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The Black Atlantic as Dystopia:

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.49.2.283

1528-4212

Judie Newman,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

In an interview Paul Gilroy acknowledged the utopian nature of his thinking, not (as might be thought) as the utopianism of a tradition, Marxist or otherwise, but in relation to utopian thinkers in the philosophical sense: "I have been very influenced by Ernst Bloch, his conceptions of utopia, and particularly his understanding of the relationship between music and utopia and also his sense of the place of the fragments—the shards of utopian thinking in everyday life."1 Bloch expanded the concept of utopia from the narrower image of a description of an alternative society designed to evoke or facilitate a better way of life to a broader understanding that included such phenomena as daydreams, religious visions, myths of a golden age, circuses, fairy tales, glossy magazines, and travel literature. For Bloch, the capacity for hope is a prime source of human creativity, dynamism, and progress and is part of our capacity for imagination.2 Similarly for Gilroy, utopias are thought experiments that restore to people the ability to imagine a better or a different world to the one that they inhabit. He poses the question, "How do we cultivate the ability to do what Bloch called dreaming forward and what value does it have to be compelled to imagine a different world?"3 Music is a key element of the analysis, as Gilroy, following Bloch, emphasizes utopias as involving the politics of transfiguration, the emergence of qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association, both within the racial community and between that group and white oppressors. The issue of how utopias are conceived is complex, not least because they strive continually to move beyond the grasp of the merely linguistic, textual, and discursive.4 Such utopias may embody an imaginary antimodern past and a postmodern future.Gilroy argues that the vernacular arts of the descendants of slaves suggest a role for art that is strikingly similar to that described by Adorno in relation to European artistic expression after the Holocaust: "Art's utopia, the counterfactual yet-to-come, is draped in black. It goes on being a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real; it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe which is world history."5 A major problem in critical response to the black Atlantic concept is the lack of awareness of its utopian nature, the tendency to regard it as a hard-edged theoretical definition instead of as a catalyst to thought and action. The term has been rapidly canonized and institutionalized in the U.S. academy and concretized as a formal space.6 As Brent Hayes Edwards notes, "It is sometimes overlooked that Gilroy himself is careful to propose black Atlantic as a provisional or heuristic term of analysis, more in order to open up a certain theoretical space that would radically dislodge any inquiry grounded in singular frames—whether "race," "ethnicity," or "nation"—than in order to formalize that space."7Although the term was never meant to be comprehensive, the areas missing from the analysis remain striking. As the editors of a recent volume of essays note, Gilroy's case studies focus on middle class male intellectuals in America (Alexander Crummell, Martin Delany, W. E. B. Du Bois), make little of class and gender, largely ignore Latin America, and appear somewhat oblivious to potential collusion between black nationalism and patriarchy. Crossing the sea tends to be the province of men, obscuring the importance of women, land, and agency. In addition, the book's Americocentrism appears paradoxical given the agenda of debunking the notion of African American provincialism by taking the African American experience as paradigmatic of the black diaspora.8 More generally, the rapid adoption of the term as a shorthand for the cultural richness of the black diaspora tends to obscure the fact that these riches came at the cost of pain and suffering; slavery may be too high a price for the global dissemination of rap music.How better to challenge Gilroy's thinking, therefore, than with a dystopian novel? In Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo constructs a deeply felt and trenchant critique of the utopian qualities of Gilroy's model, in a revision that is also an act of homage and a creative extension to his work. In her African, British, and Afro-Brazilian family history Evaristo herself encapsulates the diasporic reach of the black Atlantic. Born in 1959 in South London, she is the daughter of a white mother and a black Nigerian father, born in Cameroun in 1927, whose own father "returned" from Brazil to Lagos in 1888, when slavery was abolished. The epigraph to the novel evokes the long history of Portuguese chattel slavery: "Remembering the 10 to 12 million Africans taken to Europe and the Americas as slaves … and their descendants, 1444–1888."9 In 1444 Lançarote de Freitas landed 235 enslaved Africans in Lagos, Portugal, the first large group of slaves to be brought to Europe. In her semiautobiographical verse novel, Lara, Evaristo travels back 150 years and seven generations and across three continents to tell the tale of Yorubas who were enslaved in Brazil, became "emancipados" in colonial Nigeria, and finally emigrated to Britain.10 The novel includes multiple narratives describing other immigrant forebears, impoverished Irish Catholics and Germans (her mother's family), including one white ancestor who makes his way in London by boiling West Indian sugar night and day. It includes a rich Yoruba-Brazilian glossary and a powerful evocation of the Brazilian Quarter in central Lagos. As the epigraph indicates, this is a family that has known transnational roots and routes, that has crossed several seas and is deeply imbricated in the flows and currents of the triangular trade. Lara is the short form of the Yoruba proverb "Omilara," meaning (as the novel's epigraph states) "The family is like water." Evaristo's verse novel The Emperor's Babe, set in multicultural Roman Londinium in 211 AD, also uses a very broad canvas to emphasize the antiquity of the black diaspora that is still largely absent from the history books in 2001, as well as to stress the black presence in Britain. As its epigraph reads, quoting Oscar Wilde, "The only duty we have to history is to rewrite it."11 The novel takes its cue from Peter Fryer's account of the presence of blacks in Britain long before the English came, and significantly it also introduces the topic of white slavery.12 The heroine, Zuleika, a Sudanese Roman citizen who has an affair with the Libyan-born African emperor Septimus Severus, is not a slave but an affluent cosmopolitan and a member of the ruling class. As Evaristo comments, "Zuleika's husband Felix buys her two Scottish women as slaves and I was interested in the way Zuleika reacts to them. What struck me is how rarely we read about slavery as something that occurred outside of the black/white axis."13The Emperor's Babe clearly anticipates Evaristo's 2008 novel. Blonde Roots is a classic reversal narrative, like Lord of the Flies (children as savage adults) or Planet of the Apes (animals rule men), essentially a "what if?" novel, in this case, "what if blacks had enslaved whites?" In interview Evaristo said that her intention was to make readers focus on what, if the tables had been turned historically and Africans had enslaved Europeans, that would mean for the way we view history.14 In her account, The slave trade is a subject that elicits strong responses including anger, defensiveness, resentment, self-righteousness, guilt, sadness. So I decided to ask the question What if? What if the history as we know it is turned on its head and Africans enslaved Europeans for four centuries? What if Africans assume the moral and intellectual high ground and notions of savagery and civilisation are inverted?15 This does not mean that the history of slavery is casually erased, however. Nor are its horrors scanted. As Evaristo points out, "It's a 'what if?' book but it's also a 'This is what was' book."16 The novel incorporates almost all the familiar elements of the slave narrative genre: capture, failed escape, Middle Passage (with slave insurrection, multiple deaths, rape, torture, and mutilations), branding (18), slave auctions (33), family separation (23), renaming, whippings, the acquisition of literacy (20), and a final escape to freedom to a long-established community of maroons. Along the way the heroine, Doris Scagglethorpe, kidnapped from the "Cabbage Coast" of northern England (a replacement for the Gold Coast of Africa) is enslaved in "Londolo," a mixture of London and Mombasa, which has recognizable landmarks such as "Paddingto" and "Mayfah" but also a tropical climate and crocodiles in the "Temz." Doris works as a house slave and then a field slave, as a white mammy to her master's son Nonso, in a sugar mill on a Caribbean plantation, and as a Topsy-like companion to Little Miracle, a thinly disguised caricature of Harriet Beecher Stowe's saintly Eva (though when Little Miracle threatens to send a disobedient Doris to the port brothel, Doris shoves her into the river, where her tight dress and heavy neck-rings ensure instant drowning). Spirituals are sung, notably "Gahd save we grashus chief" (176) and "Should ole akwaintaunce be forgot" (215), and there are minstrels in "whyteface," whose black faces are smeared with chalk and who attempt the hop, skip, and jump of Morris dancing, in clogs and bells.While the reversals certainly offer a counterfactual image of historical restitution, it is a risky strategy. On the plus side, as Stephanie Merritt comments in the Observer, the creation of a photographic negative in which black becomes white and vice versa, does maintain the shock of the atrocities of slavery.17 But as Joan Smith observes in the Times, it also risks criminalizing blacks by giving them some of the worst characteristics of eighteenth-century Europeans.18 Nor does the reader ever discover why blacks became dominant rather than whites, though they are described as having once sent their own people to the New World as slaves and bond servants (28), much as the British used the penal sentence of transportation to stock the Carolinas with a labor force. Evaristo herself observed that it was important to remember that North Africans did enslave a million Europeans from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, though that paled in comparison with the slave trade's twelve million, its creation of intergenerational slavery, and subsequent wholesale depletion of the resources of African countries.19 Evaristo's imaginative reversals none the less maintain the reader's awareness of the main features of slavery while compelling a continual translation between racialized spaces and cultures, which effectively transforms black into white and vice versa, propagating Gilroy's antiessentialist agenda. The way in which renaming by masters destroys personal identity is vividly brought to life in the novel. It is often difficult for the reader to remember that Doris, renamed Omorenomwara, is white, that Ye Memé is a Dane, that Yomisi began life on a Bavarian wheat farm as Gertraude Shultz, or that Sitembile was taken hostage from a palace in Monaco in a war with the French.The most startlingly original element in the novel, however, is the reorganization of time and space. Evaristo makes the Middle Passage a metaphor for both temporal and geographical dislocation by setting events in an unspecified time (both futuristic and historical) and by rearranging the geography of the globe so that "Aphrika" and the "United Kingdom of Great Ambossa," though on the Equator, lie to the north of "Europa," from where "whyte" slaves are kidnapped by "blaks," to be exported across the Atlantic to work on the plantations of the "West Japanese Islands." By moving everything south, Evaristo effectively transfers the black Atlantic from the northern to the southern hemisphere, correcting Gilroy's Anglophone bias and relegating "Amarika" to the sidelines. Just as the concept of the black Atlantic "dislocates the whole geographic and thematic focus of British cultural studies by shifting it to a space between national borders," so Evaristo undercuts the centrality of African American culture in the African diaspora, exposes the arbitrary nature of cultural values, and questions the notion of a counterculture of modernity.20 As the title of the novel indicates, the satire cuts in several directions. The fair-haired narrator longs for her roots, for cloudy skies and cabbages, much as one of Alex Haley's characters might yearn for yams. At the same time the reference to blonde roots showing through hair dyed black satirizes the radical chic of free whites aping black appearance and fashions. In a sense Evaristo takes Gilroy at his word and imagines a different world in which blacks are not enslaved, but the results are decidedly dystopian for both blacks and whites. The rich diasporan intermingling of cultures celebrated by Gilroy is little compensation for Doris, who suffers the full horrors of slavery. And in the example of Nonso, a drunken, dissolute planter, Evaristo charts the evil effects of slavery on the slaveholders.Throughout the novel notions of modernity are questioned. In The Black Atlantic Gilroy alerts his readers to a non-Western experience of modernization induced by the suffering of the Middle Passage, an experience that amounts to a cataclysmic instance of dislocation and a sudden shift in the horizon of expectations. This African American focus has been rightly critiqued on the grounds that it neglects other African experiences of modernization. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, for example, have challenged unified concepts of modernization from a postcolonial perspective.21 Benita Parry, in particular, has invoked Marx's concept of the historical time of capitalism as involving a complex and differential temporality, so that modernity is not necessarily Western but rather coextensive with capitalism's worldwide consolidation.22 As far as Gilroy's understanding of slavery as the entry into modernity is concerned, Evaristo's satirical world deliberately questions any such easy periodization. Doris's escape on the Underground Railroad (the now-defunct London tube) apparently takes place in some unspecified future, yet the scene is also replete with crinolines and bonnets, knee breeches, eighteenth-century coffeehouses, witch burnings, and a quasi-Caribbean plantocracy. Contemporary colloquialisms ("glamazon" [189]) coexist with consciously archaic terms ("baked chewetts" [53], "oftentimes" [114]),and tanning studios, hip hop, and skateboarders share textual space with feudal landlords.The anachronism is even more obvious in the short story that was the germ of the novel, "Otakemehomelord.com," published in the Guardian in 2005, which transplanted slavery to the digital age.23 In the short story, Doris has a secret email account, Please!@ohtakemehomelord.com, on a free server set up by the not-for-profit Abolitionist's Co-op and protected by AntiMasterGuard (AMG). She worries that proslavery viruses operating in cyberspace may hunt out abolitionists, corrupt their hardware, and hack into their conversations, but she also uses the internet to get revenge, siphoning off funds from her master's account at the Tate Bank (her master has made a fortune from sugar) before escaping on the tube that has been abandoned in favor of futuristic air trains on radar-controlled pathways.In the novel times are similarly scrambled, though with less of a "sci-fi" emphasis. Coffeehouses such as Coasta Coffee, Hut Tropicana, Café Shaka, and Starbright (33) mimic contemporary London, though they also stage slave auctions, just like eighteenth-century coffeehouses in London and Liverpool did.24 Shuga, which bears on its blackboard the chalked advertisement "Fresh Slaves," is noted for its rumpaccino and for the daily news relayed through talking drums. The smells of tobacco, coffee, sugar, and rum evoke the trades that were fed by slavery (34). The 1791 revolution in Haiti is mentioned (221) as a recent event, but slaves bear names that evoke black heroes and heroines from the fifteenth to the twentieth century: Shaka Zulu and his mentor, Dingiswayo, Cleopatra, Cetewayo, Sonni Ali, Tutankhamun, and Yaa Asantewa (178), the latter a Ghanaian ruler until 1921. On one level, the technique challenges the legitimacy of all official histories, unsurprisingly given that the novel was completed in 2007, the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, in the midst of bitter debates concerning reparations and the extent to which the profits of slavery still prop up Western economies. Anachronism prevents the easy separation of past and present. In The Emperor's Babe, the Armani and Versace Roman togas are a case in point.Satirically, the target is also, more generally, the British love affair with costume drama and the "heritage" industries, exemplified in "bonnet and bustle" movies and television, utopian shards in contemporary culture that evoke a past which never was, with its horrors airbrushed out. Evaristo makes it clear that Doris was never really free but a serf to Lord Percy, owner of the Montague estate, who is in cahoots with the slave traders. In other words, Britain was never a land of freedom, and there is nothing idyllic about its history, nor (if we translate the mirror imagery) African history, which includes aristocratic Africans who also sold slaves. The family history of the aristocratic Montagues crosses Jane Eyre with The Turn of the Screw and several Dickensian novels: a wife who looked "suspiciously foreign" (53), went mad, and was locked up in an attic, illegitimate children, a child who died in mysterious circumstances on a lake, and an adulterous governess. As Doris comments, the Montagues "gave our lives drama by association, glamour by proximity, status through acquaintance" (53). They offer a utopian image, not unlike Bloch's glossy magazines or fairy stories. In its scrambled, medieval-Regency-Victorian quality, therefore, the novel calls attention to a delusive, mystified utopian history, rather like images of mythical African pasts, a history that prevents imaginative awareness of liberatory possibilities. As a result, it also powerfully underlines the importance of economic class. For the poor, history may be much the same whether medieval or Victorian. The upper classes are robbers and criminals whatever the date. Indeed, given her Brazilian background, there may be a certain glee to Evaristo's description of the capture and enslavement of the king and queen of Portugal and their entire family (63). This is restitutive history with a vengeance. Just as Parry regards modernity as coextensive with capitalism's worldwide consolidation, so Evaristo sees the profit motive as the one constant in history. Doris notes that many of the slave traders in the "Business" (27) are Arabs, who came to "Slavery HQ" with impressive cvs detailing their exemplary horsemanship and skill at raiding villages for slaves, only to find their skills redundant in Ambossa, "where the task of slavery was somewhat more managerial" (27). She is perfectly certain that the Ambossans will never give up "their cash cow" (5). The spoof advertisements in the novel target institutions that have been associated with profiting from slavery (by insuring slave ships, for example) and that still flourish: Lloyds of Londolo, the General Council of Holy Men (aka the Synod of the Church of England), and Barings Bank (25). Throughout the novel, radically different moments of history are conjoined so that modernity is comprehensively scrambled in a Benita Parry model of differential temporality, cohering only as a result of the glue of capitalism. Gilroy will never read quite the same again. As a result, Evaristo is able to construct the black Atlantic less as a social imaginary than as a set of material conditions.None the less cultural matters are not neglected. Following on from the treatment of time and space, the novel engages forcefully with three more of Gilroy's major preoccupations. The novel is divided into three books: the first details Doris's capture, enslavement, and her first escape attempt, the second constitutes an interruption in this escape attempt by the voice of a "blak" intellectual writing a pamphlet on the nature of the slave trade, in a parody of scientific racism, and the third recounts Doris's recapture and export to the sugar plantations on the other side of the Atlantic. The first focuses particularly on cultural values, the second on the collusion of Western rationalism with terror, and the third on the world that the slaves made, especially strong women slaves. In book 1, set in Londolo, "blak" is no longer a counterculture but dominant. The Ambossans consider the whytes' belief in privacy and monogamy ample evidence of their inferiority, and their cultural norms are the ones that hold sway. Evaristo turns a satiric eye on the cultural transmission of "blak" styles, the fashionable adaptations by "free whytes" of "blak" cultural icons, including music, "Aphro" hairstyles and dyes, skin darkeners, and nose flattening. An "Aphrikan" aesthetic dominates standards of beauty. For all its comic verve, the novel makes a serious comment on the construction and irreversible effects of racism, exemplified in Doris's self-hatred as a white. A slender strawberry blonde, she has "image issues" (31), is tormented by the nickname "Barbee," and keeps trying to forget that she is a size four figure with long blonde hair, a concave stomach, and slim nostrils—all marks of ugliness by the standards of the "glamorously fat" (3) Ambossan women. In parody of the mantra "black is beautiful" Doris stands before her mirror reciting, "I may be fair and flaxen. I may have slim nostrils and slender lips. I may have oil-rich hair and a non-rotund bottom. I may blush easily, go rubicund in the sun and have covert yet mentally alert blue eyes. Yes, I may be whyte. But I am whyte and I am beautiful." (32)As a house servant she is told that she has to look "respectable" when she opens the door to guests and therefore must appear topless, with her hair in plaited hoops. The poster advertising a reward for her capture describes her as a "scrawny blonde slave woman" (45). Fortunately, all scrawny blondes look alike to the Ambossans, which facilitates her escape. In Londolo, the counterculture flourishes—but it is "whyte." Most of the free whites live in the crowded ghettoes of the "Vanilla Suburbs," whereas the blacks live in the spacious townhouses and compounds of the central "Chocolate Cities" (29). Evaristo thus engages in witty dialogue with contemporary ways of "performing blackness" in urban-popular cultures and media and with the discourse of whiteness as a trope of "minority culture." In the Burbs it is possible to buy exotic clothing (sporrans, knickerbockers, boleros, and bustles) and "lovely plain food" (30) without peppers or spices (Brussels sprouts, tapioca pudding, and of course cabbage). The Burbs also attract the cultural tourism of "blaks" from "Aphrika," effectively on township tours, who gawk in anthropological fascination at the free whites from the safety of carriages escorted by Masai or Zulu warriors. Class remains an important factor, complicating a racial reading of slavery. There are "poor blaks" living in shantytowns, many of them hostile to the slaves, at whom they shout, "Wigger, go home! You're taking our jobs!" (28). The reader has to translate black into white and vice versa to yield the historical referents (in this case South African township tours in the twentieth century and American antebellum poor whites). In the Burbs there are also underground venues for "whyte" music, featuring madrigal boy bands and recorder recitals—not quite what Gilroy imagined as the musical diaspora. For Gilroy diasporic music is the supreme signifier of black countercultural modernity, and (as Laura Chrisman has argued), he has a tendency to idealize music as categorically emancipatory for black expression.25 But music can also be an obstacle to black self-realization rather than a utopian anticipation of it. It has a highly visible commercial value. Later in the novel Ye Memé laments the way in which each of the boys of the community is dressed ("cotton pants worn so that the waist hung … beneath his bum" [204]) and their fashion of calling themselves names like Bad Bwoy, Totallee Kross, or Machete Monsta. In Ye Memé's view, their adopting the poor role models of "dose wotless gang boys" shows that they are bent on self-destruction (249). Rap carries no utopian charge here. When Dingiswayo describes himself, rapper style, as irresistible to "de hos and bitches" (207) his adoptive mother whacks him on the head with a hefty iron pan, reducing him to childish tears.One problem with the satiric method is that it tends to emphasize physicality rather than inner lives or emotions and therefore cuts in many different directions. While there are vigorous sideswipes at the slaveholders, Ezinwene, the liberal-left abolitionist who facilitates Doris's escape and embodies the condescension of the middle class do-gooder, is also physically caricatured in her expensive tastes. For Ezinwene, Doris is just one more fashion accessory, like her Ylang Ylang perfume, the cocoa butter with which she adorns her cinnamon skin, or her gold-capped teeth, fashionably sharpened to a point. The corrective balance comes in the second book, where Evaristo gives the reader full access to the thought and emotions of a "blak" racist intellectual. The text is that of "The Flame," reflections on the nature of the slave trade, by Doris's master, Chief Kaga Konata Katamba (whose initials KKK are branded into her skin), also known as Bwana. The pamphlet, a supposed defense of slavery against abolitionists, advances a creed of pseudoscientific racism and shares its name with a newspaper of the British far-right party, the National Front, indicating the long reach of racist ideology. Written "in defence of my rights" (110), it claims the rational high ground from the first page, beginning "I am a reasonable man and a man with reasons" (110) and describing its author as having gained access to objective truths through "Serious Contemplation, Erudite Debate, as well as Rigorous Scholarly research and the analysis of Vital Statistics" (112). In an interview, Evaristo argues that antiblack racism, portraying Africans as less than human or as savages developed as a justification for and in tandem with the growth of the transatlantic slave trade.26 Evaristo has acknowledged the influence of Peter Fryer's arguments that racism emerged in the eighteenth century as a defensive ideology for the planter class as a way to justify themselves not merely to the rest of society but in their own eyes.27Edward Long's History of Jamaica (1774), a text with overt pretensions to scientific rigor and authority, is probably the first sustained example justifying slavery on the grounds that Africans were inherently inferior. In Fryer's view, racism is not a causal factor in slavery but develops in its defense. Whereas race prejudice tends to be scrappy, oral, and confused, racism is transmitted by the written word and attempts to look "rational." Its functions are political and economic rather than psychological and cultural, as is the case with race prejudice. The pamphlet promotes the "civilizing mission" justification of slavery (notoriously pilloried in Conrad's Heart of Darkness) in which whites supposedly rescue blacks from their own barbarity. Conrad also creates an image of Britons as slaves. The narrator, Marlow, imagines what the Romans must have thought when they arrived in Britain to be confronted with "cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death" and envisages the depopulating effect on the area between Deal and Gravesend of Romans enslaving the locals.28 In Europa, on his first slaving voyage, the chief reacts similarly to the climate of the "grey Continent" (123), with its stormy and influenza-ridden coasts, parodies of the Western images of disease-ridden African jungles. He is horrified by the practice of criminals being hung, drawn, and quartered (132), witch burnings (135), beheadings (135) and the display of heads on poles (132), a direct reference to Conrad.29 European history has little to boast of here. In the fields of the "dark heart of Europa" (13) Bwana notes sinister pagan idols with hair made of straw (scarecrows). The irrational "Europanes" are characterized as deeply superstitious, whereas Bwana's task is a "Mission of Liberation—the Saving of Souls" (121). Paradoxically he studs his defense of reason and science with thanksgivings to the gods (particularly Yemonja) who have providentially delivered him from shipwreck and death. The developed nation (here "blak") denies the coevalness of the other (here "Europa), stigmatizing it as backward. Bwana is forthright: "Dear Reader, the natives of those lands are just now emerging from the abominable depths of savagery which we civilised nations left behind in prehistoric times" (118).A short essay on cranial anthropometry follows, "proving" that the hierarchy of races runs from Negroid to Mongoloid to Caucasoinid, the lowest, in which the skull is too narrow, the brain small, and the jaw weak and orthognathous. The Caucasoinid is effectively a neoprimate, unable to feel pain as the chief does. Even worse he describes the natives as "hirsute beyond decency," their visible flesh covered "in hideous hair like that of a monkey or gorilla" (126). It was common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for skull shapes to be analyzed as an index of human development.30 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the father of craniology, coined