I am in a tour boat that has a roof of glass to afford a panorama of the canal system; and the water is foul, in colour and in smell — what wharf is not? — and I in the company of Arthur de Smet, my translator, who ties the knots in the history of the Netherlands and the Island, to sustain meaning and the history of that meaning.
Before us, in resplendent and dramatic force, the force of an apparition, is the Amsterdam. A sailing ship as big as a monster. Resplendent also in the choice of colour used to embroider the mean-spiritedness of a ship such as this, rolling with the waves and with the punches of Abolitionists, over the Atlantic Ocean, and turning north instead of south, where plantations in Curaçao, Aruba, and St. Maarten were already established. I could imagine myself looking out a porthole at the wonders of fear and bigness, at canals and tall-tall buildings, and the deadening cold. The cold. The cold. How do people live in this reversed hell, this cold furnace, and remain healthy, and remain kind, and insist on being devout Christians?
I am looking at the Amsterdam from the rear, at the rudder, with three markings to identify cargo and ballast; and from the water to the deck, is the height of a four-storey building, with two rows of windows, seven in each row; but it is the colour of the paint used to decorate this portion of the ship, yellow, green, and red, and reddish-brown that is ironical, as if someone is playing a joke and purposely has used the colours of African Liberation movements, the colours (excepting the reddish-brown) of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA. Before the launch taking me on this tour of Amsterdam’s canals turns to evade other traffic with tourists, I see the two figures: on the left is a man who looks like a farmer about to plant seeds, and beside him is a large fowl or a duck, white as the skin of the man; and on the right is another man, holding a trident in his left hand; and beside him, on the ground is a white horse; and climbing farther to reach the level of the deck, is a lantern, and below the lantern is a crown and below the crown, an oval-shaped crest, in bright red, with three crosses in the shape of the symbol for an incorrect answer. But when the launch turns and approaches the Amsterdam from a closer vantage point, I see the figure on the prow of the ship, a lion: the tip of his tail is golden yellow, and his knees and the soles of his feet are golden yellow, and his skin is a rich brown, something like mahogany, with his raging mane, yellow, the colour Serena Williams used to wear on tennis courts; the colour of some white people’s hair braided on the excitement of a one-week holiday in the West Indies, from Canada’s cold. Is the decorator, or the owner, or the city of Amsterdam making a point of racial harmony, a point about the history of this “harmony” in the markings of this ship, which is still redoubtable and seaworthy, able to cross those waves all the way from Africa, and down into the West Indies, searching out Curaçao, Aruba, and St. Maarten, where the cruellest and most repressive regimes of slavery existed in these three Dutch colonies? ( I heard some of this history on the Dutch “private set,” on the wireless radio, from Hilversum, in Holland!)
So, I was more interested in looking at the ground plan at the bottom of the ship, the “pen” where the slaves were chained, at closest quarter, living in their shit and eating in their shit until the cold dowse of water from a bucket was tossed upon their filthy bodies. If the Amsterdam was ever an ocean-going ship whose cargo was slaves, there would be one of these “pens” in its steerage. I saw a replica of one in the Slave Museum at the Kura Hulanda Hotel where I stayed in Curaçao, shortly before my tour of the Amsterdam canals. The hotel was once a slave plantation; and the present owner, Dutch, I think it was said he is, “renovated” the property without damaging its historical and architectural cosmetic value, so that you get the impression, in spite of the fact that there are statuettes now and not living slaves populating the grounds, in various attitudes of labour and recreation, you are given the distinct impression that you are living amongst this era of enslavement. To bring more history to the gaze of the tourist, not a person, characteristically, to be moved by the fact of this history of enslavement, there is the museum: spanning the entire period of the slave trade, and ending with the present-day segregation and violence visited upon black Americans, culminating in a pristine outfit of a “sheet” worn by the American Ku Klux Klan. I was made numb by the display of chains. Chains seem to have been the metaphor for slavery and the robbing of freedom, even after the Emancipation. Chains seem to have been like an adornment of misery upon the limbs of the black men and women and children caught up, and caught in this trade. And chains worn today by American rappers, their heaviness of link, their conspicuousness on the body and as part of the costume — but a costume with what metaphor and fashion aesthetic? — chains on the body of rappers and other young black men in America and in Canada, to say nothing of the United Kingdom! — is an ironical demystification of a symbol invented purely for its degrading effect and effectiveness, and used today in the same way of declaring a new cultural nationalism, in the change of the “slave” name, such as Austin Clarke, to a more “suitable” and “noble” name, such as Ali Kamal Al Kadir Sudan. Or, more simply, but equally effective, “Austin X.”
When therefore, toward the end of the tour of the museum, walking underground now, in a symbolical sense, really walking through a tunnel beneath the ground on the grounds of Kura Hulanda Hotel, on whose premises this museum is built, signs declare in bold print:
EVOLUTION
SLAVE TRADE/MIDDLE PASSAGE
WEST AFRICAN EMPIRES
KINGDOMS OF BENIN
This museum is situated in the capital city of Curaçao, Willemstad. I was swallowed up — the deliberate intention of the planners of this museum — in the culture of chains. I had never seen so many chains employed to control a way of life — not even in the culture of Auschwitz was this reminder of domination and imprisonment of a despised class, a creation of an underclass, demonstrated so conspicuously. Chains and iron. “Iron chains” as my mother would christen this relic of degradation. “Iron-chains.” Chains for the ankles; chains for the arms; chains binding the arms and the legs in a contortionist dexterity that no slave was strong enough to escape from; chains that declared the ineffectiveness of a Houdini; chains that formed the outline of a human body, that were used to control him, subdue him — if further restraint was necessary, was essential — in the Curaçao sun at midday, with the accompaniment of stinging bees to keep him awake from becoming drowsy and fainting in this debilitating tropical climate. Chains left in a pile, an added emphasis of the pervasiveness of this culture of inhumanity.
And then, now walking with bended head, as if I were back in Toronto, in the basement of the house with the green door, in the basement to turn the washer on, I have to bend my head, because of the cramped space between ceiling and floor — I pass the piles of iron-chains and enter a door, bending my head as the slave must have been forced to bend his head, and his entire body, like a miner living underground for most of a day of twenty-four hours, or like a man doing the limbo dance, torturing his body in the shape of a spider — Anancy; and then I am, without preparation, in the hold of a ship built to the specifications of a ship on which Captain John Newton was master, on which he wrote nightly love letters to his wife, back in England, in which he told his wife about a child that was crying, breaking into his concentration upon the correct word of love and assurance that he wanted to use, to express to his wife the love he wanted to show, and how he could not, because the black child was crying, and he could not tolerate any more crying of the slave child, so he went down into the “compartment of the coloured,” the slaves, ripped the child from his mother’s arms, and tossed it overboard. The roiling waves ate it up like a shark would snap its head from its body. The blood that soiled the deep green waves, was black. This same Captain Newton, who gave us these equally poetic and romantic stanzas of a hymn, replete with dramatic irony each time it is sung by black Americans, each time the singing is joined in by white Americans:
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear!
It soothes this sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.
It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled breast;
’Tis manna to the hungry soul,
And to the weary rest.
But I doubt that the emotional effect of this hymn on the spirit of black people can ever be reproduced onto the consciousness of white people. To them, does it feel like a confession of guilt; collective guilt of the white race?
This hymn, number 176 in Hymns Ancient & Modern, standard edition, used by Anglicans, which I sang in the choir of St. Matthias Anglican Church, in the neighbourhood of St. Matthias, and later at St. Michael’s Cathedral Church in town, is “Amazing Grace.”
The epiphanic effect in Captain Newton’s verses does not convince me of his sincerity, of his falling on his knees, as Paul did on the way from Tarsus, setting out to murder Christians in Damascus, for Captain Newton’s path was taken in a journey of seas turbulent for their life-threatening danger and even more dangerous for the journey itself. The Middle Passage, whose physical aspect, navigation, weather, the prevalence of seasonal storms, all this was painted too thick in too garish colours to be “washed in the blood” of confession and of redemption.
Captain Newton became as skilled in the writing of hymns as he had proved in seamanship, through wealth and promotion; and after he left the captain’s cabin, and had retired to England, the contribution he made to English civilization lies in Hymn 626, “Approach, my soul, the mercy seat”; Hymn 527, “Come, my soul, thy suit prepare”; Hymn 545, “Glorious things of thee are spoken”; Hymn 690, “Great Shepherd of thy people, hear”; Hymn 551, “May the grace of Christ our Saviour”; Hymn 691, “Quiet, Lord, my forward heart.” Six hymns in all he composed. Six hymns in which the pleading for grace is being asked for, ironical for a man who offered none to so many hundreds of men and women, and children — because before his descent into requesting grace, seems, in its asking, to be incomprehensible. But white people, masters, segregationists, governors of states in the American South, have always been capable of using great brutality on black people, and then afterward, with a change of context and environment, declare their epiphanic redemption.
In this black hole, in this replica of a slave ship, in the most cramped quarters, with the chains, the “iron-chains” left on the floor of the compartment, as if the slaves had just been unlocked from their transatlantic journey, you could smell the filth of their conditions, the insipid taint in the air, vomit, expectorate, or puke, shit, tears, futile self-mutilation, and the sores that festered before they were attended to, the deterioration of beautiful black bodies, at a time of life when hope and ambition and love are at their highest potential.
“How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!” But to whom? In whose ears? Apart from Captain John Newton’s obsession for redemption, proportionate to his excesses of emotion and of violence, his emotional calling out for grace, the requirement to be washed in God’s grace to purge him of his predisposition to violence and infanticide, these aspects of his journey across the Atlantic Ocean, similar to Paul’s change of character in his journey on the road to Damascus, this Pauline redemption, nevertheless, strikes me as being hollow.
Chapter Twenty
Whether in the Black-Irish tension of the movie, Gangs of New York, the poetry of Amiri Baraka, libelling Jews as absent from the World Trade Center on September 11, or the tendency of the Irish Republican Army to align itself with the Palestine Liberation Organization, the images of the past few years feature antagonism between separate groups. This differs markedly from the way that the groups themselves previously constructed such relations.
Blacks, Jews and Irish regularly associated themselves with each other in an appositive sense to a much larger degree than we now suppose, while their external critics lumped the groups together in a negative sense. Racist pseudo-scientists of the day regularly viewed all of them as inferior races, and would jump from one to the other often on the same page or even in the same paragraph. Correspondingly, Black Nationalist thinkers liked to invoke the Zionist movement as a positive model for Africans or African-Americans, and leading Zionists paid tribute to the leaders and strategists of Irish nationalism.
This is how George Bornstein introduced his commentary in the Times Literary Supplement, March 4, 2005, under the title, “A Forgotten Alliance — Africans, Americans, Zionists and Irish.”
I have been trying to think, in varying degrees of seriousness, at irregular periods in my life, of my own association with Jews, in the years when I organized marches and other protests, during the mid-1960s on the issue of civil rights, which touched all of us, each of us, in peculiar manner, related directly to your race, colour, colour of opinion and of prejudice, with no reference to ethnicity. For the struggle around civil rights was a universal plea for justice: justice in all its real and cosmetic and metaphorical manifestation.
And when I think of my “forgotten alliance,” I think first of my friend, Rabbi Feinberg. And I think of those nights when I lay on the cold pavement in front of the U.S. Consulate General, on University Avenue, protesting the war in Vietnam, supporting the fleeing of young American citizens north, fleeing the draft into the Vietnam War, and fleeing to “freedom” in Canada, in a modern-day Underground Railroad.
For nights, in the cold, shocked that my system had become conditioned to Toronto’s inhospitable cold weather after December has passed, wrapped in this brotherhood of protest, in the warmth of bodies of Jews, men and women, we sat, some prostrate, with the hope of success that kept us warm, and from catching pneumonia; and walking in parades, in marches, and in picket lines, coming closer and closer to the expression of violence imitating the raw brutality in America, many times I wondered what was the purpose; what was the purpose to have placed myself so close to the violence — the violence of the system and the violence of the individual, and whether there was a purpose in this; a purpose that was more pragmatic than I had thought. There is, and was, a distinct naïveté in the actions and spoken ideology of black nationalism that raged throughout America, and which oozed north across the border, and infected our more paltry and conservative approach to the desegregation of the two systems, American and Canadian. This naïveté was the disregard by the black leadership, that their business, the speeches, the demonstrations, the sit-ins, the private correspondence, were all sacrosanct from the eyes and the ears of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from the Central Intelligence Agency, from spies, many of whom were themselves black men and black women, in other words, the black leadership did not themselves place the significance upon their political position, that the establishment invested it with, a fact of lamentable significance when it was eventually known that the FBI and the CIA had both infiltrated every significant and non-significant black organization seeking integration and an end to racial segregation.
Although I never had any official organization — except Ebo Voice, a four-page stencilled or Xeroxed pamphlet which we called a journal, concentrating more on literary matters than political and racial — my naïveté about infiltrators, telephone tapping, infiltrators which we called “house niggers,” and all systems of spying on me — if I was of such importance to the Canadian authorities! — exposed me to the easiest “watching.” I was a target for any amateur intelligence officer. My life was an open book. And I had opened the pages myself. It did not occur to me at the time that the Americans in Toronto, through the agency of their consulate general, would be interested in my writing, or my writing of articles on racial discrimination; and even after I returned to Toronto with the first serious interview of Malcolm X in 1963, did it cross my mind that I was some kind of “security” risk. And the fact that I was — from my learned sophistication about telephone tapping, and from the mouths of infiltrators and other brands of “house-niggers” — of more than passing interest to American and Canadian authorities, wa
s explained more from the nervousness that ran through those organizations, tempered by racial guilt, than any significance on my part, that I had anything important to divulge. Years later, when I learned the reason for my rejection of Canadian citizenship by the minister of citizenship, and the refusal by the Americans to grant me a visa to teach at Yale University, it was based entirely on “information which is confidential” and “not in the public interest to reveal.” Unless there is more “confidential” and “public interest information” buried in the vaults of the ministry and the U.S. Consulate General in Toronto, my rejection was based upon a letter of complaint written to the Canadian authorities by a white woman, who objected to the sentiments I expressed in the article published in Maclean’s magazine, under the headline, “Canada’s Angriest Black Man.” I was not even permitted by this unknown white woman — and here lies the danger: the unknown informant — to be “angry,” after all the insults and indignities I might have suffered, and was suffering in the 1950s, on my arrival here as a student, by an immigration system, and an employment system, irrevoc-
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