Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism (Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media) [1 ed.] 1032230118, 9781032230115

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Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism

This book synthesizes ecofeminist theory, American studies, and postcolonial theory to interrogate what New Americanist William V. Spanos articulates as the “errand into the wilderness”: the ethic of Puritanical expansionism at the heart of the U.S. empire that moved westward under Manifest Destiny to colonize Native Americans, non-whites, women, and the land. The project explores how the legacy of the errand has been articulated by women writers, from the slave narrative to contemporary fiction. Uniting texts across geographical and temporal boundaries, the book constructs a theoretical approach for reading and understanding how women authors craft counter-narratives at the intersection of metaphorical and literal landscapes of colonization. It focuses on literature from the United States and the Caribbean, including the slave narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs, and contemporary work by Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Native American writer Linda Hogan. It charts the contrast between America’s earliest idyllic visions and the subsequent reality: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color and the environment. This study of many canonical writers presents an important and illuminating analysis of American mythologies that continue to impact the cultural landscape today. It will be a significant discussion text for students, scholars, and researchers in environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and postcolonial studies. Christine M. Battista is Instructional Design Specialist at Sierra Space and an independent scholar in Denver, U.S.A. Melissa R. Sande is Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Humanities at Union College of Union County, NJ, U.S.A.

Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media Series editor Thomas Bristow

The urgency of the next great extinction impels us to evaluate environmental crises as sociogenic. Critiques of culture have a lot to contribute to the endeavor to remedy crises of culture, drawing from scientific knowledge but adding to it arguments about agency, community, language, technology and artistic expression. This series aims to bring to consciousness potentialities that have emerged within a distinct historical situation and to underscore our actions as emergent within a complex dialectic among the living world. It is our understanding that studies in literature, culture and media can add depth and sensitivity to the way we frame crises; clarifying how culture is pervasive and integral to human and non-human lives as it is the medium of lived experience. We seek exciting studies of more-than-human entanglements and impersonal ontological infrastructures, slow and public media, and the structuring of interpretation. We seek interdisciplinary frameworks for considering solutions to crises, addressing ambiguous and protracted states such as solastalgia, anthropocene anxiety, and climate grief and denialism. We seek scholars who are thinking through decolonization and epistemic justice for our environmental futures. We seek sensitivity to iterability, exchange and interpretation as wrought, performative acts. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media provides accessible material to broad audiences, including academic monographs and anthologies, fictocriticism and studies of creative practices. We invite you to contribute to innovative scholarship and interdisciplinary inquiries into the interactive production of meaning sensitive to the affective circuits we move through as experiencing beings. Georgic Literature and the Environment Working Land, Reworking Genre Edited by Sue Edney and Tess Somervell Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism Errand into the Wilderness Christine M. Battista and Melissa R. Sande For further information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeEnvironmental-Literature-Culture-and-Media/book-series/RELCM

Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism Errand into the Wilderness Christine M. Battista and Melissa R. Sande

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Christine M. Battista and Melissa R. Sande The right of Christine M. Battista and Melissa R. Sande to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-23011-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-23013-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27521-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to William V. Spanos, a scholar, teacher, and lover of literature and all that it does in the world.

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface 1 Ecologies of Exception: Gender, Race, and the Eco-Imperial Imaginary in the Caribbean and American Literature and Culture 2 Ecologies of Racism: A Genealogy of Black Feminisms in American Slavery

viii ix

1 22

3 Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities: Willa Cather’s Conflicted Land Ethics and Civilizing Science in O Pioneers!48 4 Errand of American Expansionism: The Intersections of Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Natural Space in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat

74

5 “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth”: Exclusionary Cartographies, Transgenerational Trauma, and Racialized Dispossession in The Bluest Eye99 6 “A Hurricane Ravaging the Island”: An Examination of Blackness, Witchcraft, and Feminist Alterity in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem118 7 Mapping the Counter-Errand: Feminist Agential Ecologies in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms141 8 Conclusion

164

Index168

Acknowledgments

Jointly, we wish to thank our editorial team at Routledge – Grace Harrison, Rosie Anderson, and Matthew Shobbrook – for their support and work in issuing this book through the publication process. We also thank Maria Farland and Duncan Faherty, co-editors at Studies in American Fiction, for permission to reprint a version of Chapter Five, “ ‘Pecola and the Unyielding Earth’: Exclusionary Cartographies, Transgenerational Trauma, and Racialized dispossession in The Bluest Eye.” Additionally, we thank Candis Pizzetta, editor of The Researcher, for permission to reprint a version of Chapter Four, “Errand of American Expansionism: The Intersections of Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Natural Space in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat.” My academic life would not be possible without the following people, to whom I am always indebted: Moustafa Bayoumi, Donette Francis, William Spanos, Joseph Keith, and Susan Strehle. I am especially thankful to Donette, for her guidance and her encouragement, not just in my writing and research, but in how to become and be an academic. I remain inspired and encouraged by the brilliant work of Bill Spanos and am grateful for the time I got to spend with and learn from him. I am thankful to my co-author, Christine, for what we have accomplished and shared, and what we will continue to write together. My family and a small group of friends give me unconditional love and I am grateful. I thank Maris Lown for always championing my writing and especially for mentoring me and supporting my aspirations. —Melissa R. Sande I am forever indebted to William Spanos for his mentorship, wisdom, and passion. I am grateful to the brilliant team at Routledge, as aforementioned, for their support, patience, and enthusiasm for this project. I wish to thank those who continually support my academic writing and my ongoing integration of, and passion for, the humanities in every aspect of my life, including Jillian Lang, Katherine Finnerty, Lendi Boyle, Olivia Battista, and my amazing husband, Christopher Cattron, whose passion for humanity fuels my intellectual and writing life. Not least, I am beyond grateful to my co-author, Melissa, for her passion, intellect, and friendship. Our writing journey is constantly in the process of becoming and I am thankful for the work we bring to life in the world. —Christine M. Battista

Preface

In approaching this project, we sought to reconcile a number of academic hauntings alongside the social hauntings of their respective inquiries. We had in mind a new synthesis among the Turnerian frontier of American Studies, the metaphysical and historiographical revisions of postcolonial feminism, and the ever-present yet newly foregrounded primacy of the ecological within literary criticism. Prior to embarking upon this path, it will be helpful to review key terms and structures of thought that will underpin our interpretive work. We are greatly indebted to William Spanos for his style of resolution between Western subjectivity and empire. Much discussion of visibility, problematic subjectivity, and epistemological hubris originates from his thought. In order, these critical areas address ways of seeing, ways of being, and ways of knowing under the empire, all of which are pre-captured by a superstructure of the self—cast apart from the fulcrum of our dissenting focus here: the ecological. In that, we find the imaginary separateness of the human project (so crucial to Western subjectivity) from its ecos or natural context as large of a piece with the arbitrary imperialist construction of not just race and gender, but the linearity of progress itself or telos, the similarities between centuries of environmental damage and the cross-generational traumas of racism and patriarchy provide a kind of overlaid primer for the hidden forensic record of dominant cultural practice. It is this new assembly that places, crucially, women of color alongside the land while searching out how those same women connected to that same landscape, both on their own terms and under power, and forms what we regularly term geosocial production or, when surveyed widely across space and timescale, ecologies of exception. Indeed geography guides much of our thinking at this site: how does land become a political place? Relatedly, how does (borrowing from Hortense Spillers) flesh become the citizen body? How do we conflate the two former, land and flesh, in service of their latter constructions, place, and body? Can these matrices and snares of empire be re-mapped into (what Toni Morrison would term) a new critical geography? From the panic of the Puritans to the Pax Americana that would seep directly from such early paranoia through the hemisphere and across the globe, we are in search of a literary genealogy of the partition where the human and

x  Preface non-human alike are organized inside or outside of a paradigmatic order of white patriarchy and liberal rationality. To this end, we employ the master’s tools. If the Cartesian or thinking self has set and licensed its “civilizing” mental franchise of taxonomy and instrumentalization above and in mastery over the natural and the “wild,” we seek to re-voice the alterity of that wilderness, and the racialized/genderized other, as the structuring absence or negative space against which such hegemony has been built and through which it might be productively interrogated. More simply, we are after a unifying theory of the outside/outdoors/frontier/other that might unravel longheld conventions defining the inside/indoors/nation/subject. And more finely, it is our position that no part of the imperial “inside” can be understood absent its coordinate wilderness or shadow; the civilizing impulse is a reaction that imagines itself an edifice. Thus women writers of color and the extent of their solidarity with nature provide, most urgently, a site of profound confrontation against the physical, intellectual, and procedural violence of the American empire over the four centuries of its development. It is upon this potential to make insurgents the unseen and make heralds of the subjugated that we set our aim.

1 Ecologies of Exception Gender, Race, and the Eco-Imperial Imaginary in the Caribbean and American Literature and Culture

When Perry Miller, professor of American literature at Harvard, delivered his address, “Errand into the Wilderness,” to the associates of the John Carter Brown Library in 1952, he opened with the provenance of his title: Puritan Samuel Danforth’s 1670 sermon, A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness. In his expanded book project of the same name, Miller links the semantic valence of “errand” to the novelty of the New World relative to the Old and specifically of New England as set apart from its parceled namesake: the wilderness. He asserts that the “basic conditioning factor” of New England “was the frontier” and that, in exploring the Puritan endeavor as it encountered this prime environmental driver, one might begin by deconstructing Danforth’s “errand” across an evolving spectrum of volition (1). He writes: Now in the 1660’s the problem was: which had New England originally been—an errand-boy or a doer of errands? In which sense had it failed? Had it been despatched for a further purpose, or was it an end itself? Or had it fallen short not only in one or the other, but in both of the meanings? If so, it was indeed a tragedy, in the primitive sense of a fall from a mighty designation. (Errand 4) Here Miller juxtaposes the flight of William Bradford’s rural and tolerant Pilgrims to Plymouth against the prerogative of John Winthrop’s much larger band of better-educated and moneyed Puritans arriving in Boston on the Arbella a decade later. If the 1620 Mayflower group were pushed (first to the Netherlands and then) to North America by a ruling climate in England that had “made life impossible,” then their migration was “not so much an errand as a shrewd forecast” (Errand 4). It was a reaction taking the form of a series of improvisations. On the other hand, Miller finds the 1630 Arbella group and its successors in the Great Migration, some 20,000 strong all told, to be of an entirely separate character: . . . Massachusetts Bay was not just an organization of immigrants seeking advantage and opportunity. It had a positive sense of mission—either DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-1

2  Ecologies of Exception it was sent on an errand or it had its own intention, but in either case the deed was deliberate. It was an act of will, perhaps of willfulness. These Puritans were not driven out of England (thousands of their fellows stayed and fought the Cavaliers)—they went on their own accord. (“Errand” 6) This second wave sought to prove the Reformation by isolating the variable upon the tabula rasa of the Americas, “a bare land, devoid of already established (and corrupt) institutions, empty of bishops and courtiers” (for Miller, they quite probably saw themselves as a “task force” that would be invited back to govern their homeland with such a proof of concept in hand) (Errand 11, 12). Per Puritan doctrine, their Calvinist belief in unknowable predestination engendered salvation anxiety where they would seek or, more finely, actively select evidence of a happy fate within the success of their earthly endeavors and the corollary presumption of God’s favor. In this cauldron of isolation and selectivity, we locate the germ of the American imagination as it gazes upon the frontier. Here, in the epistemology of the ambitious Puritan, the de novo wilderness finds solidarity with the preordination of social outcome; they are cast differently, and yet are restrained by a singular certainty arising from a conscious and centralizing volition, or “errand” on the part of the European colonizer and the Protestant mind. In John Winthrop’s lay sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity, he makes plain “the thesis that God had disposed mankind in a hierarchy of social classes, so that ‘in all times some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in subjecccion’ ” (Errand 6). Perry Miller draws out the nascent eco-imperial imaginary at play when he argues that “Winthrop took the precaution to drive out of their heads any notion that in the wilderness the poor and the mean were ever so to improve themselves as to mount above the rich or the eminent in dignity” (“Errand” 6). We may observe Winthrop’s Calvinism serving a dual purpose in this framing: he consecrates the stratification of the social outcome as he delimits the emancipatory potential of the ecos. Herein lies the basis for our exploration of the errand and its impact on the landscape, women, and bodies of color. None of this first generation was yet “American” but in the divergence of their backgrounds and the commonality of their Calvinism, Danforth had seen his forebears’ project move from the accidental “errand-boy” of God wherein the settlers “congratulated themselves that they might become a means for propagating the gospel in remote parts of the world” toward, at the close of the century, a post-Cromwell “end itself” where the “greatest difficulty” would be “not the stones, storms, and Indians” but a “problem of identity” that would require them to “fill it with meaning by themselves and out of themselves. Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the hill, they were left alone with America” (Errand 5, 15). They were left alone with the wilderness, and their zealotry.

Ecologies of Exception 3 It would be outside the scope of this project to further interrogate when and how and why the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay found themselves to be no longer in possession, and no longer desirous, of a European audience through the middle of the seventeenth century and the English Civil War. It is likewise unnecessary to fully explore the return of British interest after the Glorious Revolution. It is sufficient to remain fixed on the contradictions of the settler perspective as it realized a permanent polity and how this incoherence necessitated the salve of American expansionism across the continent, hemisphere, and globe. This provides the basis for this book chapter. The Puritan polity was, of course, a covenant with the Lord or a “due form of ecclesiastic government” containing “the very essence of organized Christianity” that would produce a “due form of civil government” to include “the duty of suppressing heresy, of subduing or somehow getting rid of dissenters—of being, in short, deliberately, vigorously, and consistently intolerant” (“Errand” 7). Yet “changes there had to be: adaptations to environment, expansions of the frontier, mansions constructed, commercial adventures undertaken” that would be “thrust upon the society by American experience” and precipitate a “yielding to the heresy of toleration.” Perry Miller, at his most acid, captures the evolution of expansionist morality in the return of an exiled Rhode Islander who dared to suggest a fair price for the endless horizon of free real estate appropriated at the cost of a passing largesse: They actually welcomed Roger Williams, whom the leaders of the model had kicked out of Massachusetts so that his nonsense about liberty of conscience would not spoil the administrations of charity. (Errand 16, 17) As the Pilgrims and the later waves of the Great Migration shared the animus of Calvinism despite significant disparities of outlook, so too did subsequent Puritan generations share a Calvinist metaphysics even as they clashed over the degree to which the “American experience” would drive their response. The Reformist ideal meant the desequestration of the spiritual and corporeal; it signified, in the broadest sense, an erasure of Catholic spiritual boundaries around collective ritual and of a centralized bureaucracy, giving way to a mythologized reality where such questions would be hybridized upon the terrain by individual actors. In perhaps his most enduring insight, Miller sounds out the linkage among the Puritan jeremiads of Danforth and his ilk, the monadic franchise they would claim to decry, and the violent expansion that would come to define all sides: There is something of a ritualistic incantation about them; whatever they may signify in the realm of theology, in that of psychology they are purgations of soul; they do not discourage but actually encourage the community to persist in its heinous conduct. The exhortation to a reformation which never materializes serves as a token payment upon

4  Ecologies of Exception the obligation, and so liberates the debtors . . . Land speculation meant not only wealth but dispersion of the people, and what was to stop the march of settlement? (Errand 11) Miller is adamant that the value of the “errand” formulation is in its dual character as the business of both holy emissary and temporal doer; we would argue that this is the cultural opening in the Puritan imaginary through which a secular capitalist ethos would inevitably flow. Indeed Miller seems to acknowledge the worldly peril of “experience” when he argues that acts of expansionist ambition at the close of the seventeenth century “were not only works of necessity but of excitement, they proved irresistible—whether making money, haunting taverns, or committing fornication” (Errand 11). In this way, the land licensed the people even as the people licensed the land, and “under the guise of this mounting wail of sinfulness, this incessant and never successful cry for repentance, the Puritans launched themselves upon the process of Americanization” (Errand 11). As Miller hears unrepentance among the pious so too can “this mounting wail” be detected in the irony with which Crevecoeur, in Letters from an American Farmer, portrays agrarian utopia in the new United States, some 100 years later: Here nature opens her broad lap to receive the perpetual accession of new comers, and to supply them with food. I am sure I cannot be called a partial American when I say, that the spectacle afforded by these pleasing scenes must be more entertaining, and more philosophical than that which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome. (8) Blood Meridian and the Logic of America’s Expansionist Ethic in the Nineteenth Century Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West exposes, in a series of unrelenting shocks to the reader, the grotesqueries of violence that undergird America’s white masculinist ethos.1 Set during the expansion of the nineteenth century, and suffused with slayings of Native Americans, Mexicans, whites, women, children, animals, and the earth, Blood Meridian proposes that the logic of the American empire, shorn of legitimating pretense and extrapolated unto its end, is paradoxically selfdestructive yet independently sustained through violence, a process wherein “slaughter [becomes] general” (McCarthy 155, emphasis added). For this, McCarthy centers war (against the land, against each other) as the essentializing condition of possibility for all beings, narratively reckoned from the position of the white man as well as the many Native Americans who had “learnt war by warring, the generations driven from the eastern shore across a continent, from the ashes of Gnadenhutten onto the prairies and across the

Ecologies of Exception 5 outlet to the bloodlands of the west” (138). The author saturates his frontier with physical force and mayhem so that it may serve as a spectacular device where overstuffed gore recedes into a sort of drone, mirroring and revisceralizing the banal regularity of bloodshed at the heart of the imperial project. The novel presents its nameless protagonist “the kid” without purpose or intent as, at 14, he runs away from his father and migrates westward. What follows is his mercenary experience in the American West, as he is swept up in the free-for-all brutality of the Glanton Gang following the MexicanAmerican War. Throughout the piece, McCarthy debunks the valorization of Manifest Destiny by casting the individual pursuit of such Providence as unruly, immature, unwieldy, underdeveloped, and unreliable—a characterization embodied in the kid. Unable to fully grasp all that lies before him, the kid is immediately made subject to an external logic of territory and war which has found in his unformed initiative the raw material of its function. Before he is conscripted by the Glanton outfit, the kid shelters for a night with a gentle hermit who teases out the presence of such a function, offering him a layman’s ontological critique that could be mistaken for a direct address by McCarthy: A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. (McCarthy 20) The experience of the land was as unforgiving in nineteenth-century Texas as it was in seventeenth-century New England, and the discomfiture of a human intellect simultaneously conscious of its limitations and prerogatives catalyzed a need to sort and control by any means necessary. While the systematicity of this logic produces a sustaining technology of domination that can, on its own, interdict the natural world and, as such, need not be tended, it must be fed. In the kid and in the killer he becomes, we witness the violent diet of the civilizing machine, born of the previously defined errand. It is this consumption or territorialization of both the landscape and body politic within Blood Meridian that we seek to foreground as a vehicle for the wider theoretical examination of the American exceptionalist ontology, an orientation that New Americanist critic William V. Spanos argues is metaphysical: “the perception of being—the always emergent ‘things-as-they-are’ (physis)—from after or above, as, in other words, a totalized structure” (8). McCarthy sounds out the violence necessitated by an epistemology preconditioned on this question of a sterile and separate legitimating authority; we find in his rendering of Judge Holden a particularly (but accordingly)

6  Ecologies of Exception monstrous exemplar of the desire to see, understand, mediate, and control the dynamics of being from a privileged position outside and beyond one’s immediate participation. McCarthy’s introduction of the judge is thick with disgust: Foremost among them, outsized and childlike with his naked face, rode the judge. His cheeks were ruddy and he was smiling and bowing to the ladies and doffing his filthy hat. The enormous dome of his head when he bared it was blinding white and perfectly circumscribed about so that it looked to have been painted. (79, emphasis added) What draws our attention to the judge is his unsightly and “blinding” whiteness, which serves to conceal his butchery, the severity of which parallels the visual extremity of his albinism. McCarthy symbolizes Holden’s charge as a frontier lawman and his tendency toward sweeping philosophical filibuster by making him the whitest2 while his portrayal as uncommonly stealthy (and perhaps deathless) verges on the demonic. But to return to the Western way of knowing, we emphasize here that the judge’s power lies in his obsessive desire to control, mediate, categorize, and oversee the entirety of nature. Throughout the novel, the judge stops to sketch and record unfamiliar species in his ledger. In the lengthy conversation below between Holden and one of his accomplices, Toadvine, the judge’s aim in documenting the wild is revealed to the reader: [the judge] pressed the leaves of trees and plants into his book and he stalked tiptoe the mountain butterflies with his shirt outheld in both hands, speaking to them in a low whisper, no curious study himself. Toadvine sat watching him as he made notations on the ledger, holding the book toward the fire for the light and he asked him what was his purpose in all this. (198) The judge replies: Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’s collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will be properly suzerain of the earth. What’s a suzerain?

Ecologies of Exception 7 A keeper. A keeper or overlord. Why not say keeper then? Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgements. Toadvine spat. The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said. The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate. I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds. The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos (198–99, emphasis added). The judge’s agenda is symptomatic3 of a Western, scientific imperial consciousness that seeks to subdue and yoke the entirety of nature for fear of the “devouring crumb.” The “autonomous” life of the land (ecos) assumes, in the Western appraisal, an antagonistic alterity in its chaotic resistance to the disciplining totality and disingenuous neutrality of the civilizing order (telos). As Hannah Arendt argues in The Life of the Mind, the Western imperial ethos cannot escape the form of its project, which, as symbolized in Judge Holden’s pressings, is fixative, superficial, and arbitrarily imagined. She writes: Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific. Moreover, the end is cognition or knowledge, which, having been obtained, clearly belongs to the world of appearances; once established as truth, it becomes part and parcel of the world. . . . The transformation of truth into mere verity results primarily from the fact that the scientist remains bound to the common sense by which we find our bearings in a world of appearances. (54) The Western architecture of scientific consciousness amounts, then, to a receptacle for the consignment and confinement of being into a category of study. It is a menagerie of meaning; it is Holden’s zoo. As Arendt insists, once

8  Ecologies of Exception a determination concerning an object of study is made, that decision comes to “belong to the world of appearances” and “once established as truth, it becomes part and parcel of the world.” Those who have the power to name and organize nature, therefore, have the power to determine its meaning as its place or being-in-the-world. Western science must speak the natural into a corralled state so as to disappear the unmediated ecos where such administration is impossible. For this, the imperial project is devoid of an inherent ecological principle per se. The land cannot be understood on its own terms and cannot be left to exist in its own right. Judge Holden, who embodies this system of regimentation in the extreme, promulgates a metaphysical consciousness that disavows the autonomous ecos in favor of anthropocentric “jurisprudence.” If “only nature can enslave man,” then the enmeshed inertia of the natural world may be viewed as a perilous recalcitrance that threatens to unwind the basic pretense of evaluated taxonomy within the hierarchy. As Jeffrey Myers argues in Converging Stories: Race, Ecology and Environmental Justice in American Literature, The formation of the Western, individual, subjective self in opposition to nature is a . . . fictional construction. The very existence of the Euroamerican subject depends on imagining not only the racial Other, but a priori on imagining the essential ‘otherness’ of the physical world—of the human body, the bodies of plants and animals, and the body of the earth itself. A recognition that such separation is an illusion—that the ‘self’ is ecologically interconnected with the ‘other’—threatens to erase individual identity as it is defined in European metaphysics, an identity ‘whose sole essence or nature consists in thinking’ . . . To maintain the illusion of separateness and superiority, the Euroamerican self must constantly display its mastery over the material world, denigrating beings, human and nonhuman, whose essential physical sameness to the animal body to which itself is bound threaten its erasure. (15) As Myers illustrates, the formation of Western identity is contingent on imagining not only the environment but the physics of human beings as an entirely separate and necessarily lower dimension relative to the construction of the mind and, therefore, the Cartesian self. Instead of accepting the self’s subject identity as “ecologically-interconnected,” the Western construction targets this understanding for erasure so that it may not contradict “the primacy of humanity over nature” (Myers 15). Herein lies the licensure of control over the natural. We return now to the seemingly stochastic violence that brands Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. We note that Myers’ characterization of the “Euroamerican self” as metaphysically repulsed by “the physical sameness” of its own “animal body” points to a paranoiac genesis for “the denigrating

Ecologies of Exception 9 [of] beings, human and nonhuman” so prevalent in McCarthy’s nineteenthcentury frontier (Myers 15). In the mirth of his butchery and the grandiosity of his self-belief, McCarthy uses Holden as a sort of psychological divining rod that might surface, denaturalize, and discredit the superstructure of his supposed authority; we are presented with the irony of the civilizing missionary reveling in a primitive milieu of bloodshed, fear, and misery even as he insists that “only nature can enslave man” (McCarthy 198). Thinking beyond the closing of the frontier and the realization of a continental and later global dominance, we argue that the Ahabian settlerhood of the Glanton Gang and its ilk produced a mapping of social, psychological, and political residue across and upon which later victors would hang their empire. The Punitive Landscape For William Spanos, the real construction of the modern West has become “far more invisible, that is, more subtle and insidious and difficult to resist” than, say, “the vulgar imperialism that characterized European conquest and exploitation of other worlds from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries” (32). In Literary Feminist Ecologies, we seek to uncover how and why the truth imperatives, or methodologies with which American imperial authority is reproduced, more often, over time and in the sense of what is made visible, enjoy consent than display coercive force. We argue that, as foreign wars tend to come home, so did the settled American frontier infused within its dormant battlefields an equally punitive yet submerged home front. This highly mediated landscape of white patriarchy found the stealth of its regulatory purchase along the original groove of its expansion, a sovereign and distortive superimposition of the errand over alterities represented by the land, by people of color and by women, via what Giorgio Agamben, in responding to Carl Schmitt, styles a state of exception in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Echoing Judge Holden’s invocation of the suzerain in Blood Meridian, Agamben suggests that “the paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact that the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order . . . the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law” (15). Agamben would resolve the apparently contradictory tension between Judge Holden’s lunatic violence and his philosophical preoccupation toward a kind of frozen organization as a unified process whereby the sovereign consumes until it has enveloped the entirety of its terrain; only then can its authority effectively preexist its environment and precede the contexts of the future. In that white patriarchal power is “only created through the suspension of the rule,” it is “not a fact” and must seek to naturalize itself over and through the fact of its human and nonhuman domain which we would term the total ecology of its exception (18). Agamben observes that “what is at issue in the sovereign exception is not so much the control or neutralization of an excess as the creation and definition

10  Ecologies of Exception of the very space in which the jurido-political order can have validity” (19). In this sense, the imperial hegemon’s metaphysical preoccupation with a totalizing after or above encounters its practical application in the production and design of the landscape itself or, more specifically, in the mapping of the land, the enclosing of individuals within a hierarchy and the glorification of human authority into the wilderness. As Agamben continues, “the ‘ordering of space’ . . . constitutive of the sovereign nomos is . . . not only a ‘taking of the land’—the determination of a juridical and a territorial ordering . . . but above all ‘a taking of the outside, an exception’” (19). This “ordering of space” would, in victory, transform the American continent into a regulated land mass acting upon the psychic horizon of possibility within imperial subjectivity which meant that those closest to the land (the subaltern) would share in the potential for its alterity. Such intimacy with the unmediated ecos (the state of abjection) could possibly precede and thereby interdict the established order. Power, so constructed, relies not merely on a preponderance of violence (a “taking of the land”) but a mythic origination (a “taking of the outside”) that, again, contains within the geographic imaginary of its leverage the potential for the natural “fact” of the ecos to intercede and topple the initiating artifice of hegemony. For this reason, we see women and people of color as natural allies of ecological alterity, or, put another way, to combine feminism and race with geography and nature lays bare the totalized disavowal of both human and non-human physis under the empire. Of course, the American continent has witnessed a gross and arguably unprecedented level of environmental destruction in concert with an equally awesome level of violence against people of color, women, Native Americans, and other minorities.4 We argue here that the demolitions of the natural world and the oppressions of patriarchy and racism derive from one monolith that has metaphysically fused the anthropocentric supremacies of economic growth, masculinity, and whiteness into an ordering whole.5 We seek to unpick the lock of this unity by examining key pieces of American and Caribbean literature by women writers of color. In Katherine McKittrick’s words, “geography’s discursive attachment to stasis and physicality, the idea that space ‘just is,’ and that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations, is terribly seductive: that which ‘just is’ not only anchors our selfhood and feet to the ground, it seemingly calibrates and normalizes where, and therefore who, we are” (xi). By destabilizing the stasis of space, place, land, gender, and racial identity in literature, we seek out how women writers reproduce, reveal, rebut, and resist the imperial geopolitik embedded in their assorted characterizations of the punitive American landscape. The emergence of geography as a pedagogical discipline speaks to a consolidation of America’s mythic relationship with the land. Per Martin Bruckner and Hsuan L. Hsu’s examination in American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production 1500–1900, an emphasis on geography within schools served not only to orient Americans spatially but also to

Ecologies of Exception 11 reinforce a fixed nature of space where the question becomes, predominantly, one of being inside or outside. As Bruckner and Hsu point out: During periods of increased political stress, such as the late colonial and early national decades or the antebellum and reconstruction eras, the discipline of geography enjoyed a more prestigious place in school curricula than history. As geography books and maps competed with history lessons, the grammar and language of geographic writing became fused to the fundamental pedagogies surrounding elementary language acquisition. Beginning in the 1820s geography became a popular entrance exam not only required of students making the transition into higher education but also as the institutional litmus test determining the prospective teacher’s moral code. In these examples, then, geography situates populations and texts socially and politically as well as spatially: geography books and maps of knowledge act not only as didactic tools for spatial orientation, but also as expressive signs marking economic status, good citizenship, moral compass, and, at times, the psychological unknown. (13) For Bruckner and Hsu to characterize geography as the abstracted litmus test of the victor harkens back to Jeffrey Myers’ othered physical space as well as Katherine McKittrick’s static container in that both constructs oblige a human agenda divorced from and preceding ecological grounding. Bringing in Giorgio Agamben and the governing exception, we see the social coding of a white patriarchal ethic upon what is perceived to be the neutral medium of the land as an act of enforcement unto itself, and as the virtualization of physical violence at the threshold between frontier expansion and the standing up of the imperial core. In ecologies of exception, those who find themselves placed outside the normative map are effective without a country; they are outside the taking of the outside. Given that subaltern peoples, therefore, are both solidaristic with the victimization of the landscape and victimized in turn by its instrumentalization, they exist at the point of a geopolitical inscription on the American continent. America’s Geosocial Production In the chapters ahead, we search through the narratives of women writers of color for how “literature and geography impinge upon one another in producing and unsettling ideologies of nationalism, liberalism, and democratic expansionism” (Bruckner and Hsu 17). In that America’s quest for disciplined homogeneity among its population and across its space necessarily produced a parallel population cast varyingly outside the desired schema, the works of women writers of color may be viewed as counter-narratives per se in tension with the privileged influence of white masculinism upon

12  Ecologies of Exception the national narrative or, as Stacy Alaimo writes of some North American women writers, they have “negotiated, contested, and transformed the discourses of nature that surround them” (1). More finely, these works threaten to define the inside against the outside, a denaturalizing inversion or “spell breaking” of the imperial production of knowledge where the outside is defined against the inside before, as Giorgio Agamben would have it, being obscured entirely. Agamben writes that it is, in fact, the conflation of the outside (nature) with the inside (culture), disappearing the former in favor of the latter, that reifies sovereignty “as an incorporation of the state of nature in society, or, if one prefers, as a state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law, and this very indistinction constitutes specifically sovereign violence. The state of nature is therefore not truly external to nomos but rather contains its virtuality” (Agamben 35). Voices from the outside threaten power, then, not only by virtue of whatever critical distance is afforded them as castaways but for their closeness to the provenance of geosocial production. Only if the lives and stories of women and people of color threaten demystification and not just passing exposure can we account for why the most oppressed under empire are nevertheless characterized by it as the most dangerous and why the geography of America functions foremost as a disciplining social sphere where space is ventriloquized by the regime toward normativity, enclosure, progress, precision, national allegiance, order, and discipline: the impostor “state of nature.” In addition to centering the function of geographical space as a regulator of the American empire, we observe that the requisite removal of living agency from the ecos feminized the natural world within the popular imaginary while masculinizing the standardization and exploitation of the land. Here we take up Anne McClintock’s position in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Imperial Conquest vis-a-vis the gendered metaphysics of conquest: All too often, Enlightenment metaphysics presented knowledge as a relation of power between two gendered spheres, articulated by a journey and a technology of conversion: the male penetration and exposure of a veiled, female interior; and the aggressive conversion of its ‘secrets’ into a visible, male science of the surface. . . . Knowledge of the unknown world was mapped as a metaphysics of gender violence—not as the expanded recognition of cultural difference—and was validated by the new Enlightenment logic of private property and possessive individualism. In these fantasies, the world is feminized and spatially spread for male exploration, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of massive imperial power. (23). McClintock offers a stark appraisal of the patriarchitecture undergirding American expansionism that focuses on the feminine virginity of the land

Ecologies of Exception 13 (ecos) as a call to masculine action (telos). Imperialist depredations against vulnerable populations and upon the land are thus afforded a legitimating and naturalizing tonality of creative destruction and become aligned with the reproductive errand of sex. Ecological feminist Vandana Shiva studies this phenomenon from the perspective of a postcolonial subject who has witnessed directly the damage wrought by Western idolatry of progress and the constant lunge for growth: The Age of the Enlightenment, and the theory of progress to which it gave rise, was centered on the sacredness of two categories: modern scientific knowledge and economic development. Somewhere along the way, the unbridled pursuit of progress, guided by science and development, began to destroy life without any assessment of how fast and how much of the diversity of life on this planet is disappearing. The act of living and of celebrating and conserving life in all its diversity— in people and in nature—seems to have been sacrificed to progress, and the sanctity of life been substituted by the sanctity of science and development. (xiv) In Shiva’s contemporary analysis, we see a geosocial genealogy of destruction elided by the character of disinterested, scientific discourse and excused by its economic value. In Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology, Michael A. Bryson argues that the public scientific initiative that accompanied the frontier era was very much grounded in materialist interest: In nineteenth-century America, science was not confined to the laboratory, bound up in a mythos of isolation and otherworldliness, inaccessible to the public mind. Rather, science quite often denoted ‘action’ in the rapidly expanding United States. The practice of natural history and, later on, narrower and more professionalized disciplines such as geology, cartography, and paleontology facilitated our engagement with the frontier, the wilderness space that has gripped the American imagination since the earliest times of European colonization. (3) Given the masculinist ethos constitutively nested inside America’s inaugural age of science, exploration, and expansion, we once again return to our intention; we will employ the narrative canon of women and the racialized other to confront imperial chauvinism in North America and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth through the end of the twentieth century. As a critical and corrective overlay, we revisit the historical and literary texts of seven writers: Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, and Linda Hogan. Prosecuting themes

14  Ecologies of Exception of yeoman ontology, social oppression, and environmental wreckage, we will attempt to forge a better forensics of empire across a study of the excepted, the excluded, and the eternal ecos. Literary Feminist Ecologies and the Chapters Ahead Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism: Errand into the Wilderness synthesizes ecofeminist theory, American studies, and postcolonial theory to interrogate what William Spanos, building upon Perry Miller, articulates as the “errand into the wilderness”—the Puritan ethic of industry, growth, and expansion at the heart of U.S. empire that moved westward under Manifest Destiny to colonize Native Americans, nonwhites, women, and the land. We look specifically to how the errand’s legacy materializes as a discrete literary trope, first in early (particularly slave) narratives and across contemporary literature in the Americas by women writers of color. We acknowledge that “the land . . . [is] crucial as [a] recuperative site of postcolonial historiography” (DeLoughrey and Handley 8). By joining texts across geographies and timescales, we build a theoretical approach for reading and understanding how women authors craft counter-narratives at the intersection of metaphorical and literal landscapes of colonization. In so doing, we may observe the experience of slavery (which acts as a theme unto itself) and the subjectivity of the Euroamerican expansionist as geoontological hauntings silently recorded upon bodies of color and feminized, colonized landscapes. As slave women and the untouched American landscape were necessary for keeping the institution of slavery generative so does transgenerational trauma induced by slavery serve to keep modern capitalism generative; they are an operative and literary piece. Yet early women writers cultivated forms of resistance through their relationships to that same untouched land, and their successors similarly confronted the geosocial regime of place that the land would become. The spatial domination of empire, even as it produces useful populations and landscapes, provokes a parallel population and remaining wilderness that together embody an active and inculpatory aggrievement. To sum up, we chart the exclusionary cartographies of the dominant ideology that may be traced about the racialized and gendered geo-ontologies of each novel analyzed here. To formulate ecologies of racism, we place the psycho-spatial cartography of racial exclusion against concomitant sites of environmental disruption and ruin to locate where and how they viscerally cohere for women of color (and their bodies) in various, seemingly disparate, narratives and novels. We ground our inquiry on the durability of the errand and how it is mapping of potentiality upon the land laid down an invisible code for wider racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and ecological violence. Further, each of the texts, and our chapters, search out underdeveloped framework areas of ecofeminism. While ecofeminism is concerned, chiefly, with the patriarchal subjugation of women and land, and the tributaries of

Ecologies of Exception 15 symbology/metaphor therein (e.g. feminization of the land in justification of conquest), we consider, with each primary text, how to extend or complicate this basis by bringing other theories to bear: postcolonialism, American Studies, etc. For example, in Chapter Two, we suggest that the narratives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson convey a range of attenuated agency that produces discrete relationships toward power; if not a challenge, we view our project certainly as a refinement of what is a sometimes problematic reliance on overt dichotomy within existing postcolonial thought. We follow up on this tack in Chapter Six on I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, where we explore how a motif of fluidity present in water elements and the sea signifies Tituba’s biracial birth and the potent hybridized identity she is able to construct in self-defense. Complications such as these, we believe, may serve to better collate understandings of power too often siloed within structural, ecofeminist, postcolonialist, and American Studies critiques. For our purposes, we will periodically refer to ‘literature of the Americas,’ a term that is inclusive of texts from both the United States and the Caribbean. We chose the texts analyzed in this study (including the slave narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs, and contemporary work by Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Native American writer Linda Hogan) for their diverse narrative aesthetics in response to the dominant “errand.”6 What happens, each text asks, when America’s exceptionalist beliefs and cultures encounter female bodies and the feminized landscape? While we draw different interpretations from each text, we note throughout how signifiers of patriarchal containment are inscribed in parallel onto bodies of color and the land. In all of the texts analyzed here, we make use of the physical as a medium for bringing out the spectral agenda of the American empire. In bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along the lines of hegemonic residue and reissue, we strategically juxtapose America’s earliest envisioned idylls and the subsequent outcome of such visions’ manifestation: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color and the environment. Instead of merely coupling bodies and landscape, the authors that comprise this study create their own solidarities in feats of political activism that work as what W.J.T. Mitchell has termed a “cultural practice.” For our own part, we have chosen these texts with an eye toward expanding the traditional paradigm of ecofeminism and bridging its theoretical axis into American Studies and postcolonial thought while also examining the black diaspora and Native American fiction. We intend to exhibit this greater latitude in ecofeminism through a careful genealogy of the novels ahead. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, for example, is set in 1941, amidst the reinvigorated nationalist sentiment of WWII, as whiteness seeks to colonize the black other anew and further elevate white beauty standards. Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory chronicles the sexual violence and shame of the American-supported “Papa Doc” Duvalier regime (as enforced by the Macoute, or paramilitary police) over the 1980s and early 1990s. We continually return

16  Ecologies of Exception to the hauntology of the American errand into the wilderness in a forensic search for the thread linking the piety of Samuel Danforth, who coined the term, with the perfidy of the present (if gasping) Pax Americana. Overall, the book’s organization tracks our central mode of inquiry, which seeks to uncover how, in the contemporary frame, a deeply anthropocentric desire to disavow the “living” essence of nature has led to a punitive landscape of geosocial reproduction in which a population of marginalized peoples, by dint of racial or sexual abjection, are unable to fit into America’s imperial schema. While this design favors thematic congruity over chronology, our structure roughly follows the trajectory of America’s snowballing hegemony over the last 200 years. Looking particularly at the representation of women, slaves, Native Americans, and the environment, we bring together a wide range of texts, from autobiographical slave narratives to representative pieces of fiction. It is against but nevertheless due entirely to these marginalized positions, we argue, that America has defined itself. If the silence that envelops this history has instilled in the American populace a latent anxiety that requires the cynical and cyclical deployment of democratic and exceptionalist mufflers, then recovering where such silence loses purchase on the haunted margins of subaltern experience should serve to denaturalize or “spell break” the metaphysical confusion of the civilizing errand. For this, the texts in question beg to be recuperated into a fuller understanding and, in the chapters that follow, we develop the argument we have initiated here through close readings of the same. Chapter Two, “Ecologies of Racism: A Genealogy of Black Feminisms in American Slavery,” initiates our analysis through several slave narratives by women. In Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action, Noel Sturgeon describes ecofeminism as “a movement that makes connections between environmentalisms and feminisms; more precisely, it articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race, and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment” (23). It is with this system of interrelation in mind that explore the writings of three women slaves: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet E. Wilson. We refer to these women throughout the chapter as African American Ecofeminists because they were variably able to identify and dissect the logic of America’s ecoexceptionalist empire through their respective experiences of the “peculiar institution” and particular cultivations of resistance through a relationship with the land. In so doing, they reveal the logic of domination that seeks to produce a simultaneously useful population and landscape. We also bring into conversation Katherine McKittrick’s geographic paradigm in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, where she examines the ways in which black women have ever had to negotiate “a geographic landscape that [was] upheld by a legacy of exploitation, exploration, and conquest” (xiv). Slavery, McKittrick argues, “incited meaningful geographic processes” that “not only visually and socially represented a particular kind

Ecologies of Exception 17 of gendered servitude” but also revealed the extent to which these processes were “embedded in the landscape” (xvii). The American empire, we contest, was predicated on the strategic development of these ecologies of racism. We unpack this cartography throughout the chapter and argue that it was those who suffered the most under such a regime—American women slaves—who were able to expose and “push up against [these] seemingly natural spaces and places of subjugation” in order to develop “alternative geographic formulations” (McKittrick xix). By crafting such alternative relationships with the land, Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs struggled for authentic ethics of inhabitancy. As we focus on the relationship between space, sexuality, gender, race, geography, ecology, and empire, we maintain that the convergence of these three remarkable women’s narratives reveals the emancipatory possibilities of an ecofeminist alliance against the misogynistic, racial, and ecological arrogances of the American civilizing mission. In beginning with the earliest slave narratives, however, scant the canon, we cite the potentiality formulated by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature: It would be wrong to overlook the importance of works and ideas which, while clearly affected by hegemonic limits and pressures, are at least in part significant breaks beyond them, which may again in part be neutralized, reduced, or incorporated, but which in their most active elements nevertheless come through as independent and original. (114) We build off of this foundational ecofeminism in the chapters that follow as we address contemporary authors and draw reinforcing conclusions about each’s use of connectivity between black female bodies and the landscape. Chapter three focuses on such politics of landscape as exemplified in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! By attending to the representation of the land, alongside the ways in which the characters interact with the environment and represent themselves from within their landscape, we can begin to perceive how empire mediates an enclosed socio-political landscape. As witness, proponent, and emblem of the New Woman ideal, Cather creates in O Pioneers! a valuable historical document in its closeness to her lived experience and, in her protagonist Alexandra Bergson, an independent character of startling newness in a country taken up with newness as definitional self-conceit. Yet in the headiness of this Progressive Era novel’s earnest consideration of the radical dimensions of freedom available for the first time to women like Cather, the author also provides for our project an opportunity to interrogate the absences that shape such triumphalism. In an echo of chapter six’s exploration of Hester Prynne as reimagined by Maryse Condé in I, Tituba, here, too, the wilderness comes to signify a haunting or an animating terror, that is evocative of Toni Morrison’s Africanist presence. Chapter Four, “Errand of American Expansionism: The Intersections of Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Natural Space in the Novels of Edwidge

18  Ecologies of Exception Danticat,” looks at two works, Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones, and tracks the author’s linkages between the pillaging of land and the sexual violence perpetrated against Haitian women in the building of the Western hemisphere’s twentieth century. Anne McClintock makes plain in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest that the “transmission of white, male power through the control of colonized women” (2–3) occurs at the heart of the imperial project. Both Danticat narratives carefully unfurl the brutality (and utility) of this patriarchal “errand” into the feminized subaltern space of the Caribbean; the incursive becomes connective where silenced histories of subjugation upon the female body and the land align as reproductive of a white, masculinist ethos and an interloping West. Further, the ecofeminist connective becomes agential where Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Farming of Bones give constituent force back to the colonized woman, rendering her in charge of her own historiography/ geography with an eye toward breaking deep patterns of silence and shame. Chapter Five takes up Toni Morrison’s first novel. “ ‘Pecola and the Unyielding Earth’: Exclusionary Cartographies, Transgenerational Trauma, and Racialized Dispossession in The Bluest Eye” observes an iterative of the modern errand Morrison’s centering of white beauty standards put upon an African American community in Ohio by the assimilative mainstream of post-war America. Before arriving at formulations of geosocial mapping and the metaphysics of exilic space, we point to Morrison’s use of natural metaphor and emphasize her conscious desire for a new “critical geography” as it manifests within the novel’s questions of social order, transgenerational trauma, and notions of inside/outside. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison speaks memorably of this intention: I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World— without the mandate for conquest. (3) Chapter Six, “ ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’: An Examination of Blackness, Witchcraft, and Feminist Alterity in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem,” analyzes the author’s rangy revision of the titular figure (whose historical record is limited to trial testimony). It is a feminist, postcolonial, and ecologically oriented satire that recuperates the traumatic history of non-white, non-Christian women through the radical agency Condé uses to restore Tituba’s narrative voice. The author proposes that “we [Caribbeans] can write history. It is not only the Europeans who can write. We can do it, too . . . the task of the writer is to forget this kind of superstructure which is imposed by us on education, tradition, and going to university. We have to listen to another voice. We can write just like the whites. But we have to use another method” (Lewis 549). By illuminating the means by which “fiction

Ecologies of Exception 19 and history are inherently interdependent” in the odyssey of Tituba’s Caribbean and Puritan experience, Condé produces a compelling counter-narrative that confronts and challenges the white imperialist fictions that have created the “witch” antagonist in the ruling imaginary. Moreover, she does so from a place of geographical leverage at the interstices of empire and through the insurgent power of the unmediated ecos on the margins of civilization. By actualizing Tituba’s magic (through her connectivity to herbs, plants, animals, curios, and ritual) and essentializing (even deifying) the fluidic vision of Tituba’s multiracial hybridity, I, Tituba honors and enlivens non-Western metaphysics. With great humor and mischief, Condé insists upon a full subjectivity for the abjected and indicts at least as much the stultifying and flattening status quo of the current moment as the madness of 1690s Salem. In choosing to title this chapter with the ambivalent hurricane imagery Condé ascribes to her protagonist, we see her conception of radical agency as conversant with the departures prescribed by R. Radhakrishnan in History, the Human, and the World Between: If ecopolitics and ecohistoricality are to be understood in humansocial but nonanthropocentric terms, what would such a platform look like? It is in fact a question about the human in a planetary context. If anthropocentrism cannot by definition be transcended, except in bad faith, then the next best option is a self-reflexive and deconstructive exercise of anthropocentrism in the name of the human, the nonhuman, and the transhuman. The human becomes the ethico-political hegemon since she or he has to speak for the worlding of the world from an ideological-human perspective with the critical awareness that human actualization of human blueprints are often in violation of planetary ontology and well-being. (235) Finally, Chapter Seven, “Mapping the Counter-Errand: Feminist Agential Ecologies in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” considers the impact of the errand upon indigenous women and their native lands through a close reading of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. The history of white colonization, its impact on indigenous Cree women, and the accompanying ecological destruction are charted across a pageant of imperial violence. Again, we confront the theme of transgenerational trauma inaugurated by Euroamerican colonizers as it manifests throughout the novel, and we pay special attention to the matriarchal Crees as they seek to heal and protect their physic and physical landscape. Notes 1 We deliberately open with a novel by a white male author before moving into nineteenth-century slave narratives in the following chapter. With this choice, we wish to more fully resolve the field of inquiry that surrounds notions of power, race, and gender in the context of American empire. By shifting from McCarthy’s

20  Ecologies of Exception Blood Meridian to the contemporaneously set writings of three enslaved women, we stress the connectivity between America’s earliest self-ideation (of settlerhood) and the actual outcome of this vision: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color as well as the environment. 2 We explore the color aesthetic of race and empire in Chapter Four. 3 We have in mind here Louis Althusser’s definition of the term “symptomatic,” which is derivative of his theorization of “the problematic.” Spanos best describes Althusser’s discussion of the “problematic” when he remarks in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam that “the individual, without knowing it, is spoken for, is ventriloquized, by the discourse of the dominant culture: his or her vision and its truth are determined by the problematic. . . . What counts as the truth are those objects and problems (or questions) that the problematic appropriates, incorporates, or accommodates, makes its own” (63). The “symptomatic” reading reveals the discourse of which that individual is a part—it reveals their construction within a delimited plane of existence and the degree to which that existence, that problematic, speaks through the subject. 4 For a more comprehensive, detailed analysis of the relationship between environmental destruction and racism throughout the course of nineteenth-century America, see Jeffrey Myers, Converging Stories; Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature. 5 We deploy the term “anthropocentrism” how it has been defined by ecological feminists. The term, according to a good deal of contemporary ecofeminist scholarship, is derivative of a “man-centered” ontology that sees land through a developmental lens and perceives nature as innately predisposed for capitalist production—what Ariel Salleh defines in Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology as “humanity versus nature” (23). 6 In conceiving of how best to unite the texts analyzed here, we thought first about the mythic traditions from past and present that naturalize American dominion over female bodies and (feminized) land, and how they are invoked by the authors’ critique of American imperial violence over centuries. In the background of each text is the silent engine of capitalism; in the forefront of each text are the various specters of the errand into the wilderness, haunting female bodies and various metaphorical and literal uses of space and place.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen). Stanford University Press, 1998. Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Cornell University Press, 2000. Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Bruckner, Martin and Hsuan L. Hsu. American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production 1500–1900. University of Delaware Press, 2007. Bryson, Michael A. Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology. University Press of Virginia, 2002. Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer. Dolphin Books, 1782. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of Environment. Oxford University Press, 2011. Lewis, Barbara and Maryse Condé. “No Silence: An Interview with Maryse Condé.” Callaloo, vol. 18, no. 3, 1995, pp. 543–550.

Ecologies of Exception 21 McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West. Vintage, 1985. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Imperial Conquest. Routledge, 1995. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Harvard University Press, 1956. ———. “Errand into the Wilderness.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1, 1953, pp. 3–32. Mitchell, W.J.T. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago, 1994. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage 1993. Myers, Jeffery. Converging Stories: Race, Ecology and Environmental Justice in American Literature. University of Georgia Press, 2005. Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan. Human, History and the World Between. Duke University Press, 2008. Salleh, Ariel. Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology. Pluto Press, 2009. Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. Zed Books, 1989. Spanos, William. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam. State University of New York Press, 2008. Sturgeon, Noel. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action. Routledge, 1997. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford, 1978.

2 Ecologies of Racism A Genealogy of Black Feminisms in American Slavery

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Geographic domination, then, is conceptually and materially bound up with racial-sexual displacement and the knowledge power of a unitary vantage point. It is not a finished or immovable act, but it does signal unjust spatial practices; it is not a natural system, but rather a working system that manages the social world. It is meant to recognize the hierarchies of human and inhuman persons and reveal how this social categorization is also a contested geographic project. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

The Gendering of Geography in the New World The developmental history of the American empire—its first errand, into a “domestic” wilderness—is motored by an eco-misogynistic ethos that conflates the denudation of African women slaves with the instrumentalization of ecological space. Stripped of any claim to selfhood, women slaves were discursively represented in the American imagination as sexless, indistinguishable, instrumentalized bodies1 of a piece with the inert and totalized body of the land. Taken together, Jacobs’s description of slavery and McKittrick’s definition of geographic domination above describe the project of American slavery as it punished and commodified both black bodies and land in the name of expansionism. In her groundbreaking article on the reproduction of gender under slavery, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers emphasizes how the rupture of the slave trade produced an ongoing political cataclysm that subsumed the specificities of African identity into a homogenous population of “captive bodies”: That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-2

Ecologies of Racism 23 dismemberment, and exile. First, their New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific. (67) Absent gender difference, slave men and women become standardized, and thus more readily manipulable, and interchangeable, tools of the American empire. Slave women, so degendered, were, for example, thereby exempted from the “benevolent” aspect of misogynist paternalism in that they, too, were forced into brutal physical labor. Moreover, because slave women were primarily perceived as slaves, their womanhood was re-confined as a reproductive utility, rather than a gendered essence, within the larger institutional apparatus. A black woman’s body was no longer her own and her kinship rights were completely discarded; slave children were, then, fundamentally susceptible to property relations and commodity exchange. Having suffered immeasurably under this discursive abomination, slave women may be placed at the nexus of colonialism’s brutal communion with patriarchy. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer Morgan asserts that “the meanings attached to the female African body were inscribed well before the establishment of England’s colonial American plantations, and the intellectual work necessary to naturalize African enslavement—that is, the development of racialist discourse—was deeply implicated by gendered notions of differences and human hierarchy” (16). With significant irony, the psychic precedent of gender hierarchy within patriarchy could be repurposed and flattened into a racialism that excepts and supersedes gender. Morgan draws back to the white gaze of the early seventeenth century to illustrate that “women’s savagery does not stand apart. Rather, it indicts the whole: all Africans were savage” (Morgan 30). While, in this way, African women were categorically subsumed by racialized slavery, they were nevertheless particular for their generative value: “as they surveyed their property and imagined their deaths, slaveowners supplemented the present value of enslaved persons with the speculative value of a woman’s reproductive potential” (91). Beyond biological practicality, slave women maintained the viability of their bondage by dint of their agricultural labor and expertise; they were vital in propping up the earliest version of land development in colonial America and germinated a brand new ecoimperialist rice culture on American soil that meant hours of both arduous and skilled work—specifically for African women. Simply, “the information necessary to cultivate and harvest rice drew heavily on female West African expertise” and so the implementation of America’s earliest farm staple aptly evokes the extent to which African women were thoroughly exploited by, for, and through America’s eco-imperialism (163).

24  Ecologies of Racism It is the complex interplay among the hegemon, subjugated female populations, and the land that we more fully explore within this chapter by considering the writings of three African American women slaves—Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet E. Wilson—who were able to uncover and deconstruct the logic of American dominion through their respective experiences under slavery. We refer to these women throughout the chapter as African American Ecofeminists because each woman’s ability to cultivate resistance was found in conversation with the land; they reveal that at the heart of American hegemony lies the dual preoccupation of securing the population and the landscape. In this way, these slave narratives lay the groundwork for the ways in which contemporary authors in the following chapters create anticolonial and anti-imperialist narratives. It is important to note here, too, that thus far, ecofeminism has been omitted from critical analyses of slave narratives and as such, this chapter aspires to be a framework for further exploration of the use of and relationship to the land in this genre. In the pursuit of this lensing, we take up Katherine McKittrick’s schema for connecting black women and geography in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, in which she examines how black women have always had to negotiate “a geographic landscape that is upheld by a legacy of exploitation, exploration, and conquest” (xiv). Slavery, McKittrick argues, “incited meaningful geographic processes” that “not only visually and socially represented a particular kind of gendered servitude” but also reveals the extent to which these processes were “embedded in the landscape” (xvii). The American empire, we contest, is sustained on such ecologies of racism: dimensions of a gendered, territorialized geo-ontology that places people of color alongside ecological space, citing both as dangerous, errant, threatening, and unruly. We seek to expose this tether in the chapter ahead and we argue that it was those who suffered the most under the early American empire—women slaves—who found great use in the proximate vantage of their vulnerability and were best suited to “push up against [these] seemingly natural spaces and places of subjugation” in order to develop “alternative geographic formulations” (McKittrick xix). It is this unique historical position that initiates our ecofeminist line of inquiry as it relates to the indissoluble trinity of slavery, empire, and the American landscape. As we demonstrate in later chapters, the transgenerational traumas articulated by contemporary women authors—with their roots in the chattel system—have served to project these tensions of race, gender, and space forward into modern capitalism. The Degradation of Slave Women and the American Environment The nineteenth century witnessed a tremendous shift in American land development away from decentralized agrarianism wherein the nation was to become an interregional economy, organizing its land for an industrialized and aggregated project of commodity capital and exchange. As Alan

Ecologies of Racism 25 Trachtenberg writes in The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, the American empire was preoccupied with the methodical overlay of productive value upon expansion: Mapmaking preceded settlement and had perhaps an even greater effect on conceptualization of the land than landscape paintings. About 1845, the government outfitted army explorations to find suitable routes for railroad lines to the Pacific. The overt aim of these early probings was to chart the way to an agricultural empire—a new ‘garden of the world.’ (19) America had learned to achieve the level of economic efficiency necessary for such consolidation through a biopolitical array of discrete environments. As Carolyn Merchant argues, America’s nascent economic order succeeded by “turning natural resources into commodities to be traded on the market” and such “commodification of nature” came to take on the form of a protoglobalist “triangular trade” that necessarily included labor, with “Europe as a source of manufacturing and management, Africa as a source of slaves, and the New World as a source of natural resources” (31). A racialized “dichotomy” would soon emerge, Merchant contends, in which, for the nature of their utility within this interdependent exploitation, “the white civilization of England represented the highest level of intellect and purity, while the African slave stood for the unruliness of nature and the body” (45). At the American nexus of the two, these “cultural constructions” lay at “the root of the plantation system that exploited both slave and soil” (45). As Deborah Gray White writes in Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, the “slave woman’s body . . . commanded no respect” from the Southern white patriarchy; in its chattel state, “that which was private and personal became public and familiar” (32). White relates, to this point, that “very often on the auction block women’s bodies were exposed and handled to determine their capacity for childbearing. Slave buyers sometimes kneaded women’s stomachs in an attempt to determine how many children a woman would have” and these “examinations” approached “a level of indecency” in which slave women were prodded and exposed in front of entire crowds of eager white Southerners (32). The physicality of the woman slave became a surveyed terrain upon which white men (and women) could territorialize and lay claim. Because slave women were “captive bodies,” and were thus abjected as a class, they occupied, in Hortense Spillers’ words, “a category of otherness,” in which “the captive body” was translated into a “potential[ity] for pornotroping”2 and, consequently, represented “sheer physical powerlessness” (67). They were rendered, then, as a kind of parallel American wilderness of willing void. We posit that perhaps most directly, many slave women managed to undermine this degraded subjectivity through sexual reclamation even as their efforts were countervailed by sexual violence (a difficult dialectic that would be handed down to their progeny and that

26  Ecologies of Racism we explore in later chapters) and yet it is arguably as compelling to identify the solidarity of the slave woman with her instrumentalized environment as a powerful avenue for unearthing and subverting the logics of hegemonic abstraction. As Jeffrey Myers neatly states, “the ethnocentric outlook that constructed ‘whiteness’ over and against the alterity of other racial categories is the same perspective that constructed the anthropocentric paradigm at the root of environmental destruction” (5). For us, each of the women upon whose stories we rely, in the tenor of their treatment and in the revelations of their resistance, offer precious keyholes, racial and also ecofeminist, through which we might understand large, and largely invisible, paradigms of power and ruination in the American experience and the Western tradition at its center. African American Ecofeminists and the Formation of Resistances I: Sojourner Truth Catalyzed by a deep religious fascination that would become devotion, Isabella Baumfree—known to history as Sojourner Truth—sought out, from childhood, communality with both abject peoples and the land as sources of succor and bases of resistance against the American consensus that had so foreclosed her early life. In a nineteenth-century world in which capitalist mechanization found new purchase across a closing American wilderness and in the social order that expanded with its grasp, Truth’s rooting of her dissent in the preeminence of the biosphere was remarkable. In this sense, Truth wasn’t necessarily an ecologist or, by any regular means, an advocate for environmental emancipation; her environmental sensibility was drawn from a personal relationship with the land itself. Thus, in this section, we deploy the use of ecology with the study of oikos, or habitat, in mind. This will require us not only to look to ecology for the traditional study of sustainability between the human and non-human world but also to place human interaction with the larger geopolitical habitat inside the ecological frame. Habitat, in our thinking, is always already mired within a complex socio-political network of power relations across space that muddle divisions among natural, social, and cultural inquiry. African American slaves began with the land in their push for emancipatory alterity against, alongside, and within the hegemony of their bondage. Attendingly, we take up this focus to ground our work. In The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Truth metaphorizes the wilderness as a sort of antenna for her religiosity, a natural cathedral actualized by its removal from the confined social geography of her subjectivity: The place [Truth] selected, in which to offer up her daily orisons, was a small island in a small stream, covered with large willow shrubbery, beneath which the sheep had made their pleasant winding paths; and sheltering themselves from the scorching rays of a noon-tide sun, luxuriated

Ecologies of Racism 27 in the cool shadows of the graceful willows, as they listened to the tiny falls of the silver waters. It was a lonely spot, and chosen by her for its beauty, its retirement, and because she thought that there, in the noise of those waters, she could speak louder to God, without being overheard by any who might pass that way. When she had made her choice of her sanctum, at a point of the island where the stream met, after having been separated, she improved it pulling away the branches of the shrubs from the centre, and weaving them together for a wall on the outside, forming a circular arched alcove, made entirely of the graceful willow. To this place she resorted daily, and in pressing times much more frequently. (32) It is from the heart of this wilderness that Truth develops her unique relationship with the land and cleaves herself off from the predominant geopolitical imperatives of the American cultural terrain. Here Truth felt safe from her master’s gaze, undermining the expectation to be “seen” and, potentially, the entire disciplinary apparatus. The secret establishment of this critical distance could not, however, resolve the realities of her captive body. Referring to her slave owner Mr. Nealy, Truth describes a common scene: One Sunday morning, in particular, [Isabella] was told to go to the barn; on going there, she found her master with a bundle of rods, prepared in the embers, and bound together with cords. When he had tied her hands together before her, he gave her the most cruel whipping she was ever tortured with. He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed from her wounds—and the scars remain to the present day, to testify to the fact. ‘And now,’ she says, ‘when I hear em tell of whipping women on the bare flesh, it makes my flesh crawl, and my very hair rise on my head! Oh! My God!’ she continues, ‘what a way is this of treating human beings?’ (10) Here, Truth’s womanhood, or rather the absence of its consideration in “specifically externalized acts of torture and prostration that we imagine as the peculiar form of male brutality and torture inflicted by other males” illuminates the fraught ideology of such violence (Spillers 68). Female slave bodies were abused and brutalized in much the same way as those of males because, like the land, they were cleared (of gendered agency) and held as inert material or “flesh,” in the Spillers construction: “that zero degree of social conceptualization” (61). The natural world, for Truth, offered, then, a return to her body and an internal refuge she would formalize into an abiding religiosity. She describes her time at Mr. Nealy’s as “a wild, out-of-door kind of life” in which she was expected to “carry fish, to hoe corn, to bring roots and herbs from the wood for beers” among other labor-intensive tasks (11). The energy and industry of this labor tended to supplant instances of physical

28  Ecologies of Racism degradation and so, in the cramped possibilities of resistance under the chattel regime, her utilization of her body outdoors worked toward its reconstitution. Undeniably, this was an attenuated freedom; Truth’s arranged marriage to Thomas, an older fellow slave likely married several times beforehand, and the five children she birthed thereafter (at least one the result of a rape at the hands of her owner at the time, John Dumont) prompted her to lambast the “peculiar institution” as “a soul-killing system” that perceived her, her marriage, and her children as limited to the realm of “things, chattels, property” (17). Yet, oppressed by a state of reduction in which her children were effectively objects, Truth cultivated agency through motherhood. The following scene, recounted by the amanuensis, Olive Gilbert, demonstrates her early feminism in this regard: When Isabella went to the field to work, she used to put her infant in a basket, tying a rope to each handle, and suspending the basket to a branch of a tree, set another small child to swing it. It was thus secure from reptiles, and was easily administered to, and even lulled to sleep, by a child too young for labors. I was quite struck with the ingenuity of such a baby-tender, as I have sometimes been with the swinging hammock the native mother prepares for her sick infant—apparently so much easier than aught we have in our more civilized homes; easier for the child, because it gets the motion without the least jar; and easier for the nurse, because the hammock is strung so high as to supersede the necessity of stooping. (18) It was through the expanded subjectivity of parenthood that Truth fostered a feminist agency that could reinstate her gender identity and restore the inviolability of her body, much as the sanctum of the wilderness, to an extent, had done. Truth’s bond with her children opened up avenues for feminist solidarity that led her to eventually make a living challenging the hegemony that perpetuated her dehumanization. There were, in short, potentialities for justice wherever America’s civilizing momentum sought to violently inscribe itself. Ecocritic and American literary scholar David Mazel argues for this insurgent tendency in American Literary Environmentalism: [T]he very idea of environment . . . depends upon an exclusion that separates the environment from the speaker who is environed. The American environment, in particular, at the beginning of its history, is constituted through the abjection of specific classes of human beings and through the violence of concomitant foreclosures. . . . Environmentalism has typically erased such abjection from its own history, but . . . the voices thereby silenced have a habit of returning to disrupt the naturalized, apparently stable boundaries of the environment. (xvi–xvii)

Ecologies of Racism 29 The prosecution of the American empire prerequired that the living agency of the land is disavowed; moreover, and to Mazel’s point, African slaves were subsumed into this predicate structure, resulting in an abiding white cultural hegemony but, in turn, also a capacity for a different sociospatial unity wherein the objectification of the land and the dehumanization of its people might be registered as an unmasked singularity of power and, most urgently, a pressure point of leverage and challenge. Sojourner Truth’s narrative helps us to imagine such a vulnerability—that in grand colonial narratives like America’s, there is always the risk that the silenced will return—and it is this possibility that Truth seizes, later, in the Northampton Association. The radicalization of Sojourner Truth, newly freed, begins in her move to New York City and in the reality that at that time the wages of females were at a small advance from nothing; and she doubtless had to learn the first elements of the economy—for what slaves, that were never allowed to make any stipulations or calculations for themselves, ever possessed an adequate idea of the true value of time, or, in fact, of any material thing in the universe? (39) The sheerness of the difficulty in establishing for herself and her children a sustainable path to happiness and security in the city had a cleaving effect that left Truth with a new sense of geography capable of resolving the promise of legal emancipation against ecologies of racism that belie such a simplistic notion. It could no longer be denied that the essential structures of what she faced in the rural America of her youth lay at the heart of American cities as well. Her amanuensis captures this instantiation of ontological distress, inquiry, and transformation: When this had been the state of her affairs some time, she suddenly paused, and taking a retrospective view of what had passed, inquired within herself, why it was that, for all her unwearied labors, she had nothing to show; why it was that others, with much less care and labor, could hoard up treasures for themselves and children? She became more and more convinced, as she reasoned, that every thing she had undertaken in the city of New York had finally proved a failure; and where her hopes had been raised the highest, there she felt the failure had been the greatest, and the disappointment most severe. (57) Truth, quoted directly, is more succinct: “the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another” (57). It is at this point that Isabella Baumfree converts to Methodism and famously renames herself in an evangelist commitment to live out the rest of her life as a nomadic anti-capitalist/abolitionist. She “began to look upon money and property with great indifference, if not contempt” and

30  Ecologies of Racism decided that “she must leave the city” and “travel east and lecture” (58). This conscious self-styling, we may understand, acknowledges a subtler rendering of the geography around her: one could not physically escape the coded landscape of the capitalist project. Emancipation, in this sense, would require a recording of one’s relationship to the land itself, primarily initialized by an itinerancy anathematic to the prerogatives of power. In the terms of Edward Said, Truth was the critical position of the “migrant intellectual.” In Culture and Imperialism, Said writes that “as the struggle for independence produced new states and new boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, and vagrants” who were: rejected by the established order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness. And insofar as these people exist between the old and the new, between the old empire and the new state, their condition articulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism. (332) The fraught politics of nineteenth-century America present as a “struggle for independence” from the slave system and produced the kind of liminal morass Said describes. Truth’s placelessness attests to this spatial dynamic, as she spent the early days of her migration “surrounded by an assemblage of people, collected from the very dregs of society, too ignorant and degraded to understand, much less entertain, a high or bright idea,--in a dirty hovel, destitute of every comfort” (61). Yet, while her difficulties continued unabated, for a time, in the interstitial zone of “the cultural map of imperialism,” she now stood in counterpoint to the “tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions” upon which she had previously been made subject. Said further contends: . . . it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered and exilic energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and the artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. (332) Here he is attempting to theoretically link the migrant intellectual with the refugee. In the case of Sojourner Truth, no exertions to this end are necessary: she is the refugee intellectual who teaches us that “every pedestrian in the world is not a vagabond” (62). It is in the remarkable synthesis of her brutal connection to and sublime grasp of the geography of alterity that we locate a

Ecologies of Racism 31 radical and profound ecofeminism that would, finally, secure for Truth a rich livelihood of anti-capitalist and anti-individualistic resistance at the Northampton Association, an abolitionist community whose ideals were geared towards “imagining a new society that could avoid some of the evils that the commercial, industrial, competitive culture were introducing” (Clark 84). Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the 1830s, the complications of abolitionism within the economic infrastructure of the North yielded a precarious state of “rapid economic change” that “placed considerable strain on the common patterns of economic life” in areas that were based on “small-scale production and informal, faceto-face negotiation for work, food, and other goods” (84–85). In pulling focus toward centralized commercial development, these shifts caused a significant threat to America’s natural environment: The market revolution threatened the American environment more than any other development in modern history. It threw open land, water, air, and all the life they contained to unrestrained development in the pursuit of wealth and status. It made profit-and-loss the sole criterion for dealing with nature, conceived as inert matter. A mechanistic worldview based on the quantification of matter and energy, interchangeable parts, mathematical prediction, and the control of nature replaced the animate cosmos of the colonial farmer. In its wake lay cut-over forests, smoky air, polluted streams and endangered wildlife. (Merchant 68) In their increasing alienation from the land, Americans learned to reconceive nature as a mute mechanism for the further and constant refinement of capitalist expeditions. A historical episode of massive change such as this illuminates the utility of the geosocial frame: under threat along with the natural realm were those, like Sojourner Truth, unable (or unwilling) to profit from its exploitation. There was, therefore, an attendant boom in alternative communities at the time. Christopher Clark lays out this dissenting developmental history in The Communitarian Movement: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association: It is not surprising that in these circumstances, some men and women should have contemplated the advantages of a system in which cooperation would replace competition and the social obligations of kinship and neighborhood could be protected from the peremptory demands of economic need. Along with its abolitionist and nonsectarian principles, and entirely congruent with its commitment to nonresistance, the [Northampton Association] held up a vision of an economy based on moral principles that owed much of its roots in small-farm, small-shop regions. (85)

32  Ecologies of Racism These communities were predicated on a form of open land inhabitancy and cooperative worker ownership that, for a brief period, provided a legitimate alternative to, or, minimally, a legitimized rebuke of the dominant American trajectory whereby “society was wrenched in new directions to reshape people for careers of calculation and competitive striving” (Merchant 68). In a dialectical sense, it was the capitalist consolidation, in its destructive urgency, that augured the greater purchase of its dissenters. Having met with the corruptions of “competitive striving” while living in New York City, Sojourner Truth was resolved to recast her subjectivity; her pursuit was heightened, and haunted, by the continued brutalization of slave women which resurfaced, in Truth’s moral accounting, the threat elided by “careers of calculation.” In the recounting of a slave woman, Tabby, viciously murdered by her white mistress (who was glancingly punished at best), Truth offers her own calculus: But to see the life of one woman, and she a murderess, put in the balance against the lives of three millions of innocent slaves, and to contrast her punishment with what I felt would be the punishment of one who was merely suspected of being an equal friend of all mankind, regardless of color or condition, caused my blood to stir within me, and my heart to sicken at the thought. (48) Her outrage searches for structure in the spectacular instance of cruelty to which Tabby succumbs and finds in the “three million” strong constituency of suffering an imperative to disengage entirely from the organized menace of such breadth. Spillers evokes the encroaching peril of Tabby’s bound and mutilated flesh in her reaction to a contemporaneous listing of slave persons used in medical research: This profitable ‘atomizing’ of the captive body provides another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory. (68) To return to the level of the liberated “body,” in Spillers’s construction, Sojourner Truth needed to eschew the “laboratory” in its entirety and return to a personal relationship with her environment. Indeed, her nomadic commitment may be seen as a restoration of the body as a unit of motile subjectivity, a freedom contrasted with the “zero degree state” in which Tabby’s body and being are deconstituted into static flesh. For this reason, we arrive again at

Ecologies of Racism 33 the notion of oikos and the positionality of Truth as an ecofeminist: if, in her maximum vulnerability, itinerant monasticism expresses the body’s free will and antagonizes the orderly deployment of disenfranchised flesh within not just chattel slavery but the capitalist project at large, then, running alongside, the constraints of geography upon the flesh of the land are confronted by the promise of empowered alterity in the body of the wilderness. For us, these are subject/object coordinate pairs of the abject experience that insist upon an ecological framing of race whereby the hegemon’s gaze does not vary as it scans over the land and its people but rather considers the communion of the aberrative hazard-looking back. African American Ecofeminists and the Formation of Resistances II: Harriet Jacobs If Sojourner Truth’s revelatory growth was incubated, expanded, and supported by a roving physical connection to the land, specifically by early moments of emancipatory experience outdoors (however attenuated) giving way to a conscious rejection of traditional geo-ontology, Harriet Jacobs came to similar answers in more confined quarters, both literally and in the sociospatial sense. While the map of their respective travels could be roughly overlaid (from the dangerous crosscurrents of New York City to the relative safety of abolitionist Massachusetts), where Truth found escalating agency, Jacobs encountered enduring foreclosure and compromise. Born into slavery and having borne children into the same (like Truth), Jacobs begins in the confusions and contradictions of her subjectivity: When my baby was about to be christened, the former mistress of my father stepped up to me, and proposed to give it her Christian name. To this I added the surname of my father, who had himself no legal right to it; for my grandfather on the paternal side was a white gentleman. What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery! I loved my father; but it mortified me to be obliged to bestow his name on my children. (104) The perverting factor, Jacobs knew, was the “thingness” of her instrumentalized flesh counterposed against the liberated subject bodies present in her mixed heritage. She finds this denuded ontology codified in the law; her father had no right to his white father’s surname for the same reason that “a slave, being property, can hold no property” (9). Jacobs clearly links her dehumanization with the agricultural project which it served when she observes of slaves that “these God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend” (11). Here, plainly, is the oblivion of property status, for both human beings and their natural environment. Here they are productive elements without recourse, “machines” of a capitalist project bent on simple extraction.

34  Ecologies of Racism Harriet Jacobs offers these insights in her pseudonymous novel-cumautobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and it is perhaps obligatory to note here that her authorship was not academically imagined, nor, after initial popularity at the time of its publication, was the book widely read, until as recently as the 1980s amid a renewed scholarship by Jean Fagan Yellin of relevant primary source papers. Writing as Linda Brent, Jacobs subtly explores the troubled prospect of sexual liberation when Brent, having been sexually abused by the married Dr. Flint, her master, chooses to take up with Mr. Sands who “was a man of more generosity and feeling than Dr. Flint” (49). She explains: It seems less degrading to give one’s self than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment. A master may treat you as rudely as he pleases, and you dare not speak; moreover, the wrong does not seem so great with an unmarried man, as with one who has a wife to be made unhappy. There may be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible. (51) Samuel Sawyer, a white lawyer, future Congressman, and the historical analog to Mr. Sands, became the father of Harriet Jacobs’ only children, a son, and a daughter. In motherhood, too, principles of morality, insofar as they presuppose agency, proved largely impossible. Jacobs’s pregnancy enraged her lascivious master, Dr. James Norcom (fictionalized as Flint), who, in response, sent her to work on his son’s plantation and regularly threatened to sell her children. As Linda, she starkly retells the unthinkable scene of slave mothers there bearing mute witness to the savaging of their children: When I lay down beside my child, I felt how much easier it would be to see her die than to see her master beat her about, as I daily saw him beat other little ones. The spirit of the mothers was so crushed by the lash, that they stood by, without courage to remonstrate. (73) Taken with the preceding moment of her daughter’s birth/naming and, before that, the negotiation of a problematized sexual politics where a sort of halfvoluntarism, in choosing Mr. Sands, pragmatically approximates agency, this fatalist accommodation of the severe stresses of motherhood under slavery completes a telling triptych of mediated disaster for Brent/Jacobs. In each case, we are faced with incongruities of abjection that create claustrophobia of, to use Jacobs’s term, impossibilities where sexuality and motherhood are warped by unnatural and external management. Hortense Spillers acutely

Ecologies of Racism 35 diagnoses the spiraling incoherence of, to return to Mazel’s term, such environmental foreclosures: When we speak of the enslaved person, we perceive that the dominant culture, in a fatal misunderstanding, assigns a matriarchist value where it doesn’t belong: actually misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false again, because ‘motherhood’ is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance . . . motherhood as female blood-rite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment. (80) Spillers evokes the horrid irony of partus sequitur ventrem, the legal consecration of slave status passing from mother to child in a feat of craven imagination where mere material possesses legal autonomy only long enough to pass its curse of thingness onto what is an unlikely issue for inert matter: its newborn children. This is the shabby, hypocritical core of the outrage and the denial Spillers decries. Jacobs via Brent concurs that slavery was, for women, a unique abomination: When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is a terrible burden for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own. (66) While both Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth were indelibly altered by the experience of slavery, it could be said that a stubbornly limited subjectivity persisted to inform the geosocial orientation of Jacobs later in her life and deeper into the crisis of the nineteenth century, differentiating her from Truth. Truth was freed by New York abolition law in the 1820s. Jacobs’ freedom was purchased in the 1850s after many years spent under the specter of fugitive status. By 1835, Truth was already captivating audiences and bringing suit, successfully, against white opponents who had slandered her participation in experimental communities while Jacobs, newly escaped from the plantation in North Carolina, was forced to hide in her grandmother’s nearby garret (attic) for the next seven years before ultimately fleeing to the North, around the same time Truth would join the Northampton Association. Ultimately, both women were able to secure for themselves and their children an extraordinary measure of security and comfort relative to the horror of their circumstances at birth, and, of course, both gifted to the world invaluable social service and literary output. Yet it is in the manner by

36  Ecologies of Racism which their geo-ontologies differ that we might develop a better taxonomy of the ecologies of racism. Sojourner Truth tended to find early refuge, whether in a natural, religious, or political modality, and it was in such freedom and self-actualization that the engine of her social awareness exploded outward. By contrast, Harriet Jacobs remained penned in by a crush of setbacks and anxieties which included the slavecatcher’s pursuit, her children’s changing fortunes, and, later, a raft of publishing failures. Where Truth flowered in dissent as an evangelist, Jacobs lingered in a more liminal zone for much of her life where the antagonisms of the hegemonic structure largely held. We may observe this divergence of experience within their respective faith journeys as well; Jacobs was equally devout yet where Truth found community in an array of religious organizations, from Methodism to the shifting camps of Adventists, Jacobs’ Christianity stood, arguably, as a spiritual interiority beset by the hypocrisies of the established churches of the South. Jacobs upbraids the complicity of the Southern clergy with a force and clarity that comes to devastating fruition in her closing line on the matter: “No wonder the slaves sing, ‘Ole Satan’s church is here below; Up to God’s free church I hope to go’ ” (68). For our purposes, it is of interest to note that on the receiving end of a good part of Jacobs’ withering skepticism is, in fact, the other side of the same schismatic Methodism that inspires Isabella Baumfree’s renaming. Here is a prime example of the hidden cartography of social geographic consideration or geo-ontology. Truth and Jacobs existed at the diametric ends of a church whose ostensible unity was rendered imaginary by larger questions of place and power. Inversely, the commonality of their transit through the emerging liberal metropolis (New York City) and arrival in zones of the abolitionist sanctuary (New England) did not, and could not, produce the same socioeconomic or physical results. For Harriet Jacobs, again as Linda Brent, it was only in London that the spell, as it were, could be broken: For the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom. (154) In this, we might disambiguate the necessity of a physical place with its sufficiency. Surely, Boston, too, may be defined, for a fugitive slave, as a refuge relative to the plantations of North Carolina and, while Jacobs availed herself of the necessity of safety in Boston at several junctures in her life and did retire there, it was also there that she received the news of her legal freedom (obtained in another “free” city) and was met with its enervating insufficiency: ‘The bill of sale!’ Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of

Ecologies of Racism 37 sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know the value of that bit of paper; but much as I love freedom, I do not like to look upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friend who procured it, but I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his. (87) Harriet Jacobs makes plain why this overdue resolution should be met with ambivalence, at best, and how, in the theoretical sense, her conditions of freedom were different from Sojourner Truth’s in that the former was by crude sale and the latter by the plodding but progressive force of state emancipation law; regardless, they are, to us, of a piece in their delimitations and legal conceit. Indeed, we would contend that the denotative freedom of emancipation, of physical movement and pursuit, falls short conceptually (as both women would later witness during Reconstruction) because it follows the apparent contours of geography and misses what is submerged or connotative: that the land is not just the land itself but the possibilities coded upon it. This is the missing actor, the hidden mapping that we call ecologies of racism, that might also explain how the historical experiences and cultural receptions of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs could both cohere and, often simultaneously, veer. In Truth’s case, freedom meant an unlocked subjectivity, a sovereign body capable of bringing her great acclaim and affording her incredible influence. For Jacobs, the “same” freedom often pointed back to the continuing traumas and stigmas of having lived as mere flesh at all. African American Ecofeminists and the Formation of Resistances III: Harriet E. Wilson Truth and Jacobs, while importantly divergent, were both effectively successful, broadly speaking, in propping up a greater agency for themselves over time and, for this, they occupy a small and fortunate minority in the larger context of black women living under the conditions of mid-nineteenthcentury America. Harriet E. Wilson, by contrast, falls more squarely in the dispossessed majority despite the apparent advantages of being the only of the three born free and having spent the entirety of her life in abolitionist New England. Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is Wilson’s novelization of her time spent under indentured servitude in New Hampshire after having been orphaned in childhood. As Jacobs speaks through Brent so does Wilson speak through Frado and her life with the Bellmonts, a wealthy, white Northern family who stand in fictionally for the Haywards, to whom the courts assigned Wilson, in what was considered an act of social welfare. For the purposes of clarity and for want of a richer biographical

38  Ecologies of Racism record, we will continue from here with the adapted fiction of Frado and the Bellmonts. At its publication in 1859, the novel proffered a difficult view in which Northern humanist virtue was more regularly a tradition honored in the breach. If Truth’s radical transformation and Jacobs’s more conditionalized version of the same tempt us to internalize a narrative of redemptive migration ending at the mythic destination of Stowe’s New England, Wilson threatens this neatness with a counternarrative of domestic terror at the center of abolitionist geography. In presenting the project of the novel amid this complexity, Wilson both acknowledges the greater barbarisms of chattel slavery in the South and foregrounds the transgressive potentialities of that same mindset in the Northern context: “I would not from these motives even palliate slavery at the South, by disclosures of its appurtenances North. My mistress was wholly imbued with Southern principles” (xi). The household regime of the novel’s equivalently afflicted mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, stands in for the jealousies, insecurities, and casual cruelties of the white gaze writ large. We note the example of the white matriarch’s energetic efforts toward a more starkly defined racialization, as Frado (like Wilson) is the product of a black father and white mother: At home, no matter how powerful the heat when sent to rake hay or guard the grazing herd, she was never permitted to shield her skin from the sun. She is not many shades darker than [Mrs. Bellmont’s daughter] Mary now; what a calamity it would be ever to hear the contrast spoken of. Mrs. Bellmont was determined the sun should have full power to darken the shade which nature had first bestowed upon her as best befitting. (39) As we have explored in Jacobs’s story, this racialization necessarily lent itself to desexualization and degendering as complementary pieces of the abjective project. Frado is described as a “beautiful mulatto, with long, curly black hair, and handsome, roguish eyes, sparkling with an exuberance of spirit almost beyond restraint” (17). To this end, Mrs. Bellmont resorts, in seeking to rob Frado of any agency derived from her appearance, to shaving her head, dressing her in tattered, unflattering clothing, and inflicting continual abuse on her body including “a blow which lay the tottering girl prostrate on the floor” (82). Wilson writes: “Mrs. B had shaved her glossy ringlets; and, in her coarse cloth gown and ancient bonnet, [Frado] was anything but an enticing object” (69). As if to ensure that she would never bring herself to fathom let alone achieve any kind of emancipation while in bondage, Mrs. Bellmont beats Frado to the point where, at times, she was barely able to walk. When Frado is old enough to take leave of the Bellmonts, she finds it nearly impossible to find work because of her degenerative state: “Now she was alone in the world. The past year had been one of suffering resulting from a fall, which

Ecologies of Racism 39 had left her lame” (117). After “three years of weary sickness wasted her, without extinguishing a life apparently so feeble,” Frado is eventually employed by two “old maidens” for minimal labor (122). But her physical infirmity persists and amounts to a scarring, or violent inscription, made upon her by hegemonic forces that, in the North, are perhaps, in the forensic sense, better laid bare since race, for the white metropolitan Northerner, is a matter of cruder pragmatism unadorned by the bloated excesses and ranging mythology of antebellum culture to the South. Mrs. Bellmont, when presented with Frado at the outset, makes a blunt calculation to this point: ‘I don’t mind the nigger in the child. I should like a dozen better than one,’ replied her mother. ‘If I could make her do my work in a few years, I would keep her. I have so much trouble with girls I hire, I am almost persuaded if I have one to train up in my way from a child, I shall be able to keep them awhile. I am tired of changing every few months.’ (37) Here of course, notably, is a fellow woman as keeper of the captive female body. Spillers explains that “since the gendered female exists for the male, we might suggest that the ungendered female—in an amazing stroke of pansexual potential—might be invaded/raided by another woman or man” (77). This is precisely the dynamic that emerges in Our Nig. Mrs. Bellmont’s dominant position over Frado is predicated on Frado’s racialization and de-sexualization co-acting into a cocktail capable of vacating the threat Frado, in her beauty and pique, would otherwise embody. Again, we observe the deranged ethic of the subject “body” rendered down to abject “flesh” (in the Spillers terminology); again we witness an imposed thingness at play in the presumptions and internalizations necessary for white hegemony. Frado’s only allies within the house are Mrs. Bellmont’s kind son, Jack, and invalid daughter, Jane, who, vulnerable like Frado, shares her fear of the Bellmont matriarch. In an attempt at succor, Jack purchases a dog for Frado: He resolved to do what he could to protect [Frado] from [his other sister] Mary and his mother. He bought her a dog, which became a great favorite. The invalid, Jane, would gladly befriend [Frado]; but she had not the strength to brave the iron will of her mother. Kind words and affectionate glances were the only expressions of sympathy she could safely indulge in. (37) Frado’s alienation from the family, as positioned alongside the similarly reduced status of Mrs. Bellmont’s disabled daughter, Jane, and the presence of Fido, Frado’s pet, forms a narrative constellation that makes from racial otherness, disability, women, and the non-human natural world, a subaltern whole against which whiteness may set itself. In her critical work, Playing in

40  Ecologies of Racism the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison explores the instrumentality of this binary in the racial context: What, one wants to ask, are Americans alienated from? What are American always so insistently innocent of? Different from? As for absolute power, over whom is this power held, from whom withheld, to whom distributed? Answers to these questions lie in the potent and ego-reinforcing presence of an Africanist population. This population is convenient in every way, not the least of which is self-definition. (45) In the building of difference, people of color are placed exterior to a presumed white subjectivity that is the national/cultural paradigm. Their externality is considered a “raw” naturalness or a primordial state untouched by “progress” and, in turning once more to Spillers, this zero degree of social conceptualization necessarily aligns them with intersecting subaltern cleavages (gender, ability, etc.) and the “outdoors” as zones of overlapping nullity under the white gaze; taken together, they are the relief that gives the impression of depth. Despite whatever administrative exertions Mrs. Bellmont and other disciplinarians might expend on leveraging schism where the constituents of the other threaten confederation, the nature of Frado’s position negotiates her toward a liminal subjectivity that is given to such “negated” solidarities. In fighting to connect with Jane, in her love of her dog, and in the long hours spent laboring outside, Frado is lent an ecological vantage that promises, in Jeffrey Myers’s words, “alternative ways for human beings to coexist with other people and the land, ways that respect the nonhuman world” (6). This alignment may be most clearly framed through the relationship she fosters with animals—particularly her dog, Fido. Wilson writes: These were the days when Fido was the entire confidant of Frado. She told him her griefs as though he were human; and he sat so still, and listened so attentively, she really believed he knew her sorrows. . . . Fido was the constant attendant of Frado, when sent from the house on errands, going and returning with the cows, out in the fields, to the village. If ever she forgot her hardships it was in his company. (41–42) When Mrs. Bellmont tries to sell Fido, Wilson observes of Frado that “to be thus deprived of all her sources of pleasure was a sure way to exalt their worth, and Fido became, in her estimation, a more valuable presence than the human beings who surrounded her” (62). The compositional juxtaposition of expected human fellowship, its absence in fact, and the extant interspecies alternative evokes a cutting and, we should assume, intentional irony; later, when the dog is returned to her, the material conditions ungirding such

Ecologies of Racism 41 a break are borne witness explicitly by James: “I stepped into the barn, where I could see her. She was crouched down by the hay with her faithful friend Fido, and as she ceased speaking, buried her face in her hands, and cried bitterly; then, patting Fido, she kissed him, saying, ‘You love me, Fido, don’t you? but we must go work in the field’” (emphasis added 75). Their bond is, of course, solidaristic. Cary Wolfe argues in “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities,” The animal is linked complexly to the problem of animals’ ethical standing as direct or indirect subjects of justice—a problem that invites a critical and not just descriptive practice of disciplinarity to assess how this newly robust entity called the animal is plumbed, repressed, or braided with other forms of identity, other discourses (race, gender, class, sexual difference) in works of literature and culture. (567) We would argue that the complexity and, perhaps, confusion of this interplay, begins with the notion of the poetical imparting of anthropomorphized subjectivity. Even Wolfe’s argument seems to imagine a one-way interpretive overlay of the human onto the animal; in questions of power, we have sought to demonstrate (via Spillers, etc.) that the reverse overlay—animalization of the human—is at least as crucial to the exploration of justice for human and non-human “subjects” alike. In the case of Frado and Fido, we cite, as Wolfe might, the “humanized” co-experience of their suffering but note the “animalized” instrumentalization at the core of their pain. It is the latter construct that Harriet Jacobs, who does not notably rely on relationships with animals or, for that matter, nonhuman nature, would recognize as projected upon the population of exploitable, mechanized, “animalized” individuals to which she gives voice and among which she counts herself. We return briefly to Jacobs, in closing this section, for how the subtleties of her invocation of the animal underline how imagined separation and disciplinary perversion are coded upon the land as ecologies of racism that varied more in tone than form from Massachusetts to North Carolina. Jacobs remarks, “Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation” (43). She continues: Women [slaves] are considered of no value, unless they continually increase their owner’s stock. They are put on par with animals. This same master shot a woman through the head, who had run away and been brought back to him. No one called him to account for it. If a slave resisted being whipped, the bloodhounds were unpacked, and set upon him, to tear his flesh from his bones. (44)

42  Ecologies of Racism Yet as Jacobs indicts the white owners for their metaphorical lowering of slaves to the status of beasts, she refuses to afford those same owners—Dr. Flint in this case—the decency of those same beasts: “No animal ever watched its prey more narrowly than he watched me” (37). Similarly, faced with the prospect of seeking shelter in a nearly uninhabitable and dangerous swamp during an early phase of escape, Jacobs insists, through the pseudonymous Brent, that “those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized” (95). To be returned to a state of nature among the pigs and the snakes, we are to believe, can be both much less and much more than one deserves. Through the paradox, Jacobs sounds out the finer point, which is to bring into question the provenance of the separation premise entirely. On this count, Jeffrey Myers proposes that “just as the formation of whiteness in opposition to the racial Other is a construction with no basis in the natural world, the formation of the white, individual, subjective self in opposition to nature is an equally fictional construction” (15). It is, then, the initiating and hubristic formation of separation that accounts for the incoherence of the American capitalist project’s relationship with the natural world, its people, and whatever internal logics of control rise to meet the stupefaction of “that community called civilized.” Consequently, we consider the arbitrary and exploitative bounds of physical geography to be of a piece with the perfidy of social geographies latticed across them. Moreover, we affirm the union of subaltern peoples and the natural world as a single site of resistance against this engine of reduction and despair that extends over the width of a continent and can yet coalesce in the small, broken body of Harriet E. Wilson’s Frado. Repressive Geographies and Black Femininities Captured conditions produce captive bodies. In his article, “Geographic Consciousness in the American Slave Narrative,” Ian Finseth argues for the centrality of space in the operation of the chattel system: On the plantation, slaves had to navigate a hierarchical and unpredictable environment, where the arrangement of physical structures and natural space expressed an elaborate complex of power relationships and emotional realities. The unavoidable lessons of agricultural slavery were that the mastery of human beings thrived upon the mastery of space; that overseers oversaw both the slaves and the terrain; and that the white regime enforced obedience not only by employing violence but by restricting both mobility and spatial privacy. (242–243) If we are to synthesize the kernels of lived experience at play within the written record of Sojourner Truth (as told by Olive Gilbert), Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent), and Harriet E. Wilson (writing through Frado), we would

Ecologies of Racism 43 begin with their common impression that the regime of the plantation was a supremely literal but otherwise faithful microcosm for the nation outside its borders. In New York and Boston, the three women encounter foreclosures of opportunity and dehumanizing conditions that belie the supposed removal of those Northern environs to the predations of slavery. All three women, to this point, offer a stark rebuke to such simplicity: Truth’s early captivity took place by the Hudson River, Jacob’s most harrowing moments, arguably, were in fear of slave catchers scouring Brooklyn, and Harriet E. Wilson’s Frado, whose was indentured as a child, never left Massachusetts. McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds that the organizational impulse, anywhere, initiates and situates the social order: If we imagine that traditional geographies are upheld by their threedimensionality, as well as a corresponding language of insides and outside, borders and belongings, and inclusions and exclusions, we can expose domination as a visible spatial project that organizes, names, and sees social difference (such as black femininity) and determines where social order happens. (xiv) McKittrick goes on to contend that the ideological conception of geographic “transparency” or blankness, an exceedingly potent delusion in the American context, naturalizes such inscription of social difference upon space: This naturalization of ‘difference’ is, in part, bolstered by the ideological weight of transparent space, the idea that space ‘just is,’ and the illusion that the external world is readily knowable and not in need of evaluation, and that what we see is true. (xv) It is toward this submerged coding that we orient ecologies of racism as a construct that may link McKittrick’s transparent space with our frequent refrain in preceding sections, Spillers’s zero-degree subjectivity. A denuding imperative on the part of the hegemon couples these ideas, and this impulse to clear can also be understood as the first step in a drive to totalize control, bringing us to the example of visibility during Sojourner Truth’s time in captivity under Mr. Dumont. We mention Mr. Dumont briefly in Truth’s section as the likely father (by rape) of her first child, Diana. He in fact figures prominently at the end of Truth’s narrative as, some 20 years later, a genuine penitent and, throughout, is described in more humane terms than his predecessor, Mr. Nealy. It is perhaps for this reason, and undoubtedly due to the pull of having left her children behind (as New York emancipation law required child slaves to continue serving into their early twenties), that Truth briefly seeks to return to Mr. Dumont after having escaped to nearby New Paltz after Dumont

44  Ecologies of Racism revoked his promise to grant her freedom slightly ahead of the legal deadline. Yet she demurs as his wagon arrives, overcomes with the sense that to return to slavery would be an offense against God: But, ere she reached the vehicle, she says that God revealed himself to her, with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning, showing her, ‘in the twinkling of an eye, that he was all over’-that he pervaded the universe-’and that there was no place where God was not.’ She became instantly conscious of her great sin in forgetting her almighty Friend and ‘ever-present help in time of trouble.’ All her unfulfilled promises arose before her, like a vexed sea whose waves run mountains high; and her soul, which seemed but one mass of lies, shrunk back aghast from the ‘awful look’ of him whom she had formerly talked to, as if he had been a being like herself; and she would now fain have hid herself in the bowels of the earth, to have escaped his dread presence. But she plainly saw there was no place, not even in hell, where he was not; and where could she flee? Another such ‘a look,’ as she expressed it, and she felt that she must be extinguished forever, even as one, with the breath of his mouth, ‘blows out a lamp,’ so that no spark remains. (51) In a curious but telling juxtaposition, Sojourner Truth appears to lend to Dumont the omnipresence of her God in the negative. It is as if, in her revulsion, she senses, like the flash of divine inspiration she describes, a deep clarity into the nature of slavery’s coercive systematicity, and her portrayal of Mr. Dumont’s presence, and indeed her God’s, may be likened to Foucault’s discussion of Bentham’s disciplinary prison, the Panopticon, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The pervasive infusion of a constant and continuous discipline (corrosive on the part of Dumont, emancipatory as it relates to Truth’s personal religiosity) speaks directly to the Panopticon, which Foucault marks as: a modality of power that normalizes the population and arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through those power relations. (206–207) Returning to the question of totalizing visibility, we see that Truth experiences Mr. Dumont’s “dread presence” as a suffusing “look” that, in its perilous disciplinary ethos, capable of blowing out any “spark” of subjectivity,

Ecologies of Racism 45 becomes metaphorical of the larger white gaze. In the rush of claustrophobia and in her epiphanal certainty that there are no half measures, no negotiated surrenders, and no partial submissions in the ecology of racist subjugation, Truth demonstrates an innate understanding of white patriarchal power as an absolutist spatial project. If, as Katherine McKittrick asserts, black women were truly “bound up with practices of spatial domination” and if “saying space and place is understood as one of the more crucial ways geography can work for black women,” (xxiii) then Harriet Jacobs offers a powerful inverse to the panoptic encirclement of Sojourner Truth’s horror at the sight of her former master. One of Jacobs’s first refuges between her escape and final flight Northward was a brief stay locked away in a friend’s attic storeroom, where she discovers she is able to watch Dr. Flint from the window: Opposite my window was a pile of feather beds. On the top of these I could lie perfectly concealed, and command a view of the street through which Dr. Flint passed to his office. Anxious as I was, I felt a gleam of satisfaction when I saw him. Thus far I had outwitted him, and I triumphed over it. Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants. (85) Indeed, Jacobs positioning potently counteracts the panoptic prerogative of her master in that she successfully secures a place of concealment and tenuous safety but the “gleam of satisfaction” she feels speaks to a further, subversive advantage; she becomes the observer, the subject who surveys the landscape. Jacobs is now the woman in the panoptic tower, who watches Dr. Flint’s anxiety mount day by day as he relentlessly searches for her. While she grasps that this reversal would be fleeting under the larger order of spatial dominance, that “there was no place, where slavery existed, that could have afforded [her] a good place of concealment,” her surveillance of her former master is nonetheless a striking moment of seditious potential and a hijacking of the disciplinary mechanism that certainly aided her escape (98). Even in the subsequent seven years ensconced in the much smaller garret of her grandmother’s shed, Harriet Jacob’s refusal to be seen produces a rupture within the “the logic of visualization” and “patriarchal knowledge” that is symptomized in the tormented Dr. Flint and his increasingly unhinged pursuit (McKittrick 40). By the mere denial of visibility, without even the previous vantage of knowledge, Jacobs enjoyed at the window, Dr. Flint remains inverted as the disciplined, “the individual subjected to immediate coercion; the tortured body” (Foucault 131). Harriet Jacobs’s cogent invocation of guerilla “cunning” acknowledges the leverage of her disappearance as an offensive weapon rather than merely a shield or, in McKittrick’s words, her time in seclusion revealed,

46  Ecologies of Racism “the tensions of geography rather than a simple solution to geographic domination” (43). In the lives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet E. Wilson, and in their literary output, we reflect upon not only the forensic value of their abjectivity at the center of white patriarchy in nineteenth-century America but also how their struggle for subjectivity projected a path for their descendants in the post-Reconstruction period and beyond. The increasing visibility of the remarkable advances of their agency continues to carry a catalyzing potential for our understanding of ecologies of racism that pervade the present in a manner that must be described as one that would be familiar to all three of them. Simply, they indict the present as they confront the past, and their tradition, too, is coded onto the land. Notes 1 We elaborate on this throughout this chapter, but see also Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Or Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. 2 “Pornotroping” refers to the process of reducing a person to only flesh. This process will be echoed in later chapters.

Works Cited Clark, Christopher. The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association. Cornell, 1995. Finseth, Ian. “Geographic Consciousness in the American Slave Narrative.” In American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500–1900, edited by Martin Bruckner and Hsuan Hsu. University of Delaware Press, 2007, pp. 236–258. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Translated by Alan Sheridan). Vintage, 1995. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Dover, 2001. Mazel, David. American Literary Environmentalism. University of Georgia Press, 2000. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota, 2006. Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. Routledge, 2004. Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. University of Pennsylvania, 2004. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage, 1993. Myers, Jeffrey. Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature. University of Georgia, 2005. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64–81.

Ecologies of Racism 47 Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. Hill and Wang, 2007. White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig: Or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black. Penguin, 2009. Wolfe, Cary. “Human, All Too Human: Animal Studies and the Humanities.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 564–575.

3 Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities Willa Cather’s Conflicted Land Ethics and Civilizing Science in O Pioneers!

When Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), the larger significance at play, for him, was not America as inexorably revitalized by the horizon but America emergent from, and emboldened by, the terrible crucible of its frontier environment. As Turner insists: There is no tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. (59) The violence of this overcoming has allowed America to define and accept itself in and through an ontology of domination manifested as objectification of nature. Beginning with the taxonomic model Thomas Jefferson created in Notes on the State of Virginia (originally completed in 1781), Americans began to reduce the “living” portion of the natural world in favor of new instrumentalism. As we see in Turner’s thesis, composed over a hundred years after Jefferson’s Notes, the discursive reproduction of the American landscape as a variably inert antagonist and inert inheritance has come to define the project of American nation-building. Attending to the representation and imperial politics of landscape, gender, and empire throughout the history of American westward expansion, Krista Comer argues in Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing that “natural spaces themselves, when mapped by human minds, not only reflect human social organization but, as representational systems, participate in both the construction and maintenance of every kind of racial, gender, class, sexual, regional, and nationalist relationship imaginable” (12). As we observe in the opening chapter, the land licenses the people even as the people license the land. In this chapter, we focus on such politics of landscape as exemplified in DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-3

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 49 Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (1913). By attending to the representation of the land, alongside the ways in which the characters interact with the environment and represent themselves from within their landscape, we can begin to perceive how empire mediates an enclosed socio-political landscape. American land has been historically represented as a feminized, virginal space imbued with the germinative seeds of civilization. As Nina Baym articulates in “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” landscape is deeply imbued with female qualities, as society is; but where society is menacing and destructive, landscape is compliant and supportive. It has the attributes simultaneously of a virginal bride and a nonthreatening mother; its female qualities are articulated with respect to a male angle of vision: what can nature do for me, asks the hero, what can it give me? (75) At the turn of the twentieth century, this deep patriarchal symbolism had suffused the American body politic in its relationship to its newly closed or, in keeping with the metaphor, now fully deflowered frontier. The pace of urbanization and industrialization maintained westward momentum under a new phase of consolidation where white pioneers sought escape from the “menacing and destructive” sphere of Northern industry and refuge in the “supportive” territory of the West. Under The Homestead Act (1862), these migrants trekked westward at least as much for the pull of “open” land as the push of urban blight.1 Of course, the West was not in fact open at all; it was heavily populated with Native American tribes, which had inhabited those lands for centuries. Nevertheless, vast swaths of this area were summarily categorized as unappropriated public land, surveyed by a vanishingly small cadre of white settlers and officials. When the Nebraska Territory, for instance, was created in 1854, “a census taken in November of that year showed only twenty-seven hundred whites living in the state—most of them residing on the eastern fringe of the territory along the Missouri or transients who actually lived in Kansas” (Fischer 39). Once the Homestead Act was passed as a spoils system for Northern victors of the Civil War and, consequently, became the administrative framework for further settlement of the outer territory, the removal of Native Americans took on outsized logistical priority: Many of the Indian tribes living in eastern Nebraska were either confined to reservations or forced to ‘trade’ their ancient lands for trinkets and new guarantees of lands further West. The success of this program of removal, combined with the dramatic rise in population as a result of the Homestead Act (intended to consolidate control of these lands) and with the American Civil War, which effectively removed the proposed

50  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities southern routes from contention, led President Lincoln, in 1863, to choose the Platte River valley as the route that the railroad would follow. The first track was laid that year; by 1867, the rails had reached Nebraska. (Fischer 39) As Alan Trachtenberg argues in The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, the stunningly repressive set of policies that implemented the removal of the native population was made all the more insidious as it fell behind this myopic “veil” of democratic development. For Trachtenberg, the Turner thesis in particular came to canonize, as a sort of national bildungsroman, America’s total dismissal of Native American agency in the service of commercial expansion and continental empire: The Turner thesis, which defines the land as ‘free’ and identifies Indians with ‘wilderness,’ as a ‘common danger,’ is one such veil: it fails to see Indians as other than undifferentiated ‘savages’ in the path of ‘social evolution’ from ‘frontier’ to ‘city and factory system.’ To see Indians as ‘savage’ is already to define them out of existence, to define them only in relation to their apparent opposite: ‘civilized’ society. (28–29) In service of this “social evolution” was a parallel evolution of whiteness. Individuals like Frederick Jackson Turner and Edward Ross, a eugenicist and contemporary of Turner’s, were more transfixed by the blank potential of the frontier than they were beholden to lingering sentiments of white ethnic division that accompanied waves of southern and eastern European immigration. As the nation expanded, so did whiteness. Jean C. Griffith explains in “How the West was Whitened: ‘Racial’ Difference on Cather’s Prairie” that: The passion for assimilating immigrants was openly espoused by some of the most influential commentators on the American frontier, men like Edward Ross and Frederick Jackson Turner. While Ross and Turner expressed reservations about new immigrants, they also minimized just the kind of white racial differences the eugenicists found so important to safeguard. Both men located America’s greatness in its ability to unify distinct nationalities, classes, and religious groups from the Old World, and both argued that such unification produced a better racial stock than any to be found in Europe. (396) While the process of European assimilation took on the chauvinist but tempered character of an emulsion of racial “stock” where difference would be leveled toward inherent compatibility (and in service of the white population growth necessitated by the frenzy of expansion), Native American

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 51 assimilation remained preoccupied with the annihilation, rather than admixing, of difference. From the breaking of tribes into single-family parcels via the Dawes Act (1887) to the breaking of families through the boarding school system, the Native American propensity toward open inhabitation, migratory nomadism, responsible farming, and communalism posed an existential challenge to America’s developmental ethos and thus had to be “defined out of existence” rather than reconciled into a conglomerative whole. The flexible accommodation for which Ross and Turner congratulated themselves could not be afforded across color lines, to be sure, but, recalling here the Africanist shadow discussed in the preceding chapter, we would contend that metaphysical and materialist structures of being underlay both their mere racism toward native people and, relatedly, their exploitative disposition toward the land. In The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History, Carolyn Merchant explains: In comparing Indian and Western ways of relating to nature, Indians generally considered themselves to be just one among many entities in an animate world, living according to culturally defined canons of respect for other members, while nevertheless developing tools and technologies that allowed them to provide for their own subsistence. (14) Insofar as their identity and survival were determined by their environment, Native American tribes tended to interact with the land on its own terms; instead of transforming the terrain, they moved with shifting conditions: “Native Americans of the Great Plains centered their subsistence economy around the buffalo . . . Buffalo, unlike cattle and sheep, could not be domesticated, but early Indians developed an understanding of herd psychology” (15). As the Great Plains were relatively barren, “the Plains Indians were primarily nomadic” (15). However, once the “Europeans moved onto the Plains, they developed policies towards Indians and buffalo that altered the region’s ecology and native cultures” (14). In order for the Plains to be settled and the American empire to take further root, the landscape itself needed to be harnessed and domesticated; this necessarily, and with fairly bald intention, upended the native way of life: Environmental and technological factors were supplemented in the 1860s through 1870s by a U.S. government policy of ridding the Plains of both Indians and buffalo, dealing the coup de grace to Indian culture. In 1867, one member of the U.S. Army is said to have given orders to his troops to ‘kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone’ . . . [And] nevertheless a massive slaughter of bison by white hunters heralded the demise of the Plains Indians cultures. . . . The average buffalo hunter killed one hundred a day. One thousand buffalo

52  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities were killed each year, until they were on the verge of extinction, removing the subsistence base from Indian cultures. (Merchant 20) The wholesale slaughter of bison was one of the most significant and brutal ways through which the American imperial imaginary defined itself over and against the natural world. As it met resistance, the new American empire would disavow the living agency of nature, casting it as an inanimate prize or, in the example of the buffalo, a genocidal cudgel. The pageant of westward expansion, the incorporation of newly arrived immigrants from Europe into America’s imperial ethos, and the capitalist hunger for land development were not, of course, solely the province of white males. At the turn of the century, white women were increasingly involved in the momentum of frontier occupation. Reginald Dyck observes in “Willa Cather’s Reluctant New Woman Pioneer” that “the Homestead Act of 1862 did allow single women to gain their own land, and especially after 1900 they did participate. However, for most women, the land was an investment ‘that would improve their prospects for marriage’ ” (163). Yet the fact of land ownership did give way to emancipatory rites of passage, so to speak, for women, who, internalizing their new reality, increasingly adopted male tendencies as they confronted the civilizing task before them. Although men had led the frontier charge in the preceding decades, “by the late nineteenth century, many women had begun to take advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire property in the West” (Wiesenthal 48). To wit, “the government censuses report that between 1875 and 1900 approximately 250,000 women operated their own farms” (Werden 202). At the time and ever since, this flourishing of woman ownership has been placed among the first successes in American feminism and, as we will demonstrate, O Pioneers! lauds the arrival of the independent, “masculinized” New Woman. As witness, proponent, and emblem of the New Woman ideal, Willa Cather creates in O Pioneers! a valuable historical document in its closeness to her lived experience and, in her protagonist Alexandra Bergson, an independent character of startling newness in a country taken up with newness as definitional self-conceit. Yet in the headiness of this Progressive Era novel’s earnest consideration of the radical dimensions of freedom available for the first time to women like Cather, the author also provides for our project an opportunity to interrogate the absences that shape such triumphalism. In an echo of Chapter Six’s exploration of Hester Prynne as reimagined by Maryse Condé in I, Tituba, here, too, the wilderness comes to signify a haunting or an animating terror, that is evocative of Toni Morrison’s Africanist presence and points once again to the specific trajectories of a colonizing whiteness after, against, and above its structuring shadow: . . . images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the [black] shadow that is companion to this

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 53 whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing. This haunting, a darkness from which our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself, suggests the complex and contradictory situation in which American writers found themselves during the formative years of the nation’s literature. (Morrison 33) Cather’s Alexandra: Embodying Female Masculinity and Empire Through the Land Willa Cather’s adolescence spent on the Nebraska prairie (before moving to Lincoln for university, then Pittsburgh and New York) tremendously influenced her literary output.2 A primary and oft-cited example of the “New Woman” who eschewed marriage for a college degree and career, Cather, in turn, created female protagonists who would reflect these hitherto masculine ideals. Judith Butler recounts that “some feminists have argued that [Cather] is a male-identified writer, one whose stories presume a masculine narrator or foreground a masculine protagonist” (143). In O Pioneers!, Cather creates in Alexandra Bergson a female protagonist who embodies what she may have considered the ideal at the turn of the century: vividly self-deterministic yet agrarian in the longstanding sense of yeoman independence.3 As we are introduced to Alexandra, the novel’s protagonist, we are told she “was a tall, strong girl, and she walked rapidly and resolutely as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next. She wore a man’s long ulster (not as if it were an affliction, but as if it were very comfortable and belonged to her, carried it like a young soldier)” (10). She is furthermore described as “looking with . . . anguished perplexity into the future” (13). We immediately understand her intellect to be prehensile, which is to say teleological, less concerned with the feminized space of consolidation and security in favor of a ranging, if wary, survey of the future.4 Alexandra’s perception of the land as instrumentalized subject to her prerogative is redolent of Luce Irigaray’s portrayal of the Western scientific ethos as reductive and totalizing; in Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray describes this characterization in detail as the relationship between vision, being and measuring which together account for Alexandra’s gaze upon the land as well. Irigaray argues: Vision protects itself from the risk of blindness by using daylight for the exact perception of ‘beings’ and for the calculation of the relation and correlations ‘beings’ have with their ideal inscription in the psyche. Direct vision means looking directly ahead, of course, but it also means doing so through an optical apparatus that stands between man and light and prevents light from touching him at all. Reason—which will also be called natural light—is the result of systems of mirrors that ensure a steady illumination. . . . The episteme begins its surveying,

54  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities measuring, and calculating on the basis of shadows projected by/upon surfaces, screens, and supports. (148) The Western vision must be counted and calculated, at a distance, through a lens that centralizes the self against an encroaching lack; it must anticipate growth by occluding any radical contingency that might impinge upon the linearity of progress. In the case of O Pioneers! Alexandra operates from the position of a land surveyor, the Jeffersonian visionary, and for that, she disconnects herself via Irigaray’s arm’s length of “reason;” she can only reflect and, thus, regenerate the self. She sees her father and herself in the land because she perceives the natural world through the shadow of private imperialism, and this bounds the land to her terms. Yet Cather complicates the spiritual sequestration of this vision as she emphasizes Alexandra’s emotion for the land on its own terms and timescale. The following passage exemplifies this phenomenon: When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of the geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have been bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. (34) Her sentimentalism here toward the animus and history of the land nevertheless remains bound up in a sense of the novel and ennobled submission to her will by the taxonomy of former wilderness. It was precisely this anti-ecological ethos that led to the widespread desertification of the Great Plains. As Carolyn Merchant observes, what was once a “pristine grassland” inhabited by a “nomadic band of Indians” was quickly transformed by white settlers “over a period of 150 years into a desert, exemplified by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s” (90).5 But Cather fails to countenance the precipice of environmental devastation that would follow over-farming. When Cather wrote O Pioneers! at the turn of the twentieth century, she, as a modern and scientific liberal, must have been aware of the degree to which the grasslands quickly diminished and the face of the American landscape began to radically change. Yet, as Jean C. Griffith illustrates in “How the West Was Whitened”: ‘Racial’ Difference on Cather’s Prairie,” Cather was primarily concerned with reconciling relations between disparate white immigrant groups while using the land as a medium: “Cather often spoke of her deep interest in immigrants she had met as a youth in Nebraska, and, as she

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 55 claimed in a 1913 interview, she was particularly interested in ‘Scandinavian and Bohemian pioneers’ . . . [Furthermore, Cather believed that diverse immigrant races contributed] to the cultural diversity of the prairie, and to the nation more generally” (397). By democratizing the landscape and producing an agriculturally sustainable environment, Cather sacrifices ecology for productive solidarity. Cather’s Alexandra personifies the American democratic visionary who would successfully negotiate with a highly divisive complex of immigrants and races through the tight and unexamined control of the landscape. As Griffith emphasizes, it is Alexandra’s “particular manifestation of Swedishness that accounts for the certainty of her agricultural success in America” (399). In the largest sense, Alexandra is predisposed to capitalist development, and pervasive agriculture was given the ways in which her whiteness is structurally internalized. Alexandra inherits the farm from her father, John Bergson, a Swedish immigrant symbolic of the Old World whose land “did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past” but who, regardless, “had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame” (16). Alexandra, so the hope went, had “strength of will, and the simple direct way of thinking things out, that had characterized her father in his better days” (17). Alexandra, in this second attempt at frontier mastery, takes upon herself the character of the civilizing errand.6 The land, which to her father was a “wild thing that had its ugly moods” and was “like a horse that no one [knew] how to break to harness, that [ran] wild and [kicked] things to pieces” (16–17), needed the volition of someone who could “farm it properly” (17). As Cather illustrates throughout O Pioneers! it is only through the cultivation of the soil that the differences between the Old World and the New World might be reconciled and a new synthesis could spring forth. Here Jean C. Griffith takes an unadorned view, When Willa Cather wrote novels of a western prairie teeming with diverse immigrant communities, she entered a debate about the relative whiteness of various European groups we now call ‘ethnic’. . . . At the same time that reactions to new immigration contributed to fractured whiteness and called into question the racial credentials of the Slavs, such reactions also provided a sense of racial solidarity between AngloAmericans and European immigrants, as in the case of the Swedish Alexandra Bergson. (393–394, emphasis added) The Plains expedition, then, was as much a project of widening demographic horizons as of strengthening agricultural concerns. We must note that greater inclusivity within white racial construction necessarily called for antagonism against some other “white” aspirant i.e. one must accept the Scandinavians only against and above the Slavs. Given this, Cather’s O Pioneers! is a novel about the interpolation and homogenization of “greater white America”

56  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities within a promise-fulfillment narrative. Douglas W. Werden reinforces the importance of these advanced and experimental regiments of whiteness in the realization of imperial gain: the American ‘pioneer’ usually refers to those at the leading edge of American migrations whether frontiersman, forester, mountain man, miner, overland trail venture, prospector, gold rusher, or homesteader. These people are initiators, originators, and forerunners preparing the way for ‘civilization.’ Etymologically the word is derived from foot soldiers who ‘march in advance of an army or regiment, having spades, pickaxes, etc, to dig trenches, repair roads, and perform other labors in clearing or preparing the way for the main body.’ (200, emphasis added) Of course, the term “foot soldier” evokes a militarist sensibility. The pioneers of the west, then, were foot soldiers not only in a sort of emancipatory confrontation with shifting perceptions of whiteness but also with the landscape that promised, under their direct control, to excuse, by the material windfall of its development, such internecine rifts. In this respect, Alexandra captures what Annette Kolodny in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor As Experience and History in American Life and Letters refers to as the “inevitable paradox” of civilization: Colonization brought with it an inevitable paradox: the success of settlement depended on the ability to master the land, transforming the virgin territories into something else—a farm, a village, a road, a canal, a railway, a mine, a factory, a city, and finally, an urban nation. As a result, those who had initially responded to the promise inherent in feminine landscape were now faced with the consequences of that response: either they recoiled in horror from the meaning of their manipulation of a naturally generous world . . . or . . . they succumbed to a life of easeful regression . . . neither response, however, obviated the fact that the despoliation of the land appeared more and more an inevitable consequence of human habitation—any more than it terminated the pastoral impulse itself. (7) These tensions remain unexamined in O Pioneers! where Cather emphasizes logistical affronts and hard victories as the very first stirrings of civilization; for Alexandra, the tabula rasa is not so much material, as Turner has affirmed. Rather, it is the repeated psychic emphasis on a “new country,” made “bewildering” by the “absence of human landmarks” which was, to Alexandra, utterly “depressing and disheartening” (15). She observes, “the roads were but faint tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 57 left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human stirrings” (16, emphasis added). Any trace of the Native American population that existed before the colonizing immigrant is made invisible (invisibilized) relative to the deterministic absence of “civilized” signature upon the land. As Mike Fischer argues in Pastoralism and its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism, “Cather’s appropriation of the land’s materials for her own purposes—so that she might build a ‘country’—required that those contexts and peoples which did not accommodate her textual strategy be marginalized or naturalized so that their stories would not contradict her own” (32). The contradiction, under these terms, is metaphysical. For Alexandra, the land does not present “a record of human stirrings” for its lack of durable alteration across time. For those who subscribe to the pretense of its inherent sense of achievement, domination of space across time, however destructive, yields tremendous cover for the sort of hypocrisy necessary to institutionalize such a regime and indicts progressivism, like Cather’s, for its myopic faith in historical vector: During the American Civil War, the people for whom the federal government was supposedly fighting—and to whom it was promising self-determination—were the African Americans. Nebraska ranked second among the territories in the number of volunteers it gave to the Union cause, and it named its capital after the man who had issued the emancipation proclamation (J. Olson 134, 144). Yet even as the Union was reaffirming its commitment to freedom for all peoples, it was implementing its genocidal policy of expansion in the West. The North’s victory at Gettysburg in 1863, long seen in American mythology as a landmark in the advance of freedom, allowed the War Department to send eight companies of cavalry West to the Plains (J. Olson 135). They would participate in the campaign that ended in Chivington’s programmed massacre of twenty-eight men and one hundred and five Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children at Sand Creek in 1864. In an example of hypocritical double-speak duplicating that employed during World War I, the United States was proclaiming its racial tolerance as it was conducting a brutal campaign of race hatred. (Fischer 42) As she must have been passingly aware of the nation’s violent pursuit of “Indian Removal,” it is troubling that Cather chooses to obviate their presence on the Nebraskan Divide.7 Krista Comer contends that “by figuring their own various projects through landscape discourse, women writers write themselves into dominant western history at the same time that they change the conditions and values that enable ‘official’ history to be known and told” (29). By removing Native Americans from the ranks of those that might make “human stirrings,” Cather homogenizes and sanctifies the human ecological

58  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities stance as one of uncontested exploitation after, against and above the wilderness. In that, she titles the first section of O Pioneers! “The Wild Land,” Cather prefigures the crucial security role of landscape in the American imaginary but denies that landscape is the carefully studied agency ascribed to it by native peoples. As Carolyn Merchant illustrates in The Columbia Guide, the Great Plains, “initially conceptualized as a Great American desert, was gradually brought under control and transformed into a garden, making the Great Plains a Garden of the World. That transition in perception occurred as people increasingly settled the Plains and gained control over nature” (89). The invention of barbed wire by Joseph Glidden in 1874, for instance, marked a significant moment in the history of the American vista and the end of open land. Merchant explains that, “double-stranded barbed wire was significant because it made the homestead possible . . . [but it also] spelled the end of the open range. The farmer’s frontier of sedentary life and power . . . could now replace the nomadic pastoral frontier of the Indian and rancher” (93). Following this enclosure was the rise of reinforcing technologies such as the windmill that “accompanied the European advance onto the Plains, giving settled agriculture a stationary power-base compared to the shifting campsites of nomadic Indians” (93). Next came the plow, harvester, and railroad which “not only provided means for immigrants to reach the Plains but transported cattle and crops such as wheat and corn to eastern markets” (94). Naturally, Cather, through Alexandra, celebrates this genealogy of domestication in a happy 16-year time jump that sees her heroine transformed from a struggling homesteader to a legitimated capitalist freeholder. In another instance of conciliating conservatism for the civilizing project, Cather deploys unwieldy yet sympathetic foil characters that represent primitivism and anachronism. One such notable character in O Pioneers! is “Crazy Ivar,” a hermit. Before we are introduced to him, we follow the Bergsons on the trek from their house to Ivar’s settlement. Ivar’s identity, therefore, is presupposed by Cather’s description of his proximate landscape. She informs us that: the road to Ivar’s homestead was a very poor one. He had settled in the rough country across the country line, where no one lived but some Russians . . . They had left the lagoons and the red grass behind them. In Crazy Ivar’s country the grass was short and gray, the draws deeper than they were in the Bergson’s neighborhood, and the land was all broken up into hillocks and clay ridges. The wild flowers disappeared, and only in the bottom of the draws and gullies grew a very few of the toughest and hardiest: shoestring and ironweed, and snow-on-the-mountain. (22) We are to gather that the narrator looks down upon this character, gently but clearly, for the perceived poverty of his environment, a portrayal which

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 59 also evidences Cather’s narrative construction of the land as an expression of personal character. Relatedly, John Bergson’s life (and death) was defined by his losing struggle with the land; Alexandra, the inheritor of his trouble, makes it her life’s mission to cultivate what is barren. Ivar, by contrast, has chosen to remove himself from the great effort entirely, seeming to revel in the desolation Alexandra so fiercely wishes to remedy. Ultimately, Cather’s characters in toto are foils for her land ethic. Although Cather seems to dismiss Ivar’s ontology from the outset, she nevertheless evinces a sentimentalism and qualified admiration for his rugged independence and simplicity of being. Indeed, this romanticization becomes an assimilating key. Describing his house, which was made of sod, Cather writes: “you could have walked over the roof of Ivar’s dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation. Ivar had lived there for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done” (22). Drawn as a “queerly shaped old man, with a thick, powerful body set on bow-legs,” Ivar’s “shaggy white hair, falling in a thick mane about his cheeks, made him look older than he was” (23). As she further describes, Ivar had a peculiar religion of his own and could not get on with any of the denominations. Often he did not see anybody from one week’s end to another. He kept a calendar, and every morning he checked off a day, so that he was never in any doubt as to which day of the week it was . . . Ivar found contentment in the solitude he had sought out for himself. He disliked the litter of human dwellings: the broken food, the bits of broken china, the old wash-boilers and tea-kettles thrown into the sunflower patch. He preferred the cleanness and tidiness of the wild sod. He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would be Mrs. Badger. He best expressed his preference for a wild homestead by saying that his Bible seemed truer to him there. If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at the rough land, the smiling sky, the curly grass white in the hot summer; if one listened to the rapturous song of the lark, the drumming of the quail, the burr of the locust against the vast silence, one understood what Ivar meant. (23). If Cather could be seen to champion Ivar’s non-interventionist/cooperative policy toward the ecos here, she nevertheless renders his existence with an exaggerated emotion suggestive of a noble doom. Alexandra’s brothers appraise Ivar as “crazier than ever” because, in his subsistence, he “would never be able to prove up on his land because he worked it so little” (26). Alexandra, however, as the New Woman, perceives the value of Ivar’s pastoral knowledge as a sort of asset to be claimed in his bankruptcy. After receiving his advice regarding her pigs, Alexandra leaves Ivar’s homestead “planning

60  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities to make her new pig corral” (27). Ivar’s conventions regarding sustainable farming practices, animal care, and environmental conservation prove useful to Alexandra as an appropriate system of imperial technology. While Alexandra feels a warmth for Ivar, she more practically has a use for him. This is the Western scientific regime in microcosm, a movement that was in full flower during the progressivist period in which Cather writes. To give her budding expertise its worthy antagonist, Cather initially portrays Alexandra beset by “hard times” that brought everyone on the Divide “to the brink of despair” (27). Lou, Alexandra’s younger brother, laments that “this high land wasn’t meant to grow nothing on” but his sister, the imperial visionary, reorients his pessimism as the inflection point for salvation (31): For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. (34) Again, we note the invisibilization of the native population as they fall out of the category of human witness, and the mythic “how” of this disregard prompts a confrontation with the Edenic image set forth as the object of Alexandra’s “yearning” love.8 Here Cather rejuvenates the Jeffersonian ideal of agrarian utopia even as the pastoralism of his time has given way to a more complex and regimented hypermediation: America, as New Eden, would redeem feminized metaphors of rebirth long abandoned by a spent and decadent Europe: Eden, Paradise, the Golden Age, and the idyllic garden, in short, all the backdrops for European literary pastoral, were subsumed in the image of an America promising material ease without labor or hardship, as opposed to the grinding poverty of previous European existence; a frank, free affectional life in which all might share in a primal and noncompetitive fraternity; a resurrection of the lost state of innocence that the adult abandons when he joins the world of competitive selfassertion; and all this possible because, at the deepest psychological level, the move to America was experienced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating metaphor: regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape. And when America finally produced a pastoral literature of her own, that literature hailed the essential femininity of the terrain in a way European pastoral had never dared, and, from the first,

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 61 took its metaphors as literal truths. The traditional mode had embraced its last and possibly its most uniquely revitalizing permutation. (6) Although Cather wishes to represent Alexandra as the weeping ur-mother, we would emphasize the Adamic paternalism she exhibits in her inability, cloaked and enabled by mythic sentiment, to see the land on its own terms outside its unrealized potential as a generative turbine for her identity and that of her nation. The land does not cause Alexandra to reconsider her orientation or her practices; instead, her success is providential. Cather’s blindness towards dissent in this realm and her tendency to emotionalize the plight of the conqueror reveal her complicity with the contextualization of American expansionism as the organizer of value in the natural world. Here lies the crux of Alexandra’s, and Cather’s, ecological reconciliation: for them, environmentalism cannot challenge progress. Rather, it bestows upon the task sacred knowledge and an overall religiosity. As the first chapter draws to a close, we are again met with the protagonist’s ecstasy for the land and the future as an indivisible unit of faith: Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered to keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. . . . She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring. (36 emphasis added) Alexandra takes awestruck pleasure in what she sees as the inherent “ordered march” of the stars, “the great operations of nature” and the “law that lay behind them.” In seeing the natural world from this perspective, Alexandra removes from the abstract whatever chaos of nature refuses to “bend low” before the developmental ontology undergirding her admiration. Further, she centralizes herself inside a teleological narrative of her own ordination. While the distant perfection of the stars may stand in comfortingly for the future, the cleanliness and order of Ivar’s beavers must give way; selectivity is the prerogative of the colonizer. This ordering pronounces itself in “Part II: Neighboring Fields,” where Cather’s narrator exclaims, “From the Norwegian graveyard one looks out

62  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities over a vast checker-board, marked off in squares of wheat and corn; light and dark, dark and light. Telephone wires hum along the white roads, which always run at right angles” (37). The neat implementation of monocrop agriculture and mass communication along the gridlines of this newly hypermediated space lends itself, returning briefly to Irigaray, to the policed monadism of Western consciousness: Access to the earth must be barred by developing an onto-theology at the very outset. Except in the case of God, who is alien to matter, this philosophical construct reduces the potential for generation, growth, change, and expansion for all beings. Everyone, in effect, is pulled up by the roots, deprived of the ‘body’s’ first resources, of the endless possibilities of being in space. Hence, it is essential that no one outgrow the place allotted or the movements suited to his nature, that no new being should be added to the existing number for fear of encroaching on another’s space or destroying it. . . . All that remains is for each person to realize his essence as perfectly as he can, to give full expression to his telos, within the limits ascribed to him. (164) For Irigaray, it is the intimacy of one’s kinship with the land that unlocks “endless possibilities” of “expansion for all beings” and when that link is severed by “onto-theology” or what Jeffrey Myers terms “the teleological belief in the primacy of humanity over nature,” the Western self confuses rootlessness for independence and seeks, in the angst of its exposed solitude, to dominate and control (Myers 15). Alexandra, in surveying the uprooting quilt of right angles that have refaced the Nebraskan prairie, marvels at the level of discipline under which the land generates the greater and greater output: The Divide is now thickly populated. The rich soil yields heavy harvests; the dry, bracing climate and the smoothness of the land make labor easy for men and beasts. There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country, where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow; rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness. . . . There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. (37) In seeking to “give full expression to [her] telos” by coaxing from the land what she has determined to be its unrealized essence, Alexandra feminizes the ecos as a prostrated supplicant before her. The soil now “eagerly” yields

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 63 itself. The young country now “gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season.” Instead of destabilizing patriarchy with a powerfully liberated female protagonist, Cather, in masculinizing Alexandra’s alterity, not only allows her to remain interpolated by the logic of that patriarchy, she actively recreates in Alexandra what Kolodny describes as the “pastoral impulse,” a “yearning to know and to respond to the landscape as feminine,” as an instrument eagerly awaiting the fertilizing thrust of masculinized civilization in order to become actual (8). In a further exemplification of Cather’s developmental ethos, we soon find out that Ivar had recently lost his land “through mismanagement” (42) and Alexandra has taken him in to save him from being institutionalized and has made him useful on her farm, again adopting his expertise in sustainability. Cather is keen to signify the success of the farm, now depicted as more of a sprawling plantation, using the language of settlement and whiteness. Alexandra’s homestead is a “big white house that stood on a hill” with “so many sheds and outbuildings grouped about it that the place looked not unlike a tiny village” (40). The accompanying land is described as lush, prosperous, and at peace: On either side of the road, for a mile before you reached the foot of the hill, stood tall osage orange hedges, their glossy green marking off the yellow fields. South of the hill, in a low, sheltered swale, surrounded by a mulberry hedge, was the orchard, its fruit trees knee-deep in timothy grass. Any one thereabouts would have told you that this was one of the richest farms on the Divide, and the farmer was a woman, Alexandra Bergson. (40) For her part, Alexandra, too, exhibits a signifying whiteness: She still has the same calmness and deliberation of manner, the same clear eyes. . . . Her face is always tanned in the summer . . . but where her collar falls away from her neck, or where her sleeves are pushed back from her wrist, the skin is of such smoothness and whiteness as none but Swedish women ever possess: skin with the freshness of the snow itself. (42) In the tirelessness and purity of Alexandra as the egalitarian shepherd, we observe Cather’s need to put the anxieties of the frontier to rest, to not only pathologize those, like Ivar, who believe in non-Western interconnectivity but to bring them onside within the “limits ascribed” to them and under the aegis of white industry and its missionaries. We come to learn that Alexandra cares for a diverse flock of individuals, from her Swedish servants to her Irish foreman, Barney Flinn, to her brothers to Crazy Ivar. Alexandra’s big white

64  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities house, then, comes to symbolically represent Turner’s vision of America: a multicultural melting pot that serves to perpetually revivify the imperatives of American democracy and its white identity. That Alexandra’s idyllic village—her house, her servants, her wards in charity, her tidy garden, her burgeoning fields—may be viewed as a model for the nation suggests the hopeful ambition of Cather’s authorial intervention and the earnestness of her feminism. Yet insofar as Cather is unable to confront the land outside a developmental ontology, she remains bound to the Turner thesis of growth, a teleology where the natural world offers its virginity as a catalyzing medium for the virtuous: The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction of the farmer’s frontier. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. (Turner 28) What Turner paints as inexorable and cathartic at a national scale, Cather tends to individualize and personify. She writes that “it is in the soil that [Alexandra] expresses herself best” (41). And in a conversation with her longtime friend, Carl, Alexandra attests that the land chooses to develop itself: We hadn’t much any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its own little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still. (53, emphasis added) Through the individualization of Alexandra’s talent as a providential force upon the land and the personification of the land as another reformed adherent in Alexandra’s flock, Cather discretely justifies the motives of her protagonist and signals her tacit support for the empire. Broadly, O Pioneers! reflects uncritically the tendencies and ideologies of American westward expansion, yet there are important slippages within the novel that point to Willa Cather’s latent uneasiness with the legacy of colonization. As we will illustrate in the following section, these moments of hesitation are clearest in the scenes involving Marie Shabata, Alexandra’s Bohemian friend and neighbor. In the interplay between the two women, we discern a tension that may point to Cather’s self-consciousness as she negotiates and occludes the violence of the civilizing order.

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 65 Alexandra and Marie: Feminist Empire and Nomadic Ecology When we first meet Marie Tovesky, the Bohemian girl9 and friend of Alexandra’s, she is described as a “dark child, with brown curly hair, like a brunette doll’s, a coaxing little red mouth, and round, yellow-brown eyes. Everyone noticed her eyes; the brown iris had gold glints that made them look like goldstone, or, in softer lights, like that Colorado mineral called tiger-eye” (12). From the outset, Marie is defined by the darkness of her skin color and the rawness of her effect, capable of refinement but not necessarily on par with the driven, civilized, and snow-white Alexandra. Her father, Albert Tovesky, was “one of the more intelligent Bohemians who came West in the early seventies. He settled in Omaha and became a leader and adviser among his people there” (63). Not unlike John Bergson’s relationship with Alexandra, Marie is Albert’s favorite child, “the apple of his eye” (63). But in contrast to Alexandra, who is described as having an innate sense of purpose and volition, Marie is flippant, romantic, and predisposed to recklessness. Marie soon chooses to marry Frank Shabata, a “young man with high connections” whose “blue eyes” was an “interesting discontent” that “every Bohemian girl he met imagined herself the cause” (64). Disdainful of Marie’s poor instincts, Albert condemns Marie to a convent, where she pines over Frank for a year, “until her eighteenth birthday was passed” (65). Soon after, “she met Frank Shabata in the Union Station in St. Louis and ran away with him” (65). Since this fit of self-deterministic pique, that nevertheless redounds to domesticity, Cather writes, “her story had been a part of the history on the Divide” (65). Cather’s deep interest in the immigrants who populated the Divide becomes a representative (if not outright allegorical) primer and prescription for America where Alexandra and Marie come to embody the spiritual subjectivity of the New and Old World respectively.10 As Jean C. Griffith asserts, the liminality of the frontier and its new arrivals, for Cather, becomes a contested “site of Old-World survivals and their place in the New World” (398). Griffith goes on to explain that “these survivals are exemplified most forcefully in the contrast between the Swedish protagonist Alexandra Bergson and the Bohemian Marie Shabata. Unlike Alexandra, Marie is often excessively emotional . . . a trait associated both with traditional notions of femininity and with the supposedly ‘yielding’ temperament of Slavs” (398). If Cather imbues Alexandra’s “particular” Nordic inheritance with the trim competence of empire that “accounts for the certainty of her agricultural success in America,” she “dooms” Marie’s Slavic sensualism and her abiding closeness to the land as omens of anachronism, irresponsibility, and irrelevance. In this morality tale, pale Alexandra is the empire builder while darkened Marie literalizes Cather’s propensity for personification by standing in for the earth upon which such empires must be built; it is in this capacity that she is “part of the history of the Divide.” As we will demonstrate, Marie’s nomadic, Bohemian jouissance does appear to give Cather pause before it ultimately provides the disciplining pretense for Alexandra’s ideological victory.

66  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities As Cather emphasizes throughout (and subtly but consistently ascribes to her Slavic ethnicity), Marie presents as erratic, unwieldy, impulsive, and lacking direction but struck through with an orgastic vigor. Like fine iron ore in need of refinement, Marie possesses the potential to grow into the kind of character Cather might admire but in her choices (which Cather is at pains to bind to temperament), she forecloses such transformation. Most starkly, as we read Marie in contrast to Alexandra, we grasp Marie’s sexual excess relative to Alexandra’s asceticism. Alexandra’s management of her sexuality enables her to become a successful farm manager absent the presence of a man while Marie, unable to control her sexuality, is confined to a convent by her father and, once freed, only completes the dialectic of male control and desire by flying from her father to Frank. Cather makes Marie a vehicle through which male desire is transmitted, mediated, and maintained. Conversely, she foregrounds Alexandra as a protagonist free from male intervention. Yet, the historical context remains and the material reality persists where Alexandra’s father grants unto her the right to property and the expectation of legacy. Indeed, Alexandra’s desire to make her father proud motivates her throughout the novel even as it transforms her fortunes and the Divide. Only in the reformation of her sexuality into agricultural productivity can Alexandra acquire the tools and agency for what Cather envisioned as authentically feminist. Given this batch of attenuations, we would argue that Cather’s progressive ideal fails to cleave itself fully from the patriarchal gaze. But in constructing an alternative female protagonist over and against the visceral excesses of Marie, Cather actually modernizes the paradigmatic repression she seeks to disavow, refreshing only the representation while recreating the essential chauvinism at play.11 Tellingly, Cather metaphorizes Marie’s (purportedly aberrant) sexuality through a prism of her relation to the land. While Alexandra, bedecked in men’s clothing, strides across the plains as the surveying savior, Marie flits without aim. Marie’s sexual urgency evokes and coincides with the fertility of spring planting: Emil, Alexandra’s brother, and Marie’s secret lover asks of Marie, “What’s the matter with you? What makes you so flighty?” (66) and Marie responds, “Am I flighty? I suppose that’s the wet season, too, then. It’s exciting to see everything growing so fast” (66). Cather continues, [Marie] tripped away and Emil stood looking after her. In a few moments he heard the cherries dropping smartly into the pail, and he began to swing his scythe with that long, even stroke that few American boys ever learn. Marie picked cherries and sang softly to herself, stripping one glittering branch after another, shivering when she caught a shower of raindrops on her neck and hair. And Emil mowed his way slowly down toward the cherry trees. (66) One can imagine Marie’s “tripping” as a double entendre that may signify her coltish ungainliness or her lilting glide across the prairie, resolving, in

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 67 either image, to capture the play and joy of youth poised perilously against the supervision of society. Marie and Emil’s thickly suggestive duet of the cherry harvest, believing its agricultural character, creates with “glittering raindrops” a submersion within nature that can harbor the separate peace of their incipient adultery. Secreted away with Emil, Marie’s childlike naïveté communes with her Bohemian heritage to bolster an open, uninhibited, and instinctively ecological sensibility. She recounts to him: The Bohemians, you know, were tree worshipers before the missionaries came. . . . I’m a good Catholic, but I think I could get along with caring for trees, if I hadn’t anything else . . . I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I just begin where I left off. (67, emphasis added) Marie intrinsically understands the age and solemnity of the trees as one of Irigaray’s “first resources” with which one might exist in nature on its own terms; she somewhat subversively identifies the arrival of Christianity as an anti-ecological interloper and looks back to first-millennium paganism as a more profound lineage. Although Cather seems keen to honor the beauty of Marie’s libidinal effervescence and fervent love for the land (a mood she captures in her poetic epigraph “Prairie Spring”), she nevertheless renders Marie the fallen woman who befits and will soon receive a tragic end. Cather reports to the reader that “everything [was] done and over for [Marie] at twenty-three” (84). Trapped in an unhappy marriage with an “emptiness that ached in her heart,” (85) Marie becomes a victim of her own choices. A prisoner in her own marriage, “in the first days of their love she had been [Frank’s] slave [and] had admired him abandonedly . . . [but eventually] the spark of her life went somewhere else, and [Frank] was always watching to surprise it” (92). Marie grieves for her life of disappointment and marital duty on the prairie as she earlier grieved her father’s authority and would quickly come to grieve a third disastrous encounter with male desire in Emil: “before she knew what she was doing, she had committed herself to [a] kiss that was once a boy’s and a man’s, as timid as it was tender; so like Emil and so unlike anyone else in the world . . . it was like a sigh which they had breathed together; almost sorrowful, as if each were afraid of awakening something in the other” (93). Again, Cather consistently shades Marie as wilting under the inscription of the male gaze but in the final sequence of her story, this tendency comes into sharper focus as a narrative hedge against the author’s latent anxiety surrounding the conflicted female colonizer and the anti-ecology of imperialism. After the kiss, Marie rediscovers feelings of freedom and rapture, especially in nature. In one of the final scenes before her husband violently

68  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities murders them both, Marie has entered a state of repose that, notably, can now only be interrupted by Emil despite his kiss having augured it: Emil went softly down between the cherry trees toward the wheatfield. When he came to the corner, he stopped short and put his hand over his mouth. Marie was lying on her side under the white mulberry tree, her face half hidden in the grass, her eyes closed, her hands lying limply where they had happened to fall. She had lived a day of her new life of perfect love, and it had left her like this. Her breast rose and fell faintly, as if she were asleep. Emil threw himself down beside her and took her in his arms. The blood came back to her cheeks, her amber eyes opened slowly, and in them Emil saw his own face and the orchard and the sun. ‘I was dreaming this,’ she whispered, hiding her face against him, ‘don’t take my dream away!’ (107) Cather allows Marie’s subjectivity to explode with promise in each new encounter with male desire only to see it recede as a spent force with the sobriety of time; Alexandra is anti-romantic by contrast and marries her longtime friend for the steadfastness of their regard. There is some irony in placing Alexandra’s sustainable (qua ecological) disposition toward marriage alongside the fact that Marie’s damaging interactions with men seem to trace the cyclical and restless pursuit of the frontier. In any event, if Alexandra represents the Adamic visionary who wrests control from Nature over the Divide’s new Garden of Eden, Marie represents Eve, the temptress and sinner.12 Here Cather reaches a precipice. In her grief over the drudgery of the colonizer’s life, in her insurgent longing for an older and wilder subjectivity, and in her refusal to internalize the teleology of empire, the author has created in Marie a character unmoored by metaphysical convention in a novel ostensibly centered on Alexandra, a character unmoored by social convention but very much the champion of Western metaphysics and good order. Marie haunts the text. She haunts Alexandra and her rigid predisposition towards the land and humanity. Cather stays true to the civilizing mission, keeps a common cause with her white Anglo-Saxon identity, and chooses to demean Marie, who will not be tamed, by demoting her dissent into simple infidelity. To do away with the threat, Cather must do away with Marie and so her infidelity provides a sort of cover whereby Marie can be punished for her larger insurrections against the new hegemony on the prairie. Upset and confused by his own actions, Frank angrily blames Marie: “Why had she been so careless? She knew he was like a crazy man when he was angry. . . . Why had Marie made him do this thing; why had she brought this upon him?” (109–110). Even in death, Marie is Eve in a Garden now stained with her blood. In the couplings of remorse and conscious moralism that follow, Cather crucially weaves the gore of her and Emil’s demise with

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 69 the representation of landscape and it is here that her authorial ambivalence gives way to a new synthesis of purpose: The story of what had happened was written plainly on the orchard grass, and on the white mulberries that had fallen in the night and were covered with dark stain. For Emil the chapter had been short. He was shot in the heart and had rolled over on his back and died. His face was turned up to the sky and his brows were drawn in a frown, as if he had realized that something had befallen him. But for Marie Shabata it had not been so easy. One ball had torn through her right lung, another had shattered the carotid artery. She must have started up and gone toward the hedge, leaving a trail of blood. There she had fallen and bled. From that spot there was another trail, heavier than the first, where she must have dragged herself back to Emil’s body. Once there, she seemed not to have struggled anymore. She had lifted her head to her lover’s breast, taken his hand in both her own, and bled quietly to death. She was lying on her right side in an easy and natural position, her cheek on Emil’s shoulder. On her face there was a look of ineffable content. . . . But the stained, slippery grass, the darkened mulberries, told only half the story. Above Marie and Emil; two white butterflies from Frank’s alfalfa-field were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows; diving and soaring, now close together, now far apart; and in the long grass by the fence the last wild roses of the year opened their pink hearts to die. (110–111) The lands recur as a metaphor for Providence in O Pioneers! and we are now met with the brutal image of its pure orchard grasses stained by the sin of Marie’s final moments. Much as, to Cather’s mind, the wilderness on the Divide “desired” to be tamed away from overgrowth and danger, so does Cather imply that Marie herself wished to be tamed as the mask of death had given her “a look of ineffable content.” The author then reconciles her own anxiety about the terror of Marie and Emil’s murder, and the gory affront to the land, by naturalizing the scene; Marie and Emil had but “opened their pink hearts to die.” An open, nomadic, and free communion with the land cannot ultimately be sustained, by this thinking, and, rather, its razing shall be added to the burden of leadership for visionaries like Alexandra Bergson. This is how Cather negotiates the closing of the frontier, with its Maries and Ivars, and the inauguration of the empire, with its army of Alexandras. Only productivity visited upon the land at great cost will sustain America’s Providential mission; the costs substantiate the necessity. In a further justification at the close of the novel, Alexandra, reunited with her longtime friend and soon-to-be husband remarks: The land belongs to the future, Carl; that’s the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years?

70  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother’s children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while. (125) While one could perhaps argue Alexandra espouses a latent ecological humility in her surrender to mortality, her belief endures, beyond her own death, in the elect who “love” and “understand” not the land on its own terms but the organizing project of its ownership and exploitation. When she asserts that “the land belongs to the future,” she envisions the land belonging to its future owners rather than to its own permanence across time. Her metaphor of the unwillable sunset, then, falls into the same category of enabling religiosity with which she looked up at the stars in the first chapter; as ever, the land bends low to perform its dumbshow as human Providence. America’s imperial future lay behind Alexandra Bergson’s eyes from the opening of the novel to its close. From her summary dismissal of the Native American population at the beginning of O Pioneers! to the domestication of Ivar and the brutal deaths of Marie and Emil, Willa Cather struggles to reckon with a civilizational mission that can only be realized against its structuring absences—its ghosts and its bloodshed. Cather is not without the capacity for wonder at the natural world, and she grants to her protagonist this awe, but her unwavering faith in Alexandra’s talent for knowing and doing creates around her an ecology of exception that, even in the peace of the Plains, weaponizes the land to excuse not only Marie’s blood on the white mulberries but all the blood that preceded it and all the blood that would follow. However, insofar as it may be true that one is betrayed more by one’s poetry than by one’s prose, we would submit the final line of the author’s epigraph, “Prairie Song” as potential evidence of her surviving regard, compromised by purpose, for the wild and the free: Against all this, Youth, Flaming like the wild roses, Singing like the larks over the plowed fields, Flashing like a star out of the twilight; Youth with its insupportable sweetness, Its fierce necessity, Its sharp desire, Singing and singing, Out of the lips of silence, Out of the earthy dusk. Notes 1 Lucy Mayblin and Joe Turner’s 2021 Migration Studies and Colonialism intervenes in the current debate between anthropologists and historians concerning nomadism. In short, the authors argue that contemporary studies of migration fail to account for history and long-term impacts of colonialism.

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 71 2 Dyck explains: “Although Cather set much of her early work on the Nebraska prairie where she grew up, as an adult she resided in Pittsburgh and New York, working as an editor, journalist, critic, teacher, and writer. Characteristic of the New Woman, she gained a university education, chose not to marry, entered a profession, and rose to a position of considerable importance as managing editor of McClure’s, a leading magazine at the time” (Dyck 161). 3 As Douglas Werden writes in “She Had Never Humbled herself’: Alexandra Bergson and Marie Shabata as the ‘Real’ Pioneers of O Pioneers!”: “As a child and as a woman, Cather read and identified with male literary heroes full of selfdetermination, self-possession, power and autonomy. She reveled in the romance of the self-assertive individual whose personal forces could make a difference . . . she reviled novels that celebrated a woman’s unquenchable desire for a man’s love, whether it was nineteenth-century American domestic novels or the latenineteenth-century British sensationalist fiction” (Werden 205). 4 Werden writes: “Alexandra breaks society’s gendered perceptions that women were neither to be business administrators nor to perform tasks in a dominant position. Her challenge to these boundaries provides a pioneering route for other women farmers—farming with the mind instead of the body” (Werden 204). 5 For more on the Dust Bowl, see Donald Worster’s The Dust Bowl (1979), a historical text that exemplifies “the ecological decline of the Plains that came about through capitalist agriculture and ranching and resulted in the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl” (qtd. In Merchant, 90). 6 Some would argue that Cather’s depiction of Alexandra runs counter to what she had initially intended for her protagonist. For instance, as Nina Baym argues in “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” “[American] women [authors] are not likely to cast themselves as antagonists in a man’s story; they are even less likely . . . to cast themselves as virgin land. The lack of fit between their own experience and the fictional role assigned to them is even greater in the second instance than the first . . . If a woman puts a female construction on nature—as she certainly must from time to time—she is likely to write of it as more active, or to stress its destruction or violation. On the other hand, she might adjust the heroic myth to her own psyche by making out nature to be male—as, for example, Willa Cather seems to do in O Pioneers!” (75–76). Indeed, one could make the claim that Cather does masculinize the land; however, Alexandra only has access to the land in and through her father, thus further emphasizing that women are always mediated by male forms of power and desire—and Alexandra, although she takes ownership of the land, nevertheless is endowed with the power to control her farm through her father. Furthermore, she follows in the spirit of Western patriarchy in that she seeks to inseminate the land, thus fulfilling the role of the white male imperial pioneer. 7 As Mike Fischer articulates, “Cather usually chose not to remember the presence of Native Americans in Nebraska, or, perhaps more accurately, she literally seemed to forget their existence. While her short history of Nebraska does account for the Indians’ erstwhile presence, it does not try to account for their removal—nor explain how the peoples who roamed the prairies ‘undisturbed’ were eventually disturbed enough to disappear and make possible the agricultural paradise that she proclaims Nebraska to be” (34). 8 Historically, the West came to symbolize a Garden of Eden. As Carolyn Merchant illustrates, “A hostile environment, initially conceptualized as a Great American desert, was gradually brought under control and transformed into a garden, making the Great Plains a Garden of the World. That transition in perception occurred as people increasingly settled the Plains and gained control over nature” (89). 9 As the editor remarks, “Bohemia, an independent Slavic kingdom in central Europe, joined with Moravia and Slovakia to form the nation of Czechoslovakia

72  Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities in 1918. All Slavic immigrants from this region were known as ‘Bohemians’ in Nebraska” (12). 10 See Jean C. Griffith’s description: “Cather’s insistence on the roles women play in maintaining and transmitting cultural distinctiveness explains why her immigrant pioneers are so often women, and her reliance upon European racial differences explains why those women immigrants differ from one another. Cather’s novels, indeed, explore the distinctions between European races by assigning two very different versions of womanhood to them. Her Slav or Alpine immigrant women are tied to home, hearth, and ultimately to the past, while her Northern European, Nordic immigrants become independent, professionally minded New Women who transcend traditional gender roles and succeed in widening the scope of acceptable spheres for women” (398). 11 As Luce Irigaray articulates, women have historically been defined as the coexistence of opposites, existing by/for man, never necessarily able to achieve the “wholeness” of their form without the intervention of a male subject: “Woman, for her part, remains in unrealized potentiality—unrealized, at least, by/for herself. Is she, by nature, a being that exists for/by another? And in her share of substance, not only is she secondary to man but she may just as well not be as be. Ontological status makes her incomplete and uncompletable. She can never achieve the wholeness of her form. Or perhaps her form has yet to be seen—paradoxically—as mere privation? But this question can never be decided since woman is never resolved by/in being but remains the simultaneous co-existence of opposites” (165). The protagonist/foil binary of Alexandra/ Marie in O Pioneers! reflects the problematics Irigaray questions here. 12 See also where C. Susan Wiesenthal cites the Edenic motif within O Pioneers!: “Because indeed, the whole tragic point of the devolution of Alexandra and Marie’s relationship is undermined by Cather’s ultimate reliance upon the archetypal paradigm of the fallen Eve for Marie, and her apparently unqualified endorsement of a conventional marriage for Alexandra” (60–61).

Works Cited Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” American Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, 1981, pp. 123–189. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993. Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! Oxford World Classics, 1989. Comer, Krista. Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing. University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Dyck, Reginald. “Willa Cather’s Reluctant New Woman Pioneer.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, 2003, pp. 161–173. Fischer, Mike. “Pastoralism and its Discontents.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 1990, pp. 31–44. Griffith, Jean C. “How the West Was Whitened: ‘Racial’ Difference on Cather’s Prairie.” Western American Literature, vol. 41, no. 4, 2007, pp. 393–417. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman (Translated by Gillian C. Gill). Cornell University Press, 1974. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) (Edited by William Pedel). University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Mayblin, Lucy and Joe Turner. Migration Studies and Colonialism. Polity, 2021.

Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities 73 Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. Routledge, 2004. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1992. Myers, Jeffrey. Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature. University of Georgia, 2005. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New Hill & Wang, 1982. Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional, edited by Richard W. Etulain. Bedford, 1999. Werden, Douglas W. “ ‘She Had Never Humbled Herself’: Alexandra Bergson and Marie Shabata as the ‘Real’ Pioneers of O Pioneers!” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 3, 2002, pp. 199–215. Wiesenthal, Susan C. “Female Sexuality in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and the Era of Scientific Sexology: A Dialogue Between Frontiers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1990, pp. 41–63.

4 Errand of American Expansionism The Intersections of Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Natural Space in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat

“We [Haitians] have a collective agreement to remember our triumphs and gloss over our failures . . . in order to shield our shattered collective psyche from a long history of setbacks and disillusionment, our constant roller-coaster ride between saviors and dictators, homespun oppression and foreign tyranny, we cultivate communal and historical amnesia continually repeating cycles that we never see coming until we are reliving similar horrors.” Edwidge Danticat, “Daughters of Memory” “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread, and, above all, dignity.” Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Postcolonial fiction, in its many forms, practices, styles, and responses, has sought to rescue the abrogated histories of the oppressed from induced amnesia. Finding purchase within the interstices of patriarchy that has produced this shattering of native voice and memory, the postcolonial framework attempts to make whole those whose stories have been subsumed by the invisible ubiquity of the hegemon and, by this restoration, challenge an insidious historicity written upon the collective geopolitical ideation of nation building. Writing in “Daughters of Memory,” Haitian postcolonial author Edwidge Danticat places her first experience with Haitian literature after her arrival in the United States. As Danticat elucidates, she had read only French literature in colonized Haiti. This counterintuitive compels Danticat to weigh and examine the deeply insidious means through which cultural memory is constructed through the voice of the colonizer. In other terms, Danticat illustrates how cultural memory might be constructed when that native culture is denied its own historical memory by an imperial externality upon the homeland, which is to say (most keenly in the case of an island state such as Haiti), upon the interior of that culture. From here, we may observe the primacy of the land—as Fanon, a philosopher from another Caribbean colony, Martinique, does above—and especially its victimhood; it is here that we also may DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-4

Errand of American Expansionism 75 find parallel thefts. In the epigraph quoting Danticat above, she identifies the manifestation of cultural erasure within the “glossing over [of] failures” and “repeating [of] cycles,” while emphasizing the collective ways cultural trauma has been surreptitiously erased, forgotten, buried, and irrevocably recuperated throughout the long history of Haiti’s brutalized lifespan. As we emphasize within this chapter, Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones critically retrace these “failures . . . disillusionment[s] . . . oppression[s] and foreign tyrann[ies]” in order to revoice the silenced, gendered forensics that preceded such losses, thus highlighting the concomitant relationship between the violent masculinist geopolitics that underwrite both pre-colonial and colonial manifestations of empire and its devastating impact on women, men, and the land.1 From within the intersections between both novels, we examine how Danticat finds the potential for unity from within the unfurling and unearthing of these complex narratives which have, as Danticat elucidates, served as a means to shield the “shattered collective psyche” of the Haitian historical imaginative. In order to critically frame the insidious ontology of violence embedded, respectively, though not reductively, within both the pre-colonial and colonial patriarchal civilizing mission, we look briefly again to the work of early American historian and co-founder of the discipline of American Studies, Perry Miller. In his 1952 address delivered to the associates of the John Carter Brown Library and later, borrowing from a 1670 Massachusetts election sermon, published as a book, Errand into the Wilderness, Perry Miller explores the wider agenda (reason-for-being) of the first colonists in America; Miller’s title prompts a significant question: whose errand? While Miller’s address focused on the early transformation of the European mind, as settler colonists built and became a new nation, Americanist literary critic William V. Spanos observes American expansion as hinged not merely episodically but characteristically (perhaps virally) upon this notion of “the errand” into the new-as-difference. In Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation, Spanos explains that “Puritan thesis, in its secularized and hegemonized form, particularly that central, polyvalent, and enabling ethical core of its multifaceted exceptionalist character referred to as ‘the calling,’ persists, however beleaguered, into the twentieth century and beyond” (106). Elsewhere, Spanos elucidates what he means by the American exceptionalist ethos that undergirds the Puritan thesis: I am referring to the history of violence against America’s others inaugurated by the American Puritans in the name of their belief, modeled on the Old Testament Israelite Exodus from captivity to the ‘Promised Land,’ in their ‘election’ by God and their divinely sanctioned ‘vocation’—their ‘errand in the [New World] wilderness’: continued through the period of Westward expansion under the aegis of ‘Manifest Destiny’. (“American Exceptionalism” 292)

76  Errand of American Expansionism As Spanos illustrates, wilderness is not, in this sense, an originating problem to be “civilized” so much as a projected construction, expandable within the context of empire and yielding difference as a raw product. The land is therefore as wild as the empire is not. It is the first negative (the first other) upon which one may act: An Other—an alien/inferiority entity on the other side of the always moving dividing line between good and evil, settlement and wilderness, civilization and savagery, that threatens the divinely ordained errand and must, therefore, according to the imperatives of this exceptionalist logic, be eradicated by violence in behalf of the errand. (“American Exceptionalism” 296) Spanos’s work goes on to examine how American exceptionalism must conquer but also redeem, or claim to redeem, those who are conquered. This is the civilizing mission, a teleological narrative underpinned by cultural evolutionary and Social Darwinist thought. Its conquering and redeeming constitute, in effect, the irony of the errand into the wilderness: the invented solution to an invented problem submerged within a pathology of an organization that makes the difference it seeks to reform. Although Spanos speaks specifically of the relationship between American exceptionalism and global empire building, his critique may be better aligned with the ontological roots of the Western urge writ large. In this way, the younger American errand as initially defined by Miller and investigated further by Spanos provides a rubric for how violence, natural space, and women’s bodies everywhere come to intersect within the older international errand of a global empire. We know that both errands, the greater and the latest, coalesce (as they have in Haiti) around white patriarchy. In the work of Edwidge Danticat, specifically Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones, the author marks parallels between the pillaging of land and the sexual violence silently perpetuated against Haitian women in the building of the twentieth century.2 Through their respective narratives, both novels powerfully reveal the inevitably violent consequences of the colonial and patriarchal “errand” into the feminized subaltern space of the Caribbean. The incursive becomes connective where the colonialist/capitalist/patriarchal errand into the world’s wilderness invites comparison, where it seeks to dominate simultaneously environmental and individual reproductive space. In both novels, the representation of women and nature thereby creates an agential narrative space for the recording of a neglected history of subjugation and domination upon the person but also upon the land. The author’s exposure of these intersections enables a silenced culture to emerge: readers see how the exploitations and violence against the female body are by and for the West’s civilizing mission and the constant reinvigoration of a white, American masculinist ethos. As Anne McClintock makes plain in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest,

Errand of American Expansionism 77 the “transmission of white, male power through the control of colonized women” (2–3) is intimately aligned with Western hegemony. Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Farming of Bones carefully unfurl the brutality (and utility) at the heart of this white, masculinist ontological vehicle while giving constituent force back to the colonized woman, rendering her in charge of her own historiography. In both novels, Danticat juxtaposes the violence of white masculinity’s psychical void against its privileges. In this chapter, we analyze two novels because, taken together, as Danticat works through both the Duvalier regime and the Parsley Massacre, she highlights significant commonalities in women’s experiences (particularly of sexual violence and silencing) of the larger history of colonization and American expansionism in the Caribbean. In his work, Martin Munro discusses the 1937 massacre central to The Farming of Bones, as well as the brutal history of other U.S. interventions in the Caribbean. It is important to note, Munro suggests, that while Danticat focuses on a singular historical event in this novel that she “examines the effects of trauma on the individual and community, identifies what trauma destroys, and also indicates the new structures and sensibilities that emerge from the traumatic and post-traumatic condition” (237). Through this emphasis on the trauma of colonialism and neocolonialism, Danticat further proves the notion established in the preceding chapter: American empire is sustained on ecologies of racism, or dimensions of a gendered, territorialized geo-ontology that places color alongside ecological space, citing both as dangerous, errant. As we trace the internalization of the expansionist ethic through various texts and in various geographical spaces, we see in this chapter on the Caribbean that the ethic is absorbed in cycles of pain and sexual violence; its internalization here is psychic.3 Gender, land, and identity form the center of Danticat’s expostulation of colonialism’s cruelties in Haiti; they also map the practicalities of securing an empire. As ecofeminist scholar, Val Plumwood contests, “colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial, and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body constructed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture” (Plumwood 4). The masculinist dynamics of conquest embed within the Western concept of “reason” as an assumed tonality and this exclusionary/expeditionary structure self-justifies the colonization of non-white culture, alongside the land, by casting both as a “lesser form of humanity.” Danticat exposes how these ontological imperatives of Western metaphysics have historically situated colonized women as passive/nonagents/non-subjects alongside a colonized landscape of the same character: by codifying nature as terra nullius, a resource emptied of its own purposes, bereft of inherent meaning and presented as an invisible background against which the achievements of the Western reason may take place, “part of a sharply separate, even alien lower realm, whose domination is simply ‘natural,’ flowing from nature itself and the nature(s) of things” (Plumwood 4).4 An example of this is the way in which Danticat links sexual abuse by the

78  Errand of American Expansionism Tonton Macoutes, as well as a tradition of “testing” daughters to ensure purity before marriage, to the eventual suicide (by 17 stabs to the stomach, or more precisely, womb) by Martine in Breath, Eyes, Memory. Each instance of sexual violence is inscribed upon the landscape of Martine’s body and is presented in the novel as nocturnal violence that haunts Martine in her sleep and in the dark, and makes her, in the end, an invisible entity upon which the Western errand into the wilderness has dominated, colonized, and silenced. Giving agency back to women and the land—by giving voice to the violent history silently recorded upon them—Danticat’s narratives reclaim a primordial conceptual power from the impositions of Western patriarchy/ imperialism. Even more, Danticat reveals in both novels the extent to which “the one who does the othering, the ‘self,’ who is the measure of identity, of normalcy, intelligence and of the right values, makes himself invisible” (Roothan 22, emphasis added). The “invisible” workings of masculinist geopolitics are animated and centralized in both works of fiction to simultaneously demystify and centralize the systemic workings of the empire carved into the land. More finely, Danticat’s narrative potential is located within her visceral representation of the pain women experienced at the point of imperial assumption. As articulated in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s “Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” “We need a way to talk about the materiality of the body itself as an active, sometimes recalcitrant force. Women have bodies; these bodies have pain as well as pleasure. We need a way to talk about these bodies and the materiality they inhabit” (144–145). By foregrounding the significance of pain suffered by women at the hands of their (largely male or, surely, patriarchal) colonial assailants, Danticat animates the trauma of the body as a site of dissent, injustice, and simple invasion while denuding the process by which this coercion becomes calcified as a naturalism of its own. While Breath, Eyes, Memory focuses primarily on the subjugation of women’s bodies in the name of nation-building and The Farming of Bones is concerned more generally with metaphors of gender, land, and trauma, the two novels unite in their use of memory as a literary device. In “Restoring Haitian Women’s Voices and Verbalizing Trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory,” Angela Watkins takes up Danticat’s emphasis on memory and forgetting, as evidenced in this essay’s epigraph from “Daughters of Memory.” Watkins writes, “To forget is to give an incomplete history; it results in the inability to confront the past, however painful the memories, and to heal” (114). In both Breath, Eyes, Memory5 and The Farming of Bones, Danticat employs memory in the reconstruction of a past previously foreclosed by hegemonic control. Danticat writes to insist that sexual violence, land exploitation, slavery, and plantation economy are part of Haiti’s history as a nation, a history obscured in the long, foreign-aided shadows of Duvalier and Trujillo that must be confronted fully in order to inoculate against recurrence. To colonize is to control, dominate, violate, commodify, and enslave. These form a singular impulse; all speech posed counter to one emanation of this urge,

Errand of American Expansionism 79 even a single instance of physical trauma wherein these hegemonic forces are invoked, touches the superstructure. Thus, the novels present “alternative archive[s] to hegemonic history” (Vargas 1162). Danticat gives voice to women (and the land) as recorders of a silenced political history or, more to the point, as the makers of an indictment against a historical narrative that has neglected its highly physical (and, then, psychic) impact on women’s bodies and the natural world. This notion is brought together fully when Tante Atie tells Sophie as they visit a cemetery, “Walk straight, you are in the presence of family” (149). The Farming of Bones recounts the 1937 Parsley Massacre, where Rafael Trujillo organized the genocide of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The exact numbers of the dead are unknown, but historians estimate over 8,000 perished at minimum. Danticat’s title is invoked in Chapter Ten when Amabelle describes working in the cane fields as “travay te pou zo,” or the farming of bones (55). Throughout the novel, work in the cane fields is portrayed as scarring and mutilative, for workers, in the literal sense, for the fields that must be burned between harvests and, of course, for the well-organized tumble into mass killing that might “naturally” follow. Where the body is a site of oppression in The Farming of Bones, so is the land, and we see them intertwined as imagery in the text. Those closest to the land share its erasure and are thus closest to the original lie of the colonizer, that there is a blankness in the world upon which others may write. Their proximity infuses the threat of the land into their bodies. Their vantage, when activated as an alternative history, rebukes and makes perilous the consolidating and myopic imperial project. For this, they invite the worst attention of the colonizer. In reading Danticat, we are shown who the patriarchy are, those who seek to ever rescue this system of invented rescues with endlessly profound violence. We are also shown the others, that constituency indigenous to the lie, receivers of the violence, natives of the subjective object, be it the land or the body. Without question, their trauma is a reproach of received Western norms but Danticat finds in their treatment a defusing blueprint where understanding (and its attendant power) may yet yield a measure of justice. Breath, Eyes, Memory

In her work, Susan Bordo explains what is written upon the body: “The body . . . is a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphorical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body” (165). Working from a similar notion of the cultural significance of the body, Breath, Eyes, Memory positions the tropes of women’s bodies and the land to question the presence of state violence and connect it back to the initial American errand into the wilderness, exposing a violent, diffuse mythology.6 Jean-Claude Gerlus has written about the Cold War period and how it “reinforced the relations

80  Errand of American Expansionism between the U.S. and Haiti from the 1960s to mid-1980s” because the U.S. perceived a Communist threat in the Caribbean, yet it considered Haiti as ruled by Duvalier “as an ally against Soviet expansionism” (34). Therefore, Duvalier’s threat to the women in this novel—his haunting presence in the text—is a direct reflection of the American errand and the Cold War policies that extend from it. To echo discussions of Hortense Spillers’s work in a previous chapter, if the body is wilderness, capitalism inscribes itself upon the body to tame and control it. To control bodies is to ensure their functioning in the capitalist machine. The novel’s linkage of the female and the ecological draws out the sameness by which both have been presumed as blank, modifiable sites for the business of cultural violence, and how this consolidated victimhood might resurface the early coding of the colonial errand. Breath, Eyes, Memory is particularly concerned with the ways in which sexual violations against women and the exploitation of nature are obscured by the state—they are dismissed as exaggerated, inconsequential aberrations that do not impact (or elucidate) the political or cultural life of society at large.7 This is an extension of what we have termed ecologies of racism: a gendered, territorialized geo-ontology by the colonialist, imperialist errand that places women of color alongside ecological space, citing both as dangerous, errant, threatening, and unruly. Danticat’s project with this text, then, as well as the other addressed in this essay—The Farming of Bones—is part of what Edward Glissant terms the reclamation of Haitian history, seen here through tracing back to the errand from the constellation of its constituent violence. Land and bodies necessarily coextend here as primary sites of commodification and exchange within the colonizing impulse so their linkage amounts to a reconciliation. Tante Atie’s name, for example, is derived from the Haitian word for earth, and Sophie’s married name, Woods, is a direct connection back to the land, the wilderness. Breath, Eyes, Memory tells generational stories of four Caco women—each of whom passes their burdens and traumas to the next generation.8 Violence recorded on silenced bodies that then silence other bodies presents a cynical metaphor for the cyclical nature of capitalist/patriarchal social reproduction. Sophie Caco, acting as the keeper of the family’s memories, narrates the novel; her mother, Martine, was raped and impregnated in a cane field by a Tonton Macoute. Here we see Danticat speaking to sexual trauma through place and demonstrating that the land, too, keeps memories (and secrets). In the rape scene, Sophie’s emphasis on the earth and the silence created by the omnipresence of the Macoutes speaks to how both the land and Haitian women are haunted and hushed: Outside the fairy tales, [Tonton Macoutes] roamed the streets in broad daylight, parading their Uzi machine guns. Who invented the Macoutes? The devil didn’t do it and God didn’t do it. . . . My father might have been a Macoute. He was a stranger, who, when my mother was sixteen years old, grabbed her on her way back from school. He

Errand of American Expansionism 81 dragged her into the cane fields, and pinned her down on the ground. He had a black bandana over his face so she never saw anything but his hair, which was the color of eggplants. He kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a sound. When he was done, he made her keep her face in the dirt, threatening to shoot her if she looked up. (138–139, emphasis added) Here we see the violence of the American errand, of colonialism and American expansion, of hegemonic force, passed to the Macoutes from the American military and then wielded as a weapon against their own women. This paramilitary force was actively supported by the United States to “restore stability,” but did so by brandishing weapons and touting absolute power to control the bodies of citizens, particularly women. The Macoutes were given free rein to terrorize citizens by Duvalier, whose reign was “synonymous with greed, corruption, and oppression” (Torgman 119). As Donette Francis writes, “Duvalier’s willful choice of [the] name [Macoutes]—which translates to ‘mythological bogeyman’ and suggests ‘not real’—for his militia force enabled him to camouflage his own violations against his citizens, especially sexual violations against women” (81). The scene above is an example of what Hortense Spillers calls “severing the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” (67). Spillers goes on to explain that the “captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality” and “at the same time—in stunning contradiction—the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor” (emphasis in original, 67). As Danticat evinces through the novel, this “being for the captor” is passed on from mother to daughter by the sexual violence of “testing.” Like the cyclical nature of trauma explored in The Bluest Eye in the following chapter, Danticat is highlighting what the Macoutes learned from American imperialism, passed to Haitian citizens through sexual and physical violence, and what Haitian women silently internalized and passed on to the next generations. The color imagery of the novel—and the contrast that emerges with this significant passage—are important to note. Where Danticat consistently uses yellow, bronze, and gold colors in the initial descriptions of Haitian women’s bodies and clothes (yellow and bronze in Chapter Two, for example, correspond to the “skin of the natives” (21)) or even the women’s possessions (Tante Atie tells Sophie that everything she owns is yellow: “wildflower yellow, like dandelions, sunflowers” and that Sophie’s mother “loved daffodils” (21)), this is in stark contrast to the dark colors of black and eggplant in the violent passage of rape quoted earlier. This darkness drives out the light and points to the nocturnal violence that haunts the Caco women: “For months she was afraid that he would creep out of the night and kill her in her sleep” (139). In addition to symbolizing imperialism more broadly, the containment of female figures within the landscape (in this scene, Martine is almost beaten into the land) evokes the historical characterization of the frontier as a specifically female territory, ripe for settlement. It also directs the reader

82  Errand of American Expansionism to consider here how popular conceptions of the American landscape have obscured U.S. expansionism and imperial history. Violence in this scene is enacted against both Martine and the land. When Martine passes sexual violence to Sophie, we see what Fanon describes as “the neurotic colonized subject who does not resist the oppressors but instead tries to become more like them” (Koopman 306). Caco being the lifeblood of the Haitian monocrop economy, the women’s name and lineage are immediately joined with nature, which, like them, is used for the benefit of imperial conquest.9 As Francis elaborates in her article, “ ‘Silences Too Horrific to Disturb’: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory,” invoking the Caco name implicates the American presence in Haiti. During the 1915–1934 occupation, U.S. Marines, in instituting the Gendarmerie, “dismantled the Haitian legislature and replaced it with a puppet Council of State, overriding local civil courts” (78). This allowed the American military presence to effect a “significant shift in Haitian political culture by installing a military state that ruled against the nation as the state now followed the dictates of the U.S. government rather than Haitian citizens” (78).10 In the process, the systematic sexual harassment and rape of local Haitian women took place, but these acts were effectively silenced as they went “unrecognized, unnamed, and unpunished by the U.S. government” (78). We may therefore observe Caco as a patronymic of American imperialist abuse and of solidarity with the accompanying victimhood of the land. Not unlike The Farming of Bones, memory is used in this novel to construct and voice a silenced history that has been written on the violated and exploited bodies of women and the land. Reconstructing four generations of memory involves centralizing black women’s traumas and refuting Haiti’s official historical record of colonial resistance and triumph.11 The novel also moves between Haiti and the United States, suggesting, as Francis writes, that “one geographical space” cannot “explain the complexities of these women’s lives” (76). Through the reckoning of these violent acts, an alternative archive is brought to bear, as the novel makes visible the various sites and scenes of violation. But Danticat’s rejoinder goes beyond mere acknowledgment. She usurps the imperial prerogative and chooses for herself what is henceforth to be visible: on bodies of land and bodies of women. It is in the metaphysical logic of patriarchal western imperialism—born of the errand into the wilderness—that women and the land shall be subaltern, Other, terra incognita. It is in this conceived blankness that we may discern the excuse for imperialist license and so to threaten the conceit of non-entity is to revoke the legitimization of the errand. Danticat’s reference to Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes, his masked paramilitary force deployed to pacify the rural countryside in particular, and infamous to Haitians for raping women and making people disappear, calls back to the eradication of difference as the unitary filling of an enforced void.12 The Macoutes operate on gendered violence that reinforces paternalism, imperialism, and the commodification of women,

Errand of American Expansionism 83 systematically silencing them and erasing them from social discourses. In the novel, the use of dark shades and figures lurking represents how the Duvalier era hangs over the central characters. As Sharrón Eve Sarthou writes, “inside the Caco house, the human silence is deafening” (106). For example, of Martine’s rape in the cane field, Carole Sweeney notes the resultant silence of her trauma: “In the cane field, the site of so much violence to Haiti’s population, Martine is raped of her language, the dirt in her mouth a grotesque mirroring of the degradation of the genital rape” (60). By this, Martine is “literally unvoiced” (Sarthou 106), choked by the raw material of her larger imperial subjugation. As Myriam Chancy writes, “The experience of the Haitian woman is defined by exile within her own country, for she is alienated from the means to assert at once feminine and feminist identities at the same time that she undergoes the same colonial experiences of her male counterparts” (13). Danticat’s novels reclaim Haitian women from this alienated, exilic state and reanimate their respective historiographies as the vocal heart and soul of both their own narratives and their nation. In “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duvalierest State, Transnationalism, and the Emergence of a New Feminism (1980–1990),” Carolle Charles contends that their designation as “dependents” once offered women in Haiti a degree of protection from political violence. Pre-Duvalier, “Women, children, and old people were defined as political innocents . . . [U]nder the Duvalierist state, however, systemic repressive policies undermined the prevailing conception of women as passive political actors” (139). The significant change under Duvalier then is not simply the increased violence perpetrated against women, but that the utility of such violence was so clearly to strip away their political neutrality, as a hinge point in the projection of power. While Beverly Bell’s book, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance notes that women do report rape in Haiti in very high numbers, these efforts are disappeared by hegemonic patriarchal narratives, and the state itself. Indeed, the Duvalier era was marked by “misogynist views ingrained in the culture, and self-imposed silence for fear of retribution” (Watkins 110). Danticat begins with this silence. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Atie separates herself from a familial history of sexually abused women by documenting it in official town records. Atie also keeps a notebook of her writing, despite her mother’s objection. While critics have debated whether Sophie or Martine are ultimately able to overcome the abuse they’ve endured, there is general agreement that Atie, who is closely associated with the act of writing and also functions as a storyteller in the text, achieves autonomy and is able to break the cycle of sexual violence.13 On the other hand, Martine is arguably trapped and successfully silenced by her traumas. After her brutal rape at the age of 16, she flees Haiti for the United States. While she hopes that this will allow her to put the experience behind her, readers see it fester as she suffers from nightmares that induce tearing at her own flesh. Eventually, she takes her own life because of a second unplanned pregnancy that only intensifies the violent nightmares. The silence surrounding Martine’s trauma

84  Errand of American Expansionism causes her suicide—the memory of it is never actually confronted; there is no real hope for catharsis. Martine’s traumas have her repeating rituals of self-harm and this prevents her from articulating or narrating the trauma to arrive at a catharsis. As Dominick LaCapra writes, In acting out, the past is performativity regenerated or relived as if it were fully present rather than represented in memory and inscription, and it hauntingly returns as the repressed. Mourning involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past which involves recognizing its difference from the present—simultaneously remembering and taking leave of or actively forgetting it, thereby allowing for critical judgment and a reinvestment in life. (716) Conversely, Sophie is able to verbalize her trauma in therapy, heal her resentment toward her mother and find some resolution. The use of migration here unpacks the nexus of land and body: Martine can leave the land, but not the memory, and remains haunted and silenced. Sophie, in her return to Haiti, confronts the land to confront the memory and begins the process of overcoming it. The novel ends with Sophie’s return to the cane field: I ran through the field, attacking the cane. I took off my shoes and began to beat a cane stalk. I pounded it until it began to lean over. I pushed over the cane stalk. It snapped back, striking my shoulder. I pulled at it, yanking it from the ground. My palm was bleeding. The cane cutters stared at me as though I was possessed. The funeral crown was now standing between the stalks, watching me beat and pound the cane. My grandmother held back the priest as he tried to come for me. From where she was standing, my grandmother shouted like the women from the market place, ‘Ou libere?’ Are you free? Tantie Atie echoed her cry ‘Ou Libere!’ Ou libere are you free, my daughter. Now you will know how to answer. (234) In this scene, we see that Sophie’s overcoming is premised upon her use of the land and her body to express herself against poisonous cultural practices. In returning to the cane fields, Sophie is also directly confronting Haiti’s plantation economy, symbolic of the system of slavery that bore it out. As the Macoutes are an extension of Duvalier’s power, here, Sophie is confronting both. Because he was backed financially and militarily by the United States, and by his “ruthless death squads,” and because Sophie frames the rape scene in a folktale, Watkins argues that the Caco women’s use of folktales “implicate the Duvaliers as the personification of the slave master” (112). As Clare Counihan argues, in the stories that symbolize the mother line Sophie seeks to reclaim, Grandma Ifé and Martine never name the slave master (or his violations)

Errand of American Expansionism 85 explicitly, but the religious and folk figures who inhabit their tales, like Erzulie, continue . . . to articulate and embody a memory of slavery, intimacy and revenge with their veiled narratives of sexual danger. (39) Importantly, the novel also carefully documents the act of “testing” prevalent in Haitian culture. The testing is the kind of destructive invasion premised on preservation that is the basis of the original errand. The landscape of the female body is therefore settled through the act of testing. Sophie’s grandmother, Ifè, of a generation of women powerfully influenced by the patriarchal agenda, inaugurates the family tradition of “testing” girls who have reached puberty. The process, of course, is meant to ensure that young women remain “unspoilt” (virginal) for marriage. As Watkins explains, “like female circumcision” the act “denies women’s sexual pleasure by inflicting psychological and physical trauma upon the mind and the body” (110). The act, visited upon girls in order to preserve the notion of male sexual conquest, is overtly performed but goes essentially unaddressed within the community, another externally initiated site of self-policed silence, and one that gives the lie to the safety of sexual moralism. As suggested by Counihan, “the logic of testing provides a fiction in which women exert a degree of sexual agency: by remaining within the boundaries of sexual propriety testing defines, women can (supposedly) forestall imminent rape” (40). In the novel, Martine contrasts how Atie screams in protest when their mother tests her against her own inability to do the same; in this, she illustrates how silence forestalls agency. Martine tells Sophie, “The one good thing about my being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day” (Breath, Eyes, Memory 170, emphasis in original). Here Danticat implicates the inadvertent complicity of many women in continuing cycles of violence and abuse—under the dominion of the hegemon, victims become conscripted as enforcers: as silence passes from one woman to another, as the dirt in Martine’s mouth is both an agricultural totem of usurpation and a literal silencer, as the Macoutes annihilate the humanity of their own people under the yoke, ultimately, of an externality, trauma suffered repeats as trauma performed and always in silence. Martine’s silence, evocative of the Duvalier era’s censorship of women’s protests, passes her trauma to Sophie, an inheritance set in motion as she is exposed to her mother’s violent nightmares, in which Martine rips at her own flesh, and realized as Sophie is first tested. In a brutal parallel, Sophie will later rip apart her own flesh with a pestle to avoid further testing (Breath, Eyes, Memory 88). In her essay on The Bluest Eye, Debra Werrlein argues that “parents who emerge from histories of oppression might reproduce that degradation within the family unit” (61). Here we may notice that the sexual abuse of women points backward to a slave tradition, but also forward to—just as in The Bluest Eye—the transgenerational trauma that Danticat emphasizes in the novel.14 While each woman’s body records trauma and violence—be it through testing, rape, or the bulimia Sophie endures—articulation of the event, as

86  Errand of American Expansionism we have stressed, often remains too difficult. Sophie says, “It took me twelve years to piece together my mother’s entire story. By then, it was already too late” (61). When Aunt Atie is tasked with telling Sophie how she was conceived, her voice, its promise having previously separated her, fails as she stops short of the full truth. To stop the testing, Sophie lets her believe she lost her virginity to Joseph, opting to employ the lie rather than attempt any direct confrontation with her trauma. These traumas, and surrenders, are explicitly connected to the state, as we see when Sophie returns to Haiti in adulthood. For example, the murder of a coal man by a Macoute exhumes memories of her mother’s rape in a cane field. When at the marketplace with her grandmother, Sophie encounters a Macoute herself, who “grabbed his crotch with one hand, blew me a kiss, then turned back to the others” (117). Duvalier’s looming “bogeyman” presence in the novel is articulated here and throughout as sexual danger; violence visited upon women is not only a runoff surplus of the state’s monopoly on violence, as we might regularly suspect, but, in this instance, it is component to an organized and overt design toward power. Similarly, patriarchal fantasies of sexualized revenge are articulated by the Macoutes as well: “they asked to be fed, demanded the woman of the house, and forced her into her own bedroom” (139). Indeed, in her essay on the novel, Angela Watkins begins with the notion that the “figurative dark presence” of the Duvalier regime hangs over the women in the novel (106) as a literal bogeyman appropriated from the Vodou religion, Baron Samedi, the god of death: “donning dark glasses, a top hat, and a dark suit as he determined the fate of the Haitian people” (112). Watkins argues the dark god figuration gets at the completeness of Duvalier’s power and control, in that a bogeyman can be lurking anywhere at any time—often appearing out of the darkness when one least expects it. And the darkness is instructive here. In Sophie’s many dreams of her mother, cheerful imagery of the bright sun and daffodil flowers is, as previously discussed, consistently deployed: “My mother’s face was in my dreams all night long. She was wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair . . . I was lost in the yellow of my mother’s sheets” (28). These points of light coalesce as memory, contrapuntal to Martine’s desire to repress her violent nightmares and thereby forget. In turn, the bright colors with which Sophia idealizes her mother must be measured against the darkness of her conception in the cane field. Danticat positions the promise of reconstructed memory for these women against the dark reality of life in Duvalier’s Haiti and offers a realist appraisal of the value and pain of reconstituted agency. Watkins writes, “Whereas gender had once shielded Haitian women from political terror even as it excluded them from political discourse, the Duvaliers initiated a new form of violence that effectively silenced them” (112). Danticat challenges the nullifications of the regime in her insistence on remembering— memory may be credibly elevated as the central trope in her narrative and through memory, we see the often halting but potent journey from articulation to the possibility of a real breakout. Returning to Spanos, the women in

Errand of American Expansionism 87 the novel are treated as inferior entities, others in need of containment when they attempt political participation and voice in the Duvalier era—which is of course haunted by the American presence and ethos (Martine remarks, for example, that the cold in America “turns us to ghosts” (160)). Faced with this cordoning, Danticat unites the mentalities and methodologies of the relegation of women with the process by which the land is similarly voided and rendered as currency. While the land must remain inert to its victimhood, the Others, even in a “silence too horrific to disturb,” might yet find a voice. The Farming of Bones

The Farming of Bones similarly centralizes and animates the voice of the female subaltern as a site of agency, resistance, and autonomy from within a landscape of brutal patriarchal violence while examining, challenging, and revealing the ontological roots of the errand. Within The Farming of Bones, Danticat maps a counter-historical literary ecology that foregrounds a “spatial imagination made possible by the experience of place” (DeLoughrey and Handley 4). Oddly enough, Danticat noted in a 1998 interview with Mallay Charters that the Parsley Massacre is an event that “nature has no memory of” (42). In her description of visiting the Massacre River, the site of the genocide, she said: It was really strange to stand there—it was low tide, and people were bathing, and washing their clothes in the water. . . . There are no markers. I felt like I was standing on top of a huge mass grave, and just couldn’t see the bodies. That’s the first time I remember thinking, ‘nature has no memory’ and that’s why we have to have memory. (43) As she attempts to recover individual stories and challenge the calculated historical erasures of the archives, Danticat is working through trauma, emphasizing how unresolved trauma is carried forward and repeated (not unlike what she does in Breath, Eyes, Memory). As Megan Feifer explains, “In doing so, the novel addresses the temporal relationship between history as a historical moment and the ways in which an event remains rooted in the present day” (39). Focusing on individual stories in the novel in order to work through collective trauma “testifies to the importance of re-remembering what has been left out of the history books” (39). The notion of re-remembering is a reminder of the impact of historical events on individuals despite a lack of acknowledgment in the official record. But re-remembering also connects the lived trauma to the physical site at which it occurred. Contrary to Danticat’s assessment that “nature has no memory,” Feifer writes, “Spaces, then, like physical bodies, become receptacles of trauma” (39). As Danticat herself demonstrates in Breath, Eyes, Memory, there are specific “locations in which one is forced to remember an act and the emotions that surround

88  Errand of American Expansionism it” (Feifer 40). The Farming of Bones indeed suggests that geographic space is significant in working through trauma, as spaces and places mark memories and often silenced events. The novel, Danticat explains, works through trauma: The book itself, the telling, is meant as a path towards healing. The pain goes into the telling of the story. The pain goes into the telling, both for me and for her (main character of the novel). The rituals don’t exist. No markers. We have to recreate them, Our words are the markers of the past and its effect on the present and the relationship to heal is of particular note. (Adisa 350) At the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to Amabelle, through whom the memories of the 1937 Parsley Massacre are narrated. The novel retells the story of the massacre, in which approximately 20,000 Haitians were killed by the Generalissimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina regime.15 Amabelle is a living vestige of the traumas her lineage has suffered and, as the novel unfolds, an embattled warrior who fights her way through the massacre, narrowly escaping death while simultaneously watching her land and people suffer and die under the hands of the infamous Dominican dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molinda. Danticat utilizes Amabelle to reveal the inherited gendered violence enacted on the men and women of her nation, thus initiating a profound dialogue around the concomitant intersectional relationship of colonial violence enacted on the colonized body and the land. While Danticat foregrounds the gendered violence both women and men experienced under Trujillo, she purposefully narrates the story through a female character in order to animate and illuminate the inherently masculinist dynamics invisibly written into the geopolitical colonial errand. As Anne McClintock exemplifies in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, “In myriad ways, women served as mediating and threshold figures by means of which men oriented themselves in space, as agents of power and agents of knowledge” (24). Since colonized women were the vessels through which male colonial power was most brutally exercised, these women were able to experience, and see, the workings of power most viscerally and explicitly. In The Farming of Bones, Amabelle is the keeper of memory, the voice of her people, and the witness of the atrocities of her colonizers. But even before we truly meet Amabelle, we meet her memories and her subconscious, both of which are inextricably tied to the natural world—specifically, the Dajabón River. It is well known that the Dajabón River, which serves as the northernmost part of the international border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the site of mass human carnage. Beginning with her nightmares of the Dajabón River, we learn not only of Amabelle’s deep relationship with her native natural world but of the integral ways in which the colonial struggles over geography, land, and water shape the memory,

Errand of American Expansionism 89 subjectivity, and narrative of the Haitians who were surreptitiously brutalized by the patriarchal imperatives of the Western civilizing mission. Further, we learn of the ways in which the violent masculinist imperatives of the errand are endemic to, and inscribed within, geopolitical mapping itself. When readers meet Amabelle, they also meet her lover, Sebastien Onius, a cane worker: both of whom are subaltern servants within the lowest Haitian class in the Dominican Republic. The novel begins: “His name is Sebastien Onius. He comes most nights to put an end to my nightmare, the one I have all the time, of my parents drowning” (1). Steeped in the trauma of her parents’ death, Amabelle’s nightmares are a metaphor for the subaltern, severed positionality of Haitians from their native land coupled with the visceral memories of violence and tragedy embedded in the river’s memories. The river is what connects Amabelle to her past while serving as a mediating threshold symbol of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, an ongoing site upon which the markings of colonial power are violently negotiated yet continually usurped by the power of the river itself. Within The Farming of Bones, the Dajabón itself is a character. The river is the keeper of memories, a place that was once a peaceful intermediary between members of the Dominicans and Haitians. On the day her parents drowned in the Dajabón, River, Amabelle recalls a peaceful crossing of the river into Dajabón, “the first Dominican town across the river” to purchase pots from local merchants (48). Amabelle’s recounting of the amicable relations between Dominicans and Haitians illustrates the deeply complex historical archives buried within the island of Hispaniola. As Richard Lee Turits argues in “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,” “Oral histories reveal how ethnic Haitians and ethnic Dominicans living in the northern frontier region had mixed fluidly and often formed families together” (596). Amabelle’s earliest memories of crossing the river and back exemplify the complexity of a history that was all but eradicated with the Massacre—and the Dajabón River is one site within which these narrative archives are held. For Danticat, the inextricable relationship between space, place, and identity is endemic to recuperating a lost historiography. To quote from Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, “the individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings need to be understood” (105–6). We place such emphasis on the Dajabón because it bears witness to these forces of history; the Dajabón River is a unifier of events, a threshold space within which life and death are recounted, relived, remembered, and carried away. Furthermore, the river is a dynamic space onto which the cultural values of characters are projected and revealed. For Amabelle’s parents, who were both healers and had a profound reverence for the natural world, the river is a living entity, worthy of respect and fear: “my father reaches into the current and sprinkles his face with the water as if to salute the spirit of the river and request her permission to enter. My mother crosses herself three times and looks up to the sky before

90  Errand of American Expansionism she climbs on my father’s back” (49). Amabelle’s recounting of this moment is but one example within the novel where Danticat illustrates her family’s animistic relationship to nature, a relationship predicated on the inert belief of “spirit” within all living beings, objects, and spaces. Despite the grave foreshadowing and fatal circumstances of her parents’ consequent drowning in the river, the description of this moment nevertheless reveals the profound reverence and respect Amabelle’s lineage has for the land and water— especially for its unprecedented, and dangerous, power. As ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant elucidates in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, “because language contains a culture within itself, when language changes, a culture is also changing in important ways. By examining changes in descriptions of nature, we can then perceive something of the changes in cultural values” (12). Amabelle’s descriptive memory animates the ecologically interconnected value system of her family. In this respect, their consequent death within the Dajabón River symbolizes and exemplifies the loss of a waning way of life that has slowly been overtaken by the West’s “images of mastery and domination, [which] functioned as cultural sanctions for the denudation of nature” (Merchant 11). Further, the ghosts of Amabelle’s memory, which continually haunt her dreams throughout the novel, reveal the persistence of historiographical memory embedded in nature— despite the West’s compulsory momentum to all but eradicate these histories. The continual interweaving of the Dajabón River throughout the novel, whether in Amabelle’s hauntings or the events that unfold around the river, makes the Dajabón River one of the most important characters within The Farming of Bones. Amabelle is born from her history and the trauma of her lineage, and her narrative bears witness to both. Danticat’s exemplification of the river within the novel, therefore, serves as “a participant in [the] historical process rather than a bystander to human experience” (DeLoughrey and Handley 4). Water (and land) are agential forces in The Farming of Bones, consistently bearing witness to the ongoing suffering and struggles of its native peoples while remaining an active force in their lives. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley argue, “since it is the nature, so to speak, of colonial powers to suppress the history of their own violence, the land and even the ocean become all the more crucial as recuperative sites of postcolonial historiography” (8). Through its centralization of nature as an agentic force, The Farming of Bones offers an ecological postcolonial historiography of the myriad ways the violent imperatives of patriarchal colonialism actively suppressed the voice and agency of the Haitian peoples alongside the decimation of their natural world. Furthermore, Danticat’s elucidation of the complex communities that existed within the northern frontier region between the Dominican Republic and Haiti breathes humanity into a socioeco-topography that was widely homogenized and diminished by Dominican elites. As Turits emphasizes, “the racist opposition of elite Dominicans to the bicultural conditions of the Dominican frontier dovetailed with similarly long-standing state interests in gaining greater political control over the

Errand of American Expansionism 91 region. With their vast, untamed woods and hills, remoteness from population centers, dispersed peasantry, and scarce infrastructure, these areas had for decades resisted subjection to the national state” (600). The land itself was a space upon which the colonizing, hegemonic impulses of Western colonial power were systematically demarcated. Gaining control over the island meant clearing these “untamed woods and hills” and obliterating the wilderness areas that “resisted subjection to the national state.” In Haitian history, and within The Farming of Bones, the land is a powerful signifier, a marker of power. And for Haitian natives, the land was a form of agency. So clearing these wild spaces and transforming them into a plantocracy was a strategic marker of power implemented by the West. As Turits asserts: [N]ew agricultural villages organized, supervised, and supported by the state (‘colonies’) were first envisaged in the early years of the twentieth century. Early colonization schemes focused on the frontier regions and responded to fears that the growing immigration and presence of ethnic Haitians in that area would support wider territorial claims by the Haitian state, especially as there was no definitive borderline yet drawn between the two countries. (601) To once again echo William V. Spanos, the agricultural villages and the empire set up through these early colonization spatio-temporal schemes were emblematic of the “divinely ordained errand.” The control of land meant control of Haitian autonomy, both of which were situated as an “alien/inferiority entity” on the other side of this errand. Creating colonized spaces and territorializing the spatial topographies of the landscape would further assure Western dominance over the island, and over the Haitians. As we have begun to map out, Haitians were forced to navigate exclusionary geography that was metaphysically imposed by the colonizing powers of the West. As exemplified within The Farming of Bones, native Haitians inhabited what McClintock calls “anachronistic space”: “colonized people . . . do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency—the living embodiment of the archaic “primitive” (30). As McClintock exemplifies, the logic of Western metaphysics codifies space and time through a teleological lens, thus encoding geography itself as an agent of the imperial mission. In spatializing land through this lens, wilderness—indeed, wild living spaces—are antithetical to the Western civilizing mission. The colonized people who are associated with anachronistic space (wild and untamed land) are simultaneously cast as “atavistic” and devoid of human agency. These wild spaces, which exist outside of “history proper,” are precisely the spaces that were surreptitiously utilized as a means through which to secure the imperial workings of power, thus relegating Haitians as “archaic humans” alongside

92  Errand of American Expansionism a landscape that was wild and unruly. Here the notion of ecologies of racism from Chapter Two is echoed.16 As McClintock emphasizes, “societies are most vulnerable at their edges, along the tattered fringes of the known world” (24). And within The Farming of Bones those whose subject positions are most precarious, whose claim to space has been mediated through the colonizing impulses of the West, are those most vulnerable and susceptible: the cane workers. As Amabelle exemplifies, “I reached for [Sebastian’s] fists and opened them to see the palms where the lifelines had been rubbed away by the cane cutting” (141). Sebastian is one whose agency, whose story and history, has all but been rendered invisible. Sebastian’s erasure of his lifelines symbolizes the concomitant loss of the native Haitian to his lineage, ancestry, community, and, not least, his connection to the land itself. As the character Sebastian illustrates, “ ‘sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,’ he said. ‘They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajé wayfarers’ ” (54). As migrant workers living and working in the Dominican Republic, the Haitians have no land rights. The imperial workings of the empire are mediated through the bodies of these workers, rendering the Haitian cane workers all but stripped of their agential rights. According to Hortense Spillers, they are reduced to mere flesh. As Lizabeth ParavisiniGebert argues in “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures,” “The social and political framework of colonial administration was anchored in the assumption that the colonies’ natural resources were subject to the demands of the colonial powers” (10). As The Farming of Bones reveals, Haiti’s lands, and its inhabitants, were only useful insofar as both could be utilized as profit for the Western civilizing machine. By giving voice and agency to those most brutally subjugated by this machine, Danticat reveals the codified workings of power that are endemic to the workings of power—what she refers to over and again throughout the novel as “the farming of bones.” When rumored murmurings of Trujillo’s brutal massacre begin to circulate throughout the Haitian servant community, the cane workers and women such as Amabelle are most at risk. Similar to the cane workers who are “an orphaned people,” Amabelle realizes, “I had no papers to show that belonged either here or in Haiti where I was born . . . I found it sad to hear the nonvwayajé Haitians who appeared as settled in the area as the tamarind trees, the birds of paradise, and the sugarcane—it worried me that they too were unsure of their place in the valley” (68). Alongside the non-vwayajé Haitians, Amabelle has no legitimate claim to land, to space. Despite working as a servant for the wealthy and powerful Valencia family, Amabelle’s subject position is devoid of agency. As she remarks, “working for others, you learn to be present and invisible at the same time, nearby when they needed you, far off when they didn’t, but still close enough in case they changed their minds” (34). In this respect, Amabelle’s servitude symbolizes the subordinated other

Errand of American Expansionism 93 upon which the Western metaphysical tradition has been predicated. To quote Val Plumwood, Reason in the Western tradition has been constructed as the privileged domain of the master, who has conceived nature as a wife or subordinate other encompassing and representing the sphere of materiality, subsistence and the feminine which the master has split off and constructed as beneath him. The continual and cumulative overcoming of the domain of nature by reason engenders the Western concept of progress and development. (2) In The Farming of Bones, the colonization of wild land, by native Haitians, is concomitant with the Western tradition’s privileging of “reason” over and against the feminized, subordinate other. A profoundly brutal metaphysics of gender violence is embedded within the Western civilizing mission—and is the ontological imperative within which Western “progress and development” is predicated. In this respect, Amabelle—a subaltern Haitian woman with no claim to land or native space—is representative of the domain upon which “the master has split off and constructed as beneath him.” Within The Farming of Bones, this is both literal and metaphorical: Amabelle is a servant for the Valencia family, an invisible subject within which the powers of her colonizers are transmitted; her agential subject position is linked with that of unruly, wild, untamed spaces that are an ongoing threat to the Western civilizing mission. In this respect, Amabelle represents the concomitant relationship between silenced, racialized women and land—and how both have been brutally subjugated by Western ontologies of exclusion and violence. As a subaltern woman with no claim to land or identity, Amabelle has no choice but to flee for Haiti. As Amabelle queries, “where would such causerie begin and where would it end? At this point it was a matter between our two countries, of two different peoples trying to share one tiny piece of land” (145). Mediated between colonial male forms of violence, Amabelle’s perilous journey back to Haiti is emblematic of the metaphysical violence that underwrites patriarchal colonization. Crossing through the city of Dajabón, which was once a space where Dominicans and Haitians intermingled, had now become an epicenter of violence. Seized by Trujillo’s loyalists, Amabelle’s body becomes a target upon which patriarchal violence is performed and she is brutally beaten, nearly to her death, in the middle of the city square: Someone threw a fist-sized rock, which bruised my lip and left cheek. My face hit the ground . . . the faces in the crowd were streaming in and out of my vision. A sharp blow to my side nearly stopped my breath. The pain was like a stab from a knife or an ice pick, but when I reached

94  Errand of American Expansionism down I felt no blood. Rolling myself into a ball, I tried to get away from the worst of the kicking horde. I screamed, thinking I was going to die. (192) This deeply disturbing moment within the novel exemplifies McClintock’s expostulation of colonial power asserting its dominance directly onto the most subjugated of the human population: the colonized woman. Here we see, as with the previous chapter on woman slave narratives, the deranged ethic of the subject “body” rendered down to abject “flesh” (in Spillers’s terminology); readers witness an imposed thingness at play as necessary for white hegemony, for the errand. As McClintock asserts, “In this familiar trope, the fear of being engulfed by the unknown is projected onto colonized peoples are their determination to devour the intruder whole” (27). The overt thrust of the colonizing patriarchy upon the violently subjugated, feminized woman represents the deeply embedded fear of male boundary loss endemic to the Western civilizing mission. The need to dominate with such force and violence represents a concomitant fear of “engulfment” by the colonized other. In this respect, the violence upon which Western power writes itself on Amabelle’s body is commensurate with the violent assault against the lands of Haiti and the geospatial landscape on the island of Hispaniola as a whole. Amaballe’s body serves as a contestatory space in which patriarchy, colonialism, and racism all intersect: “In spite of their curiosity, I knew that my body could no longer be a tempting spectacle, nor would I ever truly be young or beautiful if ever I had been. Now my flesh was simply a map of scars and bruises, a marred testament” (225). Amabelle’s body becomes a living symbol upon which the brutal forces of Western colonizers have written their power. After her traumatic escape, Amabelle is forever haunted by images of the Dajabón River. As she says, “I . . . thought that if I came to the river on the right night, the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. But nature has no memory. And soon, perhaps, neither will I” (307). Having narrowly survived the deadly genocide and borne witness to the many who drowned in the Dajabón, Amabelle’s agency is once again aligned with the natural world—and its resilience. In this respect, both Amabelle and the Dajabón River serve as mediating thresholds through which metaphysical power is both revealed and expressed. Even though Amabelle claims “nature has no memory,” Danticat elucidates otherwise. In constructing ecological postcolonial historiography, Danticat explicitly reveals the imperatives of gender and land violence that are at the heart of Western metaphysics. As DeLoughrey and Handley argue, the systematic “decoupling of nature and history has helped to mystify colonialism’s histories of forced migration, suffering, and human violence” (8). But The Farming of Bones explicitly re-couples the relationship between nature and history through the story of Amabelle alongside the Dajabón River. Just as Amabelle reveals the dark underside of violent

Errand of American Expansionism 95 colonial historiography, the river, too, reveals and unearths the traumas of history: “every now and then, I’m told, a swimmer finds a set of white spongy bones, a skeleton, thinned by time and being buried too long in the riverbed” (306). Through her lucid narrative remembering of the tragedies suffered against colonized women and the land, Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones offer powerful counter-historiographies that recuperate those voices that were systematically silenced by the imperatives of Western colonization. By exposing the profoundly violent ways Western patriarchal metaphysics created an oppressive, exclusionary landscape through which the workings of empire operated, Danticat’s novels breathe life into the hidden, sordid folds of history that directly undermine the West’s supposedly benevolent errand into the world’s colonial wilderness. As feminist works of postcolonial ecological fiction, Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones offer important meditations on our global environmental crisis, revealing the fundamental ways Western ontologies of conquest are distinctly predicated on destroying and conquering wildland and native ecologies. Just as the “white spongy bones” every so often continues to surface in the Dajabón River, Danticat reminds us that the traumas of conquest refuse to remain hidden and buried. By giving an agential voice to women and the land, Danticat’s novels offer powerful, reconstructive narratives of resistance that are integral for continuing to confront the violent legacy of colonialism while imagining alternatives to our widespread environmental crisis. Notes 1 While ecofeminism has been applied to much of Danticat’s work, we distinguish our approach—the sounding out of an expansionist civilizational/capitalist errand powering over women’s bodies and land—from current and past scholarship on her novels. 2 In composing this chapter, we recognize the incredible violence perpetuated against both women and men within the pre-colonial and colonial civilizing mission on the island of Hispaniola, concentrating specifically on Haiti. As per our emphasis and theoretical/cultural orientation within this chapter, we focus primarily on women’s bodies as a means through which to examine the concomitant intersections between patriarchal geopolitics and the spatiality of conquest embedded within the civilizing mission in order to centralize this historically silenced, marginalized demographic. We recognize, as well, the critical and damaging ways men have also suffered underneath and within the violent discourse of the civilizing mission and are careful to illustrate, for the purposes of our focus in this chapter, the specific means within which women have been subjugated while recognizing the concomitant ways men have also been impacted. Our goal here is to challenge the exclusionary, violent ontological, geopolitical imperatives of conquest that have inflicted such horrors onto both genders, while acknowledging that we purposefully overdetermine and centralize female subjectivity within this chapter. 3 Resmaa Manakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies draws more attention to how trauma is passed down from generations.

96  Errand of American Expansionism 4 This chapter and others rely on Plumwood’s work for the author’s linking of colonialism, gender, and the abuse of nature. More recent scholarship like Greta Gaard’s Critical Ecofeminism and Serpil Oppermann’s Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene on other feminist ecocritical approaches and activism are valuable as the field expands more and more into linking ecocriticism and social change. The new emphasis on social change remains a contribution to postcolonial critique. 5 Insisting on this connection to history, early in the novel, Tante Atie tells Sophie, “We are each going to our mothers. That is what was supposed to happen” (19) and later Grandma Ife tells Sophie, “Your mother is your first friend” (24) as if to highlight history passed from generation to generation. 6 We must note that, in addition to exploring the facets of the errand into the wilderness, we focus on female characters and their bodies in this chapter because, as Sharrón Eve Sarthou argues in her work, “in Danticat’s tales it is women who support and perpetuate these destructive and demeaning conventions” of reinforcing patriarchal structures of power (108). 7 For more on this, see the full essay by Donette Francis: “Silences Too Horrific to Disturb: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” 8 Myriam Chancy argues that protagonist Sophie conveys for readers that Haiti is “a place where nightmares are passed on through generations like heirlooms” (233). 9 The Cacos were also the Haitian peasant guerillas who worked as armed resistance against the American occupation of 1915–1934. These men were also known to have raped the Haitian women they were to protect—which is excluded from nationalist narratives. Here we see a reinforcement of silence surrounding violence perpetrated against women. 10 For further on this, see the work of historian Mary Renda. 11 See Angela Watkins’s “Restoring Haitian Women’s Voices and Verbalizing Sexual Trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory” for her discussion of how female revolutionaries are excluded from official Haitian history despite their roles in the Haitian Revolution. She summarizes: “Although Haitian women have been systematically excluded from social and historical discourse even as they actively engage in the fight for change, Danticat proves through her characters that revolutionaries come in many forms” (107). 12 Importantly, the Macoutes did not hide—they patrolled streets during the day in plain sight. Not only are they portrayed as chasing out the light (yellow, gold, and bronze associated with Haitian women in the text), but the darkness of their presence is reinforced in the other ways female characters are left vulnerable in the open landscape of the night. If a woman gives birth to a baby girl, for example, “. . . the midwife will cut the child’s cord and go home. Only the mother will be left in the darkness to hold her child. There will be no lamps, no candles, no more light” (146). 13 See, for example, Clare Counihan’s essay, “Desiring Diaspora,” which argues that Sophie cannot find resolution because of her inability to reconcile the past. The work of Myriam Chancy and Simone A. James-Alexander take similar stances, while Angela Watkins counters with the “unconventional ways” in which resolution is found in the novel (109). 14 Werrlein’s work is explored further in the following chapter on The Bluest Eye. 15 The official death toll is disputed due to a lack of archival data. As Amy Novak has written, “No documentation with direct references to the massacre—before, during, or after it—has been found in Dominican archives. The narration of this trauma in official histories of the Dominican Republic did not include a confrontation with or working through of the past, but instead entailed a justification of the event in order to consolidate Trujillo’s faction authority” (96).

Errand of American Expansionism 97 16 As we defined in the previous chapter, ecologies of racism are dimensions of a gendered, territorialized geo-ontology that places people of color alongside ecological space. Both are then cited as dangerous or errant.

Works Cited Adisa, Opal Palmer. “Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer’s Life.” African American Review, vol. 43, no. 2, 2009, pp. 345–355. Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman. “Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Indiana University Press, 2008. Bell, Beverly. Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance. Cornell University Press, 2001. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press, 2003. Chancy, Myriam JA. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. Rutgers University Press, 1997. Charles, Carolle. “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duvalierist State, Transnationalism, and the Emergence of a New Feminism (1980–1990).” Feminist Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 1995, pp. 135–164. Charters, Mallay. “Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited.” Publishers Weekly, August 17, 1998. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/30020-pw-edwidge-danticat-a-bitter-legacy-revisited.html. Counihan, Clare. “Desiring Diaspora: ‘Testing’ the Boundaries of National Identity in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 16, no. 1, 2012, pp. 36–52. Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. Vintage Books, 1994. ———. “Daughters of Memory.” In Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 59–72. ———. The Farming of Bones. Soho Press, 1998. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley. “Introduction: Toward and Aesthetics of the Earth.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford University Press, 2011. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963. Feifer, Megan. “The Remembering of Bones: Working Through Trauma and the Counter-Archive in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020, pp. 35–49. Francis, Donette A. “Silences Too Horrific to Disturb: Writing Sexual Histories in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 35, no. 2, 2004, pp. 75–90. Gerlus, Jean-Claude. “The Effects of the Cold War on U.S.-Haiti’s Relations.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1995, pp. 34–56. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. University of Virginia, 1999. James-Alexander, Simone A. “M/othering the Nation: Women’s Bodies as Nationalist Trope in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” African American Review, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 373–391.

98  Errand of American Expansionism Koopman, Emy. “Incestuous Rape, Abjection, and the Colonization of Psychic Space in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 49, no. 3, 2012, pp. 303–315. LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 4, 1999, pp. 696–727. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. Routledge, 1994. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. HarperOne Press, 1990. Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness. The William and Mary Quarterly for the Associates of the John Carter Brown Library, 1952. Munro, Martin. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferriere, Danticat. Liverpool University Press, 2007. Novak, Amy. “ ‘Marred Testament’: Cultural Trauma and Narrative in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 4, 2006, pp. 93–120. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford University Press, 2011. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1994. Sarthou, Sharrón Eve. “Unsilencing Défilés Daughters: Overcoming Silence in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!” The Global South, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 99–123. Spanos, William V. “American Exceptionalism in the Post-9/11 Era.” symplokē, vol. 21, no. 1–2, 2013, pp. 291–324. ———. Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Mediation on the American Vocation. Fordham University Press, 2016. Torgman, Annabelle L. “Haiti: A Failed State? Democratic Process and the OAS Intervention.” The University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2012, pp. 113–137. Turits, Richard Lee. “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic.” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 82, no.3, 2002, pp. 589–635. Vargas, Jennifer Harford. “Novel Testimony: Alternative Archives in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” Callaloo, vol. 37, no. 5, 2014, pp. 1162–1180. Watkins, Angela. “Restoring Haitian Women’s Voices and Verbalizing Sexual Trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory.” The Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2016, pp. 106–127.

5 “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” Exclusionary Cartographies, Transgenerational Trauma, and Racialized Dispossession in The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye opens with the black body and the land as a couplet, aligning the object ontology of barren soil with Pecola’s plight, itself an incursion on the body of her being from which no issue comes: Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow. . . . We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair. What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. Cholly Breedlove is dead; our innocence too. The seed shriveled and died; her baby too. (5) We might ask, then, what compels Morrison to so explicitly overlay the personal and the environmental.1 Instances of dispossession and imposition cohere within and around the poor black disabled girl, Pecola, who is the most disenfranchised of the characters in her community.2 She becomes a nexus of experience where internalities and externalities of dominance and despair become confused, as in the assumption on the part of the community that the marigolds didn’t grow because Pecola was having her father’s child, due to their being connected parts of a larger idea that American Studies critic William Spanos defines as the calling that the United States (and its empire) was founded on: To put it provisionally and all too summarily, the dominant—the ‘chosen’—culture in the United States—from the inaugural ‘errand in the [New World] wilderness’ of the founding Puritans (God’s ‘chosen people’); through the era of westward expansion, which secularized the Puritans’ Word and its providential history as ‘Manifest Destiny’; to the Vietnam War and post-9/11, which has borne witness to America’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-5

100  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” extension of its divine- or history-ordained ‘errand in the wilderness’ to include the wilderness of the world at large—has re-presented the awesome immensity, the vastness, the majesty, the mystery of the world’s wilderness in terms of a twofold ideological strategy directed inwardly toward the covenantal community and outwardly toward its threatening enemy. (Redeemer Nation 16) The frontier, then, is simultaneously psychic and literal, individual and environmental, or, as Spanos has it, inward and outward. In either mode, the imperative for coercion occurs at the point of departure, beyond which lies: an Other—an alien/inferior entity on the other side of the always moving dividing line between good and evil, settlement and wilderness, civilization and savagery, that threatens the divinely ordained errand and must, therefore, according to the imperatives of this exceptionalist logic, be eradicated by violence in behalf of the errand. (“American Exceptionalism” 295–296) What is held out and acted on, violently, in both cases, in the racial razing of the social body politic and in the mechanistic razing of the physical landscape, is the body. It is the preexisting physis that threatens and continually initiates a hegemonic reordering through which black bodies and the land are to be made wild and then made unfree. As Hortense Spillers might advance, if a body is a wilderness, the system of capitalism may be used to tame or control it. The American empire is, of course, sustained on what we have already defined as these ecologies of racism: gendered, territorialized geo-ontology that places people of color alongside ecological space, where both are labeled unruly and in need of taming. Once tamed, they may be used to effectively keep the capitalist system going. Polly’s story, which is explored later in this chapter, is an example of this. We will show throughout this chapter that for Morrison, the frontier becomes part of memory, and becomes internalized. As she demonstrates at the conclusion of the novel, we easily replace the land and psychologically become our own frontier. In the aforementioned opening passage of The Bluest Eye, Morrison charts the muteness of a miscarriage in the midst of larger communal pain or the blankness of a field that falls fallow after seeding as eradicative output within the singular “productive” function of white patriarchal endeavor. Destructive failure presents as a sort of ironic residue left by the fading particulars of inexorable progress—a haunting, to return to a recurring theme seen in the novels of this study. This trope of haunting is not unlike what woman slaves experienced in the name of American settlement and expansionism, as explained earlier; nor is it different from the haunting of past trauma experienced by the Caco women in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. In this way, human and environmental bodies share solidarity as venues for the will to

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 101 power and as arenas both vast and small that may serve as a forensic record. In Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Actions, Noel Sturgeon speaks aptly to this unity as it is observed through an ecofeminist lens that “makes connections between environmentalisms and feminisms” and “more precisely, articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race and class are related to the ideologies that sanction that exploitation and degradation of the environment” (23). Through a careful examination of The Bluest Eye, we chart in this chapter the exclusionary cartographies of the dominant ideology that may be traced around the racialized and gendered geo-ontologies of its cast of characters. As a matter of method, we frame our analysis in ecofeminism, setting the psycho-spatial cartography of racial exclusion against concomitant sites of environmental disruption and ruin in order to locate where and how they viscerally cohere for black women in the novel. We emphasize how our analytical approach is parallel to Morrison’s approach: “. . . since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how” (emphasis in original, 6). We ground our inquiry in the durability of the Puritanical expansionary ethic and how its ontological mapping of the land laid down an invisible code for wider racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and further ecological violence, as Spanos has theorized in Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum, and as demonstrated in Chapter Two’s closely related discussion of the founding of America and its expansion through the destruction of landscape. More specifically, we excavate evidence of the organizing hegemonic errand from inside the lived trauma of black women, expanding upon what we established in the earlier chapter on slave narratives, and synthesizing the legacy of slavery in African American communities as both traumatic transgenerational memory and ongoing liminality where space (as prerogative) is preset and foreclosed in one sense and retains its raw potential in another. The land, for Morrison, is an altogether distinct presence in The Bluest Eye. It has antagonistic and protagonistic force, and it shapes the subject identity of each woman, often paradoxically delimiting and engendering their agency at once. Thus, the spatial organization of Morrison’s women reveals the extent to which black women—and black children—have had no choice but to internalize the operative modes of the American empire and its violent dynamism therein. As Debra T. Werrlein argues in “Not So Fast Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in The Bluest Eye,” Morrison decides to use a child narrator and to focus on a child’s body as the receiver of an entire community’s shame as a way to scrutinize the concepts of youth and innocence. In citing the American “errand into the wilderness” in order to connect bodies and land, we mark the notion of a national innocence inscribed in that early, indelible thinking, and we then mark its deployment in the defense of heinous violence. In the previous chapter, we charted its extension through the American expansionist ethic further, into the Caribbean, specifically Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

102  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” Morrison’s thematics of childhood point to an American obsession with endemic purity, and by showing us the violence done to Pecola’s juvenile body, the novel indicts the “superficial and ahistorical conceptions” of history still prevalent in American culture and ideology (Werrlein 54). In conversation with this hypocrisy, we argue that this young woman’s body becomes a reservoir for the collective shame, trauma, and suffering of a community stunted by the land. Her body also becomes a thing, and thingness, as described by Hortense Spillers, is necessary for the internalization of white hegemony. Yet the land, for its part, serves in its innocence as a parallel reservoir for destruction and grief, even, as with the body, it might still carry the promise of redemption. In this interplay between the haunted body and the haunted land, we discern the spectral provenance of an American errand that has attenuated what is possible for black bodies and the landscape and their visibility in its quest to impose itself upon the natural world. It is here, where invisible power yields ghosts, that we locate Pecola in our analysis. A brutalized young exile, Pecola makes visible the pain of those around her, and in her suffering at their hands, she personifies that reservoir into which the spatialized fears, anxieties, and collective traumas of a haunted community are poured. As a child unable to properly defend or protect herself, she diagnoses “the pathology of a nation that defines its own virtue through an ideology of childhood innocence” but then “ironically allows for the expendability of children like (her)” (Werrlein 54). As they shun Pecola, the community repeats the errand’s compulsion to clear physical terrain in an equivalent razing of the social landscape. The narrative hones in on the opening pairing of body and land as a means to tease out hegemonic consumption of the hitherto “untouched,” with the erasure of Pecola and the absence of the marigolds posing as reciprocal indictments of the concepts of homo nullius and terra nullius. Pecola the Exile and the Natural Nation Set against the ascendant nationalism of America in 1941, The Bluest Eye considers the aesthetic and coercive work of the white cultural errand as it confronts a poor, segregated African American community—and, particularly, a young girl named Pecola—in northeastern Ohio. We read Morrison’s novel as a modern examination of the “errand into the wilderness,” “a labor the fruits of which made life in the wilderness easier, more comfortable, less strenuous” (Spanos “American Exceptionalism” 295). This manmade ease must predicate itself and its civilizational teleology on an exclusionary metaphysics of violence that first seeks to empty (nullius) that order and that through its systematic emptying necessarily deterritorializes those (women/ people of color) placed outside the organizing frame. As Anne McClintock postulates in Imperial Leather, the impulse to explore, claim, and settle the land finds justification in “the myth of the virgin land [that is] also the myth of the empty land, involving both a gender and a racial dispossession”

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 103 (McClintock 30). Used in the context of Pecola’s body, the errand seeks to violently, or by any means necessary, indoctrinate Pecola into believing only in whiteness. In this way, the novel carefully locates the illogic of Western reason—which as Val Plumwood notes, “provides the unifying and defining contrast for the concept of nature, much as the concept of husband does that of wife, as master for slave”—at the points where its demolition, sexism, and racism coalesce into a singular (and circular) presumption of separation emanating from and reified by triumph (4). The complex and paradoxical portrait that Morrison paints in The Bluest Eye of black women against this ontological backdrop where natural, sexual, and racist modalities of imperialist errand are interchangeable is intentional. Morrison reveals that each of the women inhabits a nearly impossible terrain where matrices of space, nature, and body pre-inform their subjectivity and fracture it. This is obvious with Claudia and her resentment of white baby dolls: “I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls” (22). But it is less obvious and still true of characters like Maureen, who is wealthy but mulatto, and in making Claudia and Frieda jealous, prompts a new self-hatred in the sisters; and Geraldine, who is lightskinned, cold, and thinks of herself as superior to other blacks while keeping a meticulously clean house. As Katherine McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, “The landless black subject is, importantly, anchored to a new world grid that is economically, racially, and sexually normative, or, seemingly nonblack; this grid suppresses the possibility of black geographies by invalidating the subject’s cartographic needs, expressions, and knowledges” (3). Morrison’s women have no choice but to work within this exclusionary “grid,” expressing whatever agency they are able to from within prescribed parameters. In this deployment of exclusionary geography (geo-ontology), the “errand into the wilderness” recreates and reinforces its parent hegemony. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the trauma and violence inflicted on and internalized by black bodies in the violent, liminal zones of this errand to uncover the character of its expansionary ethic. Significantly, many of Morrison’s main characters (Pecola, Claudia, Frieda, and even Maureen) are children who, in their greater proximity to nature as undeveloped non-agents, have the potential to bring into relief the civilizing interventions they suffer. McClintock’s “virgin land” myth, then, may be seen not merely as evocative of gendered dispossession, as she notes, but also of the preoccupying desire to annex and regiment the rawness and vitality of youth. It is in the context of this impulse toward order, which is to say power over the environment, that we are met with Pecola’s miscarriage. In the opening narration, Claudia relays her conviction that the town’s efforts, mystical or horticultural, could yet save Pecola’s baby: A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody’s

104  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and everything would be all right. (5) At the conclusion of the narrative, Claudia has not fully given up on the idea that the community is responsible for failing to save the baby, but she also now allows for a degree of exogenous, if equally magical, interference: And now when I see her searching the garbage—for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. The soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. (206) Morrison uses her child narrator’s erratic superstition to tease out the more adult—but no less fallacious—intellectual folly that corrals nature into a causal framework with human prerogative at its center. It is neither that the flowers’ health shepherded by Claudia’s industry could have saved the baby, nor that one failure ensured the other. In Pecola’s case, it is of course true that her 11-year-old body could never have supported her pregnancy. Yet Morrison seems to insist on a metaphorized description of the interrelations at play (going as far as to partially excuse or, at least, reframe Cholly’s rape of Pecola); this allows her to equate these instances of trauma, which in turn enables her to render them as more than the simple result of applied forces and to represent them as constituents of deeper victimization at the core of the urge to power. As we observed at the outset, here is the solidarity in victimhood where we might imagine the planters of marigolds ironically as both gardening invaders and casualties of the faulted earth on which larger invasions are visited. We see, too, how Claudia responds to the possibility of legitimacy through violative force that might make right with ambivalence, yet the process of surrender to the whims of the soil, the helplessness and reversal that she describes, is also present in the excusal of Pecola’s destroyers, or, more accurately, the invention of her spontaneous self-destruction. Morrison pairs Pecola with the earth, therefore, at a moment of borrowed prerogative in which the hegemon reaches for the natural world’s violent license, just as, in Perry Miller’s observation, the early colonizers were long in pursuit of “the embodiment of America as rooted in the soil” (449). Centered in this way, the natural nation may begin to define itself through differences.

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 105 Spanos, with Miller’s understanding of the errand in mind, explains that the two most prominent historical theses regarding “the origins and hegemonic exceptionalist character of the American national identity”— Frederick Turner Jackson’s and Sacvan Bercovitch’s—“have America’s intrinsic need for a perpetual ‘frontier’ or ‘enemy’ in common: an Other” (Spanos “American Exceptionalism” 296). Just as empire is able to cast itself as a superior replacement for nature by deputizing naturalism and geography to serve as a means of self-legitimation, so, too, with this legitimacy, it deputizes the populations of the Other to self-police and weaponize cultural alienation. In so doing, hegemonic violence takes on itself the natural character of force majeure; “cleansed” of discreteness and made invisible, it invites, in Morrison’s view, acquiescence. At the end of the novel, Pecola is physically exiled from her community because the dominant cultural process is able to take advantage of her greater vulnerability as a younger person who is thought to be ugly to oust her.3 While Pecola longs to be absorbed into the white landscape, it is her distance from that Edenic image that catalyzes those around her: “All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. . . . [H]er pain made us glow with health[,] . . . her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous” (205).4 Here Morrison revises Spanos’s conception of the Other. As she explains in her 1993 work of criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, it is problematic to define the Other as the subordinate; rather, the dominant image should be considered itself a construction within which one will find the preexisting presence of those on whose exclusion the image relies but also through whom it develops. For Morrison, the black body of Pecola and the black soil of the earth are the original physis; they came first and are thereby innocent. In their union, we see what Werrlein calls the “counterhegemonic potential of reimagining childhood in the context of history” that makes it possible for a child victim like Pecola to offer a “way of demythologizing the ‘innocent’ past” of the conqueror” (Werrlein 54). We see, too, Pecola’s reduction to mere flesh, an example of Hortense Spillers’s concept of pornotroping. She is repeatedly the object of violent impulses, whether they are sexual or otherwise. It is important, too, to consider the way Sammy, Pecola’s brother, also disappears from the community, albeit completely by choice. As a character in this novel, he may be said to have an absent presence. By this, we mean to highlight his ability to hide in the family (in large part because of his gender) and escape many of the difficulties Pecola is unable to. While Morrison makes clear his suffering from, like the rest of the Breedloves, the belief that he is ugly, the ramifications of such are not nearly as devastating for him as they are for Pecola. As Susmita Roye argues, “Sammy dreams of escaping his horrible home-life and finally does. This is not a viable option for a female child like Pecola, whose dream is to vanish or to somehow magically acquire blue eyes, which, she thinks, will make her more lovable” (219). She goes on:

106  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” “if Sammy never thinks of helping his sister, it is, in great measure, society’s fault for its devaluation of girl-children who are often deemed not to deserve, desire, or achieve freedom from domestic suffocation” (219). The errand is thus revealed as illusory and only accomplished through a forced repositioning that is continually constructed through a “cleansing” (i.e., mythologizing) violence. As Morrison explains in the foreword, Pecola is “the one least likely to withstand such damaging forces because of youth, gender, and race” (x). Pecola’s eventual breakdown and ostracism reflect “the damaging internalizations of assumptions of immutable inferiority” (xi) that arise from the logic of the errand and its tethering of blackness to ugliness and the void. Morrison’s text creates new discursive territory where the silent pain stored by black bodies and the land may be mined for the residue of their nullification; the mining of this residue might, in turn, decenter and demystify the dominant narrative. For those black women characters around Pecola (Geraldine, Maureen, and all of the lovers of white baby dolls) who not only internalize hegemonic culture as Pecola does but can successfully mimic it and thus modify it to suit their purposes, their fear at the beginning of the novel of being “put outdoors” not only foreshadows, of course, their rejection of Pecola, but as an aspect of their geo-ontology, “which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair” so that “the journey to destruction is sealed,” it also helps explain their transgenerational silence in the face of trauma (x). Morrison dispenses with this secret-keeping at the outset (“quiet as it’s kept”) and, as Jessica Horvath Williams argues, the novel “makes visible the consequences of internalized racism, [and] indicts her community for its failure to save [Pecola]” (Williams 91). Morrison’s focus on the exile breaks, in spatial terms, the logic of the Puritan errand. The opening chapter of Playing in the Dark makes clear her interest in geo-ontology and the production of knowledge about black bodies as she outlines her desire to create a “wider landscape” of American literature and draw a “critical geography” similar to the way the New World was charted, but “without the mandate for conquest” (Morrison Playing in the Dark 3). If we are to understand our national literature, she argues, we must contemplate the traditional placing of Africans and African Americans in the United States “at the margins of the literary imagination” (5). She wonders if the “championed characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation . . . are not, in fact, responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” (5). In The Bluest Eye, this submerged discourse of cultural creation takes on a spectral quality; although it is obscured by hegemonic legitimation and the hijacking of the natural world, the trials of the exile Pecola threaten to excavate it. Morrison argues that this semi-visibility, which we argue amounts to a haunting, is an effect of the creation of a core American identity: “For excellent reasons of state—because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 107 not yet valorized in the new country—the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony” (8). “Here is the House”: Gendered Spatialities and the Threat of Being Put Outdoors The errand surfaces repeatedly throughout the novel at the intersection of gender, race, and spatiality. Morrison highlights these points of connection between physical place and the formation of identity in order to chart American cultural hegemony; paying close attention to space, land, home, identity, and community, she positions readers in such a way that they are able to survey the landscape through the eyes of those most marginalized, enabling them to see the ways in which “racism, colonialism, and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial, and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body constructed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture” (Plumwood 4). In this way, we can understand Morrison as an African American ecofeminist, who cultivated resistance in conversation with the land. Forced to navigate a foreclosed geo-ontology and operate within its “sphere of inferiority,” her characters exhibit common anxiety in relation to their homes, built environments, neighborhoods, and, consequently, their identities; the fury of this interplay offers a glimpse of a submerged cartography of constructed difference and exclusion.5 Narratologically, Morrison identifies the sunny dread of suburban patriarchal mapping by prefacing the novel with a paragraph in the style of a Dick and Jane reading primer that, in the absence of illustrations, condenses into a telling geo-ontological tautology: “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy” (3). The primers form a master plot, and in juxtaposing her young characters’ lived experiences with them, Morrison exposes, in Werrlein’s words, the utilization of “childhood innocence as a pervasive ideology that simultaneously perpetuates and mystifies the harsher realities of white nationalist hegemony” (56). Functionally, space denotes being, or, as Katherine McKittrick maintains, “geography is always human and that humanness is always geographic” (ix). What is “very pretty” owing to its order and neat containment is therefore “very happy.” “House” and “family” may both be found “here.” The situating of the land as either within or without the bounds of beauty, prerogative, and ease underwrites a spatial overdetermination where “existing cartographic rules unjustly organize human hierarchies in place and reify uneven geographies in familiar, seemingly natural ways” (x). The prospect of being put “outdoors,” of being ejected from this favored geography, therefore not only mediates each individual’s consciousness in

108  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” The Bluest Eye but also bifurcates its African American community at large. Claudia observes that knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; . . . they painted and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the row of weeds that were the rented houses. (18) The ecological metaphor of black-owned houses as “hothouse sunflowers” looming over “the row of weeds that were the rented houses” naturalizes the class division of neighborhoods in a manner that acknowledges both the hegemon’s socio-geographic cartography and, correlatively, its opportunistic legitimation. In binding the precarity of her characters to the socializing terrain, Morrison collapses the binary between subjectivity and space and locates in their interdependence the point of schism where the black self fractures and the community veers from the solidaristic experience of shared history to the atomized experience of separate lives, of hothouses and weeds. As McKittrick points out, “black diasporic struggles can also be read, then, as geographic contests over discourses of ownership” (3). Dispossession is the mediating constant with which Morrison’s women navigate space; self-agency is marked by ownership and upward mobility. In our view, the notion of being cast “outdoors,” then, transposes the constant threat of dispossession into a geo-ontological metaphor and physicalizes the anxiety of the community. The further up the socioeconomic chain the character is located in the novel, the more rapacious the desire for ownership. The pathologies of displacement embedded within the lived environments of The Bluest Eye’s Midwestern setting affect even the most affluent of the population: “They come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian. And the sound of these places in their mouths make you think of love” (82). The fervor of the privileged women of color who originate from these towns sets them apart from their poorer sisters and the community. Morrison returns to ecological terminology in capturing the difference: “Like hollyhocks they are narrow, tall, and still. Their roots are deep, their stalks are firm, and only the top blossom nods in the wind” (82). Better established, these women have appropriated, adapted, and deployed the same exclusionary cartography that stymies their less fortunate sisters from less fortunate neighboring towns. They fiercely protect the distinction between themselves and their poorer neighbors at all costs and to their considerable benefit: inside their exclusionary ecosystem, women, conditionally but crucially, might hold reign over men. As these “hollyhock” women attend “land-grant colleges” and learn “how to do the white man’s work with

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 109 refinement” (83), they directly engage and, ultimately, subvert the dominant order within the cloistered landscape they so fervently seek to enhance; as a result of their energetic relationship to space—their power over space—their agency coalesces, undetected: What [the men] do not know is that this plain brown girl will build her nest stick by stick, make it her own inviolable world, and stand guard over its every plant, weed, and doily, even against him. In silence she will return the lamp to where she first put it in the first place; remove dishes from the table as soon as the last bite is taken; wipe the doorknob after a greasy hand has touched it. A sidelong look will be enough to tell him to smoke on the back porch. Children will sense instantly that they cannot come into her yard to retrieve a ball. But the men do not know these things. Nor do they know that she will give him her body sparingly and partially. (84) In reshaping their subordinate terrain, the women in these affluent neighborhoods leverage not only the ownership of their homes but the ownership of their bodies and sexuality. Both points of “inviolable” control hearken back to a shared legacy in chattel slavery and repeat, with ferocity, precision, and difference, the cartographic enterprise of power over the body of the land and the black body; the transgenerational trauma of these “hollyhock” women is thus strategically transmuted into their agency on a landscape limited by the original and dominant form of that enterprise, the white patriarchal errand. We first meet Geraldine, “one such girl from Mobile, or Meridian, or Aiken who did not sweat in her armpits nor between her thighs, who smelled of wood and vanilla, who made her scuffles in the Home Economics Department, [who] moved with her husband, Louis, to Lorain, Ohio” (86) through Pecola’s eyes. Lured into her home by Geraldine’s troubled and violent son, Junior, Pecola drinks in Geraldine’s environment, homing in at once on the careful presentation of knick-knacks that stand in delicate testament to her wealth and privilege: “How beautiful, she thought. What a beautiful house. There was a big red-and-gold Bible on the dining-room table. Little lace doilies were everywhere—on arms and backs of chairs, in the center of a large dining table. Potted plants were on the windowsills. . . . She wanted to see everything slowly, slowly” (89). And in radical juxtaposition to the abandoned and decrepit storefront in which Pecola and her family reside and its trauma, Geraldine’s home offers itself as an idyll of beauty and refuge for Pecola. Ironically, of course, Geraldine’s home is just as toxic. Her obsession with whiteness enacts violence against anything else. Geraldine’s careful attention to order and space and its promise, however, belie the fraught impulses of subscription that undergird such a project. Here we are presented with Morrison’s carefully orchestrated discursive impasse: the proverbial Geraldines in the novel activate their agency in a radical

110  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” dismissal, severing off, and eradication of their sisters across the socioeconomic class. This amputative remapping, McKittrick notes, is carried out vigilantly and vigorously: “The placement of subaltern bodies deceptively hardens spatial binaries, in turn suggesting that some bodies belong, some bodies do not belong, and some bodies are out of place. For black women, then, geographical domination is worked out through reading and managing their specific racial-sexual bodies” (McKittrick xv). A characteristic of hegemony is its constant activity, and its control over space: the home becomes a doing where one must continue to belong, where belonging is also a doing. Taking in the gilded cage, Morrison sees a haunted house: “The line between colored and nigger was not always clear; subtle and telltale signs threatened to erode it, and that watch had to be constant” (87 emphasis added). McKittrick concurs that the specter of the errand is refracted through domestic spatiality: “The materiality of place fosters a frenetic desire for ownership illustrating that home, community and nation are uniquely interlocked and bound by false promises of home and belonging” (134). The near paranoiac desire to secure a “home,” to wrest enduring control over the existential threat of “outdoors,” serves as an interceding signifier for all of Morrison’s women, rending the socioeconomic landscape of Lorain, Ohio, which is a microcosm of American nationhood as it is energized across the space and within the being of subaltern bodies. Internalizing the Errand: Landscapes of the Past in Cholly’s and Pauline’s Stories The novel’s seasonal structure sharpens the account of the Breedlove family’s experience of the haunting errand; Morrison subverts the redemptive metaphor of the natural world’s temporal landscape; rather than new life, trauma is “reborn,” giving rise to a cycle of cross-generational ontological disorientation. Morrison uses the trope of nature in order to highlight the Breedloves’ alienation. As we have noted, the artificial binary of Western reason sets the human and the natural apart and creates a blankness (nullius) whereupon white patriarchy, through sites of cleavage such as the landless spatialization of the Breedlove storefront, inscribes itself as a naturalism-cum-historicism and becomes invisible. This assumed naturalness of the white patriarchy is what leads Cholly and Pauline to reproduce self-hatred and the curse of whiteness’s gaze in their daughter, Pecola, as she drinks milk from the Shirley Temple cup and eats the Mary Jane candies. Gurleen Grewal has argued that the Breedlove family manifests a history directly correlated with slavery: a “race-based class structure of American society that generates its own pathologies” (118). Moreover, as Werrlein observes, “parents who emerge from histories of oppression might reproduce that degradation within the family unit” (Werrlein 61). Thus, we may view that Cholly and Pauline’s stories do not just point back to a post-slavery tradition but forward to the transgenerational trauma emphasized so often

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 111 in the novel. The natural metaphor Claudia deploys to describe Pecola’s rape at the hands of her father—Cholly had “dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt” (6)—has a subtext: Cholly transmits the germ of the “civilizing” errand that was once forced on him. As Jess Jelsma argues, Cholly’s powerlessness is “implanted by instances of white oppression, is deep rooted and infectious, spreading from Cholly to contaminate the Breedlove household and family” (200). When a young Cholly’s first moments of sexual discovery, in the woods with Darlene, are interrupted by two white men, and, humiliated, he obliges their perverse request for him to violate Darlene in front of them, we see how those seeds are sowed in him: Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconsciousness knew what his conscious mind did not guess—that hating them would have consumed him. . . . He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men—but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. (151) Morrison here again creates parallelism between trauma and the landscape: the white hunters’ incursion pierces the sanctity of the wooded setting that had promised to harbor Cholly and Darlene’s youthful exploration. The natural venue for this violence of hyper-masculinist whiteness on black innocence provides the analog to the act itself in its congruity with the victims as a colonized body; for both, inasmuch as they are viewed as elemental by the patriarchy, they are treated as “dark” and uncivilized. Further, this scene is an example of what Hortense Spillers describes as “severing the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” (67). While our primary concern in this study is woman characters and their bodies, this scene, along with the lens through which Spillers works in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” is illuminating in terms of how the errand is passed down and how it damages male bodies and psychologies as well. As Spillers explains, in severing the captive body from its will, we “lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver” as is clear in this scene in the woods (67). The “captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality” and “at the same time—in stunning contradiction—the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor” (emphasis in original 67). Spillers goes on and we quote her important explanation at length here: . . . in the absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’ and as a

112  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” category of ‘otherness,’ the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general ‘powerlessness,’ resonating through various centers of human and social meaning. (67) Sexual violence, then, is positioned as a constituent emanation of a pervasive dominance across bodies and space. In the dehumanizing effect of the white hunters’ depravity, we witness the multiplicativity of hegemonic force. Cholly’s shame disorients him; he misdirects it first toward Darlene and later, disastrously, toward his daughter, resulting in a wider fallout of communicable pain. Emy Koopman frames the scene in which Cholly is forced to rape Darlene as a simultaneous rape of Cholly and argues that “the result for Cholly is a complete confusion concerning his own desire, which he is no longer in charge of. Since this desire has been reappropriated by the white men, Cholly’s sexuality will forever be tainted with violence and disgust” (306).6 Koopman interprets the ruined sanctum of the woods and of Cholly’s virginity through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s model of abjection that describes the horror a subject experiences when it is simultaneously reproduced within (objectified) and cast off by (abjectified) the colonizing order (304–305). This horror causes the boy to shift his rage away from the hunters and toward his young lover and to transmit the white gaze from one generation to the next; in paroxysms of confusion, despair, and guilt, as he contemplates raping his daughter, he asks himself, “Why did she have to look so whipped?” (161). If Cholly broadly represents a deleterious freedom from restraint arising from traumatic alienation, the women he seeks to cleanse himself through, modern slaves incarnate, are bound to his self-hatred and reinternalize the horror he seeks to exorcize; it is through these women that a perpetuating inheritance of white ontology may be widely surveyed as not just performed on black bodies but delivered by them, over and over again. The recapitulation of both white and black violence against black bodies (re)physicalizes the historical defenselessness of black men against white power. In his fear, Cholly becomes what Franz Fanon describes as “the neurotic colonized subject who does not resist the oppressors but instead tries to become more like them” (Koopman 306). In their equally fearful attempts to regain psychic, spatial, and bodily dominion from the demoralizations visited on them by black men, black women, too, perform this irony; its terrorism spans the novel and, in its thematic linkage to slavery as prime mover, speaks, of course, to Morrison’s greater project. Pauline’s story begins in the thick of this spiral. After meeting Cholly and migrating North, she finds, however subconsciously, that the conditions she lives in and her self-ideation inform each other in a feedback loop of circumscription: “The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 113 believed they were ugly” (38). For her, space, place, and identity are indissoluble. As McKittrick suggests, “If who we see is tied up with where we see through truthful, commonsensical narratives, then the placement of subaltern bodies deceptively hardens spatial boundaries, in turn suggesting that some bodies belong, some bodies do not belong, and some bodies are out of place” (xv). Constrained by a spatiality determined by a white narrative, Pauline tries desperately to realize her identity from within her community but is met with their performative dismissal: “Pauline felt uncomfortable with the few black women she did meet. They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair. When she tried to make up her face as they did, it came off rather badly. Their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking . . . and dressing developed in her a desire for new clothes” (118). Pauline’s being—her appearance, her mannerisms, her southern drawl—reminds these northern women of Morrison’s “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence,” which causes them to look past her. This treatment thoroughly conditions her consciousness, in a way that it does not do to her daughter so that dissenting does not even occur to her (Playing in the Dark 5). It follows, then, that Pauline finds comfort and reinvigorated self-regard as a servant in the home of a wealthy family: “She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled practically all of her needs” (127). McKittrick asks, “What would happen to our understanding of race and humanness if black women legitimately inhabited our world and made their needs known? And how do her silence, absence, and missing desired and desirable body, figure into the production of selfhood?” (xxv). Pauline’s “production of selfhood” depends, impossibly, on her agential erasure. She fulfills her essential longing for a space that will legitimize her existence in vassalage to the affluent Fishers, in which “power, praise, and luxury were hers in the household” (128). By measuring the value of her racial and socioeconomic subject identity in her proximity to white wealth, Pauline not only embraces peonage over her selfhood as a wife and mother but, in the pursuit, she further calcifies the exclusionary cartography that has led to her drastically compromised stance in the first place: “Pauline kept this order, this beauty, for herself, a private world, and never introduced it into her storefront, or to her children” (128). The sectioning of her identity reflects the sectioning of the African American community as a whole and necessarily enhances it. The internalization of the civilizing errand’s spatial regime by its subaltern adherents across generations actively, rather than merely, inertly benefits the hegemon. “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth”: Taking Refuge in How Cholly’s worst impulses toward Pecola, for Morrison, are not so much evidence that he does not love as much as they are evidence of the subversion of that love. Trauma originates in this spoiled love as one generation visits

114  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” itself on the next. Morrison can thus see Cholly’s rape of his daughter and his love for her as a singular potential, cursed in its expression by the specter of the errand across time. With this vision, Morrison reconceives the cycle of victimization as one in which the monstrous and the helpless are interchangeable within a dialectical process of mass trauma, exemplified in the case of African descendants in the Americas. Moreover, the reality of the human experience, she suggests, shows that human ontology connects to the land without fear and looks skeptically on the Western metaphysical schism effected in the name of civility and progress: And Cholly loved her. I’m sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye. (206) The white gaze, too, is an “inward glare” in that it uses nature to exert control over not only the landscape but over populations and aspects of human life. Ecocritics Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin observe that “the ‘primitive’ [is] distinguished from the ‘civilized’ precisely by its proximity to the natural world” (3). Racism, colonialism, and sexism have thus drawn their conceptual strength from casting subaltern difference as a form of inferiority closer to nature—a lesser, conditional, and primordial ontology lacking the full measure of rationality or culture. Plumwood cogently elucidates how the Western impulse to set differences apart and insulate white intellect becomes its own license to preside over the resulting rift. Significantly (and with much irony), the hegemon defends its subjugation of the land and its people by way of reference to nature. Citing the work of Vandana Shiva, Plumwood notes that it is not only women’s labour which traditionally gets subsumed ‘by definition’ into nature, but the labour of colonised non-western, nonwhite people also. The connections between these forms of domination in the west are thus partly the result of chance and of specific historical evolution, and partly formed from a necessity inherent in the dynamic and logic of domination between self and other, reason and nature. To be defined as “nature” in this context is to be defined as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible background conditions against which the ‘foreground’ achievements of reason or culture (provided typically by the white, western,

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 115 male expert or entrepreneur) take place. It is to be defined as a terra nullius, a resource empty of its own purposes or meanings, and hence available to be annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or intellect, and to be conceived and moulded in relation to these purposes. It means being seen as part of a sharply separate, even alien lower realm, whose domination is simply ‘natural,’ flowing from nature itself and the nature(s) of things. (4) In “Nature and the National Ego,” Perry Miller argues that the specific reality of a surrounding wilderness initiated the cleaving of the American mind; the “irreconcilable opposition between nature and civilization,” in his view, turns a fundamental need for reordering into the “secret heart” of the nation (208). In Morrison’s novel, we see how the violence of white American culture over black bodies and landscapes is pre-sanitized by this New World dualism. If no civilizing effort can eclipse the natural agonist (which includes African Americans and women, among others), then the justification for the project becomes automatic,” effecting, as Plumwood suggests, a naturalism of its own. It is this idea of the “natural nation” that Morrison seeks to challenge, using the most vulnerable as a sort of fissile material with which to expose the presence of power. This is Pecola’s utility. While she is nearly silent and as readers we rarely have access to her thoughts, we do get important bits in significant scenes. Following an argument at the Breedlove storefront that arises from “assumptions of immutable inferiority” (to again use Morrison’s critical terminology), Pecola brings this hateful ethic to its logical conclusion, wishing for her own annihilation: “ ‘Please God,’ she whispered in the palm of her hand. ‘Please make me disappear.’ She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. Now slowly, now with a rush” (45). Pecola’s self-negation indicts the logic of the errand itself by visibly interrupting the constant promise of the Western idyll. Through her narratological refusal to offer any closure or rebirth, Morrison flips the thematics of innocence in her text, aiming to break the transgenerational cycle of trauma by exposing how the expansion, virility, and individuality of the errand’s agenda produces loss, barrenness, and death. The white gaze can only reproduce itself successfully if black people, whether they are the privileged Geraldine, Maureen Peel, and the other “hollyhock” women or the vulnerable Pecola, embrace what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin term “a homogeneous code.” Therefore, Pecola’s desire to undo herself is consistent with the ethic she internalizes, yet her desire also belies the ethic’s pretense of innocence. This is the final refutation of the errand, and its metaphor may be found, tellingly, in the marigolds because the same specters that haunt the land while killing the flowers have driven Pecola mad. Clarity on these points of dominant practice and the threat of exile promise unquiet revelations of liberation and absolution. Claudia’s statement that “there is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult

116  “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” to handle, one must take refuge in how” (3) might prompt us to try to understand instead of accepting the surrender she professes; how may become a shelter for understanding rather than a shelter from it if in the particulars of communal pain, we would find the forensic language to rescue ourselves from the foregone logics of dominance and control. The land and those made closer to it by exile are meant to signal this original and enduring hope for humanity: “Nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth” (8). It may be important to recall alongside this quotation Perry Miller’s claim that the earliest colonizers were looking for “the embodiment of America as rooted in the soil.” In The Bluest Eye, Morrison confronts the perceived ugliness and received pathologies of her characters to test her theory of innocence as far as it will go; she challenges us to restore through them the delicate redemption of the marigolds and, in so doing, to cast out the ghost of the errand that seeks still to colonize not just space and the body but the generation of meaning. In the promise of this possibility, the refuge of how might yet address the great and longstanding difficulties of why. Notes 1 Morrison’s rich oeuvre includes other, similar equations of victimhood and survival in the geo-ontology of female Others (e.g. those of Native American or poor, immigrant white women in later works like A Mercy). In order to properly analyze her debut novel, however, this chapter focuses only on The Bluest Eye, while fully acknowledging the larger backdrop of what Morrison’s body of work offers in toto. 2 While Morrison’s primary focus is Pecola and other woman characters like Freida and Claudia and the devastating impact of white beauty standards upon young black girls, she attends to the effects that this sort of colonization has on men as well, as evidenced in the stories about Pecola’s brother Sammy and her father Cholly. 3 There are multiple references in the novel to her ugliness. See, for example, the discussion of the Breedlove homelife: “Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly” (38). 4 After Soaphead Church is able to convince Pecola that he has—through God— given her the blue eyes she desired, Pecola becomes more docile, more passive. Her belief that she is closer in proximity to whiteness, that she is closer to the kind of divine providence she seeks and through which she perceives the world, makes her more susceptible to abuse. 5 The vast, expansive landscape of ecological feminism has become more richly interlaced with theories of postcolonialism. See also Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s Material Feminisms; Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene; Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands’s Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times, Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self; or Greta Gaard’s Critical Ecofeminism. This is certainly not an exhaustive list but these ecofeminist scholars have shifted the scope of ecological feminism to include the disproportionate plight of white male colonialism on minority women and the ecos. 6 Morrison is, in fact, fairly overt on this point, given the phallic imagery of the hunters’ flashlight “worm(ing) its way into his guts” (148).

“Pecola and the Unyielding Earth” 117 Works Cited Grewal, Gurleen. “ ‘Laundering the Head of Whitewash’: Mimicry and Resistance in The Bluest Eye.” In Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie McKay and Kathryn Earle. MLA, 1997. Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin, “Green Postcolonialism.” Interventions, vol. 9, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–11. Jelsma, Jess E. “Decay and Symbolic Impotence in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Explicator, vol. 75, no. 3, 2017, pp. 200–202. Koopman, Emy. “Incestuous Rape, Abjection, and the Colonization of Psychic Space in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 49, no. 3, 2012, pp. 303–315. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. Routledge, 1995. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Miller, Perry. “Nature and the National Ego.” In Errand Into the Wilderness. Harvard University Press, 1956. Miller, Perry. “The Shaping of the American Character.” New England Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 4, 1955, pp. 435–454. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage, 1993. ———. The Bluest Eye. Vintage, 2007. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993. Roye, Susmita. “Toni Morrison’s Disrupted Girls and Their Disturbed Girlhoods: ‘The Bluest Eye’ and ‘A Mercy.’ ” Callaloo, vol. 35, no. 1, 2012, pp. 212–227. Spanos, William. “American Exceptionalism in the Post-9/11 Era: The Myth and the Reality,” Symploke, vol. 20, no. 1 and 2, 2013, pp. 295–96. ———. Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation. Fordham University Press, 2006. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64–81. Sturgeon, Noel. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Actions. Routledge, 1997. Werrlein, Debra T. “Not so Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in The Bluest Eye.” MELUS, vol. 30, no. 4, 2005, pp. 53–72. Williams, Jessica Horvath. “Unlike the Average: Mental Disability as Narrative Form and Social Critique in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 91–117.

6 “A Hurricane Ravaging the Island” An Examination of Blackness, Witchcraft, and Feminist Alterity in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem They [the founding Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay colony] took the lead in defining their settlement based on ‘a Covenant with God’ to create ‘a city on a hill’ as a model for all the world, and people of other Protestant faiths soon also came to see themselves and America in a similar way. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Americans defined their mission in the New World in biblical terms. They were a ‘chosen people’ on an ‘errand in the wilderness,’ creating ‘the new Israel’ or the ‘new Jerusalem’ in what was clearly ‘the promised land.’ America was the site of a ‘new Heaven and a new earth, the home of justice,’ ‘God’s country.’ The settlement of America was vested, as Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, ‘with all the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual appeal of a religious quest.’ (Huntington 64)

Maryse Condé’s 1986 novel, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a fictional account of the slave Tituba, who, as a matter of historical record, truly was at the center, as star witness and accused, of the widely infamous 1692 witch trials in Salem. For its part, the novel is one of myth and migration,1 imagining Tituba’s early life in Barbados, her time as wife and slave in the Massachusetts colony, and, subsequently her freedom after the ordeal of the trials (which now feature anachronistic cellmate Hester Prynne), and her return to her homeland, as a healer for the enslaved. In this role, she cares for a brutally beaten slave, Iphigene, eventually taking him as a lover, together fomenting a plantation revolt and, ultimately, hanging alongside him. Freed once again, Tituba pursues a cosmic antagonism in the spiritual/invisible plane, where she achieves a centralizing omniscience. As a matter of history, Tituba’s story is constrained to her surviving Salem testimony.2 In seeking for Tituba to tell her own story, the declared project of the titular I, Condé reconstructs, with a liberal and ranging fiction, Tituba’s silenced genealogy and reconciles the mania of the witch trials with the mythologies of blackness and feminist alterity at work within the larger context of seventeenth-century Salem: its civilizational errand into the wilderness. As the Huntington epigraph above describes, Puritans sought to inscribe upon what they perceived to be the blank bounty of the land a characteristically DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-6

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 119 cohesive, literate, and conscious order. It is within the complexities and follies of such a yearning for rigid, doctrinal glory that Condé positions Tituba’s subaltern counternarrative. In asking why the author would find the wellworn touchstone of the Salem trials particularly resonant with large, subsequent questions of otherness in America, we should return to Perry Miller’s foundational Americanist text, Errand into the Wilderness. In its prologue, Miller repeatedly links Puritanism to notions of American “beginnings” and “origins” (the words are used 14 times in 3 pages). Arguably, the advent of America as a social phenomenon unto itself can be located nowhere else and this ubiquity of industrious, Protestant individualism at the inception of a nation provides for Condé a totalizing field against which the negative of Tituba’s invisibility might be better understood as a silenced protagonism. She explains that “I really invented Tituba. I gave her a childhood, and adolescence, an old age. At the same time I wanted to turn Tituba into a sort of female hero, and epic heroine” (200–201). Condé deploys Tituba’s imagined journey as a subversive and kaleidoscopic pastiche across which recurrent master narratives of whiteness might be confronted at angles unavailable to traditional history. I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem begins: “I can look for my story among the witches of Salem, but it isn’t there” (xi). Significantly, Tituba is the first to proclaim her involvement in witchcraft and in so doing launches one of the worst witch cases in early American history, yet she is scantly discussed in existing scholarly accounts.3 The fact of her absence4 is the provocation for Condé’s work and its emotional, sociopolitical, and mythic implications lie at the core of her mission. The promise of redeeming Tituba’s invisible history poetically is rooted in Condé’s ironic fascination with the amalgam of “historical Tituba” that contains both the quotidian neuroses of Puritanical life within her real testimony and the Afro-Caribbean pidgin/voodoo affect later ascribed to her (most indelibly by Arthur Miller in The Crucible); Condé wishes to transmute the record and memory of Tituba into an active subjectivity so that her inconsistencies point back to our expectations and reanimate her alterity, whether Native American or African American, enslaved Puritan convert or heretical witch, as an insurgent threat.5 This is the darkness of the Other that Reverend Parris decries in demanding of Tituba and her husband, John Indian, “I know that the color of your skin is a sign of your damnation, but as long as you are under my roof you will behave like Christians!” (41). When she is accused of witchcraft, she is physically violated; the men beat her, and they “[lift] up [her] skirt and thrust a sharpened stick into the most sensitive part of [her] body” (91). To John Indian, who is allowed to comfort her afterward, she insists she is not guilty. Indian replies, “Oh, yes, you are and you always will be in their eyes” (92). He means, of course, that her “race, gender, and native spirituality contributed” inexorably to her condemnation (Jalazai 413). Condé begins the novel with Tituba’s conception in which her mother, Abena, is raped by an English sailor aboard Christ the King, as the ship

120  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ sails to Barbados. Tituba explains, “I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt” (1). With this opening passage, Condé establishes a symbolic primer through which the specific tonalities of Tituba’s story may be read as a tapestry of larger complicities and fears. The contrapuntal setting of the rape aboard the piously named vessel evokes a horrible “christening” in line with what William V. Spanos terms the “barbarous violence perpetrated by the inexorable binary logic of white Western/ American civilization” against its Other (229). The setting likewise suggests an equivalency between the feminized instrumentalization of seagoing crafts and a Puritan society that, as Elizabeth Reis describes, imagined women’s bodies as “weaker vessels” that were always “vulnerable . . . always ready to succumb to the devil” in such a way that the perceived threat “inadvertently implicated corporeal women themselves” (15). More finely, Reis links the Puritan ideation of the soul as a venue of feminized susceptibility with the patriarchal saturation of Puritanical society in that by “defining a witch as a person whose (feminine) soul covenanted with Satan by signing a devil’s pact rather than quiescently waiting for Christ, Puritans effectively demonized the notion of active female choice” (16). Condé symbolically meshes such structural disenfranchisement with the discrete violence of Abena’s rape and aligns her casual victimization with what Sacvan Bercovitch calls the Puritans’ “cries of declension and doom” which, he argues, were “designed to revitalize the errand [into the wilderness]” (xiv) and activate what Spanos observes as the will to power over radical Others. Thus can it be said that a preoccupying and devout terror over self-protection from aberrant forces of Satanic chaos, as seen to swirl around natural and feminine sites, initiated a “predatory history that bore witness to the virtual extinction of the natives of North and South America, the African slave trade . . .” (“Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis” 220). We arrive, through this appraisal of the Western gaze as paranoiac toward the natural, at what is perhaps Condé’s governing or, at least, most complex symbolic construction, into which she roots the ontology of witch/other-ness: the ocean. As the author describes the ocean’s power: For although the water of springs and rivers attracts spirits, the perpetual movement of the sea drives them away. They remain on either side of its great expanse, sometimes sending messages to those who are dear to them, but never daring to cross the waves. (138) Tituba’s seaborne origin suggests she is un-landed in the Western sense, that she might lack a fixed birthright, and it is the alterity of her bond with the flowing, inconstant ocean that brings us the primary motif of the novel: that of fluidity. It is in this sense that Condé begins to write against fixed, predestined identity, a target she consistently unravels across the narrative’s arc, from Barbados to Massachusetts and back: “As Tituba journeys farther away

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 121 from her homeland, her awareness of others increases, challenging any formulation of identity-based on geographical and group belonging” (Ortega 119). This is an important observation because, as Gema Ortega further explains, in the same way, that Condé physically and metaphorically distances her titular character from her homeland or any land at all, Condé distances herself—as an author—from catch-all hybridity (Antillanité Creoleness) defined by French West Indian thinkers like Èdouard Glissant and the other Créolistes: Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé, et al. Where Glissant seeks to “re-root” Creoleness in its “true place,” Condé questions the postulate mechanics of such a project, challenging us to consider that it errantly reproduces the binary of Creole/non-Creole, siloing the individual within a cultural nationalism. To Condé, a singular, national culture may be, for the Creole, a means (borrowed/internalized from the colonizer) to obscure the enduring racial and sexual prejudices that continue to haunt Caribbean societies.6 In this chapter, we read Condé’s novel as revisionist fiction that resists the totalizing impulse of Western colonialism and begins to map the web of historicities and contingencies amid agential ecologies, gender, race, and empire. By completing and centralizing Tituba’s story, Condé upends the white supremacist, masculinist, and exclusionary matrices maintained by America’s Puritan cultural aesthetic. Fittingly, Condé sees this deeply profound task as glimpsed best within the interstices of the human condition and at the level of populist experience: But we [Caribbeans] can write history. It is not only the Europeans who can write. We can do it, too. We could write the history of Guadeloupe and Martinique, but we would lose the tiny events which have more importance to people than the big events . . . the task of the writer is to forget about this kind of superstructure which is imposed upon us by education, tradition, and going to university. We have to listen to another voice. We can write just like the whites. But we must use another method. (Lewis and Condé 549) Condé thus asserts the core precept of her treatment of Tituba, that “fiction and history are inherently interdependent” in her re-telling, in the mythic antecedents around Tituba, in the historical record, and, most tellingly, in the historical representation of “witches” within the American imagination. Moreover, Condé suggests not only that resistance and agency can be cultivated on the margins, but that it is the exteriority of these margins that so terrorizes the colonizing hegemon and that through such sites as “the witch,” we might reassemble an illuminating genealogy of power. To this end, in locating the purchase of Tituba’s magical potential in her connectivity to water, plants, animals, curios, and ritual, Condé draws out the threat non-Western forms of native spirituality have posed to the workings of Western religious and imperial modalities, and, in so doing, she creates a richer accounting of America’s systematic colonization and damnation of the Other.7

122  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ As Val Plumwood argues in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Western “colonialism and sexism have drawn their conceptual strength from casting sexual, racial and ethnic difference as closer to the animal and the body constructed as a sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture” (4). Condé subverts this logic of domination by restoring Tituba’s protagonism and exposes how the ontological imperatives of Western metaphysics have historically situated the colonized woman as passive/non-agent/non-subject alongside a colonized landscape that has been simultaneously codified as bereft of life and agency, all while exoticizing both as essentially dangerous. By situating nature as terra nullius, a resource empty of its own purposes or meaning and the invisible background against which the achievements of Western reason take place, the proverbial colonizing errand into the wilderness has justified its imperial mission through an ontology of violence, which views subaltern space (and those who inhabit this space) as “part of a sharply separate, even alien lower realm, whose domination is simply ‘natural,’ flowing from nature itself and the nature(s) of things” (Plumwood 4). In the gaze of the patriarchal colonialist, Tituba epitomizes this “alien, lower realm,” the “backward” culture against which the Western empire was developed. Condé’s great achievement, then, is in how the rescue of Tituba’s personhood, which had been relegated to the level of abject/inert threat, catalyzes an unmaking of dominant practice. On History Condé’s interest in a renewed Tituba should not be misunderstood as a drive toward an alternative protagonism per se; her historical criticism is not sated by a recuperative revision or an inversion of the triumphalist polemic. Condé once said in an interview with Ann Armstrong Scarboro: For me Tituba is not a historical novel. Tituba is just the opposite of a historical novel. I was not interested at all in what her real life could have been. I have a few precise documents: her deposition testimony. It forms the only historical part of the novel, and I was not interested in getting anything more than that. I really invented Tituba. (Scarboro 200–201) Much as the author questions Creolist nationalism as mere substitution, her positioning of Tituba at the center of her narrative is not a tidy replacement of the historical narrator but rather an interrogation that veers, with no small amount of apparent pleasure, toward mockery of the conceit. She maintains, “I wanted to give a life to this obscure and forgotten woman. But since I am not the kind of writer who creates model characters, I quickly destroyed what might appear exemplary in the story by rendering Tituba rather naïve and sometimes ridiculous” (qtd. in Pfaff 60). As Zubeda Jalalzai emphasizes in her article, “Historical Fiction and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 123 Witch of Salem,” Condé dialogues between “standard historical writing and memory” so that “new narratives from remnants found within the dominant historical narrative” may be formed (414). In the novel La Vie Scelerate, for example, Condé is “trying to write memory” by centering on “the smaller and more banal details in life rather than on official history” (549). In an echo of Danticat’s project from a previous chapter, Condé moves away from the fixative ethic of historicity and toward a fluidic meditation on the inconstancy of memory where the latter might not only criticize but attempt to poetically fill the lapses and gaps of the former. Tituba, then, “exceeds the limits of historical plausibility” in that the character is largely of the author’s mischievous making, and, for this, she presents “a figure who is [not] wholly convincing or admirable” and is therefore “indicative of the postmodern impulses to tear down heroes and to challenge master-narratives” (413). Condé identifies the errand into the wilderness as the master narrative in question when she affirms, “Writing Tituba was an opportunity to express my feelings and present-day America. I wanted to imply that in terms of narrow-mindedness, hypocrisy, and racism little has changed since the days of the Puritans” (qtd. in Scarboro 203). It is the current inertia that initiates Condé’s retrieval of historical memory interred within psychological and physical violence visited against women, people of color, and the untamed landscape of the new colonies; it is the continuum of pain she exhumes that links the state of the present to the sins of Tituba’s “Salem! A community that stole, cheated, and burgled while wrapping itself in the cloak of God’s name” (84). The novels in this study forge varying connections to “the errand” that together lens the psychic and material holistic of American expansionism. In previous chapters, we map how the parallel destruction of female bodies and the natural environment has served to reify a patriarchal capitalist system. Condé’s novel is a piece with this aim but tends to reach satirically for the contradictions of individual agency within such a structure. For example, Condé tongue-in-cheek upending of cliches around black female spirituality actually reinforces the primacy, via its problematics, of the relationship between female bodies and the land because “the complexity with which Tituba displays her ethnicity in her confession allows Condé to capture her ambivalence and create a multilayered text where the politics of self-representation are constantly interrogated” (Marouan 108). This is perhaps the narrative (and anti-hegemonic) right to be multimodal or, as Mara Dukats argues, Condé’s mélange “illustrates ways in which literary texts reclaim unacknowledged and effaced agency” and “marks out a space for Caribbean women’s presence on the literary landscape by exposing [Tituba’s] historical marginalization” for the flattening of nuance that it induces (Dukats 52). Dukats places the novel within the model Françoise Lionnet outlines in “ ‘Logiques métisses’: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representations” where colonized cultures threaten to “delegitimate” cultural hegemony and refute the “paradigm of exoticism and/or victimization” (103–16). This is to say that the hybridity arising from the empire’s contact with its abject contains,

124  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ by the fact of itself, the undermining of the imperial consummation at the level of identity. Lionnet confronts much of what we discuss in previous chapters using Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Morrison holds that slavery created “a playground for the imagination” (38) of early American writers; Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is an apt example. Contrary to the notion that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the U.S.” (5), Morrison argues, the “Africanist presence” has created the “arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity” (44) and furnished the major themes of American literature. The interplay she characterizes leads us to what Lionnet terms the “global mongrelization or métissage of cultural forms” (101). Both authors uncover the structuring negative of the historically marginalized as a kind of invisible accounting for the fate of Hester Prynne and others who found themselves at odds with righteous Puritanical certainty. Morrison explains that “Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny” (52). Tituba, at her mythic apex, then, replenishes the Puritan identity as powerful, positive, innocent, and good. I, Tituba is not a counter-text in the dialectical sense. Its history does not follow, antithetically, from the edificial thesis of white hegemony. If anything, the opposite is true. The historical complication Condé offers to us is Tituba’s presence at the inception of an empire and, indeed, the countervailing narrative power of her agency within the context of its creation. The novel’s value, and the core of its playful spirit, lies in its reading as a late coming completion of the American story rather than a piece of contemporary restyling. In a conversation with her husband John Indian, Tituba asks him why he fears her. He responds: “Because I know you are violent. I often see you as a hurricane ravaging the island, laying flat the coconut palms and raising the lead-gray waves up to the sky” (30). Given the context of her memory surfacing across a forgotten history, his rendering of her elemental danger speaks at least as well to Tituba’s metaphorical utility in capturing the force of the hurricane and vice versa. The Blackness of Witchcraft If the common notion of indigenous supernatural power in the Americas mingles the physis of the body with that of the wilderness in a nominally religious union, then the Puritan persecution of witches offers to its victims the status of colonial antagonists on this dual front, as both the feminized “weaker vessel” and the harbinger of environmental calamity. Tituba’s race adds a third paranoia and, as we’ve contended, her hybridity helps to taxonomize and reconcile a genealogical latticework of gendered and racialized constructions

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 125 that, taken together, point at Puritan alarm toward the ecos. As the bump in the night is not only heard but created by the listener, the alterity of Tituba’s blackness and witchcraft may be understood, of course, as emanating from the dominant order that interdicts her. To this end, Maryse Condé searches for where the abject reflects back upon power; in I, Tituba, she emphasizes what landed ness Tituba possesses (her connection to Barbados) to draw out not only the particular marginalization of the titular character but the fate of the Caribbean in the face of American expansion: To try and console myself I used a remedy. I filled a bowl with water, which I placed near the window so that I could look at it while I busied myself in the kitchen and imagine my Barbados. The bowl of water managed to encompass the entire island, with the swell of the sea merging into the waves of the sugarcane fields, the leaning coconut palms on the seashore, and the almond trees loaded with red and dark green fruit. (62) Tituba’s homesickness comes after an increasingly fervent interrogation by her soon-to-be accusers, young white girls thrilled by the exoticism and verboten status of her paganism. As Condé contrasts the mania of their questioning with the simplicity and innocence of the water bowl devotional, she posits that the invention of Tituba’s witchcraft operates paradoxically, much like her race or gender: an indelible stain as professed and a ranging, opportunistic catchall as practiced. We, then, are challenged to “move beyond simplistic notions of identity” that are fixed and toward, perhaps, the fluidic meditations of the water bowl (Marouan 108). The status of Tituba’s witchcraft is feminized via its inconstancy in the face of a masculinized imperative toward denotation and enclosure, but it is always also, for that antagonism, made native and wild. While Condé cheekily subtitles the novel “black witch of Salem,” and melds the vagaries of the record to their evocations, seventeenth-century court documents refer to Tituba as Indian.8 In “The Metamorphosis of Tituba,” Chadwick Hansen documents the shift in Tituba’s race from Indian to mixed to black, alongside changes to her practice of magic, which were originally identifiably English, before shifting to Indian and finally African in Miller’s The Crucible, where Tituba is a “Negro” woman who practices voodoo. This site, where the feminine and indigenous are given to becoming blackened, is, for us, a major opportunity for intersectional inquiry. Puritans “regarded the soul as feminine and characterized it as insatiable, as consonant with the supposedly unappeasable nature of women” (Reis 15); women as feminine bearers of feminine souls were doubly susceptible. We would posit that shared proximity to mythic evil fuses the feminine with the racialized Other9 in I, Tituba to form the hurricane ravaging the island, and this unity might begin to explain the gradual blackening of Tituba in history. As Reis explains, “Among witches, the body clearly manifested the soul’s acceptance of the diabolical

126  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ covenant” since “The Puritans’ earthly perception of women’s bodies and souls corresponded to their otherworldly belief concerning Satan’s powers” (16). We are left with a key metaphysical confusion that is regardless meant to accredit the intercession of Western reason: that the black female body is both of the state of nature and damned by the association. In Condé’s portrayal, Tituba is very much an avatar of confusion as the daughter of an African slave woman raped by an Englishman aboard a slave ship. Marouan contends that “Condé here problematizes Tituba’s racial identity, first by blurring her racial boundaries as a person of mixed race, and second, by associating her coming into the world with violence and enslavement” (109). Condé mischievously shades the “hatred and contempt” into which Tituba is born into the paranoid epistemology of the Reverend Henry Smith: “So soon as we rise in the morning, we go forth to fight with two mighty giants, the world and the devil; and whom do we take with us but a traitor, this brittle flesh, which is ready to yield up to the enemy at every assault?” (Fuller 18). Puritans believed in the primacy of the soul. For the Reverend Samuel Willard, the parts of the physical body were “to be at the Command and under the Government of the Nobler Part [the soul]” (123). Yet, for this intimacy, to follow Smith’s logic, the body, in its pose of instrumentalized compromise, becomes a vulnerable medium for Satanic agents in pursuit of The Nobler Part. Condé recognizes how Tituba’s liminality (bi-racial, nautical) coupled with the trauma of her conception creates a sense of the aberrantly visceral in a community preconditioned to fear any departure at the embattled camp of New Jerusalem: Imagine a small community of men and women oppressed by the presence of Satan and seeking to hunt him down in all his manifestations. A cow that died, a child smitten with convulsions, a girl whose menstrual period was late in coming set off a chain of unending speculation. (65) What Tituba recognizes as the paranoiac, Mary Beth Norton expands as an urge toward the Manichean that centralizes difference as an organizing and divine essence: The foundation of the witchcraft crisis lay in Puritan New Englanders’ singular worldview. . .. That worldview taught them that they were a chosen people, charged with bringing God’s message to a heathen land previously ruled by the devil. And in that adopted homeland God spoke to them repeatedly through his providences—that is, through the small and large events of their daily lives. Remarkable signs in the sky (comets, the aurora borealis), natural catastrophes (hurricanes, droughts), smallpox epidemics, the sudden deaths of children or spouses, unexpected good fortune: all carried messages from God to his people. (295)

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 127 Witchcraft may be understood as the horrifying re-animation, and reclamation, of any number of such alterities, including the externalism of blackness in the Americas. The hegemon’s fear is reifying itself in this way due to the reprisal its structuring violence so inexorably invites. Gema Ortega takes this to mean that the actual subversion of Tituba’s “sorcery” resides in its capacity to disrupt and destabilize the Western master narrative: “Witchcraft does not function in the novel as a mere element of the plot but as a counterdiscourse, which serves to denounce any narrative that claims the power to represent others” (118). For her part, Condé, through John Indian’s imploration of Tituba, understands, too, that to be cast as a Biblical threat is to become one: “by pretending to obey them, avenge yourself and me as well. Like the lord, deliver up for plunder their mountains, their fields, their wealth, and their treasures” (92). Here, broadly, lies the fear at the heart of the errand and the agency of its periphery. Nature, Fluidity, and Identity “You will suffer during your life. A lot. A lot. But you’ll survive.”

Between the horror poetics of Tituba’s conception and her maturation into a muscular and clear-eyed foil for Western turpitude, we find the presence of Condé’s borrowing-with-a-difference from the bildungsroman in the form of an early spiritual mentor, Mama Yaya. We are told that Yaya, who is in fact “Yetunde” but enters the story Creolized, differs ethnically from Tituba in the context of their African extraction (a distinction lost on the Western racial register, and largely lost to history); her identity as “a Nago from the coast” who has, with this voodoo pedigree, “cultivated to a fine art the ability to communicate with the invisible,” sets her apart from Tituba and her mother, who are Ashanti (9). Thus, Mama Yaya presents as the traditional exoticized mentor figure in Tituba’s developmental journey yet, in a departure, promises to reconcile back into the land the trauma within an impossibly young Tituba of her mother Abena’s hanging, and Abena’s slave husband Yao’s subsequent suicide, over an incident where Abena successfully defends herself against her white master’s sexual violence: Mama Yaya taught me the prayers, the rites, and the propitiatory gestures. She taught me how to change myself into a bird on a branch, into an insect in the dry grass or a frog croaking in the mud of the River Ormond whenever I was tired of the shape I had been given at birth . . . shortly after my fourteenth birthday, her body followed the law of nature, I did not cry when I buried her. I knew I was not alone and that three spirits were watching over me. (10)

128  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ As the third watchful spirit placed alongside the ghosts of the violative terror in which Abena and Yao lived and died, Mama Yaya’s “propriety” with nature characterizes her mentorship as destabilizing a hegemon antagonistic toward the ecos. Where, in the regular order of the bildungsroman, the mentor would be considered broadly consolidative of her structural context, here we see, alternatively, and in a fine bout of irony for Condé, how the colonized mentor is, instead, necessarily antagonistic of her received metaphysical terrain: Mama Yaya taught me about herbs. Those for inducing sleep. Those for healing wounds and ulcers, those for loosening the tongues of thieves, those that calm epileptics and plunge them into blissful rest, those that put works of hope on the lips of the angry, the desperate, the suicidal. . . . Mama Yaya taught me the sea, the mountains, the hills. She taught me that everything lives, has a soul, and breathes. That everything must be respected. That man is not the master riding through his kingdom on horseback. (9) Her decentralizing revision away from the mentor’s reification of monadic sovereignty within the Western mythos makes this a postcolonial-ecological text. In order to counter a legacy of distress and ruin that would strain any individual capacity, Tituba is empowered by Mama Yaya to ground her alterity in and through the power of nature as a collective. Yaya’s insurgent potency takes on the modality of a swirling natural response; as Ortega notes, she “teaches Tituba a type of adaptation that requires agency, movement, and skill, as opposed to mere acceptance, assimilation, or despair” (119). Even under the arrogant gaze of the colonizer, this level of emancipatory sophistication moves their mysticism beyond superstition and into the legitimate antagonism of an expanding horizon of possibility that might engage the occupying project itself. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley assert, “the postcolonial writer [is] in the position of having to renegotiate taxonomy, struggling to articulate new relationships and new meanings in the tired language of empire” (11). Condé boldfaces this renegotiation of the land, of space and nature, as a means through which Tituba is “initiated into the upper spheres of knowledge” (10) and while the emphasis on the peril of her growing confidence is intentional, Condé is quick to explain, in these powerful opening moments of the novel, that Tituba “was born to heal, not to frighten” (12). Here we locate Condé’s great sympathy for witchcraft as a benevolent and feminized divinity encoded onto a natural world that Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman in Material Feminisms understand as not merely “a passive construction” but “an agentic force that interacts with and changes the other elements in the mix, including the human” (7). In taking the specific example of Tituba’s work with curative herbal remedies to comfort her fellow sick and dying slaves, we observe that such restorative

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 129 alchemy centralizes, for Condé Carolyn Merchant’s authentic state of “nature as a living organism” and antithesizes the colonizing/razing errand which presupposes an inert and instrumentalized field of play for its many heroes on horseback. When she is removed from the Puritan enclave of Massachusetts, Tituba remains connected to her native Creole spirituality, and to nature; she utilizes her abilities to protect herself and to help others, including the young white girls for whom she is enslaved as a caretaker. Tituba’s natural solidarity with these girls despite their relationship to her coerced labor, and surely her desire to reify the legacy of Mama Yaya in her own mentorship, are meant to buttress a marquee feminist correction away from the Satanism of her historical/ mythic characterization. It is the move away from witchcraft as a unilaterally corrupting projection, the Puritan theorization underlying Tituba’s eventual condemnation, and toward a sorority of collective transformation that begins to vigorously animate Condé’s revisionist impulse. Ortega offers that “Condé’s poetics of identity in I, Tituba can be better understood through a Bakhtinian interpretation of the subject as a creator” (114). We take this to imply that to fear Tituba’s witchcraft as Satanic, as her Puritan masters did, is to mistake a reconciling dialogism for the same destructive monologism that, internalized and projected, has rendered any wider perspective impossible. Bahktinian dialogism, which is to say, in the simplest terms, the inevitability of feedback/input from one’s actions/output, is, for 1692 Salemites, the unacceptable “bump in the night” from the previous section. Bakhtin’s model captures, by contrast, the anti-fluidics of Western unipolarity and explains how Tituba’s dialogic spiral would arrive predestined for contestation, scorn, and continual punishment. Condé writes: What is a witch? I noticed that when he said the word, it was marked with disapproval. Why should that be? Why? Isn’t the ability to communicate with the invisible world, to keep constant links with the dead, to care for others and heal, a superior gift of nature that inspires respect, admiration, and gratitude? Consequently, shouldn’t the witch (if that’s what the person who has this gift is to be called) be cherished and revered rather than feared? (17) Condé answers her own question in that her retrieval of Tituba’s subjectivity has in mind the West’s rejection of non-Christian identities and the paranoia projected onto the bodies, minds, and souls of colonized women who, in this construction, can be both read and celebrated as witches. McClintock finds a related finesse in her recognition that “the fear of being engulfed by the unknown is projected onto colonized peoples as their determination to devour the intruder whole” (27). To internally assume the zero-sum of the civilizing mission is to witness it externally everywhere; this is the aggressor’s assumption of reciprocity. Thus, the threat of boundary loss (“engulfment”)

130  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ conjures a level of force and violence free from the possibility of legitimate input emanating from the natural world or its liminalized inhabitants. The artifice of this detachment, sine qua non for the liberal order, activates Merchant’s relegation of nature from organism to the mechanism and cues Lynn White Jr.’s argument in “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis”: Christianity (especially in its Western form) is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen . . . [it] not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. (43) This amounts to a conflict over the quality of participation as a first principle, whether one ought to resist or commune with questions of interconnection and mortality (Mama Yaya’s closeness with the dead and Tituba’s active deathlessness are powerful non-Western examples bookending the novel). For those Christianizing the landscape, participation can only be reified insofar as one supplants/becomes the Lacanian big Other and establishes a totalizing or unchanging and eternal monopoly over one’s fear of Kristeva’s abject. In this mode, where the vector of purpose is forever outward and cumulative, that which is pre-existent and external becomes wilderness rather than refuge and the pagan recognition of a networked and flowing ontology becomes heretical to the pretense of an ever-self-necessitating domination. Such rationalizing enclosure (or exclusion) invites around the Puritan selfmyth the identificatory force of a citadel, or of a New Jerusalem. As William Spanos writes in his essay “American Exceptionalism in the Post-9/11: the Myth and the Reality,” “the American Puritans, following the directives of their figural Biblical exegesis, viewed themselves as ‘exceptional’—as a youthful people elected by God to undertake his ‘errand in the [New World] wilderness’ to fulfill the rationalizing work abandoned by the Old/World, a world that, in forsaking the Word in favor of the World, had become old, decadent, and tyrannical—that is, ‘over-civilized’ ” (294). The victims of the 1692 Trials were seen to have also chosen the World beyond New Jerusalem’s gates. In the widest sense, the Puritans appraised the “decadence” of Old Europe and the “mysticism” of the indigenous Americas as related paganisms existing under a larger umbrella of relativist externalism, or the mere willingness to consider feedback as a dialectic to the self. In the case of Tituba, her “decadence” in apposition to the natural “World” was apparent precisely in the greater fluidity and personal surrender of her voodoo alterity or “mysticism.” For the other women victimized by witch hunt mania, the most minor incursion, or even feint, toward “heresy” evinced the same perilous flexibility. Yet, in either case, the prospect of the World as active, and even seductive, beyond its mute instrumentalization as a supporting nullity prompted a deep terror of the outside, and a commensurate self-licensing for violence, among the Salem leadership.

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 131 Where, in the face of this fervor, Condé reclaims Tituba’s characteristic inconsistency as agential and antagonistic toward power, Tituba’s “upper” knowledge and “magic” abilities serve to metaphorize her hybridity as a colonial subject. In Barbabos, Mama Yaya first imparts to Tituba the subversive potential of substitutions, transformations, and adaptations: “Under her guidance, I attempted bold hybrids, cross-breeding the passiflorinde with the prune taureau, the poisonous pomme cy there with the surette, and the azalêe-àes-azaxêes with the per-sulfureuse. I devised drugs and potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations” (11). Once delivered upon the alien New England landscape, Tituba intuits a new pharmacology that is both wholly improvised and grounded in the land: “A maple tree whose foliage was turning red would do for a silk-cotton tree. Glossy, spiny holly leaves would replace the Guinea grass. Yellow, odorless flowers would do for the salapertuis. . . . My prayers did the rest” (45). Tituba’s tolerance and cultivation of the new approaches a poetics of identity; she develops variable ways of being free from the “authentication” of Western thought; indeed the “magic” of her resistance is against a fixed ontology of any kind. In her lineal hybridity, in her seaborne birth, and in the ironized project of her consolidation as a protagonist, Condé’s fractal narrative of Tituba continually changes as it contacts the world, deconstructing for the reader the original development of the mythic Tituba as a trail of breadcrumbs back toward power. Each retelling requires a return to the past, a reformulation of the present, and a prognosis. In Ricoeur’s words, the excavation of Tituba’s kaleidoscopic memory may be “itself the spiral movement that, through anecdotes and episodes, brings us back to the almost motionless constellation of potentialities that the narrative retrieves” (186). Condé uses fluidic motion, water, and the sea, to set apart Tituba’s hybridity as an activist in its creation of natural and feminine possibilities of knowledge unbound by patriarchal systematicity and thus necessarily subversive of the colonizing impulse. The Intertextuality and Echo of The Scarlet Letter In his essay, “A is for African: The ‘Black Man’ and Demonic Ground of The Scarlet Letter,” Seth Cosimini considers the structuring absence of blackness in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 text and it is through his search for the Africanist shadow cast across the novel that we begin to address Maryse Condé’s anachronistic resummoning and bold restyling of Hester Prynne as Tituba’s witch trial cellmate, some 50 years and 15 miles from Hawthorne’s depiction of his protagonist. Drawing from Frantz Fanon, the historicization of race, and perhaps most indebtedly from Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark, Cosimini uses the folkloric bogeyman “The Black Man” as a hinge for confronting questions of race and ecology in a novel devoid of black characters and populated, with rare exception, by a citizenry who understand the wilderness only as a state of siege. Cosimini employs Leo Marx’ “hideous wilderness image of landscape” to illustrate the Puritan internalization of ever-present

132  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ danger; Marx’s term derives from a Jamestown report later echoed by William Bradford in describing Plymouth before Cotton Mather termed the same Massachusetts wilderness “The Devil’s Territories” in his post mortem on the witch trials (43). In an analysis of this anxiety, Morrison observes the “unsettled and unsettling” Africanist shadow that “writers peopled their work with signs and bodies of this presence” because it was “crucial to their sense of Americanness” (6). As constructed from one townsperson to the next in moments of stress and uncertainty, The Black Man is a black-garbed analog of Satan who stalks the Boston woodline on horseback and terrorizes the Puritans’ civilized redoubt with the spiritual chaos of temptation even as the forest he occupies more concretely “haunts the Puritans and materially threatens their settler colonial existence” (Cosimini 133). In seeking to unravel this disciplining figure of darkness, we are impressed by parallel scenes of conflation in The Scarlet Letter and I, Tituba. In the former, Hester directly challenges her husband and zealous tormentor, Roger Chillingworth: “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us?” (77). Chillingworth is not a Puritan, his medical knowledge is seen as close to witchcraft, and indeed it was obtained in the woods under the tutelage of the Native Americans that had captured him prior to his entrance into the story. Hester seems to be consciously in control of this metaphor throughout the book, ascribing her own fate to a dalliance with The Black Man before here using him to mock her husband’s pathological drive for revenge; she would seem to understand The Black Man as a social reflex against difference. Tituba’s first encounter with the Puritan Rev. Parris, who would bring her to New England from Barbados, presents a similar conflation, and another echo of subjectivity: In the early afternoon a man came to see her, a man such as I had never seen in the streets of Bridgetown, nor for that matter anywhere else. Tall, very tall, dressed in black from head to foot, with a chalky white skin. As he was about to go up the stairs, his eyes fell on me, standing in the half-light with my bucket and broom, and I almost fell over. . . . Imagine greenish, cold eyes, scheming and wily, creating evil because they saw it everywhere. . . . I’ve just seen Satan! (34) If, as Cosimini would have it, we take Hawthorne’s invocation of The Black Man as geneologically linked to Morrison’s Africanist shadow and the Western need to “define against,” then Condé seems to ironize the artifice of racial difference here where Tituba, properly centered and thus (to paraphrase Morrison) now the subject dreamer, may see the white gaze as that which is unsettled and unsettling, and clad all in black. Cosimini quotes Frantz Fanon from Black Skin, White Masks in an effort to explain the utility and centrality of “dark” and “black” as a sort of subjective relief against and through which whiteness perpetually invents itself: “The white gaze, the only

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 133 valid one is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their microtomes are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality” (95). This is to suggest that for the subaltern to be prostrated before the Western scientific machine, which we have discussed as an ontological engine, is for the “reality” of that subject to become not only fixed, as a point of leverage for the production of being but also “cut” or cordoned into areas of visibility and invisibility relative to the slicing of the “microtome.” As Tituba is confronted by the racism of her colonial masters in Barbados, Condé speaks through her of this distinction between the “unseen” which is “dark,” “black,” and full of peril like the forests of early New England and the “invisible” or, perhaps more finely, the invisibilized as “fixed,” “dissected,” and above all, leveraged away from being even as it leverages into being the white gaze that beholds it: You would think I wasn’t standing there at the threshold of the room. They were talking about me and yet ignoring me. They were striking me off the map of human beings. I was a nonbeing. Invisible. More invisible than the unseen, who at least have powers that everyone fears. Tituba only existed insofar as these women let her exist. It was atrocious. Tituba became ugly, coarse, and inferior because they willed her so. (Condé 24) By contrast, Condé initially shades Tituba’s encounter with cellmate Hester Prynne as largely de-racialized by dint of their shared feminism where “life is too kind to men, whatever their color” or, in her praise of Tituba’s “magnificent color,” racially affirmative (95–100). Condé’s Hester strikes the reader as hypermodern, an “outcast like [Tituba]” who rejects Puritan Massachusetts as “not [her] society” and, much, in the same way, Hawthorne grants her considerable metaphorical vision, she is here given Condé’s control of the anachronistic ironies of the mock-epic (a term we will unpack in the next section), breezily dismissing the patriarchy of her community as “two generations of visible saints stigmatizing carnal pleasure” for whom her conscientious abortion of their children provides the only recourse (96–98). This revised Hester empowers an infatuated Tituba to narrate with a similarly feminist alacrity, and for Hester’s unborn daughter, Pearl, her first meeting with John Indian: ‘Do you know if he’s good, if he’s bad, if he’s even human and has blood in his veins? Perhaps it’s some evil-smelling, viscous humor that’s flowing to his heart’ . . . . And the young girl left her solitude and her cabin for the unknown man in white drill and slowly her life became hell on earth. Can’t we ever keep our daughters away from men? (99) Yet it is at this point, as Hester realizes the story is autobiographical, that “something” causes Tituba to stop short. As Tituba’s attitude toward Hester grows warier, they move on to preparing Tituba’s trial testimony (which

134  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ we address in the next section). But in pondering this break, and returning to Cosimini’s structuring blackness, we would point out here that Condé, faithful to Hawthorne’s portrayal, describes Hester as possessing black eyes “like the benevolent shadow of night” and “a mass of thick hair, as black as a crow’s wing, itself the color of sin for some people and worthy of punishment” (95). Hester, then, presents as the “unseen” and darkened antithesis to her society, enraptured by the exercise of “powers that everyone fears” including, in Condé’s telling alteration, her suicide while pregnant with Pearl, who both live out their days in the Hawthorne text. Cosimini senses in The Scarlet Letter the nature of the rift between Hester and Tituba when he points to “the absence of whippings that Hester would have faced in Puritan New England” as a silencing of anti-black violence in the context of Hawthorne’s 1850 publication and his presumed desire not to necessarily associate the Puritan forbears of his abolitionist New England with the odious and rapidly deteriorating contemporary situation in the South. Thus, Hester Prynne is not whipped. She does not receive corporal punishment of any kind despite the fact that Hawthorne’s ancestor ordered the whipping of a “Hester Craford” for adulterous fornication in 1688, decades after the setting of the novel and several years before the actual scarlet letter law took effect in the colony, curtailing corporal and capital punishment for such offenses. Condé tidily echoes this point when Hester reports, “They no longer stone adulterous women. I believe they wear a scarlet letter on their breast” and Tituba shrugs in response, “Is that all they do?” (98). We would take this to imply that insofar as Hester, a highly educated white woman, cannot be prostrated before the microtome of her own race’s domineering gaze, her feminist solidarity with Tituba is attenuated. If set against the patriarchy, Hester styles herself after the insurgent antithesis of The Black Man or the vengeful and dark Hawthornian romance of the forest he prowls, she is nevertheless blind to the “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” that accounts for such haunted dichotomy; she is blind to what is invisibilized within Tituba’s blackness, which is never merely worn or wielded without having already been placed upon and against her (Morrison 2). Returning to our larger inquiry, we would emphasize that this limitation speaks to the tremendous value of the black female narrative voice, like that which is restored in Condé’s I, Tituba, as a medium for synthesis beyond and away from the Western mode of being. And as we have repeatedly stressed, it is once again the meditation of the water bowl, or return to the ecos, that arrives for Tituba at a moment of great trepidation in her jail cell, and promises to resolve larger dialectics of race, place, and empire: I am back on the island I thought I had lost! No less rust-colored, her soil! No less green, her hills! No less mauve, her sugarcane, sticky with juice. No less satiny the emerald belt around her waist! But the men and women are suffering. They are in torment. A slave has just been hung from the top of a flame tree. The blossom and the blood have merged

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 135 into one. I have forgotten that our bondage is not over. They are lopping off our ears, legs and arms. They are sending us up in the air like fireworks. Look at the confetti made with our blood! When I was in this mood, Hester could not do anything for me. (102) In Tituba’s Barbados, the beauty of the wilderness as an eternal homeland bears silent witness to the truth of colonialist inhumanity; in Hester’s Massachusetts, the horror of the wilderness as an alien threat can only reprovoke the chauvinist errand underlying such cruelty. Errand Into the Puritan Wilderness Maryse Condé’s casual and cutting irreverence toward colonizer and colonized alike provides a unique refinement on the question of the submerged master narrative, and its overdetermining hold on human subjectivity under capital. As we mention in the opening section on historicity, she describes herself as a writer incapable of deploying “model characters.” That her title I, Tituba would seem to stand in, cheekily, for I, Claudius speaks to the subtlety of her project. This Tituba can be neither relied upon nor ignored; the truth of her experience is ecstatic rather than fixed and, as she frets over her small role in the social conflagration of Salem, we grasp that while the immediate impact of Tituba’s difference at the colonial fringe may be the discrete instigation for which she is famous, the poetic potential of her difference is to refract power into its constituent presumptions: in Condé’s hands, the slave/refugee version of Claudius employs the master’s tool of historicism in spectroscopy of American empire that seeks to account for the subsequent Caligulas of the New World. We would cite, for instance, fanciful Massachusetts Bay cellmate Hester Prynne’s admonition: “You’re too fond of love, Tituba! I’ll never make a feminist out of you!” (101) to situate the value of Condé’s acidic irony beyond its mirth as omnidirectional, trans-chronological satire and toward a deeper melting down of Western intellectual order. In this example, the conceit of her wit turns on a preoccupation with mutual exclusivity or any such didactic cordoning of meaning that, once bared, echoes across the expansionist patriarchy and necessitates regimes of re-mystifying silence as a primary tenet of imperial maintenance and of the errand in the abstract. As he explores the semiotics of the term for which he is best known, Perry Miller explains: By the end of the Middle Ages, errand developed another connotation: it came to mean the actual business on which the actor goes, the purpose itself, the conscious intention in his mind. In this signification, the runner of the errand is working for himself. (4)

136  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ The conscious intention in the mind pertains, in our inquiry, to a jealous guarding of meaning from which flows the disciplining of women and the ecos under the hegemon and, as we’ve claimed, we see the eco-feminist overlay as a novel means to surface the errand at its origin, in an epistemological wilderness. Returning to not only Condé’s Tituba but the real woman of the historical record, we examine her famed confession not for its evident falseness or coerced production but for the pretense of its form and the troublesome, unexplored expectation of certainty on the part of its soliciting culture. New Americanist critic William V. Spanos argues this dominant orientation is metaphysically bound within “the perception of being—the always emergent ‘things-as-they-are’ (physis)—from after or above, as, in other words, a totalized structure” (8). As Hannah Arendt lays out in The Life of the Mind, the Cartesian separation allows, on the side of the mind, a reconciling quest for innate totality which is, again, after or above the contradictions and opacities of the physical realm: Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific. Moreover, the end is cognition or knowledge, which, having been obtained, clearly belongs to the world of appearances; once established as truth, it becomes part and parcel of the world. . . . The transformation of truth into mere verity results primarily from the fact that the scientist remains bound to the common sense by which we find our bearings in a world of appearances. (54–56) Western meaning is roped off along lines of appearance and agenda while imagining itself transcendent of both. Those who have the power to name, organize, and taxonomize nature, therefore, fix its meaning, its place, and its being-in-the-world while taking for themselves the title of the suzerain, the keeper, master, and overlord of all physis; they reserve their worst zeal for those others whose subjectivity “closer” to nature, which is only to say outside of the arbitrary tent, leaves open destabilizing questions of license and legitimacy. Tituba intuitively grasps this connection: Perhaps it’s because they have done so much harm to their fellow beings, to some because their skin is black, to others because their skin is red, that they have such a strong feeling of being damned? (47) Tituba’s confession, a received mélange of superstition and paranoia, culminates in chaos, with her wailing “I am blind now. I cannot see” (SWP No. 125 Tituba). She is taken to mean that the Devil has blinded her but, even in the historical record, we should take at face value the convenience of the claim in contriving an end to the proceedings. In Condé’s telling, it is Hester

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 137 Prynne’s coaching that accounts for the subterfuge (with Prynne again as the wily white avenger, armed with her own muscular clarity, to Tituba’s generally terrified and abortive insurgent): Give names, give names! If you do, you’ll become the same as they are with a heart full of filth! If some of them have wronged you in person, then take your revenge, if that’s what you want. Otherwise give them an element of doubt and, believe me, they’ll know how to fill in the blanks! At the right moment shout: ‘Oh I can’t see any more! I’ve gone blind!’ And you’ll have pulled the trick off. (100) Here Condé evokes Arendt’s concept of cognition/naming as a self-interested business of enclosure, and she points to the zealous manufacture of meaning as a ready site of manipulation inside Puritanical thinking. Yet this is in fact the second time Tituba hears the same advice. The first instance comes from Mama Yaya, who deftly reframes the matter: “When you get to the blind man’s country, close both eyes” (54). The certainty of the West’s blinkered subjectivity must first place the ecos outside. The land, this is to say, cannot be perceived or understood on its own terms and cannot be left to exist in its own right because the denial and systematic erasure of an inherent ecological principle has spawned and continually regenerates the Western self-concept of individualized and totalizing mastery over human and non-human domains alike. In Converging Stories: Race, Ecology and Environmental Justice in American Literature, Jeffrey Myers skillfully places this peril of the outside at the point of greatest vulnerability within the colonizing psyche: The formation of the Western, individual, subjective self in opposition to nature is a . . . fictional construction. The very existence of the Euroamerican subject depends on imagining not only the racial Other, but a priori on imagining the essential ‘otherness’ of the physical world—of the human body, the bodies of plants and animals, and the body of the earth itself. A recognition that such separation is an illusion—that the ‘self’ is ecologically interconnected with the ‘other’—threatens to erase individual identity as it is defined in European metaphysics, an identity “whose sole essence or nature consists in thinking” . . . . To maintain the illusion of separateness and superiority, the Euroamerican self must constantly display its mastery over the material world, denigrating beings, human and nonhuman, whose essential physical sameness to the animal body to which itself is bound threaten its erasure. (15) As Myers so elegantly captures, the Achillean structure of Western identity turns on reimagining the earth itself as a body of “otherness,” necessarily but also precariously and by contrivance set apart from the construction of the

138  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ self. The errand’s violence, and indeed the madness of Salem, begins, then, as a revulsion from the “animal body” in the mirror. Subsequently, the attending drive for limitless expansion protects those seekers, Puritans, and their spiritual heirs, whose intellectual artifice in this regard has ensured that to ever look back is to break the spell. We have sought to unpack in this chapter why Maryse Condé would choose to reconstitute Tituba as, in her terming, a “mock-epic character.” For her part, Condé explains her decision as arising from an authorial vacillation between irony and the seriousness of Tituba’s plight. While this presents as a straightforward self-interrogation of tone, the tension created by “mock-epic” strikes us on either side of the construction. First, we countenance the subversive potential of a mocking dissent/deconstruction at such a liminal and inchoate site of dominant practice, where, in the 1690s, the pretense of Western authority in America might still be seen as gestative in relation to the cross-continental project it would go on to birth. For the second, “epic” impresses us for its unavoidable closeness with the core curricula of the white/patriarchal empire; Tituba’s heroic journey is a telling and intentional fraud exactly because it eschews the forced sequestration of the self that the heroes of the Western master narrative, as they conquer the horizon, must glorify. Therefore, in the nexus that is Tituba’s black/ eco/feminism lies the promise of more concerted leverage against a regime of knowing and being that relies entirely on the fabricated externality of that abjected triptych. Condé may be pointing to such hope through Yao, the slave husband to Tituba’s mother, Abena, who, having killed himself after Abena’s hanging, returns to Tituba in the spiritual form at the close of the novel. Tituba recounts his words to her in a coda just before her own hanging: “Our memory will be covered in blood. Our memories will float to the surface like water lilies’ ” (Condé 168). Condé allows the spirit of Mama Yaya the last word over Yao, with the quotable line: “There’s no end to the misfortunes of black folks” (165). Yet it is in the surfacing of memory, bloody but inexorable, where Mama Yaya’s fatalism might still give way. Notes 1 As Zubeda Jalalzai explains in “Historical Fiction and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem,” history and fiction come together in the novel: “Defining Tituba illustrates . . . that textuality, whether historical or literary, functions through sometimes analogous dynamics. But also like a certain strain of New Historicism, Condé does not remain within a space of historical indeterminacy. I, Tituba does proclaim historical truths, if not about the woman called Tituba, then about Puritanism and seventeenth-century New England” (413). 2 For further discussion of this, see Maha Marouan’s chapter, “Conjuring History: The Meaning of Witchcraft in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem,” in Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women’s Fiction. Marouan writes, “The absence of a ‘legitimate’ genealogy for Tituba shows that the attempt to explore origins is often problematic, because of the violence, the displacement, and the silencing of histories that characterized African diaspora identities” (110).

‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ 139 3 Elaine G. Breslaw’s 1995 study, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem, explains the absence of Tituba from historical records as something that “stems from the dearth of useful, direct information about her. Historians need reliable, written, artifactual, or statistical evidence with which they can detail events or on which to base their conclusions. The absence of reliable resources often means that a particular potentially significant element has to be omitted from a study. Such has been the case for most of the underclass in history, particularly women, Africans, and American Indians” (xx). 4 In an interview with Françoise Pfaff, Condé reported coming across Tituba’s story accidentally at the University of California Library: “I was unaware of her existence and asked about her, but I didn’t find anything because nobody seemed to know her. There were historians at the institution where I was teaching at the time, but they didn’t know about Tituba and were not the least bit interested in her” (58). 5 In Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem, Elaine Breslaw explains that Reverend Samuel Parris, owner of Tituba and John Indian, purchased both in Barbados, and sparse historical documents indicate that Tituba was actually Arawak Indian. We see in the novel, however, Condé’s assertion that Tituba’s dark skin is what truly matters. 6 See, for example, Condé’s essay, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer.” 7 Indeed, it is Condé’s idea to use witchcraft in this way: “in all the contemporary accounts of what happened—not a single person suggests that Tituba told stories of witchcraft or voodoo. Not one person hints at it or says anything that could be misconstrued to imply it” (Rosenthal 14). 8 In Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem, Breslaw maintains that Tituba was brought to Barbados from the South American mainland as a child. Bernard Rosenthal’s essay, “Tituba’s Story,” published in 1998, draws on Breslaw’s work, but argues that Breslaw assumes Tituba was acquired by Rev. Parris in Barbados and that there is no evidence to support such a claim. 9 Tituba reports, “Susanna Endicott had already told me she was convinced my color was indicative of my close connections with Satan. . . . In Salem such conviction was shared by all” (Condé 65).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Harcourt, 1978. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York University Press, 1995. Condé, Maryse. I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem (Translated by Richard Philcox). University of Virginia Press, 1992. ———. “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer.” Yale French Studies, vol. 83, no. 2, 1993, pp. 121–135. Cosimini, Seth. “A Is for African: The ‘Black Man’ and Demonic Ground of The Scarlet Letter.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 48, no. 2, 2021, pp. 129–146. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford University Press, 2011. Dukats, Mara L. “The Hybrid Terrain of Literary Imagination: Maryse Condé’s Black Witch of Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, and Aimѐ Cѐsaire’s Heroic Poetic Voice.” College Literature, vol. 22, no. 1, 1995, pp. 51–61. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (Translated by Richard Philcox). Grove Press, 2008.

140  ‘A Hurricane Ravaging the Island’ Fuller, Thomas, ed. The Works of Henry Smith; Including Sermons, Treatises, Prayers, and Poems. Edinburgh, 1867. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Translated by Michael Dash). University Press of Virginia, 1989. Hansen, Chadwick. “The Metamorphosis of Tituba, or Why American Intellectuals Can’t Tell an Indian Witch From a Negro.” New England Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1, 1974, pp. 3–12. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ohio State University Press, 1962. Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. Simon, 2004. Jalalzai, Zubeda.” Historical Fiction and Maryse Condé’s ‘I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.” African American Review, vol. 43, no. 2–3, 2009, pp. 413–425. Lewis, Barbara and Maryse Condé. “No Silence: An Interview With Maryse Condé.” Callaloo, vol. 18, no. 3, 1995, pp. 543–550. Marouan, Maha. “Conjuring History: The Meaning of Witchcraft in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.” In Witches, Goddesses, and Angry Spirits. The Ohio State University Press, 2013, pp. 103–152. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford University Press, 1964. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993. Myers, Jeffrey. Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature. University of Georgia Press, 2019. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Knopf Doubleday, 2007. Ortega, Gema. “The Art of Hybridity: Maryse Condé’s Tituba.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 47, no. 2, 2014, pp. 113–136. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993. Pfaff, Françoise. Conversations with Maryse Condé. University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Reis, Elizabeth. “The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England.” The Journal of American History, vol. 82, no. 1, 1995, pp. 15–36. Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Scarboro, Ann Armstrong. “Afterword.” In I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp. 187–225. Spanos, William. “American Exceptionalism in the Post-9/11 Era: The Myth and the Reality.” Symploke, vol. 21, no. 1–2, 2013, pp. 291–323. ———.“Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis After 9/11/01: Rethinking the Anthropologos.” Symploke, vol. 13, no. 1–2, 2005, pp. 219–262. White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science, vol. 155, no. 3767, 1967, pp. 1203–1207. Willard, Samuel. The Complete Body of Divinity. Printed by B. Green and S. Kneeland for B. Eliot and D. Henchman, 1726.

7 Mapping the Counter-Errand Feminist Agential Ecologies in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms

The long history of white patriarchal colonization in the continental United States is predicated on a violent dualism that has historically situated the western self over and against the natural world. In the western ontological tradition, the formation of ego and self—and the precipitous logic of egoic “reason”—is the primary lens through which the western mind codifies humans and nature alike. As William Spanos argues in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam, the ontology of western reason is grounded in “privileged metaphysics—a mode of inquiry informed by Logos or principle of presence, outside of or prior to time and history, as the essential ground of thinking” (2). As this metaphysical ontology exists “outside of or prior to time and history,” the unquantifiable dynamics of being are systematically reified into interchangeable mechanized parts of the capitalist machine. As Spanos continues, “the metaphysical epistemology of the liberal capitalist dispensation reifies or, more precisely, ‘structures’ being (its be-ing) in its entirety, transforms its temporal dynamics into a totalized and inclusive (strategic) ‘terrain’ or ‘region’ or ‘field’ in which everything/time has its proper place under the metaphysical eye’s gaze” (48). The world, through the “metaphysical eye’s gaze,” becomes a quantifiable terrain to control, dominate, and lay claim. Here, nature is robbed of its life force and becomes the mechanized terrain upon which the west continues its imperial mission—its ongoing errand into the world’s wilderness. The violent consequences of western metaphysics have resulted in unprecedented levels of environmental—and human—destruction. In its relentless, insatiable quest for profit, the maniacal thrust of liberal capitalism has radically transformed a once vibrant, ecologically rich global habitat into a volatile, unpredictable, increasingly barren world. In 2000, the Nobel Prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and limnologist Eugene F. Stoermer reported that man has now become the dominant force of the earth, taking over the earth’s natural geologic processes—thus putting the life cycles of the planet into a dangerous, uncertain future. Crutzen and Stoermer define this new epoch as the “Anthropocene.” In their article, “The Anthropocene: DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-7

142  Mapping the Counter-Errand Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature,” Paul J. Crutzen, Will Steffen, and John R. McNeill argue: [T]he term Anthropocene suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state. (614) Crutzen, Steffen, and McNeill describe the global change in terms of its impact on the “Earth System,” which is “the suite of interacting physical, chemical and biological global-scale cycles that provide the life-support system for life at the surface of the planet” (615). The future of the planet is uncertain as the rapid onset of climate change and the subsequent, unprecedented devastation of ecological and human habitats continue to accelerate at a dangerously rapid pace. The root of our anthropocentric, ecological world picture is in a violent dualism that systematically situates nature as the backdrop upon which Western culture is built. As Val Plumwood argues in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, “western culture has treated the human/nature relation as a dualism and this explains many of the problematic features of the west’s treatment of nature which underlie the environmental crisis, especially the western construction of human identity as ‘outside’ nature” (2). With nature juxtaposed in radical opposition to the human, any intersections that exist within and between the two are dissolved. This metaphysical severing of self from nature is the foundation upon which western culture is built—and is what has precipitated the concomitant destruction of the earth and indigenous cultures that align with the earth’s processes. In her ecological feminist novel, Solar Storms, Linda Hogan reveals the tragic impact of western metaphysics on women, land, and the indigenous peoples whose identities are implanted in the land. The novel serves as a response to the Puritan errand into the wilderness, challenging the logic of western metaphysics in all its destructive manifestations. With its homeland named “Adam’s Rib,” the novel offers a revisionist lens through which to critically examine the Christianized narrative of Western culture and its incipient manifestations. As Desiree Hellegers argues, Hogan subverts, critiques, and revises Genesis accounts of the fall of Adam and Eve as she traces the origins of Angel’s trauma in ecological, cultural, and sexual violence. In Hogan’s counternarrative to Genesis, the contaminating effects wrought by women in the story of Adam and Eve are replaced by the contaminating effects of patriarchal European cultures, which sanction violence against women and animals. ‘Original

Mapping the Counter-Errand 143 sin’ in the novel is inextricably linked to the introduction of a marketbased economy that transforms everything—including human beings, and women in particular, as well as animals, plants, water, and vast ecosystems—into sources of profit or disposable commodities. (5) In tracing the counter-errand or, as Hellegers augurs, Hogan’s “counternarrative,” the novel reveals the concomitant relationship between Euroamerican colonization and the ontological imperatives of violence embedded within the Christian civilizing mission. In centralizing the indissoluble relationship between human identity and nature, Solar Storms undermines the Euroamerican geo-ontology within which nature is codified as terra nullius, the proverbial backdrop upon which western civilization is built, while also revivifying the agential power of Native Americans, nature, and women. Not least, Hogan centralizes the profound “ecological grief” suffered by Native Americans in the novel. As Ashlee Cunsolo and Nevill R. Ellis illustrate in “Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate-change related loss,” ecological grief is defined as “the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change” (276). In Solar Storms, Hogan illustrates the deep, synergistic, compassionate relationship her characters have with the environment and centralizes the devastating, irrevocable consequences of Euroamerican eco-colonization and its insidious impact upon the hearts, souls, minds, and bodies of Native Americans. Here, Hogan’s characters experience “solastalgia,” which “refers to a sense of desolation, detachment and grieving in response to losing an important place” (Galway L.P. et al. 33). Each character is “confronted with irrevocable changes to landscapes they feel connected to,” thus resulting in collective despondency and psychological turmoil (34). Hogan’s centralization of ecological grief as experienced by the indigenous, by those whose reverence for the living world sees that world diminish before their very eyes, serves as a profound intervention into our Anthropocentric historical present, while also unveiling the Euroamerican ontological origins of our current environmental crisis. Errand Into the Wilderness: Jeffersonian Geopolitics and the Disavowal of Ecology In Postcolonial Ecologies, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and George Handley pose the following question: “How can an author recover land that is already ravaged by the violence of history?” (4). This is Linda Hogan’s focus: to recuperate and centralize both the voice of the Crees and their land. Hogan characterizes land as a protagonist force in the novel, anchoring and centralizing the narrative around the historical assault leveraged against Native American land. For Hogan, the land has feelings, intuition, and thoughts. It remembers every historical event: every tree felled, every wolf slain, every

144  Mapping the Counter-Errand river run dry. The land feels pain. The land mourns the loss of its habitat. And the land rebels. Furthermore, Hogan reveals the loss of “spirit” in nature under the regime of Euroamerican colonization. As Lynn White Jr. articulates in “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” this removal of “spirit” is deliberate and calculated, resulting in a profound separation of man from nature: “The spirits in natural objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world itself was confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature crumbled” (43). Not unlike White Jr’s assertion, Native American feminist-activist Winona LaDuke argues in All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, “There is a direct relationship between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Wherever Indigenous peoples still remain, there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity” (1). The relationship between the indigenous peoples in Solar Storms and the biodiversity of the region echoes LaDuke’s statement. The remaining tribes left on Adam’s Rib desperately clench their dwindling habitat and traditions as their lands continue to diminish before their eyes. As LaDuke further asserts: The last 150 years have seen a great holocaust. There have been more species lost in the past 150 years since the Ice Age. During the same time, Indigenous peoples have been disappearing from the face of the earth, over 2,000 nations of Indigenous peoples have gone extinct in the western hemisphere, and one nation disappears from the Amazon rainforest every year. (1) In tracing the loss of species and indigenous habitat in Adam’s Rib, Hogan brings to bear “a fictionalized version of the James Bay project,” a devastating loss incurred by the “government-owned public utility Hydro-Quebec” in 1971 (Hellegers 1). As Desiree Hellegers furthers, the James Bay Project caused “thousands of miles of the Crees’ land to be submerged by the project” (1). In 1991, Matthew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees described this project as one that involved “the destruction and rearrangement of a vast landscape, literally reshaping the geography of the land” (82). As Coon continues, “This is what I want you to understand: it is not a dam. It is a terrible and vast reduction of our entire world” (82). Without any regard for their native habitat, the colonial-capitalist James Bay Project brutally destroyed the Crees’ population and its biodiversity. While Solar Storms primarily narrativizes the James Bay project’s impact on the Crees, embedded within the novel is a deep and powerful deconstruction of the errand’s ontology. As Spanos describes, the origin of the errand is predicated on “a metaphysical ontology: the perception of being—the always emergent ‘things-as-they-are’ (physis)—from after or above, as, in other words, a totalized structure” (8). The Western colonizing mission is

Mapping the Counter-Errand 145 predicated on a violent ontological imperative that inherently perceives the land from “above,” as a “totalized structure” devoid of life. Furthermore, this ontological imperative inheres within a dualism that situates patriarchal, white, Christian Euroamerican, capitalist colonialism over and against the indigenous, women, and the natural world. Codified as backward, savage, and a barrier to the errand, Western metaphysics justifies its mission as necessary to the construction of the New World. In this respect, Hogan reveals the legacy of transgenerational trauma inherent within the long history of metaphysical violence wrought against the land and its people: “the long-term, intergenerational effects of overtrapping—including cultural disruption, displacement, food insecurity, and gendered violence—catalyzed by involvement in the European fur trade” (Hellegers 2). The logic of Western metaphysics reveals itself within the structured, exclusionary, ordered mapping of the landscape—precipitation of Jeffersonian land politics. In many ways, Solar Storms distinctly reveals the historical outcome of Thomas Jefferson’s geopolitics. Inherent within Jeffersonian land politics lies a metaphysical principle of presence intent on commodifying the natural world into a manageable, commodified, policed, and controlled geopolitical space. In a radical attempt to make sense of the bewildering, wild, land that lay before him, Jefferson implemented and solidified his vision of the New World across the continental United States within Notes on the State of Virginia. As Jeffrey Myers articulates, Notes was a “continental-wide vision of ecological and racial hegemony, whereby all elements of the natural world—land, watersheds, climate, trees, beaver, bison, and people—would be under the control and exploitation of an expanding, increasingly AngloAmerican society” (20). Notes are written as an exploitative, colonial taxonomy of the nation: its natural spaces, its species, its peoples, and its culture. For instance, the table of contents includes “Boundaries of Virginia,” “Rivers,” “Sea-Ports,” “Mountains,” “Cascades,” “Productions of Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal,” “Climate,” “Aborigines,” and “Religion.” Jefferson’s composition of Notes denotes and solidifies a powerful turning point in the history of the United States. Here, the Puritanical errand into the wilderness becomes systemized, and therefore set in motion, within Jefferson’s geopolitical vision—a vision predicated on the Cartesian mind/body dualism that “views ‘nature’ as everything that is ‘not-me,’ which leads to a radical splitting off of the mind from the human body and the body of earth in which the latter becomes subaltern” (Myers 22). The “subaltern” here also represents all Native American tribes. Below, we quote at length a pivotal letter written by Jefferson to the chiefs of the Cherokee Nation on January 10, 1806. In this letter, Jefferson’s colonial, hegemonic imperative is mapped onto the Cherokee nation from the perspective of the benevolent colonizer. We quote this letter at length as it exemplifies the totalizing, hegemonic violence imposed on the great tribal nations of the United States—and its continuous impact on Native American tribes to this very day. As one can see, Jefferson infantilizes and stigmatizes the entire Cherokee Nation, calling them “children,”

146  Mapping the Counter-Errand perceiving the tribe as wild, savage, subaltern beings in desperate need of taming. Jefferson writes: My friends and children, chiefly of the Cherokee Nation,—Having now finished our business I hope to mutual satisfaction, I cannot take leave of you without expressing the satisfaction I received from your visit. I see with my own eyes that the endeavors we have been making to encourage and lead you in the way of improving your situation have not been unsuccessful; it has been like grain grown in good ground, producing abundantly. You are becoming farmers, learning the use of the plough and the hoe, enclosing your grounds and employing the labor in their cultivation which you formerly employed in hunting and war; and I see handsome specimens of cotton cloth raised, spun and wove by yourselves. You are also raising cattle and hogs for your food, and horses to assist your labors. Go on, my children, in the same way and be assured the further you advance in it the happier and more respectable you will be. (561) Jefferson’s geopolitical hegemonic agenda is clearly exemplified throughout this letter. He explicitly calls attention to the ways he has led the Cherokee tribe to “improve” their situation, no longer violent savages, but now following the ways of the white man. The tribe’s internalization of Western colonization effectively “saves” the Cherokees from their own backwardness. By cultivating the land, “enclosing” their grounds, “employing the labor in their cultivation,” which they “formerly employed in hunting and war,” the Cherokees are transformed into loyal servants of the errand. As Robert J. Miller argues in Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny, “Jefferson was eager to expand America’s borders, power, and influence, and he utilized almost every strategy he could devise to promote those aims. He knew, as did every other American of his time, that American territorial expansion could come only at the expense of Indian Nations and tribal property rights” (77). As Miller illustrates, the wholesale obliteration of Native Americans was an integral component of the errand. In fact, the codification of Native Americans as childlike savages served as a justification for the spread of continental colonization. As a result, the civilizing mission took hold and swept the nation. Solar Storms directly counters Jeffersonian geopolitics and reveals the discriminatory ethics inherent within the errand’s metaphysical mapping onto the land, Native Americans, and women. Through her devastating illustration of the loss of Cree lands, Hogan reveals throughout the novel the “three governing themes of Western imperialism: the transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women; the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of commodity capital” (McClintock 2–3). In Solar Storms, we see these “three governing

Mapping the Counter-Errand 147 themes of Western imperialism” exemplified through the concomitant intersections between mapping, colonization, destruction of the land, and control of indigenous women. The inextricable link between mapping, ecological imperialism, and female dominance is central to the ontology of Western colonization. Both nature and women are coupled together as terra nullius, a blank, empty space upon which the Western empire is constructed. And both are ruthlessly exploited as “commodity capital,” forms of exchange within the capitalist patriarchy, devoid of agency. Indigenous Agential Ecologies and the Ecofeminist Imperatives of Decolonization: Mapping the Counter-Errand Solar Storms begins with the story of estranged, 17-year-old Angel Jensen, who travels back to her native homeland, Adam’s Rib, a geographical space located between the northernmost portion of Minnesota and Canada, to find her biological mother and native family. Through Angel’s counter-errand, we witness the violence of Western colonization as it is inscribed upon the landscape and Native Americans. As Angel reconnects with her mixed ancestral family of Cree, Chickasaw, Anishinaabeg, and European women, she begins to see the layers of intergenerational trauma laced within and between her family and the land on which they reside. As Hogan writes, Adam’s Rib is primarily inhabited by women, The Abandoned Ones: “the first generation of the Abandoned Ones traveled down with French fur trappers who were seeking their fortunes from the land. When the land was worn out, the beaver and wolf gone, mostly dead, the men moved on to what hadn’t yet been destroyed, leaving their women and children behind, as if they too were used up animals” (28). Returning to McClintock, the Abandoned Ones exemplify the insidious nature of Western imperialism as it is inscribed within the land and women’s bodies, “the transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women” (McClintock 2–3). What remains is a nearly abandoned land, devoid of biodiversity, resources, and bustling wildlife, depriving the indigenous of their essential resources. The trauma of the errand remains. With no regard for the integrity and vitality of the land, the European Christian settlers who colonized Adam’s Rib and its surrounding terrain brought unprecedented devastation and destruction to the land and its native species. Through the character Angel, Hogan reveals, and recovers, the memory of the land that was (and continues to be) “ravaged by the violence of history.” When Angel first arrives at Adam’s Rib, she recovers the story of the road upon which she arrives, Poison Road: It was called Poison Road, the road we walked. The French had named it ‘Poisson,’ after fish, because once it had rained tiny fish onto the earth along this road. They’d fallen from the sky. It was said they hatched in a cloud. But a few years later the road came to be one of the places where the remaining stray wolves and foxes were poisoned to make room for

148  Mapping the Counter-Errand the European settlers and the pigs and cattle they’d brought with them, tragic animals that never had a chance of surviving the harsh winters of the north. Now it was called Poison and it was the only connecting passage on the hilly peninsula. Weary houses were strung along it in a line, and all of them looked dark brown and dreary to me (24). Poison Road is the singular passageway into Angel’s native, ancestral homeland, Fur Island. As this passage illustrates, a once rich, vibrant, prosperous habitat was singularly decimated by European colonizers—with no regard for the native flora or fauna’s livelihood. The violent, wholesale slaughter of wolves and foxes, without any regard for the animals themselves, reveals the extent to which “Christian imperialism . . . stripped from nature all spiritual qualities and rigidly distanced it from human feelings—promoting a view of creation of a mechanical contrivance” (Worster, 29). Throughout the novel, Hogan reveals the callous, “mechanical” eco-ontological perspectives of white Christian colonizers. Described as “sky-worshipping people who did not want to look out windows at the threatening miles of frozen lake on one side of them and, on the other, at the dense, dark forest with its wolves” (27), Christians decimated the land in the name of the “errand.” Codified as a threat to order and civilization, the land is razed to master dominion and control over the terrain. As William Spanos exemplifies: An Other—an alien/inferiority entity on the other side of the always moving dividing line between good and evil, settlement and wilderness, civilization and savagery, that threatens the divinely ordained errand and must, therefore, according to the imperatives of this exceptionalist logic, be eradicated by violence on behalf of the errand. (296) Adam’s Rib is a direct remnant of the errand, a space exemplified as “an alien/inferiority entity” outside civilization that “threatens the divinely ordained errand” and is justifiably “eradicated by violence on behalf of the errand.” Codified as a threat to the spread of civilization, the Crees and their lands are all but decimated for the dam project. As Hogan writes, “agents of the government insisted the people had no legal right to the land . . . my people . . . had lived there forever, more than ten thousand years, and had been sustained by these lands that were now being called empty and useless” (57–58). Dehumanized and dispossessed of their agency, the errand justifies its mission through the systematic erasure of the entire Cree culture and territory. While Solar Storms explicitly challenges the violence inherent within the errand, the historically silenced voice of the Crees and their ecological worldview is recuperated and centralized within the narrative. In the Cree tradition, land, animals, plants, bodies of water, minerals, and all nonhuman elements are greatly respected and revered for their sacred presence. Hogan

Mapping the Counter-Errand 149 resurrects this worldview through the lens of critical ecofeminism, which radically conceives of the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, privileging the voice, agency, and livelihood of nonhuman nature (Gaard xviii). Radically challenging the dualism imposed by Western white, patriarchal metaphysics, critical ecofeminism reveals the violence inherent within this paradigm, placing emphasis on the concomitant relationship between colonization and the destruction of indigenous cultures, women, non-whites, and the natural world. Embedded within this Cartesian dualism, as inherited from European colonization, is the logical, and justifiable, extermination of nature. Serving as a mere backdrop for development, the land is perceived as inert, nonliving matter. But Hogan adamantly refuses this narrative. The agential power of nature, the deep, synergistic relationship between the indigenous and their natural world, coupled with the concomitant trauma suffered by the Western white world, are the heart and soul of the novel. In this respect, Hogan centralizes the ecological grief1 experienced by the Crees, whose identity is bound to the land. John Husk, one of the last remaining Cree, holds onto the tribal commitment to the protection of land and animals. He dedicates his life to sustainability and understands the pain and suffering of animals. As Husk illustrates: There had once been a covenant between animals and men, he told me. They would care for one another. It was an agreement much like the one between land and water. This pact, too, had been broken, forced by need and hunger . . . his main desire in life was to prove that the world was alive and that animals felt pain, as if he could make up for being part of the contract with animals. (35) This “pact” was fractured first by European colonizers and exacerbated by the desperate “need and hunger” of the remaining Cree population. The slaughter of native animals and plants initiated a deep disconnection between the Cree and their land. Not dissimilar to the Cree, ecoanthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describes in Cannibal Metaphysics the sacred relationship of nature within indigenous Amazonian cultures. As de Castro remarks, “cultivated plants may be seen as blood relatives of the women who tend to them, game animals may be approached by hunters as affines” (466). The Cree and Amazonian eco-ontology directly undermines the logic of the errand and, as Spanos articulates, is a threat to the civilizing mission. As Jeffrey Myers illustrates, colonization was dependent on “imagining the essential otherness of the [because] any recognition that the ‘self’ was ecologically interconnected threatened to erase individual identity as it is defined in European metaphysics, an identity ‘whose sole essence or nature consists in thinking.’ ” The errand, which is informed by European metaphysics, demolishes this relationship. But Solar Storms brings light to the violence inherent within this logic, revealing the extent to which “Westerners are troubled by

150  Mapping the Counter-Errand indigenous views of nonhuman animals, plants, and ecological beings such as rocks, water, and soil as not only sentient but kind to humans” (Gaard 39). Hogan’s characters bring to life this powerful connection to not only shed light on the irrevocable losses suffered by the Crees under the hands of European colonizers, but to also reclaim this relationship despite the seemingly insurmountable barriers imposed by the Western world. In this respect, the paradigm is flipped. Humans, instead, are witnessed by nature. As Angel remarks, “Our lives, the old people say, are witnessed by the birds, by dragonflies, by trees and spiders. We are seen, our measure taken, not only by the animals and spiders but even by the galaxy in deep space and the windblown ice of the north that would soon descend on us” (80). The anthropocentric ontology inherent within Western civilization—the raison d’etre of environmental destruction, climate change, and species loss—is called into question and radically undermined. Throughout the novel, Hogan carefully interlaces the founding of the errand with the loss of the ecos: “As in Genesis, the first word shaped what would follow. It was of utmost importance. It determined the kind of world that would be created” (37). The word, logos, which is endemic to the errand, floods the new world and is what gives rise to the birth of a Christianized continent. To return briefly to Perry Miller’s Errand into the wilderness: an address, the errand is predicated on a telos-oriented ontology wrought with incorporating, and eradicating, any threats to the errand into its totalizing framework. As Miller asserts: “the end is to improve our lives to do more service to the Lord, to increase the body of Christ and to preserve our posterity from the corruptions of this evil world, so that they, in turn, shall work out their salvation under the purity and power of Biblical ordinances” (7). Most notably, Miller’s address centralizes the inherent “corruptions of this evil world” and the necessity of exterminating the indigenous populations and their land—to protect the errand’s covenant from the “corruptions” of the evil world. As Miller continues: A society despatched upon an errand that is its own reward would want to other rewards: it could go forth to possess a land without ever becoming possessed by it; social gradations would remain eternally what God had originally appointed there would be no internal contention among groups or interests, and though there would be hard work for everybody, prosperity would be bestowed not as a consequence of labor but as a sign of approval upon the mission itself. For once in the history of humanity (with all its sins), there would be a society so dedicated to a holy cause that success would prove innocent and triumph not raise up sinful pride or arrogant dissension. (8) Most notably, Miller emphasizes the essential need to “possess a land without ever becoming possessed by it.” Here, he puts the errand into

Mapping the Counter-Errand 151 motion, exemplifying the evil inherent within the wild landscape across the American continent; the essence, the spirit, of the land is justifiability annihilated in the name of the errand, in the name of the Christian God. “Prosperity” is contingent on improving the land: clearing out the wilderness and building a new city of God, a population, in Hogan’s words, of “sky-worshipping peoples.” As Miller continues, those who resist the errand incur the horrifying wrath of God. The mission carried out by the deputies of the errand is predicated on “saving” a nation of sinners: those who respect and worship the spirit of the land. Citing the jeremiads of the 1660s and 1670s, Perry warns of the “castigations of the people” who failed to adhere to God’s mission, incurring “immediate manifestations of divine wrath” (8). As Miller states, the jeremiads “recite the long list of afflictions and angry God had rained upon them, surely enough to prove how abysmally they had deserted the covenant: crop failures, epidemics, grasshoppers, caterpillars, torrid summers, arctic winters, Indian wars, hurricanes, shipwrecks, accidents” (8). In Solar Storms, the devastating consequences of the errand underwrite the narrative. As if to echo Miller’s words, Hogan brings to bear the ontological imperatives of the errand, revealing the eradication of spirit from the living natural world and its devastating impact on nature. As Hogan writes, The Europeans called this world dangerous . . . their legacy . . . had been the removal of spirit from everything, from animals, trees, fishhooks, and hammers, all things the Indians had as allies. . . . Before, everything lived well together—lynx and women, trappers and beaver. Now most of us had inarticulate souls, silent spirits, and despairing hearts. (180–181) The imposed severance of Native Americans from their connection to nature to tools, resources, and animals, is precisely the motivation behind the errand. Here, we quote at length Lynn White Jr.’s expostulation of the concomitant relationship between Christianity, anthropocentrism, and the destruction of the ecos, to further highlight the principles of dominance embedded within the Christian ontology: Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. . . . God’s transcendence of nature, Christianity . . . not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. . . . The Christian dogma of religion . . . has another meaning for our comprehension of today’s ecological crisis. By revelation, God had given man the Bible, the Book of Scripture. But since God made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology. (44–45)

152  Mapping the Counter-Errand As White Jr. exemplifies, Euroamerican Christian colonizers codified nature in “God’s image,” thus justifying the widespread exploitation of nature. By colonizing the ecos, the implementation of white, colonial Christianity becomes rooted in nature itself. Not least, by stripping Native Americans of their relationship to their living world, they lost their agency and power— which was predicated on their concomitant relationship with nature. As Hogan emphasizes, “the immigrants had believed wilderness was full of demons and that only their church and their god could drive the demons away. They feared the voice of animals singing at night. They had forgotten wild. It was gone already from their world, a world according to Dora-Rouge that, having lost wilderness, no longer had the power to create itself anew” (86). The Crees held an integral gift that was a profound threat to the Europeans: a poignant, reciprocal, powerful knowledge of the land—its weather patterns, native medicinal plants, animals, waterways, and trees. By stripping and removing the land from under the Crees, their agency and spirit were decimated, leaving their population and land utterly vulnerable to European colonizers. Angel’s ancestors are the last remaining Crees on Adam’s Rib. In a matriarchal line, women hold the wisdom and power within the tribe, which exemplifies the heart of Solar Storms: its deliberate, impassioned ecofeminist emphasis. As Karen J. Warren articulates in Ecofeminist Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters: Ecofeminist philosophy is a commitment to critique male bias where it occurs and to develop a theory and practice that is not male-biased. As an environmentalism, it is a commitment to critique environmental policies and decision-making structures that continue the dominations of women, other human Others, and nature, and to develop a theory and practice which do not perpetuate the interlocking ‘isms of domination.’ (68–69) Through and through, Solar Storms undermines the logic of domination inherent to the Western civilizing mission, shedding light on the darkness cast upon the marginalized. Further, Hogan reveals the disproportionate impact of European colonization upon women and flips the patriarchal paradigm, centralizing women as protagonists. The Cree women are the most revered and respected in the tribe. They are medicine women. And their knowledge of the land and, specifically, plant medicine, directly counters the patriarchal metaphysical imperatives of the errand. Each woman’s relationship with the ecos is symbiotic. And their identity is not encompassed within their egoic self, but rather, it is expansive and exists through their relationship to their community, their native environment, and all embodied within. In Cree culture, there is no self; rather, selfhood is shared, generative, and reciprocal. In this respect, the Cartesian mind-body dualism is shattered, thus revealing the violence inherent within this dualism and its devastating impact on the

Mapping the Counter-Errand 153 psyche and the natural world. Hogan reveals the psychic and spiritual pain incurred through one’s radical severance from nature. Further, Solar Storms exemplifies the deeply problematic ontological imperatives of the errand, which codifies the land as evil, a land that must be possessed “without ever becoming possessed by it.” As if to directly undermine Miller’s damnation of the wilderness, Hogan centralizes nature as a character, personifying the memories, emotions, and pain experienced by nature throughout the long history of colonialism. Hogan personifies the voice and agency of land, exemplifying what Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman describe as “agentic”: “Nature is more than a passive social construction . . . and is an agentic force that interacts with and changes the other elements in the mix, including the human” (7). By ascribing agency back to the land, Hogan undermines the anthropocentric framework upon which Western civilization is built, revealing the ecological interconnection that exists between the human and nonhuman world. As Angel narrates, the people at Adam’s Rib believed everything was alive, that we were surrounded by the faces and lovings of gods . . . the stones, too, were alive, the stinging nettles, the snails of Fur Island, and the tree which folded its leaves when touched by human hands. When I thought of this while walking the island, I felt its life. I remembered and loved it. I suffered for the felling of this world, for those things and people that would never return. Not only this, but the division between humans and animals was a false one. There were times, even recent times, when they both spoke the same language. (81–82) The Crees’ reverence for nature, their belief in the innate living essence of all things in nature, exemplifies the concept of animism—a belief system that radically contrasts the Christian worldview. As Carolyn Merchant illustrates in “The Indian animistic belief-system and reverence for the earth as mother were contrasted with the Judeo-Christian heritage of domination over nature and with capitalist practices resulting in the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ (exploitation of resources available for any person’s or nation’s use)” (23). Here, Hogan offers an ecofeminist paradigm shift, a direct response to anthropocentrism—the ontological worldview upon which Christianity is predicated, within which the “domination of nature” and subsequent “capitalist practices” embedded in this paradigm are justified. In this respect, Hogan de-privileges the dominance of man over nature, bringing to light the deeply problematic Christianized codification of the land. By centralizing, and bringing to the fore, the vitality of life in nature, Hogan seeks to recuperate a feminist, eco-ontological ethos long lost in the throes of Christian colonization. In recuperating this feminist ecoethics, Hogan centralizes our current ecological crisis. In Carolyn Merchant’s words, “As long as the earth was considered to be alive and sensitive,

154  Mapping the Counter-Errand it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it” (Merchant 11). As the novel unfolds, Hogan continually unveils the detrimental anthropocentric logic embodied in Western Christianity exposing the extent to which the errand is fundamentally grounded in the justifiable “dominations of women, other human Others, and nature” to eradicate the threat of land destroying the Western self. As Jeffrey Myers expostulates, the very existence of the Euroamerican subject depends on imagining not only the racial Other, but a priori on imagining the essential “otherness” of the physical world—of the human body, the bodies of plants and animals, and the body of the earth itself. (34) It is precisely this geo-ontology that precipitated the incipient razing of Native Americans and their habitat. Centralizing the pain and loss of those victimized by the errand is the essence of Hogan’s narrative: “this is what happens to humans when their land is destroyed . . . they lose their inside ways” (342). Witnessing the visceral pain suffered by her ancestry, Angel is the vessel through which the errand’s legacy is exposed in all its ugliness and brutality. Remarking upon her arrival on the shores of her new home, and her new identity, Angel felt within herself that it was “the end of a way of living in the world” (26). Abandoned by Hannah, her Cree biological mother, and forced into the dysfunctional American foster system, Angel returns to her native homeland to reconnect with her ancestors, and her mother, seeking “wholeness,” which she soon discovers is utterly fleeting and illusive. Shuffled between abusive foster homes, Angel’s face, body, and spirit are scarred by the afflictions of Western civilization. As Silvia Schultermandl remarks in “Fighting for The Mother/Land: An Ecofeminist Reading of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” “white American culture [broke] the relationship between Angel and her matrilineal ancestors when she was removed from their care and put into foster homes outside the reservation” (72). Angel’s trauma is a direct result of white Westernization. Having been jettisoned from her home and forced into the separatist, exclusionary, patriarchal culture of Western society, Angel’s trauma exemplifies the losses suffered by the indigenous and their land under Euroamerican colonization. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes argues in Women Who Run with Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, “when a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized and her instincts and natural life cycles are lost, subsumed by the culture, or by the intellect or the ego—or one’s own or those belonging to others” (8). Angel’s separation from her lineage is representative of Crees’ separation from their native homeland. Stripped of their land, their resources, their animals, and their plants, the Cree lost their relationship to their own “instincts.” Just as Angel is subsumed by American culture, her tribe, too, is “sanitized,” robbed of agency.

Mapping the Counter-Errand 155 Having been disconnected from her instincts and source of power, Angel’s initial reaction to her native homeland is one of disdain and fear: “like the missionaries, I was threatened by its way of life and the way it resisted human efforts to contain it” (71). Having been immersed in American society for most of her adolescent life, this new way of life seems foreign and threatening. She knows that her new beginning was an “end of a way of living in the world” (26), the collapse of her Western identity. Yet as she begins to immerse herself in the legacy of her matriarchal family, her old identity begins to fall away and, with reverence, she sees that most of the people on Adam’s Rib “were women, mighty women” (36). Angel is taken in by her step-grandmother Bush, her great-grandmother Agnes, and her greatgreat-grandmother Dora Rouge, “each of which initiate Angel into the knowledge of an inner language humans share with the nonhuman world of nature” (Schultermandl 73). Each woman is profoundly independent, relying only on themselves, their relationship with one another, and their deep knowledge of the land. Foregrounding the synergistic, ecological relationship between the women and their land, Angel describes her familial relationship as an ecosystem: “Dora-Rouge, I think now, was a root and we were like a tree family, aspens or birch, connected to one another underground, the older trees feeding the young, sending offshoots, growing . . . it was an old world in which I began to bloom” (48). Transgenerational Trauma and the Recuperation of the Divine Feminine Angel’s journey is predicated on recuperating an integral aspect of her feminine nature, her agency, that was lost upon her violent severance from her tribal family. In her quest to reconnect with her divine feminine self, Angel is faced with unearthing the transgenerational trauma suffered by her mother, Hannah, who was brutally robbed of her divine feminine agency and power. As Angel remarks, my beginning was Hannah’s beginning, one of broken lives, gone animals, trees felled and kindled. Our beginnings were intricately bound up in the history of the land. I already knew in the nooks of America, the crannies of marble buildings, my story unfolded. This, I suppose, was the true house of my mother. (96) When Angel begins to learn more about her mother, and her bloodline, she realizes the incommensurate relationship between Euroamerican colonization and its violent, traumatic impact on indigenous women. As the novel unfolds, we learn that Angel’s lineage descends from a legacy of Euroamerican violence. Women are the direct inheritors of this violence, the mediating threshold through which white, male dominance was

156  Mapping the Counter-Errand transmitted—thus robbing women of their feminine instincts, their life force. Angel’s story—and trauma—begins with the eradication of her land and her people. As Agnes says to Angel, “what happened to you started long ago. It began around the time of the killing of the wolves. People were starving . . . there wasn’t a single beaver that year. They’d killed them all. And they’d just logged the last of the pine forests” (37). The loss of the tribal women’s power is commensurate with the loss of their land. As Estes exemplifies, it is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. . . . It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears, and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ungracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous. (1) These “instinctual archetypes” radically threatened white male power and, as such, were systematically obliterated. Having been violently stripped of their power and agency, Angel’s mother and grandmother incurred firsthand the assault against their bodies and psyche by Euroamerican men. Loretta Wing, Angel’s grandmother, descended from the Elk Islanders, a Native American tribe brutalized by white men. As Hogan reveals: [Loretta] was from the Elk Islanders, the people who became so hungry they ate the poisoned carcasses of deer that settlers left out for the wolves. The starving people ate that bait . . . the curse on the poor girl’s life came from watching the desperate people of her tribe die. I saw the same thing once in a dog, wretching and jerking from that same poison. How she’d lived, I didn’t know. But after that, when she was still a girl, she’d been taken and used by men who fed her and beat her and forced her. That was how one day she became the one who hurt others. It was passed down. I could almost hear their voices when she talked, babbling behind hers, men’s voices speaking English. (37–38) Loretta internalizes and perpetuates the violence inflicted upon her, serving as a vessel through which the insidious, misogynistic violence of the Euroamerican civilizing mission is passed through the bloodline. The colonial mission moves beyond initial conquest, systematically stripping women of their power and agency from generation to generation. Women are essential to colonization as they are the mediating vessels through which white male dominance is disseminated between generations, thus keeping the colonial mission alive and well. Estes refers to women’s agency as a “wild woman nature,” the errant, expansive, wild, untamed, female principle that threatens male dominance. As Estes confers, “the comprehension of this Wild

Mapping the Counter-Errand 157 Woman nature . . . is a psychology in its truest sense . . . a knowing of the soul. Without her, women are without ears to hear her soul talk or to register the chiming of her own inner rhythms. Without her, women’s inner eyes are closed by some shadowy hand . . . without her, women lose the sureness of their soulfooting” (8). When women lose their connection to their “own inner rhythms” and “lose the sureness of their soulfooting,” they are robbed of their lifeforce, their womanhood, and their vitality. In this respect, the colonization of women is deliberate and fundamental to the securing of white male colonial power. As Luce Irigarary exemplifies in Speculum of the Other Woman: “by her failure to be defined to be predicated, she serves as an (in)definite basis for the ontological promotion of each living thing. She is both radically lacking in all power of logos and offers, unawares, an all-powerful soil in which the logos can grow” (162). Women are the fertile soil within which the errand is rooted and disseminated. Serving as an expansive, unquantifiable “basis for the ontological promotion of each living thing,” thus threatening the reductive ontological imperatives of Euroamerican colonialism. The transgenerational trauma2 inaugurated by the violence Loretta suffered is inherited by her daughter, Hannah, whose “eyes had no trust, not in anything or anyone. They were dark and flat. No light. It was the expression the tortured wear” (98). Here, the razing of Loretta’s inner “Wild Woman” is passed down to—and internalized by—Hannah. As a young girl, she is vacant, empty, void: “the old people said it was soul loss and old sickness . . . from the very beginning she didn’t sleep. She paced at night. Like she was trapped, or something was trapped in her” (98). Not unlink Loretta, it’s as if “men’s voices speaking English” were trapped inside her, possessing her body and diminishing her life force. As Hogan continues, the old people used to say that animals in danger from men could shrink themselves, go off into a cave or lake or beneath a stone where they would hide until the world was safe again . . . she was a body under siege, a battleground . . . beneath all her layers of clothes, her skin was a garment of scars. There were burns and incisions. Like someone had written on her, the signatures of tortures . . . and farther in, I knew, there were violations and invasions of other kinds . . . I saw it in her, her life going backward to where time and history and genocide gather and move like a cloud above the spilled oceans of blood. That little girl’s body was the place where this all met . . . she was also the child of those starving and poisoned people on Elk Island. (101) And so, the violence of the errand carries on through women, across generational lines. Men no longer need to tamp down women’s power because women have internalized white male violence and perpetuate the misogyny endemic to the colonial mission. Women’s bodies, and the brutality afflicted

158  Mapping the Counter-Errand upon their bodies, are a map upon which the legacy of colonialism is written. As McClintock argues, the vast, fissured architecture of imperialism was gendered throughout by the fact that it was white men who made and enforced laws and policies in their own interest . . . gender dynamics were, from the outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise. (6) Indeed, women were the key to keeping the “imperial enterprise” alive and well from generation to generation. Returning to Irigaray, the Western ontological tradition is predicated on the strategic, insidious razing of female agency. As Irigaray elucidates, thus, this ‘lack of qualities’ that makes the female truly female ensures that the male can achieve his qualifications. In order to take full possession of himself, man will need to take over not only the potentiality and potency, but also the place, and all the little chinks (re) produced in his ceaseless drive to transform anything different and still self-defining into his own likeness. (166) Male power is solidified through the annihilation of what makes “the female truly female”: the expansive, unknowable, unquantifiable dynamics of her being. A woman’s body, then, becomes a canvas upon which the male colonial gaze takes hold and is the repository upon which man transforms her divine femininity into his “own likeness,” a reproduction of the white male empire. Here, the patriarchal gaze is internalized and she is dispossessed of her power, simultaneously possessed by the ontological imperatives of Euroamerican colonization. Throughout Solar Storms, Hogan brings to the fore the unspeakable gendered trauma carried across ancestral lines, citing the incommensurate relationship between the loss of tribal lands, the violence imposed upon women, and the transgenerational trauma carried in the hearts of women. Returning to Estes: Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species. Over time we have seen the feminine nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and wildlands. For several thousand years . . . it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed and natural cycles formed into unnatural rhythms. (1)

Mapping the Counter-Errand 159 The brutality suffered against the Elk Islanders passed down from Loretta to Hannah and to Angel exemplifies both literally and figuratively how the “spiritual lands” of these women, characterized in the eyes of the patriarchal as “wild” and “unruly” have been “plundered,” their natural cycles obliterated. As Hogan exemplifies, “tragically, Angel owes her broken face to her mother, Hannah. A victim of violence herself, Hannah committed the unspeakable crime of passing down her own abuse to her child” (167). But through Angel’s eyes and her ongoing deconstruction of the self, the violence suffered by indigenous women is centralized, thus recuperating their silenced and buried stories. Solar Storms radically calls into question the predominant paradigm inherent to American Exceptionalism, a paradigm normalized and hegemonically solidified in the consciousness of Americans. Further, Hogan’s emphasis on the strategic suffering incurred against indigenous women reveals the threat these “wild” women posed to the white civilizing mission. Returning to Perry Miller, women exemplify the wild landscape, who must be “possessed” to ward off ever becoming “possessed by it.” Here, women and the land are a couplet, both exemplifications of an unspeakable force in need of containment for risk of male consumption. By fragmenting, dissecting, and eradicating indigenous women of their agency and power, white male power takes hold and carries on. Countering this legacy, Angel remarks, “I wanted an unbroken line between me and the past. I wanted to not be fragments and pieces left behind by fur traders, soldiers, priests, and schools” (77). Angel’s recuperation of her inner wild woman is endemic to her healing process, a reconnection of her feminine life force, her ancestral self. She had lost herself in the Western world and her scarring—a visible, visceral exemplification of her robbed life force—became her identity: “my ugliness, as I called it, had ruled my life” (54). It’s precisely the inscription of white male colonialism on Angel’s body, and her psyche, that disconnected her from her power and set in motion the tragic internalization of patriarchal hegemony— the male gaze. As Irigarary asserts, although woman “may be fully herself and in herself . . . [a male] other has to declare this is the case” (162). Searching for “herself,” and robbed of her connection to her tribe, Angel deeply believed she could only be “fully herself” through the relationship with another man: “my need for love had been so great I would offer myself to any boy or man who would take me . . . there was really no love in it, but I believed any kind of touch was a kind of love. Any human hand. Any chest to lean my head against. It would heal me, I thought. It would mend my heart. It would show my face back to me, unscarred” (54–55). But as Angel reconnects with her matriarchal tribe—and the natural world—her “illusions began to drop away” (74). As Angel illuminates: I knew [my past] was about to be dismantled, taken apart and rewoven the way spiderwebs on the floating island changed every night. Only a short time before, my life had been one thing. Now it was something altogether different. There was nothing for me to measure it by any

160  Mapping the Counter-Errand longer. There as not even as much as a mirror in Bush’s house for me to recall my image. Only my pocket mirror. So, on the first night, in the bedroom when moonlight fell on the floor, I spoke my made-up story inside myself one last time. (74) Angel realizes her identity is a fictional, illusive construction. No longer needing to “measure” herself by the prescriptive imperatives of the white patriarchy, no longer needing a male “other” “declare” or approve of her identity, she begins to loosen the gripping stranglehold of white male colonialism on her body, on her psyche. In this respect, “Solar Storms describes Angel’s reinitiation into an older knowledge of a world where human and nonhuman nature are connected in a harmonic balance” (Schultermandl 71). And the compulsory inscription of the male gaze is slowly deconstructed as Angel begins to immerse herself in a new form of being: I began to form a kind of knowing at Adam’s Rib. I began to feel that if we had no separate words for inside and out and there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no skin, you would see me. What would meet your eyes would not be the mask of what had happened to me, not the evidence of violence, not even how I closed the doors to violence and fear. (54) Through Angel, we are led into the life and ways of Cree culture, and “during this journey, Angel realizes the destruction of her tribal lands, the broken bonds among her family members, and her separation from her mother are results of an imbalance between human and nonhuman nature, an imbalance caused by the interference of the white Euroamerican settlers with her tribe’s culture” (Schultermandl 67). As Angel dispossesses herself of her Western identity, she becomes rooted in advocating for her tribe in their fight against the dam project, which threatens the livelihood of the entire tribe and their land. As Geoffrey Stacks argues in “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” the dam project: displaced natives communities and sparked a decades-long political struggle between the indigenous and Canadian nations . . . Solar Storms thus critiques the long history of embodied geography—that is, a figuring of the land as feminine, a move that . . . reinforces colonial will and desire . . . as Angel learns to co-opt the power of writing and mapping and the transforms them into weapons with which to fight the government’s dams, her face becomes a sign a healing instead of violence. (162) Angel transmutes her trauma into the agency, the scars on her face no longer redolent of “violence” but now a tattooed badge of power and honor.

Mapping the Counter-Errand 161 Deeply aware of the immense struggle with which her people are faced, Angel fights the dam project with her people as she rediscovers her agency with her matriarchal tribe and her symbiotic reconnection with nature. In and through her rekindled relationship with the Crees, she transmogrifies her inherited transgenerational trauma into action. In this sense, “Hogan in particular juxtaposes the healing powers of the ancestral landscape with the protagonists’ fighting for a restorative healing of the landscape” (Schultermandl 69). Angel is the vessel through which the ecological crises her people face are brought to the fore and her entire perspective of the Western world shifts. Now aware of the damaging, dehumanizing, colonial male gaze, Angel sees the inhumanity of the men razing the landscape for the dam project: Later I wondered how these men, young though they were, did not have a vision large enough to see a life beyond their jobs, beyond orders, beyond the company that would leave them broke, without benefits, and guilty of the sin of land killing . . . I still wonder—what elements, what events, would allow men to go against their inner voices, to go against the cellular will of the body to live and protect life . . . they were men who would reverse the world, change the direction of rivers, stop the cycle of life until everything was backward as lies. (289) Although the dam project continues for a year and devastates a significant part of the Crees’ natural habitat, the Crees eventually succeed in their resistance, thus revealing the extent to “human liberation and the liberation of nature are inextricably connected, as are the ecological and social crisis” (King 730). In this regard, Solar Storms rewrites the story of Christian colonization to centralize the voices of the marginalized, and the voices of the natural world, to undermine and expose the insidious ontology of the errand into the wilderness. The novel is a profound ecofeminist statement on our current environmental crisis and the ongoing danger our anthropocentric paradigm poses to the ecos and humanity alike. In Lisa J. Udel’s words, Solar Storms ends “with the promise of human redemption and connection with the natural world” (79). With a hopeful nod toward the future, Hogan reveals the profound power of one’s coextensive relationship with the natural world. Bringing our current ecological crisis to the fore, Solar Storms is a powerful meditation on our current historical present, the legacy of colonialism mapped onto the face of America’s land, and the necessity for recuperating the spirit in nature, the wildness in women. Notes 1 See Ashlee Cunsolo and Nevill R. Ellis’ article: “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss.” Nature Climate Change, vol. 8, 2018, pp. 275–281.

162  Mapping the Counter-Errand 2 Our discussion of trauma here is deeply informed by the rich field of trauma studies. Most notably, we argue this novel is reminiscent of Nasrullah Mambrol’s article “Trauma Studies.” Our representation of trauma as experienced by Loretta, Hannah, and Angel is predicated on the following quote: “trauma is an unassimilated event that shatters identity and remains outside normal memory and narrative representation. Fragmentation or dissociation is viewed as the direct cause of trauma, a view that helps formulate the notion of transhistorical trauma, which suggests that trauma’s essential or universal effects on consciousness” (par 11). Transgenerational trauma, as perpetuated throughout the female ancestral bloodline, severely dissociates the women from their identity, thus robbing them of their agency and life force.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Indiana University Press, 2008. Coon Come, Matthew. “A Reduction of Our World.” In Our People, Our Land: Perspectives on the Columbus Quincentenary, edited by Kurt Russo. Lummi Tribe and Kluckhohn Center, 1992. Cunsulo, Ashlee and Neville R. Ellis. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate-Change Related Loss.” Nature Climate Change, vol. 8, 2018, pp. 275–281. de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros. Cannibal Metaphysics (Edited and Translated by Peter Skafish). University of Minnesota Press, 2014. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford University Press, 2011. Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1996. Gaard, Greta. Critical Ecofeminism. Lexington, 2017. Galway, Lindsay P., Beery Thomas, Jones-Casey Kelsey and Tasala Kirsti. “Mapping the Solastalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 16, no. 2662, 2019. Hellegers, Desiree. “From Poisson Road to Poison Road: Mapping the Toxic Trail of Windigo Capital in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 27, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1–28. Hogan, Linda. Solar Storms. Scribner, 1997. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman (Translated by Gillian G. Gill). Cornell University Press, 1985. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Lilly and Wait, 1832. LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Haymarket Books, 1999. Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Trauma Studies.” Literary Theory and Criticism, December 19, 2018. http//:literariness.org/2018/12/19/trauma-studies/. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. Routledge, 1995. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Harper Collins, 1980. Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness: An Address. Belknap Press, 1956. Miller, Robert J. Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny. Bison, 2008.

Mapping the Counter-Errand 163 Myers, Jeffrey. Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature. University of Georgia, 2005. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993. Schultermandl, Silvua. “Fighting for The Mother/Land: An Ecofeminist Reading of Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 17, no. 3, 2005, pp. 67–84. Spanos, William. American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of Vietnam. State University of New York Press, 2008. Stacks, Geoffrey. “A Defiant Cartography: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, 2010, pp. 161–176. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Ambio, vol. 36, no. 8, 2007, pp. 614–621. Udel, Lisa J. Revising Strategies: The Literature and Politics of Native American Women’s Activism. University of Cincinnati, 2001. Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminist Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. White Jr., Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. University of Georgia, 1996.

8 Conclusion

We think of this book project as drawing an initial map of the kind that Morrison describes in Playing in the Dark: “a map . . . of critical geography . . . to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration . . . without the mandate for conquest” (3). This project began with the early writings of woman slaves—Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth—to demonstrate how they deconstruct the logic of America’s eco-exceptionalist empire by creating their own forms of resistance through relationships with the land. It is important to begin with such early ecofeminists because their work reveals how the heart of America’s hegemonic reign was predicated on a logic of domination that simultaneously sought to produce a useful population (in this case slaves) and landscape. This point is echoed in Chapter One’s discussion of Blood Meridian, a novel that also lays out American expansionism (into the West) at the expense of land and the native population of Indigenous Americans. As Perry Miller remarked in his work, “the Puritans launched themselves upon the process of Americanization” (11) and we see this enacted through the various methods of American expansionism explored in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. From the analysis of works of African American ecofeminists, we moved into O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, looking at the treatment of land in the expansionism of the twentieth century. This chapter addressed some of the ways in which the Native Americans were treated, echoed, and expanded upon later in Chapter Seven’s study of Solar Storms. Overall, we map a genealogy, a counter-narrative that challenges the errand, privileging the voices and stories of those women most marginalized and brutalized by the American civilizing mission, developing a literary ecofeminist cartography that radically undermines and deconstructs the metaphysical mapping imposed by the American civilizing mission. We develop a new kind of spatial imagination predicated on revivifying women’s stories as well as the stories of the land itself. Through our strategic examination of key women writers from the United States and the Caribbean—an examination of the literature of the Americas—we examine the expansive outreach of the errand and its totalizing violence. As we argue, the metaphysical borders imposed by the errand are strategic, not only displacing indigenous populations DOI: 10.4324/9781003275213-8

Conclusion 165 and nonwhites but also intentionally robbing women of their relationship with their native land and their local knowledges—what Clarissa Pinkola Estes refers to as the inherent “Wild Woman.” As Estes remarks, “But in the case of the Wild Woman archetype . . . we must be more interested in the thoughts, feelings, and endeavors which strengthen women, and adequately count the interior and cultural factors which weaken women” (9). Our project seeks to expose the insidious Puritanical “cultural factors” that have strategically robbed women of their inherent wildness, their agency. As we articulate throughout the book, razing women of their power is what allowed the white, patriarchal colonizing mission to take hold as women were mediating thresholds, the vessels, through which the empire was secured and solidified. And, at the same time, in Estes’s words, we examine those “thoughts, feelings, and endeavors which strengthen women.” The ecofeminist authors in this project find their agency through their local ecological knowledges, their native folk magic and traditions, and, in the case of Tituba, their deep knowledge of plant medicine and alternative healing remedies, their connection with animals, their bodily agency and, not least, their communion with other women, as in Breath, Eyes, Memory. As this project reveals, women have been silenced and their bodies recorded violence in early works through many contemporary texts. These women posed a profound threat to the American civilizing mission because of their deep understanding of their natural environments—the very thing that threatened the errand and consequently needed to be subdued. Here, women are coupled with the natural world, both cited as unruly, errant, violent—and heretical. As exemplified within Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness, the Puritanical errand was distinctly predicated on a radical eradication of nature. As Miller warns, Puritans needed to “go forth to possess a land without ever becoming possessed by it” (8). Furthermore, citing John Winthrop, Miller argues that if Puritans didn’t live up to God’s terms, “Winthrop warned, we may expect immediate manifestations of divine wrath, we shall perish out of the land we are crossing the sea to possess (8). The list of afflictions an angry God could rain upon them included “crop failures . . . arctic winters . . . hurricanes, shipwrecks” (8). The fear and dread of the land is palpable. In the eyes of the Puritanical errand, the wild land, and all those cultures and communities whose identities and livelihoods are embodied from within the natural world, need to be subdued or, worse, eliminated. As we reveal, the devastating impact of the mission spans beyond the borders of the United States, well into the Caribbean. From Tituba, who is stolen from Barbados, codified as a witch for her indigenous wisdom and knowledge of folk remedies, to the Cree who are robbed of their humanity and robbed of their land in Solar Storms, the errand knows no geographic boundaries. Fearful of the “divine wrath” of a Christian God, the land is codified as inert matter with no agency. As Donald Worster argues in Nature’s Economy, Christian imperialism “stripped from nature all spiritual

166  Conclusion qualities and rigidly distanced it from human feelings—promoting a view of creation as a mechanical contrivance” (29). We see this throughout the book and the suffering each woman endures not only because of their connections to their environment but because of their representation of the environment. Subduing the land—and women—is fundamental to securing the errand. As Lynn White Jr. asserts, “especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (43). Perceiving the errand from the margins, through the eyes of the women most brutalized by the errand—like the young, innocent Pecola Breedlove—the anthropocentric, eco-exceptionalist historiography written by the deputies of the American civilizing mission is called into question. Most notably, each woman author in our project “pushed up against [these] seemingly natural spaces and places of subjugation” in order to develop “alternative geographic formulations” (McKittrick xix). These women, through their refusal to succumb to the errand, especially, for instance, the African American slave ecofeminists, fight for their agency and power. Mapping, land, and female bodies form an indissoluble entity. Despite the imperial civilizing mission’s unprecedented assault against this agential entity, women and nature form a formidable opponent against the errand. Here, the stories of those women brutalized by the American civilizing mission come together to form a profound counter-narrative, a counter-errand. A new, alternative, boundless, and boundaryless cartography is formed and united through the collective voices of the women, and the natural spaces, who have been brutalized by the errand. Our project seeks to recuperate the vitality of nature to expose the violence of the errand upon nature and women—to unearth the trauma of colonialism long buried within the land. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley argue in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, “since it is the nature, so to speak, of colonial powers to suppress the history of their own violence, the land and even the ocean become all the more crucial as recuperative sites of postcolonial historiography” (8). Throughout this book, the land is a protagonist. It is given a voice, a platform—it is given the agency and power it deserves since being long silenced by the errand. As our book augurs, the imperial cartographies of the American empire are unable to withstand the power of nature; nature eschews all boundaries and all forms of imperial metaphysics. As Linda Hogan illustrates in Solar Storms, nature pushes back. Our current climate crisis, for instance, is a profound example of nature violently responding to years of human abuse against the ecos. As is the subtext of our arguments about nature and landscape, our current environmental crisis takes hold within the errand and carries through to the present. Undoubtedly, our current historical present is a logical consequence of the errand brought to full fruition. Finally, this book project intends to intervene in our current eco-global historical occasion, an occasion that is predicated on a relentless search for a dwindling supply of resources, a continual onslaught of environmental

Conclusion 167 destruction, and an ever-present American globalizing momentum that continues to search for new frontiers in the world’s ever-diminishing natural world. By implementing and administering a geopolitical design intended to arrange the human and nonhuman population hierarchically, America secured its ability to control the land and its human body politic. By performing an ecologically feminist, geographical inquiry of the American nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and cultural archive, this project seeks to add to the already rich dialogue that has been prevalent within the convergent fields of American Studies, race, and gender studies, theories of geography and space, and ecocriticism—and intends to offer an alternative, anti-imperial ethics of eco-inhabitation for our current globalized consciousness. Works Cited DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford University Press, 2011. Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine, 1996. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota, 2006. Miller, Perry. Errand Into the Wilderness: An Address. Belknap Press, 1956. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage, 1993. White Jr., Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1996. Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology. Anchor Press, 1979.

Index

Adisa, Opal Palmer 88 African American Ecofeminists 16, 24, 164, 166; formation of resistances by 26–42 African Americans 18, 125; Bluest Eye (Morrison) and 102, 108, 114–115; legacy of slavery in 101; racialized slavery and 23; self-determination of 57; women slaves, writing by 24 African: “A is for African” (Cosimini) 131; bodies 23; diasporic identities 138n2; identity 22; slave 25, 29; slave trade 120; Tituba as 119, 125, 127; women 23 Africanism 107, 124 Africanist population 40 Africanist presence: Morrison 17, 52–53, 106, 113, 124, 134 Africanist shadow 51, 132 Adam’s Rib as homeland (fictional site, Solar Storms) 142, 144, 147–149, 152–153, 155, 160 Agamben, Giorgio 9–12 agentic force: nature as 90, 128, 153 Alaimo, Stacy 12, 78, 128, 153 Althusser, Louis 20n3 American dominion 20n6, 24 American empire x, 4, 14–17, 25, 29, 48, 50–52; developmental history of 22–24; eco-exceptionalist 16, 164, 166; power, race, and gender in context of 19n1 American environment: slave women and 24–26 American errand into the wilderness see errand into the wilderness American exceptionalism 76, 159; see also Spanos American expansionism 3, 11–12, 61, 100, 123, 164; errand of 17, 74–97

American landscape see landscape America’s geo-social production see geo-social production of America American slavery: genealogies of black feminisms and 22–46 American Studies 14–15, 75, 99, 167; see also Miller, Perry; Spanos, William Angel see Jensen, Angel (fictional character, Solar Storms) animal body 138 animal care 60 animals 4, 8, 40–52, 122, 137; ethical standing of 41; sphere of inferiority of 77, 107, 122; Native Americans and 150–153; otherness of 154; violence against women and 142 animism 153 Anthropocene 141–142 anthropocentric ontology 150 anthropocentric paradigm 26, 161 anthropocentrism 8, 16, 19, 20n5, 143; Christianity and 130, 151, 166; danger of 161; Western civilization and 153 archetype 72n12; instinctual 156; Wild Woman 165 Arbella Puritan group 1 Arendt, Hannah: Life of the Mind 7–8, 136–137 Bakhtin 129 Baron Samedi 86 Baumfree, Isabella see Truth, Sojourner Baym, Nina: “Melodramas of Beset Manhood” 49, 71 Bell, Beverly: Walking on Fire 83 Bellmont family (fictional) 37–40 Bentham, Jeremy 44 Bercovitch, Sacvan 120 Bernabé, Jean 121

Index  169 black bodies 100–102, 106, 108–109 black children 101; girls 116n1 Black femininities 42–46 blackness: Cosimini’s structuring absence of blackness in Hawthorne 131, 134; ugliness tethered to 106; witchcraft and 124–127 Black Witch of Salem see Tituba black women 16, 101; geographical domination of 110; geography and 24, 45; Haitian 61, 82; lived trauma of 101; McKittrick on 24, 45, 108, 113; Morrison’s exploration of 100–103; see also Danticat; Jacobs; Morrison; Tituba; Truth; Wilson; women slaves; women writers of color Bordo, Susan: Unbearable Weight 79 Bradford, William 132 Brent, Linda see Jacobs, Harriet Breslaw, Eileen: Tituba, Reluctant Witch 139n3, 139n5, 139n8 Bruckner, Martin 10–11 Bryson, Michael A. 13 Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter 53 Caco family women (fictional characters) 80–84, 96n9, 100 Calvinism 2–3 Caribbean: Afro-Caribbean pidgin 119; American expansionism and interventions in 77, 80, 101, 125; eco-imperial imaginary in 1–19; as feminized subaltern space 18, 76; Glissart on 89; imperial chauvinism in 13; Martinique 74; Tituba as voice and face of 121, 123, 125; women writers from 164 cartography(ies) 13; ecofeminist 164; ecologies of racism and 17; exclusionary 14, 18, 99–116; geo-ontological 36; new 168 Cather, Willa: Alexandra Bergson 17, 52–70; Edenic motifs of 72n12; New Woman of 17, 52; O Pioneers! 17, 48–70, 164; see also Jeffersonian agrarian ideals Chamoiseau, Patrick 121 Chancy, Myriam JA: Framing Silence 83 Charles, Carolle: “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti” 83 Charters, Mallay: “Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited” 87 childhood 26, 37; Werrlein on Morrison’s thematics of 101–102, 105, 107

Christian imperialism 148, 165 Christianity 2, 3, 36, 37, 67; civilizing mission of 143; colonialism and 145, 147, 152, 161; Cree nation contrasted to 153; God of 151, 152; Western 130, 142, 154, 166; worldview of 153–154 Christianization 150 Clark, Christopher: Communitarian Moment 31 Cold War 79 colonial administration, assumptions of 92 colonial farmer 31 colonial gaze 158 colonialism: abuse of nature and 96n4; anticolonial narratives 24; capitalist 144–145; Chancy on 83; Christianity and 145, 147, 152, 161; civilizing mission of 75, 95; Danticat’s exploration of 77–95; Euroamerican 15; grand colonial narrative of America 29; Mayblin and Turner on 70n1; patriarchy and 23, 122; Plumwood on 96n4, 122; racism, sexism and 107, 114; settler 132; Western 121, 122; white male 116n5, 159–161; see also postcolonialism colonialist/capitalist/patriarchal errand 76 colonial mission 156 colonial violence 88–89, 93 colonial wilderness 95 Comer, Krista: Landscapes of the New West 48, 57 Condé, Maryse 121, 123, 118–138; see also Prynne, Hester (fictional character); Tituba Coon Come, Matthew 144 Cosimini, Seth: “A is for African” 131–132, 134 Counihan, Clare: “Desiring Diaspora” 84–85, 96n13 counter-discourse 127 counter-errand: Indigenous agential ecologies and the ecofeminist imperatives of decolonization in 147–155; mapping 141–161, 166; transgenerational trauma and 155–161 counter-historical literary ecology 87 counter-historiographies 95 counter-narratives 11, 14, 19, 143, 164, 166

170 Index counter-text: I, Tituba in relationship to 124 Cree land and people 19, 143–144, 146–150, 152–154, 160–161, 165; animism, belief in 153; Solar Storm (Hogan) and 147–161; see also Adam’s Rib as homeland; Jensen, Angel (fictional character) Créolistes 121 Crevecoeur, J. 4 Cunsolo, Ashlee 143 Crutzen, Paul J. 141–142 Danforth, Samuel 1 Danticat, Edwidge: American Expansionism and 74–95; Breath, Eyes, Memory 15, 18, 75–80, 82–83, 85, 87, 95; “Daughters of Memory” 74; “errand” and 15, 74–95; Farming of Bones 18, 75–80, 82, 87–95 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 94, 128, 143, 166 diaspora: black 15, 108; see also Counihan diasporic: plight 23; struggles 108 divine feminine: transgenerational trauma and 155–161 Dominican Republic 79, 89–90, 92–93, 96n15, 101 Dukats, Mara L. 123 Duvalier, “Papa Doc” 15; regime of 77–78, 80–87 Dyck, Reginald: “Willa Cather’s Reluctant New Woman Pioneer” 52, 71n2 earth 7–8; America as site of new heaven and 118; animistic reverence for 153; Anthropocene and 141–142; as body of Otherness 137, 154; destruction of 142; Cather’s Marie as personification of 65; Danticat’s Tante Arie’s name as meaning 80; man (the human race) as dominant force on 141; onto-theology barring access to 62; Pecola of Morrison’s Bluest Eye and 99–117; as subaltern 145 Earth System 142 eco-colonization 143 ecocriticism 96, 167; see also Huggan; Mazel; Tiffin eco-exceptionalist empire: American 16, 164, 166 ecofeminism 14–15, 24, 31, 95n1, 101, 136; critical 149

ecofeminist: African American slave 166; alliance 17; cartography 164; connective 18; critiques 15; paradigm shift 153; philosophy 152; resistance 26; scholarship 20; theory 14 ecofeminist imperatives of decolonization 147–155 ecofeminists see African American Ecofeminists; Hogan; Merchant; Plumwood; Schultermandl; Sturgeon eco-imperial imaginary 1–19 eco-imperialism: American 23 eco-inhabitation, anti-imperialist ethics of 167 ecology: anti-ecology of imperialism 67; Cather’s sacrifice of ecology for solidarity 55; counter-historical literary 87; European altering of 51; nomadic 65–70; race, gender, geography, empire and 17 ecology of: exception 9, 70; racism 17 eco-misogynistic ethos 22 eco-ontology 148, 149, 153 ecos ix, 2, 7, 12–14, 59, 62, 134, 161; antagonism toward 128; colonizing of 152; destruction of 151; errand associated with loss of 150; hegemon’s disciplining of 128, 136; Puritan alarm towards 125; unmediated 8, 10, 19; West’s placing outside of 137 ecosystem 143, 155; exclusionary 108 eco-topography, socio- 90 empire: agricultural 25; American x, 4, 14–17, 22–24, 25, 29, 48, 50–52; Cather’s Alexandra and 53–64; Cather’s Alexandra, Marie, and feminist empire 65–70; color aesthetic of race and 20n2; disavowal of human and nonhuman physis under 10; old empire and new state 30; oppression under 12; sociopolitical landscape mediated by 49; spatial domination of 14; Western subjectivity and ix environmental foreclosures 35 episteme 53 epistemological: hubris ix; wilderness 136 epistemology: McCarthy 5; liberal capitalist 141; paranoid 126; Puritan 2, 126 errand: Adam’s Rib as remnant of 148; American expansionist 17, 74–95; colonialist/capitalist/patriarchal 76; Danforth’s 1; Danticat and 15, 74–95;

Index  171 divinely ordained 91, 148; ecos and 150; haunting 110; internalizing (Cholly and Pauline, Morrison’s Bluest Eye) 110–113; on origin of 144; reproductive errand of sex 13; Spanos on logic of 149; telosoriented ontology of 150; see also counter-errand errand into the wilderness: American 16, 22, 79–80, 82, 99–101; colonizing 122; Danforth’s sermon 1–2, 75; “Errand into the Wilderness” (Miller’s address) 1–2, 75, 150; Errand into the Wildness (Miller) 1–4, 14, 75–76, 104–105, 119, 150–151, 153, 159, 164–165; master narrative of 123; Morrison’s Bluest Eye read as examination of 102–103; ontology of 161; Puritan 99, 120, 130, 135–138, 142, 145, 165; Salem civilization 118; Western 78, 95, 141 Estes, Clarissa Pinkola: “Wild Woman” of 165; Women Who Run with Wolves 154, 156, 158, 165 ethics 32; discriminatory 146; eco-ethics 153; see also land ethics ethics of inhabitancy 17, 167 Fanon, Franz: Black Skin, White Masks 131–132; Wretched of the Earth 74, 82, 131 Feifer, Megan: “The Remembering of Bones” 87–88 female circumcision 85 female masculinities: nomadic ecologies and 48–70 feminine see divine feminine feminine land and landscape 56, 60, 73, 160 feminine possibilities of knowledge 131 feminine soul 120, 125 feminism(s): American 52; Black 22–46; ecofeminism 14–17, 28, 31; race and 10 feminist empire 65–70 feminist identities 83 femininities: Black 42–46; divine 158; essential 60; traditional notions of 65 Finseth, Ian: “Geographic Consciousness in the American Slave Narrative” 42 Fischer, Mike: “Pastoralism and its Discontents” 57, 71n7 fluidic meditation 123, 125

fluidics: anti-fluidics of Western unipolarity 129 fluidity: Tituba and 15, 19, 89, 120, 129–131 Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish 44–45 fragmentation and fragmenting 159, 162n2 Francis, Donette A.: “Silences Too Horrific to Disturb” 81–82, 96n7 frontier 1–3, 5; American 9, 48–50, 52; closing of 9, 69; expansion of 11; liminality of 65; pastoral 58; pursuit of 68; see also Cather frontier era 13 frontier lawman 6 frontiersman 56 Gaard, Greta: Critical Ecofeminism 96, 116n5 gaze: patriarchal 66, 122, 158, 159; white 23, 40, 45, 112, 114, 115, 133 gender: American westward expansion and 48; capitalism and 24; colonialism and abuse of nature and 96n4; desexualization and degendering 38; eco-imperial imaginary in the Caribbean and 1–19; land violence and 94; Puritan alarm towards ecos and 124; race and ix; reproduction under slavery of 22, 24; subaltern cleavages 40; Tituba’s paradoxical gender 125 gender difference 23, 111 gender dynamics 158 gendered: agency 27; dispossession 103; female 39; geo-ontologies 14, 77, 80, 100, 101; metaphors 78; metaphysics of conquest 12; other x; servitude 17; spatialities 107–113; ungendered female 39; violence 82, 86, 88, 145 gender identity 28 gendering of geography: New World 22–25 gender roles, traditional 72n10 gender studies 167 geographies: exclusionary 103; gendering of 22–25 geography, discipline of: 1820s popularity of 11 geo-ontology(ies): ecologies of racism and 36, 100; Euroamerican 143, 154; exclusionary geography as 103; gendered 14, 24, 77, 80, 97n16, 100;

172 Index haunting 14; Morrison’s interest in 106–107, 116n1; racialized 14, 101; territorialized 77, 80, 97n16, 101; tautology 107; threat of dispossession and 108; traditional 33; Truth’s and Jacob’s geo-ontologies, contrasts between 33, 36; see also ontology geo-politics, masculinist 78 geo-social production of America 11–14 Gerlus, Jean-Claude: “The Effects of the Cold War on U.S.-Haiti’s Relations” 79 Glissant, Edouard: Caribbean Discourse 80, 89, 121 governing exception, the 11 Grewal, Gurleen 110 Griffith, Jean C.: “How the West Was Whitened” 50, 54, 55, 65, 72n10 Guadeloupe 121 Handley, George 94, 128, 143, 166 Hansen, Chadwick 125 haunting: American identity and 106; of Danticat’s Amabelle 90; Danticat’s Duvalier as haunting presence 80; errand 110; geo-ontological 14; of Morrison’s Pecola 106; social ix; trope of 100; wilderness as signifying 17, 20n6, 52–53 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: Scarlett Letter 124, 131–134; see also Prynne, Hester (fictional character) hegemonic: abstraction, subverting logics of 26; control 78; culture 106; errand 101; exceptionalism 105; force 81, 112; forces 79; geopolitical hegemonic agenda of Jefferson 146; history 79; impulses of Western colonial power 91; limits 17; patriarchal narratives 83; reordering 100; residue 15; violence 145 hegemon: civilizing errand and 113; colonizing 121; disciplining of women and ecos under 128, 136; fear of reprisal in 127; gaze of 33; human as ethico-politico 19; imperial 10; invisible ubiquity of 74; land and, interplay between 24; natural world and 104; nature and 114; Puritan 75; socio-geographic cartography of 108; subjugation of land by 114; victims as enforcers under dominion of 85 hegemony: American 16, 24, 164; Cartesian x; constant activity of 110;

cultural 107, 123; ecological and racial 145; errand into the wilderness recreating parent 103; parent 103; patriarchal 159; Sojurner Truth’s challenge to 28; Western 77; white 39, 94, 102, 124; white cultural 29 Hellegers, Desiree 142–145 Hekman, Susan 78, 128, 153 historiographic memory: nature and 90 historiography: colonial 95; colonized woman given charge over own 18, 77, 83; Danticat’s recouperation of lost 89; exceptionalist American 16; postcolonial 14, 90 Hogan, Linda 13, 15; Solar Storms 19, 141–161, 166 homestead 58, 59, 63 Homestead Act 1862 49, 52 homesteader 56 Hsu, Hsuan L. 10–11 Huggan, Graham 114–115 ideological conception of geographic transparency 43 ideologies, ideology: American westward expansion 64; childhood innocence 102; ecofeminism on injustices authorized by 16, 101; nationalism, liberalism and democratic expansionism 11; exclusionary cartographies of dominant ideology 14; Sojurner Truth of ideology of violence 27; white nationalist violence 107 imperial: eco-imperial imaginary 1–19; enterprise 158; errand 80; ethos 7; externality 74; hegemon 10; imaginary 52; maintenance 135; modalities 121; mission 122, 141; production of knowledge 12; politics 48; power 91; project 18, 79; subjectivity 10 imperialism: American 9, 16, 20n6, 23, 52, 70, 81, 82; anti-ecology of 67; Christian 148; eco-imperialism 23; scientific 7; Western 78, 146–147 imperialist: anti-imperialist narratives 24; depredation 13; errand 80, 103; fictions 19 indigenous: Americans 164l cultures 142; grief as experienced by 143; intersectional inquiry into 125; “mysticism” of 130; nonhuman animals as viewed by 150; peoples 22;

Index  173 supernatural power 124; wisdom 165; women 19, 155, 159 indigenous agential ecologies: ecofeminist imperatives of decolonization and 147–155 intertextuality 131–135 Irigaray, Luce: Speculum of the Other Woman 53–54, 62, 67, 72n11, 157–158 Jacobs, Harriet 13, 15–17, 46, 164; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 22, 25, 33–37, 38, 41–42, 45; as “Linda Brent” 34, 42 Jalalzai, Zubeda 122, 138n1 James-Alexander, Simone A. “M/ othering the Nation” 96n13 James Bay Project 144 Jamestown, Virginia 132 Jeffersonian agrarian ideal: Cather’s imagining of 54, 60 Jeffersonian geopolitics: disavowal of ecology and 143–147 Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) 48, 146 Jelsma, Jess E. 111 Jensen, Angel (fictional character, Solar Storms) 142, 147–148, 150, 152–156, 159–161 Koopman, Emy: “Incestuous Rape, Abjection” 112 Lacan, Jacques 130 LaCapra, Dominick: “Trauma, Absence, Loss” 84 LaDuke, Winona: All Our Relations 144 landscape 2; American 24, 48–49, 51, 54, 58, 82; American destruction of 101; ancestral 161; black bodies and 102; black female bodies and 17; capitalist 30; Christianizing of 130; colonized 14, 77, 122, 123; Cather’s exploration of 55–58, 63, 69; Cree people and 19; Danticat’s exploration of 77–78, 81, 87, 89, 94, 95; domination of 164; exclusionary 95, 145; female body as 85, 94; female figures within 81; feminine 56, 60, 63; feminized 15, 49; nature and 166; punitive 9–11, 16; subaltern peoples and 11; territorialization of body politic and 5; white 105; wild 159; wilderness image of 131

landscape discourse 57 landscape of the past, internalizing 110–113 Lewis, Barbara 20 Lincoln, Abraham 50 Lincoln, Nebraska 53 Lionnet, Françoise: “Logique métisses” 123–124 literary criticism ix, 105; see also ecocriticism literary ecofeminist cartography 164 literary ecology, counter-historical 87 literary feminist ecologies 14–19 literary imagination 105–106 literary pastoral, European 60 logos 141, 150, 157 Macoutes 15, 78, 80–82, 84–86, 96n12 Mambrol, Nasrullah 162n2 Marx, Leo 131–132 mapping 9, 10, 14, 141; ecologies of racism and hidden mapping 37; exclusionary 145; feminist agential ecologies and counter-errand 19, 141–162; geopolitical 89; geosocial 18; ontological 101; remapping 110; subaltern patriarchal 107 Marouan, Maha 125–126, 138n2 Martinique 121 masculinist: American white masculinist ethos 4, 13, 18, 76, 121; dynamics 78, 88; geopolitics 75; hypermasculinist whiteness 111; imperatives 89 Massacre River 87 Massachusetts 33, 41, 43, 75, 120, 129, 132–133 Massachusetts Bay 1, 3, 118, 135 materialist interests 13, 51 Mather, Cotton 132 Mazel, David: American Literary Environmentalism 28–29, 35 Mayblin, Lucy: Migration Studies and Colonialism 70n1 McCarthy, Cormac: Blood Meridian 4–9, 19n1 McClintock, Anne: Imperial Leather 12, 18, 76–77, 88, 91–92, 94, 102–103, 129, 147, 158 McClure’s magazine 71n2 McKittrick, Katherine: Demonic Grounds 10–11, 16–17, 22, 24, 43, 45, 103, 107–108, 110, 113 McNeill, John 142

174 Index Merchant, Carolyn: on American alienation from the land 31–32; Columbia Guide to American Environmental History 51–52, 54, 58; on commodification of nature 25; Death of Nature 90, 129, 153–154; Columbia Guide to American Environmental History 51–54; on Indian animistic beliefs versus Judeo Christian heritage 153; on language and nature 90; on nature as a living organism 129; Reinventing Eden 25, 31–32 metaphorical landscapes 14–15; wilderness 26 meta-physical: American exceptionalist ontology as 5 metaphysical: confusion 16; contradiction 57 metaphysics: Calvinist 3; Enlightenment 12; exclusionary 102; exilic space 18; European 8; imperialist hegemon 10; non-Western 19; Western 68, 77, 82, 93, 94, 95 Miller, Arthur: The Crucible 125 Miller, Perry: “Errand into the Wilderness” (address) 1–2, 150; Errand into the Wildness (book) 1–4, 14, 75–76, 104–105, 119, 150–151, 153, 159, 164–165; “Nature and the National Ego” 115–116; on the Puritans and Americanization 164–165; on semiotics of “errand” 135; Winthrop cited by 165; on women and the wild landscape 159 Miller, Robert J.: Native America 146 Mitchell, W. J. T. 15 Molinda, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo 88 Morgan, Jennifer L.: Laboring Women 23, 46 Morrison, Toni 13, 15: Africanist presence of 17, 52–53, 106, 113, 124, 134; Bluest Eye 18, 99–116; children as main characters 103–104; dispossession as theme in work of 108; on the frontier 100; gendered spatialities of 107–110; landscapes of the past explored by 110–113; “natural nation” and 115; new critical geography of ix; Pecola the exile 102–107; personal and environmental, overlay of 99; Playing in the Dark 39–40, 124,

131–132; Spanos’ conception of the Other revisited by 105; thematics of childhood explored by 101–102, 105, 107; trauma and landscape, parallels drawn by 11 Munro, Martin: Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature 77 Myers, Jeffrey: Converging Stories 8, 11, 26, 40, 42, 62, 137, 145, 149, 154; on colonization 145; Euroamerican subject 8, 154; on Western drive towards domination 62; othered physical spaces of 11; on Western identity 137; on whiteness and the Other 26, 42 mysticism 128, 130 nation 24, 43; Cather’s Alexandra’s house as model for 64; Cather’s views on diversity and 55; colonization and 56, 75; colonial taxonomies of 145; natural 102–107; whiteness and 50 national: American national identity 105; innocence 101; literature 106; narrative 12; state 91 national/cultural paradigm 40 nation building 74, 78 nationalism in American 102 nationalist: narratives 96n9; relationship 48; sentiment, WWII-related 15; white nationalist hegemony 107 nature: abuse of 96n4; Agamben on 12; agential power of 149; American opposition between civilization and 115; capacity to enslave man 6, 9; Christian imperialism and 148; colonialism and abuse of 96n4; commodification of 25, 31; Danticat’s exploration of theme of exploitation of 77, 80, 90; disavowing living essence or agency of 16, 52; dualism of. man and 130, 142, 144; empire as replacement for 105; extermination of 149; feminism and race combined with 10; fluidity, identity, and (Tituba) 127–131; Hogan’s centralization of 153–158, 160–161; human identity and 143; humanity versus 20n5; Indian and Western ways of relating to 51; as male 71n6; Mama Yaya and 128; Merchant on 25; Morrison’s use of trope of 110; nonhuman 41, 160; objectification of

Index  175 48; power of organizing and naming 8; Puritan views of 145; severance of Native Americans from 151; state of 12, 42; taxonomizing of 136; as terra nullius 77, 122; Western codification of 141, 152; Western culture and 142; Western scientific desire to subdue 7, 93; white gaze and 114; wild woman 156; women and 76, 82, 103–105, 114, 147; of women 12–5126 “nature has no memory” (Danticat) 87, 94 Norton, Mary Beth 126 Novak, Amy 96n15 ontology: American exceptionalism 5; anthropocentric 150; Cather’s 59, 61, 64; Christian 151; developmental 61, 64; errand’s 144, 161; fixed 131; geoontology 24, 33, 36, 77, 80, 97n16, 100, 103, 106–107, 116n1, 143, 154; human 114; man-centered 20n5; metaphysical 141, 144; networked and flowing 130; object 99; planetary 19; primordial 114; telos-oriented 150; white 112; yeoman 14; see also eco-ontology ontology of: domination 48; violence 75, 122; Western colonization 147; Western reason 141; witch/otherness 120 onto-theology 62 Ortega, Gema 121, 127–129 Other: colonized 94; confederation threatened by 40; geo-ontology of female 116n1; human 152, 154; Myers on 137, 154; racial 154; racialized/genderized x, 137; Spanos on 76, 100, 105, 120; Warren on 152; whiteness in opposition to 42; women and the land as 82 otherness: American 119; biological expression of 111–112; colonization and 8, 149; earth as body of 137; racial 39; slave women and 25 otherworldliness 13 paganism 67, 125, 130 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth: “Deforestation and the Yearning” 92 Parsley Massacre 77, 79, 87–88 partus sequitur ventrem 35 patriarchal: agenda 85; capitalism 123; colonial assailants 78; colonialism

90; colonization 93; containment 15; “errand” 18; fantasies 86; gaze 66, 122, 158, 159; imperative 89; hegemonic patriarchal narratives 83; metaphysics 149, 152; paradigm 152; subjugation of women 14; suburban patriarchal mapping 107; systematicity 131; violence 87, 93; Western patriarchal metaphysics 95; white patriarchal colonization 141; white patriarchal errand 109 patriarchitecture 12 patriarchy: capitalist 147; Cather’s exploration of 63, 71n6; colonial 75; Danticat’s exploration of 74, 79, 80; expansionist 135; gender hierarchy in 23; landscape and 49; oppressions of racism and 10; Puritan 120; Southern white 25; traumas of racism and ix; Western 78, 82, 154; white x, 9, 11, 45–46, 76, 100, 110, 138, 160 Pax Americana ix Pfaff, Françoise 138n4 Plumwood, Val: Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 77, 93, 96n4, 103, 107, 114–115 pornotroping, concept of 25, 46n2, 105, 112 postcolonialism 15; DeLoughrey and Handley on 143 postcolonial: fiction 74; historiography 90; subject 13; theory 14 postcolonial-ecological text 128 power: abject reflecting back on 125; absolute 40, 81; agential 143, 149; American empire and notions of 19n1; animalization and questions of 41; attenuated agencies producing discrete relationships toward 15; cartographic enterprise of 109; Danticat’s exploration of the workings of 92, 94, 96n6; Duvalier 84, 86; empowered alterity 33; genealogy of 121; invisible 102; land as marker of 91; legal 9; male 158; male colonial 88–90; mechanisms of 44; of naming and organizing nature 8, 136; Native American loss of 152, 155–156; order or power over the environment 103; place and, questions of 36; prerogatives of 30; threats to 12; Tituba’s relationship to 131, 133–135; urge to 104; violence

176 Index and 10; white male 18, 77, 147, 157, 159; white patriarchal 9, 45; will to power 100–101, 120; women and 165–166 powerlessness 25, 111–112 powers: colonial 90–92, 166; healing 161; Satan’s 126 predestination 2 primitive, the 114 ‘problematic, the’ 20n3 Prynne, Hester (fictional character) 124, 131–137; Condé’s reimagining of 17, 52, 118, 131–137; Cosimini on 131, 134–135; Morrison on 124 Puritan errand into the wilderness 99, 120, 130, 135–138, 142, 145, 165 Puritans ix, 1–4, 99, 125–126, 132, 138, 165; American 75, 130; Americanization process launched by 164; female choice demonized by 120; founding 99, 118 race: American empire as context of 19n1; American Studies, gender studies, and 167; Black women and 113; Cather’s conflicted land ethics and 48–70; ecological framing of 33; ecology and, questions of 131; color aesthetic of 20n2; European races, Cather’s exploration of womanhood based on 72n10; Fanon on 131; feminism and 10; gender, ecoimperial imaginary, and 1–19; gender, spatiality, and 107; historicization of 131; injustice based on 16; modern capitalism and 24; place, empire and 134; space, sexuality, gender, geography, ecology, empire and 17; Tituba and 119, 121, 124, 125, 126, 134; Western colonialism and 121 race-based class structure, American slavery and 110 Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan 19 reason: Cather’s Alexandra and 54; egoic 141; as “natural light” 63; nature and, dichotomy between 114; ontology of 141; Western concept of 77, 93, 103, 110, 122, 126, 141 reason-for-being 75 Reis, Elizabeth 120, 125 Rosenthal, Bernard 139n8 Ross, Edward 50 Roye, Susmita 105–106

Said, Edward: Culture and Imperialism 30 Salleh, Ariel 20n5 Sarthou, Sharrón Eve: “Unsilencing Défilés Daughters” 83, 96n6 Scarboro, Ann Armstrong 122–123 Schultermandl, Silvua: “Fighting for The Mother/Land” 154–155, 160–161 Shiva, Vandana 13, 114 silencing 77, 83, 134, 138 slave catcher 43 slave ecofeminists 166 slave narrative 15, 16, 19, 24, 94, 101; Finseth on 42 slavery: American 22–46; chattel 38, 109; Haiti’s plantation economy and 84; legacy of 101; Morrison on 112, 124 slave husband 138 slaves 16; Africa as source of 25; African American 26; American empire and 29; animals, as akin to 41–42; child 43; Jacob’s observations of 33, 36; see also slave women slave trade, African 120 slave women 14, 16, 17, 22–26; devaluation of 41; Tituba as 128; trope of haunting and 100; writings by 164; see also Jacobs; Tituba; Truth; Wilson solastalgia 143 Spanos, William V. 86–87, 91, 136; on American exceptionalism and expansionism 5, 75–76; American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Spectre of Vietnam 141; “American Exceptionalism in the Post 9/11” 100, 102, 105, 130; on the “calling” of the US 99–100; on construction of the modern West 9; on “errand into the wilderness” 14; on the frontier (American) 100; on the logic of the “errand” 149; on the origin of the “errand” 144; Other, concept of 105, 120, 148; on “the problematic” 20n3; Redeemer Nation 101 sphere of inferiority 77, 107, 122 Spillers, Hortense ix; on abject body rendered or reduced to abject flesh 27, 39, 92, 94; on animalization of the human 41; on being for the captive 81; on capitalism and the body 80,

Index  177 100; “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” 22, 25, 27, 32, 34–35, 80, 111–112; on partus sequitur ventrem 35; pornotroping, concept of 105; on subaltern cleavages 40; on white hegemony and the body 102; zero-degree subjectivity of 27, 32, 40, 43 Stacks, Geoffrey: “A Defiant Cartography” 160 Steffen, Will 142 Stoermer, Eugene 141 Sturgeon, Noel: Ecofeminist Natures 16, 101 subaltern 10–11, 39, 82, 133; bodies 110, 113; cleavages 40; Danticat’s Amabelle as 93; difference 114; experience 16; female 87; peoples 11, 42; servants 89; space 18, 76, 122; Tituba as 119 taxonomy, taxonomizing: colonial 145; ecologies of racism 36; instrumentalization and x; Jefferson’s model of 48; nature and 8, 136; postcolonial writers in renegotiation with 128; Tituba in relationship to 124; wilderness 54 telos ix, 7, 13, 62, 150; see also ecos Tiffin, Helen 114–115 Tituba 15, 19, 118, 122; Abena as mother of 138; Breslaw’s study of 139n5; Condé’s novel about 17, 18, 19, 52, 118–138; Jalalzai on 122, 138n1 Trachtenberg, Alan: The Incorporation of America 25, 50 trauma: American imperialist 81; black bodies’ 103; black women’s 82, 101; bodily 78; collective 102; colonial 77; cross-generational ix; cultural 75; cyclical 81, 110, 115; Danticat’s examination of 77–78, 80–90, 94–95; Feifer on 87; “hollyhock women” and 109, 115; intergenerational 147; Jacobs on 37; landscape and, parallels between 111; loss of land and 154; mass 114; Morrison’s exploration of 99–116; physical 79; rebirth of 110; sexual 80; silence of black women in face of 106; silence regarding rape and 83–85; Tituba 126, 127 transgenerational 14, 18, 19, 24,

99–116, 145, 155–161, 162n2; unresolved 87 trauma of errand 147 traumas of conquest 95 traumas of history 95 trauma studies 162n2 trees: as “first resources” 67 tree worshipers 67 truth imperatives 9 Truth, Sojourner 13, 15–17, 24; abjectivity and subjectivity in life of 46; American eco-exceptionalism and 164; arranged marriage of 28; early captivity of 43; as ecofeminist 33; as evangelist 36; as Isabella Baumfree 26–29, 36; freedom from slavery of 29, 35, 37; McNealy as owner of 27, 45; as migrant intellectual 30–31; in New York City 32; panopticism and 44–45; parenthood and agency of 28; religiosity and the wilderness in work of 26–27, 44; on Tabby (a slave woman) 32; transformation of 38 Truth, Sojourner and Olive Gilbert: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth 26–33, 42 Turits, Richard Lee: “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed” 89–91 Turner, Fredrick Jackson 50 Turner, Joe 70n1 Udel, Lisa J. 161 uncivilized 111 United States see American expansionism; slavery violence: American imperial x; American white masculinist 4–5, 8; anti-black (in Scarlet Letter) 134; on behalf of the errand 100, 148; Cartesian 152; Christian imperatives of 143; colonial 88–90, 93, 149; ecological 101; of the errand 138; Euromerican 155, 156; gendered 145; hegemonic 105; mythologizing 106; ontology of 122; patriarchal 88; power’s reliance on 10; Puritan expansionist 3; sexual 112, 142; stochastic 8; structuring 127; transgenerational trauma linked to 157; Western colonial 147; Western ontologies of 93, 94; whiteness and 109, 111, 115, 120; women and animals, violence against 142;

178 Index women’s bodies, natural space, and 74–97 violence against women: Condé’s examination of 123, 126; Danticat’s exploration of 82–83, 85–86, 89–90, 93–94; Morrison’s exploration of 102–103, 105–106, 109, 111–112, 115; silence surrounding 96n9 Warren, Karen J.: Ecofeminist Philosophy 152 Watkins, Angela: “Restoring Haitian Women’s Voices” 78, 84–86, 96n13 Werden, Douglas W.: “ ‘She Had Never Humbled Herself’ ” 56, 71n3 Werrlein, Debra T.: “Not so Fast, Dick and Jane” 85, 96n14, 101–102, 105, 107, 110 Western: American experience and Western tradition 26, 120; Christianity 130, 151, 154; civilization 143, 150, 153; civilizing mission 89, 92, 93, 152; colonialism 122; colonization 95, 146; consciousness 62; culture 142; errand 78; hegemony 77; history 57; identity 155; idolatry of progress 13; imperialism 147; intellectual order 135; master narrative 127, 138; meaning 136; metaphysical schism 114; metaphysics 68, 91, 93, 122, 145, 149; mind 141; mode of being 134; mythos 128; norms 79; ontological tradition 141; ontologies of conquest 95; patriarchy 71n6, 82; reason 77, 93, 103, 110, 122, 126, 141; science 8, 133; scientific ethos 53; scientific imperial consciousness 7; scientific regime 60; subjectivity ix; thought 131; unipolarity 129; way of knowing 6; ways of relating to nature 51 white baby dolls, imagery and symbolism of 106, 107 White, Deborah Gray: Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South 25–26 white gaze 23, 40, 45, 112, 114, 115, 133 white hegemony 29, 39, 94, 124; body and 102 white house, imagery and symbolism of 107 white hunters 111–112; American prairie and 51

white identity: American democracy and 64 white imperialism 19 White, Lynn, Jr.: “Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” 130, 144, 150–152, 166 white male dominance and power 155–160; see also white patriarchy and patriarchal power white masculinist ethos and authority 4, 76 white mother, Black father 38 white mulberries, imagery of 68–70 white narrative 113 whiteness 6, 10; beauty and 15, 18; Cather on 55–56, 63, 68–70; ethnocentricity of 26; Griffith on 50; master narratives of 119; Morrison on 52–53, 103, 105; Other and 42; shifting perceptions of 56; violence of 109; Werden on 56 white ontology 112 white oppression 111 white patriarchy and patriarchal power x, 9, 11, 33, 76–77; 19th century American 46; assumed naturalness of 110; colonization and 141; Danticat on 76–77, 95, 100; ontological imperatives and dualism of 145; Southern 25; Truth (Sojourner)’s understanding of 45; Western imperialism and 147, 149 white settlers 49, 54 white spongy bones, imagery of 95 white supremacy 121 white Western/American civilization 120, 154 white women: frontier occupation by 52; Hester Prynne as example of 137; as slave owners 32 Wiesenthal, Susan C.: “Female Sexuality in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!” 72n12 wilderness 2, 13, 76; alterity of 33; American 25, 79; body as 80, 124; Cather on 69; colonial 95; domestic 22; haunting, as signifier of 17, 52; New World as 99; Spanos on 76; taxonomy of former 54; Truth’s metaphorizing of 26, 27, 28; Turner’s identification of native peoples with 50; Western civilizing mission and 91; see also errand into the wilderness Willard, Samuel (Rev.)126 Williams, Jessica Horvath 106

Index  179 Williams, Raymond: Marxism and Literature 17 Williams, Roger 3 Wilson, Harriet E. 13, 15, 17, 24; Bellmont family (fictional) by 37–40; Frado (fictional character by) 37–43; Our Nig: Or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black 37–42 Winthrop, John 1–2, 165 witchcraft 18, 118–138; blackness of 124–127; Condé’s sympathy for 128; Ortega on 127 witchcraft crisis: Puritan New England and 126

Wolfe, Cary: “Human, All Too Human: Animal Studies and the Humanities” 41 womanhood 23, 157; Cather’s two kinds of 72n10; Truth’s 27 women: colonization of 157; ontological status of 72n11 women writers of color x, 11, 12, 13–14, 164; Comer on 57; see also Condé; Danticat; Hogan; Jacobs; Morrison; Truth; Wilson Worster, Donald 71n5; Nature’s Economy 165 zero-degree subjectivity 27, 32, 40, 43