Postmemories of Slavery In Fred D’Aguiar’s Bloodlines
p. 73-98
Résumé
In this essay I explore Fred D’Aguiar’s long poem Bloodlines (2000). I shall consider why I believe Bloodlines is not merely, as several critics suggest, one of D’Aguiar’s weaker texts, but makes an important contribution to his continuing concerns with the ethics of representing slavery and the remembrance of this past.
I shall suggest that much of the motivation behind the violent opening section of Bloodlines is derived from D’Aguiar’s attempt to persuade his reader of the difficult nature of relationships between black and white people during the time of slavery and the ultimate failure of inter-racial love as a vehicle for transforming the legacies of this past. D’Aguiar indicates in Bloodlines that the trauma of slavery can never be entirely worked through; slavery, he repeatedly tells us, persists in the racism of today.
Bloodlines arguably offers the kind of postmemorial mourning suggested by Marianne Hirsch. Postmemory, as conceptualised by Hirsch, is not restricted to actual descendants of trauma but is expanded to include the “ethical” and multiple connections between twentieth- or twenty-first-century readers and the past of slavery. In the absence of living witnesses or accounts from slaves, and where history fails him in returning to the past of slavery, D’Aguiar is also compelled to creatively imagine this past.
Texte intégral
We joke about associating only with other couples [...] with an equal distribution of the two races between them. Our children. We stop. The words hang in the air. Two stars that have dropped from the heavens to a point just above our heads and as bright as two suns. Our children. Yes. Our children. Several of them.1
1Like the narrator figures of Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997) and Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River (1993), the life of the central narrator of D’Aguiar’s long poem Bloodlines (2000) has spanned centuries. In the course of the poem, the narrator traces the evolving relationship between his parents. Faith, a black slave, was raped by Christy, a white son of a slave-owner, but they gradually fall in love. The couple run away together, and are aided in their plan to move north by Tom and Stella, two ex-slaves in the Underground Railroad movement. Unfortunately, as Tom steers their boat across the river, they are ambushed and Christy and Faith become separated from Tom, whom they presume dead. They eventually find refuge in a barn, but a gang of white men happen upon them and, after repeatedly raping Faith and humiliating Christy, Faith is sold back into slavery to Mr and Mrs Mason. Christy, captured for indenture, becomes a boxer. Faith dies shortly after giving birth to the narrator and Christy, unable to locate either Faith or his son, is buried a pauper. The narrator records his journey to find his father and laments his inability to die, rendered animate by the continuing of legacies of slavery.2 Alongside the central narrator, chapters are also narrated by Faith, Christy, Mrs Mason, Stella and Tom. D’Aguiar deploys the ottava rima form throughout his text, a style appropriate to the nineteenth-century “beginning” of the tale.3 As I will indicate, his choice of form is no mere whim, but has important implications for his concerns about the apparent “vogue” of texts written about slavery.
2 Bloodlines, arguably, is a much more problematic and morally-challenging text than D’Aguiar’s earlier novels about slavery The Longest Memory (1994) and Feeding the Ghosts, particularly in relation to the portrayal of female roles. My opening quotation from The Longest Memory introduces the notion of the transformative power of sexual relations between black and white people; a premise devastatingly challenged in Bloodlines. Published six years after The Longest Memory, Bloodlines is characterised by a pervading cynicism regarding the potential of relationships between mixed-race couples. The optimism of my opening quotation, which shapes the stellar imagery of Chapel and Lydia’s future hopes for children, is contrasted in Bloodlines with the mixed-race narrator, who is the child of Faith and Christy. As I will show, he is orphaned and alone, fruitlessly searching for a place to “belong” and subject to continuing racism and violence. My intention initially is to examine the most difficult, or problematic aspects of this text, beginning with the relationship between Christy and Faith and moving on to explore the form of the poem. I shall then consider why I believe Bloodlines makes an important contribution to D’Aguiar’s continuing concerns with the ethics of representing slavery and the remembrance of this past. As I demonstrate, Bloodlines can provocatively be seen as an example of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”.4 The text arguably enacts a postmemorialisation of slavery which is gloomily resigned to the impossibility of ending the legacies of this trade. In her many influential essays, Hirsch coins the term “postmemory” as a way of explaining what she calls the belated “memories” experienced by those who did not directly witness the traumatic events.5 Hirsch writes that, “although familial inheritance offers the clearest model for it, postmemory need not be strictly an identity position. Instead, I prefer to see it as an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked specifically to cultural or collective trauma”.6 In writing about the possibility for postmemory as a potential space for cultural or collective trauma, Hirsch broadens the scope for empathy. Postmemory is therefore especially useful in thinking about the how authors like D’Aguiar can explore the remembrance of slavery in the absence of direct experience of this past.
3Towards the start of Bloodlines, there occurs the rape at knifepoint of a female slave, Faith—a moment arguably handled by D’Aguiar without due sensitivity or gravitas. In order that I may explain the difficulties created by the way in which he handles the moment of rape, it is necessary to quote from his text at length:
He knew what to do to make her scared—
he made the deep impression of a scar
by pressing the knife on her face. She turned rigid,
wooden, and he mounted her and he rode
flat out as she shut her mind down to get rid
of him in her and made herself a lifeless board
under his weight, his teeth biting, his rancid
breath, his hips, its thrust, its sudden load,
the knife threatening to break her skin,
so she had to, she had to, let him in.7
4D’Aguiar suggests in this passage the level of trauma experienced by Faith as she “shut [s] her mind down” to her violation. She does not, it is clear from the above passage, yield willingly to Christy’s assault. Yet, as Christy rapes Faith, D’Aguiar writes of “her hate burning to love” (6). In the midst of being raped, therefore, he suggests that Faith falls in love with her rapist. This seemingly untroubled shift of Christy’s category from rapist to suitor arguably perpetuates the myth that women essentially enjoy the masochism of violent relationships.8 Following Faith’s rape by the group of men, it is significant that he dreams of her “in an orgy instead of her trials” (73). The worrying suggestion that Faith “chooses” Christy precisely because he uses force to subdue her seems to correlate to the notion of “hate burning to love” and a deliberate confusion by D’Aguiar of the two states.
5If the act of rape is not already dealt with in a contentious-enough way in Bloodlines, it is further problematised by race; it is, specifically, the rape of a black woman by a white man. This adds a further, difficult, layer to the already problematic aspect of rape. The racist view of the apparently “harlot” or sexualised nature of black women has been explored by a range of scholars. Mary Berry and John Blassingame, for example, have written that, until the last decades of the twentieth century, white men were “fascinated” by black people. They note that black women featured in the majority of their fantasies, writing that: “[t] he image of the black woman was that she was the most sensuous, exotic, mysterious, and voluptuous female in the world—the embodiment of passion”.9 The apparent abundance of passion and subsequent dehumanisation of black women has also been examined by bell hooks, who writes in Ain’t I a Woman (1981) that:
The designation of all black women as sexually depraved, immoral, and loose had its roots in the slave system. White women and men justified the sexual exploitation of enslaved black women by arguing that they were the initiators of sexual relationships with men. From such thinking emerged the stereotype of black women as sexual savages, and in sexist terms a sexual savage, a non-human, an animal cannot be raped.10
6In Bloodlines, the sexual exploitation of black women is shown to be institutionalised within the slave trade; as Christy’s father tells him, Christy was expected to “fuck as many as [he] liked” (17). It is perhaps logical, then, that he at first apparently shares this view of Faith, imaging her to be initiating the “relationship”:
when she locked eyes with his all he could think of was that she was there because she wanted him, making easy this thing he was always doing with a slave;
the polar opposite of her motive. (4)
7Christy assumes that Faith is, in hooks’s terminology, a “sexual savage”, although his advances are clearly unwanted. D’Aguiar seems in this text to write carelessly about his female protagonist and, as is to be expected, some reviewers have picked up on the book’s apparent misogyny. Bruce King, for example, has noted in his review of Bloodlines that, “[w] e are to believe that a black slave raped at knifepoint by a lusty young white man will fall in love with him and he with her. It seems more like de Sade than the romantic tale that follows”.11
8From the start of this text, then, important issues are raised, via D’Aguiar’s portrayal of the rape of a slave, surrounding the ethics of writing about slavery; the most pressing being whether his writing ought to be categorised as exposing the “pornography of Empire” or an act of de Sadean titillation, as King implies.12 The narrator reports that, as a child, he was informed by other children:
My mother was raped and I came along,
that was the truth and I should confess
and drop this love-match, love-child crap. (50)
9In this quotation, D’Aguiar not only challenges the concept of “truth” but illustrates he is aware how the relationship could be viewed, arguably forestalling his reader’s thoughts to desist in calling rape, “love”.
10I would suggest, contrary to King, that D’Aguiar’s portrayal of rape serves an important and threefold metaphorical purpose and is not merely insensitive writing. Firstly, D’Aguiar indicates through his long-suffering female protagonist—the aptly-named Faith—the inherent misogyny of slavery in nineteenth-century America. As mentioned, black women were persistently abused by white men on the plantations. The Longest Memory, of course, also included the violent rape of Cook by Sanders Senior, although, and less controversially, she failed to love Sanders Senior despite, or because of, her violation.
11Secondly, bell hooks provides another possible explanation for his handling of the scene in her comments about the “devaluation of black womanhood”. She cites this devaluation as stemming from the aforementioned sexual exploitation of black women during the slave trade and suggests that it has been perpetuated into the twentieth century (hooks 1982: 53). Referring to Susan Brownmiller’s book about rape, Against Our Will (1975), hooks notes:
While Brownmiller successfully impresses upon readers the fact that white men brutally assaulted black women during slavery, she minimizes the impact that oppression has had on all black women in America by placing it solely in the limited historical context of an “institutionalized crime” during slavery. (hooks 1982: 52)
12By confining the rape of, and violence towards, black women by white men to the past of slavery, hooks argues, writers like Brownmiller fail to address the continuing problem of violence against black women in the twentieth century. Like the continued devaluation of black womanhood, D’Aguiar’s novel offers intimations of the things that extend from the time of slavery into the present day—such as racism, violence and sexism—the act of rape of black women by white men conflating all three elements.13 D’Aguiar’s narrator is unable to die until the “conditions of slavery” end, reiterating D’Aguiar’s argument in “The Last Essay About Slavery” (1996) that there cannot be a last text about this past because slavery is not yet dead: “[t] his is a fact of my heritage. So how can it be over? How can it ever be conferred to a condition of non-being when it lived, still lives, in me?”.14 The slave ship of Feeding the Ghosts, the Zong, is perpetually on the high seas: it is, D’Aguiar reminds us, “the present, not slavery, [that] refuses to allow slavery to go away” (D’Aguiar 1996: 126).
13 Bloodlines therefore sees a renewal of D’Aguiar’s concerns with the continuation of slavery and, in particular, with the ongoing problem of racism in the twenty-first century as a legacy of this past. The narrator’s existence captures this concern:
So history greeted me. I am condemned
to live an eternity, unless all the conditions
that brought me into being somehow mend:
I mean Slavery and all its ramifications
marching unfazed into the new millennium.
Everything that I see in countries and nations
tells me this is true: Slavery may be buried,
but it’s not dead, its offspring, Racism, still breeds. (150)
14The conditions that brought him into being were, of course, slavery but also rape. Christy’s rape of Faith therefore stands as a metaphor for slavery and an example of what D’Aguiar suggests was the prevailing engagement between black women and white men during the first half of the nineteenth century. He can therefore be seen as intimating that the violation of women has been perpetuated, like racism, into the twenty-first century:
it has always been and will always be the white man’s way: to take what he wants when he wants, how he wants, to go where he pleases when he wishes. (5)
15By indicating the continuation of this abuse via his “timeless” narrator, D’Aguiar arguably avoids hooks’s charges of confining this kind of violation of women to the historical past.
16Thirdly, I want to suggest that much of the motivation behind the violent opening section of Bloodlines is derived from D’Aguiar’s attempt to persuade his reader of the difficult nature of relationships between black and white people during the time of slavery and the ultimate failure of inter-racial love as a vehicle for transforming the legacies of this past. In The Longest Memory, the love and hopes of Chapel and Lydia for children as a method of healing the damage done by slavery are thwarted by Chapel’s death, and the close of Feeding the Ghosts similarly rejects a reunion between Mintah and Simon. Bloodlines is no more optimistic about mixed-race relationships—the relationship between black and white people is also ended through separation and provided with finality by the death of Faith, suggesting that D’Aguiar feels these relations were impossible at this time. Evident from Feeding the Ghosts, The Longest Memory and Bloodlines, he is interested in mixed-race relationships, or those that defied the norms of nineteenth-century America and Britain. D’Aguiar makes clear, however, that these relationships are especially problematic and, in Bloodlines, uses rape as a way of suggesting their perpetually uneven footing. He implies the relationship between Faith and Christy is compromised by a fundamental inequality, inviting us to “[p] icture those two if you can, arm-in-arm, / master and slave” (18). They are therefore ultimately unable to move beyond their historically-prescribed roles in this text. The unsteadiness of their relationship is in direct comparison to that of Tom and Stella, who are portrayed as starting off on a more even level; both are ex-slaves and are able to find happiness, despite hardship.
17As I have suggested, utopian hopes for a harmonious future for black and white people are dashed in Bloodlines. D’Aguiar declines to provide a happy ending; the bond of love between Christy and Faith is unconvincing and, following their separation, Faith soon dies. I would contend that D’Aguiar is refusing to transcend a relationship that began in violence; in so doing, he does not minimise the psychological damage enacted by rape, or make it (returning to the earlier metaphor, like slavery) something easily dismissed. Bruce King’s review, therefore, appears to miss the irony of Bloodlines; this text deliberately withholds a happy conclusion, even if their son believes that “Christy and Faith’s love survives their deaths. / They go hand-in-hand into the black and blue” (144). Faith pays the ultimate price for Christy’s rape: it effectively kills her with the birth of her son, suggesting that although the central characters make an attempt to forge a relationship together, ultimately, the violence and trauma (which D’Aguiar implies inevitable in relationships between white men and black women at this time) cannot be transcended. We can see in this failure to provide positive conclusions to his texts the fatally dispiriting way in which D’Aguiar indicates the futility of attempts to transcend slavery via the idealisation of mixed-race relationships. He offers no hope that this is, or even should be, possible; we should not forget or minimise the damage perpetrated at the start of Bloodlines. As I shall indicate in a moment, the poem can be seen as being caught in a state of anguished postmemory, where postmemories of this past and the continuing legacies of slavery forestall a transformative counter-remembrance.
18From such sordid beginnings, D’Aguiar proposes, only sadness can follow. The narrator is correspondingly troubled and leads a wandering, unfulfilled life: “I am the singer and the song—/ lest you forget—wrong-doer and wronged” (153). He is informed by Mr Mason:
You don’t know who you are because, young man, you’re nobody, neither black nor white!
You occupy a no-man’s-land! You belong nowhere! (48)
19The narrator’s itinerant sense of unbelonging can be attributed to his mixed-race origins, like Chapel in The Longest Memory, who also struggled with his role as a slave—unknowingly because of his dual racial parentage. D’Aguiar’s narrator in Bloodlines is a fitting emblem of the legacies of slavery because he embodies both “sides” of slavery and is accordingly riddled with contradictions. He has inherited the plantation from Mrs Mason, yet, as partly born of a slave, feels he should work upon it. Slavery has left, it seems, difficult legacies:
Surrounded by my inheritance, immersed,
daily telling myself I am a dog-eared mule
to be laden, beaten, ridden, harnessed,
my immortal side bends all the rules
that keep my slave side well versed
in hard work, hoping to kill the soul
by wrecking the body. I am master,
slave and overseer bringing disaster. (152)
20 The narrator’s troubled position as “master, slave and overseer” indicates the complexity of the legacies of slavery. D’Aguiar is questioning the simplicity and idealism of the transformative potential of love. From rapist to knight, slaver to abolitionist, later actions cannot, he implies in this text, be permitted to overshadow earlier ones. As I show, he also does not pander to the vogue for an affirmative story about slaves overcoming their oppression.
21If Bloodlines is troubled at times by its author’s use of rape as a means of suggesting the misogynistic and continuing nature of slavery, at others, it is made increasingly difficult by its ottava rima form which requires a patient reading. Consequently, D’Aguiar’s poetic talent has been questioned in reviews of this book. Bruce King has noted, for example, that “D’Aguiar shows daring in using such a stanza and the resulting tones to describe the violence of slavery, but it does not work. The tone feels wrong” (King 2001: para. 3 of 5). Robert Nye has similarly claimed that the ottava rima form “hardly lends itself to D’Aguiar’s seriousness. [...] The form constricts the content and works against it”.15 Richard King’s even more damning review suggests that “[t] he poem fails in its mission [... because] it is just so awful to read”. He continues, adding that
So determined is D’Aguiar to stick with the eight-line stanza that, overall, the poem probably has about twice as many words as it needs. The lines [...] all but stagger to their painful ends, or rather their conclusions, an unremitting stream of pointless explication pervading the whole mess.16
22 At the time of the publication of Bloodlines, D’Aguiar had published three novels and four editions of poetry; it seems unlikely, therefore, that it is just an uncharacteristically poor text or the “unremitting stream of pointless explication” Richard King believes it to be. If we turn for a moment to one of the more indelicate moments in Bloodlines:
“Not you only, Faith, the two of us.
Whatever you do, I do; when you fall
pregnant we’ll bear our children simultaneously”. “Yes! Christy, let’s turn with you still
in me”. (59)
23The unsophisticated rhymes and painful rhythm are typical of the poem. The writing is so unwieldy, in fact, that towards the beginning, the narrator apologises for his anachronistic vocabulary: “[h] e would never have said hood, but wait, / he doesn’t have to rhyme every other line” (17). The deliberately ungraceful writing exhibited by the narrator of Bloodlines can be compared with the eloquence of D’Aguiar’s writing in poems such as “Shadow Play” (2001):
There isn’t enough light in the world.
Too many shadows define what I’ve become
Forcing me to register only those shapes
Shaded from the light and shadowed
By the shade; amorphous, pellucid and cold.17
24 Nor can the clumsy rhymes of Bloodlines be entirely a product of his unfamiliarity with older verse forms such as the ottava rima. He is much more successful in earlier attempts at adopting the sonnet form in his poem “The Last Sonnet About Slavery” (1996):
Put your hand on my shoulder, dear mistress.
Hands as delicate should not hang in the air
But find ample places to pose and rest.
And since my shoulders, my head, the hair
On it, all belong to you, let those hands
Settle anywhere on me but do not let them float
Aimlessly, nor be idle, nor stand
Out as if they had no greater goal. (D’Aguiar 1996: 144)
25As we can see here, an intimacy with metre and style creates a flowing and poised verse which carefully depicts the unequal relationship between servant and mistress in eighteenth-century Britain. D’Aguiar’s deployment of a verse form most commonly associated with love poetry also implies a closer relationship between the portrait sitters.
26D’Aguiar does not, on the whole, write “bad” poetry, therefore, even when adhering to inflexible verse forms. Rather—as Richard King suggests—the unwieldy form of Bloodlines perhaps contains an implication for the way in which form and content can interact in examining the past of slavery. King proposes: “[i] t may be said that the narrator of Bloodlines is purposefully drawn as incompetent”; indeed, the failure of rhyme could be a “strategic failure, the slavish nature of the rhyming work at one with the lives of the black protagonists” (Richard King 2001: para. 7 of 8). He suggests, then, that D’Aguiar has chosen the confining and difficult ottava rima form in order to comment on the oppression of slavery. However, although I would agree that the form of Bloodlines should not be ignored, I would suggest a slightly different reason for the implementation of this particular stanza form. D’Aguiar has chosen an especially unusual and difficult form in which to narrate his story—one which distorts and fragments his sentences and words. Depictions of rape, violence, racism and the poem’s obtuse verse and faltering rhythm arguably collude to prevent an easy or enjoyable exploration of the past of slavery. D’Aguiar ensures, in his ungainly text, that it is not going to be comfortable for the reader; this will not be a slave narrative to appease those readers who wish for a redemptive conclusion.
27There is an earlier precedent for poetic sequences about slavery in a Caribbean context set by the epics of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994) also examines the past of slavery—this time focusing on Britain’s role in the trade. The American setting and focus on plantation slavery makes Bloodlines different again, and a poetic form is particularly helpful to D’Aguiar in allowing his narrator to move through centuries in a more condensed way. After writing about the involvement of Britain and America in the slave trade in his novels Feeding the Ghosts and The Longest Memory, turning to poetry arguably dissociates further D’Aguiar from the simulacrum of the slave narrative.18 The number of novels about slavery published in the last decade of the twentieth century reinforces Dabydeen’s claims about “peasantry” being “in vogue”; aside from works by D’Aguiar, we might think of Phillips’s novels Cambridge (1991) or Crossing the River, or Dabydeen’s novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999). Writing about slavery in prose is a popular choice and, by writing in poetry, D’Aguiar therefore seeks to avoid the normalising propensity of prose. The contemporary, self-conscious references of Bloodlines ensure it also does not attempt to imitate nineteenth-century poetry by slaves such as Phillis Wheatley; D’Aguiar does not attempt to offer a beautifying or transformative work about slavery.
28The title of Bloodlines alludes not only to the act of writing, but also to the genealogical lines in the veins, the myth of collective memory, or remembering, carried by blood:
I am the lives of slaves. Every move
I make obeys orders from an overseer.
First he is a whip, a kick, a rude
mouth, a fist and spit, yes sir, no sir. (150)
29The narrator, although not a slave, carries the “lives of slaves” within him —indicating the perpetuation of experiences of slavery for those born of slaves; though, once again, this is, to be accurate, remembering rather than memory. As I have mentioned, postmemory is defined by Hirsch as the relationship between the experiences of those who have undergone trauma and their children, who “remember” their parents’ experiences as stories or images, though these “are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 1999: 8). Postmemory, as Hirsch uses it, is applicable to what she calls the “second generation” of trauma witnesses; that is, the children of Holocaust survivors. As Hirsch adds, this is not, therefore, a term referring to actual, or living, memories; the name “postmemory” is intended to indicate “its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness” (Hirsch 1999: 8). Given the temporal distance between slavery and the present, postmemories of this past can only ever be belated. Ultimately, for Hirsch,
Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of their previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor re-create. (Hirsch 1999: 8)
30The life of D’Aguiar’s narrator is dominated by the narratives of Christy and Faith and, as a result, he devotes his time to tracing his father and trying to come to terms with his ancestry as well as the larger past of slavery. The narrator appears to struggle with postmemories of slavery; this is also, I would contend, the challenge facing D’Aguiar. He is aware, in his lack of interest in simulating slave narratives or poetry, that the past of slavery cannot be “re-created”. Rather than try to do this, therefore, D’Aguiar attempts to understand slavery through new creation. However, the paralysing narratives of postmemories of slavery arguably dominate Bloodlines, as D’Aguiar and his narrator are unable to relinquish the fundamentally incomprehensible and unsettling memories of this past.
31 Bloodlines seems, therefore, caught in what can be viewed as a sombre condition of postmemorialisation. Although conceptualised in relation to the children of Holocaust survivors, Hirsch is adamant that she does not wish “to restrict the notion of postmemory to the remembrance of the Holocaust”, and is clear in suggesting the wider scope offered by the term.19 As Hirsch adds,
It is a question of conceiving oneself as multiply interconnected with others of the same, of previous, and of subsequent generations, of the same and of other—proximate or distant—cultures and subcultures. It is a question, more specifically, of an ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which postmemory can serve as a model. (Hirsch 1999: 9)
32Postmemory, as conceptualised by Hirsch, is not restricted to actual descendants of trauma but is expanded to include the “ethical” and multiple connections between twentieth- or twenty-first-century readers and the past of slavery. The postmemorialisation of slavery can be seen as a central concern in the work of D’Aguiar who grapples with the earlier “narratives” and “traumatic events” pertaining to the slave trade. Hirsch notes in “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile” (1998):
Holocaust postmemory [...] attempts to bridge more than just a temporal divide. The children of exiled survivors, although they have not themselves lived through the trauma of banishment and the destruction of home, remain always marginal or exiled, always in the diaspora. “Home” is always elsewhere. (Hirsch 1998: 420)
33This is, of course, the same conclusion D’Aguiar had reached in his poem entitled “Home” from British Subjects (1993), in which he writes of the airport official “telling [him] with Surrey loam caked / on the tongue, home is always elsewhere”.20 The extended scope for postmemory suggested by Hirsch therefore has interesting implications for black writers within Britain who often struggle with the notion of “home”.
34As Hirsch continues, the “condition of exile from the space of identity, this diasporic experience, is characteristic of postmemory” (Hirsch 1998: 421). The exiled diasporic experience is arguably reflected within Bloodlines in the articulation of the narrator’s condition of unbelonging:
I have no one left on earth to speak of.
No flesh and scent I can follow away
from harm. No names to drop, or trip off
my tongue. No “mother” or “father” to say
without thinking. Only a gap big enough
for me to spend the rest of my days
between earth and sky, my cloudy head
humming full of Slavery’s towering dead. (146)
35We can see in this extract the difficulty of examining the past of slavery for D’Aguiar, with no living witnesses—just a “gap” between present and past. Slavery cannot be ignored, however; the narrator’s head “hums” with the dead of this past. Hirsch signals that possibly the most taxing issue for those exploring art forms of postmemorialisation concerns the appropriateness of identification:
The challenge for the postmemorial artist is precisely to find the balance that allows the spectator to enter the image, to imagine the disaster, but that disallows an overappropriative identification that makes the distances disappear, creating too available, too easy an access to this particular past. (Hirsch 1999: 10)
36 D’Aguiar employs various distancing effects in Bloodlines— rape, deliberately “poor” poetry, twenty-first-century references— as I have already suggested, many of the most perturbing features of the poem can be seen as methods of distancing the reader from the slave past. The twenty-first-century references enhance the text’s eschewal of slave narrative simulacrum, and the conspiring violent content and troublesome form further alienate the reader and point to D’Aguiar’s intention to avoid an “overappropriative” identification with this past. In refusing to provide an uplifting story about the potential of love between races as a means of overcoming slavery, Bloodlines does not, as I have indicated, offer an easy access into this past.
37It is also vitally important to be sensitive to the distance between the lives of slaves and the writers under examination in this thesis, in their admitted twenty-first-century positions of privilege. As Dabydeen has candidly commented in an interview with Lars Eckstein: “[Caryl] Phillips is a wealthy man who drives a big limousine up and down in New York. What f***ing scars has he got?”.21 He concludes that “we have to be honest with the subject and say, ‘Really, it happened a long time ago to our ancestors’” (Eckstein 2001: 30). Slavery ended in the British Caribbean more than one hundred and fifty years ago, yet it is not a too-distant past and is one which, for D’Aguiar, requires continual revisiting and exploration. Hirsch identifies a similar desire to work through trauma in the work of Dominick LaCapra:
He has distinguished between two memorial positions: acting out (melancholia) and working through (mourning). Acting out is based on tragic identification and the constitution of one’s self as a surrogate victim. It is based on overidentification and repetition. Keeping the wounds open, it results in retraumatization. Working through, on the other hand, involves self-reflexivity, a determination of responsibility, some amount of distance. (Hirsch 1999: 16)
38Melancholia, where the writer enacts a “tragic identification” is the kind of position Dabydeen hopes to avoid in his call for honesty in writing about slavery.22 This concern is clearly shared by D’Aguiar and the notion of retraumatization is also particularly crucial to his work. For the narrator of Bloodlines, retraumatization occurs through the postmemory of his parents’ past. The distancing effects utilised in Bloodlines create a necessary gap which indicates D’Aguiar’s desire to elucidate the difference between his texts, which examine the slave past in an imaginative way, and slave testimony. This space enables him, in Hirsch’s words, to attempt to “work through” the past of slavery. As Dabydeen reminds us, we have perhaps moved on from this past. However, while the material position of black people in Britain and the United States has undoubtedly improved since the demise of the slave trade, we are left with lingering racial prejudices from this period which have not been entirely banished and continue to affect trauma. Correspondingly, in Bloodlines D’Aguiar’s narrator encounters the living legacy of twentieth-century racism when using a public standpipe:
A crowd gathers and one of them empties paraffin on me. Either I am too stubborn to catch alight or the famous humidity
softens their matches. I start to run,
they give chase. My crime? I only failed to read the sign, Whites Only. (156)
39It would seem that D’Aguiar is unable to offer hope for this particular legacy of slavery ending. His poem attempts to work through the past of slavery, but he finds this is not entirely possible—there can be, he affirms, no final text yet about this past because slavery has not truly ended.
40This state of negativity is reinforced by the narrator of Bloodlines’s realisation of the impossibility of healing through love the rift between races generated by slavery:
I ask myself if I am ready
to die and leave Slavery and feel no regret
that white remains white and black is black. (159)
41 The Longest Memory, Feeding the Ghosts and Bloodlines may all present the possibility, however fleeting, of a benign future enabled by a transforming relationship between black and white men and women, but ultimately reject the utopian potential of such meetings. D’Aguiar, perhaps even more pessimistically, indicates in Bloodlines that the trauma of slavery can never be entirely “worked through”. Slavery, he repeatedly tells us, persists in the racism of today. Even twenty-first-century generations of black and white people cannot alter the conditions of how they first met historically, in the violent period of slavery. There is no way of forgetting or assuaging the fact of slavery. As with Christy’s unconvincing metamorphosis from rapist to knight, later actions (abolition, twentieth-century migration, anti-discriminatory laws and so on) cannot neatly appease the past. D’Aguiar’s pessimism cannot be seen as indicative of a peculiarly British approach to writing about the past of slavery. In novels like Crossing the River, for instance, Phillips—ventriloquizing Martin Luther King—offers the possibility “that the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood”.23 D’Aguiar, however, does not share his optimism about the possibility of harmony between races.
42Instead, Bloodlines arguably offers a form of postmemorial mourning described by Hirsch, who writes that
postmemory seeks connection. It creates where it cannot recover. It imagines where it cannot recall. It mourns a loss that cannot be repaired. And, because even the act of mourning is secondary, the lost object can never be incorporated and mourning can never be overcome. (Hirsch 1998: 422)
43D’Aguiar’s works also suggest that in the absence of living witnesses or accounts from slaves, and where history fails him in returning to the past of slavery, he is compelled creatively to imagine this past. But he, too, cannot overcome mourning; just as his narrator’s head “hum [s] full of Slavery’s towering dead”, D’Aguiar reveals in his texts that slavery cannot be forgotten or easily dismissed. Bloodlines is not a hopeful text. It can perhaps be read as a postmemorial to slavery, though it does not mark the demise of the trade, but rather mourns the continuation of aspects of this past in the racism of the twenty-first century.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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Works cited
Bal, Mieke, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1999.
Berry, Mary and John W. Blassingame. Long Memory: The Black Experience in America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
D’Aguiar, Fred. An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 2001.
D’Aguiar, Fred. Bloodlines. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000.
D’Aguiar, Fred. The Longest Memory. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995.
Dunant, Sarah and Roy Porter, eds. The Age of Anxiety. London: Virago, 1996.
10.1080/17449850108589343 :Eckstein, Lars. “Getting Back to the Idea of Art as Art—An Interview with David Dabydeen”. World Literature Written in English. 39: 1 (2001): 27-36.
10.1017/S0021875800024890 :Hamilton, Cynthia S. “Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative”. Journal of American Studies. 30 (1996): 429-445.
10.1353/yale.2001.0008 :Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”. Yale Journal of Criticism. 14: 1 (2001): 5-37.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press, 1982.
Kemp, Sandra and Judith Squires, eds. Feminisms. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
10.2307/40156337 :King, Bruce. “Bloodlines”. World Literature Today. 75: 1 (2001). Literature Online lion.chadwyck.co.uk [accessed 22 February 2005].
King, Richard. “I Fell ‘Lurve’”. PN Review, 27: 4 (2001). Literature Online.
0-lion.chadwyck.co.uk [accessed 22 February 2005].
Nye, Robert. “No Rhythm in the Heart of Darkness”. The Times, 2 August 2000. Section Times 2: 18.
10.1093/nq/CLXX.may02.323a :Phillips, Caryl. Crossing the River. 1993. New York: Vintage, 1995.
10.1515/9780822379829 :Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed. Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.
Notes de bas de page
1 D’Aguiar, Fred, The Longest Memory (1994. London: Vintage, 1995): 103.
2 The narrator is named after his father, but in order to avoid confusion, I shall continue to refer to him as “the narrator”.
3 The ottava rima, introduced into English by Wyatt, was most famously the form employed by Byron in Don Juan (1819-24).
4 Hirsch, Marianne, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy”, in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds. (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1999): 2-23; 8.
5 Ibid.
6 Hirsch, Marianne, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14: 1 (2002): 5-37; 10.
7 D’Aguiar, Fred, Bloodlines (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000): 6.
8 Carole Vance writes that “[w] omen are encouraged to assent that all male sexuality done to them is pleasurable and liberatory: women really enjoy being raped but can’t admit it”. See Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality” (1984) in Feminisms, Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, eds. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 327-335; 329.
9 Berry, Mary Frances and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982): 115. They add that “[g] iven the belief in the ungovernable passion of blacks, the rape of a black woman by a white man was a legal non sequitur. She stood defenseless before the bar of justice because it was always assumed that she had been the seducer” (115).
10 Hooks, bell, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1982): 52.
11 King, Bruce, “Bloodlines”, World Literature Today, 75: 1 (2001) in Literature Online lion.chadwyck.co.uk [accessed 22 February 2005]: para. 4 of 5.
12 I borrow the phrase “pornography of Empire” from David Dabydeen. See Dabydeen, “On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today”, in Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and Critics, Maggie Butcher, ed. (Sydney; Mundelstrup, Denmark and Coventry: Dangaroo Press, 1989), 121-135; 121.
13 Although hooks also notes that white men (rather than black men) continued to be identified in the late twentieth century as potential rapists for black women: “[t] he emphasis on the white male as sexual exploiter in black communities often deflects attention away from black male sexual exploitation of black women”, indicating another persistent legacy of slavery (hooks 1982: 68).
14 D’Aguiar, Fred, “The Last Essay About Slavery”, in The Age of Anxiety, Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter, eds. (London: Virago, 1996): 125-147; 131.
15 Nye, Robert, “No Rhythm in the Heart of Darkness”, The Times, 2 August 2000, section Times 2: 18.
16 King, Richard, “I Fell ‘Lurve’”, PN Review, 27: 4 (2001) in Literature Online <http://0-lion.chadwyck.co.uk> [accessed 22 February 2005]: para. 4 of 8.
17 D’Aguiar, Fred, “Shadow Play”, An English Sampler: New and Selected Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001): I. 1.
18 Writing about rape also distances Bloodlines from simulating slave narratives, as Cynthia S. Hamilton notes, rape was “the often alluded to, but unspeakable subject” of nineteenth-century American slave narratives. See Hamilton, “Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative”, Journal of American Studies, 30 (1996): 429-445; 435.
19 Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory”: 11.
20 D’Aguiar, Fred, “Home”, An English Sampler: I. 9.
21 Eckstein, Lars, “Getting Back to the Idea of Art as Art—An Interview with David Dabydeen”, World Literature Written in English, 39: 1 (2001): 27-36; 30.
22 In the abovementioned interview with Eckstein, Dabydeen adds: “you can’t write about slavery in a flat, flattened way with a [...] parade of grievances or with a display of ‘look how hurt I am, look at my scars’” (Eckstein 2001: 30).
23 Phillips, Caryl, Crossing the River (1993. New York: Vintage, 1995): 237.
Auteur
Nottingham Trent University, UK
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