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Revisiting Slave Narratives I

 | 
Judith Misrahi-Barak

The anglophone Caribbean

Roots versus Routes in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the river and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

Pilar Cuder-Domínguez

Résumé

In Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1994) and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), slavery is the starting point for the interrogation of blackness. Both Caribbean writers use the disembodied voice of an ancestor to provide the roots that bind together the transnational lives of black diasporic subjects across the Black Atlantic. These ancestral voices frame the separate narratives of several individuals, male and female, across time and space, thus tracing many different routes in Africa, America, and Europe. In Phillips’s Crossing the River, an unnamed male voice laments the sale of his children into slavery due to the failure of his crops. Consumed by guilt, this desperate father continues to listen for the voices of his lost children, two hundred and fifty years later. Their “many-tongued chorus” is represented by the life stories of Nash in Africa, Martha in the United States, and Travis in Britain. In Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon, each chapter tells the life of one of the many descendants of Marie Ursule, an African slave in early 19th-century Trinidad. Brand’s novel starts with the forced relocation of Marie Ursule as she is sold from one plantation to the next due to her rebelliousness and insolence, and continues by tracing the criss-crossing paths of her descendants over North America, the Caribbean and Europe. All in all, both Caribbean writers make use of a similar structure for their novels. Their deployment of the ancestral voice is countered by the diversity of experiences of their descendants, so that the notion of a timeless black essence is destabilised by the multiple blacknesses in the novel. Brand and Phillips thus manage to analyse the interrelatedness of the construction of the (racialised) self and the politics of place while continuing to build a black culture on the unifying ordeal of slavery.

Texte intégral

1In Caryl Phillips’sCrossing the River (1993) and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), slavery is the starting point for the interrogation of blackness. Both Caribbean writers use the disembodied voice of an ancestor to provide the roots that bind together the transnational lives of black diasporic subjects across the Black Atlantic. These ancestral voices frame the separate narratives of several individuals, male and female, across time and space, thus tracing many different routes in Africa, America, and Europe. This paper purports to engage the way in which the two Caribbean writers counterbalance both pulls in the layout, plots, and motifs of their narratives: the pull to essence and history versus the pull to multiplicity and geography.

  • 1 Indeed, the inclusion of a slave trader’s story alongside those of slaves or their descendants prod (...)
  • 2 See on this subject Low, Gail, “A Chorus of Common Memory”: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillip (...)

2Crossing the River is not Phillips’s first attempt at the exploration of slavery. His former novels Higher Ground and Cambridge bear out his sustained interest in the material history and discursive legacy of slavery. From Higher Ground onwards, Phillips has consistently written polyphonic novels, either by telling one story from many perspectives and in several voices, or else by putting together a number of more or less interconnected stories, with or without a narrative frame. In Crossing the River, four first-person narratives are framed by an unnamed male voice lamenting the sale of his children into slavery due to the failure of his crops. Consumed by guilt, this desperate father continues to listen for the voices of his lost children, two hundred and fifty years later. Their “many-tongued chorus” is represented by the life stories of Nash in Africa, Martha in the United States, and Travis in Britain, but Phillips has also added the diary of an eighteenth-century slave trader, Captain Hamilton, a story thus conspicuously different.1 Critics to this date have focused on what they perceive as the pervasive fragmentation in the novel, and indeed qualifying terms such as “fragmented”, “fragmentary,” or “fractal” are often used for Crossing the River.2 Yet the underlying theme of crossings has also been perceived as one that contributes to forge unity out of disunity and difference:

  • 3 Caryl Phillips, 110.

Literally, “crossing the river” alludes to the experience of the three children who, after being sold into slavery, first cross a river, then the ocean separating them from the west. It also refers, by extension, to the millions of Africans who crossed the waters aboard slave ships and to whom the novel is dedicated. But ’crossing the river’ also takes on a more specific and abstract meaning in each individual story: it relates to the mental borders that need to be crossed again and again in order to meet others. The use of the gerund form further indicates that the discovery of the other and of oneself is an always unfinished process that cannot accommodate the complacent idea of completion.3

  • 4 Crossing the River, 208.

3Besides these implications, it seems to me that crossing a river further locates the subject in between places, neither on one bank nor on its opposite, and such inbetweenness features prominently in the four tales. Whereas the ancestor’s voice is firmly rooted in the homeland, the four narrators /characters occupy an ambiguous space that they never fully claim for their own. Thus, Nash Williams in the first section, “The Pagan Coast,” has to navigate the muddy waters of Liberian society seen by the natives as a “white man,” but unacknowledged too by those he believed he belonged to, like his former master. Similarly, in “West” Martha dies without having reached her final destination, California. Her fellow travellers leave her in the Main Street of Denver, Colorado, where she will be given Christian burial by an anonymous Samaritan. In the third section, Captain Hamilton’s youth and inexperience place him in an equivocal position with his crew, and therefore his hold on the white world is less firm than his stolidly cruel diary of slave purchases would have us believe. Finally, Joyce and Travis in “Somewhere in England” are thrown into a “twilight zone” by their inter-racial relationship, although this is only a few further steps beyond their original marginality. Joyce had never managed to gain the trust of the village she lived in after her marriage, and as a coloured G.I. Travis never progressed beyond the most peripheral of situations in the army: “[Travis] told me that the army only liked to use them for cleaning and the like.”4

  • 5 On religion in this novel, see Ledent, Bénédicte, “One is exiled when one refuses to obey the comma (...)
  • 6 Crossing the River, 42 and 62.

4Moreover, Caryl Phillips has amplified these connections by inserting in each of the sections motifs that both recall the lament of the childless father in the frame narrative and respond to it, in dialogical fashion. In other words, whereas the frame invokes the figure of the childless father, the narratives abound in references to fatherless children. Nash mourns his separation from his master/lover Edward Williams in letters that address him as “father” and that resound with Biblical allusions.5 Endowing him with a god-like authority, Nash begs to be told why Edward has forsaken him, and why, after using him for his purposes, he expelled his son “to this Liberian paradise”.6 Like Nash in Africa, Martha too must find new kin to make up for those she lost. But living under slavery in Virginia, she is powerless to hold on to her family, and is sold away from husband and daughter. Then she too turns away from the white God-as-father that allowed this to happen. Eventually she runs away from her new owners, the childless Hoffmans, and she remakes her life with Chester, another biological father to fatherless children: “I told Chester that I didn’t think I could make him no babies no more. He smiled and said: ‘I got babies some place that I ain’t been no kind of father to. Figure it’s best if I don’t bother with no more baby-making.’” (83-84)

5In addition, the two white characters in this novel are missing their father. Captain Hamilton took over running the ship after his father disappeared in mysterious circumstances two years earlier. Indeed, the need to discover what happened seems to be one of the driving motives for his involvement in the slave trade, a business he has qualms about. He feels he is ill-regarded by his crew, and that he is not well equipped to discharge his duties as captain, as compared to the great reputation his father used to enjoy. Nevertheless, he insists on pursuing his quest, as he discloses in a letter to his wife:

The principal cause of my sleeplessness, indeed, my distress, has been the unfeeling intransigence displayed by a certain Mr Ellis. At every opportunity, I ask after my dear late father, but he parries my enquiries. I have constantly demanded of him that he transport me to the very place where my later father, only two years past, lost his life, but he refuses to aid me... It would appear that Mr Ellis seems determined to keep from me the more intimate details of this mystery, and it distresses me that his replies are so framed as to imply that my lack of years are the sole impediment to a fuller confession. (118-119)

6The fourth narrator (Joyce) introduces us to a time and place, Britain between the two World Wars, where fathers are again conspicuously absent. Joyce grew up alone with her mother, her father having died in the Great War. She never really got to know him, as her mother remarks with contempt: “I told her that Dad would have wanted me to get my school certificate, and maybe even one day go to college. She just stared at me and said, How do you know? She spoke to me as if he were nothing to do with me.” (190) Joyce’s first husband, Len, lost both parents long ago. But before that marriage, a very young and friendless Joyce had been seduced by a married man, Herbert, and so she had decided not to have a child for whom she could not provide a legal father. Years later, her friend Sandra finds herself in a similar plight, when she gets pregnant by another man while her husband is at the front:

you’d better write to him. Let him know before he gets back. What do you think? I think so, she says. But what if he doesn’t want to come back? What’s Tommy [Sandra’s first born] going to do for a father? I pointed out the obvious. That this is a war. That if Tommy ends up without a father, he won’t be the first and he won’t be the last. (157)

7Movingly, Sandra frets not so much about her own fate, as over the future of her first child if rendered fatherless, and she tragically proves to be right, for her husband’s reaction at his return is to kill the mother and disown the son. Finally, in Joyce’s “G.I. child” Greer we find the last of this long chain of fatherless children. Like Sandra, her regret is not selfish. She is certainly aware of her huge loss in giving him up for adoption, but she understands that she had no choice. Instead, her deepest regret is that Greer did not get to meet his father: “I had no money. Nothing. Only Greer... And so we were sensible, my son and I. Into the care of the County Council as an orphan, love. It hadn’t really dawned on me, but it was true. His father would never see him. Never.” (230)

8Resulting from this proliferation of broken families and homes, there clearly emerges in the novel the common theme of kinship disrupted by slavery throughout history. What’s more, the structure of the novel thus laid out resembles the call and response patterns of traditional African music and song. To the call of the father from the African shore there respond the voices of several fatherless voices located in disparate coordinates of time and place. At this point, we should perhaps revise the notion of polyphony mentioned above, since antiphony is perhaps more appropriate for this structuring principle, insofar as each voice utters his or her song alternately, and not simultaneously.

  • 7 McCallum, Pamela, and Christian Olbey, “Written in the Scars: History, Genre, and Materiality in Di (...)
  • 8 For contextualisation of Dionne Brand’s œuvre in African Canadian writing, see among others: Kaup, (...)

9McCallum and Olbey have argued that Dionne Brand’s first novel, In Another Place, Not Here (1996), should be read as a neo-slave narrative because it is “concerned with the representation of the profound and deep-rooted physical and physiological effects of slavery as they persist in contemporary forms of superexploitative labour practices endemic to the contemporary process of capitalist globalization”.7 Although it certainly attests to Brand’s marxist politics and to a long-lasting interest in slavery, it is nonetheless also true that the engagement with slave experiences is much more latent than explicit.8 Brand’s later work, both her second novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, (1999) and her essay A Map to the Door of No Return (2002) manage to convey much more successfully her thoughts on slavery, ancestry, and diaspora. In fact, slavery stands as the driving force behind the latter, providing a historical and ontological departure as well as the very title of the essay:

  • 9 Brand, Dionne, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002): (...)

Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast. In some desolate sense it was the creation place of Blacks in the New World Diaspora at the same time that it signified the end of traceable beginnings. Beginnings that can be noted through a name or a set of family stories that extend farther into the past than five hundred or so years, or the kinds of beginnings that can be expressed in a name which in turn marked out territory or occupation. I am interested in exploring this creation place - the Door of No Return, a place emptied of beginnings - as a site of belonging or unbelonging.9

10The title of Brand’s novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, is also related to the memory of slavery. Brand’s novel starts with the forced relocation of Marie Ursule, an African slave in early 19th-century Trinidad, as she is sold from one plantation to the next due to her rebelliousness and insolence. Here in Mon Chagrin, she manages to thwart the system that deprives her of her freedom, by arranging for all the plantation slaves to commit suicide, as Kamena explains to his and Marie Ursule’s daughter, Bola:

  • 10 Brand, Dionne, At the Full and Change of the Moon (Toronto: Alfred P. Knopf, 1999): 296.

At the full and change of the moon. Everything get measured here by the moon. And when it was a good moon, as it was big and round and the rim of it was white with clouds, they say that it was not a good day for the leaving. A good day was at the end of the moon’s rounds when the evening come dark, so dark as they could pass the medicine without discovery. Your mother made the preparations to take everyone to the heavens and to rid them of the wicked world of slavery they had entered and to give them their deliverance from the hands of Mon Chagrin estate. Full-moon nights, your mother slip away to find the medicine.10

11Unlike Phillip’s novel, which places the experiences of the ancestor in the frame sections, Brand establishes the roots of her diasporic genealogy in the first sections, one devoted to Marie Ursule ( “... But a Drink of Water”), the next to her daughter Bola, who though born to slavery, is made free by her mother’s rebellion ( “At the Full and Change of the Moon”). The following seven chapters trace the criss-crossing paths of Bola’s descendants over North America, the Caribbean and Europe, while the novel closes by turning once more to the figure of the ancestor/s in a chapter entitled again like the whole work.

12Again unlike Crossing the River, this novel deploys a double ancestor, Marie Ursule and Bola, and accordingly there is a strong maternal current weaving together the disparate routes of the descendants. While Marie Ursule stands for the pain, suffering, and loss that are inseparable constituents of slavery, Bola best expresses human love for life and for freedom, highlighted in the novel by her life in communion with the sea, which for Brand here and elsewhere is an everlasting symbol of beginnings and ends, of distance and closeness, of departures and arrivals:

  • 11 A Map to the Door of No Return, 12.

Our origin seemed to be in the sea. It had brought the whole of Guayguayare there from unknown places, unknown origins. Unknown to me at the time and even more unknown now. My grandfather, who knew everything, had forgotten, as if it was not worth remembering, the name of our tribe in that deeply unknown place before the trade. Derek Walcott wrote, “the sea is history.” I knew that before I knew it was history I was looking at.11

  • 12 Moynagh, Maureen, “Uses of Cultural Memory”, Canadian Literature 170- 71 (2001): 194.

13That is why she is incapable of tying herself to anyone or the other way round, so she insists on bestowing the same kind of freedom she enjoys on her many children, giving them away to their fathers or more simply, to fate. This is the starting point for what Moynagh has described as the “tenuous genealogy linking the offspring of Marie Ursule”,12 since their dispersal across the Black Atlantic may occasionally entail that cousins are unaware of each other’s existence, and they might very well meet as complete strangers. A case in point is how Emmanuel and Cordelia in “A Sudden and Big Lust” get married without ever finding out that they are first cousins.

  • 13 At the Full and Change of the Moon, 79.

14Counterbalancing the pull to fragmentation and dispersal along many routes is, at times, the ghostly presence of the ancestor Bola or the eerie sound of the voice of Marie Ursule. More importantly, there is a strong emphasis on the mother-child relation that pervades the novel, rather like the father-child relation surfaces in multifaceted ways in Crossing the River. Thus, the chapter “Tamarindus Indica” focuses on the humiliating experiences of Private Sones in the Great War. From his early childhood, his mother Augusta encouraged an unequal friendship with a white boy, Michael de Freitas, in the belief that a black man “could rise above all this.”13 When years later, both join the army to go and fight for the “mother country”, they find themselves on opposite sides of the racial divide, one an officer, the other his servant. What’s more, the black soldiers “were not allowed to do combat against European soldiers because of their colour. He grew smaller and smaller inside. He wanted to go home. He wanted to get through the days.” (87) It seems evident that Sones is a forerunner to the later generation of black soldiers represented by Travis in Phillips’s novel. When Sones finally rebels, he is dismissed for misconduct, a final rejection he can never recover from, remaining a broken man haunted by the memory of his mother Augusta and by the ghost of his grandmother Bola, endlessly rocking in her chair.

15Another tragic story interconnecting three generations and dwelling on the theme of mother-child relations is told in two consecutive stories, “Blue Airmail Letter” and “Bola.” The earlier story is a letter written by Eula (Eulalie) in Toronto to her now deceased mother, identified simply as “Mama.” Here the pain of exile takes the shape of homesickness and the loss of the mother’s love. Eula, who grew up in loving closeness to her mother, cannot stand the separation, and Mama’s expectations for her new life in Canada weigh very heavily on her. When she falls in love with an African man in Toronto, she rejects him because of his mother:

He took me to meet his mother and all I wanted to do was run out of the room. His mother was a round woman like you, short and round, and she was shining with expectation and he too, but all I saw was a room full to the brim with all that they could buy and stuff into a small room. And a mother. Full of expectations. The room was full. I cannot tell you how I felt choked. I could not breathe and he smiled so lovingly at his mother and then at me and I felt hopeless and wanted to run. (248)

16Eula feels she cannot live up to her mother’s expectations, and refuses to enter into new and potentially equally asphyxiating relationships, to the extent that she sends her newly born daughter to Trinidad, for Mama to raise. The tragic fate of this child is disclosed in the following story, “Bola,” as she grows in the belief that her grandmother is in fact her mother. Like Eula, she is trapped in the woman’s love, and when Mama dies, young Bola feels such unbounded grief that she can only be consoled by retreating into madness. Then she starts living in a dream life, never stepping beyond the house, where she is perfectly happy and content in her complete union with the mother. In a way, Bola has tragically taken the place left by Eula’s departure, and she lives the life Eula wished she had, but neither staying nor leaving works for the two women.

17Mama is the complete opposite of her ancestor Bola, in that she never learns how to be free or make others free, and her utter dependency on her daughters enslaves them. To a certain extent, maternal love signifies in Brand’s novel the hold of the mother land, the mother country, over its children/citizens and thus it is twofold, or at best ambiguous, both transcendental and crippling.

  • 14 I am grateful to my colleague Ana Fraile (University of Salamanca) for first bringing this parallel (...)

18All in all, Phillips and Brand make use of a similar structure in Crossing the River and At the Full and Change of the Moon.14 Both employ the trope of slavery and kinship as the unifying principle, while exploring a number of life stories, case studies for the Black Diaspora. As a result, the deployment of the ancestral voice is countered by the diversity of experiences of their descendants, so that the notion of a timeless black essence is destabilised by the multiple blacknesses in the novel. However, whereas kinship takes the shape of the father-child bond in Crossing the River, At the Full and Change of the Moon highlights the mother-child relationship. History meets Geography in both novels, and Brand and Phillips thus manage to analyse the interrelatedness of the construction of the (racialised) self and the politics of place while continuing to build a black culture on the unifying ordeal of slavery.

Bibliographie

Works cited

Brand, Dionne. In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1994.

Brand, Dionne. At the Full and Change of the Moon. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1999.

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.

Buchanan, Brad. “Caryl Phillips,” Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew. Cambridge: Polity, 2002, 174-90.

Clarke, George Elliott. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “African Canadian Writing and the Narration (s) of Slavery”, Essays on Canadian Writing 79 (2003): 55-75.

Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Ledent, Bénédicte. “‘One is exiled when one refuses to obey the commandments of Conquest Mission’: Religion as Metaphor in Caryl Phillips’s Diasporic Philosophy,” Missions of Interdependence, ed. Gerhard Stilz. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002, 121-30.

Kaup, Monika. “West Indian Canadian Writing: Crossing the Border from Exile to Immigration”, Writing Ethnicity, ed. Winfried Siemerling. Toronto: ECW, 1996, 171-93.

Low, Gail. “‘A Chorus of Common Memory’: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River.” Research in African Literatures 29.4 (Winter 1998): 122-40.

McCallum, Pamela and Christian Olbey. “Written in the Scars: History, Genre, and Materiality in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here,” Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (1999): 159-82.

Moynagh, Maureen. “Uses of Cultural Memory”, Canadian Literature 170-71 (2001): 193-5.

Phillips, Caryl. Crossing the River. London: Picador, 1993.

Notes

1 Indeed, the inclusion of a slave trader’s story alongside those of slaves or their descendants produces such discomfort that some critics conveniently forget it is there at all. See for instance, Buchanan’s statement that Higher Ground and Crossing the River are both “three-part novels following the stories of three related characters living on either side of the Atlantic” ( “Caryl Phillips” 182), which erases the captain’s voice from the latter novel. Buchanan, Brad, “Caryl Phillips”, Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew (Cambridge: Polity, 2002): 174-90.

2 See on this subject Low, Gail, “A Chorus of Common Memory”: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River’, Research in African Literatures 29.4 (Winter 1998): 122-40; and Ledent, Bénédicte, Caryl Phillips (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002): 115-26.

3 Caryl Phillips, 110.

4 Crossing the River, 208.

5 On religion in this novel, see Ledent, Bénédicte, “One is exiled when one refuses to obey the commandments of Conquest Mission”: Religion as Metaphor in Caryl Phillips’s Diasporic Philosophy, ’ Missions of Interdependence, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002): 121-30.

6 Crossing the River, 42 and 62.

7 McCallum, Pamela, and Christian Olbey, “Written in the Scars: History, Genre, and Materiality in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here,” Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (1999): 159-82, 164.

8 For contextualisation of Dionne Brand’s œuvre in African Canadian writing, see among others: Kaup, Monika, “West Indian Canadian Writing: Crossing the Border from Exile to Immigration”, Writing Ethnicity, ed. Winfried Siemerling (Toronto: ECW, 1996): 171-93; Clarke, George Elliott, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar, “African Canadian Writing and the Narration (s) of Slavery”, Essays on Canadian Writing 79 (2003): 55-75.

9 Brand, Dionne, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002): 5-6.

10 Brand, Dionne, At the Full and Change of the Moon (Toronto: Alfred P. Knopf, 1999): 296.

11 A Map to the Door of No Return, 12.

12 Moynagh, Maureen, “Uses of Cultural Memory”, Canadian Literature 170- 71 (2001): 194.

13 At the Full and Change of the Moon, 79.

14 I am grateful to my colleague Ana Fraile (University of Salamanca) for first bringing this parallelism to my attention.

Auteur

University of Huelva

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