Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  There were, of course, pragmatic and tactical reasons why melancholy was the preferred rhetorical mode in slave narratives and other accounts against enslavement. Within the context or aftermath of abolitionism, in which the books by Prince and Douglass were written and circulated, any contemplation of black pleasure in enslavement would fall right into the trap of the slave-owning class and its propaganda machine, which liked to display images of happy slaves as evidence of the good life they were having in the plantation. So if Douglass insisted that his image in public be surrounded by pathos, and if he would get upset when a daguerreotype or carte de visite presented him smiling, it was because he understood that images or stories of happy slaves could undermine the project of abolitionism, and the pathos on which it was constructed, faster than any philosophical argument.33 Operating within the orbit of white desire and pleasure, black entertainments such as butting heads in Venezuela or dancing a jig in a Southern plantation came to be perceived as a further diminishment of the blacks' control over their economies of desire and pleasure.

  5.6 “Danse de Negres.” From Amedee Grehan, ed., La France Maritime [Paris, 1855], vol. 3, facing p. 179. Copy in Princeton University Library.

  However, the strategic deployment of pathos in the discourse of abolitionism did not necessarily mean that melancholy or the play of sorrow was, per se, the essential condition of the slave. In spite of Douglass's admonitions, slave holidays and the scenes of happiness that seemed to surround them were a dominant feature of the cultural and social geography of the plantation. And despite the hardships associated with enslavement, the lasting images of slaves, whether at home in their own quarters or in front of their masters', was one of subjects at play. Indeed, for a people who were the most brutalized in the culture of modernity, excluded from the category of personhood, separated from community and kin, and forced into a regime of labor enforced by continuous violence, African slaves in the new world appeared unusually happy.

  It was this condition of happiness that struck Matthew Gregory Lewis when he arrived in Jamaica around the turn of 1815 to 1816 to visit his newly inherited West Indian plantations. On witnessing a New Year festival soon after his arrival in Jamaica, Lewis concluded that he had never seen “so many people who appeared to be so unaffectedly happy.” Compared to the poor in the English marketplace, where attendance seemed to be based on social compulsion or the simple need to exchange goods and make money, Lewis described the West Indian fair as a site of “real pleasure,” one that “seemed to consist in singing, dancing, and laughing, in seeing and being seen, in showing their own fine clothes, or in admiring those of others.” Unlike the scenes of enforced bacchanal described by Douglass in his retrospective view of slave festivals, Lewis's version of Jamaican festivals was one of a self-willed orderliness: “There were no people selling or buying; no servants and landladies bustling and passing about; and at eight o'clock, as we passed through the marketplace, where was the greatest illumination, and which, of course, was most thronged, I did not see a single person drunk, nor had I observed a single quarrel through the course of the day.”34

  Similar scenes had been reported by earlier European travelers in the landscape of slavery. Traveling in Antigua and St. Christopher in December 1724, Janet Schaw described the appearance of black slaves on their way to market as “one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw,” and went on to describe a scene so picturesque that it seemed at odds with the wretchedness of slavery she had witnessed elsewhere on the island:

  They were universally clad in white Muslin: the men in loose drawers and waistcoats, the women in jackets and petticoats; the men wore black caps, the women had handkerchiefs of gauze or silk, which they wore in the fashion of turbans. Both men and women carried neat white wicker-baskets on their heads, which they balanced as our Milk maids do their pails. These contained the various articles for Market, in one a little kid raised its head from amongst flowers of every hue, which were thrown over to guard it from the heat; here a lamb, there a Turkey or a pig, all covered up in the same elegant manner, While others had their baskets filled with fruit, pine-apples reared over each other; Grapes dangling over the loaded basket; oranges, Shaddacks, water lemons, pomegranates, granadillas, with twenty others, whose names I forget.35

  These scenes were to enter the paintings and prints by Brunias that opened my discussion.

  The interplay between melancholy and such scenes of gaiety seems to lead to a theoretical or analytical caesura and to raise troubling questions: How are we to explain these consistent images of black slaves as happy and sensuous subjects in the theater of brutality and abjection? Were they mere expressions of white fantasies intended to counteract the violence of slavery? Were they part of a grand design to eroticize the body in bondage to make the colonial scene worthy of settlement? Or did these scenes reflect the feelings and passions of the slaves, who, in spite of their condition, found means of expressing sensuousness and created aesthetic spaces where none were supposed to exist? Given the slaves' investment in the work of pleasure and the carnivalesque atmosphere that surrounded their gatherings, markets, and squares on weekends and holidays, one cannot dismiss these images and accounts of happy slaves at play as the simple projection of white fantasies. The persistence of accounts of slaves as subjects of pleasure cannot be assumed to represent the partial view of a group of interested observers merely focused on the beauty of the human and natural landscape at the expense of its torrid ruins. On the contrary, they function as important signals to the complex and often contradictory ways that slaves presented themselves in the public sphere, the subject of my next chapter.

  One could argue that Lewis, Brunias, and others—including the slaves they observed at play—were caught in the frenzy of a festival, a social space outside lived experience and “now” time, and that the scenes of happiness observed and presented to the outside world were mere performatives, separated from the empirical world of enslavement. One could then conclude—following the arguments of Mikhail Bakhtin—that the slaves were engaging in speech forms that had been liberated from the “norms, hierarchies, and prohibitions of established idiom.”36 Such speech forms would hence not be called upon to bear witness to the condition of enslavement.

  My overall concern in this chapter and the next, however, is on the meaning of the scenes of merrymaking that dominate descriptive accounts of West Indian and American slavery and how they should be read or interpreted. Should these scenes be interpreted as occasions for leisure and sources of pleasure and, by extension, as expressions of local identity? Could one, then, see slave performances and related forms of expression, many of them sensuous, as essential and indispensable cultural weapons in the African slave's long journey from the bowels of the slave ship (the zero ground of modernity) to the public sphere, the square, the market, the fair, where their phenomenological presence could be acknowledged?37 Or should we look at them as forms of enforced pleasure, modes of false consciousness, what Douglass called “safety-valves,” whose sole intention was to “carry off the explosive elements inseparable from the human mind when reduced to the conditions of slavery”?38

  Simply put, our challenge here is how to provide a descriptive and analytic response to these scenes of happiness, not so much to figure out whether they were genuine or affected, but to understand the role they played as a means of recoding social life for a people excluded from multiple domains of freedom and the aesthetic life that came with it. Even within these parameters, however, the task of the analyst is made even more difficult by the absence, within slavery itself, of independent black voices that might provide us with an inside view of what slaves themselves thought when they performed happiness. The black voices that we hear from the archive of slavery come to us mediated by white interlocutors or the powerful idiom of abolitionism; they thus tell only partial stories. These limits, however, also offer at least two theoretical or conceptual opportunities. First, if slave performances were inventions of the masters—g
estures and tasks that had been chaperoned either to create the semblance of pleasure in enslavement, or to provide escapism from the drudgery of enforced labor—couldn't they also be transformed into spaces of leisure, populated by the slaves' own needs and desires? We should be cautious in treating cultural activities that are enforced as essentially antithetical to the interests of the oppressed, for even within domination, slaves could transform enforced play into a set of what Michel de Certeau has called tactics.39 Second, there is the problem of what I will call a mangled semantics, the confusion of the performative and the truth-value of slave cultural activities and utterances: did the continuous presentations of happiness witnessed by observers in the slave plantation reflect the moral geography of servitude, or were they mere performatives, speech acts that were not intended to describe or represent an existing situation?40

  3

  The anonymous author of Marly, a description of Jamaican plantation culture, was astounded to discover, on arrival at the island, that all the slaves he encountered were fawning on him as if he were King George himself, although he was apparently just a bookkeeper. Indeed, Jamaican slaves saw the bookkeeper as the link between them and the English king, whom they referred to as Brother George.41 Even the urbane and often cynical Matthew Gregory Lewis was startled by the affections (or affectations) of the slaves who celebrated his arrival, happy to meet the man who owned them and even happier to belong to “Massa George,” the king: “On my arrival, every woman who had a child held it up to show to me, exclaiming,—'See massa, see! here nice new neger me bring for work for massa'; and those who had more than one did not fail to boast of the number, and make it a claim to the greater merit with me.”42

  Why would slave mothers show off the children they had produced to work for the master and be happy about the inevitable bondage of their progeny? Lewis was puzzled by these gestures, but the more this fawning was piled on him, the more he began to recognize that it was part of a subtle and insidious reversal of the structure of control. He slowly came to understand that the slaves who flattered him most were those who had transgressed in his absence or needed favors from him. Here, the performance of happiness in the face of servitude was a calculated tactic, a means to a specific end.

  Now, given the confusion between genuine affect and a manipulative play of feelings, the question of semantics or speech acts is an important one. It is important because when we listen to slaves flattering their masters or expressing the pleasure of belonging to a particular owner—and by extension Massa George, the king himself—it is difficult for us to tell whether they were rehearsing conventions expected of them, whether they were involved in a kind of play, sucking up, as it were, to the often absentee master, or whether their happiness was linked somehow, in a deeper sense and meaning, to their referential and experiential world. Indeed, white visitors to the slave colonies were highly disturbed by their incapacity to draw the line between the semantics of authenticity and sincerity and self-interested performance. For many white observers and other outsiders, understanding the affective nature of the slave, either in private meetings or in public gatherings, did not seem to cohere with the general condition of enforced labor, which was one of unmitigated suffering. Many observers of slavery in the West Indies wondered what the meaning of these scenes of pleasure was in relation to dominant notions about freedom, especially the assumption that only free people could be happy. More particularly, liberal observers struggled to reconcile the slaves' momentary sense of freedom, expressed mostly on Sundays and the Christmas holidays, with the overall condition of enslavement. J. B. Moreton, writing on Jamaica, was struck by the fact that slaves engaged in the hardest labor were commonly singing; he was moved by the “deep melancholy of their songs.”43 And Lewis, who seemed to thrive on scenes of slaves at play as a validation of his own role as a liberal slave owner, found the presentation of happiness and affection to be the source of some doubt and confusion: “Whether the pleasure of the negroes was sincere may be doubted; but certainly it was the loudest that I ever witnessed: they all talked together, sang, danced, shouted, and, in the violence of their gesticulations, tumbled over each other, and rolled about upon the ground. Twenty voices at once enquired after uncles, and aunts, and grandfathers, and great-grandmothers of mine, who had been buried long before I was in existence, and whom, I believe, most of them only knew by tradition.”44

  Lewis was probably involved in a subtle defense of slavery; the rhetoric of his journal reflected a modish attempt to represent enslavement as a benign, almost harmless, institution and thus to ameliorate the discourse of abolitionism.45 Still, his observations raise important questions about how slaves themselves came to redefine the condition of servitude and how we should read the performances that must now be seen as the key to their own aesthetic ideology. For going by even secondhand accounts of both the enslaved men and women and observers of their daily lives, it is apparent that even within the instrumental culture of the plantation, African slaves were able to create a site of pleasure and leisure at odds with their lived experience; in these sites of play, they could be temporarily liberated “from the prevailing truth of the established order.”46 In fact, while Douglass's reservations about festivals cannot be dismissed offhand, slaves did seem to recognize the power and value of the fair, the marketplace, or the carnival as what Stallybrass and White have called “the epitome of local identity.”47

  At issue here, then, is a process defined by apparent contradictions, one in which two equally compelling cultural logics seem to be at work, against each other or in tandem. There was, on one hand, the recognition that the process of enslavement represented the radical evacuation of the African from the central categories of cultural identity, morality, selfhood, and even the capacity for pleasure. Within this logic, Douglass's distaste for slave performances as just another form of servitude makes perfect sense. Making those deprived of the capacity for pleasure perform happiness would indeed strike us as a cruel form of punishment and a foreclosure of what Douglass called “virtuous liberty.”48 On the other hand, however, performances represented the clearest and most palpable evidence of the emergence of an alternative aesthetic or culture among the slaves. It is not accidental that all the leading studies on slave cultures have focused on performance as the essence of black self-making in the very sites of control that sought to deny them agency.49 The overriding question, however, is this: How could the slaves turn the nothingness in which they found themselves into the consciousness of their own being? And how do we now read the inscription of being in the structure of negativity?

  A useful first step here is to understand the origin of nothingness itself. Jean Paul Sartre, who is my guide on identity as a form of dissociation, notes that there are “an infinite number of realities which are not only objects of judgment, but which are experienced, opposed, feared…by the human being and which in their inner structure are inhabited by negation, as their necessary condition.”50 Realities that are defined by negation, what Sartre calls négatités (his neologism) are caught between their existence as expressions of “wholly positive realities,” which are still defined by negation, and a realm of experience in which “the positivity is only an appearance concealing a hole of nothingness.”51 To the extent that slave performances and other material forms were ways of being in the world, they could be described as positive realities; but since the world that produced these experiences and to which they were a reaction were defined by radical negativity, they could well have been mere appearances, concealing the deep hole of that enslavement.

  And there is no doubt that slaves conceived their existential condition as structured by negativity, as depressive of the body and mind as it was exhaustive of being. Equiano presented this structure of nothingness in the form of a question: “Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all its fire, and every noble sentiment?”52 Quobna Ottobah Cugoano conceived his enslavement as a descent from “a state of innocence and freedom�
� into a world of terror and barbarism, of “oppression and calamities” that seemed excessive of descriptive language.53 For Mary Prince, slavery was an affliction and terror.54 And when her infant son fell sick, Harriet Jacobs was torn between her love for her baby and the thought that death was better than slavery. What seemed to hurt her most, Jacobs noted, was the cruel fact that the child would not bear his real father's name, because her master had decreed against it: “It was a sad thought that I had no name to give my child. His father caressed him and treated him kindly, whenever he had a chance to see him. He was not unwilling that he should bear his name; but he had no legal claim to it; and if I had bestowed it upon him, my master would have regarded it as a new crime, of insolence, and would, perhaps, revenge it on the boy. O, the serpent of Slavery has many and poisonous fangs!”55 For the slave, the breakdown of the body and mind signaled the beginning of the descent to nothingness, a point underscored by Douglass in his retrospective narration of the first six months of his stay with Mr. Covey, where he had been sent to be broken like a horse:

  If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey. We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!56