

For more information, see Chanady in Zamora and Faris, 124–44. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm#link2HCH0014 (February 2nd, 2016).

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The willing suspension of disbelief consists in readers accepting the supernatural, “or at least Romantic” features of a tale in order to enjoy its “human interest,” residing in what such features allow “our inward nature” to express or represent, such as emotions, which Wordsworth had to draw from everyday life and make so strong and passionate that they would “excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural” and tear “the film of familiarity” to pieces. Wordsworth’s task, then, was to give sight back to readers blinded by the tumult and distractions of daily routine to slow down and adopt a “quiet eye” that would allow them to “see into the life of things” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 157, l. 47–9), which sounds like quite a supernatural fit. Hence, in Wordsworth’s part of the project, the requirement of a “willing suspension of disbelief” in the supernatural is syncretized with that of “a willing suspension of perception in distraction.” Not only did such prerequisites – calm observation of nature and acceptance of the supernatural effect it may produce – condition Wordsworth and Coleridge’s composition of the Lyrical Ballads: they also appear to consist in a way of seeing that the marvelous reality of nature forces on its viewers, according to Carpentier. In other words, the supernatural impression that nature produces to induce authors to write in a magic(al) realist way is analogous to the effect that Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s early Romantic poetry sought to synthesize, that is, “the powerful overflow of powerful feelings” provoked by one’s environment and “recollected in a state of tranquility” (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 307). In this sense, Romanticism might be perceived as being in confluence with magical realism, if magical realism is defined as a literary presentation of one’s reception of reality as marvelous. In this perspective, it makes sense to find that Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s magical realist tales rely on early Romanticism.77 In addition to this Romantic subtext, other elements evoke Orphism in Bloodlines. For instance, Tom freed himself from the hell of slavery by fleeing “without looking back” after killing the overseer of the plantation where he grew up (134). He is successful in his flight because, unlike Orpheus, he does not turn back and meets his future lover, Stella, as a result (D’Aguiar 2000, 88). Later, Tom uses his newly-acquired freedom, after being “train[ed]” (an apt pun in this context) by Stella, “to ferry runaways” to safety (95, italics mine) via the Underground Railroad. The idea of a metaphorical “underworld” or 77

In “A Theory of Caribbean Aesthetics,” D’Aguiar converges with our argument, as he argues that an author’s aesthetics primarily derive from a somewhat affective and partly imaginary attachment to “land” – not as national territory, but as the environment with which the author identifies the most (D’Aguiar 2007), such as Wordsworth’s lake district or Harris’ Guyanese rainforest (D’Aguiar 2007).

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“­underground” network, of a community that tries to help slaves from below the Mason-Dixon line to get above it and, then, out of the hell of Southern plantations, “on a train no one off it can see” (22, 89), also sounds like an Orphic endeavor, all the more so when one knows that it is actually by sailing “overnight downriver” (25) that Tom tries to lead Christy and Faith up North. Moreover, and like Orpheus this time, Tom fails to lead the two lovers to freedom, as they are ambushed on the river (34). Tom manages to make it to safety again after almost drowning – in another, submarine “underworld” – although, like Orpheus, he gets out of the depths alone, and Christy and Faith are captured and sold separately at auction. As they are made to part, Christy “look[s] over his shoulder at her, she over hers / at him, till they shr[i]nk one from the other’s sight” never to see each other alive again (38). This profusion of characters fleeing from Hades-like plantations via “underground” networks and their “falling back” into servitude being related, more than once, to descriptions of their (not) turning back, confirm that the myth of Orpheus, along with the Lyrical Ballads, is one of Bloodlines’ intertexts. The inter-ethnic quality of the crew on Tom’s boat, Christy being white and Faith being black, along with its relation to the plantation economy, are also reminiscent of planter Donne’s creolized crew in Palace of the Peacock (Harris 1960), and suggest that, like Children of Paradise, Bloodlines is intertextually related to Harris’ novel, all the more so since Bloodlines also contains implicit representations of the bone flute. For instance, after the American Civil War, Tom and Stella are free, and daydream of Africa. More precisely, Tom imagines Africa from the vantage point of the making of a drum from the body of a goat: “A continent shaped by hands on skin / sacrificed by a goat who must have seen / his soul fluting” (D’Aguiar 2000, 127, emphasis mine). In addition to these lines’ being reminiscent of Harris’ mention of a “flute of soul” in The Infinite Rehearsal (Harris 1987, 77), the ritual making and playing of a drum turns the soul to a flute that tunes in to otherness in the form of Africa, after the slaughter of a goat. Apart from the fact that the magical quality of such music relates it to that of Orpheus, the drum that turns soul to a telepathic flute functions like the bone flute itself, all the more so since such magic operates after the ritual sacrifice of a goat the meat of which is eaten (D’Aguiar 2000, 126), in the same way as the power of the spirit-bone is said to be ritually activated by ingesting (human) flesh.78 Furthermore, in the chapter on the American Civil War, a soldier’s mother thinks of her country in anthropophagic terms 78

The “goat drum” is an image that is profoundly anchored in the network of Caribbean intertexts to D’Aguiar’s works: it is present in Omeros (Walcott 1990, 273) and The Arrivants (Brathwaite, 97).

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to describe the interaction between the country, her son, and herself: “The mother hates how her country consumes / her days, yet spares her, savoring the morsel of her son” (115). This is not a question of either the Confederacy or the Union trying to “summon” their “enemy’s know-how and plans” (D’Aguiar 1993, 36) through the bone-flute, but a case of the country treating its inhabitants as its enemies, whom “she” cannibalizes, bereaving mothers of their sons (D’Aguiar 2000, 115). In other words, D’Aguiar uses the Guyanese, Carib trope of the bone-flute, which he took from Harris’ novels. By so doing, he provides a singular d­ escription, informed by Guyanese culture and Orphic textures, of the ­American Civil War. The idea of a soul fluting towards Africa is also evocative of a spiritual flight that is reminiscent in turn of the end of Bloodlines, when Sow, after dying, meets again with the “ethereal / selves” of his parents, the Masons, and Tom and Stella on board the train that has transformed, apparently, into a ship after Sow’s death in one of its coaches: “gravitiless, the light fills [them] and [they] sail” (161) into an afterlife. This ending is similar to that of Children of Paradise, where the spirits of the children who die in Jonestown sail on an avatar of Captain Aubrey’s boat (bound for Paradise?) (D’Aguiar 2014, 358–62), and points once again to intratextual confluence in D’Aguiar’s works. Harris’ Jonestown, which shares its historical subject with Children of Paradise, offers the image of a flying ship too: [He] turned at last and made [his] way through the Forest to the Cave of the Moon in a cliff above a Waterfall overshadowing the river of Jonestown. [He] climbed the ladder. The Virgin Ship was tied there and [he] knew [he] would embark upon it soon. The ship took me back to my childhood in Albuoystown. I sailed on the convertible claw of the sun […]. harris 1996, 27.

The narrator, like Donne in Palace of the Peacock, goes to the Guyanese interior and a cave near a waterfall at the side of which one may climb thanks to a ladder. However, this waterfall and this cave, like those Aubrey and Joyce go to in Children of Paradise, are located in the vicinity of Jonestown. Moreover, at the top of the waterfall, a Virgin Ship, rather than the Palace of the Peacock, is what the narrator reaches, to sail on a ray of light, as Sow does after “the light fills [him]” (D’Aguiar 2000, 161, emphasis mine) while, in Children of Paradise, the light is summoned to “splinter” when all the children are on board (D’Aguiar 2014, 362). Here, supernatural ships and rivers from four novels and two authors (D’Aguiar 2000, 2012; Harris 1996, 2010) sail and flow together into

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yet ­another spectral, intertextual confluence that is also evocative of Orphism since they play a role in luminous rites of passage analogous to that of the Orphic ladder, or “pillar of light” (Stewart 258).79 In addition to that Orphic contribution, the flying ships of Harris’ and D’Aguiar’s novels also relate to another myth by way of which D’Aguiar also endows his work with a Guyanese singularity, in the same manner as his reliance on the bone-flute to describe the American civil war in Bloodlines imbues his verse with Orphic and Guyanese features. This myth is that of the flying Africans, and echoes a widespread use of the theme of “human aerial flight” in African diasporic folk cultures, mostly in the Caribbean and in Southern North America, where it functions as a means to return, sometimes posthumously, across the Atlantic and to Africa (McDaniel 28). Analogies with the myth of Icarus are, of course, tempting here (36), but the contention that such a myth is Orphic is also legitimate, since the tale of the flying Africans also translates the melancholic refusal, on the part of members of the African diaspora, to relegate Africa to an irretrievable past, a land beyond reach across the Middle Passage, in the same way as Orpheus refuses the fact of Eurydice’s untimely death.80 Apart from Ovidian connections, Lorna McDaniel specifies that, “One can find thousands of variants throughout the Caribbean among older folk who know the myth” and that, in Guyana, “people say that the old Africans would simply put themselves into a hollowed-out gourd (gobi), put the cover in place and fly back to Africa” (29). In Bloodlines, Tom’s soul “fluting” back to Africa may evoke both the myth of the bone flute and that of the flying Africans, and his partner Stella’s imaginative relationship to a lost Africa is reminiscent of the Guyanese version of the flying-Africans tale even more specifically, because she owns a collection of calabashes that she has named to constitute her “phantom lineage; / the flesh and blood she dreams she’ll meet” (D’Aguiar 2000, 133). Her halves of calabash, being used as bowls, are comparable to the gourd of the Guyanese version of the myth, all the more so since they conjure Africa back for Stella, in the form of ghostly forebears, which is reminiscent in turn of Orpheus leading Eurydice’s specter out of the dark.81 Moreover, drinking from a calabash to start the day allows Stella to gather the 79 80 81

Feeding the Ghosts also contains evocations of a “flying ship” (D’Aguiar 1997, 4) and of the spirits of African slaves having to find their “way home over the sea” to Africa (37). The connection was probably not lost on George Lamming who, in The Pleasures of Exile, coins the (Orphic) phrase “backward glance” to designate this longing for a lost Africa (Lamming, 32, 84). The aforementioned notion that empty calabashes may also be reminiscent of Esu, the Yoruba deity, is not canceled, but reinforced by the present interpretation, since it constitutes an additional way in which the calabashes may conjure Africa. A darker ­presentation

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necessary strength “to face a life she’s more inclined / to skip, if she had the choice: suicide / is no option, life is for the living, she decides” (132). This additional piece of information reinforces the idea that the myth of the flying Africans is being evoked through Stella’s calabashes, since McDaniel also specifies that “‘The Flying Africans myth/tale as a whole […] alludes not only to the imagination of supernatural power and the soul’s return from exile, but also to the ideological choice of suicide that was often made by enslaved Africans’” (McDaniel, 32), but rejected by Stella in D’Aguiar’s novel.82 Hence, the Guyanese version of the myth of the flying Africans allows D’Aguiar to portray the inner lives of African-American characters at the time of slavery from a Caribbean perspective, and helps him to inscribe his writings within the network of texts by other authors from the African diaspora, while giving novels such as Bloodlines and Children of Paradise a distinctive Afro-Guyanese texture, even when the historical subject matter corresponds to a North-American setting. African-American83 authors who live(d) in the United States, such as Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paule Marshall use other versions of the myth in question in their works (McDaniel, 28, 30, 33). In other words, D’Aguiar’s strength consists, here, in his merging the myth of Orpheus with that of the flying Africans in order to express his belonging in the cross-cultural legacy of Orphic, Romantic and African-diasporic writers while simultaneously conveying his singularity as an artist of Guyanese origins, through astounding tropicality.

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of the calabash appears in Bloodlines when the head of the overseer that Tom splits in two with a cutlass in order to escape slavery is compared to two halves of calabash (135). The mythical desire to walk on, under, or over water to go back to Africa is also registered as a historical fact and place as the “Igbo Landing,” corresponding to Dunbar Creek, in Georgia, usa, where a group of West African Igbo slaves died by suicide, walking into the water, singing, as if to actualize the myth and return to Africa, until they drowned (32). In Bethany Bettany, Lionel’s suicide reproduces that aspect of the flying Africans myth. Yet, instead of being described as flying back to Africa, he is represented going back from London to “the muddy Atlantic shores of his Guyana home” (D’Aguiar 2003, 309). Paule Marshall was African-American of Barbadian parents.

General Conclusion: Vatic Environmentalism and the Politics of Tropicality This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we must finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to the other – from forest to city, from story to computer – at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part, and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone. glissant 1990, 9

∵ Fred D’Aguiar’s works thus generate tropicality and an or(phan)ic response to textual and physical realities that inscribe him within the canon of Caribbean literature, insofar as that literature is defined by its globalized cross-cultural history. In other words, the Caribbean singularity of D’Aguiar’s work is determined by its luxuriant tropical intertextual, generic, metaphorical, mythological, and philosophical qualities, ranging from Homer to Walcott, from Wordsworth and Nietzsche to Harris and Derrida, from Behn to Phillips, from Bishop to Brathwaite, from Ovid to Shakespeare, from Bakhtin to Glissant, and many others. For instance, Orphism visibly functions as a point of confluence between D’Aguiar’s novels and two generations of Caribbean authors, but also as a crossroads between cultures and literary genres, by way of which Wordsworth notably informs D’Aguiar’s and Harris’ magic(al) realism(s), inducing us in turn, through the comparison, to reflect on what the ec(h)o-ing voices of these diverse authors and of other writers, dispersed through time and space, may reveal of our relation to the environment through their visions and representations of nature, all the more so considering the present ecological predicament of our planet, and the relatively recent rise of ecocriticism as a research field. Ecocriticism developed in the 1990s through the creation of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (asle), the conferences it © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004394070_011

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organized during that decade, and the journal it has been publishing, e­ ntitled Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (isle) (Heise, 5). Although, as asle and isle, imply, ecocriticism was first worked through by scholars with literary affinities, and defined as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty in Buell, 88), the field quickly diversified from the late 1990s to the present, and contributions were made by literary critics as much as by philosophers, historians, biologists, and economists, giving way to such sub-domains as “postcolonial ecocriticism,” “animal studies,” “ecofeminism,” or “environmental justice revisionism” (Buell 97). It is usually accepted that this interdisciplinary branching out of ecocriticism corresponds to its second wave, which contributed to opening the field to the world, as the original interests of ecocriticism had, before then, primarily been monolingual (anglophone), local (Britain and the usa), and interested in Romanticism and nature writing (Buell 92). The localism of early ecocriticism and its concern with rootedness were thus informed and complicated by the import of such fields as “postcolonialism” (Buell 100) and its concern with routes and roots (Gilroy, 19; Deloughrey 2007a). In order to explain this development, Ursula Heise contends that it is difficult not to postulate some kind of seismic shift that began with the founding of the Diversity Caucus in 1999 and continued with the enormous expansion of the field around the turn of the millennium. Without some turnaround of this kind, it is difficult to explain why postcolonial ecocriticism was not already articulated in the 1990s as explicitly as it has been for the last five years [2006–2011], given that postcolonial studies were a well-established presence in the academy at the time ecocriticism emerged from the Western Literature Association in 1992. heise, 5, emphasis mine

Although such a brief history of the field is very practical, clear, and chronological, ecocriticism’s development, denomination(s), and theoretical framework suggest a more intricate definition. For one thing, Heise’s association of the dawning of second wave ecocriticism with the 1999 Diversity Caucus is partly arbitrary, and rests on the postulate that “postcolonial” studies had not, before then, formulated fully “explicit” environmental considerations. This is not taking into account a general global context marked, at the same time, by the Kyoto conference and the absorption of ecological concerns by popular culture through the film and music industries, or with the critical works of thinkers such as Alejo Carpentier and Édouard Glissant, each of whom, as early as the 1960s and the 1980s, had already conceived of working models for

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intellectual approaches to the relationship between physical environment and history, culture and poetics. The argument for parallel yet virtually separate rather than successive developments of ecocriticism within fields that did not necessarily communicate is also defensible. As far as Carpentier and Glissant are concerned, both call their vision of the relationship between environment, history, and culture “baroque,” and relate it to mestisaje/métissage. Carpentier’s discussion of the baroque intermingling of nature and culture in the American landscape is quite intuitive and spontaneous. In his 1975 Caracas lecture on “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” he claims that “Latin America is the chosen territory of the baroque,” “Because all symbiosis, all mestisaje engenders the baroque,” and Latin America is, according to him, by definition a “mestizo,” creolized place (Carpentier in Zamora and Faris, 100). He further argues that, because the Latin American environment is imbued with baroque profusion pouring from luxuriant nature and mestizo cultures, with, for instance, architectures that provide extreme diversity and detail, Latin America (and the Caribbean) calls for a specific type of writing, “a baroque style that parallels the baroque of the temperate, tropical landscape” (106). In addition to Carpentier’s use of the word “tropical” to describe a landscape in which he sees cross-pollination and creolization, it is important to note that what he describes as the baroque quality of the natural-cultural environment partakes of its marvelous, animated reality. Landscape and culture, again, are not entropic, and “The baroque always projects forward and tends, in fact, to a phase of expansion at the culminating moment of a civilization, or when a new social order is about to be born. It can be culmination, just as it can be premonition” (98, emphasis mine). Once again, the cross-culturally informed and potentially prophetic response to the animation of landscape is at the core of the affinities of marvelous reality to Orphism, which Carpentier inherited from Surrealism. Furthermore, in Poetics of Relation, Glissant’s more historical and theoretical definition of the American-Caribbean baroque draws heavily from Carpentier’s lecture, as the italicized passages in the preceding citations, and in what follows, show. Glissant describes the baroque as a reaction against a view of nature as fixed and factually knowable, as an object of appropriation. He also explains that the reaction was intensified by Western man’s discovery of the New World, by way of which “The baroque, the art of expansion, expanded in concrete terms” (Glissant 1990, 77–8). Glissant, in agreement with Carpentier, then contends that the first instances of this expansion of the baroque are to be found in Latin America, where the Iberian and/or Flemish Baroque “closely intermingled with autochthonous tones boldly introduced into the baroque concert,” and that such development of the Baroque “reached its high point in

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métissage” (78). The baroque, then “no longer a reaction, […] was the outcome of every aesthetic, or every philosophy. Consequently, it asserted not just an art or style but went beyond this to produce a being-in-the-world” (78) that announced later perceptions of global environment and the propagation of culture in chaotic, fractal terms, such as in Glissant’s own échos-mondes and Benitez-Rojo’s idea of the “repeating island” (Benitez-Rojo, 9). In this sense, staring at an infinitely shape-shifting nature with a culturally informed backward gaze (towards the historical development of the Baroque) provides a premonitory (Carpentier in Zamora and Faris, 98), prophetic vision of the past (Glissant 1989, 63–4) that, as explained above, is Orphic. And insofar as the environment is perceived as a repository of cultural history, as the vault from which artistic and philosophical, or, more generally, cultural impulses were catalyzed, as soon as nature is, then, culture, it must be preserved and built upon as a monument to the history of humanity. The Orphic arguments found in Carpentier and Glissant are, then, also ecocritical and suggest a form of vatic environmentalism, so to speak, that predates the development of ecocriticism as an academic field. This vatic approach to the environment, albeit mostly literary, is no fiction. For instance, as seen in Chapter 2, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the foreseeable death of sailors (the unpredictable is their actual survival in the play) after the shipwreck caused by Prospero’s magical power and control over Ariel is evoked by Robert Johnson’s song for the play, “Full Fathom Five” (Shakespeare 2008, I.2.397–402). Of course, it would be anachronistic and far-fetched to call this song, or the intention of the hand that wrote it, ecocritical.1 However, when Walcott looks back at this Renaissance text with contemporary eyes, he turns it to a prophetic vision of the past in Omeros, where, on the Atlantic seafloor “bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes / watched [Achille], a ­brain-coral gurgled their words, / and every bubble englobed a biography […]” (Walcott 1990, 45). There, Walcott represents the becoming-coral of the drowned, and revises the oyster’s eyes of pearl into “bubbles of eyes” from “Full Fathom Five,” as presented in The Tempest. The drowned people whose bodies have merged with the seafloor are sailors and slaves who “perished in the crossing” of the Atlantic Ocean. In this sense, the bottom of the Atlantic becomes a monumental memorial to the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas that, as such, must be protected 1 But again, in light of the notions evoked in Chapter 3, such as perpetual return, différance, and infinite rehearsal, is chronology, or time, linear? And are not deferral and anticipation rather indications of why the anachronistic requires a more complex thinking and cannot simply be attached as an objection in cases like that of the present example?

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against the ­erosion of time and the vandalism of men. This cultural argument for ­preservation comes in ­support of the ecological claim that coral reefs are some of the most fragile and threatened ecosystems that must be rescued for the sake of the equilibrium of life on earth. In other words, if that precious ecosystem also is a historical “vault,” as Walcott claims, then it is doubly necessary to ensure its preservation, and Walcott’s cultural argument that the seafloor is replete with “Hieroglyphics / of coral” (D’Aguiar 2000, 123) is, then, also an ecocritical claim, and a vatic form of environmentalism insofar as it derives from a transatlantic reading of Prospero’s Orphic use of magic to wreck a ship – that is, by the way, actually hidden by Ariel nowhere else than in the Bermuda islands (Shakespeare 2008, I.2.229). Vatic environmentalism is more evident in Pauline Melville’s latest collection of short stories, The Migration of Ghosts, which is replete with representations of prescience, prediction, or prophecy leading to environmental justice. For instance, Melville proposes a presentation of Orphic, or vatic – poetic and prophetic – ecological critique in “Erzulie.” In that narrative, readers follow two parallel stories. One is that of Armand Jenkins, who has been dispatched from Canada to Guyana by the “Cambior and Golden Star Resources” company to supervise “Omai Gold Mining Ltd,” where he tries to hide as much as he can the ecological damage the company is causing, when the sudden yet predictable event of a massive leakage from the mine takes place, and “over three hundred million gallons of dangerous toxic waste” flow into the Omai river, polluting the entire local fluvial network, and threatening the health of natives living in the interior (159–60) and, ultimately, of an entire ecosystem: Armand had done his best to dismiss worries and allay government fears. He had assured them that the mighty river would cleanse itself. What he had not told them was that the toxic cocktail of heavy metals, chemically bound with cyanide, tends to enter the marine environment and latch on to micro-organisms. Arsenic, copper, cadmium, lead, mercury become more poisonous over time. These heavy metals are ingested by fish and invertebrates and then bio-magnify and bio-accumulate. They travel through the food chain and end up in the human consumer. (162–3) After having “solved” the problem of such massive pollution, that is, prevented any incrimination of the company he works for by the Guyanese government, Jenkins is sent to Brazil on a similar mining mission close to a river and, considering what was done in Omai, ecological disaster is very likely again. Armand actually predicts that he will “cause twice as much damage” (158). The other, parallel story is that of a woman serial killer nicknamed Shallow-Grave, as she

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murders people – who all turn out to be connected to the Omai catastrophe – and buries them on the banks of the Essequibo river (139). She gets caught, then tried and imprisoned. In jail, she claims her name is Erzulie, suggesting that she is a voodoo lwa or divinity (144), and as such, gains the total love and devotion of another female prisoner, a former servant from the Jenkins household. After serving her one-month sentence, the servant helps Shallow Grave to escape, and hides her in an unoccupied room at the Jenkins’ in Guyana (153). When the Omai disaster occurs, Shallow Grave, usually described as a tremendously beautiful goddess, breaks out in rashes and sores on her skin, and her hair loses its luxuriant and healthy aspect (161). She, as a consequence, tells her servant that she needs a good (river) bath to heal, and they must flee to Brazil. In other words, Shallow Grave’s body is directly and magically responsive to the ecological damage Armand Jenkins is causing to the Guyanese fluvial network, along the banks of which Shallow Grave used to dwell, and where, one may suspect, she murdered those who harmed her (environment). Her decision to move to Brazil is also prophetic of Armand Jenkins’ next move. In Brazil, she recovers health and meets Armand several times before Armand goes with a can of beer to the river near his new working place. There, after throwing his empty can into the river – another act of pollution – he spies Shallow Grave bathing naked, but red ants (natural agents) attack him and the pain causes him to fall into the water, where Shallow Grave and her accomplice, Jenkins’ former servant, (re-)appear, drown him and bury him on the bank (164–67). Their prophetically premeditated action and the “magical” agency of ants in response to Armand’s environmental harmfulness functions as a vatic form of environmental justice that is very frequent in The Migration of Ghosts.2 Pauline Melville’s magic(al) realism, in this sense, coheres with the (­baroque) conception of the environment as a gateway to the prophetic and the marvelous real in Glissant’s and Carpentier’s discussions of Caribbean culture, and functions as an artistic complement to their thoughts, which we are, again, 2 In “The Sparkling Bitch” (119–34) the story that precedes “Erzulie” in Melville’s collection, Susan Hay is another vatic agent of environmental justice. Her husband, Charles, directs an important oil company that has recently caused oil spillages and starvation in a remote part of Nigeria. During their business trip there, Charles and Susan meet a famished Nigerian boy to whom Susan gives fifty American dollars, expecting gratitude. After a moment of silence, the starved boy blows his fetid breath into Susan’s face, causing the couple to leave. Back in England, Susan, as if under a spell, secretly starves herself and reappears before her husband at an important and public business dinner (with the Lord of the Exchequer and London City luminaries) like an avatar of the starved boy, “like some living accusation” (132). The scandal of her appearance ruins Charles’ career, making him pay for the human and ecological damage caused in Africa.

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tempted to term vatic environmentalism, all the more so since, by leaning on the transcontinental, orph(an)ic tradition of writing, a designation of such ecocritical dimension as vatic, such a sense of “Orphic green” so to speak, may help to bridge the reported gap – as this book’s fifth Chapter does – between the romantic localism of early environmentalism and the globalized visions of “postcolonial” ecocriticism, shades of which may be found in magic(al) realist fiction. For, all in all, the tradition of reading the myth of Orpheus also is, arguably, a history of the poet’s relation to the environment, of their responses to one another and reading in this perspective may certainly yield new insight. For instance, an ecocritical reading of D’Aguiar’s use of tidalectics, of his description of the forest – which is almost a character endowed with agency in Children of Paradise –, or of his dealing with human-animal interactions (the gorilla in his latest novel, the alligators of Dear Future, the spiders and scorpions of other novels), is lacking from existing scholarship on his writings, while it could prove edifying. Conversely, D’Aguiar’s and Melville’s gendering of their characters’ relation to nature has not to our knowledge been inspected in ecofeminists terms either, while it is clear that women are the agents of environmental justice in Melville’s latest short stories and that D’Aguiar does not ­present Isiac women or girls and Orphic men or boys in the same terms. Finally, it cannot be overemphasized that ecocriticism would gain from explorations of Glissant’s works, notably Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation, which form an ecology of culture, yet have gained little currency in the field. Awareness of Glissant’s ecocritical importance has actually only begun to show: Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, as editors of a 2011 collection of essays entitled Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, draw a phrase from Glissant to propose an “aesthetics of the earth” to question “how we may appreciate land that has borne colonial violence and, in doing so, […] create a regenerative response that addresses notions of environmental and social justice” (Kelly 176). Furthermore, John E. Drabinsky shows that Glissant’s poetics of Relation is thoroughly related to a specific, historicized view of landscape (Drabinsky 2011, 1–10). For instance, according to Glissant,  the experience of the shoreline for slaves who crossed the Atlantic corresponds to their initial confrontation, as members of the African diaspora, to the tautological, (an)amnesic economy of the Atlantic ocean, which withdraws and restores memories in (Caribbean) archipelagic fragments, and conditions a prophetic vision of the past, by way of which Orpheus’ backward glance (Lamming 32, 84) turns out to look forward into the future (Glissant 1989, 63–4; 1990, 8). In addition to that tautological vision of the sea, Glissant identifies the enclosed space of the plantation as a form of horrendous cross-cultural confinement that has nevertheless fused cultural elements, which have then

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branched out into the world as métissage, in a way that is comparable to the natural ­formation of rhizomes (1990, 73). Glissant’s view of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is specifically applied to culture as a rhizomatic ecosystem that is predicated on laws of territorialization and deterritorialization, be it those of tides and sedimentation (1990, 33), of plantation monoculture generating creoleness (73), or of the intermingling roots of the mangrove in a chaotic network that used to provide, along with the interior of Caribbean islands, places of hiding and refuge for maroons (1989, 10). Glissant’s poetics is predicated on Caribbean (and, arguably, world) landscapes, by way of which cultures form an ecosystem, and ecosystems are formative of culture. As such, his poetics is an ecocritical and a theoretical matrix that has much to offer in environmental studies. For one thing, Glissant’s work might solve the issue of ecocriticism’s complicated relation to and suspicion of theory. As Epril Oppermann explains in “Ecocriticism’s Theoretical Discontents,” his painstakingly researched account of critical responses to environmental studies, Ecocriticism’s reaction to theory is generally premised on th[e] denaturalization of literary realism’s assumed transparency. For ecocritics, this challenge is often confused with reducing reality to linguistic constructivism, or with the idea that reality is constructed only in language. That is why we need to advance a critical perspective in which both discursivity (in other words, discursive practices) and material phenomena can be integrated in a relational approach. oppermann, 155, italics mine.

Oppermann does not, however, note that the rift between word and world which, reportedly, induces ecocriticism to privilege political action over theoretical construction, is actually bridged by Glissant’s ecology of culture in a “relational approach,” that is, a poetics of Relation. The presumption that the theoretical is too detached from physical reality to have true political impact, or, in other words, the belief in a broken relation of the referent to the world – Western metaphysics’ fundamental white mythology (Derrida 1971, 11) – has already been overcome by thinkers like Glissant. The persistent binary distinction between world and word in environmental studies (and not only in that field) and the subsequent favoring of political action and critical description over theorization actually and arguably weaken the impact of such action, according not only to Oppermann but also to Lawrence Buell (Buell, 88), and necessarily call for the formulation of ecocritical poetics analogous to that of Glissant: “the emblematic emphasis on praxis reveals an immanent weakness

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of the ecocritical project, which becomes more a symbolic fiction than a truly activist intellectual endeavor to make a change” (162), more a “common political project than […] shared theoretical and methodological assumptions” (Heise in Oppermann, 154) that would, still according to Opperman’s argument, make environmental critique theoretically more consistent, and, subsequently, more efficient politically (Opperman, 163). “Tropicality,” as a designation of metaphor that always-already comprises a reference to physical displacement may, to some extent, – even if it is far from being an all-encompassing and all-resolving notion – help to come to terms with that world/word problem in the same way as Glissant’s sustained theoretical, or rather, poetic approach does, because if tropicality is a poetic and linguistic construct, it remains, nevertheless, profoundly anchored in a historicized, global environment. Thus, we also favor, like Buell (88), the terms “environment” and “environmentalism” over that of “ecocriticism” because, while ecocriticism and ecology are words that are understandable only through the presumption that eco- or oikos, the home, necessarily means earth (a claim, contrary to appearances, that is not so easily accepted), the notion of environment, of what surrounds us, seems to refer more “naturally” to the world and retains a sense of circularity that coheres with poetics, with tropes and tropicality. Of course, “vatic environmentalism” is yet another theoretical construct. Yet, it still may serve as one out of many conceivable ways of interacting with the world in both imaginative and rational ways and, as such, it is not enclosed in the theoretical realm or in a solipsistic planetarium. It is a poetic evocation of environmental ethics that complements activism, in the same way as representations of poetic justice in Melville’s “Erzulie” and “The Sparkling Bitch” are related to a vatic force that, in spite of being “fictional,” has an impact on us readers that is so powerful and violent that it integrates our reality through the reading experience, and induces us, as world citizens, to actually change through that exchange, without, to paraphrase Glissant, necessarily losing or denaturing ourselves: The roots of our knowledge trees Can intertwine for us to trace The routes relating you and me Without us ever losing face.

Bibliography A. Literature 1. Fred D’Aguiar

D’Aguiar, Fred. Mama Dot. London: Chatto & Windus, 1985. D’Aguiar, Fred. Airy Hall. London: Poetry Book Society, 1989. D’Aguiar, Fred. “Chickens.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, Dec. 1989a, p. 19. D’Aguiar, Fred. “A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death.” (1991) Black Plays: 3. Methuen, 1993. D’Aguiar, Fred. “1492.” Wasafiri, vol. 8, no. 16, 1992, pp. 7–17. D’Aguiar, Fred. “Retribution.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 24, no. 1, 1993a, pp. 1–3. D’Aguiar, Fred. British Subjects. Newcastle upon Tyne; Chester Springs, PA: Bloodaxe Books; U.S. Distributor, Dufour Editions, 1993. D’Aguiar, Fred. The Longest Memory. (1994). London: Vintage, 1995. D’Aguiar, Fred. “Fog Area.” The Southern Review, vol. 30, no. 2, 1994a, p. 284. D’Aguiar, Fred. Bill of Rights. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. D’Aguiar, Fred. Dear Future. (1996a). New York: Avon Books, 1998. D’Aguiar, Fred. Feeding the Ghosts. (1997). London: Vintage, 1998. D’Aguiar, Fred. Bloodlines. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. D’Aguiar, Fred. “The Last Sonnet About Slavery.” The Guardian 2001. Web. 12 Dec. 2014. D’Aguiar, Fred. Bethany Bettany. (2003). London: Vintage, 2004. D’Aguiar, Fred. “The Most Anti-Castro City in the World.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2004a, p. 14. D’Aguiar, Fred. Continental Shelf. Manchester: Carcanet, 2009. D’Aguiar, Fred. “The Martyrs’ Convention.” The Arts of Peace. Eds. Adrian Blamires and Peter Robinson, Reading: Two Rivers Press, 2012. pp. 69–70. D’Aguiar, Fred. The Rose of Toulouse. Manchester: Carcanet, 2013. D’Aguiar, Fred. Children of Paradise. First edition. New York: Harper, 2014. D’Aguiar, Fred. “English Rules.” Wasafiri, vol. 29, no. 3, 2014a, pp. 8–15. D’Aguiar, Fred. Mr Reasonable: a Radio Play. 2014b. (Author’s manuscript). D’Aguiar, Fred. “A Bad Day for a Good Man in a Hard Job.” Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories. Ed. Jacob Ross. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2015. D’Aguiar, Fred. “Westerns.” Ploughshares, vol. 41, no. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 54–55. D’Aguiar, Fred. “How Anancy Feeds His Family (and Himself).” The Cross-Cultural Legacy: Critical and Creative Writings in Memory of Hena Maes-Jelinek. Eds. Gordon Collier, Geoffrey V. Davis, Marc Delrez, Bénédicte Ledent. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2017. D’Aguiar, Fred. “Call and Response.” The Mighty Stream: Poems in Celebration of Martin Luther King. Eds. Carolyn Forché and Jackie Kay, Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2017.

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2. Other Authors

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Andersen, Hans Christian. Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen: Complete and Unabridged. Project Gutenberg, 2008. Web. 6 June 2016. Anim-Addo, Joan. Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name: A Play for Twelve Voices in Three Acts. Miami: Mango Publishing, 2008. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, Or, the History of the Royal Slave. London: Penguin, 2003. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927–1979. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983. Brathwaite, Edward K. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Brierre, Jean Fernand. “Me Revoici, Harlem: au Souvenir des Lynchés de Géorgie, Victimes du Fascisme Blanc.” Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache de Langue Française. Ed. Leopold S. Senghor. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948. Web. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Stevie Davies. London; New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Cesaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Folio. Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. (ca. 1380). London: Penguin Classics, 1971. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Chapter xiv.” Biographia Literaria. N.p. Web. 22 Feb. 2016. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Norton Critical Edition. Dabydeen, David. Turner: New and Selected Poems. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2002. De La Mare, Walter. “The Listeners.” Web. 24 July 2013. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Ed. Edgar Rosenberg. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1999. Norton Critical Edition. Dickinson, Emily. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Donne, John. Poems. Ed. J.-R. Poisson. Trans. Jean Fuzier and Yves Denis. Bilingue. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Dryden, John. “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687.” (1687). Selected Poems. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2002. Dylan, Bob. “I and I.” Infidels. New York: Columbia, 1983. http://bobdylan.com/songs/iand-i/ (June 15th 2016). Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. (1922). New York: Norton, 2000. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1952. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. London: Vintage, 1996.

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Index Abraham 154, 244–7, 250, 252 Achebe, Chinua 39, 261n Anansi 100, 120, 231, 238, 250–5 Andersen, Hans Christian 178–9 Antropofagia 260 Apollinaire, Guillaume 211 Aravamudan, Srinivas 17n, 23n2, 24–5 Aristotle 136, 196n50 Bakhtin, Mikhail Carnivalesque 128–30 Chronotope 106–8 Hidden polemic 33 Historical inversion 194, 216–7, 221 Baroque 40, 258, 283–4, 286 Baucom, Ian 9, 84, 91, 95n33–4, 144, 174, 176n30, 179n35, 180n, 185n39 Behavioral epigenetics 169, 213 Behn, Aphra 22–5, 29n11, 59, 281 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio 76n, 128, 153n3, 256, 260, 263, 267, 270, 284 Bhabha, Homi K. 17, 96, 195, 256 Bishop, Elizabeth 68n, 76–81, 83–5, 281 Black Atlantic See Gilroy, Paul Blanchot, Maurice 51, 213–14, 271 Bowers, Maggie Ann 211, 257 Brathwaite, Edward K. ix, 7, 33, 59, 68n, 76–7, 80, 100n, 104n, 139, 172, 277, 281 and tidalectics 9, 60, 62–6, 68–9, 73–4, 77, 79–80, 82–5, 88, 91–4, 96–7, 105–7, 136–7, 176, 256, 287 Brierre, Jean-Fernand 213 Brontë, Charlotte 188n43 Brown, Homer Obed 6n5, 245 Buell, Lawrence 282, 288–9 Burnham, Forbes vii, 113–4, 123, 222–7, 229n, 230, 232, 244–5 Byron 42, 118, 193–4, 210 Calypso 7, 71n, 76–7, 82, 118–21, 123n, 124, 139, 162 Camus, Marcel 212n Césaire, Aimé 15n2, 39, 212 Chamoiseau, Patrick 17–8, 27, 41, 256 Chaos theory 18, 76n, 256 Chaucer, Geoffrey 162, 208

Cocteau, Jean 211 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Biographia Literaria 272, 275–6 Lyrical Ballads 75, 192–3, 211n, 261–4, 269, 271 Colonialism 3–4, 10, 14–7, 19, 23–4, 38–40, 54–5, 59, 62, 64, 68, 70, 73–4, 77, 80, 85, 88, 94n31, 99, 114, 130, 134, 137, 147n5, 172n23, 209, 212, 215, 217, 223n18, 245, 256n56, 267, 284, 287 Colonial impulse 3–4 Neocolonialism 4 Postcolonialism viii–ix, 3–5, 14, 16n, 18n7, 24, 222n15, 282, 287 Confluence 136, 255–7, 261n, 262–7, 270–1, 273, 275–6, 278–9, 281 Conrad, John 39, 261n Creolization 18, 153n3, 283 D'Aguiar, Fred A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death vii, 34–6, 38n16, 40–1, 102, 118, 127n, 266 Airy Hall vii, 89–91, 122, 135, 188, 225n20 Bethany Bettany vii–viii, 38n15, 49n, 56n, 154n, 171n, 225n20, 238, 241–52, 253n53, 272n, 280n82 Bill of Rights viii–ix, 9, 22, 32–3, 67, 82, 103, 122–3, 125–6, 169, 214, 232, 265, 268, 270 Bloodlines vii–viii, 43–5, 54, 56, 58, 81–3, 88, 124, 189–206, 218–22, 247n, 257, 271–9, 285 British Subjects vii, 9, 22, 24–6, 28–9, 35–6, 40–4, 46–7, 50n28, 53, 55n32, 56–9, 65–73, 75–83, 88–92, 94n32, 97–8, 101, 104, 111–5, 127–8, 133, 136, 256, 265, 278 Children of Paradise vii–viii, 34, 122n, 134n, 146, 171n, 225n20, 232–8, 252–5, 257, 260n59, 264–71, 274, 278 Continental Shelf vii–viii, 9, 22, 41n, 47–51, 58–9, 67, 80, 82, 85–6, 91–2, 99, 102–3, 129, 131–3, 135, 225n20–1, 226n23, 228n25, 256, 272n73

313

Index Dear Future vii–ix, 4n3, 38n15, 171n, 218, 222–32, 247n, 249n49, 250n50, 253, 255, 263n63, 272n73 Feeding the Ghosts vii–viii, 47n24, 67n, 76, 78n, 79–80, 82, 88–90, 93, 95–7, 99–102, 146, 170–89, 229n, 238–9, 257, 279n79 Mama Dot vii, 1, 9, 22, 30–1, 34, 37, 41, 45, 70, 95, 170, 224n20, 228n25 Prosimetrum 86n24, 106, 109n3, 110–2, 114, 131, 256, 259, 263–4 The Longest Memory vii, 1, 86n25, 150–70, 177, 183, 186, 207 The Rose of Toulouse vii–viii, 37n, 111, 115–7, 125, 136, 171n Dabydeen, David vii–viii, 150n, 172 De La Mare, Walter 120–1 De Man, Paul 2, 14 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix 140, 217, 225n21, 288 Deloughrey, Elizabeth 9, 14, 62–4, 68, 74, 76–7, 83, 107, 186n, 282, 287 Derrida, Jacques and postcolonialism See Colonialism Différance ix, 3, 10, 16, 26, 84, 107–9, 119, 133 Monolingualism of the Other ix, 3, 4n3, 60, 61n3, 169, 212, 214, 255 Plato’s Pharmacy ix, 5, 55n31, 63n7, 145, 147, 149, 152–3, 159, 163, 166, 176, 178, 182, 186, 188, 196, 199, 243, 245n44 Retrait of Metaphor ix, 2, 5, 9, 13–4, 61, 74, 77, 84, 91–3, 105–7, 124, 131, 139, 255 Rhetoric of Drugs 121n, 159 Specters of Marx 9, 93–4, 97, 101, 103, 106, 125 White Mythology ix, 2, 5, 7, 9, 61, 64, 70, 73–4, 87, 105, 108n, 173n25, 257n58, 288 Descartes, René 10, 126, 149, 214, 252 Dickens, Charles 210 Donne, John 7, 162, 209, 260–4, 267–8, 277–8 Du Bois, W. E. B. 21, 28–30, 41, 51, 59, 149n Environmentalism 264, 281–9 Economy 7, 44, 61, 94, 174n, 199, 267, 277 of liquidity 9, 62–4, 68–9, 73–93, 95, 104–5, 115n, 287 Fanon, Frantz 139, 147n5, 212 Faulkner, William 217

Ferenczi, Sandor 102n39–40, 169n, 213 Flying Africans 243n40, 279–80 Foucault, Michel 143–5 Freud, Sigmund 136 Dreams 101, 110, 130–1, 168, 174–5 Uncanny 91, 98 Gaines, Ernest J. 198n53 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 16n, 19, 23–4, 33, 44–5, 149, 158, 165–6, 176n31 Genealogy 3, 6n5, 10, 91, 143–6, 151, 155–6, 159, 162–3, 165–6, 168, 170, 181–2, 190, 193–4, 199, 201, 204–5, 209, 245n44, 246 Gilroy, Paul 16n, 43, 63, 73, 82, 85–6, 89, 172, 256, 282 Glissant, Édouard and the Atlantic 63, 72, 102 and chaos theory 18–9, 256, 284 and environment 282–9 National identity 27, 41 Opacity 44, 138–9 Relation ix, 3n, 13, 17–9, 124, 213, 215, 281, 287–9 Prime elements of culture ix, 13, 61n3 Prophetic vision of the past 72–3, 89n, 216–18, 222–3, 232, 286–7 Goethe, Joan Wolfgang Von 162–3, 210 Hall, Stuart 213, 215 Harlem Renaissance 33, 149n, 198, 212n Harris, Wilson History, Fable and Myth (on limbo) 81n24, 100–2, 120, 231 Infinite rehearsal ix, 9, 68n, 95n35, 109–37, 256, 260, 277, 284 Jonestown 257, 265, 278 Palace of the Peacock 7, 15n2, 39n, 57, 106, 128, 257–63, 268, 274, 277 Haunting 9, 64, 93–6, 98, 101–2, 104–6, 108, 136n, 171, 176, 199, 202, 211, 261 Heaney, Seamus 81n, 102n40 Hermes 191, 229 Hobbes, Thomas 10, 126, 168–9, 174, 213–4, 252 Homer 6n5, 31, 51–2, 67, 78n20, 102n40, 118, 139, 162, 213, 281 Horus 237 Hugo, Victor 210, 237 Hybridity 17, 195–8, 256

314

Index

Icarus 9, 22, 30–1, 34–5, 37–8, 41, 279 Identity wall See Glissant Imagination viii, 10, 13–5, 51n30, 84, 87, 93, 101, 110, 114–8, 126, 132, 138, 148, 168–70, 180n, 183, 213–5, 220–1, 252, 289 Imperialism 3, 4n4, 14, 17, 38–40, 54, 70, 74, 80, 99, 209, 215, 260 Isis 162, 209–10, 237–55, 265, 287

125, 154, 167–8, 170, 172–3, 186, 216, 238, 240–1, 279 Milton, John 162–3, 209 Moses 86, 154, 162, 198, 210 Motown 71n Mourning viii, 47, 58, 86, 94n31, 104, 136, 162, 189n44, 210 Muhammad 215, 230n27

James, C.L.R. 19 Janus 44–6 Jones, Jim See Jonestown Jonestown viii, 22, 32, 34, 103, 122, 125, 145, 218, 232–8, 252–4, 257, 264–5, 267, 270, 278

Naipaul, Shiva 32, 34, 114, 123, 223n18, 227, 230, 232n31, 233n32, 234n, 254n, 264n65, 265n68, 266 Nancy, Jean-Luc 3, 245 Nerval, Gérard de 210, 237 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 108–9, 136, 143–4, 281

Keats, John 50, 59, 189n44

Okri, Ben 228n24 Ole Higue 224 Orientalism 15 Oroonoko 22–5, 40, 42 Orphanhood See Brown, Derrida, Orpheus and Plato Orpheus 5–7, 22n, 46n, 51, 146, 162–3, 198, 207–15, 227, 232–3, 237–8, 241, 247, 255, 257, 260, 263n64, 265–6, 269–71, 273–7, 279–80, 287 Osiris 210, 237, 241, 247 Ovid 6, 9–10, 22–4, 26–7, 29–35, 38, 40, 42, 44–6, 51, 53, 57, 59, 66, 90, 158, 207–8, 212, 214, 249n49, 252, 257n58, 270, 279, 281 Owen, Wilfred 36, 38

Legba 44–6 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2n, 15n2, 138–9 Levinas, Emmanuel 2n, 18, 26, 44, 59, 94n31, 137, 139, 213–15 Limbo 9, 64, 81n, 86n24, 93, 95, 98, 100–2, 105, 120, 231, 238, 251, 253, 255, 263n63 Lumet, Sidney 212n Magic(al) realism 6–7, 10, 75n, 94, 115n, 116n, 194, 211–3, 215, 217, 236, 249n43, 251–2, 257–9, 261–2, 264, 270, 275–6, 281, 283, 286–7 Marley, Bob 1, 20, 66n, 67–73, 86, 89n, 97 Medusa 9, 22, 30, 32–4, 47–50, 52–3, 67 Melancholy 86, 136, 196n50, 263n64 Melville, Pauline vii, 224n19, 245n43, 285–7, 289 Memory and written speech See orphanhood and dreams See Freud and Hobbes and myth See metaphor Metaphor inescapability of See De Man and Derrida as (myhological) reminder 2, 5–8, 15, 18, 20–1, 61–5, 68, 70, 73–4, 77, 80, 88, 92–3, 97, 101, 106–7, 110, 124–5, 130–1, 135–7, 167n17, 171, 208 and culture See Derrida and tropicality Midas 30–1 Middle Passage 9, 16, 47n24, 64–5, 72–4, 80, 86–91, 93, 96–100, 102, 104, 107, 120–1,

Pharmakon 147–51, 153, 155, 158–61, 163–4, 166–8, 170, 173, 182–92, 198, 200, 202–3, 205, 226 Philip, Marlene NoubreSe vii, 172, 185n Phillips, Caryl vii, 172, 268n, 281 Plato 5–6, 9–10, 145–50, 152–3, 155, 159, 161–4, 166, 170, 176, 178, 180, 196, 208, 243, 245n44, 247, 249n49, 252 Reed, Ishmael 33 Rhizome See Deleuze Rhys, Jean 188n43, 250n50 Rilke, Rainer Maria 212n Sartre, Jean-Paul viii, 6, 16n, 18n7, 210, 212–14, 221 Seth 237, 247

315

Index Shakespeare, William 22–4, 46n, 57n, 80n, 157–8, 162–3, 186n, 209, 281, 284–5 Shelley, Mary 210 Shelley, Percy 189n44, 210 Socrates 5–6, 145, 148, 208 Soyinka, Wole 213 Specters 51, 93–102, 105–6, 116, 120–1, 208, 211, 279 Spenser, John 162, 209, 215, 237 Thieme, John 39n, 188n43, 261n61 Tidalectics ix, 9, 60, 62–4, 66, 68–9, 73–4, 77, 79–80, 82–4, 88, 91–4, 96, 105–7, 136–7, 176, 256, 287 Todorov, Tzvetan 6n5, 146n Tropicalism 15n2, 18n7 Tropicality 8–9, 13–20, 24, 29, 31–2, 34, 37–8, 41, 45, 49, 53, 60–1, 64, 67–8, 76n, 80, 86–7, 92, 100, 106, 109n3, 118, 129–30, 134, 137–40, 144, 194–5, 213, 215, 255, 267, 280–1, 289 Negative tropicality 15–7 Tropicopolitans See Aravamudan

Vico, Giambattista 10, 126, 213–14 Virgil 162, 207, 209–10, 266, 273 Voodoo 33, 44–6, 286 Walcott, Derek 7, 20, 31–3, 52–4, 59–60, 64, 67n, 71, 77–80, 86–7, 89, 92, 102, 105, 107, 118, 121, 129, 136, 143, 172, 218, 256, 277n, 281, 284–5 Ward, Abigail ix, 43n, 150–1, 153n3–4, 158n, 160n, 161n, 162, 165n, 180n36, 187, 189n45, 191n, 193–6, 199n, 213, 241, 272–3 Wordsworth, William 7, 75, 80, 115n, 192–3, 210–11, 217–8, 259, 261–4, 266, 268–76, 281 Wright, Richard 212n Yeats, William Butler 34–5, 38–9, 59, 102n40 Young, Elizabeth Marie 145, 208, 221, 247 Young, Robert J. C. 3–6, 17–8, 39 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 6, 94, 211, 252, 257–8, 275, 283–4