Archives of the Black Atlantic

Reading Between Literature and History

Wendy W. Walters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136753596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Many African diasporic novelists and poets allude to or cite archival documents in their writings, foregrounding the elements of archival research and data in their literary texts, and revising the material remnants of the archive. This book reads black historical novels and poetry in an interdisciplinary context, to examine the multiple archives that have produced our historical consciousness. In the history of African diaspora literature, black writers and intellectuals have led the way for an analysis of the archive, querying dominant archives and revising the ways black people have been represented in the legal and hegemonic discourses of the west. Their work in genres as diverse as autobiography, essay, bibliography, poetry, and the novel attests to the centrality of this critique in black intellectual culture. Through literary engagement with the archives of the slave trader, colonizer, and courtroom, creative writers teach us to read the archives of history anew, probing between the documents for stories left untold, questions left unanswered, and freedoms enacted against all odds. Opening new perspectives on Atlantic history and culture, Walters generates a dialogue between what was and what might have been. Ultimately, Walters argues that references to archival documents in black historical literature introduce a new methodology for studying both the archive and literature itself, engaging in a transnational and interdisciplinary reading that exposes the instability of the archive's truth claim and highlights rebellious possibility.

Part I

Diaries, Letters, and Scrapbooks

Archives of the Everyday

1Fiction and Documents

Patricia Powell's The Pagoda

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars.

—Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”

Official archives are frequently repositories sponsored by national governments as sites to collect and create the historical records of said governments and their peoples. The documents found in such archives bind their subjects to social identities that are often legally determined by the dominant class. For example, a history of Afro-Caribbeans in eighteenth-century Jamaica might refer to plantation records that list people as property, citing the juridical identity of the African diasporic person as “slave” or “chattel.” The history of Chinese migration to the Caribbean entails records of ships loading “passengers” at Whampoa or Macao, records which speak of the Chinese laborer as “coolie.” How can these contracts, records, legal papers, and for-sale notices speak from the perspective of the colonized? What can they tell us about the subjectivity of those laboring in fields or battened under hatches making a middle passage toward indentureship? Reflecting its foundational purpose, the archive installs and inscribes social identities delimited by the discourses of the law and nation-state.

And yet the archive is also a site of desire and attraction, as it promises access to a material past. Contemporary black international literature often displays the allure of the archive. Historical novels and poetry bear the traces of archival documents such as maps, letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings. In this chapter, I propose that the insertion of fictional archival documents in Patricia Powell's The Pagoda negates and revises the subordinate social identities codified by the archive and furthered by dominant historiographies.¹ This literary insertion interrupts the narrative cohesion of the novel, producing break, caesura, and the seams and fractures cited by Derek Walcott as characteristic of much postcolonial literature. It is in the literary text that social and legal identities can be remade and reimagined as identities of resistance not subjugation. The novel also enables us to recognize the archive itself as transnational. For example, reading an archive for the history of Chinese migration to the Caribbean entails reading documents authored by Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and American governments. Therefore, the critical reading practice demanded by black international literature unhooks the archive from its stubborn hold in national ground, at the same time that it unhooks the (formerly) subordinate from the social and legal identities of the nation-states’ categories.²

The Pagoda opens up a rereading of archive by bringing fictional elements of archival reconstruction to the surface of the narrative itself. Powell presents a fictionalized retelling of a multicultural moment in Jamaican history, at the same time that she depicts the crumpling, endlessly rewriting nature of postcolonial historiography. The Pagoda overflows with faded letters, damp logbooks, maps, dusty paintings, and community gossip. Even as the postcolonial construction of narrative is necessarily fragmented and under construction, in this text we also see quite clearly that the archive of Empire itself is moldy, fading, and indeed even becoming illegible. This chapter addresses three embedded (fictional) texts within Powell's novel—a letter, a diary, and a collection of newspaper articles—that structure the ways we read The Pagoda. These three texts represent the three strands of the transnational history surrounding Powell's protagonist, Lowe. The first is a letter authored by the Chinese immigrant Lowe. In the middle is the travel diary of an Anglo-British ship captain, Cecil. And the third body of documents in the text belongs to Dulcie, an Afro-Jamaican woman who has led strikes and plantation walkouts for which she has been brutally punished. Presenting us with the very patchwork nature of the documents that inform this history, The Pagoda constructs a story around those documents, reminding us of the need for a transnational reading of archive.³

Lucille Mathurin Mair's work has been important in accessing information about the lives of Afro-Caribbean women. Describing her own archival research, Mair writes, “Records existed, most of them the result of the very nature of the slave society and economy. Estate papers and slave registration returns are rich in the demographic data compiled by proprietors and managers to keep account of the size, age, physical condition, occupation, and other attributes of their human property. Colonial Office and parliamentary reports provide prime evidence of the strategic and commercial interests of imperialism, which shaped the island polity” (“Recollections of a Journey” 53).⁴ These data are bound by the taxonomies of the slavocracy, which refer to Afro-Caribbean people as property. Seeking more nuanced representations of what life was like for Afro-Caribbeans, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that while “historical master tropes—colonialism, slavery, racism” are useful “in sketching the horizon of an era and the outer limits of a social formation, they cannot convey the lived realities of actual populations, past or present” (“Culture on the Edges” 190). As Mair notes, “There are data in abundance, but there is very little about the inner lives of slaves” (“Recollections of a Journey” 53).⁵ This reference to the inner lives of slaves also recalls Toni Morrison's essay, “The Site of Memory,” where she explains her own writerly search for the emotional lives of African American slaves, a search that led to the writing of Beloved, from the kernel of a nineteenth-century newspaper article about Margaret Garner. These and other scholars have shown that an expanded notion of the archives of slavery and colonialism takes account of multiple and complex elements consisting of diaries, letters, business accounts, slave testimony and oral histories. My focus here is not only on the archival turn, but on the literary turn, the pull to the novel felt by Morrison, Powell, and others. In a discussion of performative speech acts in the novel, Mario Ortiz-Robles traces the “institutionalization of the novel” “back to the performative acts that bring off all those rites, contracts, transactions, laws, rights, and privileges that bind us to our social identity” (15). The citation of sometimes invented archival documents in black historical literature highlights the provisional nature of the speech act which first conscripted subordinate subjects within the identity regimes of the colonizer, such juridical designations as: “slave,” “coolie,” or “arsonist.”⁶

Powell's novel foregrounds elements of an archive (these letters, maps, ships’ logs, and newspaper clippings), to loosen her characters from the social identities to which they were bound. Lowe, the novel's protagonist, is a Chinese female smuggled on board a ship bringing indentured laborers to Jamaica in the mid-nineteenth century, after the abolition of slavery. In Jamaica, Lowe lives disguised as a man, married to Miss Sylvie, an octoroon who also has a (hidden) history of “passing.” The multiple stories of passing in this novel represent identity as a masquerade, alternately misread and reread by various characters.⁷ The novel recounts Lowe's efforts to write a letter to his grown daughter, explaining Lowe's own identity, and educating the daughter about Chinese history and culture. In a parallel move that unites document and architecture, Lowe plans the building of a pagoda, a cultural center and school for Jamaican Chinese.⁸ Powell's novel, like Lowe's own projects, is documentation under construction, a form of digging and building between narrative and archive, pursuing a postcolonial questioning of identity.

Researching the subject of Chinese indentured labor in post-emancipation Jamaica uncovers archival documents such as ships’ logs, captains’ records, the records of the planters, the traders, the ship owners, and of legal cases. These are the documents of indentureship, the remnants of an exploitative past. In her work on The Pagoda, Patricia Powell sought information about this history in the “dusty archives of the University of the West Indies in Mona,” as one source (“The Dynamics of Power” 189). She also cites the books, China Men, A House for Mr. Biswas, [Sons of] The Yellow Emperor, and Anthology of Chinese Literature (Acknowledgements page Pagoda). Other sources Powell acknowledges are “scraps of conversations with Chinese and other Jamaicans,” “unpublished dissertations and published articles,” and the “films of Richard Fung” (“The Dynamics of Power” 189). Powell's own archive of information, then, is significantly interdisciplinary, including films, novels, oral information, and historical documents from a transnational range of sources. In this sense, we can see Powell's own creative project as a form of Afro-Orientalism. Bill V. Mullen's critical analysis of this term cites the “efforts of scholars of African and Asian diaspora to speak of synchronous, rather than discrete, histories of Afro-Asian encounter and exchange” (xvi). Recent studies of Asian migration to the Caribbean have noted this important transnational frame. Lisa Yun and Ricardo René-Laremont's multinational and multilingual research has shown that “what emerges from the nineteenth century is a widely varied picture of what ‘coolie’ and ‘coolie history’ means. The history of the Americas, with its Spanish, English, French, and American colonial legacies, cannot be homogenized” (100).⁹ Yun and Laremont's bracketing of the word “coolie” is important, as this is a term by which Powell's character, Lowe, would be described within archives of nineteenth-century Asian migration to the Caribbean.

In 1864, this word bore a similar legal and material weight to the word “slave” throughout the previous centuries in the Caribbean. Adjudicating a case brought by James Tait and Jose Mattea vs. The Ship Hound, Judge William D. Shipman of New York City ruled on the basis of what “Coolie” meant.¹⁰ Tait and Mattea claimed that they had signed a contract with a charter company to take on 400 Chinese passengers at Macao and transport them to Havana. The Captain of the ship, Peck, refused to board that many, instead taking 219. Reading the archive of the lawyers for the ship and captain, we see that the judge's decision hinges on the definition of the word “Coolie.” He states:

The contract is what is well known among a certain class of commercial adventurers as ‘Coolie Charter’—an agreement by which American vessels, as well as others, were fore [sic] a time engaged for the purpose of transporting Chinese laborers, called Coolies, from China to Cuba, California, and some other places. The object of this voyage was perfectly well understood by both parties at the time the contract was entered into [ . . . ] The court is of the opinion, upon the whole evidence, that while there was no definite number fixed upon it was nevertheless generally expected, both by charterers and owners, that the ship would carry about 350 or 400. She was going on what was called a Coolie voyage” (Williams papers, emphasis added).

The judge's decision highlights the juridical performativity of the designation “coolie.” Here an implied understanding of the legal identity of “coolie” determines what is usual custom in loading a ship for a “coolie voyage,” and the treatment of Asian migrants is bound by hegemonic understandings of what a “coolie charter” means.¹¹ The court's supposed agreement about what “coolie charter” means, however, stands in direct contrast to the lack of agreement between laborer and charterer about what “indenture contracts” meant. As Denise Helly writes, “The disillusionment of the Cantonese who signed work contracts for Cuba was immediate and total. They had in no way imagined that they were renouncing their condition as free men when they agreed to work in some distant, unknown land” (20).¹² Speaking in the archive's silence, Lowe recounts in Powell's novel, “On that last trip there, on that nasty old boat, ready to turn over any second, ready to sink, he had eight hundred of us pack up down there. Eight hundred. And you should see how little the ship. [ . . . ] Five hundred of them kidnap” (68).

Lowe visits other Jamaican Chinese in another scene: “listening to the virulent histories of their lives and the woeful conditions that drove them from China. With faces haggard and gray and bathed in the scanty light of the semidarkened room, with fingers still glistening from the India ink that bound them to contracts—two pounds a month for five years at seventeen, twenty hours a day, six days a week—they talked about China and about the debts” (43). Here the ink, the material trace of the laborious bondage, marks the body of the subject, mirroring the fact that perhaps the novelist's access to this subject is only available via the contract, the ink remaining to be read in the archive. The character created by the writer is knowable through the trace of this ink, this material that marks the body. But this source material provides limited access to the voice of the Chinese laborer himself, and can only present a mediated testimony about the conditions of this alternate middle passage from China to Jamaica on board ships.¹³ As a novelist, this character's voice and perspective is what Powell seeks, and she supplements her reading of the “official” documents with the creative voices of Maxine Hong Kingston, the oral lore of her own community, and V.S. Naipaul's Trinidadian perspective. Powell describes the novel as partly her own “search for what Jamaica is: an island bereft of its original inhabitants and composed of a transplanted citizenry, some of whom are Chinese people who have contributed greatly to Jamaica but whose efforts are often minimized in the pages of history and literature” (“Dynamics of Power” 189). Powell's work recognizes a multicultural Jamaican social, political, and economic space, and therefore both consults and constructs a similarly diverse archive.

LOWE'S LETTER

The first letter that appears in the novel, dated April 1, 1893, is a letter Lowe is writing to his daughter whom he has not seen in twenty years. He begins the letter in order to reveal to her the truth that he is not her father, but rather her mother, and that her father is actually the white ship captain who discovered Lowe as a cross-dressed stowaway, and then held her captive in his cabin for the rest of the voyage. Lowe's daughter Elizabeth is the product of this rape, but Cecil, the Captain, sets Lowe up on the island as a male Chinese shopkeeper, and then finds a “mother” for Elizabeth in Miss Sylvie. Here is the narrator's description of the first time we see Lowe's letter: “The unfinished letter to the daughter was there, several sheets of paper that stared up at him from among the yellowing piles of old newspapers and magazines, ledger accounts, invoices, and IOU's from customers down at his shop, dried-up inkwells and pens that no longer wrote, squat bottles of pills and cough medicine without labels but which he knew by heart and swallowed regularly” (5). Lowe's letter is described as an item amidst a pile of other ephemera. Could this be the novelist's own dream of the voice of the subject? Amid the list of details that say only “facts” or numbers and accounts is the fantasy of a letter that would speak from the heart. The paper and ink bottles surrounding Lowe are yellowing and old, as are so many of the material items listed in the novel. Indeed, “[Lowe] had never written a letter before and had had to rifle through Miss Sylvie's moldy and decaying correspondence in order to find the correct form” (5). Lowe's repeated acts of writing this letter are fraught with fear and hesitation: we see the letter's own imminent decay foretold in the moldy condition of the documents that surround it, the ink that runs out, the pen that doesn't write. Lowe fears the letter may be intercepted: “Suddenly it occurred to him that maybe the husband would receive it first and read it. Worse still, maybe the postmistress would steam it open. Then what?” (7–8). Lowe seeks a private correspondence with his daughter, and the novel foreshadows the peril of disclosure that is always a potential in the archive's treatment of letters. Part of the allure of reading personal letters in an archive is the thrilling (and voyeuristic) prospect that we are reading something that was never meant for our eyes.¹⁴ Lowe finally begins the letter, immediately doubting, “Maybe a letter is not the right thing. Maybe I should meet up with you in person and explain face-to-face” (8).

Despite these false starts, Lowe begins to tell the history of his emigration from China to Jamaica, writing, “There isn't a record of any of this. Of what I am in truth. No certificates. No registration. Everything had to be quick and hush-hush. Nothing was written down” (8). The letter in the novel thus acknowledges its own need to be written, acknowledges that the documented archive must be incomplete. In fact, Lowe's comment in the letter only partially describes the condition of the historical archive of Chinese immigration to Jamaica, as there are specific retrievable certificates and documents. Walton Look Lai's 1998 work on Chinese immigration to the Caribbean cites “Colonial Office correspondence and papers, reports of Immigration Department officials and British agents in South China, reports and papers of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission in London, Parliamentary Papers,” admittedly mediated access to the migrants’ own perspectives (Chinese in the West Indies xi).¹⁵ Like Lowe, Powell the novelist knows that these colonial documents can only tell a partial story, and can perhaps never tell a story like Lowe's, one of disguise and concealment.

Lowe returns to his interrupted letter-writing several times throughout the novel: “He wandered over to his desk, which had been locked up since that night, and found lying there among the squat silver bottles of pills and old receipts the crumpled-up pieces of paper that were the letter he had begun” (23). He alternately crumples the letter and looks for matches to burn the letter. Perhaps aware ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Black Historical Literature and the Archive
• Part I Diaries, Letters, and Scrapbooks The Archives of the Everyday
• 1 Fiction and Documents Patricia Powell's The Pagoda
• 2 Archives of Anthropology and Psychoanalysis V.Y. Mudimbe's The Rift
• 3 Prison or Paradise? Archiving the Black American West in Toni Morrison's Paradise
• Part II Reading Rebellion The Archives of the Slave Trade
• 4 Elizabeth Alexander's “Amistad” Reading the Black History Poem through the Archive
• 5 “Object Into Subject” Michelle Cliff, John Ruskin, and the Slave Ship
• 6 The Spectral Ledger Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts
• 7 Reading the Archive, Looking for Bones
• Epilogue Toward an Aspirational Archive
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index