1In a film entitled Nèg Maron,1 released at the end of 2004, the young black male protagonist breaks into the house of a rich white family in an unnamed Caribbean island and stumbles on a picture showing slaves stacked together in rows on a ship to the New World colonies. This incident is for the young black thief a violent confrontation with his own past and the cruel history of his ancestors at the hands of white slave traders and owners. The viewing of this print becomes a turning point for the young man who struggles to find a place in a society for which he is one of many young, unemployed black men in the Caribbean who have restricted future prospects and often lead a life of crime. The ‘malêtre’ of the main protagonist is linked in this particular scene to the history of the Middle Passage, a crucial event in the history of the Caribbean and in the shaping of human relations in the region. The film’s Creole motto, ‘Ni chenn an pyé, ni chenn an têt’ (‘Ni chaînes aux pieds, ni chaînes dans la tête/No chains on your feet, No chains in your head’) highlights the Caribbean spirit of resistance through its homage to the runaway slaves, the Maroons, as well as the desire to choose one’s own destiny embodied by the slave flight from the plantation.2 Yet, as this particular scene of Nèg Maron shows, the wish to break loose and fulfil one’s destiny entails a confrontation with the past through an investigation of the slave trade and its ongoing effects on Caribbean communities.

2The ‘Middle Passage’, a term used to designate the Atlantic trade routes which forcedly brought African slaves to the European colonies of the New World has left profound marks on the psyche of descendants of those who experienced this form of transport. The Trade and enslavement has left profound marks on Caribbean societies. On the one hand it gave birth to a culture unique by its creolised form of an African, European and Amerindian heritage. On the other hand, far from being a mere geographic uprooting, the ‘Middle Passage’ was a break from one’s culture, one’s society and one’s history. The Creolised societies of the Caribbean are then characterised by a sense of loss as well as a problematic relationship both to their own culture and their past.

3One way of apprehending this fear of the past is to give voice to those silenced by colonial history. Writers and poets such as Fred D’Aguiar, Derek Walcott and David Dabydeen have tried to write the story of the Middle Passage by giving voice to those who were subjected to it. For instance, in his poem Turner,3 David Dabydeen recreates the infamous episode depicted in Turner’s 1840 painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying4 in which slave traders threw slaves overboard in an attempt to cash in on the insurance premiums secured on the ‘goods’ they were transporting. The silent victim of Turner’s painting is given a voice by Dabydeen: the drowning slave awakens from centuries of submersion in the sea to recreate a life and a personal history for himself. However, Dabydeen’s poem highlights the inescapable character of history and shows that the grief and suffering left by the Middle Passage cannot be erased nor forgotten. Yet, as I will attempt to show in this paper, the experience of the Middle Passage has had far reaching effects on the black population of the New World as well as on the white population descending from slave owners. This inescapable aspect of history has led several scholars to describe the rewriting of history in the fiction of the Caribbean region, described in Joycean terms as a nightmare from which the Caribbean peoples are trying to awake.5 The nightmare finds its roots in the violent history of slavery and colonialism. History itself is a nightmare rooted in the imposition by Western colonising powers of a system with which to articulate the notions of time and space. Indeed, from the moment the region was ‘discovered’ by Columbus, the history of the West Indies has been appropriated and formulated by the European nations that colonised the islands.

4In his Discours antillais,6 Martinican critic Edouard Glissant argues that, by consenting to the imposition of European history, the Caribbean intellectual élites tacitly agree to the idea of a ‘unicité historique’ controlled and enforced by Europe (Edouard Glissant, 1981: 158). The belief in a unique history common to the whole world and ordered by the historical events shaping the Western world is also reinforced by the notion that history equals continuity and progress. Moreover, this sense of history as a performance is used as a standard with which to measure the level of development of other regions of the globe. Therefore, achievement in terms of industrialisation, education, culture functions as a tool within the rhetoric of colonialism, and as an excuse to impose a European sense of ‘modernity’ onto other countries. In Glissant’s cultural theory, this diachronic vision of world history results in a contradiction, in the Caribbean region, between a community that instinctively tries to retract itself from the imposed history and the official ideology to which some intellectuals adhere. This contradiction eventually leads to a problematic quest for a communal identity. Glissant claims that the awareness of a history common to all members of a community contributes to the forging of a collective consciousness. The absence of an accumulating sense of history makes it impossible to attain this collective consciousness and also makes the quest for identity all the more difficult. History, as imposed by the outsider, is then lived as a neurosis, or in Glissantian terms as a ‘hantise du passé’ (Glissant, 1981: 254). This fear of the past translates itself in the need to wrench the writing of Caribbean history from the yoke of a Eurocentric vision of the world in order to rewrite the region’s history from the perspective of those on the margin, unheard and silenced, like Dabydeen’s drowning slaves. Yet, as I will show in this paper rewritings of certain aspects of Caribbean history such as the Middle Passage have concentrated on the exploration of the repercussions of colonial history on not only the descendants of slaves but also on descendants of slave-traders.

5In his sixth novel, entitled Natives of My Person,7 George Lamming reconstructs the Atlantic slave route from the perspective of Europeans. The novel is set in early colonial times, its characters are Europeans aboard a ship aptly named the Reconnaissance heading towards the New World in the hope of settling a colony on the island of San Cristobal. The novel retells the colonial search for new virgin territories where Europeans can fulfil their ‘manifest destiny’. Hailing from the fictional kingdom of Limestone, the ship’s Commander has a sole purpose: escape the moral depravity of his native land in order to set up a new colony where he can play out his moral ambitions. In his personal diary, the Commander describes his mission in the following words: ‘I declare it was my pride and less to build from this batallion of vandals and honest men alike such an order as might be the pride and example for excellence to Lime Stone herself; that I would plant some portion of the Kingdom in a soil that is new and freely chosen... here is a perfect school in the arts of conquest and command.’ (Lamming, 1992: 10-11)

6 Natives of My Person portrays the colonial enterprise as a search for glory and a means to exercise power. The ship functions as a microcosm of society, yet this is a fractured social world where officers—who remain nameless and are only referred to by their position title—are kept separate from those described as ‘those down below’: the ordinary crew. Moreover, the ship does not set alone at sea. At first, unknown to all but the Commander, a ship carrying the wives of the officers is also making its way towards the New World where the Commander’s intent is to use them as mates for his men. The presence of crew and women is perceived as a threat by the officers and both therefore need to be contained. In a verbal exchange between the Steward and the Surgeon the latter reflects that ‘there is an order of person who must be kept in the dark’. (Lamming, 1992: 190) This comment applies to the women as well as the men below deck. Moreover, the success of the commander’s ideal depends on the enforcement of a strict domination on the basis of gender and class.

7Next to the discourse of social and gender domination, another notable feature in Lamming’s novel is the absence of slaves; yet the activity of trading involving Africans is strongly felt through its effect on the men aboard. Within the ship’s microcosm crew and officers share a common abhorrence of Africans. The latter are portrayed as barbarians and the white men’s discourse is infected with fear of racial contamination and degeneration as well as with stereotypes of black men’s lust. Likewise, the native tribes of the New World are only alluded to, they remain a presence in the background. This physical absence of both slaves and native tribes highlights the way in which all colonial discourse seeks to erase the presence of those at the periphery. Their invisibility reflects imperialism’s process of ‘Othering’: the construction of an Other in terms of identity and culture. Lamming’s novel demonstrates how the self needs an Other in order to mark out its own limits and how class differences can be erased in the face of the utmost Other: the Barbarian or the African. This idea of class solidarity has been carefully analysed by John Barrell in his study of Thomas de Quincey’s writing.8 In The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism, Barrell defines imperialism’s construction of difference using the terms This/That/The Other to exemplify the representation of Asia as a frightening, barbaric space in De Quincey’s work and in particular in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.9 In Barrell’s analysis, De Quincey stands for the ‘This’ category: the son of a merchant who enjoys aristocratic and intellectual friendships but who at the same time is outside of these two categories because of his poverty. The London Poor or the servant girl of De Quincey’s cottage form the ‘That’, whose difference is based on social class. Barrell argues that this class difference can make way for a limited class solidarity when confronted with another race.10 Moreover, the imperial project needs this limited solidarity in order to provide a solid base against another civilisation with which they share nothing. This logic also appears in Lamming’s Natives of My Person as crew and officers unite in their contempt for slaves and Barbarians. At the same time, this process of Othering also appears in the Commander’s relationship to both Officers and Crew. Yet, Lamming’s novel shows the fragility of this reasoning as group allegiance constantly shifts according to circumstances.

8As Supriya Nair has argued in her study of George Lamming ‘the blindness of the sailors is their own critical weakness and the invisibility of the Tribes the latter’s most effective weapon’.11 Indeed, Lamming addresses the fallacies of colonial discourse by showing how colonizers become blinded by their own distorted vision. On the one hand the novel seems to mimic the triumphant travel narratives and the great stories of adventure and heroism in the New World. On the other, it also exposes the flawed vision of imperialism as the commander’s enterprise crumbles in the section entitled ‘Middle passage’. At the end of this passage the commander faces the mutiny of both officers and crew who forget class boundaries to unite against him. His personal ambition ends in failure as he is killed by two of his officers who in turn are killed by a crew member. In this episode, the Commander becomes the Officers and Crew’s Other as all feel betrayed by his proposed enterprise.

9The surviving crew escapes to the promised land of San Cristobal and the novel ends with a dialogue between the women who have also arrived on the island and are unaware of the ship’s tragic demise while the native tribes lurk in the background. The novel’s ending depicts an uncertain vision of the future, with only the invisible and down-trodden classes remaining to reconstruct a new world. All figures of European authority disappear through death or mental disintegration. For instance, the ship’s Priest, who embodies the moral authority of the Old World, survives the mutiny but collapses mentally. In his account of the final hours aboard the Reconnaissance, the Priest acknowledges the collapse of his vision of the world and is left with nothing but fragments. He declares: ‘A whole world broke into fragments, and before my very eyes. I saw it. To bear witness to the collapse of all order and to feel the foundations of every necessary belief crumble.’ (Lamming, 1992: 322) The priest’s words show the limits of an imperialist worldview. His account also highlights the failure of language and in particular the failure of language to carry moral significance. His mental collapse is the collapse of language as a conveyor of meaning: ‘And all my past, the whole history of my service, has finally deprived me of all meaning. I watch the words I can no longer name, and realize I am simply exercising with the alphabet. My life has been nothing but a fruitless exercise with the alphabet.’ (Lamming, 1992: 323) Although he refers to himself as the ‘shepherd of the coast of black cargoes’ he meets the same end as the nameless victims of the slave trade, like the nameless drowning of Dabydeen’s poem Turner. He writes: ‘My body is already like a corpse, nameless and without any memory of its former substance.’ (Lamming, 1992: 323)

10 By making a figure such as the Priest lose his power of speech Lamming underlines the limits of colonial discourses of power. Nevertheless, he shows this from the perspective of the colonizer rather than the colonised. Moreover, Lamming has explained that his title, ‘Natives of my person’, comes from a postcard depicting an African who represents his own entire family and is labelled ‘natives of my person’. The title may therefore suggest that one person can be many others at the same time: one cannot be simply male or female, black or white but all categories are linked to one another. Applied to the experience of the Middle Passage, Lamming’s idea suggests that the history of Africans cannot be seen separately from the history of Europeans.

11The Middle Passage bore consequences not only for the slaves transported to the new world but also for those who transported them and who also found themselves displaced in an unfamiliar environment. Far from diminishing the suffering of black slaves and from diminishing the responsibility of European slave traders and colonists, Lamming underlines the shared experience. Also the slave trade imported a history of violence, and Lamming shows how a system born out of violence can only bear violence in return.

12In a similar vein, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff addresses this issue of inherited violence in her own writing. In her two novels Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, Cliff retraces the psychological development and political awakening of a young mulatto girl growing up in an environment that presents contradictory world-views. By using an adolescent to bear witness of the history of Jamaica the novels place the narrative in a peripheral position, the main character being doubly marginalised by her gender and her racial background. The conflicting narratives of history, the gaps contained in the official historical discourse as well as in the individual family histories illustrate the feelings of alienation from the community felt by the main character, Clare Savage. Her very name pinpoints her dual heritage: Clare, an allusion to the light skin tone inherited from her European ancestors and Savage, which can allude both to the stereotyping of Africans as savages as well as to the violent character of the relationship between Europeans and African slaves in the Caribbean.

13In No Telephone to Heaven, Clare Savage is an adult living in America and Jamaica in the 1990s and who is described as disconnected from her geographical surroundings. To heal this sense of loss and disjunction she embarks on a journey to the Britain which as a former colonial subject she still considers her mother-country. The journey can be seen as a middle passage in reverse as the protagonist takes the route in an opposite direction, leaving the New World to confront the Old World. Like Andrea Levy’s Small Island12, Cliff ’s novel explores the relation between Britain and the colonies at the other end of the Middle Passage. In both novels, the journey to the mother-country is a bitter disappointment and a harsh lesson in racism.

14In No Telephone to Heaven, Clare with what is described as ‘the logic of a Creole’ (Cliff, 1996: 109) settles in London, the capital of ‘the mother country’ that brought the West Indies into existence and propelled them into the modern world. Ironically, the move to London is defined as a ‘natural’ step ‘toward the country by whose grace Clare’s people existed in the first place’ (Cliff, 1996: 109). Britain is the land of promises for West Indians; or so the latter were led to believe during as well as after colonisation. Through learning and education, Clare seeks to connect with her past. However, her approach is flawed from the start as she assumes erroneously that Britain’s glorious colonial history is also hers. The past she seeks out is invariably the reflection of Britain’s economic and cultural domination of its former colonies. London is simply a review of famous monuments celebrating a glorious imperial past but these remain a collection of ‘impressions’ for the novel’s protagonist (Cliff, 1996: 113). In this staging of the past the violent and racist aspects of colonialism are carefully ignored. This journey is an important step in understanding the history of the colonies, and in the process achieving a sense of identity. But, No Telephone signals that this identity can only be defined through confrontation with the racism raging in twentieth century British society.

15In the rhetoric of imperialism Britain pictured herself as a generous mother figure who showered her colonies with the gift of civilisation and the promise of a better life. In Cliff’s novel this image is carefully destroyed as the migrants from the former colonies are considered by governmental services and the British population as an unwanted economic burden. In No Telephone, the mother country is portrayed as a tired old lady, an impatient parent with a dried out bosom and of little comfort to her colonial children. The harshness of the colonial mother transpires with the intertextual reference to the motherless child of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s poem ‘Aurora Leigh’. Britain in No Telephone is a cold and rejecting parent. Like the child in ‘Aurora Leigh’ begging to be released from her mother’s overpowering influence, Clare also seeks to free herself from the restraints imposed on her by her racial and social background. As she tries to wrench free from her own family history she is also trying to escape her surrogate and suffocating mother Britain.

16 This journey back to the mother-country and the ensuing rejection is a cruel albeit necessary step for Clare Savage as she tries to make sense of who she is. Confrontation with the racism of British society finally encourages her to confront her own dual ancestry. In order to heal her psychological wounds Clare must return to her homeland of Jamaica. Symbolically, her journey is undertaken by sea, as ‘her ancestors had once done. Some concealed below. Some pacing above...’ (Cliff, 1996: 168). This journey also sparks a desire to recover the hidden history and culture of Jamaica. Clare familiarises herself with African based traditions and rediscovers revolutionary myths such as the story of Nanny, the female leader of a group of Maroon slaves. As in Lamming’s novel, Cliff shows that colonialism and slavery have led to a loss of humanity and to an ongoing psychological burden from which her female protagonist cannot escape. But in contrast to Lamming, Cliff’s novel shows that even in contemporary times the weight of the past cannot be escaped. For the protagonists of No Telephone to Heaven the inability to escape history leads to violent political action. Clare Savage joins a group of young rebels who wish to destroy Jamaica’s neo-colonial dependence on European and American culture. The group decides to attack the film-set of an American production on the life of Nanny the Maroon leader.

17On this Hollywood set Nanny is transformed into exotic commodity. She is sexualized so as to conform to Western stereotypes of black women. Cliff ’s text ironically notes the discrepancy between her appearance as it is known in Jamaican folk tales and in its Hollywood counterpart:

Two figures stood out in the costumed group. One, a woman, the actress called in whenever someone was needed to play a Black heroine, any Black heroine, whether Sojourner Truth or Bessie Smith, this woman wore a pair of leather breeches and a silk shirt—designer’s notion of the clothes that Nanny wore. Dear Nanny, the Coromantee warrior, leader of the Windward Maroons, whom one book described as an old woman naked except for a necklace made from the teeth of whitemen—sent by the Orishas to deliver her people [...] Facing the elegant actress was a strapping man, former heavyweight or running back, dressed as Cudjoe, tiny humpbacked soul. (Cliff, 1996: 206)

18The script turns the military successes of both Cudjoe and Nanny against the British into simple backdrops to a romantic plot. The portrayal of Nanny shows how the West Indian woman, and by extension the black West Indian population, is in danger of becoming this very same Hollywood stereotype, of becoming an actor in a country turned into a stage set.

19With the attack on the film set, the guerrilla group aims to make a political statement through the destruction of the overt appropriation of Jamaica’s national symbol of resistance. Violence becomes a necessary act for which Nanny’s legendary exploits provide inspiration. The ambush is also part of an act of remembering long forgotten powerful female figures of history such as Nanny herself, and other female runaway slaves and Obeah women. Curiously, in No Telephone, female resistance and motherly tenderness are intertwined. For instance, Clare is motivated in joining the fighters by her claims that: ‘the loss, the forgetting... of resistance... of tenderness... is a terrible thing’ (Cliff, 1996: 196).

20Cliff’s novel could stand as a narrative of revolution in which the author undermines the male fantasies of revolt explored by West Indian authors. These masculinist narratives echo western revolutionary texts by describing revolutionary acts undertaken by black men against a white oppressor. In No Telephone, political violence is not a male prerogative as women are no longer kept in a feminine role but claim for themselves a masculine role. In Cliff’s own words, women such as Clare Savage ‘claim masculinity’ as their own.13 Revolution in the Caribbean is then not a purely male contest between black and white, as in V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas, but now involves female participation and leadership. In this way, Cliff attempts to reinscribe black women’s position within the historical discourse on the Caribbean yet she does this by using a mixed race Creole. The ambush’s ending in an apocalyptic crossfire suggests that only death can bring wholeness by integrating both the black side of Clare’s cultural heritage and the white part. The apocalyptic ending could also point to the limits of that integration: in the final passage the scene explodes with nature’s sounds, the birds’ songs and the physical desintegration of the guerrilla fighters into the Jamaican landscape. After the final act of violence, nature reconquers the earth. In a sense the act seems futile. But as Lamming shows in Natives, Cliff views colonialism as a system which engenders violence. However, the apocalyptic scene at the end of the novel may well suggest that revolution, and in particular a female-led one cannot yet be realised. The fusion of Clare’s self with the Caribbean landscape at the end of the novel suggests that the representation of revolution is locked in a deadly dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine, black and white, from which only death provides final liberation.

21 In conclusion both Natives of My Person and No Telephone to Heaven focus on the idea of an inherited history of violence which is shared by those on either end of the Atlantic Middle Passage. Both novels also highlight the role of literature and writers in postcolonial nations: Cliff and Lamming draw attention to the continuing dissensions in Caribbean societies. The role of the postcolonial writer is to explore the relationship with the former colonizer as well as engage in an exercise of self-criticism as a member of a postcolonial community in a former colony. As such, their writing can be considered as examples of Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘littérature engagée’.14 Indeed, David Scott in the introduction to his extensive interview with George Lamming hails Lamming as a ‘risker’, a writer for whom ‘the sovereignty of the imagination’ entails re-examining the political and moral fallacies of postcolonial nations.15 In his essay ‘The Occasion for Speaking’, Lamming himself has underlined the crucial role of literature in the representaion of the Caribbean by claiming that the West Indian novel carries the same historical significance as the discovery of the region by Columbus in 1492.16 Indeed, for Lamming the Caribbean novel is ‘a historical event that attempts to expose and repair the scars of that arrival’ (Nair 28). Michele Cliff ’s writing can be viewed in a similar light as she examines the social, political and moral issues of post-independence Jamaica. Moreover, as the physical and mental desintegration at the end of each novel demonstrates, the discourse of colonial power is a failure. It may also suggest that language may not be able to adequately represent the wound left by colonial history. Indeed, the Middle Passage and its consequences on descendants of slavers as well as traders is still a point of contention to this day. The historical relevance of this event and the ways in which to remember and commemorate it are subject to numerous and at times heated debates. UNESCO declared the year 2004 the international year of slavery and organised an itinerant exhibition retracing the history of slavery and the role of all nations involved. In France, a law drafted by Christiane Taubira, Member of the French Parliament for French Guyana, recognised slavery as a crime against humanity. Yet, only in 2005 a few lines in a law proposal made by right-wing Members of Parliament in France underlined the need to stress the ‘positive contributions’ made by the French colonial experience; these lines sparked a heated discussion on the way in which the colonial enterprise is to be remembered and taught to future generations. As this recent debate shows the place of colonialism is still problematic in contemporary society. Yet as the protagonist of the film Nèg Maron shows acknowledging responsibility is crucial in helping the descendants of slaves and traders to address their common history.