Rituals of “rememory” in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
p. 177-198
Résumé
Set on a fictive Caribbean island, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) branches out across three continents probing the effects of the past on a wide range of issues—the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, Black and Jewish Diasporas, post-colonial societies and First World relations. Well ahead of her time, Marshall explores interconnections between the local and the global in our transnational world.
This essay focuses on Marshall’s extremely original evocation of the Middle Passage and notably on her interweaving of Black and Jewish diasporic destinies. It also argues that The Chosen Place, The Timeless People appears as a generically hybrid novel. If Marshall reworks some widely used tropes of the (neo)-slave narrative, she ultimately strays away from the canon and produces a unique, original fictional work.
Through a close analysis of the text, the article attempts to decipher the various layers of meaning underlying the persistence of rituals and haunted presences on Bourne Island. While this imaginary place is a paradigm for impoverished, post-colonial countries it also acts as a resonance chamber, reverberating with the effects of past and present vicissitudes across continents. The novel is marked by the irreconcilable tension between cyclical and progressive conceptions of time, suggesting that the history and memory of this “repeating island” leave but little hope for redress and reconciliation.
Texte intégral
Verandahs, where the pages of the sea
are a book left open by an absent master
in the middle of another life—
I begin here again,
begin until this ocean’s
a shut book....
Derek Walcott, Another Life
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”
1Almost forty years after its publication, Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) strikes the reader anew with its artful blending of universal and topical concerns. Set on a tiny Caribbean island, the novel branches out over three continents probing the effects of the past on a wide range of issues— the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, Black and Jewish Diasporas, post-colonial societies and First World relations.1 Well ahead of her time, Marshall explores interconnections between the local and the global in a transnational world.
2A Barbadian immigrant in the United States, the writer holds an insider/outsider position on the American literary map.2 This in-between status—neither African-American nor Caribbean— was not a very comfortable one during the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by the ideological confrontation between Black Power intellectuals and White establishment, African-American writings took on a radical stance that left little room for a more nuanced approach to issues of race and class. The period was also marked by the revival of the archetypal African American genre: the slave narrative. A maverick of sorts, Paule Marshall embarked on her own literary trajectory which earned her some severe criticism from writers Nikki Giovanni and Kamau Brathwaite among others. Her writings have received due recognition only within the past two decades as critics are opening up to Marshall’s hybrid fiction that suggests comparisons with African-American women writers (Gloria Naylor comes to mind) but also with the themes and preoccupations of Caribbean writers like Fred D’Aguiar or Caryl Phillips.3
3 This essay focuses on Marshall’s peculiar representation of the Middle Passage and on her interweaving of Black and Jewish diasporic figures, i.e. ironically the very aspects that were criticized or overlooked when the book first came out. I will also argue that Marshall creates a unique, original genre in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Even as she resorts to some tropes of the (neo)- slave narrative, she ultimately strays away/departs from the strict generic canon and produces a hybrid fictional work.
4The novel unfolds against the backdrop of a fictional, forgotten and forlorn Caribbean island where blacks, whites and mixed race people—locals and visitors of various origins and social classes—are brought together. The novel’s starting point is the arrival of an American team (headed by Saul Amron, a Jewish American anthropologist) whose mission is to assist the islanders in their economic development. Bourne Island4 is divided into two sections: the rich one inhabited by the local elite and Bournehills, the devastated part of the island —Marshall’s “chosen place” whose inhabitants are the “timeless people”, poor, black, forever marked by their past enslavement. Their spokeswoman, Merle Kinbona,5 the offspring of a white sugar cane plantation owner and a black servant, is back on the island after a tumultuous stay in London. The tense, ambivalent relations between natives and foreigners, blacks and whites, haves and have-nots dramatize the legacy of the past and the vicissitudes of post-colonial power relationships. The novel closes with the cancellation of Saul’s project, his wife Harriet’s suicide, and Merle’s decision to return to Africa and join her estranged husband and daughter.
5In its sweeping epic scope, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People tells the intertwined histories of slavery and the black Diaspora in reverse, starting from the New World.6 The novel’s narrative and thematic structure appears to be governed by a strange dialectics between spatial unity and temporal expansion. Bourne Island lies at the far east of the Caribbean, in a nexus position between the New World, Africa and Europe:
Like the others, it was small, poignantly so, and vulnerable, defenseless. Like all the rest, it seemed expendable: for what could it be worth to the world, being so small? Unlike the others [...] it stood off by itself to the right, almost out in the Atlantic. It might have been put there by the giants to mark the eastern boundary of the entire continent, to serve as its bourn [...] it remained—alone amid an immensity of sea and sky, becalmed now that its turbulent history was past, facing east, the open sea, and across the sea, hidden beyond the horizon, the colossus of Africa.7
6 History and geography have come together to mark Bourne Island as a physical and cultural crossroads between past and present, between Old World and New World. This is Marshall’s “chosen place” that brings together “heirs and descendants” (title of Part I) of the slave society and of colonial rule and forces them to confront their burdensome pasts. Seen from a plane, this patch of land appears to be “at the will of a mindless sea,” like a boat or a ship that could be swallowed by the sea at any moment. Given her insider/outsider perspective, Marshall manages to capture and to convey the sense of fragmentation, the instability, the cultural heterogeneity, that characterize the Caribbean. Outsiders who try to apply their methods to understanding the area are soon confronted with their incapacity to decipher its multiple layers of meaning. This is precisely what happens when the team of American anthropologists comes to Bourne Island. Saul Amron (and the reader in his wake) embarks on an ethnographic exploration of the island only to find out that his “tools” are not adapted to penetrating the secrets of “the chosen place”.
7One could actually argue that Marshall’s fictive island epitomizes the volatility, the unpredictability but also the serial, repetitive nature that, according to certain scholars, characterizes the Caribbean.8 Approached from this angle, Bourne Island appears as a “repeating island,” a chaotic space “which can lead to unexpected corridors allowing passage from one point to another in the labyrinth” (Benitez-Rojo 1992: 3). The peculiar topography, suggestive of timelessness but also of transience, makes the island a fit outdoor stage for the performance of human passions lying dormant. The “wrecked hills that appeared to be racing en masse toward the sea [...] looked like crude seats of some half-ruined coliseum, where an ancient tragedy was still performed” (99, my italics).9 The island appears as “a narrow winding corridor” taking the visitors into another time (95). It seems unreal, a trick played on the eye. To Saul it evokes “every place that had been wantonly used, its substance stripped away, and then abandoned”... (100) A contact zone of intersecting histories and geographies, the place elicits a sense of déjà vu among the main characters; Merles, Saul and his wife Harriet are set off on intricate journeys into (re) memory.
8The island reverberates with the turbulent history of the Caribbean—the destruction of the local Caribs and the importing of slaves by the Whites, “those uninvited guests”. Not much has changed in Bournehills since slavery times; the economy is still based on sugar cane cutting and the poor islanders still live with the memory of the slave revolt led by Cuffee Ned, a memory rekindled and re-enacted during the yearly carnival. The islanders’ everyday life is accompanied by the persistent sound of the ocean. In its fluidity, instability and clamour, the sea perpetrates the “unceasing lament” of those drowned during the Middle Passage:
It was the Atlantic this side of the island, a wild-eyed, marauding sea the color of slate, deep, full of dangerous currents, lined with row upon row of barrier reefs, and with a sound like that of the combined voices of the drowned raised in a loud unceasing lament—all those, the nine million and more it is said, who in their enforced exile, their Diaspora, had gone down between this point and the homeland lying out of sight to the east. (106)10
9An emotionally charged place, Bournehills is given a majestic stature in the novel. It is home and exile, space and place, “rememory” and forgetfulness, past and present. The poor inhabitants— “heirs and descendants” of slaves, victims of colonization and neoslavery—form an indistinct, faceless group, marking the significant events on the island by their regular appearance: immobile and silent, they gaze intently at the white visitors, their inquisitive eyes asking for an impossible redress. The islanders’ silent chorus speaks louder than the most vociferous accusation.11 Messengers of another time, they are never assigned names; in their still life poses, they look “unimaginably old,” as if they had come from the other end of “a dimly lit corridor” (137). Their deep-seated incapacity and unwillingness to communicate suggest the impossibility of uttering the unspeakable. Drowned in the submarine unity of the Caribbean, their ancestors’ traumatic experience is forever silenced.12 If the tragedy of the Middle Passage remains inarticulate, it is palpable in the alternating rhythms of the roaring ocean and in the islanders’ pregnant silence; or, in Merle Kinbona’s oscillating moods between occasional verbal overflow (actually a counterpart to the islanders’ silence) and cataleptic states of mute isolation.
10Merle, arguably the novel’s central character and Marshall’s alter ego, is an educated, “twice diasporized” half-breed whose physical appearance betrays the presence of conflicting strains: Bantu face dusted over lightly with talcum powder, earrings carved in the form of European saints, colorful print dress with African tribal motifs. “She had donned this somewhat bizarre outfit, each item of which stood opposed to, at war even, with the other, to express rather a diversity and disunity within herself, and her attempt, unconscious probably, to reconcile these opposing parts, to make of them a whole” (5). Her heavy bracelets, “like a captive’s chains [...] lent a clangorous, unsettling note to her every move” (5). Her name is a strange composite of the African Kinbona ( “That’s just a little something left over from my African campaign”) and the European Merle: “The name’s just Merle. And soon it won’t even be that. No names. No tags or titles. Just anonymity and silence”. (72) Insecure, at odds with her self, Merle is tempted to join the islanders’ “anonymity and silence”. As if replicating Bourne Island’s nexus location, she is both bridge and center, go-between and spokesperson. Saul’s intuition is correct; to know the island and its people he has to know Merle, she “appeared to contain them all” (260).
11The entire text is fraught with tensions arising from the juxtaposition of ahistorical (horizontal) and historical (vertical) perspectives, from the collusion between the Western notion of regularly progressive time and the “aquatic, sinuous culture of the Caribbean where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar” (Benitez-Rojo 1992: 11). Time seems to have come to a standstill on Bournehills, even if outside intervention is meant to propel it forwards. Approaching the island, Harriet is overcome by “the sensation of being borne backward in time rather than forward in space”. (21) The cyclical nature of the islanders’ seasonal activities acts upon the visitors’ psyche modifying their sense of space and time, laying bare the workings of their subconscious. This peculiar environment brings to the fore “some mysterious and obscured region of the mind which ordinary consciousness did not dare admit to light” (21); in Saul’s case, “it could have been a troubled region within himself to which he had unwittingly returned” (100). Time appears to be governed by “its own laws” of simultaneous expansion and contraction: days and weeks seem to take years (Saul no longer knows how long he has been there), while whole centuries are telescoped into recent events. Moreover, the boundaries between the living and the dead, between the young and the old tend to dissolve. The local children seem “unnervingly old and knowing [...] They might have been very old people who had lived out their time, and then instead of dying, had resumed the forms of the children they had once been and begun the life cycle all over again” (168). Saul is prone to a feeling that “he had stumbled upon a world that was real, inescapably real, yet at the same time somehow unreal; of the present but even more so of the past”. (216) He desperately wants to reach these “holdouts who [...] continued to stand like so many ghosts washed up by the sea under the great shadow of the house” (139). Churning the events of the past, the “repeating island” seems to expand in space and in time; thus, the “shadow” of the house evokes the Great House and its slaves but it could also signify other Shadows in recent history— the Shoa and the nuclear “holocaust”.13
12 The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is built on thematic and narrative triangulations. As Eric Sundquist put it, “the sea sounds of history toll differently” for Merle, Saul and Harriet.14 The African, European and New World “presences”15 that have come together in the making of Caribbean cultural identities are represented, albeit rather systematically, by the three characters. A former site of slave trade turned into a post-colonial society, Bourne Island is the aptly “chosen” place for a repetition of sorts, a remake with a difference as it were, of past events. At its centre lies the sugar factory: with its connections to slavery, underdevelopment, capitalism, imperialism, repression, and wars, it is one of the present-day manifestations of the plantation “the extraordinary Caribbean machine that repeats itself continually” (Benitez-Rojo 1992: 8).16 Parallels between the plantation work of slavery and plant work under neo-colonialism are manifest. Bourne Island sustains dangerous race and class divisions made visible in the geographical separation of the islanders. The men working in the factory evoke their enslaved ancestors ( “ghosts they might have been from some long sea voyage taken centuries ago”, 154). The white manager Pollard, a reincarnation of the past overseer, holding to old ways, jodhpurs, polished boots, hat and horse, “called to mind some ghost who refused to keep to his grave even during the daytime” (161). The veranda of Merle’s house, “like some no man’s land no one dared cross” (132), epitomizes this separation: the poor islanders stare at it from a distance but refuse to join the party even though they are invited to do so.17
13Race and class distinctions are temporarily abolished during the yearly “Bacchanal! Big Fete!” “Carnival in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is less the pre-Lenten tourist festival, less the ancient cosmic festival of chaos and order, and more a ritual re-enactment of an event from the past—a re-memory of the Fall that displaced and dispersed people of African descent to the Americas” . . .18 The opening march, punctuated by the sound of steps and the ring of bracelets, evokes the Africans’ forced migration to the New World:
It was an awesome sound—the measured tread of those countless feet in the dust and the loud report of the bracelets, a sombre counterpoint to the gay carnival celebration. It conjured up [...] dark alien images of legions marching bound together over a vast tract, iron fitted into dank stone walls, chains [...] rattling in the deep hold of ships, and exile in an inhospitable land—an exile bitter and irreversible in which all memory of the former life and of the self as it had once been had been destroyed. (282)
14The novel is suffused with “haunted imagery” that foregrounds the overlapping of present time and historical time. Marshall “resurrects” the dead as a silent, menacing presence that relentlessly haunts the living. Featuring the former slaves, the Bournehills band wear identical blue-and-white striped costumes and don the same masque “as if they had actually become those they were depicting” (283).19 The past is strangely present in “those eyes which always appeared to be regarding you from across a great vista of time” (283). The ghostly spell of slavery hanging over the march is broken with the re-enactment of Cuffee Ned’s revolt.20 His legacy is passed on mainly through ritualized expression: body language, gestures, music, drums. The pageant proceeds with a “restrained two-step dance” conveying the entire ceremony a binary character, with alternating rhythms between silence and music, death and life, sadness and jubilation, defeat and triumph. “So it went the entire afternoon, the dead march alternating with the vivid scene on the float and the triumphal outpouring” (288). Remindful of the ocean’s tide, the movement is repeated throughout the streets culminating with the performance of Cuffee Ned’s victory. The entire town participates in this climactic moment that contrasts with the numbed silence of the opening ceremony. In the cyclical repetition of the ritual, the Bournehills people stubbornly stake their claim to this crucial episode of their history affirming its messianic value (they await the second coming of a mythic slave rebel). The poor islanders live with the (re) memory of the past: “We’re an odd, half-mad people [...] We don’t ever forget anything, and yesterday comes like today to us” (102), confesses Merle. It is as if the past had abruptly stopped with the slave institution, as if historical continuity had been rendered impossible. Marshall’s islanders seem haunted by a “history that has not ended, [...] by a historical occurrence of an event that, in effect, does not end”.21
15If Bourne Island is a paradigm for impoverished, post-colonial countries it also acts as a resonance chamber, echoing past and present vicissitudes, perpetrated there and elsewhere. Sugar’s nightclub,22 the meeting point of islanders and visitors, still bears signs of having served as one of the famous West Indian barracoons.23
It resembled a junk shop rather than a nightclub, so filled was it with an assortment of odds and ends. It could have been the dumping ground of the world. All the discards of the nations, all the things that had become worn out over the centuries or fallen into disuse might have been brought and piled in a great charnel heap here. (82)
16 Mutatis mutandis, Marshall’s description of “the dumping ground of the world” echoes certain literary and visual representations of the Shoah.24 The omniscient narrator’s voice traces the long-term effects of slavery from the vantage point of a post-Holocaust consciousness. There emerges a bleak, repetitive vision of history in which wrongs are endlessly perpetuated and impossible to efface. The novel’s epigraph (from the Tiv of West Africa)— “Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end”— cancels out any hope for redress, as if the concentric view of time with its inherent fatalism had won over the West European notion of progress, of regeneration.
17 The title of the novel harbors an implicit association with another chosen people and another timeless place. By making Bourne Island the meeting ground between Merle and Saul, children of the Black and Jewish Diaspora respectively, Marshall adds a significant layer of history and memory to the text. A sympathetic outsider, ready to assist Bournehills in its economic uplift, Saul Amron is a Sephardic Jew whose first wife had been a survivor of Auschwitz. The instant he sets foot on the island, Saul is prone to a strange feeling of déjà vu. In its barrenness and depletion, the place “seemed to hold some personal meaning for him, his thoughts becoming complex, circular, wheels within a wheel” (100). The islanders’ expressions of self-hatred mingled with disdain for their own kin mirror Saul’s own ambivalent feelings. He craves acceptance from the faceless, silent people whose penetrating gaze seems to lay bare all his flaws. This gnawing sense of kinship acquires sudden meaning when (in a partial analogy with the biblical Saul) he is struck by a two-fold revelation: his Sephardic Jewish heritage has made him sensitive to the suffering of others; however, atonement can only come from one’s inner self. His momentary communion with Merle is based on affinities that go back to their ancestors’ experience of suffering and oppression over centuries of displacement.25 Merle and Saul “might have been witness to, victim of, some unspeakably inhuman act and been condemned to wander the world telling every stranger about it”. (89) Though differently placed in origin and situation, Merle and Saul “can intimately ‘have’ the same experience”.26 This empathic intersubjectivity is what allows them to engage in acts of “mutual rememory”. In its display of excess and chaos, carnival time catalyses their feelings, prompting them to pour out their respective tales. As he is watching the silent march of the Bournehills band, Saul sums up the painful past of the two Diasporas in a condensed, elliptical statement ( “it evokes better than any words in the world what it must have been like back then for your people—and for mine for that matter, all those centuries”, 314). Marshall aptly refrains from reifying Black or Jewish identity. Merle and Saul express irony, sarcasm and scepticism toward each other but are also tolerant toward their respective idiosyncrasies. A significant reversal of roles occurs when Saul, who has been interviewing the local inhabitants for his research, is interviewed by Merle, the native Caribbean educated in England. Throughout, the novel addresses many of the epistemological, ideological and moral issues that anthropology as a discipline has had to face in its confrontation with “the Other”.
18Though not meant to last, the relationship between Merle and Saul is built on trust, responsibility and independence. Mutual confessions pour forth as each discovers in the other an empathic listener and a unique chance to atone for past sins. In a poignant scene, Merle’s and Saul’s deceased wife Shosha’s faces seem to merge in a joint accusation: “And it fleetingly occurred to [Saul] that perhaps in Merle he was being offered a chance to make good that old failure” (399). Sitting by her bedside, Saul takes in the objects in the room, Merle’s personal belongings “dumped in a confused heap” (401) but also the prints and drawings hanging on the walls. The latter retrace the history of slavery starting with the Middle Passage27 and moving on to scenes of the planters’ wives and daughters out for their late-afternoon drives, next to others showing “black figures at work in the fields that looked deceptively pleasant in the old prints”... (400) “Fixed and rooted in that other time”, Bournehills serves as a lasting testimony to all that had gone on [...] as a reminder... that it was not yet over, only the forms had changed [...] and finally, as a memorial [...] to the figures bound to the millwheel in the print and to each other in the packed, airless hold of the ship in the drawing. (402, my italics) It is then and there, in Merle’s room, among the scattered objects in the room, “memorabilia of a lifetime—and of the time that reached beyond her small life” (401) that Saul has a new revelation: the room not only mirrors Merle’s “attempt to impose some order on the chaos” (401), it is a representation of Bournehills’ history and memory and, by extension, of the entire Caribbean:
Like the room, [Bournehills], too, was perhaps a kind of museum, a place in which had been stored the relics and remains of the era recorded in the faded prints on the walls [...] Bournehills, its shabby woebegone hills and spent land, its odd people who at times seemed other than themselves, might have been selected as the repository of the history which reached beyond it to include the hemisphere north and south (402).28
19Saul views the Caribbean as a “paradoxical space in which one has the illusion of experiencing totality” (Benitez-Rojo 1992: 17) possibly because people neutralize violence through real or symbolic sacrifice, by referring society to the trans-historical codes of Nature.
20The “timeless people’s” rites and rituals remain shrouded in mystery.29 In the novel’s closing lines, a heavy curtain of rain covers the roads of the island erasing all the traces of the place and the people. Likewise, the frequent use of modals like “might”, “might have been,” “could have been” constantly undermines the reliability of the narrator so that the reader is left wondering whether this may have all been a dream or rather the nightmare from which Bournehills has not awakened yet.30 This narrative unreliability underscores the novel’s hybrid generic form. If The Chosen Place, The Timeless People clearly belongs to the long series of African American writing that take slavery as its “pre-text”,31 it does raise puzzling generic questions: Is it a slave narrative? A neo-slave narrative? A palimpsest narrative? A trans-national historical novel? Marshall’s novel certainly contains elements of all. But while it reworks tropes of the (neo)-slave narrative, the novel does not conform to the classic definitions of the genre.32 I would suggest that it is a mark of Marshall’s literary originality to have crossed the generic boundaries traced by her predecessors and to create a unique literary work that defies strict generic definitions.
21Pathos gives way to bathos in the novel’s open ending. Saul and Merle’s capacity to act as go-betweens (as “island bridges”) has reached its limits. Harriet is claimed by the sea that harbors the victims of the Middle Passage. Saul heads back to the United States in search of a new vocation, while Merle embarks on a voyage to Africa, via an original trajectory that will take her south to Trinidad, then to Recife33 and on to Uganda. Her “chosen place” however remains Bourne Island, the New World, where Africa exists as an imagined community, with an imaginative geography and history. “To this ’Africa, ’ which is a necessary part of the Caribbean imaginary, we can’t literally go home again” (Hall 1990: 241). A return to the mother country of origin appears impossible. Merle and Saul remain diasporic identities, “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Hall 1990: 244). Within its paradoxical space and time, Marshall’s novel ultimately probes the limits of inter-personal understanding and the possibility of intelligible discourse across cultures and religions. Merle and Saul’s momentary communion offer a glimmer of hope for the future of inter-personal relationships across Diasporas. But their short-lived experience could only take place in Bournehills, “someplace the world has turned its back on and even God’s forgotten” (469). It is no mere accident that the “chosen place” should be located in the Caribbean— “the first, the original and the purest diaspora”.34
Bibliographie
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Works Cited
Bell, Bernard. The African American Novel and its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
10.1515/9780822382058 :Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.
Carby, Hazel. “Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989; 125-143.
Charras, Françoise. “Landings: Robert Hayden and Kamau Brathwaite’s Poetic Renderings of the Middle Passage in Comparative Perspective”, in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, Maria Diedrich, H. L. Gates, Jr. and C. Pedersen, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; 57-70.
Denniston, Dorothy. The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993.
Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash, Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992.
social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/glissa1.htm.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Theorizing Diaspora, Braziel, Jana Evans and A. Manur, eds.. 1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003; 233-247.
Hall, Stuart. “Caribbean Identity in Question”, “Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture”, University of Warwick, 1991. www.mona.uwi.edu/library/stuart\_hall.html
Marshall, Paule. The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. 1969. New-York: Vintage, 1992.
10.1080/02690050108589754 :Phillips, Caryl. A New World Order. Random House: New York, 2001.
Reyes, Angelita. “Carnival as an Archeological Site for Memory”, in Memory, Narrative and Identity. A. Singh, J. Skerett, Jr. and R. Hogan, eds. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994; 179- 198.
Rushdy, Ashraf. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Rushdy, Ashraf. Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction. The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/rushdy\_remembering.html.
Spillers, Hortense. “Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985; 151-174.
10.4159/9780674044142 :Sundquist, Eric. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Walcott, Derek. Selected Poetry. Oxford: Heinemann, 1993.
Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Notes de bas de page
1 Cf. Caryl Phillips’ comment on the Caribbean artists as being better prepared for migration than others since three continents, Europe, Africa, Asia have provided the bedrock of their identity. “Caribbean people are forever moving between versions of ‘home’, spurred on by the restless confluence of blood in their veins, an impure mixture that suggests transcendence and connectivity”. A New World Order (New York: Random House, 2001): 131.
2 Her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) centers on the members of a Barbadian family in New York.
3 It has been noted that Caribbean writers made earlier and more numerous attempts at portraying the Middle Passage than their American counterparts. See the individual works and the long debate between Lamming, Naipaul and Brathwaite on the concept of Caribbean culture. Cf. Françoise Charras, “Landings: Robert Hayden and Kamau Brathwaite’s Poetic Renderings of the Middle Passage in Comparative Perspective”, in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, Maria Diedrich, Henry L. Gates, Jr. and C. Pedersen, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 57-70.
4 Note the choice of the name “bourne,” i. e. edge, limit.
5 The name suggests the kinship of bones, maybe as a reference to her African origins.
6 “The chronology of Marshall’s publications suggests her intentional design to reverse the ‘middle passage’; that is she examines the experience of blacks not in transit from Africa to the New World but from the New World back toward Africa”. Dorothy H. Denniston, The Fiction of Paule Marshall (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983): xii.
7 Marshall Paule, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969. New-York: Vintage, 1992): 12-13. The page numbers of subsequent quotations are noted parenthetically in the text.
8 Influenced by the theory of Chaos, Antonio Benitez-Rojo claims that “within the sociocultural fluidity of the Caribbean archipelago, within its historiographic turbulence and its ethnological and linguistic clamor, within its generalized instability of vertigo and hurricane, one can sense the features of an island that ‘repeats’ itself, unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and lands of the earth...” The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992): 3.
9 Marshall seems to anticipate Derek Walcott’s vision of a devastated Caribbean devoid of grand ruins and monuments whose only exhibits are “the rusted slave wheel of the sugar factory, cannon, and chains, the crusted amphora of cutthroats, all the paraphernalia of degradation and cruelty which we exhibit as history [...] as if the ovens of Auschwitz and Hiroshima were the temples of the race”. “The Muse of History”, What the Twilight Says (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998): 44.
10 Note Derek Walcott’s similar perception: “The sea sighs with the drowned from the Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines [...] bleeds in the scarlet of the immortelle, and even the actions of surf on sand cannot erase the African memory”..., “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, What the Twilight Says (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998): 81.
11 “The women were silent also but they gave the impression of being on the verge of uttering some word, some dark pronouncement which they would intone in prophetic Delphic voices” (135). As Robert Hayden suggested, “a silence can be audible as a laugh, a sigh, a groan” (Collected Prose, “Reflections,” in Charras 1999: 59).
12 “Africa, the signified which could not be represented directly in slavery, remained and remains the unspeakable ‘presence’ in Caribbean culture”. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, in Theorizing Diaspora, Jana Evans Braziel and A. Manur, eds. (1990. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 240. The only story the islanders are willing to pass on, by re-enacting it during carnival is that of Cuffee Ned’s revolt. Note also Edouard Glissant’s comment on Kamau Brathwaite’s sweeping statement about Caribbean cultures, “the unity is submarine”: “To my mind, this expression can only evoke all those Africans weighed down with ball and chain and thrown overboard whenever a slave ship was pursued by enemy vessels and felt too weak to put up a fight. They sowed in the depths the seeds of an invisible presence. And so transversality, and not the universal transcendence of the sublime, has come to light”. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse. Trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992). social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/glissa1.htm.
13 The nuclear menace is represented by the “shadowy” character of Harriet’s first husband, a physicist working in the development of nuclear programs.
14 Sundquist, Eric, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005): 277.
15 The term is borrowed from Aimé Césaire’s and Leopold Senghor’s metaphor: Présence africaine, présence européenne, présence américaine. Cf. Hall 2003: 240.
16 My use of the concepts “machine” and “plantation” is informed by Benitez-Rojo’s interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept. “[...] every machine is a conjunction of machines coupled together, and each one of these interrupts the flow of the previous one,” (Benitez-Rojo 1992: 6)
17 The text repeatedly evokes Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory” as the continued presence of that which has disappeared or been forgotten.
18 Reyes, Angelita, “Carnival as an Archeological Site for Memory” in Memory, Narrative and Identity, A. Singh, J. Skerett, Jr. and R. Hogan, eds. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994): 180.
19 Edwidge Danticat describes a similar procession during the carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. Cf. After the Dance: A Walk through carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002): 44.
20 “Cuffee Ned perfectly embodies Bournehills’ idea of subversion that is rehearsed in various New World historical narratives—Haiti’s Toussaint L’Ouverture and Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey of the southern United States share the same heroic constellation”. Hortense Spillers, “Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985): 162.
21 Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992): xix.
22 Note the significant choice of the name. Sundquist quotes a chilling Cuban aphorism, “Sugar is made with blood” (Sundquist 2005: 276).
23 “The rusted remains of the iron manacles that had been fitted around the ankles and wrists, around the dark throats, could still be seen [...] in the walls of the cellar. It had all begun there” (82).
24 Paule Marshall is not the only Caribbean writer to resort to the Holocaust as a possible point of departure for understanding slavery. Caryl Phillips, Derek Walcott and Jamaica Kincaid also probe connections between Black and Jewish history and memory.
25 As Paul Gilroy points out, “fruitful links between the experiences of oppression encountered by [Jews and Blacks] can be deduced not from the stress on pain and suffering, on dissonance and the negative [...] but from a more primary experience, namely that of fear and vulnerability: the helplessness of the village community before the perpetual and unpredictable imminence of the lynching or the pogrom, the race riot”. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993): 206.
26 I am indebted to Ashraf Rushdy’s general reflections on “The Palimpsest Imperative in African American Fiction”, Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (The University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/rushdy\_remembering.html
27 “In the midst of these... stood a large, very old... drawing of a three-masted Bristol slaver [...] the kind famous in its day. It had been meticulously rendered in cross-section to show how the cargo, the men, women and children, the babies at breast, had been stowed away on the closely tiered decks to take up the least room on the journey” (401)
28 “The Antilles are an island bridge connecting, in ‘another way, ’ North and South America. This geographical accident gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the character of an archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction”... (Benitez-Rojo 1992: 2, my italics).
29 Importing American technology and know-how into this universe only provokes misunderstandings as the presence of “the other” brings to the surface deep-seated feelings of resentment on the part of the local people. “You can’t see for looking”... Merle tells Saul (390).
30 Besides this reference to Joyce, the text contains numerous inter-textual references; among others, to the Wandering Jew, the Ancient Mariner and, of course, The Tempest.
31 Cf.Carby, Hazel, “Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989): 126.
32 Cf. Bell, Bernard, The African American Novel and its Tradition. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987) and Ashraf Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
33 Recife was the first place in the New World to harbor Sephardic Jews after their expulsion from Spain.
34 Hall, Stuart, “Caribbean Identity in Question” (University of Warwick “Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture”, 1991): www.mona.uwi.edu/library/stuart\_hall.html. For Hall, diaspora means hybridity and difference; hence his vision of the New World as the real beginning of diaspora and difference. Cf. Hall: 1990.
Auteur
University of Versailles
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