1In a recent review of Mike and Trevor Phillips’s social history of the post-Windrush black presence in Britain, the poet and cultural commentator Archie Markham pointed out a recurrent problem that appears when dealing with the representation of the politics of race:

In the end [Markham writes] Windrush confirms the view that there were essentially two types of person involved, victims and aggressors. If you were to ask a contemporary person which she’d rather be - victim or aggressor - you wouldn’t, I imagine, get many takers for either, as most people’s sense of self transcends such simplifications. Part of the point here, perhaps, is that battling racism diverts your attention, saps your strength and, in the end, robs you of a full expression of your humanity.1

2In this paper I wish to sketch the beginnings of an analysis of how literature can begin to engage with this unfortunate dynamic that may lead to the possible erasure of human complexity in any representation that attempts to engage with an anti-racist politics.

3I focus my attention on the Uncle Tom figure as he appears within a literary tradition of representing race. As the ultimate victim, submitting to the degradation of racial oppression, Tom provides a focus for writing about the types of position that may be adopted in terms of resisting enslavement and exploitation. However, along with Tom, I shall also be examining the character that epitomises the opposite representational pole - that of the aggressor, who reacts to discrimination with violence. To exemplify this position I shall utilize Richard Wright’s infamous creation, Bigger Thomas.

4I intend briefly to outline some of the factors that may have led Wright to construct Bigger and address some of the problems that may come about through the employment of such a representation. I move on to a quick exploration of some of the poetry of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, in whose work, I argue, we can see the figures of the victim and aggressor played against each other. The bulk of my analysis, however, will be concerned with Fred D’Aguiar’s 1994 novel The Longest Memory. I wish to argue that D’Aguiar is able to begin a deconstruction of the fixity seen in the representations of anti-racist positions. Through an understanding of the mechanics of a society reliant on slavery, D’Aguiar can outline responses to a discourse around race that do not rely on the reproduction of stereotypes that work to stifle the reality of human variety.

5Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was probably the most important novel written in the abolitionist cause. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have described it as the book that made the American Civil War and it sold over two million copies in the first ten years of its release. It was, at the time, acclaimed as a masterpiece by such luminaries as Turgenev, Victor Hugo and George Elliot yet, today, is largely regarded as, at best, naïvely sentimentalist, or, at worst, dangerously racist.

6While Mrs Stowe is certainly guilty of producing some, to say the least, questionable images, it has been pointed out that much of the truly objectionable imagery surrounding Uncle Tom’s Cabin was articulated in the aftermath of the novel as it was reproduced and re-imagined within the cultural marketplace. Marcus Wood has provided a fascinating account of how the visual representations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (woodcuts, cartoons, caricatures) were inflected by the racial discourses of the time and eventually could act as a filter that removed the radical anti-slavery messages of the original text and instead allowed for the reproduction of negative images of black people that became, as Woods puts it, a “cultural index of how England and America desired to remember slavery and black people.”2 The characters and situations of Stowe’s novel are incorporated into extant racist discourses and indeed can act as metonyms that stand for the whole negative worldview that springs from the inequality between the races that was initiated and perpetuated by the slave system.

7The most enduring of these images is, of course, that of Uncle Tom himself. He became the byword for the acquiescent slave and the epitome of black subservience. Certainly in black America in the early 20th century, we can see the reaction to the disseminated image of the good slave as the Uncle Tom sobriquet was attached to those black people who were seen as collaborating in their own oppression and thereby setting back the cause of black liberation. As the journalist Gary Younge puts it: “If Stowe had not invented Uncle Tom, African-Americans would have had to.”3 In opposing the doctrines of white supremacy in the United States, and in combating the tyranny of Jim Crow legislation, the figure of the complicit Uncle Tom also had to be attacked. It provided a model of the black person as passively accepting the injustice of their position and trusting in the benevolence of good white folks to ensure that everything would work out fine in the end. Within a political culture of anti-racism, such beliefs must be derided in the attempt to spur people to action.

8It would seem to be this conviction that shapes much of the content of Richard Wright’s collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children. Written in Chicago in the mid-1930s, Wright’s book was a powerful piece of protest literature, outlining the state of black America. The tone of the book is concisely expressed in its epigraph:

The post Civil war household word among Negroes - “He’s an Uncle Tom” - which denoted reluctant toleration for the cringing type who knew his place before white folk, has been supplanted by a new word from another generation which says: “Uncle Tom is dead”4

9The five stories that make up Uncle Tom’s Children reflect the impossibility of adopting Uncle Tom’s subservient stance in early 20th century America. This can be seen clearly in ’Fire and Cloud’ in which the Reverend Dan Taylor receives a whipping for supposedly spreading incendiary ideas. Uncle Tom famously acquiesced to the beating that killed him, trusting in a Christian redemption after death. Dan, on the other hand, feels that his Christianity requires a position of dignity and, rather than accepting the punishment, curses the white men who deliver it. The angry (and often doomed) black men who inhabit these stories are antitheses of Uncle Tom, in the final instance having no choice but to rebel against the iniquities of white oppression.

10Wright’s dissatisfaction with the way his book was received is well documented. He wrote of his dismay on realising he had “written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.”5 His desire to create a character that could not be so easily assimilated into the established discourses of race in America and evoke pity or sympathy in the reader led to his novel, Native Son, and its hero, Bigger Thomas. Bigger, one of the most powerful characters in 20th-century literature, is perhaps the most clearly defined of Uncle Tom’s children. His “goddamnit” to the white world and the brutality of his manners are indicative of a racialised sub-society that interpellates its subjects into positions that can only be negotiated through acts of physical or spiritual violence. If Uncle Tom is dead for Wright, then his successor is this self-destructive rebel.

11Wright’s insubordinate black men are worlds apart from Stowe’s slaves, not just in terms of their attitudes but also in the way they are portrayed. The stock figures of Stowe’s novel, who act in simple and predictable ways, are superseded by Wright’s complex characters whose detailed interior monologues bear witness to the existential traumas brought on by their situations. In Wright’s books black people are reclaimed as subjects in a way that defies Stowe’s often one-dimensional representations.

12Yet both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son were attacked for over-simplifying the situation of being black in racist America by another master of African-American letters, James Baldwin. For Baldwin, Wright’s novel is as guilty as Stowe’s of presenting an image of black people that reduces their humanity to a constricting stereotype. While he finds Wright’s representations less offensive than Stowe’s, Baldwin still argues that the depiction of the concentrated anger of a Bigger Thomas irons out necessary intricacies and ambiguities of the human condition.6 Rather than helping to foster productive race relations, the intensity of Bigger’s antagonism can only work to reinforce the oppositions that racialised hegemonies rely upon. It becomes a stultified position, a site from which it is impossible to initiate change. Neither Uncle Tom nor his rebellious heir are able to provide a model for the resolution of the question of how to negotiate racial injustice.

13If we move forward to 1967 and shift geographically to the Caribbean, we can find another writer engaged in an exploration of this age-old philosophical question of “How should I live?”:

So what to do, man?
Ban the Bomb? Bomb
the place down?

Boycott the girls?
Put a ban on all
marriages? Call
You’self X

wear a beard
and a turban
washing your tur-
bulent sex

about six
times a day:
going Muslim?
Black as God

brown is good
white as sin?
An’ doan forget Jimmy Baldwin
an’ Martin Luther King...

14The poet is Edward Brathwaite (before he took the name Kamau), the poem is ’The Emigrants’ from his Rights of Passage collection.7 The collection narrates a series of journeys: physical, spiritual and, as in the piece just quoted, ideological. Brathwaite explores a variety of ways in which the black subject might construct a position from which make sense of themselves in the world and address the problems that beset them. One of these interrogated positions is, unsurprisingly, that of the Uncle Tom, whose character seems especially present in three poems at beginning of the collection: ’Tom’, ’All God’s Chillun’ and ’Didn’t He Ramble’. The Uncle Tom presented here seems to conform to the archetype, communicating his subservience in a range of voices: “Massa, yes / Massa, yes / Boss, yes / Baas.” He seems content to live without the need to rail against his condition and rather accepts his lot submissively, hat in hand. Yet, the voice of this Tom is interrupted and challenged by those of the rebellious children who offer the violence of the oppressed in contrast to his compliance:

Cut the cake-
walkin’, man; bus’
the crinoline off the white woman,

man; be the black butting ram
that she makes you
an’ let’s get to hell out’a Pharaoh’s land!

15The voice of our Uncle Tom frames these interjections, questioning their validity and despairing at their violence. The nihilism of the rebel is challenged for offering only destruction, rather than the production of any kind of hope. But the voices do not stop, for all Tom’s denunciations. They rise again and again, deploring his passivity and protesting against their situation. Thus do Tom’s resigned stance and a philosophy of insurrection exist side by side in the poems. Through presenting these two opposed subject positions simultaneously, Brathwaite can begin to challenge the logic informing each pole of the dichotomy. The constant presence of the opposing voice disallows the establishment of either as dominant. Like the sway of a pendulum, the impression of a fixed position is immediately countered by a movement back to the opposite extreme. The inactivity of Uncle Tom is rejected but so too is the violence perpetrated by his successors.

16The next appearance of an Uncle Tom that I should like to look at is in Fred D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory.8 D’Aguiar has described the novel as an attempt to play out the dichotomy between the options of passive acceptance and active rebellion that we have seen in Stowe, Wright and Brathwaite. He recognises the centrality of this debate to an effective articulation of an anti-racist politics and identifies its presence at the root of some of the most important historical disputes over the nature of black protest such as those between Booker T Washington and W E B Du Bois and between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.9 I wish to suggest that, like Brathwaite, D’Aguiar refuses to accept the fixity of the Uncle Tom role and subjects it to interrogation while also moving on to examine how it may function as a position within a larger social structure brought about by slavery.

17The Longest Memory centres on Whitechapel, the elderly head slave on a Virginian plantation at the beginning of the 19th century. The novel opens with Whitechapel’s own narration in which he delineates his Uncle Tom role: “The master of my own fate. No longer in need of control or supervision. One so accustomed to his existence that he impinges on his own freedom and can be left to his own devices. A master of his own slavery”. (27)

18Even in terms of his own self-regard, Whitechapel seems the worst kind of Uncle Tom, evidenced in the novel when he reveals the whereabouts of his runaway son, Chapel, to the trackers who are pursuing him. The plantation overseer then whips Chapel to death. Whitechapel’s complicity with the plantation’s superiors would seem to make him responsible for this death and for the continuing oppression of all the slaves.

19We are given some idea of the rationale behind Whitechapel’s adoption of this persona and the reasons for his willingness to cooperate in his own bondage. Like Brathwaite’s Tom he is aware that he has been taken from Africa and that the fact of this forced relocation has thrown up an unsurpassable barrier, denying him the opportunity of re-connecting to that history, so he refuses to try. “Africa is not for you” he instructs his great granddaughter, “Make your dreams here” (125). He prides himself on being grounded in his situation and on doing what he can to make his life as good as possible in the circumstances.

20The circumstances are of course those of slavery. Whitechapel’s great limitation is that he cannot imagine himself outside of that institution. He recalls telling Chapel that “his place in life was the same place occupied by me and available to his children” and that “the evidence of 300 years” ratified his view (21). Whitechapel is convinced that movement away from this “same place” is impossible. Slavery is portrayed as a place outside of spatial and temporal orderings. Having been severed from his history and placed on foreign soil, the slave, in Whitechapel’s view, has been taken out of time. “The future is just more of the past waiting to happen,” (1) we are told in the first line of the novel and this can begin to explain Whitechapel’s unwillingness to look to the past or to the future. “Memory is pain trying to resurrect itself,” (138) he tells us and he tries to close down both the recollection of the past and any dreams of the future. Instead, it is only his captive present that he may focus upon and he does this though the exercise of the Uncle Tom qualities of “subservience, obedience, compliance” (13).

21However, D’Aguiar’s novel works by introducing many different voices as each character divulges more of the story to us. The sections that follow Whitechapel’s self-denunciation complicate the initial impressions that we may have received. The account from Sanders Senior, the former overseer of the plantation, reveal Whitechapel was able to disconcert his masters even in the acts of complying with their wishes. Although Whitechapel always seemed obedient, he could be so in a way that played on the ambiguities of the bond between master and slave and to invert the nature of the relationship through what Homi Bhabha has called “sly civility”.10 The smile that he gives to Sanders never seems to falter yet Sanders is aware that it is unlikely to be genuine. Instead, Whitechapel’s stoicism seems to mock the overseer and conceal Whitechapel’s real reaction to the commands given to him. Sanders Junior, the overseer who beats Chapel to death, also seems to have a complicated relationship with the aged head slave. Following Whitechapel’s death, Sanders addresses the slave’s body, and tries to justify his action of administering the fatal punishment to Chapel. This desire for vindication for doing his job, and to be absolved from blame by a slave, again leads to a questioning of the mechanics of power on this plantation. Whitechapel’s decision to sacrifice his selfhood to the slave system has in fact led to his positioning not only as the surrendered slave object but also as a valued subject whose presence helps dictate the operations of the system. The account given by Cook, Whitechapel’s wife and Chapel’s mother, once more shows us how, through his self-effacing obedience, Whitechapel is, in fact, able to achieve a position of dignity and self-assertion that few slaves can enjoy.

22D’Aguiar, thus, does not create an Uncle Tom figure entirely without autonomy but rather one whose negotiation of the terms of his oppression takes place through the initial adoption of an accommodating pose. It is by no means a perfect position; Whitechapel does, of course, still lose his only son and is crushed by this hurt. But, D’Aguiar’s explorations of the workings of the phenomenon of slavery allow us a better perspective from which to assess and understand the actions of the Uncle Tom.

23The polyvocal narration of The Longest Memory facilitates the creation of a strong sense of the social environment in which the novel takes place. We can begin to understand how the actions of the characters are always overdetermined by the mechanics of the peculiar institution of plantation slavery. The individual accounts each can be seen as expressing an aspect of a structural totality in which there exists only a limited number of subject positions and ways of responding to situations that arise.11 The economic and social ordering of the antebellum South regulates the range of possible identities that can be expressed on either side of the master / slave divide. The hegemony that enforces these limitations upon the available ideological stances is most apparent in the chapters that communicate the views of the plantation owners. The disembodied, nameless voices in the Gentlemen’s Club and in the editorials of The Virginian newspaper evoke the pervasive enunciations of power, acting to contain the imaginations of all those who live within its grasp. These exhortations act like a social conscience, a superego that legitimises certain behaviours while disavowing any that run contrary to its interests. The choices to be made by anyone in this society are forever circumscribed by these pronouncements.

24Yet, although the slave-owners’ viewpoint dominates and influences all possible responses to the plantation, their fortress is not impenetrable. We have seen how our Uncle Tom, Whitechapel, could begin to carve a small space of self-assertion within the hegemonic order and it is perhaps valuable to look at how the rebellion of the defiant slave, Chapel, is articulated. I wish to suggest that D’Aguiar reveals a mode of protest that is specifically formed by, and in opposition to, the inequitable society of his novel.

25Lydia, the daughter of the plantation’s owner, is prepared for her entrance into society by practising walking with copies of Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser balanced on her head. The cultural achievements of her society are here explicitly used as a tool to ensure the perpetuation and reproduction of the established order. The dissemination of cultural artefacts often takes place due to a desire to reproduce a given order of power relations. However, it is these same texts that she memorises to read to her lover, Chapel, during their clandestine meetings and that fire his yearning for liberty. The tools of systemic oppression become those of resistance and the striving towards liberation. Chapel can take these elements of the hegemonic order and utilise them within an articulation that allows him to demand recognition of his humanity. He accepts Whitechapel’s recognition of the unsurpassable divide that the Middle Passage has left between his slave present and his African past, yet does not allow this to shut him off from the possibilities of the future. He can reconnect with the temporal order through the literary artefacts he and Lydia share and articulate the knowledge that resides within them in a way that defies the system that would deny a teleology of progress to the black subject in bondage. D’Aguiar details the way in which this appropriation of the dominant culture allows the articulation of a subaltern and defiant response in his other major plantation-based work; the long poem “Bloodlines”:

One’s oppression carries with it the seeds
of liberation, some frailty or hairline fracture
cohabits with that which we most need
to free ourselves from.12

26The key to resisting an oppressive order is to be found within the very structures that constitute it.

27D’Aguiar rejects the simple dichotomy that insists on a complete discrepancy between the utterances of master and slave but he also rejects the thinking that reduces the subject positions available to black people to that of the compliant Uncle Tom or nihilist Bigger Thomas. Rather, he refashions this dichotomy into a dialectic in which the limitations exerted by systemic determination are acknowledged but are tempered by the recognition of the various articulations of resistance that are made possible by the contradictions and ambiguities that exist within the dominant racialised discourse.

28The Uncle Tom character in The Longest Memory does then participate in a literary tradition that explores the phenomenon of the black person who would seem to co-operate with his or her own subjection. However, D’Aguiar is not concerned simply to castigate this archetypal creature but rather works to investigate how such a person may be created by the forces operating in a given prejudiced society. This appreciation of the effects the structure of society has upon the individual is also evident in D’Aguiar’s image of the rebel, who does not have to lash out against every aspect of the dominant culture in order to reject its injustice. Though it may seem paradoxical, D’Aguiar’s grasp of social determination actually makes the humanity of his characters all the more convincing.