Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  They are commonly secured, by putting the right leg of one, and the left of another, into the same pair of fetters. By supporting the fetters with a string, they can walk, though very slowly. Every four slaves are likewise fastened together by the necks, with a strong rope of twisted thongs; and in the night, an additional pair of fetters is put on their hands, and sometimes a light iron chain passed round their necks. Such of them as evince marks of discontent, are secured in a different manner. A thick billet of wood is cut about three feet long, and a smooth notch being made upon one side of it, the ankle of the slave is bolted to the smooth part by means of a strong iron staple, one prong of which passes on each side of the ankle. All these fetters and bolts are made from native iron; in the present case they were put on by the blacksmith as soon as the slaves arrived from Kancaba, and were not taken off until the morning on which the coffle departed for Gambia.53

  Although some of the slaves in Karfa's coffle seemed to bear their hardships stoically, the majority of them “were very much dejected, and would sit all day in a sort of sullen melancholy, with their eyes fixed upon the ground.”54 And Nealee was the most melancholic, refusing even to eat her gruel. She seemed resigned to her physical imprisonment, but she was determined to resist her psychological enslavement by all the means at her disposal. She wanted to die.

  Why was death so appealing to Nealee? Park thought that African slaves dreaded the prospect of being sold at the coast because they held a “deeply rooted idea” that “whites purchase Negroes for the purpose of devouring them, or of selling them to others, that they may be devoured hereafter.”55 But there was much more than this fear of real or imagined death. Although Nealee had spent at least three years in the stockades at Sego and endured many of the hardships that characterized the life of a body in bolt and chains, her journey on the slave route to the Atlantic coast represented a radical departure from the life she had known so far, for, as I will show later, there was slavery and the slave trade, and they represented different degrees of bondage and suffering.56

  For most of April 24, after the bee attack episode described at the beginning of this chapter, Nealee refused to continue with her enforced march to modernity. As Park reports, “the wretched woman obstinately refused to proceed any further; declaring that she would rather die than walk another step.”57 Entreaties and threats were used on her to no avail. The whip was then applied, and this forced her to walk for another five hours; then she made an attempt to escape from the coffle but was too weary to get very far and she fell in the grass. The whip was applied again without effect, at which point Karfa had her put on the donkey that usually carried provisions; but the ass, “being very refractory,” could not carry her forward, so she was borne on a litter of bamboo cane, which was carried by other slaves. It was quite apparent that Nealee was slowing the coffle considerably and thus jeopardizing the profits that awaited the slatees, or slave merchants, at the Gambia slave markets. A moment arrived when a decision needed to be made about her fate. Now a cold calculus came into play:

  April 25th. At daybreak poor Nealee was awakened; but her limbs were now become so stiff and painful, that she could neither walk nor stand; she was therefore lifted, like a corpse, upon the back of the ass; and the Slatees endeavoured to secure her in that situation, by fastening her hands together under the ass's neck, and her feet under the belly, with long slips of bark; but the ass was so very unruly, that no sort of treatment could induce him to proceed with his load; and as Nealee made no exertion to prevent herself from falling, she was quickly thrown off, and had one of her legs much bruised. Every attempt to carry her forward being thus found ineffectual, the general cry of the coffle was, kang-tegi, kang-tegi, “cut her throat, cut her throat;” an operation I did not wish to see performed, and therefore marched onwards with the foremost of the coffle.58

  Here we have the phenomenological situation that scholars of modernity and slavery must inevitably engage. On one hand we have Nealee's desire for death, which emerges from an almost existential recognition of the paradox of freedom; she seemed to realize that it was only through the nonexistence represented by death that she could be liberated from perpetual bondage. On the other hand, from the point of view of the slave traders, cutting Nealee's throat would have been the most pragmatic thing to do, ensuring the successful delivery of the other slaves in the coffle to the Atlantic coast, but this would also mean yielding to her desire to die. So the enslavers came up with an intriguing solution: “I had not walked above a mile, when one of Karfa's domestic slaves came up to me, with poor Nealee's garment upon the end of his bow, and exclaimed Nealee affeeleeta (Nealee is lost). I asked him whether the Slatees had given him the garment, as a reward for cutting her throat; he replied that Karfa and the schoolmaster would not consent to that measure, but had left her on the road; where undoubtedly she soon perished, and was probably devoured by wild beasts.”59 Why did Karfa and his associates refuse to consent to the cutting of Nealee's throat? Since they left her to die in the bush, this might seem to be an academic question, but it goes to the heart of a problem that will constantly haunt modernity—namely, the role of the body in the construction of identity.

  As is well known, the idea of a modern identity, especially one predicated on the terms of taste that I discussed earlier, was premised on the radical separation of the self from the body. A basic premise of the aesthetic ideology was that art had the capacity to transform or raise the body from its material condition into a transcendental, hence sensuous, subject—a self.60 Although slaves like Nealee were considered to be objects for sale, they were already directly or surreptitiously disturbing the regimen of modern self-fashioning by blurring the distinction between bodies and selves. Was the slave a human subject or a disposable body? Was her progress in time and space a journey toward the enhancement of the self or a movement toward its dissolution?61

  Initially, Nealee's desire for freedom through death was matched by the determination of her captors to discipline her using all the technologies of power within what Foucault calls an “‘epistemological-juridical’ formation.”62 Here, Nealee's treatment by her captors, especially the deployment of numerous disciplinary mechanisms intended to make her submit to the regimen of enslavement, illustrates how the body of the condemned slave was bound up with “complex reciprocal relations” of power and wrapped up with “relations of power and domination” and also how “a well-regulated system of subjection” would become “a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.”63 My conjecture here is that Karfa could not allow Nealee's throat to be cut, because killing her would function as a symbolic attainder—it would nullify the condition that made her a valued body, though not a self. It would effectively put into question the slave's status as a productive body. More significantly, killing Nealee, thus granting her wish to die and become free, would take away Karfa's power of subjection.64

  Left on the road to die, she was, of course, no longer a productive body, but she was still a subjected one. It is significant, then, that Park's narrative of Nealee's last days, plotted as a movement from one site of subjugation to another, would end with an aporia: she was left on the road, “where undoubtedly she soon perished, and was probably devoured by wild beasts.”65 This aporia would serve as a figure of doubt and suspension in this economy of debate. But given the inevitability of Nealee's death, we are left wondering what task Park's rhetoric of equivocation was being asked to perform. Was it intended to secure the humanity and humanness of Karfa, a slave trader and a perfect host, whose actions Park resisted judging? Or did it express Park's consistent refusal to be drawn into making moral judgments about slavery and the slave trade, whose quotidianness he was willing to accept as a fait accompli? Or did Park, who had private qualms about slavery, invoke the figure of this aporia as a way of expressing doubt about enslavement without alienating his British readers, or the majority of his backers, who subscribed to the African slave trade without question.66
>
  Some possible answers to these vexing questions are suggested by the final scene in Nealee's drama: the effect of her death on the whole coffle: “The sad fate of this wretched woman, notwithstanding the outcry beforementioned, made a strong impression on the minds of the whole coffle, and the schoolmaster fasted the whole of the ensuing day, in consequence of it. We proceeded in deep silence, and soon afterward crossed the river Furkoomah, which was about as large as the river Wonda. We now travelled with great expedition, every one being apprehensive he might otherwise meet with the fate of poor Nealee.”67 The shift of responsibility for Nealee's death from her captors to unseen and unknown forces in the wilderness would have two consequences: one was that she would disappear into the historical record without ostensibly affecting the identity of her captors, who would continue to live the lives of good Muslims and traders; the other was that it would appear to be a tangent in the archive of empire, important here more for what it tells us about Park the observer than for what it says about the subjected body.

  Indeed, it could be said that in representing this and other episodes involving African women, Park was already constructing a posthumous identity for himself and his heroic fate in the African wilderness. After reading Park's account of his travels in Africa, mesmerized by a section in which the Scottish traveler found hospitality in the hut of an African woman during a storm, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, wrote a poem that was later set to music by G. G. Ferrari. As the first and last stanzas of the poem illustrate, it was an ode to mercy and hospitality rather than a testimony to slavery and suffering:

  THE loud wind roar'd, the rain fell fast;

  The White Man yielded to the blast:

  He sat him down, beneath our tree;

  For weary, sad, and faint was he;

  And ah, no wife, or mother's care,

  For him, the milk or corn prepare:

  ……………………………………

  The storm is o'er; the tempest past;

  And Mercy's voice has hush'd the blast.

  The wind is heard in whispers low;

  The White Man far away must go;—

  But ever in his heart will bear

  Remembrance of the Negro's care.68

  Georgiana, who had mastered the idiom of sympathy and sensibility, was keen to direct her readers' sentiments to the white man who had survived the African wilderness rather than the black woman in shackles or the one who had taken him into her care. In a curious way, however, the duchess recognized the surreptitious connection between Park, the Scottish adventurer and modern man of science; the African woman left to a cruel fate in the midst of a brutal trade; and herself, the English beauty who had attracted the attention of distinguished painters, including Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Like sensibility, beauty existed under the shadow of slavery.

  4

  What I have provided above is, of course, an allegory of reading rather than a history of two actors and agents in the theater of empire. I have not focused on the authenticity of the experience represented or on the verifiable facts in the lives of Larpent or Nealee, which are available to us only through a set of texts, but on the rhetoric of representation and visible semiotic codes.69 An emphasis on the rhetoric of presentation, in turn, opens the way for a contrapuntal reading of the distinctive, yet ultimately connected lives of two subjects of modernity located at opposite spectrums, thus ensuring a dialectic between the visible subjects of modernity and its invisible actors. On one hand, we have Anna Larpent, a middle-class British woman whose movement through the time and space of modernity would lead her to new heights of prosperity and subjecthood, to a self-conscious sense of herself as a cultured subject; and on the other hand, we have Nealee, a lonely African slave, in shackles, awaiting death, which she considered the only sensible alternative to an enforced and violent entry into the world of commodities and exchange. As Larpent was securing her identity within the culture of a triumphant middle class, the young African woman was frog-marched into objectification, torn from home, community, and language into what has come to be known as social death.70

  But what is the usefulness of these contrasts? Were they actually acknowledged in the lived experiences of the subjects themselves, or are they products of the mode of reading hat I have adopted here? Larpent's diary does not record the lives of slaves, although perhaps some of the servants she alludes to regularly were Africans; and apart from Park, her fellow traveler, Nealee's image of white people was that of apparitions and cannibals. Still, although they didn't know this, the two women were operating in the same orbit; they were, as Louis Althusser would say, overdetermined, and the “index of their determination” was slavery and empire.71 My contention is that the key to understanding the repressed relationship between the subject of modernity and the object of slavery could be found in both their affective and structural relationship. Larpent's happiness and her everyday conviviality must be read against Nealee's melancholy and tragedy.72 An allegory of reading enables us, then, to see Larpent and Nealee as figures who overflowed the roles assigned to them by history or destiny. In this scenario, Larpent functions as a supplement—a stand-in—for the middle-class subject in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, just as Nealee is the residual sign of the unremarked slave.

  I reduce these two subjects to semiotic terms not to diminish their historicity or negate their identities but to reflect on the inner world of modernity, one that is available to us only through its effects or affects. For if, as it is generally agreed, members of the rising British middle class in the Georgian period became cultured subjects because luxury and refinement were now within the “reach even of relatively humble families,” then the kinship between Larpent and Nealee, though obviously unacknowledged, was part of the political unconsciousness of the period.73 And this connection is to be explained not simply through the now obvious fact that slaves were producing the goods that were being consumed by the middle class, but also through the fact that it was precisely the existence of slavery—at odds with the key theories of modernity, yet enabling of it—that prompted the long, complicated, and perhaps unresolved debate on the relation between the rarified objects of culture and the messy world of commercial transactions. Philosophers of taste often agonized on how beauty could coexist with a materiality that seemed to negate its demands, and many of them would strive to separate white beauty from black ugliness, but for ordinary middle-class subjects, such as Larpent, the universe of culture did not seem to have a language of negativity. Since consumption and its display in the public space endowed modern subjects with the psychic energies that countered any sense of loss or displacement, the world of progress and luxuriousness was one of total sensuousness—and happiness.

  Culture and luxury were informed by a powerful sense of moral and cultural superiority: the “alliance of money and gentility was calculated to maintain the morale and sense of superiority of propertied people. Politeness was the mark of an immensely vigorous but also a remorselessly snobbish society.”74 In contrast, Nealee was available to the culture of modernity only as the object of servitude and abjection. Like other slaves observed in coffles, markets, or the bowels of slave ships, her essential countenance was one of sadness, identified by Julia Kristeva as “the fundamental mood of depression.”75 Sorrow, notes Kristeva, “is the major outward sign that gives away the desperate person”; it is the “the psychic representation of energy displacement caused by external or internal traumas.”76 Located against her will in a circuit of power that demanded her submission to servitude as a precondition for survival, Nealee was perhaps using her subjection to counter the poison pill of modernity. Her melancholy, which we can recognize in the eyes of the enslaved women observed by Sir John Willoughby more than a century later in Portuguese East Africa (fig. 2.5), was perhaps the counterpoint to the bargain of the “middle passage,” what the poet Robert Hayden has called the “voyage through death / to life upon these shores.”77


  A possible objection to the argument I have presented here is that the opposition I am working with—between Larpent's happiness and Nealee's abjection—emerges out of my allegorical readings rather than their lived experiences. One could then argue that there is no reason to suppose that cultured subjects like Larpent did not have moments of melancholy or that slaves like Nealee did not have bouts of happiness. But the surface discourses, the texts that constitute our only evidence of their lives, suggest otherwise. Larpent's diaries are constant performances of happiness and contentment as a condition of modern, cultured life; Nealee's countenance, as observed by Park, presents nothing other than abjection.

  The opposition between Larpent's conviviality and Nealee's melancholy does not, of course, represent the essential opposition between the condition of freedom and that of enslavement. One can assume that Larpent had her moments of sadness and that Nealee's enslavement did not exclude moments of happiness. At the same time, it is quite apparent that the condition of happiness was imagined or performed as one of the defining characteristics of the culture of taste as experienced by Larpent and her generation, just as melancholy was a signal for bondage. Simply put, happiness was one of the assumed goals of the logic of consuming culture discussed earlier.78 In fact, one remarkable feature of the eighteenth century was the emergence of “commercialized leisure” as an essential mechanism in the civilizing process.79 Leisure was a key component of the sense and sensibility we have come to associate with the modern age; it was associated with the realm of freedom, representing “the liberation of the libido from the past, from tradition, from the judgment of society, elders, family and peers.”80 But leisure was not considered extraneous to morality or political economy. In fact, in order to be considered legitimate, the modern subject's capacity for enjoyment needed “a sound moral excuse.”81 Liberated from Calvinism and its ideas of original sin, modern subjects shifted the moral economy of goodness to that of happiness and thus “opened the gates for a new psychology of personal and social adjustment.”82 From David Hume cloistered in Edinburgh to Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele in London, the work of cultural criticism was premised on the integration of happiness and civic virtue.83 The leisure palaces of the period, such as Vauxhall Gardens, were in effect functioning as places where happiness could be both performed and consumed. In an age when leisure was supposed to operate under the law of morality, the palace at Vauxhall Gardens appeared to none other than the Spectator's fictional narrator, Mr. Spectator, to be “a kind of Mahometan paradise” in need of “more nightingales, and fewer trumpets.”84 Such monuments to leisure however, were far removed from black life. When they appeared at Vauxhall, for example, blacks—even free ones like William Henry Lane, who performed at the garden later in the nineteenth century—did so as minstrels, objects of distorted entertainment (fig. 2.6).