5.4 Propping Sorrow, a moment in a dance by the National Dance Theater Company of Jamaica. Photo by Maria LaYacona, no date. From Rex Nettleford, Dance Jamaica: Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, 1962-1982.
As they sought an idiom for their captivity, the only comfort Equiano and his sister could find “was in being in one another's arms all that night, and bathing each other with our tears”; but the pathos of enslavement was deepened by the fact that soon they were “deprived of even the smallest comfort of weeping together.”12 In one of the most moving scenes in his narrative, the one describing his separation from his sister, Equiano would turn to the power of apostrophe to demarcate sorrow as the only logical emotional response to natal alienation:
When these people knew we were brother and sister they indulged us to be together; and the man, to whom I supposed we belonged, lay with us, he in the middle, while she and I held one another by the hands across his breast all night; and thus for a while we forgot our misfortunes in the joy of being together: but even this small comfort was soon to have an end; for scarcely had the fatal morning appeared, when she was again torn from me for ever! I was now more miserable, if possible, than before. The small relief which her presence gave me from pain was gone, and the wretchedness of my situation was redoubled by my anxiety after her fate, and my apprehensions lest her sufferings should be greater than mine, when I could not be with her to alleviate them. Yes, thou dear partner of all my childish sports! thou sharer of my joys and sorrows! happy should I have ever esteemed myself to encounter every misery for you, and to procure your freedom by the sacrifice of my own.13
The play of sorrow, then, was a persistent and pressing arsenal in the cause of abolitionism in both Europe and the Americas, constituting a significant counterpoint to the rationalized regimens of representing the African as either an object of trade or a figure whose goals and desires were anterior to the logic of modern identity.
2
The turn to melancholy as an aesthetic response invites several questions: How did African slaves respond to enforced labor, to the tortured life that was the signature of their displacement in the plantations of the Americas? What was their reaction to notions of taste and economies of pleasure in situations that seemed to negate the very idea of a black sensorium? And how could slaves, defined in modernity as property, cling to a subjective identity?14 Perhaps the best way of responding to these questions is to turn to a work that has nothing whatsoever to do with slavery, but one that provides us with the most powerful and touching commentary on the condition of loss in the modern world—namely, Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama.15 Benjamin's book is a masterful reading of the aesthetics of the tragic in the modern world and of melancholy and allegory as the essential response to the loss and displacement of the human subject, one isolated from nature, history, and selfhood and thus forced to feed on its inner passions. It is a book that is particularly acute in its understanding of the play and display of human wretchedness as the only logical response to modernity's failure to live up to its redemptive claims.
Central to Benjamin's book is the argument that in a world in which the idealized and transfigured face of nature had failed to live up to its promise and had instead given in to the “facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape,” sorrowfulness was the essential register of the negative historicity of the subject, the mark of its process of decline and decay in time:
Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death's head. And although such a thing lacks all “symbolic” freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity—nevertheless, this is the form in which man's subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline. The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance. But if nature has always been subject to the power of death, it is also true that it has always been allegorical. Significance and death both come to fruition in historical development, just as they are closely linked as seeds in the creature's graceless state of sin.16
For Benjamin, melancholy registered the stations of decline in what was supposed to be the redemptive history of the world. The play of sorrow, the Trauerspiel, would embody the semiosis of death and its power to dig, even deeper, the trench separating alienated nature and human capacity, thus marking the descent of the subject into nonbeing.
The world of slavery was, of course, nowhere near Benjamin's thinking when he was reflecting on the meaning of subjecthood in death; his immediate concern was the atrophy of the narrative of Western civilization as it slipped toward barbarism in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Still, the terms of Benjamin's discourse should resonate powerfully with the experience of enslavement, whose tortured worldliness stands out as the stain of modernity and its enabling condition. For the world of the African slave in the new world would come to be defined by loss and the power of death. Here, again, Equiano's reaction to the geography of enslavement is illustrative. Separated from the new colleagues he had formed on the slave ship, and finding himself without a common language to share his experiences with other slaves in the Americas, Equiano plunged into melancholy: “I was now exceedingly miserable, and thought myself worse off than any of the rest of my companions; for they could talk to each other, but I had no person to speak to that I could understand. In this state I was constantly grieving and pining, and wishing for death, rather than any thing else.”17
And Equiano was not the only slave who found it hard to find a redemptive language for a deracinated experience, or to respond to the lack of a social point of reference with a combination of melancholy and fear. On her first night as a slave, Mary Prince was possessed by what she described as “a sad fright”:
I was just going to sleep, when I heard a noise in my mistress's room; and she presently called out to inquire if some work was finished that she had ordered Hetty to do. “No, Ma'am, not yet,” was Hetty's answer from below. On hearing this, my master started up from his bed, and just as he was, in his shirt, ran down stairs with a long cow-skin in his hand. I heard immediately after, the cracking of the thong, and the house rang to the shrieks of poor Hetty, who kept crying out, “Oh, Massa! Massa! me dead. Massa! have mercy upon me—don't kill me outright.”—This was a sad beginning for me. I sat up upon my blanket, trembling with terror, like a frightened hound, and thinking that my turn would come next. At length the house became still, and I forgot for a little while all my sorrows by falling fast asleep.18
Sorrow would become the marker of separation of the self from the world. Paradoxically, for slaves like Equiano and Prince, the alienated nature of the new world, the primordial landscape of loss and unbelonging and the passion of sorrow that it generated, would be the first sign that they had become modern subjects. In this context, the play of sorrow, the passion drama of alienated nature, would appear to be the only condition the slave had inherited as the basis of a modern identity, and in order for the slave to become human, suffering itself needed to be transformed into a redemptive narrative, a story of being oneself against the violently imposed identity of being a slave.19
My operating premise here and for the rest of this chapter is that the condition of possibility of being black in the new world could not be realized until slavery, a sorrowful state of shame and negation, was transformed into a narrative of identity. It is probably this transformation that W.E.B. Du Bois had in mind when, in the concluding chapter of the Souls of Black Folk, he described Negro spirituals—the sor
row songs—as the medium of what was tantamount to a black logos. Through these songs, Du Bois asserted, “the soul of the black slave spoke to men”; they were “the most beautiful expression of human experience born of this side of the seas.”20 For Du Bois, the sorrow songs functioned as allegorical expressions of the repressed self and its yearning for a language of freedom out of the ruins of enslavement. While they denoted suffering as the essential historicity of the African slave in the new world, the songs of sorrow also had the capacity to secure the coupling of what Benjamin had cryptically called death and significance. Death represented the descent of the self into the sphere of nonbeing; significance was the desire for transcendence.
Du Bois identified the double play of allegory in his careful reading of the sorrow songs. He noted that they were signifiers of loss, of disconnection from Africa, and thus registered “the voice of exile.”21 But he also recognized the redemptive hermeneutics embedded in the sound of these sorrow songs:
What are these songs, and what do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. They tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy. I can easily believe this of some, of many. But not all the past South, though it rose from the dead, can gainsay the heart-touching witness of these songs. They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.22
What did Du Bois mean when he said that the sorrow songs served as a “heart-touching witness”? Witness to what? To history? To suffering? Or to black being?
Du Bois did not elaborate what he meant when he said that sorrow songs were “the articulate message of the slave to the world,” but it is not implausible that he was thinking of these songs functioning, very much like Benjamin's Trauerspiel, as an allegorical way of seeing and being in a world defined by pain and suffering. Here, witnessing sadness and sorrow, like the general play of melancholy, could operate as a weapon against the death drive, a total onslaught against alienation. In fact, if we agree with Julia Kristeva's assessment that a “depressive affect” operates as “a defense against parceling”—namely, the atomization of the self—then sadness can reconstitute “an affective cohesion of the self, which restores its unity within the framework of the affect.”23 Kristeva recognizes that the protection that melancholy affords the self is a flimsy one, but she nonetheless calls attention to the compensatory nature of depressive affect; those who have been invalidated in a symbolic sense can register the dignity of the self in adversity: “The depressive mood constitutes itself as a narcissistic support, negative to be sure, but nevertheless presenting the self with an integrity, nonverbal though it might be. Because of that, the depressive affect makes up for symbolic invalidation and interruption (the depressive's ‘that's meaningless’) and at the same time protects it against proceeding to the suicidal act.”24
Slave narratives often staged melancholy as a negative anchor to the enslaved person's quest for identification. The staging of a sensibility of loss was often foregrounded as the counter to the picture of the happy slave in the European imaginary. Thus, at the end of her slave narrative, first published in 1831, Prince noted that she was vexed and saddened by people in England who believed that slaves were happy or even hinted that there was any cause or source for joy in enslavement:
I am often much vexed, and I feel great sorrow when I hear some people in this country say, that the slaves do not need better usage, and do not want to be free. They believe the foreign people, who deceive them, and say slaves are happy. I say, Not so. How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back? and are disgraced and thought no more of than beasts?—and are separated from their mothers, and husbands, and children, and sisters, just as cattle are sold and separated? Is it happiness for a driver in the field to take down his wife or sister or child, and strip them, and whip them in such a disgraceful manner?—women that have had children exposed in the open field to shame! There is no modesty or decency shown by the owner to his slaves; men, women, and children are exposed alike.25
Although Prince directed her rhetoric at any suggestion that happiness and slavery were compatible, the closing paragraphs of the History of Mary Prince seem to suggest that much more than the question of happiness, or its absence, was at issue in debates about the emotional condition of the enslaved. For what Prince set out to present at the end of her book was a forceful denunciation of the ideology of the aesthetic that I have discussed in previous chapters, an ideology that assumed that “sensual recognition” was the key to subjectivity and that being happy was both the means and ends to a modern life.26
Prince's picture of the slave was that of a body deprived of its sensuous capacity, turned, often through brutal and sustained acts of violence, into a beast of burden, one regulated outside the norms of affective relationships such as family, kinship, and passion. When English people go to the West Indies, lamented Prince, “they forget God and all feeling of shame,” and this forgetfulness of divinity was evident in the treatment of the slave as an animal: “They tie up slaves like hogs—moor them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged;—and yet they come home and say, and make some good people believe, that slaves don't want to get out of slavery.”27 The mere suggestion that slavery was a place to seek fulfillment was, for Prince, incomprehensible and apprehensible: “I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel—I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don't want to be free—that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so. I never heard a Buckra man say so, till I heard tell of it in England. Such people ought to be ashamed of themselves.”28 Having thus displayed her own suffering in the course of her narrative, Prince was now in a position to shame her English readers and shift debates about the condition of slavery from the happiness adduced to them by the pro-slavery lobby to scenes of suffering, where, in her mind, questions of identity truly belonged.
And Prince was not alone in the privileging of sorrow and suffering as the lived experience of the black slave in the new world. Frederick Douglass detested any suggestion that the experience of slavery would generate any kind of pleasure for the enslaved, or that people in bondage could become sensuous beings, akin to the white subjects of taste that I discussed in previous chapters. Slave holidays and the entertainments associated with them, Douglass noted bitterly in Life and Times “served the purpose of keeping the minds of the slaves occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived.”29
5.5 Portrait of Frederick Douglass as a Younger Man. 1855. Engraved by J. C. Buttre from a daguerreotype. Frontispiece. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom.
Douglass went on to provide a systematic indictment of modes of pleasure that were, in his view, created and enforced by masters to “secure the ends of injustice and oppression.”30 He argued that this kind of enforced pleasure in situations of bondage defied all notions of “rational enjoyment” and militated against “virtuous liberty”: “The license allowed appeared to have no other objective than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make them as glad to return to their work as they had been to leave it.”31 Douglass believed that the only morally acceptable representation of slavery was one that took cognizance of its tragic dimension and identified and affirmed seriousness and unhappiness as the essential condition of the black in the modern world. Douglass's own self-presentation, both in his works and pictures, was intended to enforce the rule of pathos as the counterpoint to play (fig. 5.5).
In his fierce critique of slave performances, which he argued were inauthentic and un-redemptive, Douglass was
indirectly assaulting the ideology of the aesthetic on two fronts. First, he was interrogating the claim, common in theories of taste and leisure since the eighteenth century, that people who had access to happiness, whether through consumption or leisure, were free subjects, irrespective of what was consumed and the circumstances in which leisure was enacted. Douglass's counterexample to the idea of happiness was his portrait of slaves in the antebellum South, often and insidiously compelled not only to be happy, but also to display this happiness as a mask for their real condition of existence. The performance of enforced happiness seemed to defeat the core foundation of freedom as an expression of sensuousness and affect. And Douglass was, of course, aware that from the moment they arrived on the slave ship, in their passage through the Atlantic and in their eventual placement in the plantation, enslaved Africans were subjected to degrading performances, including being made to dance on the deck of the slave ship (fig. 5.6).
Second, Douglass's harsh rejection of an imposed economy of pleasure among the enslaved served as an implicit questioning of the notion that sensuousness itself could have value outside the domain of rationality and reflection. As far as he was concerned, slave holidays and performances were part of the master's cunning, attempts to manipulate affect rather than provide a vehicle through which the real feelings and sensibilities of slaves could be expressed. Such enforced acts of play, or expressions of happiness, precluded a thinking or reflective subject. If taste and happiness could thus be manipulated, it was difficult, if not impossible, to posit the realm of the senses as the foundation of true feelings or real identity, as ideologues of the aesthetic such as Alexander Baumgarten had been arguing since the early eighteenth century.32
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 27
