Métaphore, Mythe et Mémoire dans la Littérature
Caraı̈be : l’Oeuvre de Fred D’Aguiar
Leo Courbot
To cite this version:
Leo Courbot. Métaphore, Mythe et Mémoire dans la Littérature Caraı̈be : l’Oeuvre de Fred
D’Aguiar. Literature. Université Charles de Gaulle - Lille III, 2016. English. <NNT :
2016LIL30031>. <tel-01468455>
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Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3
École Doctorale des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société de Lille – Nord de France (ED 473 SHS)
Metaphor, Myth & Memory in Caribbean Literature:
the Work of Fred D'Aguiar
Thèse
pour obtenir le grade de
Docteur en langues et littérature anglaises et anglo-saxonnes
Discipline
Langues et littérature anglaises et anglo-saxonnes
Présentée et soutenue publiquement
le 25 Novembre 2016
par
Léo Courbot
sous la direction de
Monsieur le Professeur Thomas Dutoit
Membres du Jury:
Madame la Professeure Fiona McCann, de l'Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3, France
Madame la Professeure Bénédicte Ledent, de l'Université de Liège, Belgique
Madame la Professeure Kathie Birat, de l'Université de Lorraine, France
Monsieur le Professeur John Thieme, de l'Université de East Anglia, Angleterre
Monsieur le Professeur Thomas Dutoit, de l'Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3, France
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This thesis is dedicated to Pauline Croquesel, for more than a decade of support and
unconditional love.
I would also like to thank my entire family and, more specifically, my father and mother, for
believing in me, and helping me out for everything from day one.
Fred D'Aguiar, thank you very much for your relentless support, long-distance friendship, and
interstellar art: you initiated me to the powers of the imagination.
I am also very grateful to Marguerite Derrida for the gift, mediated by Thomas Dutoit, of
beautiful editions of more than ten books by Jacques Derrida: I could not have written the present
thesis if it was not for these texts.
An enormous thank you to Thomas Dutoit, who has helped me to make sense of what teaching
is about, learn how to read literature, get the agrégation, and who has been patient enough to put up
with my “fits” – you know what I mean – for six years as my research director.
Huge thanks must also go to Fiona McCann for her patient proof-readings, for inviting me to
her seminars, for introducing me to magic(al) realism, for accepting to be part of the jury for my
doctoral defense and, last but not least, for her contribution to my success at the agrégation.
I also must thank Bruce E. Graver for kindly sending me the electronic version of his wonderful
article on Wordsworth and Orpheus.
Thanks to Isabelle Boof-Vermesse, without whom I would have taken a very long time to
understand what problematization is.
I would also like to thank all of the doctoral jury members that I have not mentioned yet, for
taking the time to read my work. More specifically, John Thieme, whose discussions of inter-textuality
have significantly enriched some of my readings, Bénédicte Ledent, who also kindly invited me to
attend conferences in Liège, and whose articles on Fred D'Aguiar and Caryl Phillips are enlightening
pieces of research, and Kathie Birat, whose contribution to Revisiting Slave Narratives has aroused my
curiosity concerning authors I have not had a chance to read yet, such as Patricia Eakins: I am looking
forward to reading them all!
And of course, thanks are due to the École Doctorale de Lille – Nord de France and the Conseil
Régional du Nord pas de Calais, without whose funding this research work could not have been
written.
The present dissertation proposes a study of Fred D'Aguiar's complete verse and prose works, through
the triple lens of myth, metaphor and memory, and from within a broad, inclusive, and cross-cultural
understanding of Caribbean literature. Beginning with an exacerbation of metaphor's hypomnesic
relationship to mythology and Western metaphysics, the argument expands to address issues such as
that of the relationship between word and world, and elaborates a cross-cultural, and geographicallybased understanding of metaphor as tropicality. Tropicality in turn gives the argument its thrust, as it
allows, in the first half of the dissertation, for a singular reading of Fred D'Aguiar's entire verse corpus,
which is also shown, in the process, to intersect with a vast body of literature, ranging from Roman
antiquity to American-Caribbean magic(al) realism and from British romanticism to the philosophy of
Jacques Derrida. The second half of this research work explores D'Aguiar's novels in terms of
orphanhood, as all the protagonists of his six novels – itself a genre which, presenting itself as
newness, denies filiation – are orphans. Divided in two chapters, the second half of this dissertation
begins with a problematization of the links that relate textuality to orphanhood and orphanhood to
slavery, but also slavery to literacy, in order to study Fred D'Aguiar's novelistic accounts of slavery. It
then proposes a reflection on the supernatural, Orphic qualities of D'Aguiar's orphan characters, and of
their relation to the environment, which leads, in turn, to reflections on the Orphic traditions pervading
literary history, and opens up onto the ecocritical dimensions of contemporary literature, through the
tentative coinage of the notion of vatic environmentalism.
Key words: myth, metaphor, memory, tropicality, Orpheus, orphanhood, Fred D'Aguiar, Caribbean
litterature, ecocriticism, postcolonial studies, Jacques Derrida.
Ce travail de recherche propose une étude de l’œuvre intégrale, en vers et en prose, de Fred D'Aguiar, à
travers le prisme du mythe, de la métaphore et de la mémoire, et dans le cadre d'une définition large,
inclusive et interculturelle de la littérature caraïbe. A partir de la mise en lumière de la relation
hypomnésique de la métaphore à la mythologie et à la métaphysique occidentale, l'argumentation
s'étend sur des questions telles que celle du lien entre référent et monde et élabore une vision à la fois
interculturelle et géographique de la métaphore en tant que tropicalité. La tropicalité donne, à son tour,
son élan à l'argumentation, en permettant, pour la première moitié de ce travail de recherche, la
production d'une lecture singulière de la poésie de Fred D'Aguiar, qui s'avère aussi liée à un vaste
corpus littéraire, s'étendant de l'Antiquité romaine au réalisme magique américain et caraïbe, du
romantisme britannique à la philosophie de Jacques Derrida. La deuxième moitié de ce travail explore
la prose de Fred D'Aguiar à travers le thème de l'orphelinat, car tous les protagonistes de ses romans
sont des orphelins – et, qui plus est, parce-que le roman est aussi, par définition, le genre qui nie toute
filiation. Divisée en deux chapitres, cette deuxième partie de l'étude commence par une
problématisation des liens qui opèrent entre textualité et orphelinat ainsi qu'entre orphelinat et
esclavage, mais aussi entre esclavage et illettrisme, afin d'étudier la représentation de l'esclavage dans
les romans de Fred D'Aguiar. Cette deuxième moitié progresse ensuite vers une réflexion sur les
qualités surnaturelles, voire orphiques des orphelins de la prose d'aguiarienne, ainsi que sur leur
relation, tout autant orphique, à l'environnement. En conséquence, le présent travail de recherche se
clôt sur deux questions : celle de la tradition orphique qui sous-tend l'histoire de la littérature, de
l'antiquité jusqu'à présent, et celle de la dimension écocritique de la littérature contemporaine, que l'on
proposera de défendre pour certains cas, en tant qu'environnementalisme vatique.
Mots-clés : mythe, métaphore, mémoire, tropicalité, Orphée, orphelinat, Fred D'Aguiar, littérature
caraïbe, éco critique, études postcoloniales, Jacques Derrida.
General Introduction: Caribbean Orphic
There's a natural mystic blowing through the air –
I won't tell no lie; If you listen carefully now you will hear:
There's a natural mystic blowing through the air. (Bob Marley, Exodus, 1977)
Metaphor, myth and memory. In Caribbean literature. Fred D'Aguiar. Ternary rhythms.
Metaphor, myth and memory alliterate on the beats of a trimetric line, and suggest that some sort of
analogical, yet implicit, link relates the three notions to one another. The nature of that link is
unclear: a first thing to explain. Then, there is that broader ternary pocket, by way of which “the
three M's” are related, somehow, to an “in,” an “inside,” a “within” of a literature that is called
Caribbean, and to which, perhaps, Fred D'Aguiar may “belong.” What is the “inside” of a literature?
What is the Caribbean? What is the inside of a literature defined as Caribbean, and how does
D'Aguiar relate to that literature? Is he even a Caribbean author, considering the facts that he was
born in London in 1960, reared in Guyana from 1962 to 1972, then sent back to London where he
became a critically acclaimed poet, until he left Britain again in 1994 for the United States, where
he has lived ever since, becoming an American citizen in 2014? As one zooms in on them, the
apparently tight pockets of meaning condensed in the title of the present study fall apart at the
seams into a “woven complexity” (D'Aguiar 1994, 33), and need to be re-plaited into a smooth
texture, so that the next time a magnifying glass is used, it will, hopefully, offer the sight of an
enlarged, embroidered rug ornamenting the grounds on which the following study unfolds, without
sweeping anything below the carpet or into the oblivion of “floorboard creases” (D'Aguiar 1985,
39). Metaphor, myth and memory in Caribbean Literature: the Work of Fred D'Aguiar. This title,
indeed, does not pan out, but progresses from the general to the specific. Let us follow that
movement.
Metaphor, myth and memory. Not myth, metaphor and memory, as an implicit, yet expected
1
designation of the role of myth in nation building as a shared, metaphorical memory of what unites
a people into a nation or a cultural area. Not “simply” mythopoetics. Order and punctuation,
rhythm, time keeping and progression are not meaningless. Metaphor, comma, myth and memory.
Comma because the colon is necessary elsewhere, between “Caribbean Literature” and “the Work
of Fred D'Aguiar,” and cannot be elegantly repeated. But the “colon” is “edifying” here, a pillar on
which one can build. Metaphor: myth and memory. Metaphor on one side, myth and memory on the
other, because metaphor has the singularity of being inescapable, from a linguistic standpoint, as
Jacques Derrida demonstrates in “The Retrait of Metaphor,” and thus necessarily conditions the
telling of myths and memories:1
[the] withdrawal of the metaphoric does not free up the place for a discourse of the proper or the
literal [littéral], it will at the same time have the sense of a re-folding, of what retreats like a wave on
the shoreline [littoral, my italics], and of a re-turn, the overloading repetition of a supplementary
trait, of yet another metaphor, a re-tracing [Derrida's italics] of metaphor […]. (Derrida 1978, 66)
In other words, Derrida explains that every attempt at speaking in fully literal terms on any subject
is intrinsically bound to fail, because speaking is, by definition, making metaphors, undoing the
fixity of the signifier into its displacement, translation or meta phorein, in diversions and reversions,
singular rotations or tropoï, tropes. Elsewhere, in Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida emphasizes
this point by repeating that “inalienable alienation” is a fundamental property of language (1996,
48).2
And what metaphor ultimately re-turns by returning to its speaker, still according to Derrida,
is memory of the metaphorical or, more precisely, catachrestic erasure, in Western metaphysical
discourse, of the Indo-European (and hence, cross-cultural instead of exclusively, hermetically
European or, by extension, “Western”) mythological tenors on which the vehicles of that discourse
1 In the present thesis, interpretations of Derrida's work will spring from the French versions of his texts. Citations
from his work, however, will always be drawn from consultations of the English translations of these books and
articles, except where indicated. Original texts and their translations are all listed in the bibliography, below. When
the translated pieces appear to have lost the shade of meaning necessary to the argument being made, our
translations are provided. When translations are cited, page references correspond to the anglophone versions of
Derrida's texts. When we translate, page references refer to the French editions. As for other francophone
philosophers whose thoughts are recurrently used in this thesis, such as Édouard Glissant and Michel Foucault, the
French texts are consulted and their translations cited, except for Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity, for which
we provide our translations, for reasons similar to those inducing us to translate Derrida.
2 Chapter II below returns to this subject in thoroughly detailed and explanatory terms.
2
(its words), and language in general, were founded. Such erasure, Derrida calls “white mythology”
(1971, 11). “White,” not in the ethnic sense, or at least not openly and exclusively so, but as a
designation of the “blank” that results from the whitewashing of a specific, metaphorical
representation of the past on which the nature of language is predicated. In this sense, “white
mythology,” is always-already being undone by the palimpsestic re-tracing of mythic tenors from
below the surface of presumed literal vehicles or signs, that is, by the (perpetual) re-turn of
metaphor as an intrinsic quality of language. In other words, the relationship that links myth and
memory under the linguistic hegemony of metaphor, so to speak, is that metaphor is a mythological
reminder. In more scientific, philosophical terms, metaphor is not a catalyst of absolute memory, or
anamnesis, but a re-presentation, a restoration of memory, that is, hypomnesis. Hence the “three
M's.” Metaphor: myth and memory. Metaphor, myth and memory. Metaphor is the hypomnesis of a
mythology threatened with erasure – and, as such, points to moments of amnesia, the political
implications of which, concerning the Caribbean context that is yet to be defined, are fundamental.3
Speaking of which, the relation of the current Derridean approach to the forthcoming
definition of a Caribbean framework does not correspond in any way to the imposition of a readinggrid that is to predetermine discussions of Fred D'Aguiar's works and/or of texts by other, related
authors. Quite contrarily, reliance on Derrida is conditioned by logical and argumentative reasons
that spring from a reading of the literary texts in question. The appropriateness of referring to
Derrida's thoughts on the above-mentioned themes in a Caribbean perspective is, moreover,
3 Etymology, of course, also plays a part in the retrieval of the cross-cultural mythological past of words and, hence,
in the undoing of white mythologies. In this sense, in the present, French context (that is also partly Caribbean,
through the country's Départements and Territoires d'Outre Mer), the 2016 reform simplifying the spelling of French
written speech by presumably tightening the link between graphic and phonic, and the planned disappearance of
Latin and Greek as specific disciplines from the scene of secondary teaching are neither fortuitous nor innocent:
while being enforced on the pretexts of facilitating the acquisition of literacy and/or of the disused nature of
classical languages – yet, one may suspect, actually for strictly economic reasons – these reforms complicate
hypomnesic access, through language, to a (cross-)cultural past, and is at the risk of condemning, incidentally, the
next generations of students to a shallow sense – because less informed by myth and history, which are, again,
crucial to the undoing of white mythology – of cultural identity that is, arguably, at odds with the globalized world
they will have to live in. What such a loss of one's sense of belonging to a global cross-culturality actually facilitates
is (1) the perpetuation, as discussed in Chapter I, of the misguided idea of “national identity,” for which the rightwing 2007-12 French government also went so far as creating a Ministère, (2) the preservation of the naive pride in
and nostalgic holding on to such nationalist (yet, here, ironically, anglophone) slogans as “Made in France” and (3)
the continuation of political reliance on the fear of foreign immigrants for electoral purposes.
3
exacerbated by a great variety of historical and philosophical facts: as a Sephardic, Spanish, Jew the
expulsion of whose ancestors from Spain generated the money to finance the exploration, and
colonization, of South America, as an Algerian (and hence African) Jew whose ancestors were given
French citizenship in 1870, as a Jew dispossessed of French nationality by the French government
in Algeria in 1942 until he was restored with it in 1945 after the victory of Allied Forces, as a
French-Algerian Jew who emigrated to Paris in 1948 and who did his military service in Algeria (as
an English teacher to French soldiers' children) from 1957 to 1959, as the child among three who
single-handedly organized his family's (two siblings, parents, relatives) departure from Algeria in
March 1962, and finally as a scholar whose first book, published in February 1962, coincided with
Algerian independence, with French decolonization, and conceptualized “différance” as a deep way
of formalizing the relation of colonized and colonizer as well as colony and so-called “post-colony,”
Jacques Derrida's genealogy, family history, personal experience, and intellectual project are deeply
entwined with the colonial and postcolonial experience of artists such as Fred D'Aguiar (and others
studied and mentioned in this doctoral dissertation) (Nancy 2007, 65-70; Young 2001, 414).
The aforementioned nature of language as an intrinsically metaphorical medium partakes of
what Derrida's work reveals of colonialism. As he explains, again, In Monolingualism of the Other,
the irresistible, yet, by definition, unsatisfiable desire to master language, to control its literalness
and prevent its escape into the metaphorical, into Otherness, corresponds to a primarily imperial or
colonial drive from which other, analogous wishes derive, and become manifest, for instance,
through attempts at imposing one's language and culture over the Other so as to promulgate the
“hegemony of homogeneity” (Derrida 1996, 44, 46, 68-70).4 Such hegemony is, however,
unachievable, because of, or, rather, thanks to, the intrinsically decomposable nature of the literal
4 The generalization of the colonial impulse as an intrinsically human desire to master speech leads to a view of the
colonial drive as a force that, in spite of its diversified manifestations, works the colonial into a form of permanence:
there is colonial desire as long as there is a desire to speak in a “proper,” “appropriated,” mastered literal way. That
impression of permanence may lead, in turn, to questions concerning the aptness of designating colonialism as
posterior or new to itself, since, presuming that the desire for clear communication is implicitly conditioned by a
belief in literal sense, the colonial is always-already there, suffusing our speech. Such questions are thoroughly
addressed in Chapter II, below.
4
into the metaphorical, of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, of the cultural into the crosscultural, or of presence into “différance,” by way of which origin is always-already prosthetic and,
hence, unoriginal, non-universal, not totalizable (Derrida 1982, 13). In Poetics of Relation, Édouard
Glissant corroborates this point by explaining that culture can never be reduced to a sum of primary
elements, as these presumed “primary” elements are, in actuality, always divisible into other entities
(Glissant 1990, 169).
The same remarks concerning the inescapable nature of metaphor are, necessarily,
applicable to literature, insofar as literature is a linguistic and cultural mode of expression.
Furthermore, literature, because of its intrinsically metaphorical qualities as a linguistic medium, is,
subsequently, also endowed with the potential for a hypomnesic restitution of specific pasts and
mythologies (Derrida 1971, 11; 1978, 66): examples of this fact abound in the literary history of the
past two millenniums, as will soon be shown. But then, in this perspective, literature, in its written
form, is doubly mythological, for, not only being related to myth through the metaphoricity of
language, literature, as textuality, or written speech, has itself been mythologized. In other words,
the linguistic, metaphorical inscription of the mythological into texts is, arguably, a mythological
scene in itself. For instance, in the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates locate the origin of writing in the
Egyptian myth of Theuth, where Theuth presents his invention of written speech to Ammon, who
rejects Theuth's gift of writing as a remedy for memory, because Ammon believes that writing will
induce readers to stop exerting their memory once they can be reminded by textual constructs: in
Ammon's words, Theuth has “discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding” (Plato a 62,
275a). In this sense, the memory of a myth leads to a view of writing that corroborates, yet through
an argument other than that of inescapable metaphoricity, the idea that textuality, or literature in the
broadest of senses, is a hypomnesic medium.
In addition to that view of written speech, Plato further explains that unlike spoken words,
writing “always needs its father to help it; for it is incapable of either defending or helping itself”
5
(Plato 63, 275e). Derrida again, in “Plato's Pharmacy,” quite justly identifies “the distress of the
orphan” there (Derrida 1972, 95, translation mine). Such a comparison of writing to orphanhood is
not fortuitous at all, as it discretely refers to another mythological scene, contemporary to Plato's
time, of the advent of written speech. For Plato's “anxieties about the inability to control a message
once consigned to paper” (Young 2008, 11) are a consequence of the rise of Orphism, that is, the
cult of Orpheus, which, breaking with Greek tradition, did not spread its precepts by word of mouth
and through public ritual, but through the consignment of Orpheus' alleged words in writing,
making the cult unusually dependent upon books, which was not to the taste of every classical
thinker at the time: as seen in the above-cited passages from the Phaedrus, “Plato [had] something
to say on the topic” (Young 2008, 11). Considering the etymological link that relates the words
“Orpheus” and “orphan,” through the Indo-European -orbh- root, which designates “bereavement,”
be it of an orphan's parents or of Orpheus' Eurydice, Plato's definition of written speech as an
orphan, at the very moment when Orphic texts became widespread, cannot be accidental. Hence,
the definition of writing that Plato has Socrates speak in the Phaedrus, being formulated in response
to Orphism, and through the legend of Theuth, is made doubly mythological, and again, in the
process, corroborates the idea that written speech is endowed with hypomnesic qualities. Finally,
while these features are what made Socrates suspicious of written speech, they are used by Ovid,
precisely through the metaphorical representation of the emergence of writing at the end of his
rendition of the myth of Orpheus, to defend the value of written verse as a means by way of which
archaic Greek myths can actually be recorded and remembered into a Greco-Roman, poetic, literary
corpus (Young 15-7). In this sense, classical, orph(an)ic views of written speech strongly relate
myth, metaphor and memory to the world of texts and to literature.5
5 Another, convergent way in which literature may be related to myth is the history of the advent of the novel, which
both Tzvetan Todorov and Homer Obed Brown describe as a self-orphaning genre that, by presenting itself as
newness, as novelty, denies having any precedence or genealogy (Todorov 14; Brown 1996, 12). More precisely,
Homer Obed Brown explains that the history of the novel is comparable to that of the myth of the patriarchs in
Genesis 12: 1-2, in which Abraham is asked by God to break with his father, or orphan himself, in order to start a
new genealogy and go found a nation. The transmission of that story by word of mouth across generations, and its
consignment in Scriptures, turned the genetic story to an unprecedented myth. Conversely, still according to Brown,
the novel was mystified and institutionalized as a genre at the beginning of the 19 th century, but its break, or
6
Moreover, Ovid and Plato's inscription of the genesis of writing and literature as an
orph(an)ic scene is a fundamental feature of literary history, because it initiated a tradition of
reading the myth of Orpheus that developed and enlarged across the centuries to the present through
rewritings by innumerable authors, not only from the West, but from all over the world including
the Caribbean, that a tracing of the Orphic literary tradition will help us reach in presumably
unusual ways.6 Following the classical era in which Plato (c. 428-348BC) and Ovid (43BC-c.
17AD) successively lived, the advent and spread of Christianity, from late antiquity to the Middle
Ages, led to the formulation of analogies between Jesus Christ and Orpheus as a means to induce
pagan communities of the Mediterranean (including Greece and Egypt) to convert to Christianity,
and progressively gave way to a moralizing interpretation of the myth, notably in the wake of the
publication of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, in works such as those of Henryson, Chaucer,
and the unknown author of Ovide Moralisé (Gale 334; Gros Louis 1966, 652-3, Chaucer ca. 1380)
as far as Europe is concerned. This Christian, syncretic way of reading the myth, which Gros Louis
calls the “textual tradition,” developed into a “popular tradition,” as oral poets took up the Christian
version of the myth as a subject for their song, by way of which the myth of Orpheus was
popularized and integrated to the world of chivalric romance (Gros Louis 1966, 645).
Although the “popular tradition” came to supplant the “textual one,” both followed their
course well into the Renaissance. The “textual” trend, for instance, gained importance in Britain
orphaning from former traditions dates back to Middle-Ages romance. Drawing from Walter Scott, Brown further
explains that romance first was a language that broke away from Latin, the imperial, patriarchal language, and that
was itself split into different romance languages according to zones the delimitation of which approximated that of
European territories such as, for instance, England, France, and Italy, giving birth to specific romance literary
traditions in these respective areas. Hence, instead of exclusively relying on the Greco-Roman tradition, as had been
done from the Renaissance to the age of Enlightenment, eighteenth and nineteenth-century European writers
rediscovered and embraced these proto-national romance traditions of the Middle Ages to found the novel as the
expression of a national literature, as a renewed quest for (national) origins, a mythopoetics breaking with the
classical tradition (Brown 1997, 19). In the same way as the orphan nature of the novel is extended to written speech
as a whole by Derrida through Plato (Derrida 1972, 63-4), in Donner la Mort, Derrida also explains that not only the
novel, but literature itself is Abrahamic (Derrida 1999, 177), and thus confirms Brown's argument, and ours, that the
history of literature is strongly related to the institutionalization and/or palimpsestic concealment of mythologies.
6 The introduction to Chapter V, entitled “Orpheus in Retrospect,” retraces this tradition at length and shows the
multiple ways in which Fred D'Aguiar's work is embedded within that tradition. For obvious reasons of space and
length, the present introduction will only retrace the development of literary treatments of the myth across history in
its broad lines, so as to quickly get to formulate some of this dissertation's crucial arguments concerning
contemporary (Caribbean) literature.
7
under Elizabethan rule, as Orpheus was favored as a moral philosopher-poet who could temper the
base, bestial instincts of animals and men with his song (Gros Louis 1969, 64-71). Such a view of
Orpheus as a civilizing force of sorts was capitalized upon by humanist preceptors of rhetoric who,
prolonging Ovid's muting of Orpheus' song into written verse, privileged Orpheus' speech over his
music as an instrument of power. This favoring of rhetoric over music was then used by Elizabethan
poets such as Shakespeare, Sidney, John Rainolds, Henry Vaughan, Henry Reynolds, Francis Bacon
and Spenser to legitimize written verse as an art form in its own right, and confirm the importance
of their social role as poets (Cochrane 11). For instance, Spenser, in the Faerie Queene, secures his
position as a national poet by creating for himself a (literary) genealogy positing Orpheus, via
Virgil, as one of his ancestors,7 and invents, for Elizabeth, a line of descent relating her to feminine
forebears such as Britomart, the Virgin Mary, Eurydice, and Isis, by way of which the poet creates a
“translatio imperii” that entitles Elizabeth to the inheritance of the Roman Empire (Delsigne 199,
212). Furthermore, Spenser relies on the legend according to which Orpheus was the Argonaut who
outplayed the sirens and brought order to the watery world in order to defend British overseas
claims to waters and lands that Britain was trying to wrestle from the Spanish at the time: by the
same token, Spenser not only re-inscribed Orpheus within the literary legacy of the Roman empire,
but recreated the Thracian bard as an imperial civilizer in the imagery that promoted modern
colonial conquest.8
Apart from this Elizabethan expansion of the “textual tradition” of the Middle Ages, a
revival of the “popular tradition of reading the myth of Orpheus occurred by the end of Elizabeth's
rein, simultaneously to the rise of Puritanism, the advent of Enlightenment philosophy, and the
7 Conversely, Spenser's French contemporary, Ronsard, staged himself as the French Orpheus par excellence (Cain
28).
8 That Orpheus became part of the colonial imagery that served to corroborate the idea that “Britannia rule[d] the
waves” might consist in a way through which the myth was spread around the world, via colonial routes. The
persistence and popularity of the myth on all continents is also due, of course, to its cross-cultural adaptability, as
thousands of Orpheus-type myths can be found all around the world, for instance in India, Japan, New Zealand (in
Mahori mythology), Hawaï, Samoa, Melanesia, the New Hebrides, in American Indian mythologies, and in Egyptian
and West African tales (Gros Louis 1967, 245; Gonzales 153-64; Bricault 261-9; Delsigne 205; McDaniel 28;
Misrahi-Barak & Joseph-Villain, Eds. 36). Again, for a fully detailed account of “Orphic” traditions, see Chapter V.
8
accession of James I to the throne (Gros Louis 1969, 70). The death of Elizabeth and the changing
times had a disorienting effect on poets of the period, such as John Donne (70), and led to a shift in
representations of Orpheus, which started to lean toward the morbid, for instance with Milton's
description of the bard's severed head floating down the Hebrus river in Lycidas (Milton, lines 5863; Martindale 322-3). Furthermore, the Puritans' desecration of myths, in addition to the insistence
of Enlightenment philosophers on the importance of pragmatic rationality, ultimately led to
“Restoration and eighteenth-century burlesque and mock-heroic treatments of mythical heroes”
where Orpheus was “travestied and used as mere decoration” (Gros Louis 1969, 80).
Only with Wordsworth, and the subsequent rise of romanticism in the late seventeenth and
early nineteenth centuries, would Orpheus be taken seriously again. For it is during the summer of
1788, in Cambridge, while mourning for his deceased parents, that Wordsworth, then an orphan,
translated two hundred lines from Virgil's Georgics, a hundred of which were dedicated to the myth
of Orpheus. It is through this translation, in his formative years, that Wordsworth developed his
portrayals of grieving (wo)men and worked out his lyrical sense of a man's relationship to nature
and time – for instance through the figure of the rower in his “river” poems (Graver 137, Wu 360).
Lord Byron and Percy Shelley would soon follow suit, the former by recurrently composing scenes
of Orphic leave-taking in Manfred and other works (Stratham 364-4, 371), the latter by claiming, in
“A Defence of Poetry,” and in keeping with the textual tradition of the Elizabethan period, that
poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley 1821). At the same time, and well
into the Victorian age, Mary Shelley's Frankestein would remind readers of the dismemberment of
Orpheus as much as of the re-membering of Osiris – an Egyptian deity to whom Orpheus is often
syncretically related, as a disciple of Isis, Osiris' wife (Delsigne 206) – and Dickens' would allude to
the bard in his last novel, The Mistery of Edwin Drood, and to Eurydice through the character of
Agnes in David Copperfield (“David” himself also being a Biblical figure that has often been
compared to Orpheus) (Bauer 309; Gros Louis 1966, 644).
9
All the while, the myth of Orpheus lived on into French literature too, notably through the
syncretic vogue that followed the 1789 Revolution (Cellier 146, Spiquel 542) and into the
nineteenth century in the works of Gérard de Nerval and Victor Hugo. In “El Desdichado,” Nerval
represents himself as an Orpheus of sorts while, in Aurelia, he laments upon the loss of Eurydice
and uses the Rhine as an allusion to Faust, Goethe's Orphic tale (Fairlie 155, Cellier 147). Victor
Hugo recurrently mentions Orpheus throughout his work as well, and compares him to Job, Jacob,
Moses, and Dante, and has recourse on the Thracian bard as much as on Isis – as the goddess who
initiated Orpheus according to syncretists – in order to preserve a sense of mystic in poetry, while
remaining free of the oppressiveness of Catholicism in France at the time (Cellier 151-2, Spiquel
546). Most of all, it is by citing Hugo's poem entitled “Horreur Sacrée,” that Sartre would later
claim, in the twentieth century, that “Orpheus is Black” (Hugo 355; Sartre 1949, ix, translation
mine).
As far as France at the turn of the twentieth-century is concerned, Apollinaire certainly was
one of its most Orphic poets: his pseudonym related him to Apollo (Orpheus' father), his first
collection of poems was entitled “Le Bestiaire d'Orphée” and, in “Alcools,” he repeatedly claims
being from Orphic lineage, in addition of comparing himself to (the Christian) God (Grojnowski
94-100, Dekens 42). Furthermore, he used to designate his artistic project of coupling poetry to
music and the visual arts, notably cubist painting, as Orphic (Grojnowski 103). Only after seeing
Parade, the ballet composed by Eric Satie and written by Jean Cocteau – whose Orpheus film
trilogy also relates him to the bard (Cocteau 1930, 1950, 1959) – would Apollinaire coin the term
“surrealism” to re-Christen what he had so far been calling “Orphism.” The term would soon be
taken up by André Breton to write his Surrealist Manifesto (Grojnowski 103, Bowers 133). Hence,
Surrealism was, from its beginning, haunted by the specter of Orpheus and, although the artistic
movement was short-lived (it is commonly accepted that it lasted from 1919 to 1939), two other
forms of Orphism arguably rose from it, and were particularly related to the Americas, the
10
Caribbean, and Africa (Bowers 133).
First and foremost, it is actually through his exchanges with French Surrealists that Alejo
Carpentier discovered Franz Roh's description of a new form of expressionist painting as “magic
realism,” a term he reworked into his own (lo real maravilloso Americano) as a means to describe
what he viewed as the intrinsically marvelous nature of the American (and Caribbean) landscape
that European Surrealists were forced to reproduce, artificially, through the inclusion of exotic
elements into their works. Furthermore, Carpentier's use of the term is an open reference to the
“French Surrealists' exhortation that reality should be considered as marvellous” (Chanady in
Zamora & Faris 137). This American “territorialization of the imaginary” (137) can be viewed as
Orphic insofar as it corresponds to an enchanting and enchanted reception to landscape by way of
which “'magic' images are borrowed from the physical environment itself, instead of being
projected from the characters' psyches,” as Jeanne Delbaere-Garant puts it in her definition of one
of the most widespread variants of marvelous realism in literature, which she calls “mythic realism”
(Delbaere-Garant in Zamora & Faris 253, emphasis mine). Such an infusion of lyrical sense and
supernatural movement in a natural landscape is, indeed, highly comparable to the mythic response
of trees and streams to the laments of the Thracian bard. 9 By the same token, marvelous reality
provides a first, Orphic gateway into American and/or Caribbean literature(s).
The other movement that Sartre, in “Black Orpheus,” claims is an Orphic heir to Surrealism,
is, of course, Negritude (Sartre xxii).10 More precisely, in “Black Orpheus,” which was published as
a preface to Senegalese writer and president Leopold Sedar Senghor's 1948 Anthologie de la
9 As explained further on into this introduction, Chapter V, below, strengthens that point, and argues, in addition, that
magic(al) realism is a literary response to landscape that is comparable to the early romanticism of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, as described in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.
10 Magic(al) realism and Negritude are privileged here because of their particular relevance to Caribbean literature and,
by extension, as shown below, to the work of Fred D'Aguiar. However, such a “privilege” is in no way intended to
eclipse other twentieth-century ways of reading the myth of Orpheus, as can be found in the writings of modernist
authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus or the “Hades” and “Circe” episodes of Joyce's Ulysses
(Lanson 255). It must also be noted that Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Wright also revised the myth in The
Man Who Lived Underground (Cappetti 41). Later on, in the 1950s, Tennessee Williams would publish Orpheus
Descending (1957), which was adapted to the screen as The Fugitive Kind (1960) by Sidney Lumet (Traubitz 5766), one year after Marcel Camus had won the Palme d'Or in Cannes for his Orfeu Negro, transplanting the myth to
Brazil (Villeneuve 105-22).
11
Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache de Langue Française, Sartre argues that Negritude poetry is
Orphic, in the Ovidian, vatic – poetic and prophetic – sense of the term, for two reasons: first,
because Afro-Caribbean Negritude poets such as Césaire, being part of the African diaspora, are in
exile, away from a lost Africa, like Orpheus in Thrace, away from Eurydice (Sartre xvi-xviii).
Second, Sartre claims that Negritude poetry corresponds to the black poet's introspective search to
retrieve and capture his black essence and bring it out of spiritual depths and into the light for all the
world to see, as if it were a Eurydice of sorts (xvii). However, and in spite of Sartre's Orphic interest
and primordial influence in twentieth-century French anti-colonial theory, through “Black Orpheus”
(1948) and his 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (Sartre in Fanon 17-36),
many aspects of “Black Orpheus” sound very awkward today. For instance, critics have repeatedly
shown that Sartre mistakes ethnic essence – which is a fallacy – with historical experience (which is
factual) (Sartre xii, xiv), and does so in order to promote the argument that Negritude is the second
part of a dialectic, an antithesis to European colonialism, that will be synthetically resolved when
black men fully integrate the contingents of the world's proletariat (Wehrs 765, Jacques 9). This
argument, apart from being revelatory of Sartre's Marxist bias here, is invalidated by the fact that
Sartre's designation of Negritude as the violent appropriation of the hegemonic language of masters
and colonizers (French in the present case) (Sartre xviii) corresponds, as seen above, and according
to Derrida, to a colonial desire that is, hence, not absolutely antithetical to European colonialism,
and necessarily unsatisfiable, as language always-already escapes into Otherness (Derrida 1996, 44,
47, 68-70). Furthermore, Sartre's contention that “black consciousness” will become “historical”
through such appropriation (Sartre xxix, xxxvi), in addition to being misguided, presupposes,
following Sartre's recurrent Hegelian binary distinctions, that “black consciousness” has been
lacking historicity, which is highly debatable.
Finally, Sartre is so blinded by his argument that the language of Negritude poets is
essentially “black,” that he fails to see how Negritude poetry is replete with allusions to Western
12
mythology, for instance to Homer (Sartre xxvii-viii). Furthermore, he remains strangely evasive
about a citation he makes from Fernand Brierre (Sartre xxxvi), where the poetic persona claims that
his memory exceeds the limits of lived experience and expands back in time to the era of slavery,
while it is precisely via such a type of memory that “black consciousness” is proven to be already
fully anchored in the history of modernity, and through which the Orphic quality of Negritude
poetry is confirmed, as the poet's supernatural memory brings a lost past into presence in the same
way as Orpheus' song conjures the dead back from the underworld. Such a view of imagination as a
gateway to an apparently inaccessible past is, moreover, crucial in the (magic(al) realist?) literature
produced by descendants of the African diaspora (such as Afro-Caribbean authors), as shall be
shown, and emanates from a rich diversity of philosophical and scientific practices, from
Renaissance thinkers such as Hobbes and Vico – who, pace Descartes and hypothetico-deductive
rationality, respectively believed that the imagination was a form of memory (Hobbes 14) and that,
as a consequence of the mnemonic quality of the imagination, myth was formative of history
(Banchetti-Robino 122) – to Holocaust theories of postmemory (Ward 132) and contemporary
scientific discoveries in behavioral epigenetics, according to both of which memory, in some cases,
can be genetically hereditary (Hurley 2013, Powledge 588-92, Ferenczi 34-5).
Another, non-Sartrean philosophical and cultural way of looking at Orphism in world
literature is, thus, necessary. Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is, arguably, clearly aware of that, as he
criticizes racial essentialism in Sartre, to whom, according to several critics, he responds by
creating, in The Man Died and Season of Anomy, African versions of the Orpheus myth that are not
ethnically or culturally exclusive (Barber 91, Whitehead 29). Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Stuart
Hall and, as seen above, Édouard Glissant have also formulated theories thanks to which cultural
identity would no longer be thought of as hermetic and static, but as mutable and open to Otherness
(Hall 225-6, Glissant 1990, 169).11 In France, during the second half of the twentieth century, and as
11 Stuart Hall does not give a definite name to his theory of identity, but tentatively, and quite aptly suggests Jacques
Derrida's notion of “différance,” as explained in further detail below (Hall 228-9).
13
Donald R. Wehrs convincingly shows, thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and,
most of all, Emmanuel Levinas promulgated conceptions of sameness and difference, of identity
and otherness that exceeded Sartre's essentialist logic as well (Wehrs 771) and which, quite
interestingly in the present perspective, turn out to be Orphic too: in Levinas' discussion of ethics in
Totality and Infinity, for instance, the Other, or rather, his/her face, is not, contrarily to what Sartre
suggests, totalizable as an undifferentiated whole, but always-already, infinitely escapes any
totalizing gaze, because the face constantly expresses itself (Levinas 42-4), and forces one to
respect – that is, watch again, and therefore never congeal or petrify the Other's face with a
Gorgon's stare – the Other's difference. Thus, Levinas presents “the face-to-face [as] the starting
point […] of the ethical relationship” (Poirier 107). In other words, hence, the constant expression
of the face is what makes a human being absolutely other, untotalizable, in the same way as,
according to Derrida, the withdrawal of metaphor makes it absolutely impossible to appropriate
language (1996, 44). As Patrick Poirier convincingly explains, Levinas' representation of the faceto-face, by way of which the Other escapes into infinity, actually corresponds to a reading of Ovid's
description of how, when Orpheus turns around to face Eurydice, she inescapably evades his grasp
(Poirier 108-9). Poirier further explains that it is through this Orphic conception of the ethic
relationship that Maurice Blanchot, a famous friend of Levinas', rewrote the myth of Orpheus in
“Orpheus' Gaze,” in The Space of Literature, and in The Infinite Conversation (Blanchot 171-7,
Poirier 109). Thus, late-twentieth century French conceptions of ethical relation to Otherness
happen to be predicated on a reception of the myth of Orpheus again, and to cohere with the abovementioned definition of metaphor which, then, may be viewed as deriving from an ethical
understanding of language and, by extension, of literature.
To recap, metaphor, myth and memory are related to one another through the ways in which
metaphor may function as a hypomnesic reminder. Furthermore, the inescapable metaphoricity of
language necessarily implies that such a relationship between metaphor, myth and memory can be
14
found in literature. Literature in turn, as written speech, is also related to myth and memory through
the metaphorical, or(phan)ic history of the genesis of writing. In addition, the literary tradition that
has flowed, from this Orphic scene, to the present, has spread around the globe and into the literary
works of American and Caribbean authors, for instance through Negritudinist writing and magic(al)
realism. In this sense, the idea that metaphor, myth and memory not only operate in, but are
fundamental to literature in general, can now be taken as clarified and confirmed.
But what happens, then, when literary genres that are presumed to be, originally, AmericanCaribbean (marvelous realism), or African-diasporic (Negritude), turn out to be Orphic, and hence,
not essentially American-Caribbean, or Black,12 but cross-culturally related to Europe, a continent
these genres thus hypomnesically bring back to mind through the surfacing of their encrypted
mythological, Orphic scenes of literary inscription? For instance, in the literature produced by
Caribbean authors, what happens when, in Afro-Guyanese author Wilson Harris' magic(al) realist
novels, the Guyanese interior is presented by Dreamer through the eyes of a fictional John Donne
that is Orphically summoned from the dead through the poetic principle of the American-Indian,
Arawak bone-flute (Harris 1960; 8, 20)? What happens when Calypso tries to retain Odysseus, like
Orpheus Eurydice, on her Jamaican island, by singing a calypso song (Brathwaite, 48-50)? What if
the calypso song is actually being sung by an Orphic prophet such as Tiresias (Harris 1987, 32)?
What if St-Lucian poet Derek Walcott's backward rower is Wordsworth's Orpheus-Collins, and his
Achilles an Afro-Caribbean fisher (Walcott 1986, 217; 1990, 45)? What is Caribbean about this?
What happens with Caribbean literature? Well, precisely, this. Every time Caribbean literature turns
in on a referent of regional cultural identity, Caribbean literature opens that referent to the world by
revealing the multiplicity of geographical and textual places from which it springs, thereby undoing
the “white mythology” that would posit the homogenous as hegemonic in language and culture
12 Moreover, the marvelous real, in one of its guises, that is, magic(al) realism,* is a genre that has spread far beyond
the boundaries of Latin America, from Canada to India, from Nigeria to Belgium and on virtually all continents, as
shown in Chapter V.
*Denominations of the genre abound, and have constituted the object of many critical debates. Magic(al) realism is
used in the present dissertation as an umbrella term for that diversity of denominations. Some of these labeling
problems are addressed in more detail in Chapter V too.
15
(Derrida 1996, 47, 68-70; 1971, 11). The culturally-coded referent, like Eurydice, like a metaphor,
or a trope, always-already whirls away to embrace Otherness and return as a diversified world in
orbit around a cross-cultural prism of signification.
And the thesis of the following dissertation is precisely that Fred D'Aguiar, as a writer of
literature, can ethically be defined as a Caribbean author only insofar as contemporary Caribbean
literature is taken to correspond to a particular historical time and regional area that opens the
Caribbean to the world, notably via the cross-cultural, metaphorical and or(phan)ic economies of
language and writing just described. In other words, this study of Fred D'Aguiar's work will not
only inscribe his writings within the legacies of a network of Caribbean writers, but show how his
published corpus – six collections of poems, six novels, one play, and a multitude of articles –
relates to literary traditions, mythologies and histories from Europe, North America, Latin America,
and Africa, through specific metaphorical riffs, intertexts, and problematizations of Orphism and
orphanhood.
Furthermore, and quite strikingly, the above-described articulation of metaphoricity and the
orph(an)ic history of textuality to myth and memory apparently corresponds to how Fred D'Aguiar's
verse and prose corpus can be, simultaneously, distinguished and related. In other words, while Fred
D'Aguiar's poetry mostly relies on metaphor as a means of hypomnesic restitution of cross-cultural
history through the undoing of white mythologies, it is in his six novels, all of which are replete
with orphan characters who, more often than not, are endowed with supernatural powers, that the
literary, or(phan)ic qualities of myth, metaphor and memory in literature are most palpable. And it is
for that reason that the present dissertation will address Fred D'Aguiar's verse and prose separately
in two parts that will, nevertheless, echo one-another as two (communicating) ventricles at the heart
of Fred D'Aguiar's work.
The present dissertation's first half will thus explore, in three chapters, major themes and
techniques that are mainly, but not exclusively, developed throughout Fred D'Aguiar's verse
16
corpus,13 and which metaphorically and cross-culturally relate philosophical, theoretical, and critical
ideas in a poetics of what this thesis tentatively defines as “tropicality:” a type of metaphoricity that
is predicated on physical and cultural displacements across the tropics and their related longitudes
and latitudes, by way of which a metaphorical or, hence, “tropical” presentation of the cross-cultural
may be achieved.14 More precisely, Chapter I shows how tropicality functions as a lens through
which Fred D'Aguiar rewrites canonical texts and tropes, such as those of Greco-Roman mythology,
in a way that is inrertextually informed by other literary wefts, such as those of slave narratives,
British and Irish writings, and Afro-Caribbean literature. Fred D'Aguiar's specific reliance on
intertextuality will, indeed, prove crucial to how the poet revises literary works into cross-tropical
tales of interracial love. Furthermore, Chapter I will show that D'Aguiar's reworking of Roman
mythology in terms of ethnicity is effected through the infusion of renewed metaphorical meanings
within classical mythological texts (by way of which myths are related to the tropics as a
geographical and cross-cultural space), and through the injection of Caribbean voices within Roman
tales, thereby turning them to tropicalities. Fred D'Aguiar also develops and expands this initial
network of cross-tropical tropes in subsequent collections, not solely through intertextual references
to the works of other authors, but by revising his own, earlier texts. It will, of course, not come
across as fortuitous, considering our initial discussion of the relation of Orphism and textuality to
millennial Platonist and Ovidian literary traditions, to find that the revised myths that play a pivotal
role in D'Aguiar's metaphorical webs all come from Ovid's Metamorphoses: Pyramus and Thisbe,
Icarus, and Medusa are recurrent figures in Fred D'Aguiar's poetry (D'Aguiar 1985, 1: 1993, 60-3;
1998, 73; 2009, 86-7), and the mythical revisions D'Aguiar operates through them have an impact
on his entire work, as the tropes resulting from them overflow, for instance, into his metaphorical
riff on the oceanic theme.
13 In order to explore the technicalities of D'Aguiar's verse in detail, each of these three first chapters will open with
the micro-reading of a select few poems from D'Aguiar's verse corpus, before addressing his numerous pieces of
poetry in a more general (macro-)reading format.
14 The introduction to Part One will clarify that point, as it is fully dedicated to an in-depth discussion of this
understanding of “tropicality,” which it also relates, compares and distinguishes from the profusion of terms
designating the same types of phenomena in the fields of cultural, Caribbean and postcolonial studies.
17
It is precisely the tropicality of that sea riff that Chapter II explores. More often than not, in
Fred D'Aguiar's poems, water comes to stand as a metaphor for uprootedness and the oblivion of
history, but also for the retrieval and re-creation of lost history into memory and self-consciousness:
for the most part, the history that is being (re)visited through D'Aguiar's sea riff is that of the
experience of peoples of African descent across the Atlantic, such as that of slaves who crossed the
Middle Passage, in relation to that of contemporary members of the African diaspora traveling back
and forth across the Atlantic, such as Fred D'Aguiar himself, whose life is shared between the
United States, Guyana, Britain and Africa. Yet, the tropicality of his sea riff not only springs from
the cross-tropical, historical facts concerned, but from the way in which such facts are forgotten and
remembered in D'Agiuar's verse, as the (an)amnesic presentation of his sea riff is patterned on the
cross-cultural parallelism that transpires through Jamaican poet Edward Brathwaite's tidalectics as
an oceanic version of metaphorical retreat or withdrawal (Derrida 1978, 66). In other words,
Chapter II will explain how the mnemonic economy of D'Aguiar's tidalectic metaphors serves his
purpose of awakening historical consciousness in his readers, and to subvert potential white
mythology: in other words, Fred D'Aguiar's sea riff fulfills the hypomnesic purpose of transcribing
tropes of oblivion into the retrieval, or “re-treat,” of the historical knowledge he is concerned with,
be it by playing with the economy of liquidity – that is, the language of capital and/as water that is a
direct consequence of the triangular trade, yet is barely acknowledged as such (as a metaphorical
reminder) today, and has arguably become a white mythology that Fred D'Aguiar's verse undoes
(DeLoughrey 2007a, 56-7; Derrida 1971, 11) – or dealing with the sea as with a haunted limbo of
sorts (Derrida 1993, 49-50, 202; Baucom 2001, 61-82).
The inescapable nature of metaphor, its “perpetual return,” “like a wave on a shoreline,” so
to speak (Nietzsche 1883-5, 236; Derrida 1978, 66), progressively leads, in Chapter III, to
reflections on the cyclical representation of time in Fred D'Aguiar's work. Specifically, that final
chapter in the first part of this dissertation explores how history, dreams, and musical memories
18
function as metaphorical and literal re-turns that cohere with Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris'
principle of infinite rehearsal, which itself corresponds to a cyclical understanding of time that
resembles Nietzsche concept of perpetual return, except that what recurs with temporal cycles is not
sameness, but différance (Derrida 1982, 13).
Temporal considerations in Chapter III push the discussion into questions of legacy and
genealogy in turn and, hence, into an exploration of the theme of orphanhood, which is related to
textuality, as seen above, but is also etymologically connected to the notion of slavery, as explained
in full detail below, in the introduction to Part Two, where the articulation that operates between
Orphism and the status of the foundling is investigated more thoroughly as well. These themes,
respectively, textual orphanhood and the Orphism of foundlings, are studied as such and in this
order in that second part dedicated to Fred D'Aguiar's novels. It is hoped that such thematic
treatment of orphanhood, in Chapters IV and V, will show that D'Aguiar's apparently Platonist
treatment of orphanhood is supplemented by an Ovidian reliance on the Orphic that allows for the
remembrance of presumably irretrievable pasts through writing and imagination as reliable Orphic,
poetic and mnemonic gateways to the past. More specifically, Chapter IV contends that the
intricacies of orphanhood function as a node between literacy and slavery that appears to constitute
the core of Fred D'Aguiar's interest in novels such as The Longest Memory, Bloodlines, and Feeding
the Ghosts.
Chapter V, on the other hand, investigates the ways in which Fred D'Aguiar's novels relate to
the Orphic literary tradition, and show, again, that the author relies on Orphism through a crosstropical variety of myths in his writings, in order to re-explore the transatlantic past of slavery and
pre-slavery Africa thanks to the imagination. In this sense, Fred D'Aguiar will also prove to be
linked to the philosophical legacy of Renaissance philosophers such as Hobbes and Vico, rather
than in that of Descartes. Furthermore, Fred D'Aguiar's knowledge of Caribbean literature and
position as an Anglophone Caribbean writer from the African diaspora relate his imaginative
19
backward glance at the past to the legacy of Afro-Caribbean writings such as those of the Negritude
poets, although he does not fall prey to the pitfalls of cultural exclusivism, but still manages to
convey a sense of his awareness of the existing relationships that link colonialism to the or(phan)ic
history of literature. Finally, his recourse to both Western and Caribbean literary canons partakes of
the cross-cultural nature of his work, and transpires, for instance, through the British romantic
sensibility that suffuses his magic(al) realist tales. In sum, Chapter V offers readings of Fred
D'Aguiar's novels that clearly show how Orphism pervades the texts, be it through Orphic orphans,
Isiac women, or hellish journeys.
Before embarking onto that Caribbean Orphic voyage through the following dissertation, it
must finally be signaled to readers that from chapter to chapter, shifts in style will occur, from the
historical to the mythopoetic, from the descriptive to the analytical and theoretical, with relevance
to the objects studied in the diverse parts of the thesis. If these changes can be surprising, or even
disconcerting, they nevertheless allow the following discussion to escape monotony, and translate
attempts at making the type, form, or manner of writing cohere with the sense of its argument. As to
now, let us move on to the setting of a singular theoretical frame.
20
Part One
Tropicality: Fred D'Aguiar's Poetry
[...] motion is a passage and passage is a translation; translation, once again, means motion,
piles motion upon motion. It is no mere play on words that 'translate' is translated in German
as 'übersetzen' which itself translates the Greek 'meta phorein' or metaphor (De Man 1978,
17).
We are therefore no longer dealing with a metaphor in the usual sense or with a simple
inversion permutating places in a usual tropical structure (Derrida1978, 69-70, my italics).
By the same token one cannot break each particular culture down into prime
elements, since its limit is not defined and since Relation functions both in this internal
relationship (that of each culture to its components) and, at the same time, in an external
relationship (that of this culture to others that affect it).
Definition of the internal relationship is never-ending, in other words unrecognizable
in turn, because the components of a culture, even when located, cannot be reduced to the
indivisibility of prime elements. But such a definition is a working model. It allows us to
imagine. (Glissant 1990, 169).
We have always known, that it is impossible to have an idea of the totality of humanity,
because men have an inner life that is closed to the one who, however, understands the
global movements of human groups (Levinas, 51, my translation).
Trope and tropic. These two words have related Latin and Greek etymologies. In fact, they
respectively come from the Latin and Greek tropus, tropos, and tropicus, tropikos, which both
translate a turning, a motion. Moreover, if one operates morphological derivations of these words
with the help of suffixes, they necessarily become polysemous: one obtains tropical and tropicality,
or even just the word tropic, which can then stand for a noun – the tropic of Cancer or of Capricorn
– and for an adjective – referring to the metaphorical nature of a language. As a consequence,
“tropicality” itself potentially becomes a trope or, more precisely, a metaphor which designates the
tropic as both a linguistic quality and a topographic zone, both a tenor and a vehicle that is
substitutable to itself in its two senses. But the similarity which allows for the merging of these
terms into a metaphor is not, as one can already imagine, only relying on etymology or polysemy.
Trope, as a word, itself is a metaphor in that it is the designation of any linguistic operation of
21
version, of rotation, by way of which a thing is “turned” into something else: “trope” is a
metaphorical mise en abyme, a metaphor of metaphor (De Man 1978, 17). As for the tropics, they
were named “Cancer” and “Capricorn” because the sun respectively shone on these zones from the
Cancer and Capricorn constellations at the Summer and Winter solstices in 2 BC (Britannica 1995,
796), and these constellations were named Capricorn and Cancer after the Greek mythological
figures that were imagined to be traced in their starry patterns (ibid., 835). In other words, the
tropics are metaphorical gatherings of stellar, mythological, and topographical images. Moreover,
the tropics are a figuration, a construct, imaginary lines which draw the limits of a climatic zone and
the metaphorical boundaries of one of the major loci to have been colonized by Western countries in
the past, since they comprise the Caribbean, tropical Africa and South Asia. Hence, the tropics have
always been tropes and, as a consequence, tropicality can be considered as a metaphor of metaphors
that brings tropes and tropics into proximity.15
But why such a morphological and metaphorical play? Towards which goal, or rather, which
turning point or conversion is this reflection orienting itself? The convergence that has just been
brought to light can have a dramatic impact on critical and artistic approaches to cross-cultural
phenomena. In fact, if tropicality is considered as a metaphor that connects tropes and the
geographical zone of the tropics, then it effects a mapping of tropes, a “t(r)opography.” However,
since the tropics themselves are a trope for a major locus of colonization, they indicate intercultural
relations between themselves and the West, outside of them, above the tropic of Cancer, that
necessarily withdraw any possibility for an exclusive t(r)opography that would confine tropes to a
geographical strip on the face of the earth. By the same token, the imperialistic trace constituted by
tropical lines as a global belt established by the West would be transgressed by tropical crosscultural relations that shape the sine qua non condition of their alleged postcolonial sense
15 In my finding this idea, I am very much indebted to Jacques Derrida's “The Retrait of Metaphor,” in which he
derives “trope” into the adjectives “tropic” (Derrida 1978, 67) and “tropical” (69, 71, 79), without openly dealing
with the implications of the potential polysemy that has just been presented, as the epigraph to this introduction
shows.
22
(DeLoughrey 2007a, 56).16 Thus, any trope conditioned by a crossing of the cultural contexts of the
tropics, any turning in linguistic signification translating a cross-tropical displacement – in a word,
tropicality – would necessarily be cross-cultural, and no one could monopolize it in the name of an
allegedly pure, hermetic, and permanent culture. Two examples will suffice to illustrate the
implications of this statement.
First, in this sense, tropicality would debunk any expectation, on the part of white Western
readers confronted with the idea of “the tropics,” of exoticism in its biased signification of a
prejudicial picturing of people of color as excitingly different because of their imagined primitivity,
such as can be found in phrases like “exotic dancer.” 17 Thr “exotic dancer” image translates a
Western perception of tropical peoples as primitive due to their relative nudity. It is therefore a
stereotype used – more or less unwittingly today – by the West to establish the tropics as its
uncivilized Other. This is, in other words, one instance of geographer Pierre Gourou's sense of
“tropicality,” which Gavin Bowd and Daniel Clayton call “negative tropicality” (Bowd & Clayton
209): a tropicality that David Arnold, still according to Bowd and Clayton, identified as a tropical
equivalent of Edward Said's notion of Orientalism: “a system of representation that constructs the
Orient [or the tropics in Gourou's case] as inferior to the West” (Ibid., 214). Paradoxically enough,
then, “negative tropicality” is the West's acknowledging its being culturally altered by cross-tropical
relations through a frightened refusal to admit the power of such cross-cultural encounters over
itself: the cultures of the tropics necessarily had an impact on the West for it to come up with such a
trope as that of the “exotic dancer,” and negative tropicality is but a fig leaf that pretends having no
common point with the grass skirt – or the other way round – except when this is to contend the
16 In fact, if postcolonialism is defined as what is posterior to, but conditioned by, the colonial era, then it can be said
that the cultural riches that were born out of postcolonialism fully belong in tropicality. Moreover, because of the deterritorializations and re-territorializations that tropicality implies here, one can imagine the rhizomatic nature of
tropicality, then constituted by the intersection of cultural plateaux (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 6). For a deeper
discussion of the postcolonial, see the introduction to chapter II.
17 In this perspective, it is not surprising to find that biased expectations of exoticism have often been subverted thanks
to the word “tropic,” which was the title of the journal Aimé Césaire directed as a frontman of the Negritude
movement, part of the title of Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques, and used to name the 1960s vanguard
cinematographic and musical movement of Brazilian tropicalism lead by Hélio Oiticica (Suàrez 295).
23
universal validity of some specific cultural tropes. The hypocrisy of such a way of thinking is very
clear. The tropicality that is being formulated here is a counter discourse to such “negative
tropicality,” in that it is not designed to deny cross-cultural relations or defend the notion of a
unified, hermetic, and permanent culture, but celebrates metaphorical traces of cross-cultural
exchanges found within language and arts:18 as opposed to negative tropicality, it could then be
suggested that the present tropicality is “positive.” However, since tropicality is constantly moving,
its essence cannot be fixed, hypostasized, or positioned as positive or conceptual, all the more so
since it is sometimes hard to determine the sense of its rotation, as far as the different facts –
sometimes of the most inglorious nature, such as colonization and slavery – that have contributed to
its development into a variety of cultural riches are concerned. Luckily enough, tropicality is not
positive or fixed, but can be versatile and controversial, that is, open to the fact that something
might turn against its own movement, even when it is well intentioned. Without controversy,
tropicality would be deprived of a potential to raise debates or interest, and would not have its
“place” here.
The other example also illustrates a perception of tropicality that Bowd and Clayton would
call “negative:” the origin of what has generally come to be labeled “Black music,” be it located in
the Caribbean, the United States, or both, is actually not black, although virtually most of its
performers are. Culturally speaking, this music is tropical: it necessarily depends, at least from a
historical point of view, on cultural interactions between white and black peoples across the tropics,
because of the heritage of colonization, slavery, and the Middle Passage experience, but also thanks
18 To this extent, tropicality helps to subvert cultural stereotypes: by reading stereotypes – which, for instance, are the
constituents of negative tropicality – as tropes, as metaphors or motions within signification, one subverts the main
aim of the stereotype, which consists in fixing essence. An instance, apparently trivial, of such a kind of subversion
actually occurs above, through the images of the grass skirt and the fig leaf: in fact, what becomes of the exotic
stereotype of the grass skirt when one reads, in Genesis, that Adam and Eve did not originally hide their genitalia
with one fig leaf, but with several of them sewn together? Maybe the fact that fig leaves were sewn together first
was forgotten too fast. And in this sense, how can a grass skirt (derived into a fig leave in Western Christianity) be
called exotic, or how could it be other than imperialistic or proselyte to claim a universal truth in Genesis through
the fact that versions of the grass skirt are shared by all humanity, and with the fig leaf as their common origin?
Rather, tropicality would suggest that these garments consist in evidence of cross-tropically shared cultural
practices, tropes highlighting intercultural exchange and/or continuity, and invalidating essentialist visions of
culture.
24
to unavoidable cultural exchanges taking place between different people confronted to one
another.19 It cannot be claimed that peoples of African descent, as a group, constitute the only
cultural root of jazz or reggae, unless one does not acknowledge – in a “negative” tropicality – that
a confrontation between themselves and several other groups has partly conditioned the advent of
these musical genres: their audiences should thus not confuse what they hear and what they are
given to see. In other words, musical genres commonly called “black” are not essentially black from
a cultural point of view, since they did not exist before inter-ethnic contact: in fact, they sprung
from it. In the definition of tropicality that is being given here, such musical genres are tropes,
traces of interactions conditioned by a crossing of tropical cultural spaces as permeable entities,
representations of the cultural riches that can grow from such interactions, in spite of their violence
or thanks to their friendly nature. In this sense, tropicality could be thought to be a different name
19
For instance, Paul Justman's documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown illustrates this point by
showing that black and white session musicians have collaborated in order to create some of the musical successes
of a record company that is often thought to epitomize “Black” music. A less recent example would be that of gospel
and Negro spirituals: although these songs were means of self-assertion for African-Americans, their creation was
partly conditioned by Christianity – to which African-Americans had been converted by European colonizers, slavemasters, and missionaries – and by pentatonic scales, which are known to originate not only in Africa, but also in
Asia. Gospel is not an exclusively “African” or “Black” cultural form as far as its constituents are concerned.
And although this development of the idea of tropicality was made possible, in part, by Paul Gilroy's The
Black Atlantic (1993), it is here that this discussion is to diverge, to some extent, from the notion of a cultural “Black
Atlantic,” because it could be doubly problematic in the present perspective. If understood literally, Gilroy would
want the Black Atlantic to “exceed racial discourse” (Gilroy 2) while, paradoxically, the “Black Atlantic” phrase he
uses simultaneously and unfortunately suggests the possibility of associating cultural originality and ethnic essence
(3). However, as the epigraph I have drawn from Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1990, 169) explains, cultural forms
can neither have nor constitute monolithic origins. In a “Black Atlantic” context, cultural formation always already
involves ethnic diversity, and thus prevents the attribution of a black phenotype to a wider cross-cultural space. To
this extent, the“Black Atlantic,” as a phrase, would be intrinsically self-contradictory from a cultural perspective. On
the other hand, the “Black Atlantic” might just signify on the cross-cultural syncretism that can be observed within
transatlantic, diasporic black populations. But in this case, the Black Atlantic would exclusively address the
tropicality of black people who have been confronted to other cultures, without giving consideration to the
subsequent tropicality of other transatlantic populations in its considerations, such as, say, Irish immigrants. As a
consequence, and in spite of Gilroy's undoubtedly good intentions, the Black Atlantic would implicitly re-inscribe
what it is supposed to oppose, that is, a classic binarism or partition between “black” and “white,” which should
always be, at least, questioned, in cross-cultural, tropical studies. The Black Atlantic, when compared to tropicality,
is then relatively limited, all the more so since tropicality exceeds the frame of transatlantic trips and tropes through
its opening up to a globality of cultural crossings of the tropics.
And as far as tropes are concerned, the same type of remark can be made about Henry Gates' discussion, in
The Signifyin' Monkey (1988), of ethnically coded tropes in Signifyin' practices used by African-American people to
subvert white hegemony. Signifyin' is a tropicality within tropical diversity, but it exclusively focuses on the way
cross-tropical interracial relations conditioned the way African-American people altered their speech through tropes,
without considering how other peoples' discourse might itself Signify, or have been enriched and modified, through
contact with African-American people in turn. The binarism between black and white, as in The Black Atlantic, is
not supplanted, but once more suggested through a distinction between an allegedly literal white discourse and a
more metaphorical black language (Gates 48), and through a hierarchical subversion that re-establishes a structure
analogous to that which it tries to subvert.
25
for what Homi K. Bhabha defines as the “cultural hybridity” that results from cross-cultural
confrontations in colonial and postcolonial contexts (Bhabha 296). However, even if Bhabha's
notion of cultural hybridity is intended to be subversive in its becoming a celebration of hybridity
instead of its condemnation by a West defining itself as presumably non-hybrid – again, for
instance, one may think of the exotic dancer stereotype, or of the history of disgust for métissage –,
the word tropicality, as defined here, is a more felicitous discovery, for if it constitutes, like
Bhabha's hybridity, a subversion or a counter-discourse to “negative” tropicality, it does not
function only as a unilateral, third-world questioning of Western imperialist discourse, but as a
taking into account of the impact of cross-cultural encounters on and by every cultural group
involved, and this through the study of a more widespread linguistic phenomenon – tropes in
general – than that which hybridity linguistically designates, that is, portmanteau words made up of
elements coming from different languages (Young 2001, 348). Tropicality does not consist in
opposing different discourses and their political hierarchies, but in observing the twist and turns that
poetically weave them together. Moreover, and as opposed to the word hybridity, tropicality is free
from the risk of leading to some potentially uncomfortable situations. For one thing, the
etymological signification of hybridity, on top of its original designation of the bastardization
process between a wild boar and a tame sow, is related to that of hubris. To this extent, “ hybridity”
has a pejorative etymological sense that could sound awkward in the treatment of some crosscultural facts: for instance, Robert Young writes that raï, a musical genre mainly played by Muslim
people – for whom porcine animals constitute a religious taboo – “has often been described as
'hybrid'” (Young 2003, 79). Young's intention is, of course, to celebrate the hybridity of this music,
but etymology works at the author's peril. 20 Tropicality might help to avoid this kind of dissonance
20 Hybridity as a subversive and tropological form of revision of hegemonic colonial discourse is reproduced as
tropicalization in the works of Srinivas Aravamudan (1999), and re-used, criticized, and even announced as such by
numerous scholars (Ha 2001, Aparicio 1994, Potkay 2001). However, and like Bhabha's hybridity, tropicalization is
presented by Aravamudan as the “tropological revision of discourses of colonial domination” (Aravamudan 6) by
colonial subjects from the tropics, or “tropicopolitans” (here an actual hybrid, a portmanteau word) as “objects of
representation and agents of resistance” (4) rather than as part of a larger group of potential intercultural
representatives of cross-tropical Relation who might use “tropological revision” or embrace tropicality as a crosscultural cement that would exceed adversarial relationships derived from colonization. Yet, and ironically enough,
26
between cross-cultural relations and the way they are qualified.
If not hybridity, one might then suggest that tropicality is a substitute for Édouard Glissant's
re-appropriation of Patrick Chamoiseau's concept of “creoleness” through his use of the word
“creolization” (Glissant 2010, 89). In fact, Glissant chooses creolization as a process just as
tropicality is understood here as metaphorical movement, because interculturality is in perpetual
motion and – at the risk of being repetitive – cannot be hypostasized as a concept. By contrast,
“creoleness” is a signifier that aims at totalizing the moving process of creolization, a concept
designating the tropical cultures of peoples from “formerly” French colonies of the Atlantic and
Indian oceans, a result of the cross-cultural exchanges having taken place there between people of
African, European, Asian, and maybe even pre-Columbian American descent (Bernabé, Confiant, &
Chamoiseau 27-9). As a concept, “creoleness” cannot account for its own intercultural mutability.
As a totality, it might neglect the singularity of the “inner life” of the individuals it designates as a
group (Levinas 51, my translation).21 On the other hand, creolization is the perpetual process that
generates a diverse and infinite number of instances of creoleness. As such, creolization – rather
than creoleness – is a Caribbean tropicality, out of the geographically wider array of metaphorical
processes and instances that constitute tropicality in general as a trope of diversity in constant
reconversion, as a cultural ecosystem of sorts: tropicality overflows (from) creolization. However,
there is a creolization process that expands on a global scale, between all the cultures of the world,
that Glissant celebrates as “the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended
through relationship with the Other” (2010, 11), and as the “sphere of variations born of the contact
among cultures” (Ibid., 57). Every single instance of such “contact among cultures” is defined as an
“écho-monde” (Ibid., 202).22 In the perspective of Glissant's Poetics of Relation, then, tropicality
this thesis' first chapter, like the opening section of Aravamudan's book, is to consist in a discussion of Aphra Behn's
Oroonoko, but through the lens of interracial love rather than that of “pethood” (29-71).
21 Luso-tropicalism presents the same problems when conceived as the stable creoleness of the peoples from former
lusophone, Portuguese colonies, and constitutes an identitarian retreat into a single language and specific
geographical zones that opposes the self-conscious tropological development of their “postcolonial” tropicality
(McNee 2012). This dead-end of essentialism in intercultural studies has also been found in Negritude (Glissant
1990, 89) and Pan-Africanism (Young 2001, 237, 245).
22 Kept in French in the English translation of Poetics of Relation. In her introduction to the book, the translator, Betsy
27
consists in a metaphor that identifies cross-tropical échos-mondes within language and arts. But
tropicality offers more than that: by providing insights on how tropes can constitute specific “échosmondes” that relate cultures across the tropics, tropicality also shows that such tropes can be created
on purpose. Thus, tropicality does not only reveal certain types of Relation:23 it can, intentionally or
not, generate them linguistically and artistically. This, on top of its more felicitous signification
than that of other notions formulated by critics, constitutes its singularity and attests to its necessity,
in spite of the already great body of literature and terminology that precedes it in cross-cultural and
postcolonial studies. Tropicality, in fact, could adapt to a great variety of critical spheres, and
consist in an open creative principle – in the poetic sense of the term – without necessarily
functioning as a tool or a method, since tropicality can be witnessed and its movement supported or
even, to some extent, generated, but never fully mastered.
Let us summarize. Tropicality is not destined to denigrate24 culturally any ethnic group, or to
deprive them of part of their culture. It is designed to prevent cultural frustrations. Tropicality can
oppose efficiently any claim to an alleged original, hermetic and permanent cultural quality of
actually tropical art forms made up of works including and creating cross-cultural tropes.
Tropicality indicates that it is right and culturally healthy for a white German musician to be
influenced by James Brown and Bob Marley, for an Indian poet to find inspiration in African
literature, or for an Afro-Caribbean Trinidadian man such as C.L.R. James to play cricket. These
ideas might sound very banal, or be thought of as approximating truism, but they have not become
common(-)places25 in the eyes of a lot of people, and that is why it is necessary to repeat them here.
Wing, explains: “The article clearly modifies the first element (la totalité, les échos, le chaos), but the second
element (monde) is not a mere modifier, as it would appear to be if the normal English reversal of terms took place
(that is, world-totality, world-echoes, world-chaos). In fact, in this third instance all the implications of ordered
chaos implicit in chaos theory would slip away, leaving the banality of world disorder. Nor are these guises of the
world (the world as totality, etc.); they are identities of the world. The world is totality (concrete and quantifiable),
echoes (feedback), and chaos (spiraling and redundant trajectories), all at once, depending on our many ways of
sensing and addressing it.” (Glissant 1990, xv).
23 In the present study, Relation will bear a capital “R” whenever it is used in Glissant's sense of the term.
24 “Denigrate” is used here in that it seems to show how racism has been embedded into Western languages
themselves, in a negative tropicality that the present version of tropicality unveils.
25 The phrase “common(-)places” refers here to the ambivalence that Édouard Glissant plays with throughout Poetics
of Relation between “commonplace” as a truism and “common place” as a crossroad for cultures.
28
Of course, it also, and inversely, cannot be ignored that tropicality was first coerced upon, for
instance, African people who were taken across the tropics and the Atlantic as slaves, and on whom
the culture of the West – such as Christianity and the Enlightenment ideals – was forced, while they
tried and managed to preserve parts of their African cultures (Gates 129-30). The same thing was
done to the West's colonial subjects – including peoples of African descent – through acculturation
(James 51, 212, 218). As for slave-masters and colonizers, they could not resist tropicality either
since their contacts with black people and colonial subjects during a long period of time have
unavoidably engendered cultural relations which altered them culturally as well. In a tropical
perspective, such a past is not ignored. On the contrary, the ability to identify “échos-mondes”
requires the knowledge of past cross-cultural relations as a form of historical consciousness. And
such a consciousness will show that all the cultural riches that have sprung from such an inglorious
past do not find their origin in cultural exclusiveness, but in tropicality. Thus, tropicality is a
common denominator to all cultures that have crossed the tropics and, as a common point, it can
clear a path towards ethical intercultural open-mindedness, and exchange. In the Caribbean region
for instance, scholars and/or artists could represent the generative motion of tropicality to produce
critical and/or artistic works that would help to oppose cultural prejudices, works that would carry a
conciliatory message, most of all in highly racialized societies (Hintzen 106; James 65-7).
Although they do not define their art in those terms, these artists exist or have existed – one
might think of Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Wilson Harris, or even of
Bob Marley. One of these artists, Fred D'Aguiar, is of particular interest, despite the relatively little
amount of attention criticism has paid him so far. Born in Great Britain, raised in Guyana – a former
British colony – now professor of Africana Studies at UCLA, USA, he also visited Ghana in 1997
(Frias 2002, 418). Thus, from the onset, his trajectories are intercultural, cross-tropical, and they
even seem to make him a full-blown embodiment of tropicality: defining a traveler, a human being,
and an artist as a tropicality may of course sound puzzling here, but tropicality actually appears to
29
constitute, paradoxically enough, one of the most literal metaphors around. 26 In fact, metaphor is
supposed to designate a movement in signification, a translation in “sense,” a word which itself can
designate the trajectory of a displacement. But signification does not move, at least not literally: this
indicates, again, that the received meaning of metaphor induces a metaphorical understanding of
signification. On the other hand, when it comes to tropicality, the metaphorical movement of
signification is either coupled to or conditioned by another movement that is literal and physical:
the displacement that is operated within signification depends upon cross-tropical displacements
which always have a material dimension. Thus, tropicality approximates a type of metaphor where
displacement within signification is accompanied by a literal movement. In such a context, the trip
implies the trope in the same way as the tropics that Fred D'Aguiar crosses entail his tropicality. His
status as a tropical author has strong repercussions on his works, one of which being that it opens up
a space in which he can express himself, be it in his criticism, in his poems, in his novels or in his
plays. The aim of this thesis' first part will be to focus mainly, but not exclusively, on his works in
verse, which constitute more than half of the art works he has produced so far, and to investigate
how tropicality comes to express itself in them.
To this purpose, the present, first part explores several major themes and techniques
throughout the works of Fred D'Aguiar, cross-tropically relating philosophical, theoretical, and
critical sources as well in the process. Chapter I explains how the author uses tropicality as a lens
through which he can revise canonical texts and tropes,27 such as those of Greco-Roman mythology,
17th-century British and contemporary Caribbean literatures, with subtle inclusions and
representations of interracial love and hate as factors of tropicality. Chapter II shows that tropicality
also emanates from the very rich sea riff that D'Aguiar has been building throughout his work,
where the ocean comes to stand as a metaphor for uprootedness and the oblivion of history, but also
26 Metaphorikos itself serves as a literal designation of urban “transports,” such as buses and trains, in Greek (Derrida
1978, 63).
27 Intertextuality will be a main concern throughout this part, because it will aptly reveal how much textual relations
across the tropics condition the tropicality of Fred D'Aguiar's – and other artists' – works.
30
for the retrieval and re-creation of this lost history into memory and self-consciousness. Finally,
Chapter III explores how history, dreams, and musical memories function as metaphorical and
literal – authorial – re-turns in D'Aguiar's verse corpus. The implicit temporality in the idea of the
return will lead, of course, to reflections on the issue of time and its conceptions in D'Aguiar's
works, and these considerations will be seen to lead readers across the tropics again. Also, in order
to make sure that thorough (micro-) readings are granted to at least a select few poems out of the
hundreds of poems D'Aguiar wrote, the first section of every chapter in this part is to correspond to
the full study of one to four specific poems illustrating the chapter's theme, before the argument
expands, in the chapter's other sections, into a more general – but still as detailed as possible –
thematic discussion of the poet's complete verse corpus.
31
Chapter I: Tropical (Re)Visions of Mythology
Inter-racial love is just love in technicolor! An emblem of multiplicity, a plural trope, a
potpourri of possibilities, a body’s quest for otherness, a symbol of transgression, love’s
repair of inter-racial conflict and despair, eroticism’s attempt to shape the future, love’s
exegesis of history’s hurt. Love! Love! Love! (D'Aguiar in Frias 2002, 422)
In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards – ten cents a package – and exchange. The exchange was merry, till
one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, – refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it
dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had
thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common
contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky
was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or
even beat their stringy heads (Du Bois 1897)
In its American sense, revision is often understood as the revision of history. However,
revision is here intended to refer to Fred D'Aguiar's specific use of intertextuality, in which he
consciously rewrites literary works into cross-tropical referential wefts. In order to illustrate such a
form of revision, a study of D'Aguiar's reworking of Roman mythology through the lens of ethnicity
proves to be effective. In fact, D'Aguiar operates contemporary rewritings of ancient myths by
investing words from the original texts with new metaphorical meanings that relate them to the
tropics as a geographical and cross-cultural space, or by injecting Caribbean voices within Roman
myths, which also provides striking occurrences of tropicality as defined above. But D'Aguiar does
not limit the process of revision to this stage, and such revisionary texts do not only happen to
consist in the result of a progression that can be traced back through the poet's previous books, but
also serve as objects of intratextual revision in turn in subsequent works. Fred D'Aguiar rewrites the
works of other writers as much as his own texts, thus creating a complex network of images. This
very network, as is to be seen, is made even more intricate by the addition of other instances of
tropicality through the theme, to use the poet's words, of “love in technicolor” (D'Aguiar in Frias
32
2002, 422).
The revised myths that play the most important parts in D'Aguiar's poetic works all come
from Ovid's Metamorphoses.28 Namely, these myths are those of Pyramus and Thisbe, Icarus, and
Medusa.29 “Pyramus and Thisbe” is thoroughly and openly revised at the end of the poet's third
work, British Subjects, published in 1993, while the author's most striking references to Icarus and
Medusa respectively appear in Fred D'Aguiar's Mama Dot (1985, 1) and Continental Shelf (2009,
86-7) collections of poems, and in Bill of Rights (1998, 73), a long meditative poem on the 1978
Jonestown Massacre. As explained above, it is from an initial, comparative study of these poems'
revisionary qualities that the subsequent parts of this chapter will stem.
I. Pyramus, Thisbe, & the Tropics
Ovid's Metamorphoses are as many transfers and changes of state as the rewritings or other
transformations they have been subjected to. It is, for instance, easy to claim that the myth of
Pyramus and Thisbe, as told by Ovid, is one of the Metamorphoses that has been rewritten the most
in the history of literature. Its most famous revision is, without a doubt, William Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet where, as in “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the union of two lovers is thwarted by their
respective families, and leads to their untimely death. In fact, Pyramus, like Romeo, commits
suicide because he thinks that Thisbe, or Juliet, is dead. Thisbe kills herself in turn at the sight of
her dying lover. What differs between Ovid's myth and Shakespeare's play is that, in “Pyramus and
Thisbe,” Thisbe flees from a lioness' blood-stained mouth and, as she runs towards a cave for
refuge, she inadvertently drops her shawl. The garment is torn to pieces and stained with blood by
the lioness, and subsequently leads Pyramus to believe that his lover has been killed by the predator.
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet drinks a poison that gives her a temporary cadaverous aspect. Romeo is
28 All subsequent references to Ovid's Metamorphoses rely on Garth, Dryden, et al.'s version, as published in 1812,
and on Klines' 2000 translations, respectively in verse and in prose, and available at the following addresses:
http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.html http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome.htm (July 8th 2016).
29 Orpheus is also a very important figure in D'Aguiar's work, but although one poem alludes to the bard, it is in the
author's prose corpus that his presence is the most palpable, as Chapter V shows.
33
unaware of the subterfuge and tragically commits suicide besides what he believes to be his lover's
corpse.
But no matter how interesting the two “star-crossed lovers” (Shakespeare 1981, 73) may be,
other characters, in Fred D'Aguiar and Aphra Behn's relatively less famous works, seem to
constitute other avatars of Pyramus and Thisbe, and it is towards them that the beginning of the
present study is to turn. In fact, these works, namely, Behn's Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave: a True
History and D'Aguiar's poems “Pyramus to Thisbe” and “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D'Aguiar 1993, 603), have the specificity of achieving two analogous transfers, namely, the literary revision of Ovid's
canonical text and, within this revision, the creation of a link between the myth and a crossing, be it
implicit or explicit, of the tropics. This crossing is explicit in Behn's text, where the action, instead
of unfolding, as in Ovid's myth, in Babylon, is transferred to Africa, and then to Surinam, which
both Behn and D'Aguiar have known – Aphra Behn participated in a colonial expedition to that
country (Behn xx), part of which is now known as present-day Guyana, where Fred D'Aguiar was
raised (Stade & Karbiener 127). The crossing of the tropics is implicit in Fred D'Aguiar's poems,
since it is only suggested by the inter-ethnic quality of Pyramus and Thisbe's relationship, Pyramus
being black and Thisbe, white. But what are the implications of such transfers? What does the
change of setting imply in the rewriting of the myth? To what purpose(s) have these modifications
been effected? Is their an actual link between Behn's novella and D'Aguiar's poems?
In order to answer these questions, parallels between D'Aguiar and Behn's works must be
looked for, and can actually be found, leading to the conclusion that it is as a revision of the
metamorphosis that Oroonoko may be read as a “proto-postcolonial” (De Stephano in JosephVillain & Misrahi-Barak 173) and pre-feminist 30 text. Similar ways of re-writing the myth are then
to be identified, more than three centuries after the publication of Oroonoko, in Fred D'Aguiar's
poems “Pyramus to Thisbe” and “Thisbe to Pyramus,” as means of revision that turn the myth into
30 Thoughts and actions supporting women are usually called pre-feminist if they happened before 1837, when the
word “feminism” was accepted into French dictionaries.
34
a trope of interracial love, with a black Pyramus and a white Thisbe. In D'Aguiar's texts, the
metaphorization of the myth also operates through a specific use of words from the original text that
renews their meanings through more contemporaneous perspectives, where the movement of
signification translates cross-cultural exchange, and where tropes cross the tropics into tropicality.
a. Aphra Behn's Con-text
It is in 1688, not long before the Glorious Revolution which deprived James II of his throne
to the benefit of William of Orange that Aphra Behn, in the last year of her life, wrote Oroonoko. In
spite of the many poems and plays Behn had written before, Oroonoko became her most famous
work thanks to its adaptation to the stage by Thomas Southerne in 1696.31 This novella tells the love
story of two African characters, namely, Oroonoko and Imoinda, to which Oroonoko's jealous
grandfather objects, to the point of complicating it by arranging for the two lovers to be sold
separately as slaves bound for the British colony of Surinam, part of which constitutes, as said
above, present day Guyana. Oroonoko and Imoinda manage to meet again there, only to realize that
they cannot love each other fully as slaves on a plantation, and Oroonoko subsequently kills
Imoinda with her consent before failing to commit suicide in turn and being decapitated by his
master a few days later. Such features as Oroonoko and Imoinda's thwarted love and their
subsequent, suicidal death, are analogous to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as told by Ovid, and
suggest that Behn revised the myth into a short novel. If such is the case, one may identify two
ways in which Behn rewrote the myth. The first, obvious revisionary trait would consist in Behn's
explicit description of the protagonists' African ethnicity – which is not specified in Ovid's myth. It
appears that the interest of such explicitness in Behn's text resides in its allowing one to transfer the
31 Then, on top of the revisionary quality of Behn's novel, Oroonoko has also been rewritten by Thomas Southerne into
a play that has known, in turn numerous adaptations – and, hence, as many re-visions – from the 18 th century to the
present (Aravamudan 345). For instance, Anglo-Nigerian playwright 'Biyi Bandele's version for the Royal
Shakespeare company in 1999 resets the play through the lens of Nigerian mythology and into a transnational
perspective where “he situates his play neither in opposition to Behn's text nor as a corrective to her work. Rather,
he places himself and Behn in a 'Jam Session,' a musical [and cross-cultural] dialogue” (Kowaleski Wallace 266), in
the same way as D'Aguiar “jams” with Ovid, as is to be seen below. For a broader discussion of Oroonoko in terms
of theatricality, also see Figlerowicz 2008.
35
story to the tropics and, as a consequence, to contribute to placing Oroonoko at the origin of slave
narratives, although Behn might not have foreseen this when she composed Oroonoko. The second
revisionary trait of Behn's text would reside in an alteration of the mythical predator: a lioness in
Ovid's text, and two tigers in Behn's. The tigers' gender, as opposed to that of the lioness, cannot be
determined, and they have no role in the lovers' death. The inscription of such a difference is not
accidental either, for, when read in relation to other passages referring to gender in the novel, it
seems to lead readers to pre-feminist interpretations. And although the novel is already known for
its pre-feminist tendencies (Todd in Behn xxiv) and for being a potential precursor to slave
narratives (Aravamudan 250, 269-70; Gates 133), criticism has never, to our knowledge, established
a parallel between its protagonists and Pyramus and Thisbe32 while, to use the terminology John
Thieme proposes in Postcolonial Con-Texts, it seems that it is actually because the myth written by
Ovid constitutes the pre-text to which the con-text (re-contextualization and cross-examination) of
Oroonoko responds (Thieme 2) that Behn's text can be placed at the origin of specifically prefeminist and proto-postcolonial literary techniques. It is such a conditioning through intertextual
transfer that has to be demonstrated now.
i. A Precursor to Slave Narratives
Oroonoko precedes his name: although he was born in Africa, he bears the name of the place
where he is to die, namely, Surinam, or the basin of the Orinoco river, which signifies “navigable
zone” in the language of the natives of its delta, and was spelled like the eponymous character's
name in the 17th century (Thieme 2). His name is thus a proleptic sign of his “transfer” to Surinam
in the novel, and of the identity dis-location he experiences after his crossing of the tropics,
represented literally at the end of the novel by his gruesome decapitation. Conversely, the text,
Oroonoko, precedes slave narratives, and this can be demonstrated by paying attention to the way
32 In addition to the fact that no analogy appears to have been established between Behn's characters and Pyramus and
Thisbe so far, even Romeo and Juliet is rarely mentioned in relation to Oroonoko (Johnson 342), and, if ever
mentioned at all, other plays by Shakespeare, such as The Tempest, Othello, or Henry V, have been privileged in
relation to Behn's work because of their inter-ethnic and/or colonial implications, or just because of Oroonoko's and
Shakespeare's kings' show comparable attitudes (see Andrade 192, and Pacheco 498).
36
the black protagonist's Otherness is always being legitimized by a heavy-handed cultural eurocentrism, to the constant effacement of the black man's difference – be it literal or metaphorical –
through moral principles, and to the paradoxical inversion by way of which the black man's point of
view is being confronted to difference and used by him to illustrate his identity and induce others to
acknowledge it as such. In fact, these three ways of leading a white readership to accept black
presence can be retraced clearly in many eighteenth-century slave narratives.
The institution of Oroonoko, a black man, as the main character and hero of a seventeenthcentury novel, is mainly operated through his being Westernized by the author, which in itself
translates cultural euro-centrism. In fact, Aphra Behn describes her novel's eponymous character by
differentiating him from other Africans: his ebony complexion is not “brown” and “rusty,” the white
of his “very piercing” eyes is similar to that of snow, his nose is “rising and Roman instead of
African and flat,” and “his mouth, the finest shape that could be seen,” was “far from those great
turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes” (Behn 15). In sum, according to Behn
and her euro-centric perspective, everything about Oroonoko is laudable, except for his being
African. Besides, he speaks several European languages which he learned from a French preceptor,
and his lineage is royal: he is to oppose the king, his grandfather, in his struggle to make Imoinda
his wife rather than the king's concubine. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, Oroonoko is thus an
instance of the “Noble Savage,” of the Westernized African man (Gates 133). Here, one first
realizes that Aphra Behn has so interiorised the patriarchal system of British monarchy – she was a
royalist – that she does not imagine the fact that, in Africa, royalty actually was matrilineal, as Janet
Todd remarks: “[...] the matrilineal, polygamous societies of West Africa have little to do with
patrilineal kingship and the undying love between the monogamous Oroonoko and Imoinda” (Todd
in Behn xxiv). Thus, whatever the gender issues Behn might address, one knows from the onset that
she will do so from the standpoint of a monarchic and patriarchal standpoint. One also notices that
this type of Westernized depiction of a black man and his society can be found in eighteenth-
37
century slave narratives, where it allows the slave to try and be accepted by Western and white
people through a claim to difference from all other people of African descent. It is Gates, again,
who deals with this fact in his study of A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life
of James Albert Ukasaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself, published in
America in 1774:
[Gronniosaw] states that he was born “in the city of Bournour,” which is the “chief city” of the
Kingdom of Zaara. Gronniosaw's mother was the oldest daughter of “the reigning King of Zaara,”
and he was the youngest of six children. Gronniosaw stresses his intimate relationship with his
mother, and to a lesser extent to his maternal grandfather, but rarely mentions his father, who we
presume was not born to royalty but wed royalty (133).
Here, in spite of a strong link with the mother that is reminiscent of a matrilineal system,
Gronniosaw Westernizes Zaara by describing it as a patriarchal monarchy. In this process, he also
avoids to mention his father, to the privilege of his maternal grandfather, just as Behn does for
Oroonoko in her short novel. Gates actually indicates that Gronniosaw's autobiographical narrative
may have been inspired by Behn's work and other texts describing “Noble Savages” (133).
However, Gates notices that Gronniosaw does not differentiate himself physically from other men
of African descent, but he nonetheless claims being singular due to his Christian aspirations (134).
And despite his rejection of some aspects of monotheism, Oroonoko also seems to try and
act according to Western moral principles, despising the Christian sin of vanity. In fact, when he is
bought as a slave in Surinam by Trefry, he still wears royal garments and attracts the gaze of
settlers. He subsequently asks Trefry to give him a slave's outfit and takes off his royal robe. But in
spite of his “holland suit,” he does not manage to hide his beauty, nor does the crowd of his
admirers decrease (Behn 43). Oroonoko thus refuses to draw attention to his beauty and rank, and
Westernizes himself both by deciding to wear European clothes – he effaces a trace of his African
origins – and by showing that he is free of vanity. The fact that Oroonoko's royal superiority still
transpires in spite of this change of costume emphasizes the fact that Aphra Behn wanted to support
hereditary kingship as a divine right: royal blood is perceptible on the body of the king more than
on his outfit. Here again, the change of clothes and the symbolic rejection of vanity it entails are
38
present in Gronniosaw's narrative:
When I left my dear mother, I had a large quantity of gold about me, as is the custom of our country.
It was made into rings, and they were linked one into another, and formed into a kind of chain, and
so put round my neck, and arms, and legs, and a large piece hanging at one ear, almost in the shape
of a pear. I found this all troublesome, and was glad when my new master [a Dutch captain of a ship]
took it from me. I was now washed, and clothed in the Dutch or English manner (Gronniosaw in
Gates 135-6).
Just like Oroonoko and his “holland suit,” it might be after the Dutch fashion that Gronniosaw was
dressed. As for gold, it is not unusually used as a token of vanity, and Gronniosaw pretends to reject
it too – maybe not to confess a less surprising fact in a context of slavery: a theft perpetrated by his
master and against his will. Like Oroonoko, Gronniosaw culturally uproots himself by taking off his
African, princely garments. Gronniosaw's narrative thus really seems to revise traits of Behn's novel
and, as Gates proves it in his book, slave narratives written after Gronniosaw's text actually consist
in revisions of Gronniosaw's narrative. In fact, John Marrant's The Narrative of the Lord's
Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, published in London in 1785, also uses the prop
of the gold chain, this time as the symbol of an American Indian's royal status. The Indian chief
takes off his gold ornaments when Marrant asks him to do so after reading him a passage from the
Bible (Gates 144). Ottobah Cugoano, in his Thoughts and Sentiments, published in 1787, clearly
indicates that he knows Gronniosaw and Marrant's works, and transforms the gold chain into a
treasure offered to Spanish settlers by Atahualpa, a South-American Indian chief, in exchange of the
Spanish colonizers' promise not to impinge upon the freedom of Indians or threaten the life of their
chief. Atahualpa, despite his valuable gift, is finally betrayed (Gates 151), just as Oroonoko is by his
masters, who do not hold their promise to emancipate him. As for Olaudah Equiano, he recreates
the gold chain as an extension of his master's gold watch and a token of his power in The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1789 (Gates 155). Finally, the
chain is evoked in another place of interest here, not as a material ornament but as a chain of sins in
John Jea's The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, which is alleged to have been
published around 1815 (Gates 163). Thus, in Oroonoko as in slave narratives written between the
39
late 18th and early 19th centuries, a man of African descent tries to be viewed as human by
Europeans through the adoption of Western principles such as Christian rejection of sin, which he
acts upon for himself or for someone else, such as the Amerindian chief. In this sense, and even if
Gates does not go this far, one can assume that Behn's novel, itself a revision of Ovid, is at the
origin of slave narratives. The question here is not to underestimate slave narratives as unoriginal
texts, but to indicate that the revision of works from the Western canon in slave narratives – and, by
the same token, resetting them on a (cross-) tropical stage – might consist in one of the first traces
of what is known as the mask problematic: it was necessary for these writers of African descent, in
their historical context, to please a Western readership by reflecting its literary traditions in order to
contradict racial prejudices and gain recognition as human beings able of mastering the “arts and
sciences” (Gates 129). Their choice to stage a patriarchal and monogamous society rather than the
actual matrilineal and polygamous one, for instance, is an integral part of this problematic. But
before examining issues of genre more thoroughly in Oroonoko, the role of the novel's Native
Indians referred to above remains to be discussed.
It has been seen that John Marrant places himself as the literate and Christian civilizer of a
North-American Indian tribe, to which he brings his knowledge. He almost magically dominates the
tribe's chief by making him take off his gold ornaments at will after reading the Bible to him. By
contrast, Cuogano describes Atahualpa, a South-American Indian, as a victim of vicious colonizers.
These two opposite representations appear at different moments in Oroonoko to constitute yet
another revisionary link between Behn's work and slave narratives. In fact, when Oroonoko
accompanies the narrator – Aphra Behn here – on a journey upriver to the interior of the country,
they meet Surinamese Native Indians, who are first described, like Adam and Eve in Eden, wearing
grass skirts or nothing at all (Behn 57, 59), and behaving as if in a state of innocence. Janet Todd
aptly explains that Behn is actually echoing Montaigne's essay “Of Cannibals,” where SouthAmerican Indians are described as being “close to nature and ha[ving] no 'words that signify Lying,
40
Treachery, Dissimulation, Avarice, Envy, Detraction and Pardon'” (Todd in Behn xxii). When
Oroonoko decides to meet their warrior-chief, he learns that they practice self-mutilation of their
faces to prove that they are honorable men able to take on military responsibilities. Descriptions of
innocence, then of stoicism, honor, and even generosity (the Indians offer food to Oroonoko and
accompanying explorers) seem to correspond to Cugoano's description of Atahualpa. However, the
“euro-centric” representation of Indians as uncivilized – because they were not converted to
Christianity, and made human sacrifices – that can be found in Marrant's text is also present in a
passage where Oroonoko meets the Indian warlords, whom Behn describes as “hobgoblins, or
devils” (59), rather than as men. This point is also made by Albert J. Rivero: “the native Indians are
first humanized by being likened to Adam and Eve and then dehumanized by being compared to
animals” (Rivero 454). This type of double description, Rivero explains, is also applied to
Oroonoko, who is presented as a Noble Savage only to end up being depicted as a monster or as
death itself (Behn 75, Rivero 454), following his rebellion, self-mutilation, and murder of Imoinda:
the difference that was first erased from Oroonoko's features is retraced upon his character and that
of Native Indians at the end of the novel.
Thus, the cultural and physical Westernization of Oroonoko, on top of his encounter with
Native Indians as a paradoxical mise en abyme of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic relations –
Oroonoko looks down on Native Indians in the same way as white people do on him – can be found
again in at least five slave narratives from the 18th and early 19th centuries. In this sense, Behn's
novel may be viewed as a precursor to these narratives, and the con-text that Oroonoko constitutes
for Ovid's pre-text may have progressively become the pre-text of con-texts where slaves tried to
gain recognition as human beings through literacy and Christianity. This network of inter-textual
calls and responses between canonical texts and their revisions has the quality of renewing one's
interpretation of former texts through the exacerbation, in the present case, of their tropical traits, in
the same way as “postcolonial” literature sometimes uses intertextuality to re-present canonical
41
Western texts in cross-tropical terms,33 and it is in this perspective that one may suggest that Behn's
novel has proto-postcolonial qualities. As a con-text, Oroonoko also enlightens one's reading of
Ovid by making explicit, Pyramus and Thisbe's possible pigmentation and, as is to be shown below,
by responding to the myth in a pre-feminist way.
ii. Pre-feminist Shades
As said above, the difference between the story of Oroonoko and Imoinda and that of
Pyramus and Thisbe resides in the scenes when the lovers die. In “Pyramus and Thisbe,” Pyramus
commits suicide with his sword, believing Thisbe was killed by a lioness. Again, Thisbe had
actually run to hide in a cave after seeing the predator, only to return and kill herself at the sight of
her dying lover. It seems that the chain of events leading to this tragic ending in Ovid's text came
across as a sexist one in Aphra Behn's opinion. In fact, the lioness is female, and Thisbe, a woman,
causes the death of Pyramus by inadvertently letting her veil fall and be stained with blood by the
female predator, letting Pyramus believe in his lover's death. In other words, the related causes and
effects leading to the death of Pyramus is entirely determined by female intervention. By contrast,
in Behn's novel, it is Oroonoko himself who kills a resigned and pregnant Imoinda, because he has
planned to commit suicide to escape enslavement, and nothing may grant Imoinda's safety after his
death (Behn 71-2). After killing Imoinda, Oroonoko fails to follow his lover by killing himself, and
is decapitated by his masters instead. This scene represents a failure of masculine heroism and
places men (Oroonoko and slavers), rather than a lioness and a woman, at the origin of tragedy. This
gendered reversal from female responsibility to male hubris in Behn's revision of Ovid seems to
have been effected in order to rehabilitate Thisbe and/or Imoinda as nothing but faithful women
who die because of men's institutions (slavery) and rebellions – such as Oroonoko's escape from the
plantation.
But if this reversal of “Pyramus and Thisbe” really is a pre-feminist con-textualization, then
33 The most famous example that comes to mind here is Jean Rhys' rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre from the
perspective of Rochester's first, Caribbean wife, in Wide Sargasso Sea (Brontë 1847; Rhys 1966; Thieme 2001, 72).
42
Aphra Behn must necessarily have addressed the problem of the lioness too: why would misfortune
originate in a female animal? Behn responds to this detail of Ovid's tale by withdrawing the
predator from its original position in the plot and making its gender indeterminable: the predator, in
Oroonoko, is doubled into two successive tigers, and the animals have nothing to do with the two
lovers' death: they are only present in an episode where Oroonoko's masters allow him to hunt,
hoping to quench his thirst for freedom, and where Aphra Behn suspends the action before its
inevitable end. In addition, the way Behn designates the animals is puzzling in terms of gender:
[…] he shot her just into the eye; and the arrow was sent with so good a will and so sure a hand that
it stuck in her brain and made her caper and become mad for a moment or two, but being seconded
by another arrow, he fell dead upon the pray. Caesar cut him open with a knife, to see where those
wounds were that had been reported to him, and why he did not die of them. […] but when the heart
of that courageous animal was taken out, there were seven bullets of lead in it, and the wounds
seamed up with great scars, and she lived with the bullets a great while […]. (Behn 54, my emphasis)
Whether the tiger is male or female cannot be determined, because it is intermittently described as a
“he” and a “she.” The same indeterminacy operates in the description of the first tiger: “we
encountered the dam, bearing a buttock of a cow, which he had torn off with his mighty paw” (52).
Its designation as a “dam” indicates it is the mother of the cub Oroonoko just captured (52), but the
masculine pronouns used to refer to it afterward come in opposition to this. Since Aphra Behn is
alleged to have written Oroonoko in a few hours (Todd in Behn xxx), one could think that this
strange alternation of pronouns is due to a moment of absent-mindedness on the author's part.
However, knowing how experienced Behn was as a writer, one may as well assume that the author
did this on purpose. The interpretation that springs to mind here is that, with the pre-feminist intent
of reversing gendered aspects of Ovid's tale, Behn deliberately made the tigers' gender
unidentifiable, rather than keeping them female as in the Roman myth, in order to indicate that
neither the predator – the animal has very little importance as a diversion for readers and Oroonoko
in the novella, and only gains significance when interpreted as Aphra Behn's way of responding to
Ovid's text – nor its gender have an impact on the fate of Oroonoko and Imoinda, Behn's versions of
43
the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe.34 On top of the secondary importance of predators in Oroonoko,
compared to that of the lionness that tore and stained Thisbe's shawl in the original story, it is
actually as a metaphor for Imoinda's social status that the shawl appears to be reproduced by Behn,
as a veil Oroonoko's grandfather, the king, offers as a ceremonial symbol of “invitation he sends the
lady [Imoinda] he has in mind to honour with his bed; a veil, with which she is covered and secured
for the king's use” (19), regardless of Imoinda's consent. This role of the shawl, later designated as
“the scandal of the veil” (29) by Oroonoko, who competes with his grandfather for Imoinda's love,
is not made despicable through its loss by a woman, causing the death of her lover, but through its
metaphorical representation of the fact that Imoinda is to become the bride of Oroonoko's
grandfather while wanting to marry Oroonoko himself, in a way that allows Behn to make a (prefeminist) critique of the (patriarchal) institution of forced marriage.
Thus, on top of questioning the predator's gender and detaching it from a tragic chain of
events, Behn re-uses the veil as a sign of Imoinda's subjection in a patriarchal system rather than as
a hint causing a man to die. So doing, Behn clearly establishes her novella as a con-text, as a
revision of Ovid's pre-text that sheds a new light again on the metamorphosis by revealing a
potential trait of Ovid's subjectivity and raising the issue of his plot's gendered causality. And this
con-textual and pre-textual strategy actually appears to be at work, as far as ethnicity and cultural
identity are concerned, in D'Aguiar's version of the myth as well.
b. Fred D'Aguiar's Version(s)
Fred D'Aguiar does in fact use, as is to be shown below, the same rewriting devices in his
revision of Ovid's text in the poems “Pyramus to Thisbe” and “Thisbe to Pyramus,” which follow
one another in this order at the end of British Subjects. It is already interesting to notice that
D'Aguiar refers to Roman mythology in a book that deals with “British subjects,” be they themes,
British people, or (post)colonial subjects of Britain, because it represents a widening of the scope of
34 For a reading of Oroonoko's encounters with predators as “mock-chivalric slayings,” see Aravamudan 61.
44
D'Aguiar's work, which had mostly been dedicated to his childhood in Guyana in his two first
collections of poems, Mama Dot and Airy Hall, and because it implicitly foregrounds the
importance of the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts during the Renaissance in the construction
of the West – and, by extension, of the idea of Empire – as a cultural unit. In other words, readers
can already sense that intercultural transfers between Roman antiquity and modern Great Britain,
but also between Great Britain and its former colonies, might be at stake, and these expectations are
justified by Fred D'Aguiar's version of Pyramus and Thisbe, since he transforms the myth into a
trope of inter-ethnic love, with a black Pyramus and a white Thisbe, and, again, thanks to a specific
use of words from the original text that renews their meanings through contemporary perspectives,
where the movement of signification translates cross-cultural exchange, and where tropes cross the
tropics into tropicality.
i. Proleptic Rhythm
D'Aguiar's version of Pyramus and Thisbe would then come in addition to those written by
Shakespeare and Behn, and suggest that the gist of what D'Aguiar is doing is writing an additional
layer of thoughts on the text of a myth that has already become a palimpsest. However, the poet
manages, like Behn, to lead his readers into another, inter-ethnic understanding of the myth's
signification in two separate poems. The first one, “Pyramus to Thisbe” (60-1), stages Pyramus
talking to Thisbe through the crack in the wall that separates the lovers' houses. In the second one,
“Thisbe to Pyramus,” (62-3) it is Thisbe who talks to her dying lover before committing suicide.
Both lovers speak in lines that oscillate between three and four beats, but these lines are gathered in
sextets of rhyming couplets in Pyramus' speech, while quatrains in alternate rhyme are preferred for
Thisbe's lament. Three-beat lines and four-beat lines, most of all when united into quatrains, echo
one of the “commonest forms of popular verse” in English: the four-by-four formation (Attridge
62). The choice of such a rhythm by Fred D'Aguiar for the poem might therefore refer to the great
popularity of the myth he revises. However, a more precise scansion of verse paragraphs from both
45
poems in British Subjects appears to reveal something else:35
“Pyramus to Thisbe”
“Thisbe to Pyramus”
x /_ x /_
x /_
The wall between our love
/_
x /_ x /_ /
Stands as neat as foxgloves
x /_ x /_
x /_
We whisper through a chink.
x /_
/_
x x /_
Our mixed breaths is our link
/_ x /_ /
/_ x /_
Doing what two lovers might
x x /_ x x /_
If the climate was right. (60)
/_
x /_ x /_
Death's the wall between
x /_ x /_ (x) /_
Us now; the wall seen
x
/_ (x) /_ x /_
From life, none can see
/ /_ (x) /_ x /_
Unless death agrees. 36 (62)
The rhythm of the first stanza of “Pyramus to Thisbe” is complex. Although the three first lines
seem to establish a regular alternation between beats and offbeats, they contain rhythmic variations
from iambic trimeter to trochaic trimeter, and back to iambic trimeter. Line four contains a rhythmic
figure, a falling inversion (/_ x x /_) which alters the regularity of the stanza's rhythm. Finally, the
four beats of the fifth line, and its demotion of the syllable “two” as an offbeat slows down the
rhythm in order to delay and to reinforce the abrupt effect of closure provided by the sixth line,
which shortens itself to hardly three beats – with “if” as a promoted syllable – and contains an
additional falling inversion. The same kind of complexity can be witnessed in the eighth verse
paragraph from “Thisbe to Pyramus,” where the trochaic regularity of the first line could only be
preserved if the reader judged appropriate to use virtual offbeats, and to demote the last line's first
syllable. Thus, if the chosen rhythm of the poems denotes popularity, its intricacies seem to
35 In this study, it is the model of single-line scansion presented in Derek Attridge's Poetic Rythm: an Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) that will be used. Stressed syllables are indicated with “/”, unstressed syllables
are represented with an “x”, beats can be seen as underscores “_”, and virtual offbeats appear as “(x).” Scansion will
only be used when the rhythms of the poems studied seem to be strikingly meaningful.
36 The see/agrees rhyme works as a palindrome, for “-ees” is “see” in reverse. This rhyming technique is first used in
British Subjects – D'Aguiar does not use it in preceding works – and is relied upon again on a regular basis in
posterior works. This see/agrees rhyme amounts to an agreement in sound that relates words with different meanings
into a metaphor (Ricks 32) by way of which the gaze (see) is related to authority (death's agreement) and evokes yet
another Ovidian intertext, namely, the myth of Orpheus, where the eponymous character convinces the keepers of
hell to let him bring his defunct lover, Eurydice, back to life with him, as long as he does not look back until
Eurydice is out of the underworld. Orpheus looks back through “the wall of death” anyway, and thus loses Eurydice
permanently for not respecting his deal with those who are then to hold Eurydice captive forever: Orpheus'
backward gaze subverts authority in the same way as the verb “see” reverses “agrees” in D'Aguiar's poem. For a
discussion of Orphism in Fred D'Aguiar's novels, see chapter V.
46
announce that D'Aguiar is not really about to tell the same old Roman story.
And what the reader learns in “Pyramus to Thisbe,” which is not mentioned in Ovid, is that
Pyramus is black, while Thisbe is white:
I am black and you're white:
What's the day without night
To measure it by and give
It definition; life.
We'll go where love's colourBlind and therefore colored. (D'Aguiar 1993, 60)
D'Aguiar's version of the myth is therefore a tale of interracial love, which is of great importance,
for two reasons. First, it relates D'Aguiar's revision of Ovid's text to that of Aphra Behn as adapted
by Thomas Southerne, in whose play Imoinda is a white woman – “thereby allowing English
actresses to play the part without blackface” (Kowaleski Wallace 258) – who, as a character, is,
however, secondary, and partly erased from the plot, to the privilege of other characters invented by
Southerne (Southerne 1696; Aravamudan 49).37 Second, and by contrast, Thisbe's whiteness and
Pyramus' blackness in D'Aguiar's poems entail a complete re-interpretation of the story: the love of
Pyramus and Thisbe is thwarted because of the difference in the color of their skins, because of
racism. Their plan to meet each other in the outside, away from the wall that separates them, and
regardless of color lines, will lead to their deaths. This reinterpretation of the story in terms of race
is also related to Behn's work and the slave-narratives that drew from Oroonoko: while Behn's
revision of Ovid is used by the authors of several slave narratives as a means to assert their
humanity and their being unfit for slavery to a white readership, D'Aguiar's re-writing of the myth,
as is to be confirmed, opposes racism, which he describes, in Bloodlines, as slavery's offsrping
(D'Aguiar 2000, 150), by asserting the equal footing of respectively black and white protagonists in
his revision of Ovid. In other words, D'Aguiar inscribes himself within the legacy of a cross-tropical
literary corpus – related to the English renaissance and Roman mythology as much as to slavenarratives – by re-employing the shared techniques of that corpus' constitutive texts for
37 Biyi Bandele, in his staging of the play, restores Imoinda's blackness and gives her a self-assertive and feminist input
(Kowaleski Wallace 268-72).
47
contemporary, yet historically related purposes.
Furthermore, it is from such an interracial context that a first interpretation of the poem and
of its form may be made: the wall that separates Pyramus and Thysbe, be it their houses' or the
metaphorical one of “death” (62), is represented in the “back-to-back” separation of the two poems,
on two sides of the same page, in D'Aguiar's version of the myth. But readers soon learn, both in
Ovid and in the first stanza of “Pyramus to Thisbe,” that this “wall” of racism, this segregationist
frontier, is cracked, and allows the protagonists to communicate through its “chink” where their
breaths “link” (60) in an apt metaphorical rhyme, where the chink, the separation that parts the wall
in two, is also a link, in that the very parting of the wall allows for the mixing of the lovers' breaths .
In D'Aguiar's poem, this flaw in the wall represents racism's inability to put up with difference,
which is the constitutive element of (the poems') meaning. It is actually through this wall that
D'Aguiar manages to use Pyramus' last words and to subvert segregation in a Saussurian approach
of the myth. What is understood by “Saussurian approach,” Derrida explains in “Différance,” when
he investigates the writings of Saussure:
The elements of signification function due not to the compact force of their nuclei but rather to the
network of oppositions that distinguishes them, and then relates them one to another. […] Now this
principle of difference, as the condition for signification, affects the totality of the sign, that is the
sign as both signified and signifier (Derrida 1982, 10).
In “Pyramus to Thisbe,” black and white are two interdependent signifiers, just as “day” and
“night,” to which Pyramus associates the two colors, because one is meaningful only through its
differing other. Black is nothing without white “To measure it by and give / It definition; life”
(D'Aguiar 1993, 60). The “face”38 of each of these adjectives' signified, the colors that are present
on the skins of the lovers' “faces” and bodies, along with their complementary nature, come to stand
as a metaphor for Pyramus' and Thisbe's desire for one another as people in love (Levinas 42).
Difference becomes a factor of interdependence and contact, while the “wall” of racism that
separates the lovers amounts to a threat to “life” (60), to the lovers' breaths, to language as a means
38 In the original, French version of Derrida's “Différance,” it is the “face” of the signified and the “face” of the
signifier that are altered. We leave this slippage or non-identity (face/ face; aspect/ aspect; the Levinasian visage or
face very nearby) apparent, here.
48
of communication and understanding that requires difference within itself. The wall partly thwarts
the interdependent relationship of (interracial) love, but its chink allows for the circulation of love's
language and illustrates that, as Glissant and Chamoiseau explain in “When the Walls Fall,” an
essay they wrote together in 2006 to oppose the creation of a ministerial office of national identity
in France, “it is unavoidable that boundaries be crossed” (5, my translation). The wall that separates
Pyramus and Thisbe in – and between – D'Aguiar's two poems actually finds its echo in the
“identity wall” (6, my translation) that Glissant and Chamoiseau describe in their essay, a few years
after the poems' publication: “It is the inability to live contact and exchange that creates the identity
wall and denatures identity” (6, my translation).39 Just as the rejection of difference counters
signification, the attempt at preserving a “pure” identity or a single cultural root prevents one from
evolving through relation with the Other. In fact, “the wall side of identity can be reassuring. It can
then serve racist, xenophobic, or populist politics to consternating extents. However, independently
from any virtuous principle, the identity wall does not know anything of the world anymore. It does
not protect anymore, gives way to nothing but the involution of regressions, the insidious
asphyxiation of the mind, and self-perdition” (7, my translation). Thus, Fred D'Aguiar's version of
the myth, like Behn's, renews one's reading of Ovid, through the potential metaphoricity of the wall
and the change of Thisbe's ethnicity from black to white. Such an interethnic perspective relates
D'Aguiar's poems to Southerne's version of Behn's Oroonoko, and all three works share Ovid's myth
as a more or less direct pre-text – Southerne's play is a (potentially unconscious) revision of Ovid
insofar as it is a recasting of Behn's novella. Finally, all of these related works might also function
as pre-texts: in Behn's case, Oroonoko is a pre-text to slave narratives, Southerne's adaptation, and
D'Aguiar's two poems, while Fred D'Aguiar's version of Pyramus and Thisbe finds its echo in the
work of other Caribbean authors, namely, Glissant and Chamoiseau's “When the Walls Fall.”40
39 I am indebted to Fiona McCann on this point.
40 Another parallel between Behn's text and D'Aguiar's poems is that “the “lion” is no longer described as female in
“Thisbe to Pyramus.” However, its continued presence reinforces a sense of intertextuality between Behn, D'Aguiar,
and Ovid's texts, and constitutes, albeit arguably, another possible evocation of the tropics.
49
But the wall is just one example of what is generally happening, in D'Aguiar's revision, in
relation to the inter-ethnic link that the poems' protagonists represent. The wall, inter-ethnicity, and
the Saussurian interpretation that springs from them lead one to re-read D'Aguiar's texts in a
hermeneutic way, and, as one reads again, words become loaded terms: their signification bends
down under the burden of race.
ii. Deepening the Image: New Meanings in Old Words
In both of D'Aguiar's poems, it has been noticed that although the quatrain and the three-beat
line echoed the traditional four-by-four formation, the difficulty of simultaneously reading the poem
aloud and following the rhythm that was found in its scansion could be interpreted as a
foregrounding of D'Aguiar's revisionary intentions. And in fact, D'Aguiar's “Pyramus to Thisbe” has
the singularity of re-writing the relationship between Pyramus and Thisbe as an interracial one, in a
way that invites readers to go through the poems again from an ethnically-guided hermeneutic
perspective. It is such a reading that enriches the meaning of “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D'Aguiar 1993,
62-3), the second part of D'Aguiar's revision.
In this poem, Thisbe is talking to a dying Pyramus, and she explains what actually happened
to her. Here is what she says in the fifth and sixth stanzas of the poem:
Pyramus, I swear
I ran faster than
You, into a cave.
It fell from my hand...
I would have turned back
For that crucial shawl
Risking my own neck,
Than you find it mauled […] (62)
The abundance of enjambments, or the absence of correspondence between syntactical constituents
and the contents of lines such as can be found in this excerpt's second line, on top of the ellipsis at
the end of the fourth line, make up obstacles to a fluid reading and certainly evoke Thisbe's voice
breaking with sobs. But these details, when read hermeneutically through the lens of ethnicity, also
come to mean much more. In fact, ellipsis invites readers to try and remember what it was that
50
Thisbe lost, that is, the following stanza's “crucial shawl.” The importance of the shawl is
exacerbated by its forming, as a word, an internal rime with “crucial,” and, given the inter-ethnic
context in which the expression appears, one cannot help but think of the “crucial shawl” as the veil
of race that W. E. B. Du Bois used, as can be seen in one this chapter's epigraphs, to describe
double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, – an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn assunder. The history of the American Negro
is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self
into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost (Du Bois
1897).
Double-consciousness is, according to Du Bois, analogous to veil that would mediate his vision by
dividing his perception of himself between the black man that he is and the idea of the man he
should be according to the standards of the white people looking at him. In D'Aguiar's poem, interethnicity, along with the elliptic and sonic foregrounding of the shawl, incite one to associate
Thisbe's “shawl,” present in Ovid's pre-text as much as in D'Aguiar's con-text, with Du Bois's racial
veil of double-consciousness.41 As far as this is concerned, D'Aguiar, then, adds nothing to Ovid's
original version, but actually withdraws the shawl, the mention of which is elliptically delayed.
Such a withdrawal and displacement draws one's attention, and subsequently leads one to trace that
element and discover that Fred D'Aguiar has translated it into a metaphor: the union of Pyramus and
Thisbe, the fusion of their breaths through the wall that splits the revised myth in two poems,
corresponds to the unification of an inter-ethnic double-consciousness, which occurs once Thisbe
lets the shawl, or, rather, the veil, fall.
Yet, on top of withdrawal and/or displacement, Fred D'Aguiar actually added one element to
the myth: in “Pyramus to Thisbe,” Pyramus teasingly questions Thisbe's ability to sprint and
challenges her to a race (D'Aguiar 1993, 61), which explains Thisbe's address to Pyramus in the
41 Behn's preference of the word “veil” (Behn 29) over Ovid's “shawl” in English translations, on top of Southerne's
white Imoinda, might add an argument, albeit tenuous, in support of the mediation of these two British authors' texts
in D'Aguiar's revision of the myth, in that Behn's use of “veil” might have lead D'Aguiar to connect Ovid's “shawl”
to Du Bois' “veil.”
51
following poem: “Pyramus, I swear / I ran faster than / You […].” This challenge to a race does not
exist in Ovid's text. However, in a hermeneutic reading conditioned by ethnicity, the polysemous
quality of the word “race” as a designation of both a footrace and what is racial is not lost on
readers, and ethnicity and velocity are at stake, again, in the epigraph I have drawn from Du Bois'
“Strivings of the Negro People:”
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common
contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was
bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat
their stringy heads. (Du Bois 1, my italics)
This seems to confirm the impression that D'Aguiar refers to Du Bois' text in his revision of Ovid,
and to strengthen the idea that Thisbe's “crucial shawl,” in “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D'Aguiar 1993,
62) consists in an allusion to the veil of race. In this perspective, when Pyramus challenges Thisbe
to a race, not only does he teasingly question her abilities as a woman, but as a white woman,
whose gender and race Pyramus implicitly suggests not to be fit to compete with those of the male
black sprinter he might be. Pyramus' pretense partakes of tragic irony, since readers learn, in
“Thisbe to Pyramus,” that Thisbe “ran faster than / [Him]” (62). It is in fact necessary for the word
“race” to function as a polysemous signifier in “Thisbe to Pyramus” if readers are to understand the
poem's penultimate verse paragraph where, long after the footrace is over, Thisbe asks Pyramus:
“Who's to win this race?” If this is an actual footrace, the finish line is death and Pyramus is the
winner. But if the question is to know which ethnic group is to take over, the answer is: none. The
two lovers die because of the wall, or veil, of race, which prevented them from joining each other in
a safe place.
iii. Reversal and Metamorphosis: Color Inversions
There is no winner, neither hierarchy nor partition between the black man and the white
woman anymore: there is exchange, Relation instead. In fact, double-consciousness, the veil of race
that Du Bois uses to define his predicament as an African-American person is associated, quite
equivocally, to a white Thisbe's shawl in Fred D'Aguiar's two revisionary poems. This sort of
52
inversion creates two possible interpretations of “Pyramus to Thisbe and “Thisbe to Pyramus:” the
shawl that Thisbe drops unwittingly, as a veil of race, either is the one that altered Pyramus' vision,
or indicates that inter-ethnicity implies double-consciousness for white people as much as for black
people. However, in both cases, its being torn to pieces by the lion would then consist in an allegory
of how necessary it is to overcome the binarism of ethnic distinctions to exceed the limitations of
the identity wall and to reach cross-cultural open-mindedness. What is tragic about D'Aguiar's
version of Pyramus and Thisbe is that the price to pay for such color-blindness is death, and the
poems' message is that such an outcome could be avoided by borrowing cultural sideways and
crossings, using the chinks as cross-cultural links to go beyond the boundaries of segregationist
isolation until the murals fall. Pyramus says it all in the middle of his speech: “We'll go where love's
colour- / Blind and therefore coloured” (60) enough to make the mulberry's “fruit / Turn red” (63),
rather than black or white: “red” can then be “read” as a trope of love unhampered by ethnic
distinctions, distinctions that blind Cupid does not make.
Thus, Aphra Behn's novel and Fred D'Aguiar's two poems inscribe themselves in similar
textures where readings of Ovid's original work are renewed, and where posterior texts such as
slave narratives or Glissant and Chamoiseau's discussion of the identity wall are foreshadowed. In
addition to this, Fred D'Aguiar's poems are intertextually related to the work of one of the first great
thinkers of ethnicity: W.E.B Du Bois, which activates a reading of words such as “shawl” and
“race” as intercultural tropes. On top of this, these texts, quite interestingly, insist on the
transnational and cross-tropical locus of the action: Pyramus and Thisbe are Babylonian lovers for
Ovid, and the transnational relation between this Roman author and his Middle-Eastern characters is
modified in Behn's text by Oroonoko and Imoinda's crossing of the Atlantic and tropics from Africa
to Surinam, and turned in Fred D'Aguiar's poems as the implicit condition to the inter-ethnic
encounter of the two lovers that leads, in turn, to tropical interpretations. In other words, in these
texts, linguistic translations pair up with cultural and geographical movements and relate tropes and
53
the tropics poetically into tropicality. It might then be said that, if Oroonoko and Imoinda, or Fred
D'Aguiar's Pyramus and Thisbe are, like Romeo and Juliet, two “star-crossed lovers” (Shakespeare
1981, 73), then these stars are those of the Capricorn and Cancer constellations.
c. Other Ovidian Transformations
On top of “Pyramus to Thisbe” and “Thisbe to Pyramus” which, as seen above, already
contain a reference to another of Ovid's Metamorphoses, that is, the myth of Orpheus, several other
poems by Fred D'Aguiar transfer the myths of Icarus, Midas, and Medusa into cross-tropical
contexts. This technique of re-inscribing canonical Western stories by relocating them in places
such as the Caribbean region relates D'Aguiar to other cross-tropical writers who use the same intertextual modes of re-writing, artists that D'Aguiar draws inside the orbit of his work as much as his
work gravitates around the constellation made up by these inter-texts.
i. Vernacular Re-Counting
References to the myths of Midas and Icarus first appear, in Fred D'Aguiar's works, in the
opening pages of the poet's first collection, Mama Dot (1985), in a short poem, entitled “A Toast,”
that serves as an epigraph to the collection, and is reproduced here:
Who gwine tek
we hope
gaf fe be a Midas
an rope
de sun
do wha Icarus
neva done (D'Aguiar 1985, 7)
Although reading aloud and scanning the poem give, at first, the impression of a varied and
intricate rhythm, reading the poem as fluidly as possible, regardless of line divisions, seems to
regularize the pattern: the first two lines, read as one, share a common metrical pattern with the
poem's third line by making up a trochaic trimeter. The two closing lines of “A Toast” constitute a
54
trochaic tetrameter, and the poem's only graphic and rhythmic rupture consists in the lines “an rope /
the sun,” the metrical pattern of which corresponds to single iambic feet. Such a rupture appears to
correspond to the place where the poem transits from one myth to another, with the verb “rope” as a
potential reference to the purple turban Midas used to hide his ears, turned into an ass's by the god
of Delos as a punishment for his lack of musical taste, while “the sun” clearly is Icarus' chosen aim.
The rest of the poem is made up of, roughly speaking, three-beat or four-beat binary units that are
reminiscent of the popular rhythm of four-by-four formations again, a rhythm that is combined with
a Caribbean patois, or even a Guyanese one, since Mama Dot is a long series of poems dealing with
D'Aguiar's childhood in Guyana, and, more specifically, with an eponymous character who is no
other than D'Aguiar's grandmother (D'Aguiar 1985; Stade & Karbiener 127). By the same token, the
association of popular rhythms and the vernacular to Ovidian references seem to inscribe the
Roman myths in Caribbean folk culture.
In fact, the poem is told by a communal or collective poetic voice, speaking in the first
person plural to state the tremendous strength of their hope, which only Midas could defeat by
turning everything to gold – an action that amounts again to a gain through coloring, as with the red
read in the mulberry tree of “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D'Aguiar 1993, 63) – and capturing the sun, a
thing which Icarus himself, with his father's wings, never managed to do. In other words, the
strength that exceeds the combined powers of Icarus and Midas – the latter being mentioned only
once, in “A Toast,” throughout D'Aguiar's work – stands as a metaphorical equivalent to that of the
community's hope. But this comparison implies that the Caribbean “we,” as a communal voice, is
also “We-stern,” since it describes itself thanks to Roman mythology, and the blending of Caribbean
vernacular rhythmicity with Western mythology into such a sonic trope indicates that the expression
of a Caribbean community's culture is intrinsically cross-cultural and cross-tropical: one could say it
partakes of creoleness, given the geographical location of this poem's “we.” But since the
interculturality of this poem's voice is formulated tropologically, its singularity might be designated
55
more specifically, from a linguistic and cross-cultural standpoint, as a tropicality.
Not only does this form of tropicality draw intertextually from Ovid's Metamorphoses, but it
connects D'Aguiar's work to those of Caribbean writers from the previous generation, such as St
Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott for instance, in yet another inter-textual network. In fact,
in his novel in verse entitled Omeros, Derek Walcott tropically revises Homer by displacing the war
of Troy to the Caribbean, and achieves the same kind of vernacular tropicality as in “A Toast” by
making Philoctete, a character from Greek mythology, participate in a creole conversation with Ma
Kilman:
'Mais qui ça qui rivait-'ous, Philoctete?' 'Moin blessé.'
'But what is wrong wif you, Philoctete?' 'I am blest
wif this wound, Ma Kilman, qui pas ka guérir pièce.
Which will never heal” (Walcott 1990, 18).
This passage uses translation from creole to English in order to let readers understand the basic
meaning of the conversation. However, a deeper insight obtains if both languages are understood,
since “blessé,” which means “wounded” in French, is translated by an archaic form of its false
cognate, “blest,” blessed, followed by the phrase “wif this wound” in the following line. If the
telling of an anecdote is allowed, French undergraduate students to whom I taught literature and
translation often made that mistake of translating “blessé” into “blessed” in order to explain that
Jake, the protagonist of Hemingway's Fiesta: the Sun Also Rises, suffers from a war injury. It might
be that kind of translational incident, or a process of trial and error, in addition to the obvious
equivocal result, that led Walcott to turn “mistranslation” to deliberate poetic choice here, by
capitalizing on the translation of “blest” as “blessé” to approximate a rime and to compare,
metaphorically, “being wounded” to “being blessed with a wound,” while inserting an archaic form
in the process so as to echo the ancient quality of the text being revised as much as the sounds of the
creole language being used. Such a cross-cultural, inter-textual, and translational blend is analogous
to that found in “A Toast,” which alludes to Ovid in Creole, and functions as a tropicality, that is, a
metaphorical manifestation of the cross-cultural, again.
56
ii. Jonestown Gorgon
The cross-tropical transfer of ancient myths thanks to the vernacular, however, does not
consist in the only tropological revisionary technique D'Aguiar shares with other Caribbean authors.
The use of form and of historiographic information as gateways into cross-tropical metaphoricity
constitute other literary devices that D'Aguiar uses, for instance, in his revision of the myth of
Medusa, which he relates, in one of his works, to the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, in the same ways
as authors such as Ishmael Reed and Edward Kamau Brathwaite do in their respective works, albeit
with different contexts and implications.
The myth of Medusa, the gorgon with snakes instead of hair whose look turns people to
stone, and whom Perseus managed to petrify thanks to a reflexive shield that also protected him
from her gaze, is another famous figure from Ovid's Metamorphoses (33) that D'Aguiar turns to
tropicality. The first occurrence of a tropical depiction of Medusa by D'Aguiar can be found in Bill
of Rights (73), which was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot prize, and is a work that is hard to define, in
that it first appears to consist in a novel in verse telling the story of the mass suicide that happened
in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, under the pressure of American self-proclaimed Reverend Jim
Jones' religious zeal, but the thread of the plot becomes hard to follow as it is being intersected with
abstract stanzas addressing a great variety of subjects – including the use of religion as a rhetoric
that induces people to die – in an increasingly frequent way as one reads on, progressively turning
the book into a long meditative poem. The fictional, narrative part of Bill of Rights corresponds to a
story narrated by a young man who has been convinced to follow Jones, but who progressively
starts questioning the Reverend's ways as he is being deprived of the woman he loves, Tikka, whom
the Reverend has decided to use as a concubine. The Reverend as a religious “Father” figure to the
young man reminds one of the grandfather who deprives Oroonoko of his Imoinda in Aphra Behn's
short novel, and suggests that revision is at play again, relating Bill of Rights to Pyramus and Thisbe
through Oroonoko and, hence, in an intra-texutal way, Bill of Rights to British Subjects. Moreover,
57
the fact that the Reverend was a white citizen of the United States who went, along with his
disciples, from California to Guyana, the interior of which he reached through a journey upriver
into the Guyanese rainforest to found his commune, is reminiscent of Aphra Behn's crossing of the
Atlantic from Britain (like the United States, a Western country) to participate in a colonial journey
upriver to meet the native Indians of Suriname, and seems to confirm the presence of such an
intertextual network in D'Aguiar's verse corpus.
Medusa appears in Bill of Rights when Jim Jones cruelly orders the young man to shave his
“untidy” hair – an “Afro” haircut he says he combs with a fork into strands that “resemble /
Tagliatelle” (73), providing readers with a darkly ironic alimentary simile that translates hunger (a
daily feeling at the People's Commune (Naipaul 145-6)) – with a broken bottle:
I didn't need those hairs
They were forked with neglect
I resembled Medusa
But lacked her appalling power
That bottle was no mirror
He looked me straight in the eye
I was the one who turned cold as stone
He slithered away in the razor grass (D'Aguiar 1998, 73)
These italics are not mine, but D'Aguiar's: in Bill of Rights, almost every page is split in two parts
thanks to spacing, and the second part is always in italics, as if to indicate a change of voice. In fact,
such a use of italics consists in a formal rendering of paralipsis, where the homodiegetic narrator, at
the moment of narration, comments on the character he was at the moment of the story. This graphic
literary device is another technical tool that D'Aguiar shares with Caribbean authors such as
Jamaican poet Edward K. Brathwaite and Haitian-American novelist and poet Ishmael Reed.
However, these authors use italics with different purposes. For instance, Brathwaite uses italics in
some poems of The Arrivants as a means to show that one line is a translation of the other: “we are
addressing you / Ye re kyere wo” (Brathwaite 99). So doing, Brathwaite effects a cross-tropical call
and response between Germanic and African languages that is, again, close to the translational and
58
cross-cultural tropicality that was seen to operate in D'Aguiar's “A Toast” and parts of Walcott's
Omeros. On the other hand, Ishmael Reed's use of italics in his novel Mumbo Jumbo, which
rewrites the 1929 stock-market crash as a side effect of the Harlem Renaissance and the viral spread
of jazz, itself seen as a form of musical voodoo, is closer to D'Aguiar's technique, in that it operates
in a meta-fictional, historiographically-conditioned text as well. In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed lets his
“Reeders” visualize a doubling up of the narrative voice according to the principles of what Bakhtin
calls “the Hidden Polemic” (Bakhtin 2002, 190), that is, the separation of the narrator's voice into
two contradicting voices – one out of the two being italicized and, in Reed, a major source of irony
– under the weight of a strong narrative dialogism.42
In the above cited passage from Bill of Rights, then, the narrator paralliptically comments
upon the fact that Jones forced him to shave his “Afro” by drawing on the Ovidian intertext of
Perseus' beheading of Medusa. The strands making up the protagonist's hairstyle allow for a
comparison with Medusa's crown of snakes, but it is Jones who is in possession of Medusa's
petrifying power and, needing no protection against his own gaze, he is equipped not with a mirrorshield but with a light-reflecting broken bottle he uses as a glass razor to shave, rather than behead,
his victim, petrified by Jones' looking him “straight in the eye” (D'Aguiar 1998, 73). Once the deed
done, Jones leaves “slither[ing] away in the razor grass” (73). This closing line is very powerful,
because it is replete with a diversity of meanings. First, the “razor grass,” a South American species
of plant, relocates Medusa and Perseus in Jonestown's Guyanese setting and constitute an apt
pathetic fallacy for the narrator, whose hair has just been shaved, certainly not without bloody cuts
into his scalp. Second, Jones' being compared to a snake, thanks to the verb “slither,” relates him
again to Medusa or, rather, to the snakes that were born from the blood that dripped from Medusa's
head as Perseus was carrying it over a Lybian desert, subsequently infested with deadly serpents
(Ovid, Book IV). This fictional act of cruelty – as opposed to the actual tortures Jones is known to
have put his disciples through (Naipaul 146-7), some of which are recounted in Fred D'Aguiar's
42 For a more detailed discussion of the hidden polemic in Mumbo Jumbo, see Gates 112-3.
59
latest novel, Children of Paradise (2014), which deals with the Jonestown massacre also – leads to
the metamorphosis of Jones into an animal, a transformation which, if more imagined and wished
for by the narrator-victim than presented as “real” within the tale, is a degradation that reveals the
protagonist to be having strong second thoughts about Jones, who is turned from a self-appointed
mouthpiece of the Christian God to the snakes of Genesis and Metamorphoses.43 Moreover, the
cross-tropical transplantation of the myth of Medusa from Rome and Libya to Jonestown, Guyana,
along with the metaphorical reshuffling of the African-American victim's Afro haircut into
Medusa's snakes, make up a version of Ovid's text that can again be defined as a tropicality, all the
more so since the Jonestown commune also resulted from the cross-tropical migration of Jones and
his disciples from Indiana to California to Guyana.
Thus, from his earliest work onwards and in revisions of the myths of Ovid, D'Aguiar has
been creating tropicalities that come in opposition to cultural and racist prejudices, and counter any
type of belief in the potential for a hermetic isolation of cultures into fixed forms. Moreover, this is
achieved without re-establishing an oppositional relationship between “the West and the rest” or
creating a merely oppositional discourse, which constitutes an implicit risk when one uses one of
the many postcolonial theories of “writing back” (Ashcroft & al. 2002), or of “con-texts” and “pretexts” (Thieme 2) Such a tropical mode of revision, as seen above concerning Pyramus and Thisbe
in British Subjects and Bill of Rights, re-appears in different texts by D'Aguiar, in different forms.
This fact, to be explored more thoroughly now, confirms that the poet does not only rewrite other
authors' works, but also his own.
II. Revising the Revised
When one reads Fred D'Aguiar's works in chronological order, one cannot help but notice
that each and every one of them consists in a reworking of the books he wrote before. Evidence of
43 For a discussion of Jones' characterization as a false prophet in Children of Paradise (D'Aguiar 2014), see chapter V.
60
that can again be shown thanks to the texts in which D'Aguiar revises the myths of Ovid. For
instance, Medusa re-turns in D'Aguiar's Continental Shelf collection (2010), in relation, as in Bill of
Rights' Jonestown, to a dark historical event again: the Virginia Tech mass shooting of April 16 th,
2007. Icarus reappears as well after Mama Dot in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death (D'Aguiar
1991, 229-80), a play inspired by one of Yeats' poems (279), in which D'Aguiar himself includes a
lot of verse. The story of the play's Icarus, on top of renewing the tropicality that was found in “A
Toast,” also turns out to lead into a love-story similar to that of Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe,” and
may thus consist in a preliminary revision of Ovid that leads to its other, poetic rewriting in British
Subjects (1993), all the more so since this collection was published soon after A Jamaican Airman
Foresees his Death was premiered at the Royal Court Theater on April 9, 1991 (D'Aguiar 1991,
230), and contains reworked fragments and images from the play. The resulting images found in
British Subjects – some of which were studied above – appear to have been re-used in turn in the
prose and/or verse works D'Aguiar wrote later on, such as Feeding the Ghosts, Bloodlines, and
Continental Shelf, suggesting that the author re-writes his inter-textual tropes recurrently in addition
to revising other artists' texts, thus repetitively inscribing himself within a literary rhizome through
a set of tropes that might well make up part of the identifiable singularity of his style.
a. Prelude to D'Aguiar's Pyramus and Thisbe
It has already been shown that the work of Aphra Behn has potentially played a mediating
role between the original myth of Pyramus and Thisbe and what D'Aguiar made of it, in that she is
the first to have made explicit references to the complexion of the two lovers. On top of this intertextual dimension to D'Aguiar's poems, an intra-textual transition from Mama Dot's Icarus to
British Subjects' Pyramus and Thisbe can be perceived in D'Aguiar's play A Jamaican Airman
Foresees his Death, which itself inter-textually and repetitively relies on a great variety of literary
texts.
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i. Icarus in the Caribbean
A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death tells the story of four Jamaican friends who join the
British army during World War II, and leave Jamaica for Scotland, where they hope to be trained as
pilots. However, racial prejudices in the army lead most of them to be assigned with menial tasks
such as washing the toilets or the dishes, cooking, or serving as barbers. For instance, Bruce
describes his routine as a barber in three verse paragraphs, where he translates the patterns and
shapes he sees on the heads he shaves in terms of life expectancy, explaining that a man with no
pattern on his head is a man who has no time left to live, and that shaving his hair is “clearing a
wild plot to receive him,” as if it was an RAF landing track and/or a burial ground (D'Aguiar 1991,
253). This passage is reproduced and revised in British Subjects, as the collection's
acknowledgment section specifies, to stand as a single poem, “The Barber.” D'Aguiar reworked it
by eliding the details that related it to the plot of the play and by altering its form. The war context,
for instance, cannot be deduced from “The Barber,” and prevents the interpretation of the clearing
as an emergency landing track for RAF pilots. The passage's somber atmosphere, however, is
preserved, since its revision into a poem turns it to a barber's address to readers, saying, not without
dark humor, that if they cannot find bumps and holes on the top of their skulls, they can
superstitiously believe that their death is imminent. The revision of this passage is important in the
present perspective, in that it already relates D'Aguiar's 1991 play directly to British Subjects
(1993).
Another link between A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death and British Subjects can be
found through the story of Alvin, the main character, who is the only member out of the Jamaican
group of friends to manage to become a pilot (D'Aguiar 1991, 252-4). However, at the end of the
play, he inadvertently shoots down an RAF plane he has mistaken for an enemy one during a
mission, and is subsequently given a “dishonourable discharge” (274) which might, in its
consequences, stand for a figural death. The protagonist's death is actually being foreseen
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throughout the play by such characters as his grandmother in scene one, and by Alvin himself at the
end of the play, as the title indicates, but it never seems to happen literally to him. In Act II, Scene
4, as Alvin tells his grandmother that he joined the Royal Air Force, she is sewing as they speak
and, worried by her premonition, she warns Alvin about the dangers of his newly-acquired position
while asking him to help her to tie a thread to a needle, since her sight is no longer good enough for
this purpose:
You think you are a bird and your station is the sky?
Lick the thread and feed it through the needle's eye.
When the Germans clip your wings explain how you'll fly?
Lick the thread and feed it through the needle's eye.
Are you an eagle or a hawk prepared to kill and die?
Lick the thread and feed it through the needle's eye.
Have you done this just to see your old granny cry?
Lick the thread and feed it through the needle's eye.
You hardly smell your sweat, don't fall for the old lie;
Lick the thread and feed it through the needle's eye. (D'Aguiar 1991, 243-4)
This passage's penultimate line seems to be an obvious reference to Wilfrid Owen's 1917 war poem
“Dulce et Decorum Est,” where the poetic persona tells his readers that if they had, like him,
witnessed the horrors of war, they would not incite young men to go to war by telling them “the old
lie,” that is, Horace's aphorism, according to which “it is sweet and right” for a man to die for his
country. Such an opposition to sending men to war is coherent with Alvin's grandmother's reproach
to her grandson that he is blinded by his joy of having been admitted into the RAF and cannot
perceive the dangers he is soon to face. Moreover, this passage is another element from the play that
D'Aguiar adapts as an epigraphical poem, “Granny on her Singer Sewing Machine,” in British
Subjects (8). “Singer,” in the title, is a brand, but it can also metaphorically refer to the poem itself,
in which the recurring line would act as the recurring chorus of a song. This kind of anaphoric
repetition is a technique that D'Aguiar often uses throughout his work. 44 “Granny on her Singer
44 For instance, in British Subjects, “Ballad of the Throwaway People” (10) is another poem that uses this device.
Moreover, in both Mama Dot and Airy Hall, the two collections preceding British Subjects in D'Aguiar's works, the
title of every poem in each collection's first part respectively contains “Mama Dot” or “Airy Hall.” Both of these
collections are actually divided into three similar parts, the first one making up a series of poems with a recurring
title expression, the second part being a more “traditional” grouping of poems, and the third one consisting in one
long poem, suggesting that Airy Hall might have a revisionary link with Mama Dot as well, insofar as it is a second
investment of a similar form by the poet. Anaphora and the insistent repetition of entire sentences are also very
present in a great majority of the pages of D'Aguiar's Bill of Rights, and the poet's latest collection, The Rose of
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Sewing Machine” (D'Aguiar 1993, 8) is a variation on the passage quoted above which D'Aguiar
obtained by spacing every couplet, suppressing the fourth one, reversing the order of the second and
third ones, and replacing the word “Germans” by “enemy,” in order to detach the poem from its
original theatrical context, as in “The Barber.” The stanza's recurring sentence can only be
understood as a metaphor that says “this desire to fly is nonsense,” in which something of Mama
Dot's Icarus intertext might remain, all the more so since it is uttered by a grandmother, and Mama
Dot is a collection D'Aguiar actually wrote about and dedicated to his grandmother. This additional
intra-textual transfer also places A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death as a transitory text
between D'Aguiar's first collections of poems and British Subjects.
Moreover, Alvin's desire to fly is a recurrent theme in the play: Alvin has “always wanted to
fly” (241) or, at least, ever since he had a kite incident. During his enlistment interview, Alvin
explains that he first had a desire to fly when he was a child. He once had a kite that pulled too hard
on his hands for him to hold it without the help of an adult, but he nevertheless decided to fly it
alone one day:
Just then a strong breeze hit the kite. Something pulled me so hard I had to look up. All I saw way
up in the sky was this tadpole waving. I thought that small thing can't tug with so much force, it must
be the hand of God. I thought, if I could hold on long enough, I'd be hauled up to heaven. And
heaven to me was all the things I ever wanted but could never have […] (242)
Alvin ends up being “dragged into a fence” (242), but the experience he has had leads him to a
conclusion: “[...] I never doubted for a moment I had to fly. Not to God. But because in my head
that kite still up there, waiting for me to pilot it to the ground” (242). The urge to reach a kite that
leads to heaven in order to come back to earth, maybe with the things that heaven promises, seems
to echo Icarus' desire to rise up to the sun thanks to wings of his father's confection, all the more so
if subsequent death is “foreseen” as a fatality. Another important detail is the omission of the
auxiliary “is” in “that kite still up there” or in other sentences uttered by Alvin such as “The pay
good, the sleeping quarters like one of we best hotels” (244), in that it shows that Alvin expresses
Toulouse (2013), has a structure analogous to those of Mama Dot and Airy Hall.
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himself through Jamaican patois. This coexistence between a Caribbean dialect and an evocation of
Roman mythology – and Christian religion, since the wind that pulls the kite upwards is being
compared to “the hand of God” (242) – creates the same kind of effect that was sensed in “A Toast”
(D'Aguiar 1985, 7) suggesting again that the play might be developing cross-tropical forms
D'Aguiar has been creating from his first collection of poetry on.
And the kite anecdote in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death actually does turn out to
consist in another prose rewriting of a Mama Dot Poem, entitled “Mama Dot Warns Against an
Easter Rising” (17), narrated by the eponymous grandmother, who repeats, in italics and at both
ends of the poem: “Doan raise no kite is good friday,” in vain, since her grandchild goes out against
her advice, manages to fly the kite until the wind pulls so hard that it lifts the child up and lets him
fall to the ground – just as Icarus' wings do – leaving him injured and forcing one of his relatives to
bring him to the hospital on the cross-bar of a bicycle. 45 Of course, the child's rebellion against his
grandmother's injunction not to rise a kite on an Easter day, along with his subsequent injury, make
up a cross-tropical metaphorical reference to the failure of the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 to
achieve secession from Britain, and to the poetic beauty D'Aguiar might perceive in the endeavor,
as in that of Icarus, despite its not being successful in the end. Through Mama Dot and A Jamaican
Airman Foresees His Death, then, the kite is being turned into a tropicality that relates Alvin's
Jamaica and Mama Dot's Guyana – former British colonies – to the Roman, Ovidian myth of Icarus,
and to the Irish anti-imperialist historical event that the Irish poet William Butler Yeats reacted to in
his elegy, “Easter 1916,” a few years before writing “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” (1919a)
which is the source poem for D'Aguiar's A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, as the title of the
play openly indicates.46 It also consists, along with Wilfred Owen's “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” in
45 In Fred D'Aguiar's second novel, Dear Future, the protagonist, named Red Head, is also led to a hospital on the
crossbar of a bicylce after his uncle inadvertently swings the back of an axe into his forehead (D'Agauir 1996, 7-8).
In Bethany Bettany, D'Agauiar's fifth novel, the eponymous character and her Kind Aunt win a race to church
against their relatives, with Bethany Bettany sitting on the crossbar, and the aunt pushing on the pedals (D'Aguiar
2003, 103-4). These elements confirm the hypothesis of D'Aguiar's revisionary writing technique. For a more
thorough discussion of these two novels, see Chapter V.
46 In the introductory note to his play, D'Aguiar explains that he loved Yeats' idea, in “An Irish Airman Foresees His
Death,” of letting the poetic persona, a World War I pilot and an aristocrat, explain that his choice of joining the war
65
another war-poetry intertext to the play.
In addition to the fact that the source of the play consists in a poem is an explanation to
D'Aguiar's frequent use of verse in A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, the author's references
to Yeats and to the Irish struggle for independence through a metaphorization of the Easter Uprising
are significant in terms of anti-colonialism. Ireland has been an important subject of debate in
“postcolonial” studies, as far as the definition of its status as a colony, a dominion, or a part of the
Commonwealth, and the date of its independence – 1921, 1931, or 1948 – are concerned (Young
2001, 60, 302; Torrent 52-5). What is less questioned is the important part Ireland played in anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles directed against Britain, and the strategic importance of the
1916 Easter Uprising as “a blow delivered against the English imperialist bourgeoisie” (Lenin in
Young 2001, 306) since, for such thinkers as Marx, the loss of Ireland could entail the end of the
British Empire (Marx in Young 2001, 306). Moreover, what happened in Ireland at the time did not
consist in an isolated event, but corresponded to a period of anti-colonial unrest in many British
colonies, including India, that coincided with World War One (Young 2001, 304).
One person that seems to embody these issues of Irish nationalism, anti-colonialism, and
relation to other colonies of the British empire is, quite interestingly, Yeats himself. On top of the
facts that “Gandhi […] consorted with the Indophiles of the Theosophical Society, the very same
milieu frequented by Yeats” (Young 2001, 319), whose poem “The Second Coming” (1919b)
provided Chinua Achebe (1959) with a title for his well-known recasting of Conrad's Heart of
Darkness (1899), an important debate exists in the sphere of literary criticism on the possibility for
Yeats to have been a (proto-)postcolonial poet.47 Edward Said, on one side of that debate, claims
effort did not result from “peer-group pressure” or “nationalistic drives,” but from an individual “impulse of delight”
(Yeats 1918; D'Aguiar 1991, 279). As a consequence, D'Aguiar was interested in reproducing the same kind of
impulse in a Second World War Jamaican working-class man: “The colonial situation would still prevail for the
Jamaican as it did for the Irishman, but both would respond to some private need and goal despite a burgeoning
nationalism and an obvious but crucial difference between them of class” (D'Aguiar 1991, 279). The “impulse of
delight” of an Irish aristocrat of the 1910's, in a period that evolved into Irish independence in the following
decades, is then translated into a childhood dream coming true for a Jamaican man in the early 1940's, twenty years
before Jamaican independence from Britain. In the process, and as shown in more detail below, D'Aguiar crosstropically syncretizes two periods that led up to British decolonization (Torrent 302).
47 For a reading of Things Fall Apart as a con-text to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, see Thieme 103-13. Conrad's novel
was also revised by Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris in Palace of the Peacock (Harris 1960) which has influenced,
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that Yeats was, from the beginning of his career to the publication of “Easter 1916,” “a poet of
decolonization” (Said 1988, 84) to the same extent as Aimé Césaire, Léopold S. Senghor, or Pablo
Neruda can have been (73), in that his nationalist implication in the late 19th century Irish Revival
corresponded to that of the initial, nationalist forms a great many anti-colonial movements took on
through such concepts as Negritude, although Yeats became prey to the pitfalls of such kinds of
nationalism, one of which being essentialism, a possible cause of Yeats' defense of fascistic ideas,
that could lead to the reproduction of colonial structures in nationalistic terms (Said 1988, 74;
Young 415). It is precisely this fascistic bias, the poet's return to mysticism (Said 1988, 80), and the
alleged subsequent inconsistencies of Yeats' late works that lead Seamus Deane to interpret Yeats'
endeavors as attempts at nationalistic colonial re-appropriation (Deane 63). Recent criticism has
been trying to come to terms with this opposition between Said and Deane on Yeats by qualifying
both points of view, but without providing much more discriminating information (see Howes 2006
and Regan 2006). Hence, on top of partaking of his play's very strong meta-textual dimension
involving Ovid, Yeats, and, by extension, Conrad, Achebe, and the history of European Empires
(the Roman, the British, and the Belgian through the Congo described by Conrad and Achebe),
D'Aguiar's poetic reference to the Easter Rising in one of his first published poems sets him, from
the onset of his career, in an anti-imperialist perspective, while simultaneously leading him to crosstropically and inter-textually relate his work to both Western and tropical texts in a way that
suggests that rather than establishing a dichotomy between former colonies and the West as an
intrinsically imperialist locus the cultural productions of which must necessarily be subverted,
D'Aguiar draws inspiration from the best every “world” has to offer in a truly inclusive and crosscultural poetics.
ii. Superimposition of Icarus & Pyramus
This cross-culturally inclusive quality of D'Aguiar's writing can be observed through his use
of Western and West Indian English dialects in the other part of the story that is told in A Jamaican
along with other works by the same author, the writings of Fred D'Aguiar (see Chapters III and V below).
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Airman Foresees his Death: during his stay in Scotland, Alvin falls in love with a Scottish woman,
Kathleen Campbell, and their dialogues blend the Creole of Jamaica and the Scottish accent “on a
continuum,” where “There is no sense in which the dialects are at war: all are marshaled to
articulate the complexity of the characters involved, as well as being a testimony to the ornate
relationships borne out of colonialism” (D'Aguiar 1991, 280), in a baroque and polyphonic crosscultural diversity expressed by characters in love in Kathleen and Alvin's case, rather than in an
oppositional dichotomy between two cultures. As a result, the only characters who set cultures
against one another in the play – for instance, Kathleen's parents, who disapprove of their daughter's
love affair with Alvin because he is black – are cast, somehow, as its villains. In fact, Kathleen's
father is happy when Alvin, the hero of the play, is faced with a dishonorable discharge, for it
provides him with an argument to oppose Kathleen and Alvin's relationship. It is obvious here that,
in addition to the obstructing father's resemblance to Oroonoko's grandfather, the love affair that is
staged resembles that of Pyramus and Thisbe, but with Pyramus as a black man, and Thisbe as a
white woman. In other words, the inter-ethnic version of Pyramus and Thisbe that D'Aguiar wrote
in British Subjects (60-63) seems to have been prepared through the story of Alvin and Kathleen.
This inferred revisionary relationship between Ovid, Behn, British Subjects, and D'Aguiar's
play appears to be confirmed by the fact that at some point, John, Kathleen's father, imagines what
is happening between his daughter and Alvin – “They're talking to each other, they're so close their
breaths are mixing” (D'Aguiar 1991, 262) – in the same way as Pyramus describes the situation he
and Thisbe share: “We whisper through a chink. / Our mixed breaths is our link” (D'Aguiar 1993,
60). Moreover, one page further into the play, John has an argument – in verse – with his wife about
Alvin and their daughter, in which he blames his wife for making Kathleen color-blind:
She wears a blindfold
You knitted on her eyes
With your tales of a world
Where black is worn with pride (D'Aguiar 1991, 263)
In that passage, the image of the “blindfold” that John uses to discuss his daughter's color-blindness
68
is analogous to the implicit designation of Thisbe's “shawl” as Du Bois' veil of race in “Thisbe to
Pyramus” (D'Aguiar 1993, 62-3), all the more so since double-consciousness can also be perceived
between the lines in which Alvin tells his friends how he feels in a Western country:
You ever feel like you on the outside of something and no matter how hard you try you can't get in?
Excluded from it though to all intents and purposes in it? That's how I feel in bonny Scotland. You
might well ask, how can you be in a place, under its skin, at the centre of its activity, yet as remote
from all that equals its life as if you watching a screen. (D'Aguiar 1991, 266, my italics)
Inside yet outside, on the margins of a predominantly white society, Alvin feels like he is being
made an eccentric against his own will. “Skin” is metaphorically at play in the passage, and
blackness is one reason why Alvin is excluded, and he compares this sense of being marginalized
with “watching a screen,” an image that can easily be likened to those of the identity wall (Glissant
& Chamoiseau 2007) and of the veil of race (Du Bois 1897) that were found to operate in
D'Aguiar's version of the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Thus, a thwarted interracial love, color-blindness and double-consciousness were already
present in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, and sprang from the re-creation of a Caribbean
Icarus that might have been evoked for the first time in “A Toast” and “Mama Dot Warns Against an
Easter Rising” (D'Aguiar 1985; 7, 17) to be reworked later on in D'Aguiar's verse revision of
Pyramus and Thisbe (D'Aguiar 1993; 60-3). Therefore, in D'Aguiar's earliest works – Mama Dot,
Airy Hall, A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death and British Subjects – the author creates a
network of images involving inter-ethnic relationships, mythology, and cross-tropical intra- as well
as inter-textual bonds that often lead, through such metaphorical elements as Thisbe's shawl or the
rising of a kite on Good Friday, to the generation of tropicality. Moreover, many of these
revisionary images are subjected to constant rewriting in D'Aguiar's work. For instance, in
Continental Shelf, one of D'Aguiar's latest collections of poems, the image of the grandmother's
needles reappears: “[...] the needle / my grandmother made me thread / with a lick of frayed cotton
[...]” (D'Aguiar 2009, 118). The fact that the images that have been gathered from D'Aguiar's first
works into British Subjects are revised again in his later works is what actually remains to be
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explored in this stitching together of the weft of D'Aguiar's verse corpus.
b. Postludes to British Subjects
After British Subjects, two new variants of D'Aguiar's revision of the myth of Pyramus and
Thisbe can be encountered, and in two different works. The first one, entitled Bloodlines, is
D'Aguiar's only novel in verse, written from beginning to end in ottava rima: octaves of iambic
pentameter rhyming abababcc and “used, among others, by Byron in Beppo and Don Juan” (Frias,
“The Erotics of Slavery” 680-1), where D'Aguiar's style remains identifiable through his use of
palindrome rhymes (13), and his regular privileging of assonance and alliteration over perfect
rhyme (1).48 The second one is Feeding the Ghosts, a novel written in highly metaphorical prose
which includes a few passages in verse. The respective revisions of Ovid's myth in these two works
is to be dealt with here, separately, and in this order.
i. Chinks & Links
Bloodlines tells the story of Christy, the son of a slave-master, and Faith, a female slave in a
neighboring plantation. Christy and Faith fall in love and are subsequently banished by Christy's
father. With neither a home nor a destination, they go on the road and stop at a crossroads when a
storm breaks. They are rescued from this hostile weather by Tom and Stella, two runaway slaves
who are part of the Underground Railroad, which used to help slaves to escape. With Tom's help,
Christy and Faith attempt but fail to become free, and Christy is bought and indentured as a boxer
while Faith is sold as a slave to the Mason family, where she soon dies giving birth to a child, Sow,
the protagonist and main narrator of the story who, as a consequence to his parents' misfortune,
cannot die until he makes the races equal.49 The time frame of the novel extends from a few years
before the American Civil War to the 21 st century. Once again, a thwarted interracial love story is
48 For a more detailed discussion of form in Bloodlines, see chapters IV and V. Feeding the Ghosts is being addressed
here in spite of its not being written in verse because of its obvious revisionary links to Ovid's myth of Pyramus and
Thisbe, and, in chapter II, due to its crucial importance in D'Aguiar's sea riff. That novel is explored differently in
terms of textuality and Orphism in Part Two.
49 The names of these characters are obviously loaded with a variety of significations, and I deal with them below,
when discussing Bloodlines as a novel rather than as poetry, in Part Two.
70
told, and seems to echo D'Aguiar's version of Pyramus and Thisbe (D'Aguiar 1993, 60-3).
Moreover, the figure of the obstructing patriarch that appears in Oroonoko resurfaces in Bloodlines
as a plantation owner that relates, again, a revision of Ovid's myth to the history of slave narratives.
Other passages in Bloodlines, like the following stanza, seem to confirm the novel's link to
D'Aguiar's revision of Ovid's myth – and Aphra Behn's novel – in British Subjects through potential
references to double-consciousness and the chink in the dividing wall of the lovers' houses:
You guessed correct. My earthly father was white,
my mother, black. Two trains on one track
thundering towards each other at night,
neither willing nor able to stop and back
the fuck up regardless who more right
than who, each looking through a crack
at the other and seeing only one gesture,
the old, backwards facing two-finger. (D'Aguiar 2000, 1, my italics)
The two lovers are separated but irresistibly attracted to one another, and they see themselves
through a “crack” which actually echoes the “chink” in the wall that constitutes the “link” between
the breaths of Pyramus and Thisbe (D'Aguiar 1993, 60), and could correspond to a metaphorical
avatar of the identity wall or the veil of race. The “backwards facing two-finger,” as the British
variant of the raised middle-finger, used on an American plantation, might confirm the idea that
Bloodlines and British Subjects are related in a triangulation – a form that may be perceived in the
sign – that is reminiscent of the triangular trade, through which Africans were sold as slaves to
America to produce rough materials that would be turned to manufactured goods in Europe. The
hand sign also consists in another “crack,” or “chink” that separates the lovers: this rift is a racist
one again, in that it separates black people and white people in antebellum America, and might
consist in a proleptic image – in the same way as the train-crash image adumbrates the failure of the
lovers' escape via the Underground Railroad – of the violence that characterizes the encounter of the
two characters, who quite unexpectedly fall in love as Christy rapes Faith.
Such an improbable love-story in Bloodlines is reminiscent of the way Tikka and the
narrator of Bill of Rights fall in love after the narrator kills Tikka's husband in front of her (D'Aguiar
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1998, 27-9), and suggests that a revisionary link exists between Bloodlines and Bill of Rights, but
does not allow one to make more sense of these scenes. In private correspondence with me, Fred
D'Aguiar argued that such facts have actually happened through history, no matter how hard it is to
find a reasonable explanation for such an outcome to a rape. A first tentative reading of this rape
scene, where the two actors end up in love, might be viewed as an instance of what Gilroy calls the
“Hegelian impasse,” where two persons such as a master and a slave confront one another violently,
only to realize that they are both putting the same amount of strength in the struggle, leaving no
possibility for one of them to take over, and such a dead-end situation leads them to “mutual
respect” and the realization that they are equals (Gilroy 62). However, this explanation is
unsatisfactory as far as Bloodlines' rape scene is concerned, in that throughout this passage, Faith
never benefits from “mutual respect,” and her strength does not equal that of Christy. Levinas' ideas
in Totality and Infinity are more fruitful as far as the rape scene is concerned: he explains that true
relation to the Other is relation to the other's face, because the Face expresses itself constantly and
therefore resists any totalization: as opposed to an object for the satisfaction of one's need or urge
(something which satisfies someone and preserves their sense of being total by becoming them, like
digesting food), the Other's face or opacity (Glissant 1997; 190, 194), the Other's irreducible
singularity as an individual, enters one through expression, without one being able to assimilate the
whole of it, so much so that the Other's face constantly overflows one and gives one a sense of
infinity, which Levinas also calls desire (as opposed to need, desire designates what one keeps on
wanting and re-specting because every additional expression provides additional satisfaction).
Moving from need or urge to desire is moving from economy to ethics, from slavery to freedom,
from war to love. The need is Christy's sexual urge, the "face to face" with Faith is a revelation of
infinity, of true desire and love/respect for Otherness culminating in Christy's realization that Faith
overflows him and that he cannot "contain," "possess," or “totalize” her: Christy throws up
(D'Aguiar 2000, 7).50
50 This of course only is a tentative explanation of how Faith and Christy might have fallen in love, and I do not intend
72
After realizing that he is in love with Faith, Christy has difficulties reconciling this feeling
with his status as the son of a slave-master: “He walk[s] the town / in denial with the two faces of a
clown” (8). As in D'Aguiar's revision of Pyramus and Thisbe (D'Aguiar 1993, 62), the white lover
might be subjected to a form of double-consciousness here as well. Moreover, his “two faces”
evoke various mythological figures, one of them being Janus, a divinity who also appears in Ovid's
Metamorphoses as the two-faced God who organizes chaos, looks both to the present and the future,
and presides over paths and gates between human beings and gods. It is fascinating to find that the
two faces and the role of Janus find their counterpart in an African Yoruba divinity, Esu-Elegbara,
who is also present in the American voodoo cults of Brazil, the Caribbeans and the United States as
Papa Legba or Papa La Bas (Gates 5):
The Fon call Legba 'the divine linguist,' he who speaks all languages, he who interprets the alphabet
of Mawu to man and to the other gods. Yoruba sculptures of Esu almost always include a calabash
that he holds in his hands. In this calabash he keeps ase, the very ase with which Olodumare, the
supreme deity of the Yoruba, created the universe. We can translate ase in many ways, but the ase
used to create the universe I translate as 'logos,' as the word as understanding, the word as the
audible, and later the visible, sign of reason. It is the word with irrevocability, reinforced with
double-assuredness and undaunted authenticity. This probably explains why Esu's mouth, from
which the audible word proceeds, sometimes appears double […] (Gates 7, my italics)
Arthur and Dash complete this description of Legba as the logos and as a counterpart to Janus by
writing that Haiti's Legba is the “keeper of gates, crossroads and paths” (Arthur & Dash 264): a
divine interpreter of sorts. In Bloodlines, Christy's “two faces of a clown” (D'Aguiar 2000, 8) are
reminiscent of representations of Janus and of Legba's two mouths, all the more so since Legba, as a
trickster, is a figure that can be likened to a two-faced clown. Moreover, Christy and Faith take
shelter at a crossroads during the storm (19), and Christy is buried at that same crossroads at the end
of the novel (148), and his tomb, like Legba, is thus made to keep “crossroads and paths” (Arthur &
Dash 264). Finally, apart from the fact that Christy is “in two minds” about what he has done to
Faith and the unexpected love that sprung from his action, his being described as a Legba-Janus
might consist in a metaphorical representation of the cultural syncretism deriving from crossat all to legitimize rape. Additional interpretations by other critics and myself are suggested in Chapters IV and V
below.
73
tropical and inter-ethnic encounters, involving myths that may have traveled between Africa, Rome,
the Americas and the Caribbeans: in other words, the fusion of Legba and Janus, on top of “Christ,”
in this depiction of Christy, might consist in a tropicality. D'Aguiar must indeed be familiar with
Janus since he read Ovid, and with Legba through his knowledge of Guyanese voodoo, called
“Obeah,” to which he refers in Mama Dot (D'Aguiar 1985, 13). Another passage from Bloodlines,
where Tom's thoughts are expressed, also reinforces the idea that D'Aguiar is using images from
Yoruba mythology in the novel:
Would a sane person actually choose
to be a slave? Tom's unequivocal
answer is yes, if it means being those
empty halves of calabash. Why so vocal
on the subject, Tom? Is it because
calabash have no features, are unequal,
divided and gutted? Slaves scheme
to be free. Calabash do not dream (D'Aguiar 2000, 134).
This octave comes across as very ironic when readers know the calabash is what contains ase, or the
logos in Gates' interpretation of the myth of Esu: “empty halves of calabash” contain no logos, no
system of complementary differences to constitute the basis of signification. As a consequence, the
only meaning Tom is willing to concede to slavery is the abolition of meaning (the emptying of
Esu's calabash), so that choosing slavery would entail the end of signification and, hence, the
abolition of slavery, since “slavery” and every other sign would no longer mean a thing. Roughly
speaking, if Tom chooses to become a slave, then he is not a slave, since he has chosen his
condition freely. In this sense, he is unequivocal about his choice, yet he is double-voiced in his way
of putting it since he relies on the calabash metaphor to explain that he can choose slavery because
such a choice puts an end to slavery, deprives slavery of its signification. So what Tom chooses, all
in all, is the actual abolition of slavery. Tom is here likened to Esu through the image of the
calabash, which confirms D'Aguiar's knowledge of the Yoruba deity as well as the fact that Christy's
two faces may refer to both Janus and Legba. However, if Christy is the trickster, he is also tricked,
since he is, unlike Tom, facing the unforeseen consequences of his own actions, which lead him
74
deep into double-faced doubt. It is also interesting to note that Christy is related to his son, Sow,
through literal bloodlines as much as through the extension of double patterns, since Sow narrates
the novel's framing prologue and epilogue, both entitled “I and I”(1, 145), an expression “borrowed
from the Rastafarian, which refers in the first 'I' to the social material and temporal self and in the
second 'I' to the spiritual, perpetual self” (Frias 2002a, 682): in the protagonist's case, the temporal
and perpetual self corresponds to his immortality, while his social and material self as a mixed-race
child of miscegenation, born to a plantation world presupposing the clear-cut separation of black
and white, is doubled up in turn.51
Such a use of prologue and epilogue as framing devices, and of a large time frame, along
with the representation of doubled-up personalities through images from Roman mythology, Yoruba
deities and Caribbean religions also appear to establish strong formal intertextual bonds between
Bloodlines and two other novels: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
In fact, Mumbo Jumbo is a detective novel the implications of which develop far beyond the novel's
temporal frame into Egyptian, Greek, Caribbean and Christian history, mythology and religion, and
lead to the discovery of the culprit by the main character, who is yet another literary representation
of Esu, named Papa LaBas. Mumbo Jumbo is also framed by a prologue and epilogue (3, 208), and
it creates, as suggested above, a formal representation of double-consciousness/voicedness through
Reed's use of two separate and oppositional narrative voices which partly contribute to stage the
plot's underlying interracial conflict between rival black and white secret societies. Ellison's
Invisible Man also contains a prologue and an epilogue, and its protagonist is metaphorically
endowed with a supernatural power – invisibility – and made to experience double-consciousness
by seeing as if through a “semi-transparent curtain” (341) or “as though a curtain had been parted,”
(306) a curtain which certainly is a variant of Du Bois' veil of race, which is torn rather than parted
in D'Aguiar's version of Pyramus and Thisbe.
However, instead of representing inter-ethnic relations in terms of rivalry, such as in Mumbo
51 See Part Two for a deeper genealogical interpretation of double threads and knots in Bloodlines.
75
Jumbo, D'Aguiar takes a different stand by showing that interracial love can win over hate and work
against racial prejudices. Just like Pyramus in British Subjects, Faith is
[…] drunk on the image
of us two in some color-blind country
I'd only dreamed of before now,
knowing in sleep it had still to be won. (22)
On top of its being reminiscent of the see/agrees palindrome rhyme found in D'Aguiar's revision of
Pyramus and Thisbe (D'Aguiar 1993, 60-3), the now/won rhyme above suggests that the victory of
inter-ethnic love, like the “race” between Pyramus and Thisbe, is not owned now but still has to be
won. This type of rhyme comes in addition, in Bloodlines, to images of inter-ethnic love, colorblindness, doubles and double-consciousness that all seem to show that D'Aguiar revises his earlier
versions of Pyramus and Thisbe in this novel again, without making his work feel too repetitive, but
creating a sense of continuity from one work to another, a riff on inter-ethnicity and love where
many images function as tropicalities.
ii. Love across the Atlantic
Like Bloodlines, Feeding the Ghosts is a novel framed by a prologue and an epilogue that
contains references to polytheistic beliefs of African, Yoruba origins (D'Aguiar 1997, 39, 57), as
well as to Christianity (32). This novel might therefore have intertextual links with Ellison and
Reed, and intratextual connections with Bloodlines, which D'Aguiar wrote later on, but with the
same kind of structure. The presence of polytheistic African beliefs such as voodoo or obeah,
evoked above in Mama Dot, Bloodlines and just now in Feeding the Ghosts, also suggests
intertextual links between the work of Fred D'Aguiar and those of Derek Walcott (Walcott 1990; 52,
58, 143, 243-5, 289) and Edward Brathwaite (Brathwaite174, 211, 219-20, 242, 263, 265), where
references to these cults are very recurrent. Moreover, since voodoo and obeah can be considered as
tropes of Caribbean culture that include elements of Christianity and freemasonry as much as parts
of African cults, they might function as tropicalities, or cross-cultural tropes, in these authors'
respective works (Arthur & Dash 255). Apart from this, and although Feeding the Ghosts is a novel
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in prose that is to be dealt with as such in Chapters IV and V, several passages from this novel
appear, again, to consist in yet another rewriting of the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe that must be
discussed briefly here, while the novel's poetic riff on the sea is to be studied in Chapter II in
relation to a set of poems where D'Aguiar uses the same kinds of oceanic tropes.
Feeding the Ghosts tells the true story of the Zong, a slave ship of which the captain, in
1783, decided to throw one hundred and thirty-two allegedly sick slaves overboard, for they would
be more profitable in insurance as goods or livestock lost at sea than if they were sold at auction. A
trial followed between the ship's crew and the insurers, who were unwilling to pay for the loss of
the slaves, and the ensuing verdict proved to be in favor of the Zong's crew, thus asserting the status
of black men and women as livestock instead of human beings. 52 Among the slaves that were
thrown to the sea, one person actually managed to climb back on board. In Feeding the Ghosts, this
person is fictionalized as a woman named Mintah. She is the novel's main character, and she
narrates the book's third part (D'Aguiar 1997, 183-226), which consists in Mintah's account of the
story of the Zong, that is, an embedded version of the novel. This part of the novel is therefore a
fictionalized slave narrative told by a woman and, as such, it might be related to the story of
Oroonoko, which is a story told by a female authorial figure that inspired eighteenth-century slave
narratives. In this perspective, Mintah's position as a slave narrator and a woman is also reminiscent
of Phillis Wheatley, a slave and a woman writer, the first African-American person to have
published a book, in 1773 (Gates in Wheatley xii).
But what mostly induces one to think that traces of D'Aguiar's Pyramus and Thisbe are
present in Feeding the Ghosts is again a thwarted love between a black woman and a white man. In
fact, when Mintah gets back on board, a young man named Simon, the cook's assistant, decides to
help her by hiding her away from the crew, in the kitchen's storeroom, where he soon falls in love
52 For a thorough study of the Zong story and the court cases that followed, see Ian Baucom's brilliant Specters of the
Atlantic. As shown in further detail in Part Two, many Caribbean authors from D'Aguiar's generation have written
on the Zong. One may think of David Dabydeen's poem Turner; of MM NoubreSe Philip's collection Zong and, to
some extent, of Caryl Phillips' novel Crossing the River.
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with her:
If she wished it, he would protect her because he loved her. But he thought she needed more time to
grow to love him, and time would convince her. Mintah replied that her heart felt love for him too
but she could not entertain that aspect of love while there was so much cruelty and suffering around
her (D'Aguiar 1997, 103).
Love between two persons of different complexions is thwarted by the context in which they meet,
that is, the slave trade. Only once will Mintah and Simon manage to kiss each other (202), before
being separated when Mintah is finally sold as a slave in the new world while Simon goes back to
England. Like Stella in Bloodlines, Mintah is to integrate the Underground Railroad, and help
“runaways [to] get to the north” (207), before going to Jamaica where she will spend the rest of her
life, dreaming of and witnessing the abolition of slavery there, and meeting Simon again (221).
Simon and Mintah, respectively a white sailor involved in the slave trade and a black slave who
meet on board a ship crossing the Middle Passage, are separated by slavery and the Atlantic ocean,
which are the same thing according to the novel's opening words, a paraphrase of Walcott's “The
Sea is History” (1986, 364) as “The sea is slavery” (D'Aguiar 1997, 3), a simile that allows for the
fusion of “sea” and “slavery” into a metaphor designating a racist economy that operates as the wall
that separates Pyramus and Thisbe (D'Aguiar 1993, 60-3), and as the space Behn's Oroonoko and
Imoinda cross separately before meeting again in Surinam, only to realize that they cannot love
each other freely there.
c. Rolling Stones: the Re-turn of Medusa
Apart from these additional revisions of Pyramus and Thisbe, another Ovidian text is to
draw attention through its being revised again, in that the figure of Medusa, which was found in a
collection posterior to British Subjects, Bill of Rights, returns in a series of elegies in D'Aguiar's
2009 collection, entitled Continental Shelf, which, again, also contains a rewritten version of the
sewing grandmother found in A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death and British Subjects, and was
a finalist for the T.S Eliot prize while, ironically enough, Bill of Rights, the other work containing
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the Medusa image, was also short-listed for the same prize. The “Elegies” consist in a long
progression of thoughts on the shooting that happened at Virginia Tech University on the 16 th of
April in 2006, where a student killed thirty-two other students before committing suicide. There is
an autobiographical dimension to this part of Continental Shelf, since Fred D'Aguiar was at Virginia
Tech during the event, and taught there until he moved, in 2015, to UCLA, where, in a dark
coincidence of sorts, shootings also occurred in 2016. 53 D'Aguiar is the “melancholic and griefstricken teacher” narrator of several parts of the “Elegies” series, as in those that are to be studied
here.54
It is from the end of the sixth “poem” (D'Aguiar 2009, 86) to the seventh “poem” (87) of the
tenth section of “Elegies” (59-121) that a Medusa-like figure is being described in ways that are
reminiscent of its Bill of Rights avatar. I put the word “poem” between quotation marks because, in
“Elegies,” a sentence can start in the last line of a “poem” and cross formal boundaries to reach its
end in the following “poem.” In other words, D'Aguiar creates enjambments and metaphorical links
between separate poems, and they constitute such instances of continuity that either readers'
defining parts of “Elegies” as single “poems” is questionable or, if D'Aguiar actually separated
fragments of “Elegies” in order to delimit what he considers to be different poems, this means that
he wants readers to consider a poem as a porous, rather than hermetic, text that might not always
provide the full picture of what it deals with when taken in isolation. This second tentative
interpretation makes more sense in an elegiac context, since elegies are supposed to mourn the
deceased, which entails a lyrical expression of powerful feelings that may let the poetic persona fall
apart at the seams in the same way as D'Aguiar's elegies overflow into one another. Moreover,
D'Aguiar's elegies deal with the Virginia Tech Massacre where many individuals, all different from
one another, were killed before the gunman committed suicide, leaving those who survived the
attack, like Fred D'Aguiar, with a haunting memory they necessarily have had to come to terms with
53 For more information on this, see Fred D'Aguiar's article in the Los Angeles Times, entitled “I was a professor at
Virginia Tech during the Shootings There. Then Violence followed me to UCLA” (June 2nd, 2016).
54 Private correspondence with the author.
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in order to go on in life: all of these pieces of data and thought processes cannot be registered
separately in neat and hermetic poems, since they are all interconnected and might, as a whole,
surpass the amount of information a short poem can reasonably contain. In this sense, D'Aguiar's
formal choice would correspond to his subject, and “Elegies,” as a part of Continental Shelf, could
be considered as a continuous meditation rather than as a grouping of separate elements which, in
any case, puzzle readers into reflection, an experience that might echoe, albeit in a milder way, how
the Virginia Tech shooting shocked D'Aguiar into poetic, philosophical, and cathartic exploration.
The figure of Medusa is actually one of the metaphors that are initiated in one poetic unit,
and extended into another one in “Elegies:”
6
One dead student walked in my shoes,
I continue in thought where
Her death left off that April morning.
There is no better work in life than
Taking up the slack of someone
Whose grip was forced to slip and slide.
The work, just as hard, feels twice
As sweet as any job foisted on me.
And that's what I tell myself every
Morning as I approach my desk
And face its reproach that I dare
To advance on anything but my belly:
Prostrate before a being who with one
Look turns living things to cold stone.
7
Not one with snakes for dreadlocks,
That's too easy, but a woman […] (D'Aguiar 2009, 86-7)
And the metaphor keeps on being extended throughout the seventh section. The stanzas' rough fourbeat rhythm, a frequent metrical pattern in anglophone poetry, evokes the routine that is “as sweet
as any job,” while paradoxically maintaining, through its irregularities, something of the weariness
with which the poet describes the same routine in the first poem of “Elegies,” where his occupation
“Chain[s him] all day to tenure's incremental advance” (51). This change of perception on the part
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of the poet corresponds to moments before and after the shooting, and evokes the strengthening of
his sense of duty toward his students, whose untimely death he feels the irrepressible need to
counter by speaking on their behalf or, rather, letting them speak through him as their ghosts walk
“in [his] shoes.” As always, hard work immobilizes the poet at his desk, where he is “chained all
day” (51), typing on his computer's keyboard to “cut and paste coupons of [his] achievements and
press Save” (51), but this immobility is described this time around through allusions to Medusa, and
the reason why his work is hard has changed. In fact, when he wakes up to his “worst nightmare”
on the day of the shooting, the catastrophe has not happened yet, and what he describes as his worst
nightmare is his “academic grave,” his office, where he feels bored by his daily writing activity,
“press[ing] Save” at the end of the day to record his work as much as to imply that he cannot wait to
be “saved” by that working day's final action, which indicates he will soon leave his “academic
grave” for home (51). By contrast, it is the actual nightmare of the shooting that leads the poet to
stop complaining about his routine as a tenured professor – a rather comfortable academic position
– and to experience it as something far “sweeter” than the cold-blooded murder of thirty-two
students, whom he now feels compelled to commemorate in poetry as a means of preventing the
dead from being forgotten and of getting over the shock of witnessing such a “nightmare” (51). In
order to do so, in the stanzas quoted above, he imagines a student has stepped into his shoes, and it
is her reflection that he sees on his computer screen as he is writing poetry about her, and it is such
a “reflection,” such a thought process conditioned by his impersonation of a “ghost,” that
immobilizes him, “Prostrate before a being who with one / Look turns living things to cold stone”
(86). This being is the student's ghost indeed, not a literal Medusa “with snakes for dreadlocks, /
That's too easy” (87) if it is not a metaphor for what actually petrifies55 him at his desk. The
evaluation of a literal reference to Medusa as “too easy” exacerbates the poet's sense of a renewed
taste for real hard work and refinement, while the metaphorical comparison, through simile, of
55 Petrify etymologically means “turn to stone”, and lets one wonder if the verb was, like one of its possible French
equivalents, “être médusé,” coined by the myth. The comparison between dread locks and snakes reappears in Fred
D'Aguiar's novel Bethany Bettany (D'Aguiar 2003, 274).
81
Medusa's hairstyle to dreadlocks corresponds to his sense of tropicality,56 transferring the gorgon
from Roman mythology into a Jamaican, Rastafarian cultural context at the beginning of the
seventh section, which conjures up the ghosts of other texts as well:
7
Not one with snakes for dreadlocks,
That's too easy, but a woman who
Turns heads in a mall just by how
She puts one foot directly in front
Of the next and creates a pendulum
Swing of the hips and balances an invisible
Fruit basket on her head, her long neck
Like a vase made by a Grecian with an
Eye on an ode to his work and posterity.
She comes toward me and I should
Keep my blindfold on as instructed,
But I feel her near and rip it off my eyes:
The rest you know, how she turns a population
Down, like a chambermaid, a bed, at the Hilton (D'Aguiar 2009, 87).
Here, the poet is thus not petrified by Medusa, but by the reflection of his female student on his
computer's screen, which keeps him stuck to his computer, where the poem he writes is then
screened as a metaphorical portrait of that student who, instead of being monstrous as a gorgon, is
depicted in sensual terms when the poet alludes to the “pendulum / swing of [her] hips” (87), a
hypnotizing charm that induces men to turn around and look at her rather than a spell that turns
them to motionless stone: being a mirror image of Medusa, she also is an inversion of the
mythological figure, with a beauty that entails movement rather than a monstrosity that petrifies. 57
Sensuality also transpires through the description of the soft curves of her neck, which evoke the
shape of a Greek “vase” and, hence, an inter-textual reference to Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”
which consists in a meditative ekphrasis of a painted vase, where Keats deals with the same themes
56 The inscription of a tropical Medusa in that Elegy is not accidental, and is evocative of the fact that the student being
described is the victim that D'Aguiar lost from his Caribbean Literature class (D'Aguiar, June 2nd 2016).
57 The “pendulum/ Swing of the hips” is an expression that D'Aguiar also uses in a series of poems entitled “Notting
Hill” (D'Aguiar 1993, 39-41), which deals with the famous Caribbean carnival taking place there each year in the
area of Portobello Road, where people dance, and those “on your sides bump to your hips' / pendulum swing” (41).
This intra-textual link indicates again that D'Aguiar constantly revises his texts.
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as those evoked by the seventh section of the first part of D'Aguiar's “Elegies.” On top of the two
poets' shared taste for works of arts from ancient Rome and Greece, sensuality plays a role in Keats'
poem too when he describes the urn's painted scene of a man chasing his lover. The two characters,
being painted, will never move, as if petrified by Medusa, and the man's desire for the woman he is
trying to catch up with will be preserved forever as a consequence, since it will never be satisfied, in
the same way as his running activity – or the prospect of a more erotic action – will keep him
“panting” (Keats 1820) for eternity, maybe like the men who turn around to watch the curves of the
student described in D'Aguiar's poem. Keats' ode ends with the thought that the moments that are
fixed in painting on the urn will survive his generation: “When old age shall this generation waste, /
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours.” The urn, as the poem's subject, leads to a
reflection on posterity, which explains why D'Aguiar describes the urn as a “vase made by a
Grecian with an / Eye on an ode to his work and posterity “ (D'Aguiar 2009, 87). Moreover, and
despite Keats' initial statement, in the ode, that the urn “canst thus express / A flowery tale more
sweetly than our rhyme,” his ekphrasis reproduces the urn, along with its power to reach posterity,
in poetry, thus creating a model that D'Aguiar follows, by painting his other “model,” the student's
reflection in the frame of his computer's screen, in lines that turn her, through portraiture, into a
work of art, and prevent her from being forgotten. 58 Posterity is Keats' concluding thought in “Ode,”
and D'Aguiar's initial intent in “Elegies.”
Another Hellenistic type of intertextuality appears in D'Aguiar's poem when readers learn
that the poet has been describing his student while wearing a “blindfold” that is reminiscent of the
shawls and screens of A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death and British Subject's “Thisbe to
Pyramus” as tropes of color-blindness and/or double-consciousness, like Du Bois' veil of race.
However, interpreting this ribbon hiding the poet's eyes as another mythological reference to Homer
and to Ovid's Orpheus appears to make more sense in the poem for, by commemorating his
58 One may note, in this perspective, that D'Aguiar does relate his poetry to painting in the acknowledgments section
of Continental Shelf, where he explains his choosing a painting as a cover illustration for the collection: “So much of
the great art of Frank Bowling suited this collection but I could only pick one painting” (D'Aguiar 2009).
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deceased student in poetry, D'Aguiar conjures up her ghost in the same way as Orpheus brings the
specter of Eurydice back from the underworld. D'Aguiar's student is a Eurydice of sorts indeed,
since men, like Orpheus in the myth, cannot resist turning around to look at her, just as D'Aguiar
cannot help tearing off his blindfold to watch her: “The rest you know, how she turns a population /
Down, like a chambermaid, a bed, at the Hilton” (87). The mythologized figure of the student
vanishes back into the underworld to let the poet face his contemporaneous reality, back from
Roman myths into American hotels, where this seventh elegiac section ends, bringing closure to the
student's portraiture. In “Orpheus' Gaze,” Maurice Blanchot reads that moment, when Orpheus turns
back to look, as an allegory of artistic creation, where artistic inspiration corresponds to the desire
that makes Orpheus turn back as he draws the work of art (Eurydice) out of darkness, which entails
Orpheus' loss of “his work” to the benefit of the work itself, the essence of which is freed from the
artist's grasp and thus consecrated into permanence (Blanchot 175), while the artist is driven back to
the “origin of the work” (173): following that argument, one reading of the poem could consist in
the idea that D'Aguiar's deceased student is consecrated into posterity through the poem as a work
of art when D'Aguiar tears off his blindfold to look at the ghost he has just conjured back up from
the dead, thus freeing the student from his “concern” in a cathartic way that nevertheless leads him
back to base reality, where he is to continue to try to come to terms with the Virginia Tech tragedy
in other elegies the creation of which were conditioned by the event. This passage from Elegies
might thus be thought of as an allegory of D'Aguiar's poetics of “re-membering the dismembered,”
a phrase he often uses to explain his artistic endeavors dealing with tragic historical events
(D'Aguiar in Kocz).59
But the poet's blindfold also evokes that of another poet, Homer, all the more so since this
excerpt also draws from a passage in Derek Walcott's Omeros, which itself rewrites the Odyssey,
and where Achille's60 childhood memories are represented:
59 For a discussion of the place of D'Aguiar's works among diverse literary traditions of reading the myth of Orpheus,
and of how, like Ovid's myth, D'Aguiar “Orphically” connects memory to the imagination, see Chapter V.
60 This is how his name is spelled in Walcott's revision.
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From here, in his boyhood, he had seen women climb
like ants up a white flower-pot, baskets of coal
balanced on their torchoned heads, without touching them,
up the black pyramids, each spine straight as a pole,
and with a strength that never altered its rhythm.
He spoke for those Helens from an earlier time:
'Hell was built on those hills. In that country of coal
without fire, that inferno the same colour
as their skins and shadows, every labouring soul
climbed with her hundredweight basket, every load for
one copper penny, balanced erect on their necks
that were tight as the liner's hawsers from the weight.
The carriers were women, not the fair, gentler sex.
Instead, they were darker and stronger, and their gait
was made beautiful by balance, […].' (Walcott 1990, 73-4)
In these stanzas, Walcott describes the women in terms that are close to those in which D'Aguiar
describes his student. For one thing, attention is paid to the “rhythm of the spine.” In D'Aguiar's
poem, one finds a “swing of the hips.” Conversely, the necks of women are objectified as ropes in
Walcott's text, and as a vase in D'Aguiar's poem. In both D'Aguiar and Walcott's works, these
women are “made beautiful by balance” and rhythm (Walcott 1990, 74). Moreover, the sense of
danger that Medusa gives as a mythological figure finds its counterpart in Walcott's writing that the
women he describes work in an “inferno,” a hell, which actually is a coal mine. These women are
“Helens” working in “hell,” carrying baskets of flammable ore (coal) on their turbaned, “torchoned”
heads, which risk being turned to “torches” in this hellish scene: these are very apt puns through
which Walcott revises Homer's Iliad into a cross-tropical tale by re-staging the Greek story in the
Caribbean islands, and making Helens black as the coal they carry all day in a picture that is highly
evocative of slavery. As seen above with, for instance, the image of a Medusa with dreadlocks,
D'Aguiar revises ancient texts through the lens of ethnicity in the same way as the author of Omeros
does, and might thus be paying a tribute to Derek Walcott as a “guiding light behind [his] work” 61
through his references, in “Elegies,” to Greece and its blindfolded poet in a scene that stands as a
revision of a passage from Omeros, which D'Aguiar read and studied, along with other texts by
61 Private correspondence with the author.
85
Walcott, in an academic essay (D'Aguiar 2005, 223).
Thus, mythological figures from Ovid's Metamorphoses (re-)appear in at least five of the
writer's books from Mama Dot to Continental Shelf, where they are constantly being intertextually
revised thanks to the texts of other authors from the West and the Caribbean, and intra-textually
rewritten through the lens of works by D'Aguiar that precede their occurrence. In this perspective,
British Subjects and Bill of Rights establish themselves as pivotal collections in the intra-textual
progression of D'Aguiar's work, since they either constitute the result of preliminary revisions of
Ovid in Mama Dot and A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, and/or provide the grounds on
which subsequent re-writings are based. Such a revisionary process regularly entails the generation
of tropicality, which D'Aguiar sometimes uses, in his re-writing of Pyramus and Thisbe for instance,
as a means to overcome racist prejudices. The fact that such tropicality springs from cross-tropical
inter-textuality also leads readers to interpretations that draw from both Western and Caribbean
critical and philosophical texts that are hence cross-tropically paralleled in turn to exceed West/Rest
binary discourses that too often have a tendency to discuss cross-cultural relations exclusively as
adversarial encounters.
III. Syncretizing Love and Hate
D'Aguiar's ways of revising himself and others exceed these binaries more often than not,
and their sources are not limited to a specific set of mythological figures, but prove to have a
dramatic number of extensions and ramifications that contribute to the making of a large crosstropical intertextual network that attests to the richness of his writing. His use of tropicality is
regularly set in motion by non-Ovidian sources that can also serve the purpose of turning metaphors
of hate to images of love, or of syncretizing both, in a way that invites readers to think on the nature
and implications of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic relations, as can be seen below in poems from
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British Subjects and Continental Shelf, and in Bloodlines as well.
a. The Rose, the Iris & the Bruise
In “A Gift of a Rose” (D'Aguiar 1993, 11), for instance, D'Aguiar creates a metaphor that
describes hate in terms of love. This poem in free verse is made up of four quintets, has no specific
rhyme scheme, and is narrated by a poetic persona who starts by explaining in the following terms
that s/he was beaten up by police officers:
Two policemen (I remember there were at least two)
stopped me and gave me a bunch of red, red roses.
I nursed them with ice and water mixed with soluble aspirin.
The roses had an instant bloom attracting stares
and children who pointed; toddlers cried and ran. (11)
From this passage's third line on, readers understand that the bruises the narrator got after the
beating are described as roses that were given or offered to him/her. In other words, bruises as
traces of violence are made the tenors of a metaphor the vehicle of which is “roses:” not any kind of
gift, since roses are the flowers one traditionally offers to one's lover. Roses are pregnant with
cultural meaning which makes them tropes of love. As a consequence, bruises as tropes of
unjustified violence or hate are turned into metaphors of love and generosity, and bruises and roses
are embedded as tropes into yet another metaphor which ironically reverses the received meanings
of what it gathers. The same type of trope can be found in Derek Walcott's Omeros, where
Philoctete has a bruise on his shin that is metaphorically described as an “anemone” (Walcott 1990;
19,274), which he is trying to heal by “soaking [that] flower on his shin / with hot sulphur” (235),
and confirms the existence of an intertextual bond that links Walcott and D'Aguiar's respective
works. While Philoctete cures an anemone with sulfur, the poetic persona in D'Aguiar's poem dabs
his/her roses with water and aspirin.
In the second stanza of “A Gift of a Rose,” the narrator is also asked if s/he has done
something wrong in order to receive the blows of the policemen, and answers that s/he “was simply
flashed down and the roses / liberally spread over [his/her] face and body to epithets / sworn by the
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police in praise of [his/her] black skin and mother” (11). The statement is of course euphemistic in
its use of litotes, with “roses” standing for bruises, “epithets” for curses and “praise” for insult, and
it contributes to the ironic tone of the poem. One also learns in the sentence the reason why the
narrator was assaulted by the police: s/he is black and the police officers' misguided action was
conditioned by racism. But the roses that spring from that beating appear, as tropes, to be evocative
of more than love in the context of British Subjects. For instance, the collection contains many
poems evoking the experience, for a man of African descent, to live in a country such as England,
which is often symbolized by the Tudor rose. In this sense, the flowers that blossom on the
narrator's body may well be Tudor roses laying their imprint on black skin to constitute a
tropological reminder of the history of British imperialism in tropical regions such as Africa, which
is itself related to other historical facts such as slavery and the triangular trade, the legacy of which
D'Aguiar defines, again, as racism (D'Aguiar 2000, 150). Then, in the same way as fascism can be
pictured as colonialism brought home to Western countries, the officers' racist use of force
corresponds to a colonial mistreatment, or violation, of the integrity of a black man's body that is
perpetrated in Britain because of the attackers' physical claim to hegemony as white British subjects
over a black body-as-commodity-or-colonial-territory. Thus, it is actually images of racist violence
as a feature of white-supremacist attitudes that the poet turns to tropes of interracial love in this
context, and such a poetic gesture amounts to a refusal to acknowledge the brute force of racist hate.
It also makes sense in this perspective to know that roses in the poem stand for welts, and that
“welt” means “world” in German. Conversely, “Gift,” a present, comes from the German “gift,” for
poison, so that “A Gift of a Rose” is translatable as “A Poison of a World” with poison being, in the
context of the poem, racism.62 But if “A Poison of a World” becomes “A Gift of a Rose,” it turns,
like the poem, the poison of racism into interracial love as its antidote. D'Aguiar might not be that
62 “Gift (n.): mid-13c. "that which is given" (c. 1100 in surnames), from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse gift,
gipt "gift; good luck," from Proto-Germanic *giftiz (source also of Old Saxon gift, Old Frisian jefte, Middle Dutch
ghifte "gift," German Mitgift "dowry"), from PIE root *ghabh- "to give or receive" (see habit). For German gift,
Dutch, Danish, Swedish gift "poison," see poison (n.).” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?
allowed_in_frame=0&search=gift (June 6th, 2016). Also see Derrida 1972, 162-5, note 51.
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familiar with German, but the etymology of the words he uses support the ambivalence of the gift
which, as the saying indicates, can always be a poisoned present.63
Although the narrator does not respond to the blows of the policemen with physical
violence, s/he is tempted to do so, and s/he even “fanc[ies s/he has] a bouquet of [his/her] own for
them” (11). The narrator's relatives also advise him/her to take pictures of the bruises and to sue the
police: “that the policemen should be made a return gift / crossed several minds – a rose for a rose”
(11). The flower metaphor is extended in that stanza, and enriches its meaning. “A rose for a rose,”
as an expression, brings an additional, Biblical cultural reference to mind: “eye for eye, tooth for
tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise” (Exodus
21:24, my italics). The same kind of statement can be found in Leviticus 24:20 and in Deuteronomy
19:21 as an apparently figurative command uttered by God which, if understood literally, could
equate justice with revenge. But the narrator does not seem to be willing to retaliate, be it through
violence or by informing judicial institutions, because s/he does not want to be a “statistic,” which
suggests that cases of racial violence are, unfortunately, frequent. As a consequence, what the “eye
for eye” reference designates is not a desire to retaliate, but an additional metaphor: if one of the
narrator's bruises is a “black eye,” the rose/bruise is superimposed to the eye's iris, “iris” also being
the name of a flower. Another floral metaphor thus appears, and indicates that the implicit violence
that is sensed in an “eye for an eye” can be made into a trope of love again, with an “iris for an iris,”
standing for a “generous” exchange of flowers. Therefore, D'Aguiar invites the reader to notice that
the “eye for an eye” Biblical passage could be read as an implicit and flowery simile that may be
interpreted as “A Gift of a Rose” or iris that one offers as a means to exceed racial prejudice.
Thus, the poetic persona does not retaliate, because it would amount to the production of a
mirror image of inter-ethnic opposition, of a racist binarism. As a consequence, the Tudor roses that
colonize a black man's body no longer represent white-supremacist violence at the end of the poem,
63 According to the series of poems entitled “GDR (for Wolfgang Binder)” in British Subjects, in which some poems
are titled “Erlangen,” or “Essen,” D'Aguiar apparently has, at least, some rudiments of German (D'Aguiar 1993, 54).
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but become a metaphor of the possibility for inter-ethnic encounters, in spite of their brutal origins,
to be guided by love rather than hate in a way that would be generative of poetic tropicality rather
than violent racialism. “A Gift of a Rose,” is also important in that its use of a floral trope to
translate instances of violence is reworked by D'Aguiar in Continental Shelf, in relation to the
Virginia Tech. shooting again, and in a way that points to a mediating part played by Bloodlines in
this revisionary process.64
b. Boxing in the Name of Faith
In Bloodlines, D'Aguiar also turns an image of hate into a trope of love, albeit without using
the flower metaphor. When Christy and Faith are captured by six men while they are trying to flee
up North to the Free States via the Underground Railroad and, before they are sold separately, the
six men take turns and rape Faith while Christy is forced to watch. In a desperate attempt to take
revenge, and with no more fear of death, Christy, before being indentured as a boxer and sent away
from Faith forever, challenges the six men to take turns and fight with him. Christy then manages to
beat the six men in a row. During the fights, the blows the men exchange are described, and some of
them are represented as follows: “The man's punches became kisses sprayed / over Christy's body
literally” (D'Aguiar 2000, 69). Kisses “literally” become a metaphorical vehicle for punches, which
are thus designated in terms of love, in the same way as bruises became flowers in “A Gift of a
Rose” (D'Aguiar 1993, 11).
Later in the text, Christy's vision of boxing is discussed through the lens of love again: “In
his fights he must be Faith's champion,” and “bec[o]me one trembling nerve pressed into love's
service” (78). The violence of Christy's blows are made to convey his love for Faith, and draw
attention to the the potential metaphorical meanings of the lovers' Biblical names, which suggest
64 Although D'Aguiar's prose corpus does not constitute the subject of this part of the present thesis, it must be noted
that the metaphorical designation of wounds as flowers is recurrently used in D'Aguiar's fifth novel, Bethany
Bettany, whose eponymous protagonist gets repetitively beaten by her relative, for reasons described and studied in
Chapter V below (D'Aguiar 2003; 2, 46, 172, 288).
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that “Christ” is fighting for a beloved “Faith” he “has lost” because of the intrinsic racism of
slavery, which lets one see, again, that like D'Aguiar's Pyramus and Thisbe, “Christ” and “Faith” are
just as complementary as black and white.
c. Floral Bullets
It is yet another image from Bloodlines that re-turns in the twelth part of “Elegies,” in
Continental Shelf, where D'Aguiar actually dedicates three sections – or poems – to a poetic
persona's dreaming of the Virginia Tech massacre who sees the murderer as a man distributing
flowers as gifts to every student s/he meets (91-2). In the first section, the poetic persona describes
his/her dream: “In my dream I see a man who hands / Out flowers to everyone he meets. / People
accept his roses [...]” (91). The dream image persists when s/he wakes up and hears that “all the
talk's about / How a man thrusts flowers at everyone, / And before they thanked him he moved on”
(91). The dream is a pretext to turn the bullets sent by the killer to roses. This image is reminiscent
of the late 1960's, when students put flowers – as a metaphor for peace – in soldiers' rifles to protest
against the war in Vietnam. It is also very apt in that the roses evoke the “blossoming” (92) blood
stains on the bodies of victims, and connect intratextually the poem to “A Gift of a Rose” (D'Aguiar
1993, 11). D'Aguiar is thus rewriting in Continental Shelf what he first created in British Subjects,
that is, the translation of an instance of violence into a metaphor of love and generosity.
However, D'Aguiar does not keep this metaphor as such: he extends it in the second section
of the twelth part of “Elegies,” in a way that prevents it from being a mere copy of the metaphor
encountered in British Subjects (11). He does so by making the murderer stand for a bouquet of
flowers, of which the pollen represents the multitude of bullets he fired:
Here comes a bouquet in the form of a man
All that pollen makes him a magnet for bees,
They trail this ambulant garden campus
Wide as its stocks deplete and spreads
Joy for free, if someone says no to a flower
It's because this simply too kind act
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Must come with a price tag, just as a bee
Swings with a sting in its tail, so a rose
Recalls a funeral parlour papered with petals […] (91).
“A bouquet in the form of a man,” not “a man in the form of a bouquet,” since the poet is not
describing or exposing how he built his metaphor, but starts from a dream image that is a metaphor
for the reality the poetic persona is to progressively wake up to. This reality is the other side of the
metaphor, the counterpart of the vehicle, the tenor. The price of the pollen is the death of its
receivers, the thorn hidden beneath the petal of a rose, and the sting at the bottom of a bee, which is
described in a highly rhythmical line – four dactylic beats (Attridge 143) that provide a swift ternary
rhythm – which also contains an internal rhyme, relating “Swings” and “sting” together, that sends
readers back to Bloodlines, where Tom thinks about Stella, his “honey bee,” in the following terms:
as bees get on with business and sing
despite the poison in their tail that's a crutch
and a weapon, since it kills them if they sting:
for love to survive in this woman this long,
she must have laboured all her life with a song. (D'Aguiar 2000, 89)
As seen above in “A Gift of a Rose,” a gift can designate both a present and a poison, and Stella's
soothing musical gift is an antidote to the hate and violence that racism could generate in her as a
runaway slave, hate and violence being lethal poisons for the love and kindness she tries to
preserve, by singing, as some of her characteristics. Stella's inner struggle between love and hate is
then compared, in a simile, to the necessity for bees not to sting, or use violence, if they want to
sing on, that is, to keep on living.65 It is this bee simile that D'Aguiar reworks in the above-cited
passage from “Elegies,” where the murderer's pollen-like multitude of bullets is a gift for “bees,”
that is, busy – or bee-sy – students, in that pollen is the sustenance of bees as much as it can entail,
as bullets, their death as hard-working students, who are therefore suspicious of the “bouquet's”
pollen gift, in that it might not be an actual present since a retribution could be asked from them, in
the same way as a bee's use of its poisonous sting entails the withdrawal of its ability to “swing,”
which creates another musical metaphor that is reminiscent of Stella's songs as much as of a
65 For a different reading of this passage, see the discussion of Bloodlines in Chapter IV.
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flowery trope where a gift of a rose evokes “a funeral parlour papered with petals” (D'Aguiar 2009
91) or a bruise (D'Aguiar 1993, 11). The description of a funeral parlor also points to the fact that
flowers are not only used as presents but as signs of mourning, and red roses and irises, on top of
red carnations and chrysanthemums, actually are traditional mourning flowers. Fred D'Aguiar thus
develops and enriches his imagery in “Elegies” by effecting a revision of tropes from “A Gift of a
Rose,” that is mediated by Bloodlines' comparison of Stella to a bee.
The third section of the part of “Elegies” that is being studied also calls up different floral
elements and meanings in its conveying a sense of regret on the part of the poetic persona, a wish to
go back in time to prevent the deaths of students, and thus to avoid a sense of guilt for not having
been able to save people, a guilt which the poetic persona seems to experience:
Before the stems of roses switch to gun barrels
Aimed at everyone in sight and blossoms red
When grounded in flesh, before police tape
Fences lots he devastated, let me keep
Hold of my student late with her
Assignment, […]
[…] in a marathon conversation
Neither of us ends for no reason we can name,
Other than the fact that outside a man wishes
To take her life that she's not ready to relinquish. (D'Aguiar 2009, 92)
It is already interesting to see that although the poetic persona is afraid that s/he will come out of
his/her almost pleasant dream-made metaphor when s/he wakes up, the metaphor returns in reality
to describe the bullet which “blossoms red / When grounded in flesh.” The dream was itself a
metaphorical return in memory to the massacre, and getting out of the dream brings the poet back to
the reality of the days following the Virginia Tech murders, but this reality is itself described in
metaphorical terms that were coined by the dream. It therefore seems to be implied that an
unconscious mediation of dreams occurs in the building of metaphorical returns66 which themselves
serve the revisionary and intratextual purpose that leads D'Aguiar to use tropes from “A Gift of a
66 This problematic of the “re-turn” is addressed in chapters II and III, in relation to other poems and additional
themes.
93
Rose” again (D'Aguiar 1993, 11).
Thus, a vast and expanding tropical network operates through Fred D'Aguiar's works. It is
enlarged and enriched thanks to the revision of a cross-tropical body of literary intertexts by
Walcott, Brathwaite, Ellison, Reed, Wheatley, Behn, Yeats, Keats, and Ovid, but also through the
author's reworking texts from a majority of his own works. D'Aguiar's ways of reinscribing bits and
pieces of this corpus into his works conjures up philosophical connections in turn between the texts
and related thinkers such as Du Bois, Saussure, Derrida, Glissant and Levinas. It has also been
shown so far that, because of the perpetual revision by the author of other canonical texts and of his
own writings, a deeper understanding of D'Aguiar is obtained when one looks through each of the
author's sentences as if they were palimpsests resulting from all the works he wrote before, rather
than when the attempt is made to study one text as a hermetic and independent unit. Moreover,
reading Fred D'Aguiar's poetry leads one to understand, again, that in order to notice specific
instances of tropicality, a certain knowledge of the history of interracial and cross-tropical cultural
relations is required. It is necessary to see that tropes can only exist as tropicalities by being
reminiscent of cross-tropical historical facts such as slavery, colonization, the triangular trade and
the Middle Passage, because as such, the mnemonic nature of tropes is, by the same token, brought
to the fore, as the following chapters demonstrate. For it is in fact historical memory that allows
D'Aguiar to open Feeding the Ghosts with such a sentence as “The sea is slavery” (3): such an
infusion of history into oceanic metaphoricity actually is, ia majot feature of D'Aguiar's work, and
its cross-tropical implications now requires sounding, that is, a critical dive into D'Aguiar's sea riff
as yet another tide of tropes.
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Chapter II: (An)amnesic Waters
The interdiction [to access language] is not negative, it does not simply give way to loss.
Nor to the perdition of the amnesia it organizes from the depths, in the nights of the abyss. It
rolls, unrolls like a wave that takes away everything, from beaches I know too much. This
[Mediterranean] sea carries everything, and on both sides, it turns upon itself, it takes away,
and prospers from, everything, it takes over, with, and away, and still swells from what it
tears away. The hardheadedness of a headless capital (Derrida 1996, 58, my translation).
My sea riff comes from Walcott who said in a poem, “The sea is history” and from Kamau
Brathwaite's “tidalectics” notion of island poetics, that says the sea works on the body of
islanders like a dialectics (as in Marx), except that the sea rhythms (tides) influence thought
and movement and shape creativity and political activity (D'Aguiar).67
As said above, tropicality, as a metaphor, as “carrying across, over,” indicates the
impossibility for tropes to belong in the tropics only (unless the “tropics” constitute the place of
losing one's place), in the same way as it is impossible for the tropics to be other than cross-tropical
tropes. To this extent, tropicality may thus designate transnational, and hence cross-cultural
metaphoricity. As such, it helps Fred D'Aguiar, in his tropical (re)visions of Roman mythology at
least, to undermine racism as a belief in yet another myth according to which ethnic and cultural
purity – if such a thing ever existed – can be preserved. 68 In this sense, his insistence upon interethnicity in Roman mythology arguably foregrounds inter-ethnicity as that mythology's
decomposable origin, and therefore, retrospectively, insists on inter-ethnicity as something that
would have already been there but which would have, in Roman mythology, been made to have
become unapparent. However, and as Derrida suggests when he draws from a reading of Anatole
France's The Garden of Epicurus in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” it is
such a supposedly Western mythology (which also creates a mythological West) that gave way to
so-called Western metaphysical discourses 69 as discourses that have, to some extent, appropriated
the language of myths by metaphorizing it catachrestically, that is, by withdrawing from its body of
67 Private correspondence with the author.
68 As soon as origin is decomposable into supplementary elements, it becomes secondary, and purity no longer exists,
except as a myth, or as the purity of an impurity (Derrida 1996, 78-9; 1967, 98; Glissant 1990, 169).
69 “Discourses,” because Western metaphysics does not constitute a unified and homogenous discourse, as Derrida has
repeatedly explained, showing that there is not “one” metaphysics (Derrida 1978, 57; 1996, 131,133).
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signs the mythological objects its signifiers were usually meant to designate, thus altering their
signification. It is in this perspective that a white mythology is “metaphysics which has erased in
itself that fabulous scene which brought it into being, and which yet remains, active and stirring,
inscribed in white ink, an invisible drawing covered over in the palimpsest” (Derrida 1971, 11).
Conversely, Western metaphysics is whitewashed Western mythology, an inextricably metaphorical
discourse the original tenors of which have been erased while remaining tractable, in other words:
“A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own
mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos – that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the
universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason. It is not easy to get
away with this” (11). According to Derrida, then, since Western metaphysical discourses derive
from the language/logos of Western myths, these discourses are implicitly built on the assumption
that these myths are the appropriate ground for the linguistic construction of philosophical truth as a
homogenous and totalizing force that is designated as “Reason,” a word that sends back to the age
of Enlightenment as deriving from the Renaissance, a period related to the rediscovery of
“Classical” texts at the origin of Western metaphysics, and originating in “Indo-European
mythology,” Indo-Europeanness being, arguably, another hypothetical common cultural ancestor to
Asia and Europe, another myth. Hence, Western metaphysics would also be intrinsically eurocentric, albeit, maybe, unwittingly so. This is precisely what happens, again, as described above,
with Robert Young's conceptualization of hybridity. Despite his being a serious reader of Derrida's
“White Mythology,” which he has studied through a “postcolonial” lens in a book entitled White
Mythologies, Young falls prey to metaphysical Indo-Euro-centrism, insofar as he uses the word in
Homi K. Bhabha's sense as a signifier deprived of one of its original significations, that is, as a
designation of a cultural portmanteau rather than as a porcine mongrel, in order to deal with the
cross-cultural in raï music, again, without concern for the potentially offensive impact of the term
on allegedly Muslim people if its classical meaning, its “mythos,” is restored, which is always a
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promise and/or a threat of metasphysical language, as Derrida explains in passages from “The
Retrait of Metaphor,” which are studied below.
Nevertheless, Young's discussion of the work of Derrida in yet another book, namely,
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, is of interest in the present perspective, because it
relates Derrida to the cross-cultural by identifying him as a “postcolonial” subject. In fact, Derrida
was an Algerian who, like Hélène Cixous,
came from the so-called indigenous Jewish community originally expelled with the Moors from
Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in the fifteenth century, their confiscated wealth then used to finance
Columbus's expedition to the new world (Laloum and Allouche 1992; Wood 1998). Strange thought:
without the Derridas and Cixous's of this world, no “Latin” America. (Young 2001, 414)
Derrida's descent is related to a history of cross-cultural displacements from Jewish Spain to Algeria
which themselves had a link with the cross-tropical expedition Columbus made to America. But the
exile of Derrida's ancestors to Algeria is not only linked to the colonization of America: it
conditions Jacques Derrida's being an Algerian in the 20th century, which means being successively
a “colonial” and a “postcolonial” subject of France, to and from which he traveled for his education
and work (422). He, like many Algerian Jews at the time, also temporarily lost his French
citizenship – and his access to education in a French school – under Pétain's government during the
German occupation of metropolitan France (Derrida 1996, 36). In such international historical
circumstances, it was probably no wonder for Derrida to write, in Monolingualism of the Other
(1996), that
The phenomena which interest [him] are precisely those that blur the boundaries, cross them, and
make their historical artifice appear, also their violence, meaning the relations of force that are
concentrated there and actually capitalize themselves there interminably. Those who are sensitive to
all the stakes of 'creolization' . . . assess this better than others. (qtd. in Young 2001, 417)
Derrida mentions Glissant's notion of “creolization,” borrowed from Chamoiseau's “creoleness,” in
a finalized text the original, spoken version of which was delivered on the occasion of a 1992
colloquium organized by Glissant himself – and David Wills, to whom Monolingualism of the
Other is dedicated (Derrida 1996, 10). It is not fortuitous, then, that just as Glissant claimed, in
Poetics of Relation, that there is no indivisible “prime element of culture” (1990, 169), Derrida
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explains, one page before the passage cited above, that one never speaks just one idiom, because
there is no pure idiom (Derrida 1996, 23), language, or dialect, and language, dialect, and idiom
precisely are some of the phenomena the boundaries of which Derrida believes not to be clear-cut,
but blurred (Derrida 1996, 23; Young 2001, 417).70 Hence, for Derrida, language, as a medium of
cultural expression, is always already “creolized,” or cross-cultural. This is precisely what he means
in “White Mythology,” by reminding readers that metaphysics is a body of euro-centric discourses
insofar as it has erased – and partly forgotten – the actual, Indo-European myths that constitute its
hypothetical cross-cultural source as a language. By retracing the original tenors of metaphysical
vehicles, Derrida turns amnesia in metaphysical discourses to metaphorical anamnesis:
Philosophical discourse – as such – describes a metaphor which is displaced and reabsorbed between
two suns. This end of metaphor is not understood as a death or dislocation, but as an interiorizing
anamnesis (Erinnerung), a recollection of meaning, a sublation of living metaphoricality into a living
property. The philosopher yearns – and it is a yearning that cannot be repressed – to sum
up/sublate/interiorize/dialecticize/command the metaphorical divergence between the origin and
itself, which is the difference of the East. […] At least, such is the philosophical proposition
contained in theses statements with their geographical tropes and historical rhetoric (Derrida 1971,
72).
Metaphysical amnesia, or the erasure of the original tenors of metaphysical metaphors, once
noticed, anamnesically leads back to an “origin” – the hypothetical Indo-European relation between
East and West – which is cross-cultural, and decomposable. This retrieval of the “impure” and
metaphorical origin of metaphysics corresponds to what has been described, in this thesis'
introduction and first chapter, as the “historical consciousness” that is necessary for one to identify
a trope as tropicality. The catachrestic withdrawal of “origin” in metaphysical discourse leads back
to “origin” as cross-cultural metaphoricity (that is, a decomposable origin) or what we have thus far
been calling tropicality, which might implicitly transpire through Derrida's mention of
“geographical tropes and historical rhetoric” (1971, 72). This anamnesic retrieval of an always
already cross-cultural past is precisely what Fred D'Aguiar's inter-ethnic (re)visions of Roman
mythology do: it is their interest, in the same way as the knowledge of the “wear and tear” (usure)
70 Derrida was indeed well aware of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, which he openly mentions in
Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida 1996, 39).
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of the original signified of metaphysical discourse gives it a “surplus value” in a linguistic usury
(usure) of sorts (Derrida 1971, 7). This economy, or “return of investment,” is the problematic of
Derrida's “The Retrait of Metaphor” (1978), which itself is a return, a “note,” on “White
Mythology” (1978, 53), where he often uses the word “tropical” instead of “metaphorical” (70) in a
way that has led, again, to this thesis' definition of tropicality, and where a maritime metaphor
serves as a means to explain such economy:
The so-called metaphysical discourse can be exceeded, insofar [Derrida's italics] as it corresponds to
a withdrawal of Being, only according to a withdrawal of metaphor insofar [Derrida's italics] as it is
a metaphysical concept, thus according to a withdrawal of metaphysics, a withdrawal of the
withdrawal of Being. But because this withdrawal of the metaphoric does not free up the place for a
discourse of the proper or the literal [littéral] , it will at the same time have the sense of a re-folding,
of what retreats like a wave on the shoreline [littoral, my italics], and of a re-turn, the overloading
repetition of a supplementary trait, of yet another metaphor, a re-tracing [Derrida's italics] of
metaphor, a discourse whose rhetorical border is no longer determinable according to a simple and
indivisible line, a linear and non-decomposable trait (1978,66).
The twofold movement of waves as an instance of what sensibly recedes only to return is very apt
to describe the dialectic of metaphorical retreat,71 the import of which is described, again, in terms
of usure (wear and tear/usury) in “White Mythology,” where it implies an anamnesic restoration of
Indo-European mythology as the decomposable origin of Western metaphysical discourses the
nature of which is inescapably metaphorical, since a “withdrawal of the metaphoric does not free up
a place for a discourse of the proper and the literal” (1978, 66).72 The erasure of the tenors of
metaphysical discourses imply their being retraced, in a way that makes metaphorical amnesia, or
retreat of memory, re-treat/return as tropical anamnesis, or memory. It is the same metaphorical
inescapability that leads Derrida, in “Monolingualism of the Other,” to explain that one can never
71 I use the word “retreat” to translate “retrait” because it seems to be convenient to evoke what the French word can
designate: something that both retreats and re-treats, that treats again when it is withdrawn, although I am aware that
Derrida's problematization of the “trait,” as a “tracing,” a “fold,” later in the same essay, is partly lost in the process.
In Kamuf's English translation of “Le Retrait de la Métaphore,” which I am using here, “retrait” is either kept in
French or translated as “withdrawal.”
72 As the first epigraph to this chapter shows, Derrida correlates usure, anamnesis, and the metaphor of the wave in
Monolingualism of the Other as well (Derrida 1996, 57-8), in order to explain that his experience of French
colonization in Algeria, and in relation to language, involved a twofold linguistic interdiction, that is, the loss of
native and indigenous tongues by way of acculturation, and the absence of full access to the colonizer's language
(French), leaving no room for a language one could believe to be one's own, for an idiom in which to write, for
instance, one's memoirs, and thus threatening one with amnesia, since writing becomes an inaccessible means of
indirect anamnesis, or hypomnesis, in the process (Derrida 1972, 168; 1996, 57). Colonialism is actually soon to
come into focus again in the present discussion.
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master, appropriate a language as one's own, that an absolute metalanguage, a meta-discourse (all
the more so when it deals with metaphor) is impossible, in spite of one's irresistible desire to exert
hegemony over it (Derrida 1996, 44). One is always within the realm of a language that escapes into
otherness as one tries to master it: “inalienable alienation” is a property of language (48). This
(unsatisfiable) desire for linguistic hegemony leads Derrida to explain, in turn, that every culture is
essentially colonial, because this wish to assimilate the otherness of language in order to achieve
linguistic unity corresponds to the colonial or imperial drive of imposing one's culture and language
on the Other in order to achieve “hegemony of homogeneity” (47, 68-70), totalization through the
eradication of difference – which is unattainable. However, Derrida does not intend, by saying this,
“to erase the arrogant specificity or traumatizing brutality of what is called modern and 'properly
speaking' colonial war, at the very moment of military conquest or when symbolic conquest
prolongs war via other paths” (69, my translation). These are indefensible guises of colonialism.
However, such a definition of the linguistic expression of culture as essentially colonial invites one
to risk the hypothesis that since culture is always already colonial, then colonialism cannot be new
to itself or posterior to itself and follow a linear and temporal progression to postcolonialism and/or
neocolonialism. Colonialism is neither new nor relegated to the past, but it has assumed different
forms, such as, roughly speaking, military conquest or conquest by settlement (so-called
“colonialism”), insidious conquest (so-called “neocolonialism”), or colonial re-appropriation after
Western “decolonization” as official political independence (so-called “postcolonialism”), to this
day. Postcolonialism would then be paradoxical as a word, in that there is no “after” colonialism,
but different, and sometimes successive, forms of the same human colonial impulse, and too general
as a signifier, in its usual acceptation as a designation of the form of colonialism that is posterior to
Western colonization after, say, 1492. In fact, the word postcolonialism never conjures up, in the
mind of its users, the idea of Europe, after the demise of the Roman empire, as a body of
postcolonial countries, while there is nothing in that word that prevents such a signification. 73 I am
73 More than that, the word “postcolonial” may not only designate formerly colonized countries, but also the other
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not suggesting that what is generally accepted as a signified of postcolonialism does not exist, but
that this signifier is, if one chooses to follow Derrida's argument, “inappropriate” as such, and
encourages one to be suspicious of the term “postcolonial,” which, from now on, will have to be
used with extreme caution if used at all again in the present study.
Another interesting point about the idea of language as what ventriloquizes us in the same
way as metaphor (Derrida 1978, 50), like a wave that only recedes to return, is that it finds its
counterpart in Edward Kamau Brathwaite's portmanteau notion of “tidalectics,” or tidal dialectics
which, according to Fred D'Aguiar, corresponds to a poetic take on how the political and artistic
activities of islanders are conditioned by tidal movements. 74 Conversely, Elizabeth DeLoughrey
understands tidalectics “as a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows
island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (DeLoughrey 2007a, 3),
as a tide that connects art to a dialectics of time and space, and comes to deconstruct a certain
“white mythology:”
In Brathwaite's definition, this “tidal dialectic” draws upon “the movement of the water backwards
and forwards as a kind of cyclic . . . motion, rather than linear.” As a methodology, this foregrounds
historical trajectories of migrancy and dispersal, and highlights the waves of various emigrant
landfalls to the Caribbean and the process of settlement and sedimentation. This approach is vital to
complicating colonial myths of island isolation because it engages local space in relation to
temporal duration. To engage island tidalectics is to historicize the process by which discourses of
rootedness are naturalized in national soil, and to establish a series of external relationships through
transoceanic routes and flows (DeLoughrey 2007b, 164, my italics).
The Western myth that tidalectics bring to the fore is that of insulation, which was an argument in
support of colonization for such countries as Britain, the limited, insular territory of which was
countries that colonized them until they became officially independent. In this sense, one may insist on the
argument, albeit from a different perspective, that European countries such as France, Great Britain, and Belgium, or
even the very special, and American case of the United States – as a former colony gone imperial (or “neocolonial”)
– are postcolonial countries, to the same extent as countries such as India, Algeria, and Jamaica are. But this
definition does not correspond to the apparent, third-worldist,* received meaning of the term. Furthermore, if such a
definition of postcolonialism fitted the word's received meaning, the subsequent profusion of countries entitled to
the “post” of “postcolonial” would cancel the presumed specificity that “postcolonial” designates, and dilute the
“post” into the totalizing, yet diversified force of the “colonial.” The same argument functions with “neocolonial,”
insofar as the resurgence of the colonial impulse, be it on the side of formerly colonizing countries or on that of
previously colonized states (which, upon independence, try to recapture a once-lost hegemony over a determined
territory), is a generalized yet diversified phenomenon the “newness” of which is always-already relative, or
unoriginal, and hence, never new.
*Robert Young goes so far as to suggest “Tricontinentalism” (Africa, South America, Asia) as an equivalent of
“postcolonialism” (Young 2001, 428).
74 See the second epigraph to the present chapter.
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claimed to call for the acquisition of new land, while the problems of its spatial limitations actually
corresponded to the inner issue of inequitable territorial distribution (DeLoughrey 2007a, 7).
Moreover, colonized islands such as those of the Caribbean archipelago were viewed by the West as
separate and isolated units because of a lack of knowledge about the oceanic routes that related
these islands culturally and economically, and in spite of their being susceptible to (indigenous
and/or colonial) migration and settlement, since the peopling of an island requires the crossing of
water expanses: in DeLoughrey's words, “The myth of the remote isle derives from an amplification
of the nautical technologies of the arrivant and an erasure of islanders' maritime histories” (8-9).
However, and in the same way as Derrida decodes Western metaphysics as white mythology, the
Western myth of island isolation can be identified as such – as a myth – only by retrieving the
historical and cultural facts it has erased to establish itself. Brathwaite's tidalectics retrace these
facts by metaphorically relating islands to overseas parts of the world through the history of what
DeLoughrey describes above, and (inescapably) thanks to tropes, in terms of migrational waves and
sedimentation – not as the superimposition of sediments on island beaches, but as the successive
(coerced or not) arrival of different settler populations there – that turn cultural roots to transoceanic
routes and emphasize the diasporic culture of island populations. In this sense, tidalectics are a
metaphorical designation of the erasure or amnesia that characterizes the myths such as that of the
remote isle which, by the same token, retraces hypomnesically or reminds, as indirect anamnesis,
eroded pasts.75 In other words, tidal dialectics function as a transoceanic, and hence transnational or
even transcontinental development of what Derrida calls metaphorical retreat.
Economy, at least as far as the Atlantic is concerned, is implicit in tidalectics as well, in the
same way as Derrida combines wear and tear and usury to the dialectics of memory and amnesia,
metaphorical retreat, and the movement of waves. Tidalectic “economy” can be perceived in its
most obvious form in relation to the slave trade, where the crossing of the Middle Passage entailed,
75 Following Derrida's terminology in “Plato's Pharmacy,” hypomnesis designates reminiscence, the bringing back to
mind of a memory, or anamnesis (Derrida 1972).
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for Africans, being severed from their motherland and made to forget, in part, their native culture
through acculturation, that is, the forced “acquisition” of a new (European) language and of a new
(Christian) religion.76 It is in this perspective that Glissant, in Poetics of Relation, is lead to describe
the Atlantic abyss as a “tautology: the entire ocean, the entire sea collapsing in the end into the
pleasures of sand, make one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these balls
and chains gone green” (1990, 6). In other words, landing in America is described as an “origin,” as
the farthest moment in the past that the descendants of slaves can reach back to through anamnesis,
yet that “origin” is decomposable as the result of a displacement traces of which remain at the
bottom of the sea in the form of “balls and chains gone green” that hypomnesically remind one that,
prior to slavery, there was “Africa.” In this sense, the transatlantic slave trade is connected to issues
of memory, economy, and tides, and the ocean is turned to a metaphor in which these issues'
dialectic implications operate. Such a transatlantic understanding of tidalectic economy also allows
one to suggest a re-adapted reading of the Derridean epigraph to the present chapter, where
acculturation is compared to (Mediterranean) tidal movements, which are in turn associated with
“the hardheadedness of a headless capital” (1996, 58, my translation): if one reads Derrida's words
with the Atlantic ocean rather than the Mediterranean sea in mind, then the “headless capital” can
be reinterpreted as the profits of slavery. “Headless,” in the citation, becomes equivocal in turn and
may refer both to the unreasonable quality of the economy at play and to the faces of a coin, head
and tail, one of which has been erased, in the same way as, in “White Mythology,” Derrida
describes Western metaphysics as the coin of Western mythology, one face of which has been worn
out, and hence brought to the fore (1971, 6). As far as the slave trade is concerned, this “hardheadedness” or “headlessness” can be interpreted both as “unreasonable” capitalism and as a
transatlantic, Middle-Passage facet of Western colonial economy that has necessarily been erased,
in part at least, to implement the myth of insulation which subsequently also served, paradoxically,
76 As far as slaves were concerned, access to literacy, to written language, was also often forbidden. For a discussion of
the relationships between slavery, literacy, and anamnesis, see Chapter IV.
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as a reason to believe that plantation slavery was very practical on islands, because slaves could
allegedly not escape – a thesis the history of maronnage (slaves escaping to the island's hostile
interior of “forested hills”) strongly contradicts (DeLoughrey 2007a, 8; Glissant 1990, xxii).
Moreover, colonization and transatlantic slavery suggest “the most compelling reason why, in the
late eighteenth century, 'flow' and 'liquidity' suddenly became the 'dominant metaphor[s]' for the
circulation of capital, ideologies, and power” (DeLoughrey2007a, 57). It is in this sense that
tidalectics, as a transatlantic, cross-tropical designation of metaphorical retreat, may serve to
deconstruct tropes of Western colonial economy as another white mythology, and to understand
Walcott's claim that “the sea is history” (Walcott 1986, 364).
And it is precisely such tidalectic deconstruction that Fred D'Aguiar's sea riff, that is, the
body of aquatic tropes that appear throughout his work, does, and coherently so with his insistence
on inter-ethnicity in his revisions of Western myths: the main part of history that is being
(re)considered through his sea riff is that of the experience of peoples of African descent across the
Atlantic, such as that of slaves who crossed the Middle Passage, in relation to that of contemporary
members of the African diaspora traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, such as Fred D'Aguiar
himself, whose life is shared between the United States, Guyana, Britain and Africa. In sum, the
history that D'Aguiar's sea metaphors bring into play is that of a variety of travels across the tropics.
His sea riff therefore implies tropicality, which also springs from the parallelism that exists between
tidalectics and metaphorical retreat as two comparable tropical phenomena that can be crosstropically gathered, and lead to the idea that D'Aguiar's sea riff consists in metaphorical retreats of
“amnesia” into hypomnesic tropes which, being rendered oceanic, are also tidalectical. This chapter
is to try to show how the mnemonic economy of D'Aguiar's tidalectic metaphors serves his purpose
of awakening historical consciousness in his readers, and to subvert potential white mythology:
after representing, in British Subjects again, a revelatory, mythological moment that connects the
sea to history, D'Aguiar has in fact built a sea riff that achieves the hypomnesic purpose of
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transcribing tropes of oblivion into the retrieval, or “re-treat,” of the historical knowledge he is
concerned with, be it by playing with the economy of liquidity, or dealing with the sea as with a
haunted limbo of sorts.
I. Tidal Epiphany
The history D'Aguiar is interested in, then, is that of displacements across the Atlantic as
related to slavery and the Middle Passage experience. It is in an impressive, and myth-like tropical
epiphany that this interest seems to be transcribed the most strikingly, in a British Subjects poem,
where the author stages a poetic persona's realization that these cross-tropical histories have tended
to be forgotten instead of being retrieved and remembered as a foundational cultural and historical
moment in the history of people of African legacy, but also in the history of all the people involved
in these transoceanic movements to the Caribbean and the Americas.
a. Transformational Tropes
Although sea metaphors appear earlier in the work of Fred D'Aguiar, the revelatory moment
that links history and the sea is dramatically described or re-imagined in British Subjects, in a poem
entitled “Dread” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16). This poem being, like “Pyramus to Thisbe” and “Thisbe to
Pyramus,” a part of British Subjects, suggests once again that the collection has had a pivotal role in
the evolution of D'Aguiar's writing. “Dread” is in free verse, made up of five stanzas which vary in
length, just as the lines themselves do, without providing readers with a clear-cut rhyme scheme.
However, the actual import of all these aspects, which involve rhythm and sound, prove to be
crucial as far as the meaning of the poem is concerned, and reveal the poet's intentions.
What first strikes the reader is the varying length of verse paragraphs and lines in “Dread.”
Its first stanza is a quatrain, the second is a quintet, the third is made up of nine lines and the fourth
of ten lines, while the last one shrinks to seven lines. The variation in the length of lines is obvious
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in the first verse paragraph, for instance:
I saw these waves
roping off into strands
that combine to make a fat rope
breaking on mud banks and turning pebbles. (D'Aguiar 1993, 16)
The fact that that the size of verse paragraphs rises up to ten lines and then recedes to seven lines,
on top of the aggrandizement – and shrinking in subsequent stanzas – of lines suggests, from the
onset, that D'Aguiar makes the form of the poem stand for the meaning of its contents. In other
words, the poem appears to imitate the movement, or shape, of waves. A scansion of the third stanza
confirms this idea, but attention must first be paid to the poem's second stanza:
But the strands formed ropes of their own
and before I could name what they were
the ingenius head to which they were plaited
reared up from the tide, widening rings
that marked new heights on the South Bank (16)
This second verse paragraph, like the first stanza, contains significant information. The absence of
capital letters at the beginning of lines, and their presence at the beginning of sentences suggest that
an emphasis is made on the importance of run-on lines, and that in spite of the line-by-line divisions
of verse, one is invited to read the poem rapidly, without pausing at line ends, as if it were prose.
Suspense has the same effect on readers, for the two first stanzas delay information and invite one
to rush through their lines in order to get to know who or what is rising out of the water. The use of
capital letters thus coincides with the type of reading that is incited by suspense, and supports the
idea that the form of the poem reflects what it conveys. The reader also learns in these two stanzas
that the narrator is standing in front of a tidal river, on the Thames' South Bank. As for the word
“rope,” it is repeated thrice, once as a verb and twice as a noun, to describe the waves on the river's
surface in a metaphorical way. The liaisons in these lines reinforce the metaphoricity of the ropes,
with “fat ropes” as “fa-tropes” and with “formed ropes” as “forme-dropes” in its near homophony
with “form tropes.” The form of the poem has in fact a metaphorical significance in that it
represents the waves which are metaphorized in turn as ropes, ropes constituting yet another trope
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that stands for gigantic strands of hair, or plaits, which are linked to the head of the figure who, like
a Neptune, is supernaturally rising out of the water, “mark[ing] new heights on the South Bank”
(16). The fact that the shape of waves on the surface of a tidal river might condition the form of the
poem, on top of the waves' belonging – as hair – to someone, metaphorically appear to indicate that
water is here endowed with, or connected to, a certain form of agency over the narrating observer as
well as over the writer, and it therefore already conjures up the idea that the poem might be
governed by a “tidalectical” approach which “shapes creativity” – as D'Aguiar defines it – and
conditions what happens in the poem.77 The supernatural transformation of water into a person's
features is also reminiscent of the mythological atmosphere of Ovid's Metamorphoses as an
intertext that keeps on transpiring through D'Aguiar's work.
b. Mythical Appearance
This figure rising up from the waves is revealed in the third verse paragraph to be Bob
Marley: the plaits actually are dreadlocks that metaphorize the Brisith river that the Thames is, in
the same way as they color the Western figure of Medusa in Bill of Rights and Continental Shelf
with “Rastafarian” shades, as a tropicality. In D'Aguiar's poem,
/_ x /_ x /_ x x /_
Marley's unmistakable smile
/_
x
x /_ x /_ (x) /_ x x /_
shone through the wash released over his face
/_ x /_ x /_
x /_
x
/_
by the matted locks. He shook them free
x x x /_ x /_ x /_ x /_ x /_ x x /_
and it was like the Crystal Palace Bowl all over again:
/
/_ x x /_
x
x /_ (x) /_ x /
/_ x /_
Bob under the lights, when, between chanting down babylon
x /_ x x /_
x x /_ x x x /_ x
he rattled his dread and in shaking them a tremor
/ /_ x /_ x /_ x /_ x /
/_
ran up and down the city knocking points off
x /_
x /_
x x x /_
the stocks and shares at the Exchange
x /_
x /_ (x) /_ x /_ x
and noughts off some dealers profits. (16)
77 See the epigraph to this chapter.
107
The fact that Marley “rattled” his dread in this stanza is reminiscent, in fact, of the “rattle-snake”
dreadlocks that were found on the heads of D'Aguiar's re-presentations of Medusa, as seen above, in
Bill of Rights (73) and Continental Shelf (86-7). Moreover, such a resemblance also helps to
understand the title of the poem and underscores a – fortuitous or not – translational link that exists
between dread and the myth of Medusa, since, again, being petrified (which itself may be related to
Ovid), or turned to stone, by a temporary feeling of dread and/or stupefaction, can idiomatically be
described in French as “être médusé:” this kind of “dread” is the feeling of the observer as s/he
watches the waves turn to “dreads” in D'Aguiar's poem. The title is therefore a metaphor, and
maybe a tropical one in that fear is either related to the West – through the Medusa figure – or
considered as universal – it can be experienced everywhere by anyone – while dreadlocks connote
Caribbean culture; and if such a hairstyle has now spread worldwide, it constitutes yet another
image of cross-topical inter-cultural exchange, or tropicality.
Mythology, intertextuality and metaphor are thus involved here again, not only because Bob
Marley rises from the water like a Medusa or a Neptune – a tune that is not his, but that flows out of
a pen that is to let him, albeit fictionally, express himself –, like a mythological deity, but also
because other, analogous images can be found in the works of other Caribbean writers such as
Derek Walcott and Edward Brathwaite. For instance, in Omeros, Derek Walcott's revision of the
Iliad, there is a scene describing Homer rising out of the sea:
[…] The old age
of the wrinkled sea was in that moan, and I knew
that the floating head had drifted here. The mirrors
of the sky were clouded, and I heard my own voice
correcting his name, as the surf hissed: “Omeros.”
The moment I named it, the marble head arose,
fringed with its surf curls and beard […]. (Walcott 1990, 280)
The emergence of Homer in Walcott's lines is comparable to that of Marley in D'Aguiar's poem,
published after Omeros, and suggests that “Dread” could consist in a rewriting of that passage from
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Walcott's text, all the more so since Homer's being “fringed with its surf curls” is comparable to
Marley's dreadlocked head shining “through the wash released over his face” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16).
It is interesting to find Walcott being intertextually put in the vicinity of Bob Marley within a poem
written by Fred D'Aguiar, because D'Aguiar actually thinks there is an artistic likeness between
these two persons: in an article where he studies a variety of works by Derek Walcott – including
Omeros, a quote from which forms the title of D'Aguiar's “'In God We Troust:' Derek Walcott and
God” – through the lens of religion, D'Aguiar explains that Bob Marley is “an artist like the poet,
but one who has made it among the populous [...]” (D'Aguiar 2005, 218). D'Aguiar might thus have
tried, in “Dread,” to represent these links that relate, in his opinion, Walcott and Marley. In addition
to Walcott's representation of Homer rising from the sea, “Dread” might find another intertextual
source in Kamau Brathwaite's epilogue to Rights of Passage, the first book in The Arrivants trilogy,
where the Jamaican poet stages a “Negro Noah” (Brathwaite 82), whose specified blackness turns
the religious figure standing on a boat over the sea of the Deluge to a cross-tropical one, in the same
way as D'Aguiar and Walcott can turn Western mythological characters to tropicalities through the
lens of ethnicity.78 Thus, D'Aguiar's representation of Bob Marley in “Dread” may gravitate around
the works of two other Caribbean poets. However, this intertextual circle is not exclusively
Caribbean, but cross-tropical too, since the apparition staged in “Dread” also evokes classic GrecoRoman mythology by conjuring up mental images of Neptune, Walcott's Homer, and Brathwaite's
Noah, and because in American poetess Elizabeth Bishop's “The Wave,” as in D'Aguiar's poem, a
wave is personalized: “See, crystal clear / Its helmet rise!” (Bishop 217).79 While Walcott's and
Brathwaite's texts re-present Western mythological figures as tropicalities through changes of
location or ethnicity, the tropicality of D'Aguiar's poem then resides, on top of its infusion of the
Thames with Rastafarian tropes, in the trajectories of the intertextual exchanges it potentially draws
78 In the initial stanzas of a poem entitled “Calypso,” Brathwaite also creates a myth of origins for the Caribbean
archipelago, in which a stone's ricochets let islands emerge from the sea. I deal with that poem in more detail below.
79 The word crystal is present in “Dread” too, which strengthens the link with Bishop's poem, all the more so since
Fred D'Aguiar mentions Bishop as one of the “guiding lights behing [his] work” (private correspondence with the
author).
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from, relating works by Caribbean, Roman, and North American writers to one another. Finally,
D'Aguiar's metaphorization of the waves as ropes in “Dread” itself has become an object of intratextual revision too, since D'Aguiar actually reverses the trope in the w(e)aving of Feeding the
Ghosts, the main part of which unfolds, as said above, on a slave ship across the Atlantic. In that
novel, when Mintah, the protagonist, imagines what will become of her if she is thrown into the sea,
she pictures, at some point in the process, a current that “sweeps the floor of the sea and
inadvertently combs [her] hair from [her] skull and arranges it in a pattern of waves [...]” (D'Aguiar
1997, 214). The metaphor is reversed in that it is not the waves that turn to plaits, but Mintah's hair
which turns to a “pattern of waves,” when she tries to picture her death at sea, and where the sea
would become a trace of her “passing,” in both its significations of “passage” and “death.”80
As far as plaits and hair are concerned, it is also interesting to note that Marley's shaking his
“wavy” dreadlocks has an impact on British economy in its “knocking points off / the stocks and
shares at the Exchange / and noughts off some dealers profits” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16). Marley's
impact on the City consists in yet another cross-tropical metaphor, in that it evokes the economic
relations that have existed between the West Indies and Britain over a long period of time and
involving the history of colonization and slavery which, through seafaring and the “rigid
disciplining of nautical time and labor,” brought “Europe, Africa, and the Americas into uneven
social and economic relations” through which, again,
the homogenous, empty time of capitalist modernity was constructed. As Connery explains,
'Movable capital is liquid capital.' This suggests the most compelling reason why, in the late
eighteenth century, 'flow' and 'liquidity' suddenly became the 'dominant metaphors' for the
circulation of capital, information, ideologies, and power” (DeLoughrey 2007a, 56-7).
This trope also indicates, Marley's dreadlocks being waves having an effect on the “tidings” of
British economy, and therefore on British people, who are islanders as well, that the hair of a
Jamaican islander produces a tidalectic effect on the island of Britain through “international
waters,” and that tidalectic current works against any conception of island life as insulation/isolation
80 Plait metaphors also play a crucial part in Fred D'Aguiar's Bloodlines, as explained in Chapter IV.
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(DeLoughrey 2007a, 164): rather, and as said above it represents it as tropicality. To recap, it seems
that Fred D'Aguiar relies on the codes of Western mythology in order to stage Bob Marley, a
Jamaican songwriter, “rearing up from the tide” of the archetypical Bristish river that the Thames is.
Such an tidal image consists in a tropicality – a cross-tropical metaphor – that reminds readers of
the historical and economic relationships that have existed between Britain and the Caribbean – the
former owing a significant part of its capital to exploitation of the latter – and lets one identify any
notion of Caribbean insulation as what Derrida would call, as explained above, white mythology.
D'Aguiar's metaphorical representation of Bob Marley returning with waves thus tropicalizes
Western mythology in a tidalectic way that reproduces the anamnesic economy Derrida perceived in
metaphorical retreat and reminds readers of the conditioning, by a cross-tropical historical past, of
Britain's contemporary (economic and cultural) position, in a way that subverts potential white
mythologies.
The tidalectic nature of D'Aguiar's poem may also be confirmed thanks to the rhythm of its
climactic third stanza, as the scansion above shows. In fact, the number of beats per line increases
and decreases in the third verse paragraph. The number of beats per line, according to the order of
these lines, varies as follows: 4, 5, 5, 7, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4. As a consequence, rhythm in the stanza has a
progression that reproduces the patterns of rise and fall, peaks and troughs, of waves, or of the
advance and retreat of their surf on the shoreline, which consolidates the impression that D'Aguiar
has let tidal dialectics “shape [his] creativity.” In this perspective, the stanza, as a wave, would then
rise up to its peak at line four: “and it was like the Crystal Palace Bowl all over again.” This line is
actually the climax of the stanza, if not of the poem, since Bob Marley has, again, made a mythical
appearance which has an economic, tidalectical effect on Britain, and an anamnesic impact on the
poetic persona and readers: while readers are being reminded of the links that have been established
between the Caribbean and Britain through history, Bob Marley's emergence conjures up the
memory, for the poetic persona, of a concert Marley played at the Crystal Palace Bowl, a concert
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hall which, both as a place and as a name, is to prove having a crucial importance in the
implications of “Dread,” in relation to additional historical teachings Marley is to provide his
audience with.
c. History in a Divination Pool
As the poem explains in the climactic fourth line of its third stanza, Bob Marley's return is
reminiscent of his Crystal Palace Bowl concert for several reasons, the most obvious of which
being, as the fourth stanza shows, that Bob Marley is made to re-deliver, in the poem's fourth
stanza, the messages he transmitted through his songs:
He spoke through that smile at me.
'I and I don't need anyone to speak for I.
Though you see dust where there was a tongue
I man still loud and clear on platinum.
Check your history and you will see
throughout it some other body speaking for we;
and when they talk they sounding wise and pure
but when you check it all they spouting is sheer lies.
Look in the river it's a crystal ball;
shout about the pain but don't shut out the bacchanal.' (D'Aguiar 1993, 16)
Marley speaks to the poet in a Jamaican, Caribbean English. The same “I and I” that gives its title to
the prologue and epilogue of Bloodlines is used as a means for the singer to introduce himself in
Rastafarian terms (Frias 682). After stating his pride that his message made it into posterity thanks
to the sound waves preserved on records so famous they have been labeled “platinum” or gold (16),
Marley addresses the poetic persona, as if s/he were part of the same community as his, with the
pronoun “we.” This pronoun, the communal sense it conveys, and its use in a speech with
Caribbean inflections is, of course, also reminiscent of “A Toast” (D'Aguiar 1985, 7), and suggests
that the poetic persona is, like Marley, of anglophone and Caribbean descent. Marley uses this “we”
to draw his addressee to his cause, which sets the resulting community in opposition to another
group, “some other body speaking for we,” that would have abused “we” throughout history. 81
81 The phrase “some other body” is interesting in that it can be understood both as “some other community” – opposed
to Marley's “we” – or as a separation of “somebody,” a person, into “some body,” a physical entity devoid of reason.
These two interpretations can be related in the context of the poem if “body” is understood as an allegory of the
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Marley's “we” has been deprived of power over history because it was written by others, who
certainly are indeterminate agents of Western imperialism, to which the group of anglophone
Caribbean people gathered in the poem's “we” have been subjected, according to the poem's
fictional Marley. In fact, this other community is “speaking for we,” depriving Marley's people of
its voice “throughout history,” so that the “other body” is the only one left to give any version of
events. Such a muting of a community resulting in a single informational voice is dangerous in that
its (historical) accounts, being the only ones to be found, incite following generations to receive
them as facts or truths, while they actually consist in subjective constructs, in what Marley radically
defines as “sheer lies.” If understood as the deformation or dissimulation by a Western community –
that is nevertheless still “sounding wise and pure” – of historical facts involving the poem's “we,”
these “lies” might well consist in a designatation of Western historiography, which the poem's
Marley would then perceive as “white mythology” again, as a metaphysical and metaphorical
discourse that has partly and catachrestically erased from its contents the cross-tropical scene that
allowed for its development, that is, slavery and colonization by the West (Derrida 1971, 11).
However, Bob Marley seems to be claiming, maybe like Derrida, that what was erased or
withdrawn can be retrieved, or even return. But before going further in that direction, it must be
shown that the lexicon that is employed in the stanza really gives the impression that it is Marley
talking. It has already been shown that a Caribbean English is used, and that Rastafarian identity is
transcribed with the doubling of the first-person subject. In addition, expressions from Marley's
songs are actually used. For instance, the falsely “wise and pure” speech of others echoes the
“Three Little Birds” who sing “sweet songs / of melodies pure and true” on Marley's doorstep
(Marley 1984, 4), and his saying “check your history” in “Dread” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16) can be
likened to lines from “Rat Race,” where Marley sings: “Don't forget your history” (Marley 1978, 5).
“Buffalo Soldier” insists on the importance of knowing one's history too:
community concerned: a group of potentially unreasonable people who are ready to lie about the history of others
for empowerment. I am indebted to Fiona McCann's insight for this tentative interpretation.
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If you knew your history
Then you would know where you're coming from
Then you wouldn't have to ask me
Who the heck do I think I am
I'm just a Buffalo soldier
In the heart of America
Stolen from Africa
Brought to America (Marley 1984, 5)
Fred D'Aguiar makes Marley speak by reformulating or revising lines from his songs. Moreover, in
“Buffalo Soldier,” the sea is involved as well, in an implicit way, since a crossing of the Atlantic is
implied in the history Marley (and most Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean communities) spring
from, since his maternal ancestors – his father was of British descent (MacDonald 2012) – were
“Stolen from Africa” and “Brought to America,” certainly as slaves. Bob Marley defines himself as
a “Buffalo Soldier” (my italics) in the song, while D'Aguiar, in the last verse paragraph of “Dread,”
depicts Marley getting back into the river dancing the “dance of the warrior” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16,
my italics). Finally, D'Aguiar also transcribes Bob Marley's inviting people to acquire a certain
knowledge of their history. This invitation seems to be of great importance for Caribbean artists
since, like D'Aguiar, Walcott uses it too in Omeros, where Achille – spelled without an “s” in
Walcott's novel – sings “'Buffalo soldier.' Thud. 'Heart of America',” until he sees himself as the
song's soldier (Walcott 1990, 161). Marley's posthumous impact appears to reside partly in his
spreading this injunction to know one's history, and in the self-consciousness it tried and managed
to raise for many people.
The sense of the necessity for one to remember one's history springs from the idea that
oblivion allows other people to control historical records and to make them lie and/or erase them, in
part at least. As a consequence, and in the imperative mode, Bob Marley tells the poetic persona that
in order not to be left with a partial – incomplete and/or biased – knowledge of history, s/he should
do as follows: “Look in the river it's a crystal ball / Shout about the pain but don't shut out the
bacchanal” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16). The fact that these two lines constitute the poem's only rhyming
couplet seems to emphasize their importance, and the description of water as a “Crystal ball”
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actually does turn out to be crucial, because it is sonically linked to a name in the fourth, climactic
line of the poem's third stanza, which says, again: “and it was like the Crystal Bowl all over again”
(16, my italics). Moreover, pictures of the concert actually show, in “full technicolor” (D'Aguiar
1993, 30), what the poetic persona must be remembering, that is, that the Crystal Palace Bowl stage
stands in front of a pond. In other words, when Marley played there, he was standing before a pool,
and pictures of the concert could almost give the impression that Marley was standing over water.82
As a consequence, it can be inferred that the venue is what conditioned the poet's idea of Marley's
“rear[ing] up from the tide,” and Marley's message on transatlantic historical knowledge, on top of
the concert hall's name, conjured up the sense that water is a “crystal ball,” a lens through which
one can gain access to a people's history. In fact, the sound of “Crystal Bowl” conjuring up the idea
of a “crystal ball” might constitute an explanation to the paradoxical use of a “crystal ball” as a
means to gain access to an allegedly unadulterated, “crystal clear” perception of the past in the
poem, while a crystal ball – or a divination pool for that matter, since water is at stake – is usually
used for clairvoyance, for seeing the future. Another way of seeing through the “surface” of this
apparent paradox would consist in reading it as an evocation of what Glissant called a prophetic
vision of the past:
The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however,
obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore this obsession, to show its relevance in a
continuous fashion to the immediate present. This exploration is therefore related neither to a
schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of
time and its full projection forward in the future, without the help of those plateaus in time from
which the West has benefited, without the help of that collective density that is the primary value of
an ancestral heartland. That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past. (1989, 63-4)
Expressing himself, like Marley in “Dread,” through a communal, Afro-Caribbean “we,” Glissant
alludes to the Middle-Passage experience as an anamnesic abyss by explaining that it is the cause of
the African diaspora, which prevents its members from enjoying the “collective density” of an
“ancestral heartland,” that is, Africa, and from having at their disposal an unbroken, chronological,
and linear historiography – a thing “from which the West has benefited.” However, knowing about
82 http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/crystal%20place-1980.html (April 4th 2012)
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the history of the Middle Passage, and writing poetically about its present day “relevance” to
descendants of the African diaspora may, according to Glissant, help them to follow the thrust of
time into a desirable future by perceiving the route, hidden below the surface of Atlantic waters, to
their African roots, but also to the decomposable, inter-ethnic origins of Western modernity – in
other words, colonization and the slave trade (Gilroy 15) –, which allows for a cross-tropical
historical consciousness and for the dismissal of euro-centric constructions of modern Western
history as white mythologies. Such a prophetic vision of the past might then be what transpires, in
Fred D'Aguiar's “Dread,” through the injunctions uttered by a fictional, Neptune-like Marley, to
look into historical water expanses as crystal balls of sorts.83
Thus, the simultaneous presence of Bob Marley and water at the Crystal Palace Bowl has
conditioned the creation of “Dread:” the mythical apparition is a trope for Marley standing in front
of a pond, and the “crystal ball” was derived from both Marley's message of historical selfconsciousness and the name of the venue where he played. Water is endowed with metaphorical and
anamnesic power as it shapes the poem, where its economic effect on Britain when Marley appears
through the waves progressively turns to a metaphorical gateway to cross-tropical history, leading
back, for instance, to the Middle Passage experience, through Marley's equivocal speech. In other
words, it is a Marley concert that serves as an apt pre-text to the creation of D'Aguiar's first fully
tidalectical poem, in which he stages the notion that the retrieval of the transatlantic and crosstropical “scene which brought [Western modernity] into being” (Derrida 1971, 11) can be retrieved,
although such retrieval brings back painful memories: “shout about the pain but don't shut out the
bacchanal” of poetry and song. The same kind of historical perception is given to another poetic
persona in D'Aguiar's “At the Grave of the Unknown African” (D'Aguiar 1993, 21), where a dead
slave tells the poet that forgotten slaves who were carried across the sea must be written into
posterity: “bring back the water canon,” the canonical, historical text that could remind people of
83 For a discussion of “prophetic visions of the past” in relation to Bakhtin's notion of “hitorical inversions” in Fred
D'Aguiar's novels, see in Chapter V below.
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the Middle Passage, the bottom of which is marked by canon-balls and “balls and chains gone
green” (Glissant 1990, 6) that retrace a triangular-trade route the victims of which are not to be
forgotten, in relation to the present. It is thus suggested, again, and as in the rest of Fred D'Aguiar's
sea riff, as is to be seen below, that lost accounts of the cross-tropical, Middle Passage experience
may be read metaphorically in water expanses as divination pools of sorts.84
But before discussing the rest of Fred D'Aguiar's sea riff, the mention of Bob Marley in
“Dread” calls for a short musical detour, because Bob Marley is far from being the only tropical
musician to be referred to in the works of Fred D'Aguiar. For instance, in British Subjects, direct
references to bluesmen B. B. King and Muddy Waters (33) and to Motown music (31) are made, on
top of Bob Marley. Some poem titles also borrow from the lexical field of music in the same
collection, with words like “song” (29) and “ballad” (10), although the term ballad, more than just a
type of song, has become a loaded term in the field of poetry, probably since romanticism. Bill of
Rights enlarges this network of musical references with a great number of artists such as Bob
Marley again (38, 51, 75, 77), Salif Keita (89), Cassandra Wilson (16), Burning Spear (77), Tapper
Zukie (77, 127), Linton Kwesi Johnson (119), James Brown (42), Nina Simone (90), Michael
Jackson (92), Ray Charles (115), Parliament Funkadelic or P-Funk (105), Brian Eno (35), George
Gershwin (28), and Bob Dylan (24, 103). Gospel is also mentioned (62). Bloodlines contains less
explicit musical references: the lines “mountain-high, pollinated and river-thick / valley deep, our
fuel and oil-slick” (9) might echo Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel's “Ain't no mountain high
enough/ Ain't no valley low enough / Ain't no river wide enough […],” and one of the novel's main
84 “At the grave of the Unknown African” (D'Aguiar 1993, 21-3) is important for various reasons, one of them being
that it deals with the history of slavery and of the Middle Passage, in that the poem consists in a dialogue between a
poetic persona and a nameless dead slave, at the slave's grave. Moreover, the poetic persona explains that s/he “got
here via White Ladies Road and Black Boy's Hill” (21), which is fascinating in the context of that poem, because
Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill both are actual places in Bristol, in the vicinity of which the slave's grave can
be visited. Whiteladies road was named after a house called Whiteladies, while Blackboy Hill, the upper part of that
road, was called so because of a coaching inn, the Blackboy Inn, that was located in the area ( http://www.aboutbristol.co.uk/clf-11.asp (20/03/2012)). As with the Crystal Bowl, it is again in a real place that D'Aguiar found a
ready-made metaphor for the slave grave he talks about: what leads to the grave of a slave is a cross-cultural and
cross-tropical displacement and encounter of black and white people on different “routes.” The black and white hill
and road of the poem make these encounters and displacements into a cross-tropical metaphor for the historical
events that conditioned, among other things (such as colonization), the advent of slavery.
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characters, Stella, also sings “field ditties” evoking work songs, the gospel genre and the blues,
while her name and her abilities as a singer, on top of her saving her lover Tom one night, is
reminiscent of Tom Young's jazz standard “Stella by Starlight.” Continental Shelf is also pregnant
with a vast array of musical allusions to James Brown (67, 101); George Clinton and Parliament
Funkadelic (106), Bob Marley (17), Tapper Zukkie (106) and calypso music (8). Calypso music is
present in The Rose of Toulouse (48) too, the first poem of which describes the sun as a “great ball
of fire,” reminding readers of Jerry Lee Lewis' rock and roll hit “Great Balls of Fire” (9). A majority
of the above-mentioned artists are “black” – a term that is very porous here as far as, picking from
this list, Michael Jackson85 is concerned –, but all of the musics that are referred to, regardless of the
color of the artists' skins, are tropical, in that their existence depends upon past inter-ethnic and
cross-tropical cultural encounters. Such a network of references might then metaphorically serve
again to show the importance of cultural diversity in the making of Fred D'Aguiar's body of work.
In other words, such a network may function as an additional tropical trait of Fred D'Aguiar's
poetry. It is also clear that Bob Marley is the most frequently mentioned artist in D'Aguiar's works,
maybe because his sound “waves,” which are still as “loud and clear on platinum” (D'Aguiar 1993,
16) as they might have been on the ripples of the Crystal Palace Bowl and on a plaited Thames,
constitute a very convenient metaphorical gateway towards tidalectical tropicality.
Tidalectical tropicality in Fred D'Aguiar's sea riff involves, again, the economy of
metaphorical retreat as much as that of the triangular trade, and brings about the anamnesic
consequence of unveiling euro-centric historiography as white mythology, while simultaneously
relying, in its representations, on the supernatural features of Western mythology, such as can be
seen with Bob Marley's Neptune-like rise from the waters of the Thames. These economic and
supernatural traits of Fred D'Aguiar's tidalectical riff are now to be studied respectively and in that
order, in this chapter's last two parts.
85 Michael Jackson's “blackness” is a large subject that cannot be dealt with here.
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II. The Economy of Liquidity
As said in this chapter's introduction and seen in Fred D'Aguiar's “Dread” (D'Aguiar 1993,
16) above, economy, mythology, metaphysics, memory, and water can be related to concentrate
around the pivot constituted by metaphor. To quote Elizabeth DeLoughrey again, the metaphorical
designations of capital in terms of “flow” and “liquidity” derive from the cross-tropical
displacements involved in the economic organization of the triangular trade, slavery, and
colonization by the West (DeLoughrey 2007a, 56-7). In other words, the trope of money as liquidity
may lead back to a specific historical past in the same way as Derrida sees Western metaphysics as
catachrestic gateways to Western mythology (1971, 11). This hypomnesic quality of the trope of
liquidity also appears to confirm Derrida's sense of the economy of metaphor amounting to a (tidal)
dialectics of (an)amnesic re-treat/withdrawal, “like a wave on the shoreline” (Derrida 1978, 66).
Moreover, the trope of money as liquidity has been used so often that it has entered common
parlance and “barely stands out as a metaphor at all” anymore: it is a “dead metaphor” (Punter 146)
that seldom brings back memories of the triangular trade when it is used. It is, then, arguably, a
white mythology too, in that it is a Western expression the cross-tropical and cross-cultural origins
of which have almost been forgotten, although they remain tractable (Derrida 1971, 11). Liquidity is
a metaphorical tenor the worn, almost erased vehicle of which is colonial money and its human cost
and, as is to be seen below, Fred D'Aguiar uses his sea riff, that is, the actual lexical field of
liquidity, to retrace, re-turn, or re-trope this erased historiographic and economic vehicle of an
imperial past by way of tidalectical or metaphorical re-treat. In the process, liquidity becomes a rich
informational medium one must, yet, remain suspicious of.
a. Silvery Surf(aces)
In addition to “Dread,” British Subjects offers yet another poem, entitled “Silver Song” (29)
where water and economy are explicitly related and, although “Silver Song” never provides an
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indubitable allusion to the Middle Passage, its being placed a few pages after such poems as “A
“Gift of a Rose” (11), “Dread” (16) and “At the Grave of the Unknown African” (21), in the same
collection, invites readers to keep the possibility for such a historical allusion in mind, all the more
so when water is in question:
I know little about water,
even less about light;
all I see is quick silver
dancing there day and night.
I want it all in my pocket.
I wish it was my bank.
In dream after dream I lock it
up like fish in a tank.
The form of the poem's two first quatrains is reproduced in the three other verse paragraphs that
follow, and evoke the ripples one may see on a stream. These undulating lines contain descriptions
of the interplay of water and light that use the lexical field of economy. For instance, the surface
being “quick silver” simultaneously evokes the “rapid” accumulation of wealth and warns about the
potentially mercurial “tidings” of financial speculation, the busts and booms of which can be
described in terms of “peaks and troughs.” Yet, and in spite of that implicit warning, the swift
anapestic rhythm of the lines' trimeters and the casual language of lines such “I want it all in my
pocket. / I wish it was my bank” seem to suggest the calm evocation of wishful thinking. In this
sense, the poem's above-cited second stanza is more evocative of the tranquility of tone of a poem
such as Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey” which, like “Silver Song,” capitalizes on the polysemous
quality of the word “bank,” as a monetary institution and as a riverbank: in “Tintern Abbey,” the
poetic persona – Wordsworth here, since he directly addresses his sister at the end of the poem –
“revisit[s]” (or pays a second visit to) the banks of the river Wye (Wordsworth & Coleridge 156),
and remembers (or re-collects, as he has often done at “unprofitable” times (158)) the first occasion
on which he went there, without “any interest / unborrowed from the eye” (159, my emphasis), and
reflects upon the “Abundant recompense” (159) he earned from what he saw. Wordsworth's use of
the lexical field of investment and interest in relation to memories of the banks of a river may have
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caught Fred D'Aguiar's eye and been put to use again by him. In this perspective, the title of the
collection, British subjects, might then also designate British canonical texts, such as Wordsworth's
poems, from which D'Aguiar would have drawn in order to weave the poems British Subjects
contains. However, D'Aguiar appears to be drawing on the language of liquidity to denote a cultural
background that highly differs from Wordsworth's pleasant memories of youth in the Lake district.86
For one thing, after having told readers that s/he does not know why s/he is so mesmerized
by the “quick silver” interplay of water and light, except maybe for the fact that both elements
“looked through [him/her] / Like [s/he] wasn't there, or dead,” as if s/he were a ghost ( D'Aguiar
1993, 29), the poetic persona further describes what s/he sees on water during his/her morning and
evening walks:
Miles clocked up on city bridges
dawn and dusk by those shores,
countless flat stones found and skidded
on water's polished floor. (29)
Such a phrase as “flat stones found and skidded / on water's polished floor,” in D'Aguiar's poem, is
strongly evocative of an actually transatlantic context, first of all because, as shown below,
D'Aguiar uses the description of water as a floor to represent the Atlantic in his novel Feeding the
Ghosts (D'Aguiar 1997, 9), a narrative that unfolds, for the most part, on a slave ship crossing the
Middle Passage. Second, the lines apparently blend phrases from two other poems by other authors,
namely, Jamaican poet Edwar K. Brathwaite's “Calypso” (Brathwaite 48-50) and American poetess
Elizabeth Bishop's “Crusoe in England” (Bishop (162-6).
Brathwaite's four-part poem “Calypso” (48-50) deals with displacement, diaspora and
migration in ways that invoke mythology and economy too, by retracing the history of the
Caribbean from its imagined beginnings to the present, via plantation slavery. Its first part proposes
a myth of origins for the Caribbean archipelago which, according to the poem, and like the “flat
stones” of water and light “found and skidded” in D'Aguiar's poem (1993, 29), would have risen out
86 I am indebted to Thomas Dutoit's 2012 course on the Lyrical Ballads for this thought. For a discussion of the
relationship between Wordsworth's romanticism and magic(al) realist features of D'Aguiar's novels in terms of
Orphism, see Chapter V.
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of the sea when a “stone had skidded arc'd and bloomed into islands,” when a “curved stone hissed
into reef / wave teeth fanged into clay / white splash flashed into spray” and created the Caribbean
Islands. This is what Brathwaite calls the “bloom of the arcing summers” (48). Hence, by partly
reproducing these lines from Brathwaite in “Silver Song,” D'Aguiar infuses a sense of
Caribbeanness into his poem. Furthermore, in the first part of Brathwaite's “Calypso,” the
mythopoetic dimension also inscribes the Caribbean, from its very origins, in a history of
displacement – in ricochets. The myth then quickly unfolds to lead on to the present, where the
poem's characters are simultaneously expecting Western tourists or travelers to come from the North
and contemplating the idea of dancing the limbo and the calypso on their island's shores, in order to
bid farewell to their friend John, who cannot find work, “so the boy now nigratin' overseas” (50). 87
The pun – here hybrid, insofar as it is a portmanteau – between “migrant” and “nigger” suggests
that “home is always elsewhere” (D'Aguiar 1993, 14) for descendants of the African diaspora.
Moreover, John is traveling for economic reasons, since “the boss gave [him] the sack,” and he is
migrating in order to find a new occupation. The poem's mythological dimension, along with the
implicit relationship between water and money that can be perceived in John's “nigratin' overseas”
to try and make a living are aspects of Brathwaite's poem that D'Aguiar has, thus, drawn from in
order to write “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29).
But D'Aguiar also seems to have found inspiration for “Silver Song” in Elizabeth Bishop's
87 In this perspective, it is not fortuitous for the poem to be entitled “Calypso.” In the same way as “limbo” can be read
as a tropicality, in that it is both a Christian construct and an Afro-Caribbean dance, “Calypso” is both a Caribbean
dance and a Greek mythological figure, an ocean nymph who kept Odysseus captive on her island, until other gods
demanded that Calypso set him free, so that he could resume his “overseas migration,” like John in Brathwaite's
poem. After Odysseus' departure, Calypso attempts but fails to commit suicide. Thus, “Calypso,” Brathwaite's myth
of Caribbean origins, also inscribes the Caribbean into tropicality and formulates a discrete political and economic
statement: it is the laws of offer and demand – instead of Odysseus' desire to meet Penelope again – that force
Odysseus/John to leave Calypso's island, to depart from her tropicality and love towards (a Western) Pen-elope and
into another tropicality: John as a Caribbean Odysseus elopes under Brathwaite's pen, because the appeal of Western
prosperity pulls him away from an archipelago that might subsequently miss and/or lack his presence, be it in
affective, cultural or economic terms, because the inverse flow of (presumably wealthy) incoming tourists is
insufficient to grant the island with the state of economic welfare that would induce John to stay. Brathwaite's myth
of foundation is a dance, a ricochet, and a migration across the tropics, a series of displacements between the
Caribbean and the West that illustrates how tropicality may function as a gateway into historical and political
consciousness while simultaneously consisting in a poetic principle for, for instance, the generation of a crosscultural myth in tropes and verse. Chapter III also deals with the term “calypso,” in relation to D'Aguiar's poem
“Calypso” (D'Aguiar 2009, 8), and with reference to Wilson Harris's use of the mythical figure in The Infinite
Rehearsal.
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poem “Crusoe in England” (Bishop 162-6) since, like Brathwaite's “Calypso,” it also deals, albeit
from a non-mythological perspective, with the birth of an island: “A new volcano has erupted, / the
papers say, and last week I was reading / where some ship saw an island being born” (162).
Moreover, and still as in “Calypso,” “Crusoe in England” indicates that displacement is at stake. For
one thing, the title of the poem indicates that Crusoe is not where he is usually supposed to be (on
his desert island), but has been displaced to England – his “island of origin,” so to speak – which is
evocative again, for Bishop's version, or displacement of Daniel Defoe's famous character, of the
prospect of migration, as in Brathwaite's “Calypso,” since, in spite of being back in England,
Crusoe does not, initially feel at home: “I told myself / 'Pity should begin at home.' So the more /
pity I felt, the more I felt at home” (Bishop 163). Finally, as a counterpart to Brathwaite's Caribbean
archipelago, the narrator of Bishop's poem dreams of innumerable islands: “nightmares of other
islands / stretching away from mine, infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands” (165). 88 Such
analogies between Brathwhaite's “Calypso” and Bishop's “Crusoe in England” as the feeling of
being out of place and the poems' respectively mythological and nightmarish multiplications of
islands might suggest that an intertextual bond exists between one poet and the other. Furthermore,
such similarities have, again, not escaped the attention of Fred D'Aguiar, who read both authors'
works,89 and whose line, in “Silver Song,” about “countless flat stones found and skidded,” in
addition of revising Brathwaite's verse, also arguably echoes Bishop's “infinities / of islands” (italics
mine), because of the “countless” adjective that D'Aguiar adds to Brathwaite's line (D'Aguiar 1993,
29).
88 Bishop's image of insular infinities provides a picture, presented as frightening by Crusoe, that is intriguingly
evocative of Antonio Benitez-Rojo's more hopeful “vision of diaspora and resettlement” through the image of the
“repeating island” resulting from his use of “chaos theory to imagine the fractal expansion of the culture of the
Caribbean across the globe, transported by contemporary migrants” (DeLoughrey 2007a, 7; Benitez-Rojo 9), in the
wake of Glissant's Poetics of Relation, which relies on chaos theory as well through the notions of “chaos-monde”
and “échos-monde” (Glissant 1990, 202). Interestingly enough, to the question “What is it that repeats?,” BenitezRojo answers “Tropisms” (Benitez-Rojo 4, 24), that is, in the author's words, a series of “movements in approximate
directions,” repetitive reflexes or motions which, in Caribbean literary contexts (and the fractal expansions they may
imply), may be designated as tropicality. If a personal comment is allowed, this unforeseen proximity in
nomenclature between tropicality and Benitez-Rojo's chaotic tropisms has had an uncanny effect on me when I first
noticed it, after reading, in the acknowledgments to the second edition of The Repeating Island, about the author's
indebtedness to Fred D'Aguiar.
89 Private correspondence with the author.
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Additional intertextual links between “Silver Song” and the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
strengthen this argument as well, as a contextualized reading of the following last quatrain in
“Silver Song” will soon show:
Water and light, I must decline
your invitation to me
to dive and dive for coins
that you two mint for free. (29)
Intertextuality with Brathwaite's “Calypso” and its subsequent evocation of the Caribbean, along
with the suspicious quicksilver, mercurial, or tidal interplay of water and light and the
aforementioned evocation of death, which derive from the language of liquidity (DeLoughrey
2007a 57), suggest that the water expanse the poetic persona faces in “Silver Song,” either is the
Atlantic Ocean or, again, the tidal river that the Thames is, as in “Dread,” in the same collection
(D'Aguiar 1993, 16). Hence, in the poem's last stanza, if the poetic persona “declines” the invitation
of such watery surfaces to dive for the metaphorical coins – sparkling ripples – they display, it
might be because s/he knows good and well that the money water and light appear to “mint for free”
actually must be the interest of some labor, or the substitute of some other product, to have any
value at all. In other words, in the context of British Subjects, the dubious presence of coins flipping
on watery surfaces – again, probably the Thames or the Atlantic, two important loci of colonial
and/or triangular trades – provides readers and the poetic persona with the sense of a superficial and
treacherous dissimulation of a source-value that was potentially constituted by slavery and colonial
economy.90 In this sense, the images described in “Silver Song” are playing a hypomnesic role, in
that they rely upon the (an)amnesic economy of (the) metaphor (of liquidity) and its re-treat to
(tidalectically) operate as a historical reminder of cross-tropical trades (Derrida 1978, 66) and, by
the same token, function as a tropicality.
Such a mnemonic role attributed to water as a suspicious medium in the last stanza of
“Silver Song” is an aspect of D'Aguiar's sea riff that can also be found in Bishop's poetry again, and
90 Brathwaite also talks about the light that “shimmers on water” (Brathwaite 204). Moreover, the only appreciation of
“silver” in the Arrivants trilogy he gives is pejorative, in that it is described as what was earned from slavery and
sugarcane (48).
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in a strikingly resembling passage from Derek Walcott's Omeros. More specifically, Fred D'Aguiar's
silver tropes also appear to echo poems other than “Crusoe in England” in Bishop's verse corpus,
such as “The Unbeliever” (Bishop 22) and “At the Fishhouses” (64-66). In “The Unbeliever,” a
dreamer thinks “The spangled sea wants [him] to fall. / It's hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us
all” (22). The sea is “spangled” with sparks of light, and its being “hard as diamonds” conveys, as
in “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29), the sense of a treacherous interplay between light and water
since, like silver coins, diamonds are both visually attractive and potentially dangerous: they are
used to cut the hardest materials. The adjective “spangled” is also evocative of the “star spangled
banner” of the United States of America, whose role is central in the history of the transatlantic
slave trade, a commerce that might be evoked in Bishop's poem too, albeit tenuously, through the
presence of diamonds, which can be viewed as emblematic of the mineral wealth of the African soil.
Apart from this hypothesis, in the “The Unbeliever,” one may note that the sea is personified, since
it “wants” the dreamy unbeliever to “fall” (Bishop 63). Such a personification is another feature that
the poem shares with “Silver Song,” where water and light are characters whose invitations are,
again, rejected by the poetic persona (D'Aguiar 1993, 29).91
In “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop 64-6), the poetic voice explains that light gives the
impression that “All is silver,” from “the heavy surface of the sea [...]” to “benches,” “lobster pots,”
“masts,” “wild jagged rocks,” and “wheelbarrows […] similarly / plastered with creamy iridescent
coats of mail” (64). “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29) provides a similar description of water
expanses. Moreover, the closing lines of “At the Fishhouses” explicitly describe water as historical:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
91 The personification of water is actually recurrent in Bishop's verse, where she describes, for instance, a
“somnambulist brook” (Bishop 63) and a sea that is “off somewhere, doing nothing” (110). D'Aguiar's also reiterates
a pejorative personification of water later in his work, in Feeding the Ghosts, where he describes the sea as a
monster with a “limitless capacity to swallow “love, slaves, ships, memories” (D'Aguiar 1997, 17), that is, an ability
to absorb and hide from the eye what contributed to the historical significance of transatlantic water expanses, a
power to generate the white mythology that the poetic persona of “Silver Song” aptly suspects to be hidden in the
“quick silver” invitation coined by the interplay of water and light (D'Aguiar 1993, 29).
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forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. (Bishop 66)
If, according to Bishop, the sea is what “we imagine knowledge to be,” and if “knowledge is
historical,” then the sea can be associated, through syllogism, with history again (Walcott 1986,
364-6), which may be viewed, retrospectively – that is, thanks to memory – as functioning like tides
and waves, with the ebb and flow of past migratory and/or revolutionary waves that have registered,
among other things, the history of the African diaspora that Fred D'Aguiar is interested in, as his sea
riff seems to convey. Moreover, Bishop's description of knowledge as “dark” and “salt” in “At the
Fishhouses” is intriguingly reminiscent of the prologue of Feeding the Ghosts, where the sea is the
history of its “salt” eroding the “dark” skins of slaves thrown overboard (D'Aguiar 1997, 4). The
movements of water are then tidalectically related to knowledge, history and the past in “At the
Fishhouses,” and confirm that Fred D'Aguiar has woven the textures of his sea riff with threads
from Bishop's verse as much as with those of Brathwaite's poems.
However, and as indicated above, Walcott's Omeros is yet another major intertext to
D'Aguiar's “Silver Song” or, more precisely, to that poem's final stanza, where the poetic persona
declines to “dive and dive for coins” that water and light suspiciously “mint for free” (D'Aguiar
1993, 29). In Omeros, Achilles succumbs to such temptation as he dives towards the Atlantic
seafloor to “fish” coins there:
In the corals' bone kingdom his skin calcifies.
In that wavering garden of huge fans on hinges
swayed, while fingers of seaweed pocketed the eyes
of coins with the profiles of Iberian kings; […].
This was not a world meant for the living, he thought.
The dead didn't need money, like him, but perhaps
they hated surrendering things their hands had brought.
The shreds of the ocean's floor passed him from corpses
that had perished in the crossing, their hair like weeds,
their bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes
watched him, a brain-coral gurgled their words,
and every bubble englobed a biography,
no less than the wine-bottle's mouth, but for Achille,
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treading the mulch floor of the Caribbean Sea,
no coins were enough to repay its deep evil.92 (Walcott 1990, 45 my italics)
The sea floor is translated by Achille as a “road of bones” (D'Aguiar 1997, 213) that belonged to
slaves who “perished in the crossing” (Walcott 1990, 45) of the Middle Passage, and the “bubbles”
emanating from these “coral” bones contain the “biography” of each and everyone of them (45).
The bottom of the sea is therefore a historical register of Middle Passage deaths, which echoes
D'Aguiar's notion that “the sea is slavery” (D'Aguiar 1997, 3) and corroborates, again, Walcott's
claim that “The Sea is History” (Walcott 1986, 364-6). As in “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29), the
silver of “coins” is present in this passage from Omeros, but this time in a literal, rather than
metaphorical, way, in that it can be identified as that of Spanish and/or Portuguese currency, coins
the heads of which represent the faces of “Iberian kings” (Walcott 1990, 45) and evoke the colonial
history of the Caribbean basin and Americas. Walcott's narrator claims that these symbolically
imperialist and European coins cannot redeem those who lost them while selling and killing slaves
across the Atlantic, in the same way as the poetic persona, in “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29),
rejects water and light's invitation to dive for coins they “mint for free,” while the human cost at the
origin of their value may actually have been huge. In this sense, in Omeros, Walcott's narrator
describes explicitly and literally, at the bottom of the sea, the reminders of the Middle-Passage
experience that Fred D'Aguiar's poetic persona represents metaphorically and implicitly on the
surface of a water expanse in “Silver Song,” and these reminders are silver, coins, currency,
liquidity. But be it at the surface or bottom of a river or the Atlantic, in both cases, water expanses
stand as metaphors that re-treat into the historical memories of colonial, cross-tropical routes, where
liquidity, again, becomes an equivocal tropicality of sorts.93
92 This passage from Omeros is also strongly related to the song “Two Fathom Five,” as sung by Ariel in The Tempest,
as the following lines show: “Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that
were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange”
(Shakespeare 2008, I.2.397-402). For a more detailed discussion of this intertexutal link, see this dissertation's
General Conclusion below.
93 Walcott, like Bishop and D'Aguiar, also personifies the sea in Omeros. For instance, he represents the sea as a
mother through the homophony of the French words “mère” – mother – and “mer” – sea (231). Homer, whose name,
in French, sounds like an apostrophe to the sea(s) and/or mother(s) – “O mer(s)! O mère(s)” – is also nicknamed
“Seven Seas” in many passages of Omeros,which amounts to representing the seas as a metaphorical storyteller who
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Thus, D'Aguiar's poetry, like that of other authors such as Bishop, Brathwaite and Walcott,
in whose works he finds inspiration, re-traces, through the language of liquidity, the transoceanic
scene that brought it into being, yet was partly erased from it, to the extent of becoming almost
invisible, as its use in Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” another intertext to D'Aguiar's work,
apparently shows. In other words, the Atlantic, or the Thames for that matter, are prey to white
mythology, unless one perceives them as historical registers of such facts as, for instance, the slave
trade. Furthermore, the interplay of water and light found in “Silver Song,” is re-presented in later
works by D'Aguiar, where, once it has been understood as such, functions as an immediate reminder
of transatlantic history everywhere it appears, in addition to being evocative of the diverse intertexts
from whence it came. For instance, in “A Clean Slate” (D'Aguiar 2009, 4) D'Aguiar describes
“Coins on the sea pressed by light” (4). In Bloodlines, one can find a sustained, histrocially-loaded,
and potentially tidalectic passage that strongly and intertextually relies on “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar
1993, 29) and “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop 64-66), when Tom describes, in the novel, the moment
when his raft capsized and he almost drowned, trying to flee from an ambush set against him and
the interracial couple he tries to lead up North via the Underground Railroad. At that specific
moment, Tom perceives the river as a “road of silver laid on water” (D'Aguiar 2000, 79), which
reads as a heavy-handed revision of the silvery interplay of water and light in “Silver Song”
(D'Aguiar 1993, 29), all the more so since that description is made, in Bloodlines, from within the
historical context of slavery that “Silver Song,” again, implicitly refers to. Moreover, during their
journey upriver, the runaways try to put their trust in water, which is described as “gushing current
news / of itself at them” (D'Aguiar 2000, 30) – a pun reinforcing the sense of water being an
informational medium in D'Aguiar's sea riff. However, just before the ambush, they mistake the
light they see, reflected and multiplied by the stream's surface, for a lantern held by someone who
will lead them to freedom, and they take the light's reflections for a “written on water covenant”
can share his memories and knowledge: here, as in D'Aguiar's sea riff, water is endowed with hypomnesic qualities
again. See Walcott 1990; 12, 14, 35, 53, 105, 111, 145, 147, 153-4, 160, 162-4, 177, 232, 274, 286-8, 300, 310-11,
314-7.
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(32) they should follow. That the “covenant” leads them into an “ambush” (34) is reminiscent,
again, of the treacherous invitation of water and light in “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29).
Finally, Tom's description of river and moonlight as a “road of silver laid on water” may also
be viewed as an intertextual reference to the silver scene of “At the Fishhouses”' (Bishop 64), all the
more so since Tom explains that, after capsizing, he “somersaulted under water, immersed /
[himself] in the element that's [his] sign” (D'Aguiar 2000, 80, my italics). Water as an element-sign
is a religious reference to baptism, and Tom is therefore telling the reader that he is a baptist below
waters that are, then, both lethal and lustral, which is relevant in relation to Bishop's “At the
Fishhouses,” since her poem contains a description of an animal seal that swims in the water by the
fish-houses, and is “interested in music; / like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing
him baptist hymns” (Bishop 65, my italics).94 The animal “seal” itself might contain a religious
meaning in its homophony with the “seals” of apocalypse, and the likeness in sound between “him”
and “hymn” frames and, thus, foregrounds, baptism which, along with the description of water as
silver, is then an additional trait that the above-mentioned passage from Bloodlines shares with“At
The Fishhouses” (64-6). Apart from intertxutality with Bishop, Tom's relation to water is also made
paradoxical by the mention of baptism. For if Tom “immersed / [himself] in the element that's [his]
sign” (D'Aguiar 2000, 80), then he is in a place where he, as a baptist, belongs. On the other hand,
he needs to escape that lustral milieu in order to survive, which indicates that he belongs
elsewhere.95 Of course, immersion and emergence are two successive phases of baptism, and are
coherent with Tom's status in that regard. Yet, the simultaneous sense of being both at one's place
and out of place in the same element, and displacements from one milieu to another, to and fro
water and air, disrupt presumptions concerning the positionality of belonging into a belonging in
displacement. In other words, being routed in water, for Tom, implies being rooted in displacement,
94 The correlation of baptism and drowning echoes Heaney's “Limbo” (Heaney 1972, 70) as well, and is arguably reused and revised later on in Bloodlines (155) and other works by D'Aguiar, as explained further below.
95 That paradoxical nature of water as a lustral medium and a deadly world is echoed by Sow, further on in the novel,
who warns readers as follows: “Stay away from water. Do not listen / However closely it approximates / to your
name. Forget you were Christened” (D'Aguiar 2000, 155, italics mine).
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in the same way as John's and the Caribbean's relations to migration and motion are founded on
transatlantic skidding in Brathwaite's “Calypso” (Brathwaite 48-50). Such a shifting sense of place
is in keeping with tidalectic retreat, wich operates through permanent and simultaneous reversions
and returns, and is further evoked in D'Aguiar's sea riff through the lexical fields of t(r)opography
and home, as is to be shown now.
b. The 'Homes' Sea Roams
To pursue with the reading of Tom's “immersion” initiated above, one may first note that,
just as the sea “claim[s]” the possession of bodies of slaves in Feeding the Ghosts (117), when Tom
realizes, in Bloodlines, that he is drowning, he also imagines that water is claiming him to “learn
that home is always some other shore” (D'Aguiar 1997,117):
I could be bait for fish now, water
In my lungs. My flesh scraped off the bones,
the bones stripped of their marrow after
the current has sucked them smooth as stones.
I saw my porous bones break and scatter
far from what was once their home.
The river put its lips to my ears and hissed
I should resign myself to its wet kiss. (D'Aguiar 2000, 81)
This stanza is very rich in terms of revision, as its images draw from many other works by
D'Aguiar. For instance, the presentation of a human being as “bait for fish” can be found in Bill of
Rights (1998, 12) and is re-used in Continental Shelf (2009, 76); the sense of water eroding bones as
stone also appears in Feeding the Ghosts (1997, 4), along with the image of bones broken by water
(214), that can be encountered in British Subjects too, in the ninth and last poem of “Sonnets from
Whitley Bay,” where “When those waves wreck in despair on sandstone, / It's my back breaking
with my need for home” (1993, 34). Be it in the above-cited passage from Bloodlines (2000, 81), or
in the sonnet just mentioned, then, water disjoints the poetic persona's body, breaks its skeleton
away from a corporeal envelope that is either described as “home” or that harbors a painful longing
for “home.” In both cases, the role of water, its economy, consists in replacing “home,” the place of
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belonging, with displacement and/or diaspora or exile. The economy of liquidity, then, consists in
dispersion through aspersion (1993, 34) or immersion (2000, 81). In this perspective, it should be
noted that the etymological signification of economy derives from the Greek, oikos (home), and
nomia (rule, law, and distribution or sharing) (Derrida 1991, 17), for such definition clarifies
D'Aguiar's correlation of home and water by implying, again, that the rule of water-as-home or
place, the economy of liquidity, is re-treat, circulation, displacement and replacement. Hence,
D'Aguiar's use of the metaphor of home is not accidental, but in keeping with the economy of the
tropes that constitute his sea riff, such as that of silver, for instance, and the description of the
interplay of water and light as “coins” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29). And although the economy of liquidity,
the circulation of water and tides, might not benefit the texts' poetic personae, their interest, the
surplus value that is brought about by tidal re-treat, consists in a reminder, destined to readers, of
the transoceanic (the Atlantic) and fluvial routes (the Thames and its relation to the sugar industry;
the Mississipi and the Missouri for Tom's Underground Railroad) that were founded on triangular
and slave trades, and conditioned the making of the African diaspora (DeLoughrey 2007a, 56-7;
Derrida 1976, 66).
As a consequence of having been taken away from Africa to serve as a slave in America,
Tom also tries to imagine his way back to African land, across water, in Bloodlines (128-9). It is a
road “not on any map” which he pictures, as if it were printed on the shore: “The sea holds still long
enough for him to draw / a map” in his “cartographer's dream” and, as he subsequently starts the
journey back, “His body twitches in recognition of the rhythm / of ship on sea” (129). The lexical
field of cartography is relied upon to describe Tom's dream where the sea – on which Tom depends
to find his way, and with which he experiences some kind of osmosis as he feels the rhythm of its
tides with his estuary-like neck (128) – once again seems to have a tidalectical role that
corroborates, in addition to Tom's aforementioned relation to baptism, the character's partial sense
of belonging in water. Moreover, the correlation of the lexical field of cartography with the
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movements of the sea is reminiscent again, of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. More specifically, in her
poem, “The Map” (3), interaction between sea and land is evoked through the description of a world
map, and serves the poetess to destabilize localizations by explaining that “names of seashore towns
run out to sea,” and that water, more than land is a “native” place – a description that is, in turn, of
course, evocative of the maternal, amniotic liquid. Bishop then insists that the sea is “where land
is,” and that “Mapped waters are no more quiet than the land is / lending the land their waves' own
conformation,” to conclude the poem with the following line: “More delicate than the historians' are
the map-maker's colors” (3, my italics). The role of the historian is to retrace and tell the history of a
specific group of people living on a precisely delimited piece of land, be it an island, a nation, a
continent, or a linguistic area. In this sense, one may understand Bishop's last line as a designation
of the “boundary” as the foundation of historiography, while topography, in her eyes, and through
the actual transgression of such fundamental limits as those between sea and land, is indicative of
the mutability of such boundaries, of an economy of movement, of liquidity rooted in displacement:
the motions that subvert the historian's enterprise. Conversely, Tom's tuning in to the rhythm of
watery motions is what allows him to write a map, to retrace his way to a lost Africa, and
reconstruct through the imagination a past that is not otherwise available in historiographical
accounts of the slave-trade, which often designate slaves not as individuals endowed with
sensibility, but list them in numbers as male or female cattle, without further description (Baucom
11).
In such a perspective, it is not surprising to find that Brathwaite is concerned with
cartography too. In the fourth part of a poem called “The Cracked Mother” (Brathwaite180-4), the
poetic persona is confused by the actions of tides and waves on the seashore:
why do [waves] come as they do:
white hoofs beating high water on sand
leaping our smashed-in wish that they halt
that they keep the boundaries clear?
[…]
After this breach of the sea's balanced
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treaty, how will new maps be drafted?
Who will suggest a new tentative frontier? (Brathwaite 183-4)
The movements of waves on the shoreline make the limit between sea and land unclear again, and
lead one to question the ground – or the ocean – on which the cartographic distinction between land
and sea is effected. If signification operates thanks to a network of differences (Derrida 1982), can
land and sea lose all meaning if their difference is not clear-cut, but always-already subjected,
again, to the economy of liquidity? Through such questioning, Brathwaite's poetry, like his notion
of tidalectics, incites comparison with Jacques Derrida's thought: in Brathwaite's topography, the
littoral cannot keep the sea at bay any more than the so-called “literal,” in Derridean thought, can
ever escape metaphoricity, because, again, metaphor only recedes to return, “like a wave on the
shoreline” (Derrida 1978, 66). The supplementary trait that Brathwaite, however, provides, through
the Caribbean context, and the notion of “white hoofs” of surf committing an infringement on “the
sea's balanced / treaty” – a treaty or law which, by the way, necessarily consists in infringement, in
the overstepping of boundaries, insofar, again, as the economy of liquidity amounts to displacement
– is a sense of colonial conquest coming from the sea, that makes the Atlantic, again, function as a
reminder of transoceanic history. Brathwaite's poem “Islands” openly reformulates this point by
staging a poetic persona who, by “Looking through a map / of the Antilles,” is reminded of slavery
and colonization (204-5).
Considering the fact that, as shown above, D'Aguiar was partly influenced by the works of
such authors as Bishop and Brathwaite, it then makes sense to find that D'Aguiar, inscribing himself
within the cross-tropical legacy of these poets, pictures the sea as the locus of dislocation in works
such as Bloodlines or British Subjects. Moreover, D'Aguiar's has been sustaining that sense of
watery dispersion up to some of his latest verse work, for instance, in his “Elegies,” where the
poetic persona explains that there will be
No place to go after I perish
But the grave or my ashes sown
Over the Demerara which catapults
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Into the Atlantic which flows
Back, back, back, to Africa
Where ancestors walked head-in-air,
But earlier they dragged knuckles
There, and were captured there,
And packed in ships in shackles:
An old story without a loving God
A bone I throw to polemic, my dog. (D'Aguiar 2009, 81)
Origin decomposes into a series of displacements in this passage. When the poetic persona dies, if
his/her ashes must be spread over regions which metaphorically represent his descent, his roots,
then these ashes must travel from the Guyanese region of Demerara, across the Atlantic that part of
his/her ancestors were presumably forced to cross as slaves, to Africa: again, roots make up routes
(DeLoughrey 2007a), localization is plural and destabilized as in Bishop's “The Map” (Bishop 3),
and the sea is a trope for a historical and cross-cultural remembering. This passage from
Continental Shelf also challenges the existence of “a loving God,” since there is “no place to go” for
the poetic persona after death, but a trip to take across the tropics as if they were a purgatory of
sorts.96 Moreover, in one of his most striking palindrome rimes, D'Aguiar seems to gather
metaphorically “God” and “dog” (Ricks 32). These two words are literal inversions of one another,
and they are supposed to designate opposite entities, but rhyming these words together suggests that
a metaphorical likeness – emphasized by sound and spelling – exists between the two, and it thus
displaces the comparison between polemic and a dog to a comparison between God and a dog,
which is another polemical idea that is in keeping with the sense of helplessness subsequent to a
presumed lack of love from “God,” springing from the perspective of the experience of slavery in
the poem.
A possibly less polemical religious image that is related to the sea appears elsewhere in
“Elegies,” when the poetic persona's mother visits her son in Virginia, not long after the Virginia
Tech shooting, and she is described as a savior: “Mother, who multiplied loaves and fish, turned /
96 Interestingly enough, Wilson Harris, a Guyanese novelist and friend to D'Aguiar (D'Aguiar 2009a) describes the
Middle Passage as a limbo gateway (Harris 1970, 157). See the present chapter's third part for a more detailed
discussion of the Middle Passage as limbo.
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Waters of distress into wines of contentment, / Mother, who parted the sea of despair for dry land”
(D'Aguiar 2009, 70). The poetic persona's mother metaphorically reproduces the miracles Jesus and
Moses effect in the Bible.97 Water has a predominant role as a mnemonic trope again, in that it
corresponds to the “distress” and “despair” of mourning the Virginia dead, a melancholy that is
temporarily made to re-treat, like a tide, to leave room for “dry land” on which to make libations
with “wines of contentment.” Moreover, for a Caribbean author interested in diaspora and the
Middle Passage to rely on Mosaic imagery apparently corresponds to Gilroy's sense of the “central
place of the metaphors of journey and exile in both [Jewish and African-diasporic] political
cultures” (Gilroy 211), and points to the tropicality resulting from the expression of a Mosaic image
in English and from a Caribbean-American perspective. Another instance of that sort of tropical
blend may be found in Bob Marley's song and album titled Exodus, along with his multiple
references to the evils he saw in the Western world as “Babylon” (Marley 1984, 13).
Derek Walcott too describes a metaphorical partition of the sea, in Omeros, where both
tropicality and the economy of liquidity are at stake. This partition is effected by a ship:
I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text;
her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking
basins of a globe in which one half fits the next
into an equator, both shores neatly clicking
into a globe; except that its meridian
was not North and South but East and West. One, the New
World, made exactly like the Old, halves of one brain,
or the beat of both hands rowing that bear the two
vessels of the heart with balance, weight and design.
Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa,
she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle's line,
the rift in the soul. (Walcott 1990, 319)
The complementarity of the two parts of vital organs such as the heart or the brain is transplanted to
the sea and the world, where East and West are reconciled and joined across a line drawn by a ship
between two complementary halves. This agreement is also made rhythmical through meter, and
97 As explained in chapter IV, the character named Whitechapel, in Fred D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory, is
another Mosaic figure for whom, at some point, people part “like the sea” (D'Aguiar 1994, 127).
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through the image of a call and response between two cardiac hemispheres, that is, through
heartbeat. This image consists in the allegorization in verse of what Walcott perceives as the stance
of those he calls mature New World writers in his essay, “The Muse of History:” “Their philosophy,
based on a contempt for historic time, is revolutionary, for what they repeat to the New World is its
simultaneity with the Old” (Walcott 1974, 36), which renders the Old and New dichotomy that
separates the cultural West and Rest irrelevant, but proposes a cultural synchronic gathering that the
present study has been calling tropicality. The weaving, or stitching together of the “Old” and
“New” worlds is operated, again, on the Atlantic, which then turns from rift to junction, bringing
two hemispheres into a cross-cultural and transoceanic simultaneity that Walcott describes, in
Biblical terms again, as “Eden” (64), that is, as a heavenly home. Such a “soldering” of two worlds
is effected by a ship that, in a “wing-beat,” also restores a link, across the Middle Passage, between
the Caribbean and Africa (Walcott 1990, 319), and thus plays a hypomnesic transatlantic part as
well, through an imaginative retracing of a bond with Africa as one out of several “homes,” or
places of belonging of sorts for Caribbean members of the African diaspora.
As in the above-cited lines from Omeros, the historical past that readers retrieve beneath the
surface of D'Aguiar's sea riff is, then, and more often than not, that of the Middle Passage
experience. Such a past relates the infamous economy of slavery to the transatlantic flow of
“liquidity” in a relatively obvious way, as can be found in the works of both authors, for instance
when Derek Walcott writes that “The Sea is History” (Walctott 1986, 364-6), which D'Aguiar
rephrases as “The sea is slavery” in the opening words of Feeding the Ghosts (D'Aguiar 1997, 3).
Moreover, in Fred D'Aguiar's verse corpus, even if the Atlantic is not always explicitly mentioned,
the general framework of the poet's collections almost always induces readers to relate images of
migration and watery tropes to that historical background, mostly thanks to the metaphor of the
home or the house as a shifting locus for descendants of the African diaspora, as seen above through
Tom's relation to water as “home” in Bloddlines (D'Aguiar 2000, 81).
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For example, in a poem called “Home” (D'Aguiar 1993, 14), a British customs agent at
Heathrow airport makes the poetic persona – who has an “afro” haircut – feel unwelcome, as a
“British Citizen not bold enough / for [his] liking and too much” (14) for that of customs officers. It
lets him know that “home is always elsewhere” (14) for a “British Subject” of African descent
traveling between continents, and that his right as a British citizen to consider Britain his home is
not taken for granted by everybody there. On top of the fact that the officer's dislike of the poetic
persona is reminiscent of another British Subjects poem, namely, “A Gift of a Rose” (11), where
racism manifests itself more violently as police brutality, the poetic persona's sense of never being
at home reminds readers again of how much displacement characterizes history for members of the
African diaspora. Since the poetic persona is an Afro- British citizen whose genealogical origins
might be found in a formerly colonized part of the West Indies or in Africa, where people of African
descent have often been reduced to minority status under white hegemony, his ancestors may have
been uprooted from Africa and taken across the Middle Passage as slaves to the “New World,” or
subjected to European colonialism in Africa, that is, in a “home” or homeland that used to be
“theirs” but was conquered and ruled by “some other body” (16). In this sense, it is not surprising to
find a reworked version of “Home”'s sense of uprootedness in Feeding the Ghosts, where slaves are
claimed by the sea, which wants them to “Learn that home is always some other shore” (D'Aguiar
1997, 117) once it has swallowed them up to make their bodies move constantly with oceanic
currents, which have become their “home” (4). This “rule” of this then Atlantic “home” is, again, a
law of displacement that is reminiscent of the tidalectic economy of metaphor, which always retreats
to return in a way that may help to prevent amnesia thanks to the hypomnesic quality of
metaphorical retreat.98 In other words, the discomfort of uprootedness, or of being re-rooted in
displacement – in sum, of a root becoming a route (DeLoughrey 2007a) – has the quality of
98 Again, the rule of the home, or the law of the home and, by metaphorical extension, the law of the land, is the
etymological signification of economy, from the Greek, oikos (home), and nomia (rule, law, and distribution or
sharing) (Derrida 1991, 17). In a colonial context, it is then also interesting to perceive anti-colonial activists asking
for home rule as a way of re-claiming control over, among other things, the colony's economy.
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preventing a certain past (here, that of the Middle Passage experience) from being forgotten by
witnesses of the throwing of slaves to the waves in Feeding the Ghosts, or by the poetic persona in
“Home,” who is led, in his migratory situation, to conclude that “home is always elsewhere”
(D'Aguiar 1993, 14).
The same designation of non-fixity as the “locus” of historical memory for members of the
African diaspora appear,s again, in Derek Walcott's Omeros too, when Achille – a Western
mythological figure cross-tropically displaced to the Caribbean – watches his reflection in ripples
and thinks it seems “homesick / for the history ahead, as if its proper place / lay in unsettlement”
(Walcott 1990, 140). The resemblance that exists between D'Aguiar's sense of home being
elsewhere (D'Aguiar 1993, 14; 1997, 117) and Walcott's impression of “proper place” as
unsettlement,” in addition to the images of oceanic partition that both authors share, confirm that
Walcott is one of D'Aguiar's crucial Caribbean forebears. 99 Moreover, be it through “uncoerced or
recreational travel experience[s]” or through “the very different types of traveling undergone by
refugees, migrants and slaves” (Gilroy 133), the poetic persona in “Home” and drowned slaves of
the Middle Passage in Feeding the Ghosts are all inscribed, like Walcott's Achille, in a history of
cross-tropical and transatlantic displacements that is brought back to mind, once again, through the
economy of the metaphor of the home-as-being-elsewhere which, hence, functions as a tropicality
in these contexts.
The functions of home and sea do not differ (and thus reinforce the idea that the economy of
liquidity is a defining feature of D'Aguiar's sea riff) in Airy Hall, Fred D'Aguiar's second collection
of – as in Mama Dot, autobiographical (Stade & Karbiener 127) – poems dealing with the poet's
childhood in Guyana, as can be seen in “A Great House by the Sea,” which also appears to engage
with issues of memory by conveying a peculiar sense of perdition related to the ocean:
99 This sense of an intertextual link between “Home” and Omeros is reinforced by the paradox of Achille's
“homesickness” – that is, a feeling of nostalgia for something that is supposed to be past – for “the history ahead,”
which conveys the same sense of a “prophetic vision of the past” (Glissant 1989, 63-4) as that perceived in Bob
Marley's designation of water as a crystal ball in “Dread” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16). For a more detailed discussion of
Glissant's “prophetic vision of the past” in relation to Bakhtin's notion of “historical inversion,” see Chapter V.
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Our first smell of the sea
Is dead flesh we mistake
For poisonous farts;
this night air is shitty.
We race indoor for body odour,
for air fired by central heating.
Our voices carry so well
It takes forever to find ourselves (D'Aguiar 1989, 42)
The sea smells of corpses in putrefaction that might be those, in the context of D'Aguiar's poetry, of
slaves who were thrown to the sea and who drowned there, in the Middle Passage, if the poem's sea
is the Atlantic littoral of Guyana, as the collection's autobiographical dimension suggests. Moreover,
the fact that “voices carry so well” over or in the vicinity of water, on top of being a well-known
physical quality of that element, is also expressed in Feeding the Ghosts, where the voice of dead
slaves can sometimes be heard in the wind that blows over the Atlantic: “When the wind is heard it
is their breath, their speech” (D'Aguiar 1997, 4), traveling over a poisonous sea (172). But the
movement of sounds over water makes those who utter them hard to localize: “It takes forever to
find ourselves” (D'Aguiar 1989, 42). The overall impression being conveyed by “ourselves” is a
sense of disorientation that is emphasized by the repeated fricative alliterations in “f” throughout the
stanzas, which may evoke the dispersion of the characters' voices over water as much as the sound
of the wind over the sea. Furthermore, that line – “It takes forever to find ourselves” – might not
literally mean that it is hard for several persons to find one another, for its syntax is vague enough to
allow for one to read it as a plural version of “it takes forever for one to find oneself.” In other
words, each person who is out on the beach might be facing the sea and its sounds in an
introspective quest to know oneself.100 In this perspective, the quest seems unproductive, since the
wind that brings odors of “dead flesh” to the shore is another “voice,” or significant trace, that the
living (standing on the shore) fail to recognize and understand as that of potential forebears (dead at
sea), since the smell coming in with sea winds is mistaken for that of “poisonous farts.” For if, as
said above, the place where the scene takes place is the Guyanese, Atlantic shore, and since looking
100The presumed Guyanese context could then be cross-tropically and implicitly related to Greco-Roman culture again,
through the line “It takes forever to find ourselves,” that is reminiscent of the Oracle of Delphi's exhortation for
people to know themselves.
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for oneself can correspond, sometimes, to looking for one's legacy, for one's ancestors, some of
which (if, again, the poem's characters are assumed to be Guyanese people of African descent) may
have been forced to cross the Middle-Passage, or even to drown there, then, the smell brought by
the wind has a hypomnesic potential that is not initially understood by the poem's “we,” and the
dispersal of odors and voices over water destabilizes the fixity of one's individual features into
transoceanic movement again. As a result to the unidentifiable quality and depersonalizing nature of
these geographical trajectories, the poem's narrators – on shore, at sea, or both – “race indoor for
body odour:” as seen above in a reading of “Thisbe to Pyramus” (D'Aguiar 1993, 62-3) the
polysemous quality of “race” may function quite equivocally in “A Great House by the Sea”
(D'Aguiar 1989, 42) too, and actually adumbrate D'Aguiar's revision of Ovid in British Subjects.
Racing indoor may amount to putting one's race indoor in order to preserve it from the wind as an
eroded reminder of transatlantic history – bringing the sea's “smell of dead flesh” to the shore –, a
past that one's “race” was once subjected to, and that the poem's “we” is first confronted with in its
attempt at “finding ourselves,” if “finding ourselves” may, again, be interpreted, in part at least, as
genealogical quest. Moreover, genealogy is actually at stake from the beginning of the poem, as a
theme that is first presented in a matter of fact, yet Biblical tone that is reminiscent of Ecclesiastes
1:4: “One man dies, another steps into his shoes; / a mother's final cry / begins her child's” in the
poem (D'Aguiar 1989, 42). But this apparently unalterable quality of the genealogical chain, as it is
presented here, is questioned by the fact that the poem's characters cannot “find” themselves,
localize themselves in a house where “There are books to outlast life,” and before which (both
spatially and temporally) there is a sea over which breaths from the past are undecipherable, carried
over and dissolved in a Bermuda triangle of sorts, only giving way to an unpleasant hypomnesic
smell of putrefying corpses that is yet not recognized as such by “we,” and, hence, functions as the
representation of a genealogical break – relative to the Middle Passage experience – that is
symptomatic of historical “amnesia,” a void that exhorts readers to remember. It is the uncanny,
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unheimlich, “un-homely” re-turn, or resurfacing of a submerged past, “that class of the terrifying
which leads back to something long known” (Freud 1917, 9), the olfactory oceanic reminder of the
Middle Passage experience, that induces the poem's characters to “race” back inside, where it is yet
still impossible for them to “find” themselves, even in the mansion's books, which, again, do not
seem to register, in historiographical detail, the traumatic Middle-Passage experience, not even the
name of lost African ancestors (Baucom 11). Here, the house by the sea, as in “Home” (D'Aguiar
1993, 14) still does not enhance one's sense of place, but reinforces the idea that roots always
already consist in routes for members of the African diaspora.
The “Great House by the Sea,” into which characters “race” away from the sea, might
reappear in the same collection, in a poem entitled “Airy Hall's Dynasty” (8). That poem is made up
of three nine-line stanzas that are all separated by a chorus-like rhyming couplet: “Boundaries you
had to respect, / Fictions you now inspect” (8). The “Boundaries” apparently are those of ages and
times, since the poem's first stanza evokes, in a way that is reminiscent of “A Great House by the
Sea,” successive generations that lived in the same house: “Children count from great- /
Grandchildren in dozens, half-dozens, / Nor twos or threes” (8). This genealogical theme is actually
extended throughout the poem thanks to the image of layers of paint on wood that “go back to
another age:”
So many layers has the wood spongy,
A feel you double-take every time.
To restore banisters and stairs,
You move through captured rainbows
Picking up sheer grain at last.
Brace yourself for the names;
Eraser, not restorer; rubbing out
Your own thumbprint and the dead's
Defenseless save your belief in ghosts. (8)
In this stanza, the poetic persona explains that scraping numerous and multicolor layers of paint off
the house's wooden parts is like moving “through captured rainbows,” through layers of paint that
stand for different periods of time, when various generations painted the house with different colors.
When all the layers are finally scraped off, the spongy “grain” of wood can be reached, and one
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may lay one's own fingers on the fingerprints ancestors left on the softened matter. As a
consequence, contact with the grain of wood is equated with contact with one's genealogical
forebears: layers of paint as the representation of a stratified past are no longer “boundaries” that
cannot be trespassed, and the then porous limits between present and pasts become the chorus'
“fictions you now inspect” (my emphasis) The rainbow that surrounds the fingerprints with layers
of paint is an open door to genealogical speculation rather than a register of actual facts, except for
a time-line of the house's color changes. The stanza thus stages time travel through paint layers to
fragile traces of ancestors printed in the grain of wood: fragile, “save your belief in ghosts.” In this
poem as in the foul winds of “A Great House by the Sea” and Feeding the Ghosts, specters are at
play again: the “boundaries you had to respect,” are visually represented by the spectacle of a
painted rainbow that the poetic persona now “inspect[s]” in fictions of his making, in speculations
about his/her ancestors' fingerprints, which are erased, conjured away by his/her own thumbprint as
it restores, or conjures them back up to him/her, but only in his/her imagination, as a temporary
haunting before s/he finds a “groove all [his/hers]” (9) (the poem/text itself?) to leave his/her
imprint. Hence, in this poem as in “A Great House by the Sea” and Feeding the Ghosts, the
questions of memory and genealogy are raised, and although the sea is absent from “Airy Hall's
Dinasty” – unless the poem's house is the same as that of “A Great house by the sea” – the
hypomnesic quality of metaphorical re-treat and tidalectics appears to be replaced by what Derrida
designates, in Specters of Marx, as “hauntology,” or the conjuring (up and away, in another re-treat
of sorts) of more or less frequent (“specter” also designates the frequency of light) and fictional
(spectral) versions of the past through traces and imprints, that is, textuality (Derrida 1993, 49-50,
202).101 The connections that operate between textuality and genealogy actually constitute one of
the main themes of Fred D'Aguiar's novels, which are studied thoroughly in these terms in Chapter
IV. However, this problematic is also addressed in several of D'Agiuar's poems, in a way that is
101The problematic of ghosts and haunting in relation to Fred D'Aguiar's sea riff is discussed in more detail in the
present chapter's third part.
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directly connected to his sea riff and to a sense of displacement, and a brief detour into designations
of water as textuality must be made, before proceeding any further.
c. Water Writing
In his verse corpus, D'Aguiar develops a thematic relation between water and textuality in
collections such as British Subjects and Continental Shelf. For instance, in a poem entitled
“Caribbean” (D'Aguiar 2009, 17), one reads:
Let the galvanized zinc
Of the sea write on sand
Erase what it writes and pull
Away fast from this place (17)
The sea is compared to the metal of a nib that writes on the shore, but its writings are ephemeral
because subjected to erasure as the sea retreats over and from them. However, since the sea is bound
to write on the shore again as a pen that drifts with currents and waves, what is erased will
necessarily be retraced, albeit, maybe, in another form. Thus, the metaphor for the sea erasing its
writings always already implies a retracing of these writings. When the ocean is an author,
metaphors of writing constantly retreat (Derrida 1978, 66) in a tidalectic way. This correlation of the
sea and textuality can also be found in a passage from “Domestic Flight” (D'Aguiar 1993, 26): “The
river is sanskrit in black ink / scribbling away into the dark, / turning over with each tides” (26).
The river that is being dealt with is the Thames, and it is being compared to a type of writing –
sanskrit – that comes from the Asian subcontinent. The poetic voice also specifies that this is
“sanskrit in black ink” (my italics). This last specification is not accidental, since one of the poems
preceding “Domestic Flight” in British Subjects is entitled “Black Ink,” and deals with the poetic
persona's ebony hands. In such a context, readers cannot see the phrase “black ink” in “Domestic
Flight” without thinking of “black skin,” which also bears an anagrammatic relation to “black ink.”
To this extent, the idea that “The river is sanskrit in black ink” could syncretize British place, Indian
textuality, and African descent into a tropicality. The then tropical text's being tidalectically turned
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“over with each tide” conveys, in turn, and as in the passage that was just cited from “Carribean”
(D'Aguiar 2009, 17), the idea that the erasure of texts in water always presupposes their being
retraced there according to the rhythm of tides or, if they are not retraced identically, their writing
and reading is at least resumed, as the metaphorical evocation of the turning of pages through the
turning over of waves suggests. Finally, since Sanskrit is an ancient text understood only by a select
few scholars today, describing water as Sanskrit does amount to making water retrace a text that is
under the constant threat of unreadability and erasure, in the same way as metaphor undoes white
mythology. Such textuality brings back a dispersed tropical sense of belonging, a “domestic flight”
of sorts again.
The images of writing and erasure found in “Caribbean” and “Domestic Flight,” do not
escape the ruling influence of Omeros over D'Aguiar either, since Walcott also describes the sea as a
“crumpling parchment” (Walcott 1990, 282), “an epic where every line was erased / yet freshly
written in sheets of exploding surf,” and as a text in verse that “never altered its metre / to suit the
age, a wide page without metaphors” (296) – lines to which D'Aguiar then seems to respond,
confirming their argument. In that last citation, however, it is hard to determine whether the “wide
page without metaphors” is “the age” or the ocean. The internal rime seems to gather “page” and
“age” into a metaphor commenting upon the down-to-earth nature of reality, but since it is the ocean
that has been compared to a text throughout the passage, it might seem more likely for the sea to be
the “page.” But how could such a metaphorical sea write texts “without metaphors,” when the
metaphorical always retreats and re-treats “like a wave on the shoreline” (Derrida 1978, 66)? It
seems that the ocean is presented, here, paradoxically enough, 102 both as a historical register under
constant rewriting and as its own amnesiac author, a personified sea forgetful of its perpetual retreat. The sea-as-author does not realize that the sea-as-text it writes always already is a revision:
102As shown above, in Poetics of Relation, Glissant describes the oceanic abyss as a “tautology,” because the shackles
of slaves who drowned in the Middle Passage mark the bottom of the Atlantic both as their historical “end” and as a
historical “beginning” for New World black communities: the ocean is “a vast beginning, but a beginning whose
time is marked by these balls and chains gone green” (6).
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metaphoricity springs from the “crumpling parchment” of the sea to the eye of the viewer, while the
personified sea-as-author does not remember the text its last wave wove, and rewrites a version of it
as if it were an original, rather than the rewriting of previous texts.
Thus, the sea writes, and the erasure of its text as it meets the shore does not necessarily
amount to a total loss of information for its readers, in that a text will be re-written there, maybe
over traces of former texts if erasure is not complete: the superimposition of oceanic texts deposits,
again, a sediment-like or maritime palimpsest that is tidalectically conditioned by the rhythms of
tides and waves in metaphorical retreats that are left for viewers to peer through. In this sense, it
then becomes logical to find that, as shown from another perspective in Chapter IV below, in order
to draw meaning from oceanic textuality, D'Aguiar actually displaces the text from the shore to the
surface of the sea in Feeding the Ghosts, when he deals with the corpses of slaves who were thrown
overboard: “Those bodies have their lives written on salt water. The sea current turns pages of
memory. One hundred and thirty-one souls roam the Atlantic with countless others. When the wind
is heard it is their breath, their speech. The sea is therefore home” (D'Aguiar 1997, 4). The sea is
both a source of restlessness, of uprootedness, and a home to the restless. It metaphorically contains
the traces of slaves and migrants, and constitutes the shifting locus where the last cultural traces of
Africa can be remembered in the history of people from the African diaspora. It also becomes a
historical and imaginative threshold toward the African past as soon as it is viewed as a haunted
text.
III. Specters of Liquid Limbo
In a comparison, above, between two Airy Hall poems, namely, “A Great House by the Sea”
and “Airy Hall Dinasty,” an analogy between the hypomnesic nature of the economy of liquidity, or
tidalectic re-treat, and Derrida's notion, in Specters of Marx, of “hauntology,” designating the
being/non-being of ghosts (Derrida 1993; 10, 63, 202), was suggested, because ghosts in “Airy Hall
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Dinasty” play the same mnemonic role as the ocean in “A Great House by the Sea.” It may further
be argued that the convergence of re-treat and hauntology resides in Derrida's definition of
hauntology as an ontology of conjuring (202), conjuration consisting in both a sending away of
being, an “exorcising” of sorts (58), and a summoning, a convocation, a conspiring of spirits or
ghosts (49-50). In other words, it is tempting to contend that hauntology, or conjuring, from a
Derridean perspective, is, like the withdrawal, or re-treat of metaphor, a riddance of being that calls
into being (Derrida 1978, 66), a simultaneous dismissal and convocation. 103 Furthermore, if, as
shown above, tidalectics consist in the tuning of metaphorical re-treat to the rhythm of tides and
waves, tidalectics, then, illustrate the frequency of re-treat, that is, its specter: “The specter, as its
name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible,” the rhythm
of light (125). Thus, that waves recede as they return, that metaphors simultaneously retreat and retreat, and that ghosts disappear by re-appearing, also points to rhythm, or specter, as the shared
feature of tides, metaphors, and ghosts.104
103Derrida reads Marx and the communist manifesto in that specific light for two reasons. One, because the Manifesto
is a conjuring of communism into being through the designation of communism as a ghosts that already haunts
society in the form of the recurrent, spectral social struggle of ruler and ruled: the opening words of the manifesto
claim that “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism” (qtd. in Derrida 1993, 2). Second, because,
since communism is designated by Marx as both spectral and as the arrival of social justice, Derrida views in Marx
the initiator of a messianic perception of the revenant, that is, a conception of the spectral “arrivant as justice”
(Derrida 1993, 33). Furthermore, the strength of Derrida's Specters of Marx is that it also consists, then, in an
actualization of what its text is precisely saying: from the preliminary notes of the book on, Derrida adopts, in light
of what has just been said, an arguably Marxist stance, by deciding to deal with “generations of ghosts” specifically
“in the name of justice,” because “No justice […] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some
responsibility […] before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars,
political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of extermination” (xviii).
Responsibility before the specter is the ethical, an-economic acknowledgment of the other as a non-totalizable
being, insofar as the singularity of otherness in itself is characterized by an economy of becoming, conjuring, or
hauntology (Derrida 1993, 26; Levinas 42-4), which is what leads Derrida, elsewhere, to define responsible
philosophy as the art of mourning, as is explained below, in Chapter V, in other, Orphic terms (Derrida 1999, 26-9).
As far as Fred D'Aguiar is concerned, his conjuring of the specters of the African diaspora, such as victims of the
transatlantic slave trade in Feeding the Ghosts, from the present, Marxist-Derridean perspective, corresponds, then,
to a responsible relation to that past, effected through the hypomnesic re-presentation of its victims in metaphorical,
tidalectic, and spectral terms, that is, in an ethical, moving hauntology of sorts, as explained below. Lois Parkinson
Zamora corroborates this sense of the ethical role of specters when she explains that “ghosts carry the burden of
tradition and collective memory: ancestral apparitions often act as correctives to the insularities of individuality, as
links to lost families and communities, or as reminders of communal crimes, crises, cruelties” (Zamora & Faris 297,
italics mine). For more information concerning the responsibility to remember transatlantic history, see also Alan
Rice's article entitled “British Selective Amnesia and the Political Imperative to Conserve Black Atlantic Memory”
(in Misrahi-Barak, Ed. 2005).
104In this sense, specters and metaphors also share the characteristic feature of pointing to the decomposable nature of
origin: language is inextricably metaphorical, always already subjected to the re-turn of the trope when it tries to
turn tropes down, and a ghost is always a revenant, a specter that always “begins by coming back” (D'Aguiar 1993,
11).
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In the introductory comments of her article “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in
U.S and Latin American Fiction,” Lois Parkinson Zamora confirms the presence of such a link
between tropes and ghosts: “[Ghosts] are always double (here and not) and often duplicitous
(where?). They mirror, complement, recover, supplant, cancel, complete. Which is to say: literary
ghosts are highly metaphoric. They bring absence into presence, maintaining at once the “is” and
“is not” of metaphorical truth” (Zamora & Faris 497, emphasis mine). In such a perspective,
correlations of the spectral and the tidalectic – that is, again, the oceanic version of metaphorical retreat – are not accidental in D'Aguiar's works, but coherent with the economy of his sea riff.105 And
it is such correlations, found in images of haunting and dilution, or in recurrent, spectral allusions to
the presumably ghostly realm of (oceanic) limbo and to death, that are to be inspected now in Fred
D'Aguiar's work, that is, in his verse corpus, but also in prose works such as Feeding the Ghosts and
A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, the spectral themes of which call for their inclusion within
the present discussion, although D'Aguiar's prose works are studied in a different, yet related light,
in Part Two, below.
a. Images of Haunting & Dilution
Feeding the Ghosts (1997) certainly is the work in which D'Aguiar works the most on sea
conceptualizations that are related to specters. The title – and maybe the idea – of this novel
apparently comes from a Mama Dot poem bearing the same title, “Feeding the Ghosts” (D'Aguiar
1985, 39). In other words, the novel's title itself is spectral, insofar as it is recurrent, and the
105Speaking of economy, it is also clear that the spectral is related to speculation, and not only in etymological terms,
for, as Derrida shows, financial speculation corresponds to a phantomalization of property (Derrida 1993, 51), that
is, to the magic conversion of currency and property (56). Such considerations make a lot of sense when applied to
the historical background of the transatlantic slave trade, which suffuses, or haunts, a significant part of D'Aguiar's
sea riff: the commerce of slaves, their inclusion into a system of equivalences and currencies (“currency” being yet
another word pointing to the tropical flow, or “current” that characterizes the economy of liquidity) arguably turns
slaves to ghosts, to phantomatic property. Such an argument loads the presentation of slaves as specters in Feeding
the Ghosts (1997) with meaning, and provides one with an angle of approach for a reading of that novel. However,
this line of argument, in relation to the slave trade, has already been pursued by Ian Baucom in Specters of the
Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, where he reads D'Aguiar's 1997 novel in those
terms (Baucom 2005, 308-33). In order not to reiterate Baucom's exploration of the novel, the slightly different view
of the spectral as a guise of the metaphorical that is, in turn, adaptable to tidalectics, will be preferred for readings of
passages from Feeding the Ghosts in the present study.
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narrative it designates might, as a consequence, have a revisionary link to the poem. This intuition
is confirmed by the novel's initial description of the Atlantic, on which the Zong sails, as an
ensemble of “loose floorboards” (D'Aguiar 1997, 9) which echoes the poem's final line:
“Generations of dust, in floorboard creases, stir” (1985, 39). Knowing that the crew of the Zong
(again, the ship the story of which is recounted in Feeding the Ghosts) threw more than a hundred
so-called “sick” slaves – adults as well as children – overboard, and since the sea is depicted as
being made up of “loose floorboards” which actually represent the peaks and troughs of waves, one
can imagine who the poem's “generations of dust” are. This dust consists in the eroded remains of
slaves thrown to the sea, and whose presence there is, arguably, represented as having been
forgotten as one omits to sweep the dust between the boards of one's floor. Yet, such an oblivion,
such an exorcism or conjuring away of their memory leads to their being conjured back up as
ghosts: in between the regular spacing of floorboards and/or the frequent peaks and troughs of
waves, they spectrally “stir”over an Atlantic seafloor that erases their passing – both passage and
death – as much as it retraces it in a tidalectic hauntology of sorts by way of which, in spite of being
silt, they are not still.106
However, before all 132 slaves are thrown into the Atlantic to drown, and after Mintah, the
protagonist, has managed to climb back on board after being sent to the waters, one slave, a
distressed, old woman, recites the following, poetic plea:
We are on the sea
Not in the sea
Over the sea
Not under the sea
Apart from the sea
Not a part of the sea
Show us mercy
Mintah's mercy
106For a more detailed historical contextualization of the Zong story and its literary treatments, along with a listing of
the instances in which Fred D'Aguiar riffs on the “floorboard creases” image, see the second part of Chapter IV,
below.
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And show us land
Mintah's land (D'Aguiar 1997, 94)
Being “Not a part of the sea” but “Apart from the sea,” according to these lines, means being alive,
and ultimately distinguishes land from sea in terms of life and death. “Land” in the passage seems
to be exposed as a correlative of “mercy,” which itself, apparently, implies being spared by the
murderous crew and, hence, from the waves. On the one hand, the wish for land, in addition to
translating an obvious desire to survive the crossing of the Middle Passage, implies that it might be
preferable to die on dry land than in the sea, presumably because dying on land as a slave entails a
chance of being buried (or, maybe, cremated), and gaining posterity by leaving the trace of a tomb
(or funeral urn), while being thrown in the middle of the Atlantic may not grant such sepulchral
traceability.107 On the other hand, D'Aguiar also seems to be punning on “mercy” as “mer/sea,” a
gathering of the French and English translations of words having a similar signification. With this
lexical fusion, “mercy” becomes not only a portmanteau word but a metaphorical and physical
correlative of land, a “translational and transnational” (Bhabha 7) or cross-cultural, anglo-french
merci-mercy/mer-sea. And in this sense, in the old woman's plea, it is then the sea, rather than land,
that is being correlated with mercy. Then, if the sea is mercy, if the Atlantic may, quite
paradoxically, spare the people it drowns, it might be by restoring them with oceanic posterity. Such
a posthumous perennial in the sea, however, can never be effected by the fixity of a tomb, but
through tidal translational movements of mer/sea as metaphorical mercy, that is, the both tidal and
tropical re-treat of the erasure of slaves into a hypomnesic trace of their passage/passing. In this
sense, then, what the old woman is asking for is not the temporary deferral of a death that is always
coming, but the exemption from oblivion thanks to spectrality which, if she is to die at sea, will be
granted by waves as metaphorical reminders: “Mintah's mercy” is the mer/sea that allows, as a
substitute for a regularly visited tombstone, for her spectral return (as memory).108 The effect of
107And even in the case of being buried in a place marked by a tombstone, individual posterity may still be thwarted by
anonymity, as D'Aguiar's poem, “At the Grave of the Unknown African,” shows (D'Aguiar 1993, 21-3). Yet, it may
be contended that the recording of such a grave by D'Aguiar in a unique poem restores the dead slave with
singularity.
108Dead slaves who were thrown overboard call for Mintah's remembrance too: “Mintah. Our bones adding to a road
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such ghostly restoration, again, is the undoing of white mythology, the act of preventing one from
ignoring and/or forgetting one's responsibility to remember that the erased side of the modern coin,
the hidden sign of its calculated value, the language of capital, liquidity, and financial “liquidation,”
derive from the actual, murderous “liquidation” of innumerable African men, women, and children,
during or after their crossing of the Middle Passage. Again, such restoration is crucial, because
justice is not conceivable if one fails to remember, that is, to look back at or re-spect one's
retrospective and prospective responsibility before past specters and ghosts to come (Derrida 1993,
xviii).
And that process of erasure and restoration is what the prologue of Feeding the Ghosts
describes, explaining that slaves who die at sea leave no trace but the sea itself, because it erodes
the body until it becomes sea salt, a diluted part of the sea. Yet, it is through such dilution that, by
the same token, “the sea becomes them, becomes their memory” (D'Aguiar 1997, 4), their spectral
reminder. The same description of dilution as the aquatic becoming of the specter may also be
viewed in the above-cited passage when Mintah, in a mirror image of Marley in “Dread” (D'Aguiar
1993, 16), imagines that sea current “sweeps the floor of the sea and inadvertently combs [her] hair
from [her] skull and arranges it in a pattern of waves [...]” (D'Aguiar 1997, 214). In the present
perspective, in the poem entitled “Colour” (D'Aguiar 1993, 17), which follows “Dread” in British
Subjects, the dilution of the poetic persona's pigmentation then also appears to be endowed with
hypomnesic power. Here is how the poem starts:
I woke with the last of my colour on my gums.
The rest had melted from me and coated the sheets
mattress and both pillowcases. I cursed myself
for sleeping nude as I stood before the mirror.
This pale somebody stared right back and right through me,
he looked so hard, I had to glance behind myself.
of bones. Mintah. Our cries in the wind. Our bodies in the sea with a sea-sound falling soundlessly. Mintah” (213).
The frequency with which Mintah's name is repeated turns her name to a spectral incantation, all the more so since
the dead speakers are bodiless, ghostly entities whose bones have sunk to a seafloor where, in spite of having fallen
“soundlessly” there, they form a skeletal spine which, along with the slaves' cries carried by the wind, becomes a
metaphorical reminder that counteracts oceanic erasure by retracing the fact of their death over the transatlantic path
of the Middle Passage.
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An involuntary shiver took me over.
Ghost after ghost hurdled my grave. […] (17, my italics)
In spite of traits of humor such as in this excerpt's sixth line, color liquefying itself and leaving the
body is not a pleasant thing for the person concerned. Sweat, which, like the sea, is a form of salt
water, has had the effect of melting the poetic persona's color away from his body. As a
consequence, he almost fails to recognize himself in the mirror, staring “right back and right
through [him],” in the same way as the treacherous water and light of “Silver Song,” as shown
above, “look through” the poetic persona as if s/he “wasn't there, or dead” (29). The loss of color
may appear, then, to have made the poetic persona translucent, to have altered his appearance until
it matched the stereotypical image of an ethereal specter one can “look through,” all the more so
since, upon seeing his colorlessness, the poetic persona almost immediately conjures up the picture
of phantoms jumping over his grave (D'Aguiar 1993, 17). And if ghosts are beings one can see
through, readers may surely “sea through” the poem's phantoms and protagonist as specters, as
resurgences of a haunting Middle Passage imagery, when the poetic persona decides to take “a bath
deep enough to float in” (17): in addition to the lead provided by intertextuality with “Silver Song,”
which, again, is evocative of the history of the Middle Passage, the bath where a formerly black
man floats is inextricably reminiscent, in the present context, of the somber image of a slave's
corpse drifting in the Atlantic. The withdrawal by dilution of the poetic persona's pigmentation is, in
a hauntological re-treat of sorts, a conjuring back up of the historical past of his African forebears.
The past is also involved at the end of the poem, when the poetic speaker looks at himself in
the mirror again, and watches the “usual patches where [he]'d lost parts of [himself] / in guest
houses, from Land's End to John O' Groats / gloat[ing] back, familiar, ghosted and ghosting” (17).
“Land's End” is “sea's beginning” and “John O' Groats” evokes a past that was long before the
poetic persona's time. While color is lost, scars still operate as hypomnesic inscriptions, punctual
markers of a personal and historical past that is, again, “ghosted and ghosting” (17) or haunting,
meaning that its return, its remembrance, if spectral, is inescapable.
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b. The Middle Passage & Limbo
As in “Colour,” a representation of a contemporary poetic persona's reminiscence of the
relatively more distant past of slavery is evoked in a poem called “At Sea,” in Continental Shelf:
Blame that two-week crossing of the Atlantic
By boat back in '62 from England to Guyana,
When I learned to rock and roll effortlessly,
And the world, the whole liquid enterprise of it,
Seemed to be going some place, leaving me
Behind or in the middle of nowhere, […] (D'Aguiar 2009, 6)
That D'Aguiar, as a child, was sent from England to be reared in Guyana, in 1962 (Stade &
Karbiener 127), suggests the poem has an autobiographical dimension. Yet, the mention of a
“crossing of the Atlantic” from England, a formerly imperial force, to Guyana, a former British
colony, is not only significant on a personal, biographical level, but points to specific historical
facts, such as European colonization of the Americas, the triangular trade, and transatlantic slavery.
In that context, the crossing of the Atlantic from England to Guyana may also conjure an inverted,
distorted image of the Middle Passage experience. In other words, through a childhood memory,
that is, thanks to personal anamnesis, the poetic persona reminds readers of a broader, historical past
in the poem's first couplet. An additional evocation of the Middle Passage experience consists in the
poetic persona's description of the Atlantic as the “middle of nowhere” (6), for such a description of
the Middle Passage is first uttered, in D'Aguiar's work, by Mintah in Feeding the Ghosts, while she
is “at sea” (D'Aguiar 1997, 61).There, she tries to come to terms with her position, as she has been
taken from Africa on a slave ship to a destination unknown to her, but which does not seem
promising, according to the way she and her companions are treated on board: “I remain between
my life that is over and my life to come. The sea keeps me between my life” (199). The “life that is
over” is the African life, and the one “to come” is unpredictable for Mintah. Her thinking that one of
her lives is over conveys a sense of death and of an ongoing process of transition towards another
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kind of existence which, being unknown, gives an impression of disorientation in turn. Another
interesting point is that time and space are interconnected in that the past life is linked to the African
continent, while the future one will necessarily happen elsewhere, but not in the sea. The sea
appears to be a place where life, and therefore time and space in Mintah's thinking, are suspended.
To the heroine, “Water promise[s] nothing. A life on water [is] no life to live, just an in-between
life, a suspended life, a life in abeyance, until land present[s] itself and enable[s] that life to resume”
(61). Mintah has been lost “in the middle of nowhere” (61) for so long that time either stopped or
became incommensurable. Hence, in “At Sea,” the poetic persona, feeling left “Behind, or in the
middle of nowhere” is in a state of mind that is comparable to that of Mintah, a slave crossing the
Middle Passage.
In that somber context, corresponding to an in-between position and a sense of doubt for
both the characters in question, it is not accidental for the poetic persona of “At Sea” to explain that
it is over the Atlantic that he learned to “rock and roll effortlessly” (D'Aguiar 2009, 6): in addition
to the musical evocation of the movement of waves, the mention of dance, correlated to doubt and
an in-between state, gives the impression that the Atlantic is specifically being compared to limbo.
Limbo, like rock and roll, is a form of song and dance the creation of which was conditioned by the
cross-cultural confrontation of European and African people. Moreover, limbo dancing consists in
the crossing of a threshold symbolized by a stick under which dancers must pass until they can no
longer dance through the interstice that is left between the parallel lines formed by stick and ground.
The allegorical rite of passage that the limbo dance constitutes is, of course, easily comparable to
Christian limbo as the designation of the purgatorial place between heaven and hell where
unbaptized children are, according to some Christian beliefs, condemned to wander, like ghosts.
This Christian signification is, presumably, at the origin of the common use of “limbo” as a
metaphorical reference to doubt. As a consequence, and again, limbo may be viewed, thanks to its
polysemous quality, as a tropicality and, in the contexts of “At Sea” and Feeding the Ghosts, as a
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metaphorical description of the Middle Passage experience, that is, as the crossing of a limbo-like
gap the parallel limits of which could either consist in the continents lounging the Atlantic or the
imaginary lines of Cancer and Capricorn. This sense of a transatlantic limbo is made explicit when
the narrative voice, in Feeding the Ghosts, predicts that slaves dying at sea or away from Africa will
not be “laid to rest but in limbo. Each spirit [will] have to find its way home over this sea”
(D'Aguiar 1997) and retrace steps back across the limbo threshold of sorts constituted by the
Atlantic. Moreover, that this description of the Middle Passage as limbo contains the only
occurrence of the “limbo” word in Feeding the Ghosts makes, through it's uniqueness or singularity,
such a designation of the Atlantic stand out.109
Wilson Harris also strengthens that sense of a link between limbo and the Atlantic in his
essay entitled “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas,” where he explains that
although limbo is a dance the origins of which are to be found in Africa, the form under which it is
known in the Caribbean today “was born, it is said, on the slave ships of the Middle Passage”
(Harris 1970, 157). He further indicates, alluding to the African spider trickster-deity called Anansi,
that getting through the cramped “limbo gateway” of the seas towards the Americas in spidery
contortions is an experience that, to some extent, African slaves share across history with “the
refugee flying from Europe” and the “indentured East Indian and Chinese from Asia” (157), within
a broad inter-cultural context. It is then clear that, as a tropicality, limbo may simultaneously bring
back the specters of transatlantic historical pasts and lead forth into metaphorical, poetic
possibilities. Both of these directions are again, contained in the prose of Feeding the Ghosts, in the
lines of “At Sea,” and even more explicitly so in the poems of the “Limbo” part of “Islands,” in the
third book of Brathwaite's The Arrivants:
stick is the whip
and the dark deck is slavery
limbo
109For a discussion of that excerpt in relation to the myth of the flying Africans and Greco-Roman mythology, see
Chapter V, part III.
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limbo like me (Brathwaite 194)
More specifically, this excerpt comes from a poem entitled “Caliban,” that Harris also cites in
“History, Fable and Myth” (Harris 1970, 157). Apart from the poem's reference to Shakespeare's
“The Tempest, a text often claimed as a founding (masculine) narrative of Caribbean literature”
(DeLoughrey 2007a, 79), what matters in this passage for the present purpose is the fact that limbo
and the Middle Passage experience are closely linked again. Limbo, like slavery, is explicitly
mentioned in a couplet that is repeated at regular intervals through the whole poem, like a persistent
– and italicized – chorus that would illustrate and summarize the stanzas it frames, in a song mostly
governed by the quick, frenetic, and ternary rhythm of anapestic feet. Slavery is also referred to
with the “whip,” here compared to the stick limbo dancers, or slaves in the poem, might have to try
to pass without being “touched” by it, and without losing their balance on the slave ship's
alliterative “dark deck” (Brathwaite 194). Yet, in the poem, the polysemous quality of “limbo” is
only partly used, in that the word seems to refer exclusively to the Afro-Caribbean dance, and not to
the Christian belief. Conversely, the slave-master's presence is only felt through the metonymy of
the whip: the subversiveness of the dance as a way to escape the whip symbolically lessens the
significance and efficiency of Western forms of oppression, which can only be perceived in part.
However, despite the finite, atrocious, and utterly violent nature of intercultural contacts on the
slave-ships of the Middle Passage, limbo as a tropicality remains a poetic image endowed with a
poetic power to prevent one from irresponsibly forgetting such historical, cross-tropical facts
(Derrida 1993, xviii).
As a tropicality, limbo has such a poetic power that in “History, Fable and Myth,” Harris
goes so far as to legitimize a “pun on limbo as a kind of shared phantom limb which has become a
subconscious variable in West Indian theatre” (Harris 1970, 157, my italics). In medical terms, a
“phantom limb” corresponds to one's continued impression of feeling one's amputated body part. In
other words, a phantom limb, from a Derridean perspective, is aptly called so, because it
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corresponds, by definition, to the dialectic of hauntology, of conjuring up and away, of simultaneous
presence and absence, that is, neither presence nor non-presence (Derrida 1993, 49-50, 58, 202). A
“pun on limbo” as a phantom limb would then be indicative of the spectral nature of limbo as the
trace of an absence or of a loss, that is, in the present context, and as seen above, as a reminder of
the Africa from which the African victims of the transatlantic slave trade were severed. In this
sense, limbo then plays a crucial role, as it constitutes an imaginary and spectral or metaphorical
gateway to an “amputated past” that cannot be physically returned to. The remainder of the present
sub-section accordingly argues that such an idea of limbo as a tropical phantom limb, as an
intertextual “subconscious variable in West Indian theater” is clearly identifiable in Fred D'Aguiar's
only published play, A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, where the production of tropicality
also relies, as in some of D'Aguiar's poems, on intertextual connections with the works of Irish
writers such as Heaney and Joyce, in addition to the aforementioned references to Yeats that the
play contains.
In A Jamaican Airman Foresees his Death, limbo is mentioned when Alvin's grandmother
recounts a premonitory dream about her grandson: “he was dead, but living; he looked older than
me. I was face to face with my grandson who looked older than me. It could only mean one thing.
He wasn't in this world and he couldn't leave it: he belonged to the next world but he couldn't enter
it. He was in limbo” (233). This description has a progression that resembles that of the above-cited
passage where Mintah describes her in-between situation on the Atlantic (D'Aguiar 1997, 199):
while Alvin is locked in limbo between a worldly life and an afterlife, Mintah is trapped on the sea
between her African life and her life to come. In this sense, be it through the contortions of a
Caribbean dance in the making or through Christian imagery, the limbo metaphor occurs in
transoceanic contexts – again, Alvin and his friends have crossed the Atlantic on board a steamboat
to join the RAF – in these works as in Harris' article. However, Mintah's situation is expressed
within a conscious internal monologue, while Alvin's status is related to the unconscious through
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the dream his grandmother had (Freud 1899, 7). This unconscious quality, on top of its being
staged, appears to confirm Harris' claim that limbo is a “phantom limb,” a “subconscious variable
of West Indian theatre” (Harris 1970, 157), and suggests that D'Aguiar aims at supporting Harris'
view, all the more so since Fred D'Aguiar knows Wilson Harris personally, as can be seen in a series
of poems entitled “Frail Deposits” (D'Aguiar 1993, 35-6) where he recounts his meeting Harris and
spending a few days with him in Guyana, and since, before becoming a professional playwright,
novelist, and poet thanks to several writer-in-residence funds, D'Aguiar had also intended to write a
doctoral thesis on the works of Wilson Harris (Birbalsingh 135), which supports the idea that
D'Aguiar is more than familiar with the works of his Guyanese forebear. 110 It may also be noted that
an Afro-Jamaican Alvin in Christian limbo, as such, is an instance of tropicality too, a metaphorical
manifestation of the cross-cultural.
Moreover, in the same way as the sea is likened to limbo through an altered perception of
time, which is suspended for Mintah on the sea, between two lives, in Feeding the Ghosts, time
accelerates in Alvin's limbo, where he grows older that his grandmother in her dream. Mintah and
Alvin's analogous relations to limbo through singular timing comes in addition to their comparable
– yet very dissimilar in their respective conditions and outcomes – experience of the Atlantic: as
mentioned above, Alvin too actually crosses that sea, from Jamaica to Scotland, with his three
friends in order to join the British army, in a transatlantic trip that constitutes, as in “At Sea”
(D'Aguiar 2009, 6), a reversed image of the Middle Passage journey, and/or conjures up a specter of
the triangular trade. In addition, Gerry, one of Alvin's friends, explains that the movements of the
ship remind him of his mother: “this ship rocking me like my mother used to” (D'Aguiar 1991,
243).111 Gerry's description of the sea “rocking” him is comparable to that of the ocean where the
poetic persona “rock[s] and roll[s]” in “At Sea” (6), and may thus contribute to the creation of a
110For a more detailed discussion of the biographical, affective, and literary links that exist between Fred D'Aguiar and
Wilson Harris, see Chapter V, part III.
111From a psychoanalytical perspective, one may infer that Gerry's correlation of mother and oceanic movements, of
“mère” and “mer,” translates an unconscious pulsion of Thalassal regression, of return to one's initial and secure
aquatic mode of existence (Ferenczi 129). See chapter V for more information on that subject. Again, and as seen
above, the comparison between mother and sea is not unprecedented (Walcott 1990, 231).
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sense of limbo, all the more so since the crossing of the Atlantic by Afro-Caribbean men on a ship is
reminiscent of the Middle Passage experience. Furthermore, the correlation of a ship to a mother,
contrasting with the tomb-like image of slave-ship hulls, is also evocative of the simultaneity of
becoming and disappearance, of life and death that characterizes (limbo) hauntology. The image is
also reminiscent of Glissant's description of the atlantic “abyss” as a womb-tomb “tautology,” as a
“vast beginning marked by […] balls and chains gone green” (Glissant 1990, 6). The syncretized
simultaneity of these two pairs of antithetical images – life-death and beginning-legacy – in
descriptions of a transatlantic experience conjure a sense of limbo-like transition between a “life
that is over” and a “life to come” (D'Aguiar 1997, 199) by way of which D'Aguiar apparently
corroborates, again, Harris' definition of limbo as a phantom limb in Caribbean theater (Harris
1970, 157).
Finally, these tautological images, or paradoxes, in addition to the above-mentioned
references D'Aguiar's play makes to Yeats, also point to a potential intertextual link with Seamus
Heaney's poem “Limbo,” where a mother commits infanticide and thus sends her illegitimate child
to limbo:
Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon,
An illegitimate spawning
A small one thrown back
To the waters. […] (Heaney 1972, 70, my italics)
In these lines, the infant's being “netted,” like fish, and its having been thrown back into an aquatic
milieu evoke again, as was suggested, in a preceding note concerning Gerry's description of a ship
on water as a cuddling mother, a sense of Thalassal regression to the amniotic liquid (Ferenczi 129).
The place where the infant died is subsequently and tautologically associated to the locus of its
conception. The paradoxical nature of the poem is pursued in the following lines, which suggest
that as it descended into the lake, the baby was sen into limbo,
A cold glitter of souls
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Through some far briny zone.
But even Christ's palms, unhealed
Smart and cannot fish there. (70)
Tautology here resides in the fact that the child is being sent to limbo – again, a place where,
according to some Christian beliefs, unbaptized children go – while being figuratively baptized
through immersion: water, motherhood and limbo are all interconnected in the poem as in
D'Aguiar's play. As far as the theme of baptism is concerned, Mintah's being thrown and immersed
into Atlantic waters to rise back from them and return to the ship's hold in Feeding the Ghosts,
along with Tom's aforementioned “baptismal drowning” in Bloodlines, might consist in distant
echoes from the earlier evocations of limbo found in D'Aguiar's play (1991), which themselves
might cross-tropically draw from both Harris' theory Heaney's poetry.
However, in addition to drawing from Yeats and Heaney, intertextuality with Irish authors
and in relation to Caribbean contexts is also enhanced by one of the play's initial scenes, when
Alvin's and his friends' dreams of leaving Jamaica and see the world by joining British troops
become susceptible to come true: one day, on the radio, they hear, Churchill's call to the colonies to
participate in the war effort. The call is being parodied by a local madman, Kojo, who imitates
Churchill simultaneously as his call is broadcast, and calls colonial subjects “dominoes,” “minions”
from the “dominions,” “children” of Britannia, thus implicitly revealing the racist and imperialist
condescension that transpires in Churchill's plea. Ironically enough, as they listen to the radio, the
four friends are actually playing a domino game, and call each other names as they take their turns:
Bruce Take this you bitch! Oh Marcus Garvey!
Alvin Our Odysseus, riding the sea in the Black Star liner to victory!
Gerry You mean Ulysses on the Liffey!
Tim O James Joyce with the tongue of a witch and the brain of a dirty old man, inspire this hand up
the skirt of the opposition. (D'Aguiar 1991, 235)
Marcus Garvey, the well known Jamaican leader of the “Back to Africa movement,” which was
very successful in the United States, along with his Black Star steamship corporation (Lewis 41),
are compared to Odysseus and his travels, so that an intertextual link between Homer's – Western –
tale and Garvey's movement is created, and the voyage of Odysseus is, as a result, turned to another
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crossing of the Atlantic, the aim of which is to consist, through a return to Africa, in a reversal of
the Middle Passage journey. In the following speech act, “Odysseus” is then transferred to Ireland
on the Liffey river as Ulysses: this constitutes an additional intertextual link between the play and
the work of an Irish writer, namely, James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. This passage is highly
tropical again, in that it intertextually and metaphorically brings Greco-Roman mythology,
canonical Irish literature, and West Indian and/or Afro-American activism together through analogy,
that is, through the themes of migration and diaspora across the seas.
Walcott creates analogous tropicalities in Omeros, where he displaces Homer's tale to the
Caribbean, which he then links to Ireland: an Irish couple, the Plunketts, are present in the novel,
and their metaphorical trip back across the Atlantic from the Caribbean to Ireland is described with
the same words as those used to depict Achilles' journey back to Africa (Walcott 1990, 215-6).
Moreover, “Mr. Joyce” and “Ulysses” are mentioned in Omeros as well (201), and a reference to
Irish lakes, with the town of Glendalough, meaning “Glenn of the Two Lakes” in Gaelic, is made
(200). Such references in Walcott's text invite one to think of the passage in D'Aguiar's play as
being potentially linked to Omeros as well, and such a heavy-handed intertextuality might implicitly
suggest that D'Aguiar, or Walcott as it were, find, as suggested above, in Chapter I, cross-tropical
analogies between Ireland and the Caribbean within a globalized, cross-cultural framework. Such
intertextuality functions as a tropicality in that it stages migration and diaspora, again, as a cultural
vehicle that allows for a syncretic and metaphorical view of the experiences of various populations
as analogous and related rather than fundamentally different and separate. Again, limbo, as a
tropicality, plays a crucial and haunting role in the making of such cross-cultural intertextual bonds.
c. Watery Re-presentations of Death
Apart from being evocative of limbo, Mintah's impression of suspension between two lives
and Alvin's transatlantic journey to war both suggest the risk of death. But more than a theme, death
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constitutes yet another recurrent, spectral image that is repeatedly being related to water in
D'Aguiar's verse, even in works that do not directly deal with slavery. For instance, in Bill of Rights,
Jonestown children die eaten by piranhas:
Chump chump went the piranhas
On the children who jumped
Unthinkingly into the river
During a spell without supervision
Oh red river
Howls under water
Blood signaling miles downstream
For more, more piranhas to come feast (D'Aguiar 1998, 12)
The alliterative correlation of “children” and the “chump” sound of jaws is a very strong and
sinister sonic evocation of what occurs in the scene: the children accidentally dive into a school of
piranhas during a “spell without supervision.” The absence of “supervision” is equivocal, in that it
may simultaneously designate the parents' lack of attention – they are not present to grant the safety
of their children – and a moment of freedom for the children who, for once, are allowed to play
instead of being given tasks to contribute to the well-being of the Jonestown commune. In other
words, they enjoy a “spell” during which assignments are not “spelled out” to them, which leaves
them with time to play, a possibility about which they are so excited that, as if “under a spell,” they
blindly jump into deadly waters (Derrida 1993, 122). Hence, the pro-spect of a lapse of spare time
operates like the casting of a spell, like the conjuration of spectral image that makes the children
spellbound and vulnerable to a watery milieu which, in D'Aguiar, is yet another conjurer of sorts.
The stream, as a consequence, turns red as the children die, and gives visibility to the dilution of
their bodies into the river's current, which conjures a shifting, spectral trace of the children in turn.
Death hiding below the surface of water, waiting to kill children, is even more directly
represented in “Elegies,” when the poetic persona goes fishing with his children and watches the
lines (those of the fishing rods as much as those of the poem) which
From the rod formed a perpendicular angle of solid
Steadiness, and it was there that my eyes revolved
In my head to make me switch places with the fisher
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In the water, who fished for men as the men chased
Fish, but who seemed to settle for my boy's face. (D'Aguiar 2009, 76)
Again, the “Elegies” in Continental Shelf consist in the poet's attempt at mourning for the victims of
the Virginia Tech shootings. In this sense, the poetic persona might be viewed, once more, as the
poet himself and, most importantly, the above-cited passage suggests, as a consequence, that the
massacre has had such a traumatic effect on the poet that his imagination is being stirred towards
the morbid even in leisurely situations: the speaker mistakes his own reflection in the water for a
personification of death as a fisher who threatens to kill his son. Haunting is at play here again,
then, for it is the presence to mind, or recurrent, spectral memory of the Virginia dead that induces
the specular inversion (on a treacherous watery surface again) of the speaker with his reflection on
the stream, and makes him fear the death of his boy – an image he would rather conjure away.
The image of a child being fished for can in itself be perceived, tautologically speaking, as a
spectral recurrence of the image of the “netted” infant in Heaney's “Limbo” (Heaney 1973, 70). In
any case, the image of the river as a deadly fisher, in “Elegy” (D'Aguiar 2009, 76), undoubtedly
consists in a re-casting of a spectral figure from a British Subjects poem, namely, “Greenwich
Reach” (27):
The Fisher of Men is Old Nick
who wields a big death-dealing stick,
he wishes to rejuvenate
the Thames, not with scaly fishes.
He means to relocate people. (D'Aguiar 1993, 27)
As in “Elegy,” death “winks at you in the water” (27). However, instead of undulating on the
presumably Virginian waters – the James River, via which slaves were distributed across the United
States? – of “Elegy,” in “Greenwich Rich,” it is the Thames that is personified into a devilish “Old
Nick” who intends to “relocate people” into the river as a means to “rejuvenate” it. 112 Considering
112Brathwaite relates water to somber legendary, or mythological figures too in “The Cracked Mother,” where “on the
seas / three nuns appeared / black specks stalked the horizon of my fear / Santa Marias with black silk sails”
(Brathwaite 180). The three nuns, of course, are the three Fates or Parcae, who control the thread of everyone's life
in Greco-Roman mythology. They are simultaneously correlated to the motherly Christian figure of the virgin Mary
and to ships, with dresses operating as sails, in a way that is evocative, again, of the poetic correlation of “mère” and
“mer.” Finally, the description, in a Caribbean context, of Greco-Roman and Christian figures may, albeit tenuously,
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the fact that much of the sugar produced by slaves in the triangular trade transited on the Thames,
the description of Old Nick's desire to rejuvenate the Thames by relocating people into it is
comparable to the historical British and European quest for the accumulation and renewal of wealth
through the “relocation” of Africans via the Middle Passage: the hypomnesic economy of liquidity
resurfaces here again.
Thus, through spectral images of ghostly dilutions, limbo and death, water is, again, turned
to tropes which, by definition, re-treat, retrace what they erase (Derrida 1978, 66), in an aquatic
hauntology of sorts that hypomnesically restores the very past that the historical waters of Fred
D'Aguiar's sea riff may seem, at first sight, to have erased. The poet manages to bring such
restoration about by undoing the economy of liquidity as mythology, and by summoning the
specters that were conjured away, partly erased or written over on the palimpsests of Western
historiography (Derrida 1971, 11).
In the process, D'Aguiar invokes a great many cross-cultural images that are, more often
than not, accompanied by networks of intertextual references ranging from Caribbean poetry to
Greco-Roman mythology via the Irish literary canon. Among these intertexts, Brathwaite's tidalectic
poetry is crucial, and Derek Walcott's Omeros plays a central role, probably because, like D'Aguiar's
works, Omeros, in addition to drawing on Irish literature and Western mythology, also retrieves the
past by “chang[ing] History to [...] metaphor[s]” (Walcott 1990, 270). Now, be it through tidalectics,
metaphors, or hauntology, recurrence appears to consist in the thread that allows for the weaving of
such diverse subjects as ghosts, water, and language into a coherent texture. Such recurrence, in
turn, seems to be indicative of a cyclical, rather than linear, understanding of time in Fred
D'Aguiar's works, and suggests that a link may operate between the circularity of tropes and the
passing of time there: the possibility for such a correlation remains to be explored.
imbue the poem with tropicality again.
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Chapter III: Chronot(r)opes
Something happens to time itself. Time switches from a linear narrative to a lyrical sense. Rather
than seeing a past that is gone and out of reach, and the fact of a future always presenting itself, there
is, instead, a defiance of the linear. The march forwards may be stalled. The backwards gaze proves
not only useful but capable of altering what happened in that past. This idea of time as a continuous
present — that is, no past, present, and future continuum, but somehow the past and the future in the
present — appeared in Harris’s first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), and continued as an
imaginative procedure through twenty-five novels to his latest, The Ghost of Memory (2006).
(D'Aguiar 2009, my italics)
The argument that a trope is a linguistic movement of rotation, and that a cross-cultural
trope, insofar as it is conditioned by geographical displacements, functions as a tropicality, as a
tropos the movement of which actualizes, in language, the physical crossing of a topos, has been
repeatedly made in the present study. Moreover, tropicality is, as shown above, regularly
accompanied by, and/or made manifest through phenomena such as literary revision, (tidalectic)
retreat and hauntology which, in themselves, are characterized by repetition: again, the wave and
the metaphor retreat by returning (Derrida 1978, 66), and the specter begins by coming back
(Derrida 1993, 11). Furthermore, what comes back, re-treats, or re-turns through these metaphorical
processes is, more often than not, a reminder, a hypomnesic trace of the past, the conjuring of the
non-present into presence. Such recurrences, or temporal resurgences, then, lead to the question of
whether the circular movement of the trope, in these contexts, may be correlated to a cyclical
perception of time, into what might tentatively be called a chronot(r)ope, as the title of the present
chapter suggests.
Of course, the term is punning on Bakhtin's notion of the literary chronotope, but not in a
simply playful way, for, being reminiscent of chronotope, the word chronot(r)ope, is evocative of
the present hypothesis that tropicality could operate as a space-time conglomerate of sorts. In
addition, the association of “trope” and “chronotope” may in itself function as a reminder of the
literary, that is, linguistic, and hence, inescapably metaphorical nature of the chronotope (Derrida
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1978, 66) – hence the bracketed (r), which becomes superfluous as soon as the metaphoricity of the
chronotope is kept in mind. Bakhtin's definition of the chronotope in The Dialogic Imagination is
indeed, first and foremost, literary: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal
indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes
on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the
movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1981, 84, italics mine).
Such a definition leads Elizabeth DeLoughrey, for instance, to designate the slave ships of
the Middle Passage as chronotopes, because it is on the transatlantic trade routes delineated by the
movement across space of these vessels that “our modern and global measurement of time” was
perfected (DeLoughrey 2007a, 55). For the slave-ship to operate as the nexus of such “time-space
compression” implies, for DeLoughrey, that the origin of modernity is decomposable into
intercontinental, cross-tropical transactions, and thereby undoes the white mythology according to
which our modern, globalized world would be the exclusive brainchild of a hermetic West (52). In
this sense, and as DeLoughrey explains again, citing Walcott, “localizing time space [also] is the
process by which one establishes that “'the sea is history'” (53). In other words, the above-studied
function of tidalectics as a poetic mode of recollection, its metaphorical restoration of hypomnesis
is founded on the chonot(r)opic nature of the transatlantic routes of slave ships. More than that, this
chronotopic quality reinforces the aptness of Derrida's comparison of the hypomnesic movement of
metaphor to that of a “wave on the shoreline” (Derrida 1978, 66), by infusing it with a
supplementary historical trait.
As far as Derrida is concerned, it might, then, not be accidental to find that Bakhtin's notion
of a time that thickens into space and of a space that mutates into time to form a chronotope has a
counterpart in Jacques Derrida's definition of différance:
It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called
"present" element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other
than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be
vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is
called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means
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of this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a
modified present. An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to
be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in
and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of
the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the
subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called
spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). And it is this
constitution of the present, as an "originary" and irreducibly non-simple (and therefore, stricto sensu
non-originary) synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protentions (to reproduce analogically
and provisionally a phenomenological and transcendental language that soon will reveal itself to be
inadequate), that I propose to call archi-writing, archi-trace, or differance. Which (is)
(simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization. (Derrida 1982, 13)
The simultaneity of spacing and temporization, or “becoming-space of time” and “becoming-time
of space,” into différance appears to correspond to Bakhtin's description of the chronotope.
However, when Bakhtin derives the chronotope from an exploration of prose, Derrida's source is
linguistic signification as a whole, in Saussurian terms. In other words, if Bakhtin's chronotope is an
avatar of différance, then chronotopy is not specific to the novel or even written speech, but to
language itself. Différance, as the condition of signification through difference, the fact that every
single sign always-already refers us to the signs it is not in order to become meaningful, implies that
a deferral, a time differential, no matter how infinitesimal, is necessary for the the sign to make
sense. The presence of the sign is hence intrinsically split into its past and its future, and conditions
the decomposable nature of origin, or the impossibility to divide any speakable thing into prime
elements. That is why Derrida favors hauntology over ontology and the metaphoric over the
literal.113
But if origin is naturally prosthetic, if a word is intrinsically chronot(r)opic or différanciel,
then it is arguable that time cannot proceed from a single origin onward into the future in a linear
way: if nothing is absolutely original or present, then everything is prosthetic and re-presented,
everything is a recurrence from the past and a trace of its future, and time, like tropes, must
necessarily circulate. Such a hypothesis on the cyclical progression of time, although not
formulated in these terms, is probably what led Nietzsche to devise the notion of perpetual return,
113Derrida's “favoring” them might also consist in his merely not erasing them, as, according to him, the Western
metaphysical tradition does (Derrida 1971, 11).
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most clearly described in the passage entitled “The Convalescent,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
'For your animals well know, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are
the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now your destiny!
‘That you have to be the first to teach this doctrine – how should this great destiny not also
be your greatest danger and sickness!
‘Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternal and we ourselves with them,
and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us.
‘You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a colossus of a year: this year must, like an
hour-glass, turn itself over again and again, so that it may run down and run out anew:
‘so that all these years resemble one another, in the greatest things and in the smallest, so that
we ourselves resemble ourselves in each great year, in the greatest things and in the smallest.
(Nietzsche 1883-5, 236)
That the present always already splits into cyclical recurrence is, as explained above, conceivable.
However, one may have reservations as to the necessity for perpetual return to preclude change, by
making every cycle the same “in the greatest things and in the smallest,” for différance114 shows, as
explained above, that the presence of the present is conditioned by the possibility of its absolute
other, by its differing deferral. In other word, repetition entails difference and, hence, the cyclical
recurrence of time is not the perpetual return of the same, but the perpetual return of the same as
different: recurrence is a variation, a differed and deferred version. In this sense, one may specify
that the cyclical qualities of time could, thus, be more specifically represented as a threedimensional spiral.
Such a claim to différance as a response to Nietzche's argument can be sensed in an idea that
was developed by someone who exerts a major influence over D'Aguiar's works, namely, and as
said above, Wilson Harris, who devised a variant of perpetual return that is not hermetic to
difference: infinite rehearsal (Harris 1987). What Harris retains from the idea of the perpetual return
is the potential for the recurrence of precise moments an infinite number of times. However, instants
repeat themselves as variants in Harris' conception of infinite rehearsal, and the strict similarity in
the reproduction of every “great year” is not maintained from Nietzsche.115 As D'Aguiar explains in
114We keep the word in its French spelling, but we do not italicize it, thereby “naturalizing” this supplement to the
English language here.
115Finding that Harris imagined infinite rehearsal subsequently to his survey of the Guyanese interior (D'Aguiar 2009a)
and in relation to Nietzsche's notion of perpetual return suggests that Harris' poetic vision of time and space is
founded on a synthetic response to European philosophy and Caribbean nature, and may, hence, be understood as a
tropicality. As a consequence, D'Aguiar's reliance on infinite rehearsal implicitly partakes of such tropicality.
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the epigraph I have chosen for the present chapter, and in terms that are strongly reminiscent of
Derrida's description of “time out of joints” (Derrida 1982, 13), cyclical time turns presence to a
temporal syncretism, an infinitely recurring version of a present into différance. Harris further
implies that such a reception of time endows the subject with (poetic) agency over it, with the
ability to “alter” (D'Aguiar 2009a) past and future in the present-as-rehearsal. 116 D'Aguiar, in his
exploration of Harris' idea of infinite rehearsal, suggests some of the literary ways in which one
may capitalize on the poetic powers granted by infinite rehearsal (as the perpetual return of
différance):
For Harris, each return to a memory, image, or dream yields new insights, and each time the viewer
or thinker participates in the recall or act of gazing — from a necessarily partial because particular
viewpoint — that person changes a little. There is no possibility of easy closure. The artistic
compulsion to look and keep looking at this rich source of self-knowledge creates the sense of a
revisionary potential when it comes to apparently fixed realities. The process of writing becomes an
interactive one. The imagination of the writer changes as a result of this deliberate act of exposure.
There is the promise of a deepening sensibility. Ceaseless exploration of earlier discoveries leads to
more complex accounts of them. (D'Aguiar 2009a)
Rehearsal operates through remembrance and imagination, that is, through re-presentation and/or,
possibly, metaphor, which itself is, again, endowed with hypomnesic power, like dreams which,
according to Freud, consist in an unconscious reworking of a preceding experiences and be
translated as metaphorical revisions of the past (Freud 1899, 7). In this sense, the literary treatment
of infinite rehearsal can rely not simply on recurring tropes and tropes of recurrence, but on a great
variety of revisionary means, and provide different perceptions, promising “a deepening
sensibility,” of the pasts and futures of presence. From a musical perspective, for instance, a way of
imagining infinite rehearsal would correspond to the principle of theme-and-variations pieces,
where an initial theme is played over and over, and each repetition of the initial melody line
contains a variation that produces an emotional effect that differs from the preceding version of the
theme. The possibilities of such a musical game are, virtually endless, and thus seem to be in
keeping with the principle of infinite rehearsal: the musical analogy has not escaped Fred
116For a discussion of that type of “magic” agency of the backward gaze in Orphic terms, see Chapter V in general and,
more specifically, its third part, which discusses the Orphic workings of Harris' Palace of the Peacock and
D'Aguiar's Children of Paradise.
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D'Aguiar's attention any more than the recurrence of dreams, and it is precisely those themes that
the present chapter is to privilege in its exploration of D'Aguiar's representations of infinite
rehearsal, after having further clarified the poetic nature of such a conception of time through the
thorough study of two poems that openly capitalize on Harris' vision.
I. Revisited Falls & Flights
These two pieces, in which Fred D'Aguiar most openly relies on Harris' principle of infinite
rehearsal, both come from series of poems. The first one is “The Trench Revisited,” and belongs to
the “Frail Deposits” part of British Subjects (D'Aguiar 1993, 35), made up of poems narrating
moments D'Aguiar shared with Harris on the occasion of a trip to Guyana (D'Aguiar 2009a). The
other, “Vulture's Theory of Perpetual Return,” can be found in the “American Vulture” series, from
the author's latest collection, The Rose of Toulouse (D'Aguiar 2013, 54). The “Trench Revisited”
recounts in verse a life anecdote Wilson Harris himself told to D'Aguiar during their trip to Guyana
(D'Aguiar 2009a), and to which the poet reacted by suggesting rehearsals of the story to Harris. The
latter corresponds to the description, through the eyes of a vulture, of its spiraling flight down to the
ground, and relies on many literary techniques which serve to produce meaning through
chronot(r)opic circulation and recurrence.
a. Trench Trip
The anecdote that provided D'Aguiar with the source material for “The Trench Revisited”
consists in a memory that came back to Harris as he and D'Aguiar, in the late 1980s, “walked in a
tree-lined street divided by a trench in Georgetown,” the Guyanese capital (D'Aguiar 2009a). Harris
explained to D'Aguiar that the then dry trench used to be full of water in the 1930's, when he, as a
schoolboy, pushed a friend into it, and pretended not to have done a thing as his friend rose back,
drenched, from the waters. The friend, as a result, believed he could only blame himself for his
ridiculous fall, and decided from then on that he was an incorrigibly clumsy person. Harris
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subsequently felt terribly guilty for having caused such an alteration of self-esteem in his friend, and
for not having managed to confess that it was he who had actually nudged him into the trench. In
that same street in the 1980s, D'Aguiar responded to the story by suggesting that Harris
should push his friend, again, since this time, meaning right then and there, no harm would be done
in what was now a dry place. Second, [D'Aguiar] speculated that he, Harris, might look at his friend,
falling, back then, from the vantage point of the present, and somehow reach back in time and grab
his friend’s arm, just in time to save him from getting soaked. And third, should both those methods
fail to appeal, or the rescue not work out, somehow Harris could confess to his friend what he had
done, again across time, the moment his friend climbed out of the trench. Of course, he might opt
simply not to push his friend at all, by suppressing the awful adolescent impulse with the restraint of
an adult sensibility, again exercised across time in this shared space. (D'Aguiar 2009a)
Harris, “laughed and nodded in recognition” (D'Aguiar 2009a) of D'Aguiar's use of infinite
rehearsal, that imaginative technique Harris had been developing from his first novel on, and openly
so in The Infinite Rehearsal (Harris 1987). Thus, the trench anecdote, during the conversation with
Harris, was first rehearsed by Harris as a reminiscence, then re-presented into a tale to D'Aguiar.
Fred D'Aguiar repeated, as shown in the above-cited excerpt, four varying summaries of that same
story in turn, which, as a result, was made to recur into différance. A few years later, D'Aguiar
revised the anecdote again, along with his moment with Harris, into the sonnet – that is, in one of
the most “rehearsed” poetic forms of literary history – entitled “The Trench Revisited,” which reads
as follows:
x
/_ x /_ x /_ x
/_ /
x
We're being driven past when you point to
x
/_ /
/_ x /_
/
/_ x /_
Where you'd pushed in a friend long, long ago,
/_ x /_ x x /_
x /_ x /_
Into what was a trench, to test its depth.
x /_ x /_
x /_ x /_ x x /_ x
You say it taught you how a civilisation,
/_ x x /_ x /_ /
/_ x /_
Feeling a blow or tug may still not know
x /_
x /_ [x] x x /_ x /_ x
A hand's involved, so can't feel indebted.
/_ x /_ x /_ x /_ x x /_
I was falling, horizontally, just
x /
/_ x /_ x x /_ x /_
To keep up and lucky to win your trust.
/_ x x /_ x /_ x /_ x
/_
Push him again, he'll fall on land that's dry
x /_ x /_
/_ x x /_ x /_
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This time and think nothing of it, and you'll
/
/_ x /_ x
/_ x /_ x /_
Bank all that knowledge lifted from the sight
x
/_
/
/_ x /_ x /_
/_ x x
Your friend made clad in mud, convinced totally
/_ x /_
x x /_ x x /_ /
That he slipped and your hand on his ribcage
/_
/ /_ x x /_ / /_
x x
Was your brave, unlucky, one-hand-clap save! (D'Aguiar 1993, 35)
In spite of numerous inversions, all of the poem's lines virtually consist in iambic pentameters
which “can be read with just sufficient rhythmic heightening to bring out the organization of the
meter, but without giving any additional stress to the unstressed syllables functioning as beats”
(Attridge 161) such as “to” and “was.” In other words, the iambic pentameter was apparently
chosen because it can help to convey the “expressive naturalism” of the conversation that took place
between D'Aguiar and Harris (Attridge 161). Moreover, the regularity of meter is in itself a pattern
of recurrence through which D'Aguiar may make form and sense converge in a poem the theme of
which precisely is recurrence: “The Trench Revisited,” as its title indicates, is an evident revision –
again, an additional recurrence – of the conversation he had with Harris a few years before in
Georgetown. Still in formal terms, it may be noted that the first stanza (an octave) transcribes the
context of that conversation, while the second, verse paragraph (a sextet) recounts the first
revisionary suggestion D'Aguiar made to Harris. The space between the two stanzas could represent
the pause in the conversation, the time of reflection that was necessary for D'Aguiar to think of how
he would respond to Harris' anecdote: the beginning of the reply, “Push him again” in the poem, is a
falling inversion that rhythmically repeats the consequence of Harris' gesture (a fall), culminating
with the word “again,” the last syllable of which, “gain,” falls on the beat, and suggests, again, that
repetition may come as a gain.
But before making his suggestion, the poetic persona, presumably D'Aguiar here,
progressively embodies, in the 1980s, the friend who fell in the trench fifty years before, by
depicting himself as “falling, horizontally” in order to keep up with Harris' walking pace, probably
slanting his body forward so much that it approximates a horizontal posture that is, in turn,
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reminiscent of the friend falling flat into the trench. Yet, in spite of the poet's impersonation of the
fallen friend, differences abound: while the unlucky man in the trench did not know that a “hand
was involved” and that Harris was “indebted” (italics mine) to him, that is, owed him a confession
and/or an apology that he did not make, D'Aguiar feels lucky for Harris' trust, expressed through the
election of the poet, who subsequently feels grateful and/or indebted, as the recipient of the
confession.117 As the italics of the previous sentence show, the poet is not the identical double of the
fallen friend, but his inverted image, contrasting luck with bad luck, confession with secrecy, and
debt with credence.
Furthermore, the scope of the event is distorted by being broadened from the intimacy of the
two friends to “a civilisation” which, “Feeling a blow or tug may still not know / A hand's involved,
so can't feel indebted” (35). Knowing that the two friends are Guyanese, and that the moment of the
action corresponds to the late 1980's, along with the lines just cited, are elements that conjure
memories of Forbes Burnham, who was the dictatorial leader of Guyana from 1955 to his death in
1985. For indeed, “a hand [was] involved” in Forbes Burnham's rise to power in the Cold War
context of the 1950s, although “civilisation” did not know it, since he was backed by the CIA and
the British Colonial Office (Naipaul 34-5) to keep Guyana in the Western block and thwart the
communist ambitions of Burnham's former friend and subsequent opponent Cheddhi Jagan. Yet,
Burnham did not “feel indebted” to the US or, for that matter, entrenched in the West, since he
broke with the USA in 1958, declared Guyana a communist Cooperative republic in the years that
followed, and created bonds with Cuba and the Pan-African movement (Naipaul 37). Thus, in the
poem, the very event of the conversation is, along with the tale it contains, driven by the poetic
principle of infinite rehearsal, and expands from a private, microcosmic ground to recur into a
political and macroscopic past.
117“Trust” is foregrounded in “The Trench Revisited,” as it forms, with the word “just,” the poem's only line-end rime,
conveying a sense of D'Aguiar's feeling indebted to Harris for “just” a mere expression of “trust” from a literary
forebear he admires. This affection for Harris is corroborated by the poem's final and only internal rime between
“brave” and “save;” words associated to Harris' rehearsed, corrective gesture, and endowed with meliorative
connotations.
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The poem is “driven” indeed, as the two writers, in the poem's first line, are “being driven”
past the trench. That in the actual story, as told by D'Aguiar in “Prosimetrum” (2009a), the two
authors were walking, might suggest that the stride is rehearsed into a cruise. However, since the
poetic persona's self-portrayal is that of a person “falling horizontally” to keep up with Harris' rapid
gait, the two characters are actually still walking, and “driven” should then be understood in its
metaphorical sense, as a designation of the two authors as “inspired” persons the expression of
whose thoughts are guided by outside inspirational forces. The poem's clear reliance on infinite
rehearsal shows that Harris' imaginative principle is the “Muse” that dictated D'Aguiar's revisionary
poem, along, perhaps, with the more somber, dictatorial figure of Forbes Burnham (Derrida 1991,
7). On the other hand, the poem's third line more implicitly conveys a sense of what “drives” Harris:
that line specifies that Harris pushed his friend into the trench to “test its depth.” Harris' motive is
added to the initial story by D'Aguiar so as to function as a reference to Harris' first occupation as a
land surveyor of the Guyanese interior, where the puzzling and irregular data he gathered from
repeated soundings of rivers and observations of meteorological phenomena occurring in the
rainforest led him to devise an imaginative conception of time and space, that is, precisely, infinite
rehearsal, a principle which, in turn, incited him to write novels that would convey his vision to
readers (D'Aguiar 2009a). Hence, while Harris is driven by nature to the formulation of a theory of
infinite rehearsal, D'Aguiar is guided by infinite rehearsal for the formulation of poetry, and such an
initial chain of causality, in the poem, is representative of D'Aguiar's affiliation to Harris, confirmed
on the page following “The Trench Revisited” (D'Aguiar 1993, 35) on which D'Aguiar writes that
“The flute [he's] trying to blow a tune on / Belongs to [Harris]” (36).
D'Aguiar's poem is thus a unit that refracts, disjoints the present into recurrent pasts and
futures thanks to Harris' theory of infinite rehearsal, to which he feels “indebted” (35). In order to
pay back his “debt,” D'Aguiar serves Harris' ideas back to him through the suggestion of rehearsing
the trench anecdote, by way of which Harris' may gain new insight and manage to confess to his
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friend, subsequently unburdening himself of his sense of guilt, and “bank all [resulting] knowledge”
(35), as the poem's final stanza explains. That he may “bank” knowledge from the “bank” of a water
trench is, as seen above in “Silver Song” (D'Aguiar 1993, 29), reminiscent of Wordsworth's punning
on the economy of liquidity in “Tintern Abbey.”118 Another obviously recurrent poem from which
readers may “bank” new insights can be found in Fred D'Aguiar's latest collection of poems, The
Rose of Toulouse.
b. Vulture Culture
That poem is, of course, and as indicated above, “Vulture's Theory of Perpetual Return,” the
title and opening lines of which actually function as a poetic definition of Harris' imaginative
principle: “I fly up and float on one wingbeat for as long as I can make circles / in the circling
winds, I see the same things all the time and all that time / I see those same things differently”
(D'Aguiar 2013, 54, emphasis mine). The circular movement of the hovering vulture is paralleled
by that of the “circling winds” of warm air on which its wings rest, doubling up the circular image
into a varying recurrence that is evoked through sound as well, with the wing/circles pair of words
becoming circling/winds, and with the alliteration in “fl” that illustrates both the flapping of wings
and aerial flotation. As the vulture's flight follows its repetitive, circular trajectory, the bird's
recurrent perception of the same elements of landscape, contrarily to what perpetual return suggests,
and, perhaps, because of variations in altitude, changes its perception of the scenery, as lines two
and three, in the above-cited tercet, explain (through a second syntactical mirroring that again,
makes form and sense converge). In this sense, the vulture's view of perpetual return comprises
altering factors and, thus, corresponds to a definition of infinite rehearsal, as a variant of perpetual
return that is inclusive of variation itself. Infinite rehearsal is a “Vulture's theory of Perpetual
Return.”
118The subsequent possibility for a triangulation between Wordsworth, Harris, and D'Aguiar, and for the operation of
links between the Orphic tenets of romanticism and magic(al) realism is the subject that Chapter V, part III,
addresses.
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The five tercets that follow these three opening lines are all built on the same type of
chiasmatic constructions produced in the poem's first stanza. In them, the vulture describes the
recurrent sights offered by its trajectory, and how rehearsed visions progressively impact its
thoughts in the process. For instance, in the poem's fourth line, the bird, speaking in the first person,
says: “The maze in the trees keeps me counting the trees in the maze” (54). The syntax may simply
sound playful, and the line could come across as tautological. However, the grammatical play
through which the same thing is presented twice, yet differently, provides the viewer with an
enhanced perception of that thing: the interstices of shade between the trees that are offered to the
vulture's aerial eye form a maze between the trees that induces the vulture to count the trees
constituting such a labyrinth. However, if the trees are “in the maze” as much as they shape it, they
may be viewed not only as its walls but as corridors walled with shade. Finally, the “maze in the
trees” might designate the same maze being repetitively found in the pattern of every tree's
ramifications, that is, a fractal labyrinth of geometrical repetitions that makes any part look like a
miniaturized replica of the whole, infinitely expanding into a dazzling rehearsal that keeps the
vulture “counting the trees in the maze,” while it can never be sure that it is not mistaking the forest
for the trees: in this case, the vulture is a natural bird of prey prone to the tricks of nature, which
then rehearse the sylvan equivocation that contributed to Macbeth's fall (Shakespeare 2005, V.5, l.
30-46).119
As far as falling is concerned, the downward spiral of stanzas on the page progressively fills
with ominous evocations of death, as if the vulture were to crash, and suggests that the bird's
trajectory is not only spacial, but also temporal, corresponding to the amount of time the animal has
left to live: the death of a vulture in the series' preceding poem corroborates that impression
(D'Aguiar 2013, 53). The first description that might come across as relatively dark in “Vulture's
119Another poem from The Rose of Toulouse appears to rehearse one stanza into its recurrences, and in the process,
also comes to evoke Shakespeare through the title of one of his plays, namely, Love's Labour's Lost. The poem is
(then aptly) entitled “Trace,” and rehearses the phrase “There's no love lost” into lines such as “No worse loss than
love,” “There's no lost love,” “No worse love than that loss,” “There's no loss, love,” an “No loss worse than love”
(D'Aguiar 2013, 16). Every line in the poem's first two stanzas is revised thus too, and gains significance as the
poem unfolds.
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Theory of Perpetual Return” appears in the third stanza's final line: “My shadow rides the plains
below and thinks it shadow rides the winds” (54). While the vulture's imagining that its “shadow
rides the plains” is possible, the reciprocal, mirrored proposition that its shadow “thinks” it imitates
the vulture in the sky is presumably impossible: a light source shining on an object casts its shadow,
but a shadow cannot be cast on its object to produce light, according to physics. Yet, the imaginative
mediation of infinite rehearsal calls those ideas into question, suggesting that rational, physical rules
might flow forth from thoughts as solipsistic as those from which apparently unreal pictures
come.120 The spectral image of the thinking shadow may be neither real nor unreal, but could consist
in the re-presentation of a becoming-specter of the vulture as it is being silhouetted against the light.
In other words, if, in keeping with the theory of infinite rehearsal, the bird's spatial trajectory
corresponds to its movement across time, its shadow may adumbrate – adumbrate actually
meaning, etymologically, “to cast a shadow on something” – the coming into existence of a future
recurrence of the vulture's flight. In that sense, what the bird is perceiving is, arguably, the making,
syncretized to its past, of its own future, maybe even of its posterity and/or assumed next life cycle,
superimposed to its legacies and past lives, if time is indeed cyclical.
It is no wonder, then, to find that from the fourth stanza on, the vulture begins to think of
death, for instance, by comparing the loss of a feather to that of a “tooth in a human dead head”
(54), an allegorical, skull representation of vanitas that induces the bird in turn to ponder the fact
that, if it was a human being, it would be “destined for a whole in the ground if lucky, / luckier still,
to grace a table for vultures” (54): the inversion between vulture and men creates yet another mirror
image in the poem, and is reminiscent, again, of the death of a vulture under the wheels of a truck
driven by a man in the preceding poem in the series (53), suggesting that death too recurs in the
poems from “American Vulture.” In “Vulture's Theory of Perpetual Return,” the vulture also
imagines the moment of its death at the hands of an imaginary lamplighter: “The lamplighter who
120Such a questioning of reality is, of course, one of the tenets of magic(al) realism. Again, Chapter V is dedicated to
the exploration of such magic(al) realist features of D'Aguiar's works.
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lights all the lamps above / lights the lamps of my eyes and how that lamplighter douses / those cold
flames so too my eye turn dark” (54). The macrocosm of a starry night is reduced into the
microcosm of glittering eyes, which then expand again into a starless sky. Such a metaleptic
description, by way of which the eye becomes its own planetarium, is a form of bi-directional
recurrence that is coherent with the solipsistic impression conveyed by the shadow that “shadow
rides the winds,” and suggests that when an individual dies, an entire universe passes with him or
her. Yet, the vulture predicts the impact of its death in the following terms: “I belong to no one and
no one wants me when I am gone, / to where I do not know, except for the sound just before /
silence and the silence just after sound” (54). These last words, forming the poem's closure,
complement the experience of a last breath, or sound before the silence of death, with the
presentation of posthumous silence as yet another experience, which implies that someone is there
to witness such absence of sound. If not the lamplighter or anybody else at the moment of the
vulture's death, the poetic voice suggests that it is the bird itself that is to experience an afterlife, or
a life in death as it were. Through that suggestion, the vulture lets readers imagine that its circular
and recurrent experience of life has led to the formulation of a “theory of infinite rehearsal”
according to which every moment ends only to recur, albeit in a different form. In this sense, the
vulture's last words foreshadow recurrences that still await the bird, in a dark prophecy of sorts.
Such a sense of the regular, almost rhythmical resurgence of life is actually evoked by Harris too, in
The Infinite Rehearsal, through intertextual reliance on musical zombie figures that D'Aguiar also
rehearses in parts of his work, as the following section shows.
II. Themes & Variations
Harris' novel The Infinite Rehearsal is, not unexpectedly, repetitive. The whole book seems
to repeat what it tells in constantly changing ways and, so doing, progressively creates and enriches
its meaning through metaphorical networks generated by repetitions. Its structure is reminiscent of
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what is called a “theme and variations” in music. Again, this practice consists in playing a short
musical motif over and over, but with an additional variation each time it is replayed. The number
of possible variants is virtually infinite. One instance of such an incremental development and
deepening of signification through repetition in Harris' novel actually relies on a calypso song that
D'Aguiar also cites in his work, while relying on anaphoric techniques that are also characteristic of
Harris' style, and that retain the rhythmical qualities of song choruses.
a. Zombie Jams
The calypso that both Harris and D'Aguiar cite in their works is first sung, in The Infinite
Rehearsal, by Don Juan Ulysses' mistress Calypso, “a black, white woman” who “belonged to the
band of Tiresias Calypsonian Tigers whose fame had spread through many worlds,” and is repeated
several times later in the novel by other characters (Harris 1987, 4). First and foremost, one may
note that the two characters just mentioned carry names that are highly syncretic: Don Juan Ulysses
obviously evokes, on the one hand, the legendary figure that inspired Molière, Byron, and Mozart
and, on the other hand, the mythical character, also present in the works of Walcott (1990, 201) and
D'Aguiar (1991, 60-3), of Odysseus as presented by Joyce in Ulysses. Furthermore, like Homer's
Odysseus and Brathwaite's John, as seen above, Ulysses is loved by the sea nymph Calypso, whose
name, again, stands as a tropicality, insofar as it is evocative of Greek mythology and Caribbean
music. Such tropicality is reinforced in Harris' novel, where Calypso is described as both “black and
white” (4). Finally, the illicit nature of her private relationship with Ulysses, away from other
people's eyes, in the novel, might have been imagined by Harris as an unveiling of the etymological
meaning of her name, corresponding to the Greek verbs meaning “to cover, conceal.” 121 Hence,
Harris' novel is, from its onset, making multiple references to a cross-tropical intertextual network
that contributes to the text's tropicality as much as to its revisionary nature, by way of which
121Online Eymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?
allowed_in_frame=0&search=calypso&searchmode=none
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characters from preceding works are rehearsed into new novelistic personae.
Of course, the name of Calypso's band is strongly tropical too, since it contains her name,
albeit derived into an adjective, framed by the substantive “tigers” – a presumably Asian animal –
and the name of the Greek mythological prophet Tiresias, the first syllable of which is echoed by
that of the word “tigers.” The recurrent sounds of the band's name, along with the oracular
undertone with which it is suffused through the mention of Tiresias, suggest that the band's songs
might have something to do with recurrence and the prophetic, that is, with infinite rehearsal, in the
novel. The first song Calypso is said to sing in The Infinite Rehearsal is entitled “Stone Cold Dead
in the Market.” Yet readers are not given a glimpse of what the song may sound like, as Calypso
stopped. Began afresh in a deep waving voice:
Belly to belly
Back to back
Ah don't give a damn
Ah done dead already. (Harris 1987, 10)
The first time readers get to “hear” what Calypso sings is already a rehearsal, as the first time her
song is cited is when she resumes singing – a re-presentation that is evocative of Derrida's sense of
an always-already prosthetic presence (Derrida 1982, 13). Moreover, the repetitive lines Calypso
sings actually come from the chorus of a song that was performed by The Kingston Trio,
Rockapella and Harry Belafonte, called “Zombie Jamboree,” which deals with zombies coming
back to life in New York City and having a dance party. The song has then been recurrently sung
before reaching Calypso's lips, and suggests again that Harris has recourse on intertextual revision
and recurrence in order to represent infinite rehearsal in his novel. Moreover, the calypso itself also
deals with recurrence as resurrectional repetition, since Calypso, adopting the voice of the song's
zombie persona, sings that she is “dead already.” The zombie is a figure of recurrence not only
through resurrection, but because it is a Caribbean myth that has been represented countless times in
art and culture, such as in American and European cinema, which arguably, turned the Caribbean
legend to a tropical character too. Hence, this very short passage from Harris' novel teems with
rehearsals, be they linguistic, intertextual, or metaphorically cross-cultural.
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The chorus of “Zombie Jamboree” evokes the promiscuity of a crowded dance-floor, where
the zombie does not care about the potentially indecent character of his/her physical proximity with
others which, in a rhythmical, dancing context, may also be erotic. However, when Calypso sings
the song a second time, one page later in The Infinite Rehearsal, the chorus' evocative quality is
preserved, but leads readers to completely different interpretations. During that second delivery,
Calypso sings “more deliberately – as if to supply longer intervals or spaces between lines than on
the first occasion. This was astonishing as her song seemed to arise from the bowels of a slave ship
becalmed a million light years from home” (Harris 1987, 11). Calypso rehearses the quatrain again
in a way that is, again, not directly witnessed by readers, but is described, through locutions
designating both spacial and temporal measurements – spaces, intervals (also used in musicology to
designate the distance between two notes), light years, or the distance light covers in a certain
number of years – as different from the “first occasion.” The difference of delivery is evocative of a
slave ship to the narrator, and, retrospectively, changes the meaning of the physical promiscuity
described by the chorus: the proximity of bodies corresponds, in Harris' words, to the cramped
situation of slaves in the hulls of ships in the Middle Passage's “limbo gateway,” where “There was
so little space that the slaves contorted into human spiders” (Harris 1970, 157). In other words,
Calypso's rehearsal functions as a historically charged recurrence by way of which her calypso is
further tropicalized through the evocation of another dance, namely, limbo, and, hence, according to
Harris, the superimposition of the Anansi trickster onto the dancing zombie figures of the song.
If the specters of slaves are being brought back, it is then not accidental for the character
named Ghost, in the Infinite Rehearsal, to speak for the first time by uttering the “Zombie
Jamboree” chorus – the third resurgence of the song in the novel:
'Is there anybody there? Said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door.
Belly to belly
Back to back
Ah don't give a damn
Ah done dead already.
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And I Tiresias who have foresuffered all
I who sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.
I could not believe it. Ghost was speaking at last. No formal message. A repetition of familiar texts
become however strangely cross-cultural, the strangest subversion, where one least suspected or
expected to find it in hollow convention or solemn usage. (Harris 1987, 32)
The lines “Is there anybody there? Said the Traveler / Knocking on the moonlit door,” as the
quotation marks indicate in Harris' text, are a citation from the opening lines of Walter De La Mare's
poem “The Listeners,” in which a horseman visits a castle, apparently, to hold a mysterious
promise, and knocks at its door. No one ever answers his call, as the castle is only peopled with
ghosts, who listen but never stir or respond in any way to the traveler, who then leaves at a gallop
(De La Mare 1912). In this perspective, the reference to specters as mute listeners, being
specifically made by a speaking ghost in Harris' novel, is ironic, or even comical, all the more so
when correlated with the quatrain from “Zombie Jamboree” that follows the citation from De La
Mare, which is then made to evoke the ghosts' complete indifference to the traveler's call. At the end
of the quote, Ghost calls himself “Tiresias.” Again, Tiresias is a mythological prophet – hence his
having “foresuffered all” (Harris 1987, 32) – from Thebes whom Odysseus, in Book IX of the
Odyssey, conjures back from the dead for guidance as to how to return to Ithaca. Tiresias then warns
Odysseus, in oracular terms, of the ambushes that await him and his crew. 122 Thus “Zombie
Jamboree,” which was turned to a Middle Passage reference in its second occurrence in the novel, is
related to Odysseus' transoceanic journey in a third rehearsal which, then, apparently suggests that
Odysseus travels on a slave ship: such a transatlantic version of the myth in The Infinite Rehearsal
is comparable to Walcott's revision of Homer in Omeros (Walcott 1990), and foregrounds Odysseus
and the Middle Passage as comparably recurrent and intertextual themes. By the same token, and as
122Tiresias is a figure of recurrence too, since, in Book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses, he performs repetitive
transformations by way of which he changes of sex, through a ritual involving the separation of two copulating
snakes. Tiresias' knowledge of both womanhood and manhood leads Zeus and Hera to ask him whether it is men or
women who enjoy sexual intercourse the most. Tiresias' answer, claiming that women take nine tenths of the
pleasure, vexes Hera, who strikes him blind. Zeus, who cannot undo Hera's curse, offers foresight to Tiresias as a
compensation for his lost vision.
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the narrator explains, “familiar texts” become “strangely cross-cultural” (Harris 1987, 32), forming
a tropical conglomerate of sorts the meaning of which twirls with the spirals of Harris' infinite
rehearsals.
Another reference to the Odyssey appears in an additional citation of “Zombie Jamboree”
when a character named Peter feeds “on the lotus, belly to belly, back to back death wish in
Calypso's and Tiger's band” (Harris 1987, 58). The mention of “lotus” as food is, in the
mythological context of Harris' novel, reminiscent of the episode of the lotus eaters encountered by
members of Odysseus' crew: like the Lotus Eaters, the crewmen eat from the flower, which drugs
them into a state of indifference and inertia that is also reminiscent, in Harris' novel, of De La
Mare's unresponsive listeners, and suggests that this occurrence of “Zombie Jamboree” is, again, a
rehearsal of the previous one.123 Thus, Harris' novel is both reminiscent of Western Caribbean, and
African mythologies, and evocative of historical memories from the Middle Passage. Mythological
and historical hypomnesis, in the novel, is progressively built through a literary reliance on infinite
rehearsal that capitalizes on the equivocal potential of a popular calypso song.
Fred D'Aguiar, in several works, prolongs Harris' rehearsals of the song by citing it again in
relation to dark historical pasts. For instance, the first occurrence of “Zombie Jamboree” in
D'Aguiar's work appears in an Airy Hall poem entitled “El Dorado Update,” and translates one of
the poetic persona's responses to his/her witnessing dire poverty, food shortages and corruption in
1960s Guyana (D'Aguiar 1989, 30-4). The poet uses the song to describe the same Guyanese
context again in his long meditative poem dealing with the 1978 Jonestown massacre, namely, Bill
of Rights:
Back to back
In the face of adversity
Belly to belly
123In “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” Derrida describes the threats of the lotus as “oblivion and the surrender of will”
(Derrida 2003, 40). He also mentions and agrees with Adorno's and Horkeimer's readings of the mythical episode,
the eaters of which are compared to contemporary drug addicts whose attitude subverts Western rationales of
productivity: “ the sufferer who cannot bear to stay with the Lotus-eaters […] opposes their illusion with that which
is like yet unlike: the realization of utopia through historical labor” (qtd in Derrida 2003, 40).
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Rub your love all over me
We don't give a damn
This country dying slowly
I done dead already
Don't bother bury me (D'Aguiar 1998, 39)
Italics mark this passage as the second, critical half of the page, as they do on every page of Bill of
Rights. The singularity of the present excerpt, however, is that the italicized lines correspond to
passages from “Zombie Jamboree” that alternate with non-italicized lines which respond to the song
and develop its meaning, following, again, Harris' principle of infinite rehearsal. The first half of the
page contains a verse description of Stabroek market in Georgetown, Guyana, in the late 1970s. The
first lines explain that “Stabroek market has a broken clock. / The time it tells always right” (39).
Such a comment on one hour always being the right hour is equivocal, in that it may suggest that
Stabroek is a 24/7 market, and that the time at which it is visited does not matter, or that any
moment is always already the recurrence of an infinity of future and past instants that make, in
cyclical time, the hour irrelevant in any case. 124 Another potential meaning is that the Guyanese
market's clock, in Burnham's time (again, Burnham was in office from the late 1950s to 1985) is,
like its dictatorial ruler, “always right.” The rest of the lines preceding the above-cited passage
explain that market sellers and dwellers do “not give a damn” about the hour as long as the clock
“tells time,” and are more preoccupied by the food shortages Guyana suffers from. In this
perspective, the lines from “Zombie Jamboree” are evocative of a crowded market the population of
which is indifferent to the metaphysical notion of time because their main concern is the more
pressing need to find the basic means of physical sustenance. D'Aguiar's intertextual, revisionary
lines are then, charged with political criticism concerning the historical past of Burnham's rule over
Guyana, a country D'Aguiar's verse depicts, above, as “dying slowly” (39).125
124The symbol of the clock is ironically echoed in D'Aguiar's latest novel, Children of Paradise (2014), which, like
Bill of Rights (1998), retells the Jonestown massacre: in the 2014 novel, a visiting “watch repairman,” whose clocks
are broken by bullets shot at him by the unwelcoming, bored guards of Jones' commune, tells the guards that they
are both literally and metaphorically “trying to kill time” rather than attempting to take his life by shooting at his
cart (D'Aguiar 2014, 58).
125D'Aguiar's mention of “Zombie Jamboree” in a market context is reminiscent of the fact that Harris' Calypso, in The
Infinite Rehearsal, first sings “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” in the novel, before singing the zombie song (Harris
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Fred D'Aguiar cites the song again further into Bill of Rights, but only in part: “Back to
back, belly to belly, / Confusion of the deathbed transfer, [...]” (D'Aguiar 1998, 69). The original
line divisions of the song are no longer respected, and only the beginning of the chorus is cited. The
sense of death in “Ah don't give a damn / Ah done dead already” (Harris 1987, 10) seems to be
“transferred” into “Confusion of the deathbed transfer” (D'Aguiar 1998, 69), and forms yet another
varying recurrence of the same song. The third and last revision of the song in Bill of Rights
develops this alteration in that it finally does not even retain words such as “death” or “dead:” “I
drank from the cauldron / But I am not back to back, / Belly to belly” (120). The cauldron that is
being described is actually the vat, containing Kool Aid mixed with cyanide, which Jim Jones
invited his disciples to drink in order to achieve what he deemed “revolutionary suicide” against the
visit of a US delegation to the commune (Naipaul 151). Then, readers may understand, by
remembering the rest of the chorus, and through the narrative context, that not being “back to back /
belly to belly” means being alive and, by extension, not having yet fulfilled the necessary condition
to turn to one of the zombies the song describes. In other words, the narrator of the passage is
saying that, although the has drunk the poison, he is not dead, not yet addressing readers from the
other side, again, like a zombie or a ghost. Thus, in the same way as Harris' rehearsal of the song
spurs the narrative on in The Infinite Rehearsal through the construction of syncretic meaning, so
too does D'Aguiar enhance the significance of the song's lines in order to fit the Jonestown story his
long poem contains.
Finally, readers may find a citation from “Zombie Jamboree” in Bloodlines too, when Sow
realizes that he is dying:
I ask myself if I am ready
to die and leave Slavery and feel no regret
that white remains white and black is black
and the two, belly to belly, back to back. (D'Aguiar 2000, 159)
The song is still evoked in relation to the theme of death, but does not constitute a deadly metaphor
1987, 4). The repeated mention of a market seems, then, to corroborate the idea that Bill of Rights engages in a
revisionary commerce with The Infinite Rehearsal.
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this time around. Maybe, if “white” and “black” remain “belly to belly, back to back” for Sow, it
must be because their opposition has still not been resolved into complementary and benevolent
relations, but strikes a tense balance between the initially loveless interracial eroticism (belly to
belly) that led to Sow's birth and inter-ethnic segregation (back to back), among the victims of
which Sow's parent may be found, along with countless others in what Sow sees as the legacies of
slavery (D'Aguiar 2000, 150).
b. Anaphoric Rhythms
Fred D'Aguiar, thus, does not only rely on Harris' infinite rehearsal in theoretical terms, but
also by intertextually drawing, from the novel The Infinite Rehearsal, citations that Harris himself
rehearsed from a calypso song the chorus of which owes as much to rhythm as to the repetition of
lexemes: these repetitive devices are recurrently present in both Harris' and D'Aguiar's works too,
and serve the progressive enhancement of meaning. For instance, in The Infinite Rehearsal, the
narrative voice elaborates a calendar that summarizes the experiences of the character named Ghost:
164 BC
12 BC
AD 66
AD 295
AD 451
AD 684
AD 1066
AD 1910
AD 1985-6
Birthday Ghost is Babylonian cake.
Birthday Ghost is Chinese and Roman cake.
Birthday Ghost is broadsword cake over Jerusalem.
Birthday Ghost ices the constellation of Andromeda.
Birthday Ghost adorns Attila the Hun.
Birthday Ghost ices a Nürnberg Tiger.
Birthday Ghost divides William and Harold.
Birthday Ghost submits to photographers.
Birthday Ghost dresses up for many a party around the globe. (Harris 1987, 38)
The anaphoric repetition of “Birthday Ghost” at every entry in the calendar is suggestive of the
metaphorical recurrence of the same event – a birthday – over time, while what follows the two
words changes with every line, suggesting, again, that every recurrence is a variation. Furthermore,
if every “birthday” is a rehearsal of another one, then the different historical elements that are listed
are implicitly compared to one another and, hence, analogized. For instance, Harris might imply
that a link operates, through the theme of war, between the post World War II Nuremberg trials, the
Huns' invasion of Europe, and the 1066 Battle of Hastings between William of Normandy and
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Harold Godwinson. Another way in which elements are correlated consists in additional repetitions,
such as can be perceived through a tracing of words such as “cake,” and “ices.” Finally, and quite
ironically, recurrence is enhanced through the repetition of “ghost,” which is then made doubly
spectral (as a revenant and as anaphora), and is reproduced on photographs in spite of a specter's
presumably not being photogenic – except, maybe, in scams and adulterated photographs shot by
members of occult groups investigating the “beyond” and trying to prove the existence of ghosts.
Dark irony is also conjured by the mention that Ghost is getting ready for parties around the world
on a day (his birthday) that has become consonant with war and violent historical events: the
resulting superimposition of war and “party,” in a somber humor of sorts, is evocative of war as a
means of adding the newly dead to a contingent of partying ghosts. Finally, the deliberate
anachronism of placing the “Nürnberg” (sic) trials before the battle of Hastings foregrounds the fact
that in the cyclical time of infinite rehearsal, “the past is present in future stories” (D'Aguiar 2000,
152). This “Birthday Ghost” passage's recourse to heavy handed repetition and irony, along with its
World War Two focal point are, of course, highly reminiscent of D'Aguiar's use of the same devices
in the above-cited passage from A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, later revised as “Granny
on her Singer Sewing Machine” (D'Aguiar 1993, 8), where Alvin's grandmother criticizes her
grandson's decision to join the World War II British war effort while repeatedly asking him to “lick
[a] thread and feed it through [a] needle's eye” (D'Aguiar 1991, 243-4). That request is darkly ironic
insofar as the probability for the grandmother to manage to feed a thread into a needle with her
impaired sight is as low as that of Alvin's return home after becoming an active World War II RAF
pilot, according to her.
Another anaphoric passage from Harris' The Infinite Rehearsal that resembles lines from
D'Aguiar's work, and further suggests that Harris' novel has played a part in D'Aguiar's use of
repetitive literary techniques, is the following one: “One is afraid to drown before one's time (yet
live), one is afraid to glimpse the age of the earth (yet descend into the womb), the age of faltering
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economies (yet arise into the spirit of value), the age of the tides, the age of ageless fall into
apparent nothingness … all before one's time … the age of terrifying responsibility [...]” (Harris
1987, 45, my italics). Every italicized fragment in this excerpt is repeated at least once. The
passage's structure itself is repetitive in its alternation of bracketed and unbracketed constituents
which also differ semantically, forming paradoxical superimpositions of death and life, aging and
reverting to a prenatal state, economic loss and spiritual value. Such contradictory syncretisms are
only conceivable through the assumption, again, of infinite rehearsal, or cyclic variation of time, by
way of which presence is always a “before” and an “after.” The “age of tides” phrase, being
rehearsed into “the age of ageless fall,” aptly illustrates the infinite, unoriginal diffraction of
presence, and is reminiscent of Derrida's description of metaphorical retreat in oceanic terms again
(Derrida 1978, 66), while the notion of a “terrifying responsibility” sends on back to responsibility
before the ghost and to Derrida's specters (Derrida 1993, xviii). The correlation of the spectral and
the oceanic is, in turn, comparable to what D'Aguiar does, as seen in the previous chapter, in his sea
riff. Such themes and repetitions also seem to be reworked from the above-cited excerpt from The
Infinite Rehearsal (Harris 1987, 45) into the following quatrain from Bill of Rights:
Down to the bottom of the deep blue sea
Down to the centre of gravity
Down on our hand and on our knees
Down on our luck unluckily (D'Aguiar 1998, 74)
The lines describe the ways in which the commune members “fall down” (74) under Jim Jones'
authority at the Jonestown commune. The mention of getting down on one's “hands” and “knees”
evokes submission as much as prayer, conveying a religious atmosphere in keeping with the sectary
context, and the “down on our luck unluckily” line, while achieving the kind of mirror effect
D'Aguiar later reproduces in “Vulture's Theory of Perpetual Return” (2013, 54), indicates, through
form, the ultimately unfortunate unfolding of time for commune members being led to their
(suicidal) deaths. Furthermore, the word “down,” in that fourth line, is no longer positional, as in
the preceding lines, but is rehearsed into the indication of a feeling of bereavement (of luck). The
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passage's first line, “down to the bottom of the deep blue sea,” does not seem, however, to cohere
with the Jonestown context, and is apparently closer to a description of the fate of victims of the
transatlantic slave trade. In other words, D'Aguiar might be implying that the position of Jones'
disciples has become one of enslavement, and thus represent Jonestown as a twentieth-century
recurrence of slavery. Thus the passage is made to suggest rehearsal through anaphoric and
metaphorical variations as much as through an evocation of historical recurrence, which makes it
comparable to the aforementioned 'Birthday ghost” and “One is afraid” passages from The Infinite
Rehearsal (Harris 1987, 38, 45), all the more so since the mention of a “center of gravity”
(D'Aguiar 1998, 74) is reminiscent of Harris' comparison, in his novel, of a “glimpse at the age of
the earth” to a descent into the “womb” (1987, 45). Thus, Harris' literary implementation of his idea
of infinite rehearsal apparently consists in one of the matrices from which D'Aguiar draws to
elaborate themes and there variations into the wefts of his works.
In addition to using anaphora as a device that could metaphorically convey the idea of
infinite rehearsal, D'Aguiar uses it as a means to operate transitions from one image to another in
successions that summarize – and therefore rehearse – preceding passages. In order to illustrate this
point, a rather long section must be quoted from Bill of Rights:
If a man acquired a cart, without a horse,
To sell mauby, shaved ice, coconut water,
By walking Georgetown, would it be a case
Of out the frying pan into the fire,
On account of Georgetown's choke and robbers
Lethal as coral snakes? A man could do worse
Than roam the capital blowing his own trumpet
Like stay here and end up in a hearse.
But that would put Descartes before the Hobbes
We know and love; and that would put an end to verse.
Cart horse
Horse ice
Ice water
Water fire
Fire choke
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Choke robber
Robber snake
Snake coral
Coral man
Man city
City love
Love verse
Verse hearse
Hearse trumpet
Trumpet love
Love cart
Cart love
Love fire
Fire love
Love water
Water love
Love love (D'Aguiar 1998, 41)
D'Aguiar is punning upon Descartes and Hobbes with cart and horse, and privileging Descartes126
over Hobbes is presented as an illogical gesture, comparable to putting a cart before a horse, “that
would put an end to verse.” Here, and as explained in more detail in the introduction to Chapter V
below, D'Aguiar is implying that, unlike Descartes' strict rational logic, Hobbes includes, like Vico
for that matter, imagination, myths, and dreams within the realm of rationality, by designating them
as some of the forms memory may take (Hobbes 14, Banchetti-Robino 122). One could infer that,
in this sense, favoring Descartes over Hobbes would entail a sharp reduction of the scope of art, so
much so that the poetic persona in D'Aguiar's poem claims that it would “put an end to verse”
(D'Aguiar 1998, 41). However, the crux of that passage, as far as infinite rehearsal is concerned,
consists in the italicized section, as it draws words from the preceding lines and uses them in an
anaphoric succession that builds images and connections as it metaphorically summarizes the poem
through a hypomnesic distortion of sorts. Specifically, the words “cart,” “horse,” “ice,” “water,”
“fire,” “choke,” “robbers,” “snakes,” “coral,” “man,” “love,” “verse” all are used again, and in in
this order, in the excerpt's second half, from its eleventh to its twenty-third line. The progression
from one word to another in the italicized section metaphorically reproduces the way the beginning
of the poem unfolds, and subsequently appeals to the reader's memory of what s/he has just read in
126An allusion to Descartes' “Cogito ergo sum” can also be found in Bill of Rights (D'Aguiar 1998, 95). For more
information on Descartes, Hobbes, and Vico's thoughts concerning reason and the imagination, see the introduction
to Chapter V.
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as a kind of summary.127 The end of the italicized passage reverses the process by going back
through the poem's ten first lines with the same words and additional words in a cyclic but varying
structure. In other words, the italicized section of the passage could consist in yet an additional way,
designed by D'Aguiar, of representing the idea of infinite rehearsal. In this sense, it is also
interesting to note that the only rime in the passage's first ten lines – “horse,” “worse,”
“hearse,”“verse,” – could itself rime with the word “rehearse.” The idea of infinite rehearsal is
consistent with these rimes as well in that a rime is a rehearsal in sound, and the imperfection of the
rhyme that is effected between “horse” and the three other rime-words, in addition to their differing
meaning, suggests the idea of variation through recurrence also conveyed by Harris' notion of
infinite rehearsal. Intertextual revision is at play here as well since, if this passage may be described
as a metaphorical representation of the idea of infinite rehearsal, it also consists in a variation of
Harris' use of repetitive techniques. Finally, and again, the first half of the excerpt corresponding to
a thematic exposition of sorts, and its second half amounting to a rehearsed variation of that theme,
in addition to the changes of rhythm metrical rewriting entails, are in keeping with the musical
definition of infinite rehearsal as theme and variations. Such a musical analogy is apparently
corroborated by another, openly musical poem Fred D'Aguiar wrote.
c. Portobello Islands
That poem is “Notting Hill” (D'Aguiar 1993, 39-41), a triptych the theme of which is the
famous Notting Hill Caribbean carnival taking place in London every year, in late August and/or
early September, on Portobello Road and its surrounding streets. One may note, in the present
perspective on repetition and cyclical time, that the poem's very theme, from the onset, corresponds
to a recurrent event. As far as form is concerned, the poem's first part consists in three pairs of fairly
regular four-beat couplets that resemble four-by-four formations and are framed by the two-line
127The self-same technique is implemented by D'Aguiar in A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, as lines of paired
words are used to summarize a conversation that has just taken place in the same scene: there, one can read “world
pearl / pearl sentence / sentence necklace / necklace gesture [...]” and so on (D'Aguiar 1991, 233).
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chorus, made up of a two respectively dactyllic and trochaic trimeters, saying “car-ni-val car-ni-val
car-ni-val / this is car-ni-val” (39). The poem's second part has a structure analogous to that of the
first section, in that it consists in three trimetric tercets interspersed with three identical choruses in
West Indian slang: “come let we wind and grind no girl / carnival not once a year / come let we
wind and grind” (40). Furthermore, these two first parts echo one another thematically since,
between the choruses of the first part, the stanzas successively deal with, roughly speaking,
“rainbow” carnival outfits (39), Caribbean musical instruments, and dancers, while the
corresponding verse paragraphs in the second part describe, in the following order, “rainbow”
carnival outfits (40), Caribbean musical instruments, and West Indian food. In other words, the
forms and theme of part one and two are comparable, except for the final theme of part two. Such
correspondence suggests, in turn, that part two is a variation on the (musical) theme established by
part one. Finally, the poem's third part almost exclusively deals with song, dance and the pervading
sense of communion that arises from the carnival, in five tetrametric sextets: the theme is, again,
altered but similar, and the tetrametric rhythm corresponds to part one, while the six-line stanzas
share their ternary structure with part two, suggesting that part three revises the preceding parts as
well.
This theme and variation along the streets of Notting Hill comes across as inescapably
associated to, and patterned upon, Wilson Harris' principle rehearsal, all the more so since the
poem's third and fourth lines are highly evocative of Harris' first novel, Palace of the Peacock
(1960), in which the main character, at the end of the novel, is described as ascending a waterfall to
the palace of the peacock, “where the light's rays decompose” (Benitez-Rojo 188), and where he
can resurrect and get through a similar, yet varying life experience, as the novel shows (Harris 1960,
100-17). At the beginning of “Notting Hill,” one reads: “peacock with feathers of the rainbow /
wings' spread all day” (D'Aguiar 1993, 39, italics mine).128 Hence, in addition to being formally and
128For a comparative reading of Palace of the Peacock and D'Aguiar's latest novel, Children of Paradise, see Chapter
V, part III.
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thematically reminiscent of the pattern of theme and variation, “Notting Hill” turns one of Harris'
tropes of infinite rehearsal (the palace of the peacock) to an outfit for yearly carnival dancers, and
so doing, intertextually specifies, from the first lines on, how the poem's recurrent patterns may be
interpreted (as infinite rehearsal). So doing, the poem also apparently legitimizes the idea that
infinite rehearsal is the space-time equivalent of the sonic pattern of theme and variations, audible
in the rhythms of carnival music.
Following Harris' principle, rehearsal in “Notting Hill,” is, then, supposed to enrich meaning
through repetition. While song and dance constitute the thread that plaits the poem's three parts
together, the three sections also convey a repetitive, yet changing sense of the carnivalesque in the
Bakhtinian sense, that is, of open-endedness and heterogeneous communion, by way of which the
distinction between bodies become indistinguishable, and through which the order of things is
subverted (Bakhtin 1984, 7-8). For instance, in the first part of “Notting Hill,” “the robes of kings
drag yards behind / head-above-their-own crowns sway” (39). Carnival kings are unofficial kings,
dressed up in regal robes that fit the occasion, but “drag yards behind” for others to either lift them
in support or step on them so that the kings may “fall.” The equivocal nature of the line “headabove-their-own crowns sway” corroborates this potential for the symbolic subversion of authority,
since the phrase may both designate Caribbean kings dancing upside down, their heads, protected
by a crown, spinning on the ground, and/or indicate that “heads” higher than those of carnival kings
make their crowns sway, or have sway over their crowns, and thus take over as kings of the
carnival.
The carnivalesque sense of physical proximity and continuity, in turn appears in the poem's
second part, through the chorus “come let we wind and grind no girl / carnival not once a year /
come let we wind and grind” (40), and is clarified in the poem's third part as follows:
You're rubbing up another body
in front, one rubbing you from behind;
two on your sides bump to your hips'
pendulum swing. Wherever your arms stretch
for balance you grab a shoulder or waist;
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when they jump you take off too. (41)
Crowd communion is so strong that the people form a single, coordinate body that moves in
synchrony to the music. Yet, such a sense of bodily continuity is not only being rehearsed from the
poem's second section, since the rhythm of the “hips' / pendulum swing,” as indicated above, is also
evoked in a passage from Omeros (Walcott 1990, 73-4), and is revised by D'Aguiar in “Elegy”
(D'Aguiar 2009, 87). The rehearsal is not only thematic and intra-textual, but intertextual here
again. Finally, the crowd, presented as a multifarious British and Caribbean body within London
streets may be viewed as a cross-tropical metaphor, or tropicality, and reminds one of the historical
past that relates Britain to the Caribbean, as the poem's closing stanza suggests:
Never mind street names, they're postal
conveniences. Life is a honeycomb
made to eat; just sort out the sting
from the honey and the choreography
comes with ease, grace; so rock on,
but mind that island in the road! (41)
The vague injunction for one not to mind street names actually makes one curious about such
“postal / conveniences,” and reminds readers that the main artery in Notting Hill, on which the
carnival procession passes, is Portobello Road. It actually turns out that Portobello Road is related
to the colonial history of the Caribbean basin, since the road was named after the local Porto Bello
farm that was named thus on the occasion of the 1739 British capture from Spain of Porto Bello, in
Panama.129 In other words, the pretense that a street name is just a postal convenience actually
brings to the fore a historical fact that partakes of a historical background which, in turn, relates the
Caribbean to Britain, and corresponds to the cross-tropical condition for the existence of such
events as the Notting Hill carnival. Hence, it is as important to mind “street names” as to beware of
that “island in the road,” which actually designates three things, simultaenously: (1) a traffic island
on which a dancer may trip; (2) a troop of dancers on Portobello road corresponding to a Caribbean
island, yet melting into other islands' choreographic bands, as the above-described physical
continuity of carnival suggests; (3) an allegorical representation of the presence of Caribbean
129Www.portobellorroad.co.uk/history/ (July 27th 2016).
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islanders on British soil as an integral constituent of the cross-cultural identity of Britain.
“Tripping” on a traffic island in Britain is a hypomnesic metaphor for the cross-tropical “trip” that
integrated Caribbean “islands” with Britain, a tropicality then minded and reminded by the poetic
persona in the poem's final rehearsal.
Thus, Harris' concept of infinite rehearsal, as a literary device that infuses Nietzsche's
perpetual return with différance, seems to have influenced D'Aguiar's writing in its conception of
time and in its technicality, put to the service of a poetic beauty infused with philosophical depth,
insofar as in both D'Aguiar's and Harris' works, infinite rehearsal, as a literary concept, is a tropical
construct that always implies returns to the past through history, intertextual revision, and repetition,
and induces one to reflect upon the nature of time and presence, of past and future. The principle of
infinite rehearsal, then, also has an impact on memory, and such an impact has an effect on
D'Aguiar's representations of dreams, be they peaceful or nightmarish, as is now to be shown,
before closing the present chapter.
III. Recurrent Dreams & Nightmares
In On Dreams, Freud describes a dream he had, in which he saw “something like two eyes
as a sketch or as the contour of a spectacle lens” (Freud 2010, 4), and soon connects that dream to a
preceding event, when he had dinner with a friend, to whom he offered “an antique shawl, upon
which eyes are painted all round, a so-called Occhiale, as a charm against the Malocchio. Moreover,
[the friend] is an eye specialist. That same evening I had asked him about a patient whom I had sent
to him for glasses” (6, Freud's italics). In other words, Freud relates his dreaming of lenses and eyes
to the fact that the day preceding his dream was replete, for him, with events concerning eyesight.
Here are, in his own words, the precise deductions he draws:
The conclusion which is now forced upon me is that the dream is a sort of substitution for
those emotional and intellectual trains of thought which I attained after complete analysis. I do not
yet know the process by which the dream arose from those thoughts, but I perceive that it is wrong to
regard the dream as psychically unimportant, a purely physical process which has arisen from the
activity of isolated cortical elements awakened out of sleep.
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I must further remark that the dream is far shorter than the thoughts which I hold it replaces;
whilst analysis discovered that the dream was provoked by an unimportant occurrence the evening
before the dream. (7, Freud”s emphasis)
Freud, in the first line of this citation, italicizes his definition of a dream as a “substitution.” He
further explains that what the dream “replaces,” in condensed form, is a past event, from “the
evening before.” In this sense, if a dream is a substitution, or replacement, by way of which one
thing is translated into an equivalent other, then a dream functions like a metaphor. Moreover, if,
according to Freud, a dream metaphorizes a past event, it then has, like metaphor again, a
hypomnesic quality (Derrida 1978, 66). The language of dreams is, thus a network of unconscious,
mnemonic tropes of a particular past. Furthermore, and as a consequence, since dreams are
repeated, yet differing pasts, their function is analogical to infinite rehearsal, all the more so since
dreams can be recurrent, and operate, in a mise en abyme of sorts, as successive variations over a
specific theme. Again, Fred D'Aguiar himself includes dreams within his discussion of Harris'
principle of infinite rehearsal: “For Harris, each return to a memory, image, or dream yields new
insights, and each time the viewer or thinker participates in the recall or act of gazing — from a
necessarily partial because particular viewpoint — that person changes a little” (D'Aguiar 2009a).
In this perspective, it is, then, not accidental to find that both Harris and D'Aguiar do apply literary
techniques that are evocative of infinite rehearsal to the description of dreams and nightmares, and
to endow such phenomena with memorial value, as the following pages show.
a. Dream Depictions
Such a correlation between dreams and infinite rehearsal is overtly suggested in the title of
D'Aguiar's poem “Guyana Dreaming Wilson Harris” (D'Aguiar 2009, 44-5). The poem is made up
of five free-verse octaves in which, as the title indicates, a personified Guyana apparently dreams of
Wilson Harris or dreams him into being. However, as the poem unfolds, the distinction between
dreamer and dream becomes porous, and allows for the formulation of mutually enriching images
and metaphors that mirror and invert one another, and have an impact on memory. Here is the
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poem's first stanza:
An explorer, he deposited me in his skull,
folded, tucked me away at the back part,
deep in a closet or bottom drawer in a chest
full of such drawers. I felt sure he buried me
just to forget me. Occasionally, light flicked
my way, or he's mind's eye brushed past me.
Most times I lay surrounded by more
useful things he had more time for.
The “explorer” is, of course, Wilson Harris who, as explained above, was a land surveyor before he
became a professional writer. The poetic persona, speaking in the first person, is, presumably, the
title's personified Guyana. And what Guyana dreams is, apparently, Wilson Harris' consigning
Guyana to the back of his mind, as if it were a notion he wished to repress deep into a chest of
drawers that stands as a metaphor for Harris' brains and the ideas they contain. The dreaming
country deduces from such a behavior that it is willfully, yet partly – for occasionally, “his mind's
eye brushed past [Guyana]” (44) – being dismissed into oblivion by Harris. As a result, “Most times
[Guyana] lay[s] surrounded by more / useful things [Harris] had more time for” (44). These two
lines, accentuate the closure of the poem's first stanza through rime, and their progression from
“time” to “more and back from “more” to “time” create a mirror effect that also enriches meaning
because, through such symmetry, one may infer that the designation of things as “useful” is
subjective, in that it translates one's choice of dedicating “more time” to the said things. Finally,
Guyana's sense of being forgotten by Harris is evocative of the actual fact that, in 1959, the
Guyanese author left his country of origin for England, where he still lives. In this sense, the
imagined presentation of “Guyana Dreaming Wilson Harris” then consists in a re-presentation (represented as such, that is, as a dream), of a biographical fact about the Guyanese author. In other
words, biographical data permeates an imagined and imaginative poem in the same way as memory
feeds into dreams, and the two phenomena are presented, syncretically, in D'Aguiar's poem, where
recurrence is, thus, already palpable.
In the poem's second stanza, Guyana explains that in its dream of being forgotten by Wilson
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Harris, it tries to get Wilson Harris to dream of it, and thus imbricates a dream within a dream that is
its inverse equivalent, in a mirror like recurrence that also reinforces the sense of encasement, or
mise en abyme, that pervades in the poem:
I almost gave up reasoning why I came up
short in his world, set aside for the time being
for the right time, but for now in my night time
waiting for the ripe time to make my entrance.
Something to do with his sense of himself
as casting shadows, instead of living under them,
made him remember me in his prison; or else
he dreamed me while he dozed in his lover. (D'Aguiar 2009, 44)
The first four lines of the stanza show recurrent patterns that are, again, evocative of infinite
rehearsal. For instance, the preposition “for” is repeated four times with an alternation of temporal
and causal significations, all related to four other occurrences of “time,” which progressively
designate a nightly moment at which Guyana, in its dream, will supposedly manage to enter Harris'
world. In the remainder of the stanza, Guyana indeed comes back to Harris' mind, either as a
ghostly shadow – the spatial presentation of which is revised in “Vulture' Theory of Perpetual
Return” – or as a dream, both of which fulfill the same hypomnesic function of making Harris
“remember” Guyana, of making Guyana recur in his mind.
However, and in spite of Guyana's intention, the country has no direct agency in its being
reminded to Harris, but does not “mind,” as long as, one way or the other, it is being remembered:
“Both suited me, twin reminders of him in two / minds about everything. He made me his ensign”
(44). The mention of “two reminders of him,” is unsettling at first, because the reminders (the
shadow and the dream) are supposed to be reminders of Guyana to Wilson Harris. Yet, the inversion
progressively makes sense in the text's poetics of reversal, and retrospectively so, thanks to the
suggested reversibility of the casting of shadows expressed in the second stanza, and because of the
mirror effect of Guyana dreaming of Harris dreaming Guyana. Harris and Guyana are, here,
implicitly being equated as reflections, “ensigns” of one another, suggesting that if Harris no longer
lives in Guyana, a dream-like Guyana leaves through him as the landscape that provided him with
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so strong a poetics (of infinite rehearsal) that it granted him with a lifelong career as one of
Guyana's most gifted novelists. The mirror effect that operates between Guyana and Harris becomes
so strong in the poem that, by the end of the fourth octave, Guyana “remind[s Harris] that [it] was
the dream and he / The dreamer (or the other way round, or not)” (44). The tension being felt,
resulting from the progressive blurring of boundaries that are supposed to allow readers to
distinguish who is (dreaming) who as Guyana dreams of Harris dreaming Guyana, is then
progressively resolved into the poem's closure in which Harris “dream[s Guyana] up and put
[Guyana] away then [Guyana] made / [its] entrance; his exit; [their] contiguous worlds” (45). In
other words, and to paraphrase Derrida (1982, 13), the poem represents the becoming-dream of
space and the becoming-space of dream into a “contiguous world” that concentrates into the
decomposable presence (in the form of a poem) of a fractal image of mirroring symmetries: the
resolution of the poem is, thus, infinite rehearsal itself.
Another, earlier poem by Fred D'Aguiar, although it is said not to consist, stricto sensu, in a
dream, has recourse to dream imagery to refer to a specific historical past, in a way that is
comparable to “Guyana Dreaming Wilson Harris” and its allusions to actual, biographical data on
Wilson Harris' past. That poem is “Flying to Nowhere” (D'Aguiar 1993, 19). Here is how it begins:
A four-seater airplane I'm in drops low
over the Thames Barrier, moved to some
jungle-type setting, by which I mean
transplanted as places tend to be in dreams.
Jungle or not there's a cathedral – don't ask how
in the middle of it, guarded by an army
you'd be foolish to meddle with; […]. (D'Aguiar 1993, 19)
The poem's first stanza posits that the setting is analogous to the type of scenery one may see in
dreams, with places transplanted to other lands. Here again, then, the translations operated by
dreams are likened to those operated by images, or metaphors. In “Flying to Nowhere,” place is
literally and tropically evoked. The “Thames” is openly named, while the “jungle-type” setting is
evocative of a tropical rainforest. In the same way as the Western river is “transplanted” into the
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sylvan landscape, so too is a cathedral, that is, a trope of Christianity, imported into the scene.
Although the poetic persona intervenes in a dismissive, neglectful way, through the second stanza's
“Jungle or not” and “don't ask me how,” the evocation of the jungle, in correlation to Britain and
Christianity, are condensed into a tropicality that is highly evocative of colonialism (the “how”
readers are supposed not to ask, in the same way as they are told, in “Notting Hill” (41), not to
“mind” significantly colonial street names), all the more so since it is the Thames and the church
that come to the jungle, and not the jungle that comes to them. The description of an army in the
jungle could be the scene of a conflict taking place in the southern hemisphere, be it in the
Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, or South Asia, according to the jungle setting. However,
considering the facts that D'Aguiar's Guyanese background transpires through many of his works,
and that Guyana, from the eighteenth century on to the late twentieth century, has repetitively
engaged in border disputes with Venezuela concerning the possession of the region's rainforest
interior, one may infer that the setting is Guyanese. 130 In any case, the poem's penultimate stanza
confirms the Caribbean setting, for, when the plane's passengers land, they go into a shop “where
the one language is a French patois,” that is, créole, and where “the currency is English pounds”
(19). Hence, the poem unfolds in a Caribbean and colonial war context. Yet, and then, quite
unexpectedly, by the end of the poem, the poetic persona compares the setting to
a haven I'll call for argument's sake
heaven, since it is a paradise in the sense
that we're all of us dead; we don't know
or we know and don't care; both feel the same. (19)
The passage does not cast paradise in the usual, positive light, but describes it as a colony of the
dead, so to speak, which suggests that, on top of the belief, repeated here, that life in paradise is a
posthumous, second life, what recurs with lives is history: here, that of a colonial past. As a
consequence, what makes heaven pleasant in the poem is not its setting, but the indifference of its
130Again, Guyana is the setting for collections such as Mama Dot and Airy Hall, or poems such as “Guyana Dreaming
Wilson Harris” (D'Aguiar 2009, 44-5). Moreover, and as shown below, three out the six novels Fred D'Aguiar wrote,
namely, Dear Future, Bethany Bettany, and Children of Paradise (D'Aguiar 2014, 321) narrate stories taking place
in Guyana, and all three mention the border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, which is further discussed in
Chapters IV and V below, in readings of Dear Future and Bethany Bettany.
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dead dwellers, which is reminiscent in turn of the recurrent “ah don't give a damn / ah done dead
already” chorus from “Zombie Jamboree” (D'Aguiar 1989, 31). Such an impression is also
evocative, again, of the fact that dreams or metaphors may hypomnesically retrace a historical past,
albeit in a varying form, as with infinite rehearsal. Yet, if history is repeated, or repeats itself under
different forms, through rehearsal and/or cyclical time, then it implicitly suggests, as in D'Aguiar's
poem, that somber historical events may recur in different guises into the present, and may be
represented as such in verse to warn about the insidious legacies of such pasts. This, D'Aguiar does
in “Flying to Nowhere,” but also through the representation of nightmarish reminiscences of the
Middle Passage again.
b. Nightmarish Depths
Of course, such nightmares are, most of all, found in Feeding the Ghosts, but a specific
occurrence of transatlantic memory that also happens to cohere with the notion of infinite rehearsal
may be found, again, in D'Aguiar's “Elegy,” and in relation to his mourning the victims of the
Virginia Tech mass shooting (D'Aguiar 2009, 58). However, before directly dealing with these
nightmares, a few points must be made regarding the intertextual bonds that might exist between
Harris' The Infinite Rehearsal and D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts.
Harris actually correlates the ideas of infinite rehearsal and of the sea in numerous passages
in The Infinite Rehearsal, and some of them are enriched with references to theater and history that
are quite enlightening as far as D'Aguiar's works are concerned. In Harris' novel, the character
called Aunt Miriam once asks Alice “to come on stage on the crest of a wave – the name I have
given to our little theatre.' (Aunt Miriam ran a school of drama (called The Crest of a Wave) in her
home beside the sounding sea. It was but half a mile or so away from Alice's house in which many
rehearsals were conducted)” (Harris 1987, 28). First and foremost, that passage capitalizes on the so
far unmentioned theatrical signification of the word “rehearsal:” waves are compared to theater
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stages in the passage. While a stage can be the place for an indefinite number of rehearsals of a play,
of rehearsals consisting in varying reproductions in time of the same theatrical text, waves
themselves must represent something that repeats eternally, yet with necessary variations, from the
ripple to the tidal wave. In other words, the ocean, here, stands as a metaphor for infinite rehearsal
and, since this principle consists in a way of considering time and, therefore, of conditioning life
and creativity, the metaphor is tidalectical too. This is, of course, reminiscent of D'Aguiar's sea riff,
and of Feeding the Ghost, the main part of which is staged on board a ship sailing on crests of the
Atlantic's waves. And Harris' oceanic presentation of infinite rehearsal, like D'Aguiar's novel, is, of
course, related to the history of the tidalectic, transatlantic history of the slave trade through its
“theatre of remembered/forgotten history” (Harris 1987, 81-2, emphasis mine), which, as seen in
Chapter II and its exploration of D'Aguiar's oceanic tropes, emphasizes the re-treat and/or
hauntology of transatlantic (an)amnesia.
At the beginning of Harris' novel, the narrator explains how the character called “Ghost
appeared out of the sea” (Harris 1987, 3). The idea of a ghost rising from the sea could evoke
Marley's posthumous apparition in “Dread” (D'Aguiar 1993, 16) and coheres with Walcott's riming
of “wave” and “grave” (Walcott 1990, 159), but what it resembles the most is the description of the
wandering ghosts of slaves from the Zong, a transatlantic slave ship “full of ghosts” (D'Aguiar
1997, 229). Of course, writers representing victims of the slave trade and of other historical
atrocities as ghosts are numerous, and the presence of oceanic ghosts in D'Aguiar's and Harris'
novels does not necessarily entail intertextual bonds between them. But lexical similarities in the
expression of such images are so flagrant that a sense of intertextuality between Feeding the Ghosts
and The Infinite Rehearsal remains irrepressible – all the more so in light of all the other links that
have been seen, so far, to operate between the two authors' respective works. For instance, the title
of the novel, in addition to being drawn, as explained above, from a Mama Dot poem (D'Aguiar
1985, 39), also seems to consist in a trace from a passage in Harris' novel, where the narrator forgets
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to feed ghosts (Harris 1987, 4). Furthermore, the story of the Zong's crew throwing a hundred and
thirty-two slaves overboard is recurrent in itself with its many descriptions of slaves being killed,
and gives a sense of a never-ending recurrence of death. Although all these slaves recurrently die by
drowning, they all, being human beings, are different from one another and are depicted as dying
and/or experiencing the prospect of death in different ways. These constitute painful but necessary
variations on the theme of death, in that they are endowed with the power to remind readers of the
historical facts such as that of the Zong, and these variations seem to provide a sense of what Harris'
principle of the infinite rehearsal may produce: “There is only the fact of the Zong and its unending
voyage and those deaths that cannot be undone. Where death has begun but remains unfinished
because it recurs. Where there is only the record of the sea” (D'Aguiar 1997, 230). The infinite
rehearsal of waves and tides becomes a tidalectical metaphor by way of which the ocean becomes a
perpetual and indelible reminder of the victims of the Middle Passage.
Thus, the metaphorical correlation of the sea and history that D'Aguiar effects through
Brathwaite's tidalectics, and shares with Walcott's poetry (Walcott 1986, 364-6), is comparable to
Wilson Harris' prose and can be related to the idea of infinite rehearsal. Harris himself openly draws
a link between the sea and history, as the character named Ghost emerges from the sea in a dreamlike, climactic moment:
I KNEW EVERYTHING, I KNEW NOTHING. I WAS THE SUBJECT OF AN INFINITE
REHEARSAL OF THE PLAY OF HISTORY. Ghost slid from his towering wave of a horse in my
library of dreams. He came to me with the head of Sir Walter Raleigh riding on his left hand. A giant
El Doradonne brow upon which I read, 'History revises itself within the intervals of consciousness
and unconsciousness that it takes for the economies of our age to fall again and again from the block
and to touch the ground, consume a spark of dust, and rise into dream orbit around the sun'” (Harris
1987, 8).
History is compared to a play that is being performed on a wave-stage mounted by Ghost and,
hence, subjected to the infinite rehearsal of tides, tropes (the stage-as-wave) and specters – Ghost
(Harris 1987, 28). The presentation of Ghost with the head of Walter Raleigh in his hand functions
as a reminder of Raleigh's decapitation, which had been scheduled as a means to appease the
Spanish after Raleigh had failed to find the gold city of El Dorado in South America, and attacked
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Spanish settlements. More generally, Raleigh played a crucial role, during the Elizabethan period, in
the exploration and colonization of the Americas, notably of Virginia, North America: the return of
Raleigh's head to the Americas thus may thus serve as a suggestive and subversive trope of the
recurrence of colonial history into its “decapitated,” incapacitated variant. El Dorado is mentioned
within a portmanteau word comprising the name of John Donne, a poet contemporary to Raleigh.
The occurrence of that “Eldoradonne” portmanteau within The Infinite Rehearsal is also indicative
of the fact that the novel's recurrent quality also partially results from intra-textual revision, insofar
as Donne is the protagonist of Harris' first novel, Palace of the Peacock, in the 1988 preface of
which he reiterates the ElDoradonne pun (Harris 1960, 11). Finally, the entire scene is being
described as unfolding from the realm of a “library of dreams” and in cyclical repetitions of
(un)conscious phases that are correlated to the “economies of our age,” one of which may be that of
liquidity, considering the oceanic context. Thus, in the passage, Harris' manages to operate a
supersyncretic rehearsal of transatlantic colonial history not only through (the economies of)
intertexts, metaphors, tides and specters, but also, and initially, through the recurrence of dreams.
Nightmarish recurrences of the transatlantic slave trade are also described in Feeding the
Ghosts. For instance, back to England, Simon is described as having profoundly been marked by his
experience on board the Zong, so much so that it has altered his formerly peaceful dreams of
oceanic artillery into apocalyptic thunder:
This was a sound he'd treasured before this voyage. He'd slept to it and dreamed whatever its noise
determined, cannon, pistol, timber crashing to the ground and his body falling as he watched it from
a great height only to be caught and floated by the sea and left unscathed. Now it was red. Now it
boiled with the bodies of Africans. They roamed in his sleep and stood before every cannon that fired
in it. (D'Aguiar 1997, 177)
The memory of slaves being killed and thrown overboard has had such an impact on the
consciousness of Simon that it manifests itself metaphorically and unconsciously as dreams. The
sound of the sea that Simon metaphorically associates to that of cannons becomes the sound of
slaves hit by cannonballs and falling into the sea in his nightmares while, before experiencing the
Middle Passage, Simon used to turn the sound of firearms – the dreamed innocence and benign
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musicality of which translates Simon's potentially unconscious denial of their deadly power – to
tropes that merely stood for the sound of waves crashing. In other words, one of Simon's favorite
recurrent dreams has been rehearsed into a nightmare through his experience of the Middle Passage.
Memory is at play as well in a dream Mintah has at the end of Feeding the Ghosts when,
several decades after her transatlantic crossing, during the celebrations of the abolition of slavery in
Jamaica in 1833, she still has dreams that are reminiscent of her experience of the Middle Passage,
and in which she meets Simon again:
I am garlanded in flowers. Wake up, Mintah! There is a man with long white hair talking to a group.
He looks familiar. He is white though his skin is tanned brown. I hear him before I recognise him.
The group sees me approach and they cheer. Others gather around. The old man holds up a book. His
face is lined. His hair is thin on top but long at the sides and white. I don't know those features. But
when he smiles I see it is Simon. My ears fill with the sea, brought to me by a breeze I don't feel. My
eyes flood with salt water. I hold out my hands to touch some rare wood before me, to feel the run of
its grain. […]
She awoke from dozing by her front door. (D'Aguiar 1997, 220-2).
Memory, in the context of that dream, plays an important role again. Tears as “salt water” evoke the
sea and the memories Mintah keeps from it, which make her cry as she remembers and meets
Simon, within her dream. The cheering group and the flower garlands might themselves consist in
tropical re-presentations of the more recent past of the preceding days, when emancipation started
being celebrated. Two historical pasts related to the history of slavery are therefore syncretized
within Mintah's dream as metaphors. Mintah's dream, thus, also conveys a sense of the possibility
for metaphorical historicity to be rehearsed through dreams.
In quite a different context, corresponding to the period of mourning that the poet131 went
through, following the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting, the poetic voice apparently represents,
through recurrence, yet another Middle Passage nightmare:
I sleep on a mattress stuffed with bones,
Human bones;
My head on a pillow filled with hair,
Human hair
A bed made with black and white sheets of skin,
Human skin;
131Again, in “Elegy,” the poetic voice is that of D'Aguiar, who, as a Virginia Tech professor on campus when the
shooting occurred, was deeply affected by the event, and subsequently wrote “Elegy.”
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Floats down a river of soup-like blood,
Human blood;
Flows into a sea of dead flesh,
Human flesh;
Sinks to the bottom of that soudless sea,
Human sound.
Settles there with me grafted to it,
Human dark. (D'Aguiar 2009, 58)
In addition to the recurrence of rimes consisting in the repetition of the same words, until the pattern
breaks in the excerpt's two final couplets, repetition is emphasized through the incantatory
“Human” anaphora. The nightmarish context is made clear from the first line of the passage on, as
the grieving poet says he is sleeping “on a mattress stuffed with bones” (58). The image of
skeletons filling an entire mattress is evocative of the alarming number of defunct people the poet
has on his mind, and these people presumably are the Virginia dead. However, in a first reversal, the
“black and white sheets of skin,” unlike what occurred at Virginia Tech, float “down a river” and
“into a sea of dead flesh.” In a Virginian context, the river being described may be the James River
which, again, is the waterway through which thousands of slaves were dispatched into North
America, and which flows into the Atlantic and the cross-tropical historical past it tropically
conveys. Hence the dream operates a confluence, within the poet's mind, between the victims of
slavery and those who died on the Virginia Tech campus grounds, and accumulates, rehearses death
into overwhelmingly varying proportions within the poet's nightmare, the final phase of which is
presented through lines that no longer rime, and fall apart at the seams to actually “graft,” or stitch
the poet's skin together with that of those who died, subsequently making him feel their presence in
his flesh as much as in the “human dark” of his infinitely rehearsing soul, correlating dark thoughts
and sensations in an evocation of his “black bile,” or melancholy (Aristotle 83), an emotion that
deeply coheres with the pervading mourning atmosphere.132
Thus, in order to corroborate the cyclical nature of time that is implicitly conveyed, as seen
in Chapter II, by the hypomnesic qualities of tidalectics and metaphor, Fred D'Aguiar has recourse
132For additional information on melancholy and mourning, see the introduction to Chapter V.
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to Harris' principle of infinite rehearsal, which he manages to evoke not only through the recurrence
of waves, but also thanks to a great variety of literary devices and chronot(r)opes. From a technical
standpoint, rime and anaphora have proved crucial for the evocation of that type of recurrence.
Intertextual and intratextual revision complement these techniques by allowing for the rewriting of
tropes from other works, and by inscribing D'Aguiar, again, within the Caribbean literary cannon to
which the works of Brathwaite, Harris and Walcott also belong, and within a cross-tropical
philosophical framework relating him and Harris to thinkers such as Freud, Nietzsche and Derrida.
The contiguous tropical worlds of Harris and D'Aguiar are actually constructed through these
philosophical and literary connections, since it is through a Freudian conception of dreams and/or a
Derridean vision of metaphor as (tidaletic) retreat that infinite rehearsal could, more often than not,
be represented into poetry, be it as the re-telling of an actual anamnesis (D'Aguiar 1993, 35) or the
imaginative spiral of a bird's eye view (D'Aguiar 2013, 54).
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Partial Conclusion: Resisting Entropy
Stories from the past about the auction block are automatically my stories. I feel on behalf of
those who suffered these things. Racism is not over by any means. There are examples of it
every day in the media. People die every day at the hands of racists. I deplore these things. I
feel them. I write about race to keep the idea of one race as superior to another strange and
unacceptable (D'Aguiar qtd. in Frias 2002, 424).
Tropicality, thus, transpires throughout Fred D'Aguiar's entire verse corpus and well into
some of his prose work, cross-tropically relating him, in the process, to a multitude of other authors,
be they from the West, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. In that corpus, tropicality is made manifest in a
great variety of ways, ranging from the revision of tropes from musical and literary canons into
versions of interracial love, to the poet's reliance on intertextuality, dreams, tidal dialectics,
metaphorical retreat and infinite rehearsal as means to hypomnesically deconstruct white
mythologies by re-presenting language and cultures as fundamentally decomposable and crosscultural and, as a consequence, by invalidating any totalizing and illusory conception of culture,
race or nation as hermetic, homogenous and unified. In order to build his verse corpus, the poet has
also constantly been revising his previous works, and subsequently turned his verse into an intricate
network of poetic images. One of D'Aguiar's major fits, in this poetic constellation of crosstropically gathered tenors and vehicles, is that his tropes almost never fail to be pregnant with
philosophical and historical depth, and help to describe the past of populations and cultures through
their displacements around the world, with reference to such facts as the Middle Passage
experience, slavery and colonization and, thus, to preserve their memory and remind them to
readers.
But more than the epistemology, or the presumably infinite list of ways in which tropicality
can manifest itself and restore memory, it is important to explore the ethics and potential limitations
of scope tropicality may entail (Levinas 33). For onte thing, while tropicality is supposed to be
inclusive, it actually only seems to address intercultural relations that imply a crossing of the
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tropics, and therefore might not be appropriate as a means of dealing with all kinds of cross-cultural
phenomena. In order to avoid such an exclusive categorization, would it be possible to enlarge the
field of application of tropicality, in a scientifically and/or poetically legitimate way? Could one
formulate a version of tropicality that would designate the creation of linguistic and cross-cultural
tropes across diverse longitudes and latitudes that would not exclusively consist in the tropics? Can
the meaning of tropicality be expanded as a metaphor for the creation of tropes the existence of
which would depend upon any geographical displacement coupled to a motion or a substitution in
the spheres of language, of signification, and then of arts and cultures? It actually seems so. As
explained above, the tropics are tropes endowed with both physical and metaphorical mutability:
they were named Capricorn and Cancer because the sun respectively shone on them from the
constellations bearing the same names, two thousand years ago, and these names originally
belonged to the texts of Greek and Roman mythology – cultural tropes from outside the tropics.
However, the earth's axis of rotation has changed and is changing, and the sun, at the two solstices,
no longer shines on the tropics from the Cancer and Capricorn constellations: the tropics, like
tropes, are in permanent translation, and they are constantly being crossed by other tropical or
metaphorical movements (Britannica 1995, 796, 835). The tropics are always-already elsewhere,
and their displacement is perpetual. To this extent, all metaphorical – linguistic and cultural –
exchange that entails a physical movement on the surface of the earth could partake of tropicality's
texture. Thus, if this hypothesis is accepted, latitudes, longitudes, or even national borders, be they
parallel, transverse, or related in any geometrical way to the axes drawn by the poles or the Equator,
could be used as a reading grid of their own transgressions in order to reach a truly global – not total
– and inclusive tropicality – not a universal one, hermetic to any celebration of diversity.
But has the problem really been solved or has it, through metaphor again, been displaced?
For if tropicality generalizes itself as a form of cultural exchange on the finite space constituted by
the earth's surface, then, theoretically speaking, there will be a day when each and every possible
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exchange will have taken place, subsequently leading to global cultural uniformity or homogeneity:
that will be the death of diversity, the cultural entropy that Claude Lévi-Strauss feared so much
(Lévi-Strauss 2001, 66). However, such thinkers as Lévi-Strauss and Édouard Glissant worked hard
to show the ways in which the world could actually resist that threat of cultural entropy. On the one
hand, in Race and History, Lévi-Strauss explains that when inter-cultural diversity shrinks, intracultural diversity grows, for instance because of social inequalities. On the other hand, he indicates
that inter-cultural diversity and cross-cultural relation are not subsequently lost, but keep recreating
themselves through all types of transnational coalitions, be they resulting from good will or from
coercion. Cross-cultural exchange generates itself through the enlargement of international relations
of all kinds, and does not stagnate thanks to the new cultural forms that spring out of opposite social
claims originating from within each group forming a part of the coalition. In sum, the “introversions” of individual communities grant, to some extent, the perennial of cultural diversity and, as
a consequence, the perpetuation of an indefinite number of combinations in which diverse and
perpetually renewed cultural contents can be shared between different societies. Then, “global
civilization could be no other than the coalition, on a global scale, of cultures all preserving their
originality” – as long as such originality is a decomposable, renewable singularity endowed with
mutability and, hence, capable of generating individualities (Lévi-Strauss 1952, 61, my translation).
This idea is corroborated by what Glissant calls “opacity” in Poetics of Relation, or “subsistance
within an irreducible singularity”, “the thing that would bring us together forever and make us
permanently distinctive” as individuals (Glissant 1997, 190, 194). In addition to the need for
cultures to preserve their originality, individuals have a claim to opacity, that is, the unalienable
characteristic of a person, the expression and nature of which cannot, then, be lost to Otherness:
opacity is what Levinas quite aptly calls the face (Levinas 42).
Thus, the movement of tropicality is not bound to become entropic and total, as long as
movements of introversion and extroversion between opacity and otherness are preserved.133 And
133Lévi-Strauss, Le Regard Éloigné qtd. in Race et Histoire, 95.
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this actually is what tropicality does: it is its secret. As Frantz Fanon poetically shows in The
Wretched of the Earth, the cultural triumph of a community can operate through the act of giving
away one's secrets in order to secrete one's own light (Fanon 50). In other words, introversion as
secrecy actually is what secretes the cultural diversity that allows for the perennial of cross-cultural
relation. Tropicality's secrecy (introversion/secret and extroversion/secretion) can be perceived,
again, in Jamaican poet Edward K. Brathwaite's uses of the word calypso. This word, as seen above,
designates the intrinsically tropical identity of the Caribbean archipelago in his poetry (Brathwaite
48-50), and, as one of his poems, it is often referred to with related meanings, again, in Fred
D'Aguiar's poetry (D'Aguiar 1993, 29; 2009, 8; 2013, 48). In that poem (Brathwaite 48-50), calypso
as a trope of the musical – and cultural – identity of the Caribbean is being danced by people who
are trying to keep a member of their community from leaving their island, but they fail and the man
finally migrates towards the Western world in order to find an occupation there. In other words, and
at the risk of succumbing to heavy-handed rehearsal, these people are like the nymph Calypso in the
Odyssey, since they try to keep their Afro-Caribbean Odysseus on their island, until they are forced
to let him go, as in Homer's tale. This illustrates secrecy as defined above, in that introversion on a
trope of Caribbean identity – calypso dancing – induces extroversion towards another place on
earth, through the European intertext this word also contains. An attempt at turning in on a referent
of regional cultural identity entails the discovery of the multiplicity of its geographical and textual
references that tropically open the referent to the world: in “Calypso,” one leaves the literal as one
leaves the littoral (Derrida 1978, 66). Thus, to put it in a Relative, if not Saussurian, perspective,
there would be no Calypso without Phaeacians,134 no shade without light, no veil without unveiling,
no secret without secretion, no metaphor without re-treat (Ibid., 66), no de-territorialization without
re-territorialisation (Deleuze & Guattari 6), and it is this secret of introversion as a condition of
extroversion that conciliates here and elsewhere into what, from now on, we will singularly 135 call
134The Greek etymology of “calypso” designates, again, dissimulation, whereas that of “Phaeacia” refers to light, the
color gray, and the island Odysseus will go to after leaving Calypso in Homer's Odyssey.
135The manner, the twist that is given to something, and hence, its singularity, is “another” etymological “sense” of
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tropicality, without altering the nature of here and elsewhere into an undifferentiated totality.
trope.
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Part Two
Orphanhood: Fred D'Aguiar's Novels
I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me, I have no father, I
want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both
whisper “history,” for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history
which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot
summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish
and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of
slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you, father in the filth-ridden gut
of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men, your
fellowman and tribesman not moved or hovering with hesitation about your common race
any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you, inwardly
forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange thanks, I give the
strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of
two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from
your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance
and your gift. (Walcott 1974, 64)
Before going any further, let us look back one more time on the logical progression that has
been followed, so far, to study Fred D'Aguiar's works: Glissant's contention, in Poetics of Relation,
that there is no “prime element” of culture (Glissant 1990, 169), has led to the idea that such a fact –
the decomposable and, hence, cross-cultural nature of cultural elements – would necessarily be
translated in language into “tropicality,” because language, on top of being a cross-cultural medium,
is inescapably metaphorical (Derrida 1978, 66). As a consequence, and as Derrida shows in “White
Mythology” and “The Withdrawal of Metaphor,” it has also been explained that behind the
presumed literal, unified, and permanent quality of metaphysical concepts lie their actually hidden,
metaphorical nature and the partly erased, palimpsestic layers that brought them into being, starting
with (cross-cultural) mythology (Derrrida 1971, 11). Moreover, the intrinsic metaphoricity of
language, following, again, Derrida's thoughts in “The Withdrawal of Metaphor” and
Monolingualism of the Other, has led to the identification of the (metaphysical) desire for the literal
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and/or for a total appropriation of language, as unsatisfiable, and colonial in intent (Derrida 1996,
44, 47, 68-70). Finally, the idea that metaphor could remind one of myths (and therefore of the
fundamentally irreducible mythic) and attest to the inescapably decomposable nature of origin has
incited us to reflect upon representations of time not as a necessarily straight, unbroken line, but as
a cyclic, potentially varying phenomenon, through Nietzsche's notion of perpetual return and Harris'
later variant of infinite rehearsal. Now, as far as origin, time, and memory are concerned, the big
issue that cries out and has not been addressed yet in the present study, is, of course, that of
genealogy.
As etymology shows, a genealogy is a line of descent or a pedigree, the “tracing of a family”
or of one's bloodlines. Most of all, it is a logos, discourse, or language on the genus. 136 Genus refers
to category, class, family, and then, by extension, to race, stock, kind, offspring, descent, and birth
or origin as characteristics through which classification or characterization may function. That birth
and origin are pivotal events of genealogy is even made clearer by the fact that genus also relates to
Greek, Roman, and pre-Indo-European verbs and roots referring to producing, procreating,
becoming, and happening. The genus is therefore inseparable from the germ, the embryo, the seed
and the organic, biological nature of filiation. Genealogy is, hence, the coupling of language and
philogeny, and as such, it is dependent as much on culture (its expression through language) as on
nature: to use the words of Michel Foucault in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” genealogy is not
exclusively about the evolution of species (Foucault 81); it is an “analysis of descent” that operates
an “articulation of body and history” (83, emphasis mine).
Foucault's article, as far as it is concerned, is of interest for the present purpose also because
its opening pages provide a mirror image of the logical progression that has been followed so far to
study Fred D'Aguiar's poetry. In other words, Part One, above, proposes an argument analogous to
that of “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” but in reverse order: while a discussion of tropicality was
136Online Etymology Dictionary.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=orphan&searchmode=none (March 14th, 2014).
All subsequent etymological information is derived from this source, except where indicated.
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initiated through a sense of the decomposable nature of origin to lead ultimately to Nietzsche, time,
and now, the question of genealogy, Foucault, in his essay, begins with Nietzsche and genealogy to
criticize the metaphysical assumptions of single origin and “traditional history,” that is, history as a
linear, unbroken, and teleological progression (75-80). Having reached that point, Foucault then
distinguishes “traditional history” from “effective history” – as a translation of Nietzsche's
wirkliche Historie137 (86) – by describing “effective history” as a genealogy that does not reject the
discontinuous and the non-teleological in history, the breaks on the time-line that function as the
decomposable original moments of emergence of new genealogical/effective-historical phases.
These breaks, Foucault calls “accidents” (81), and he specifies that these accidents correspond to a
definition of emergence as a play of contradicting forces, as the struggle for domination in which
violence and law play their part (84-5). Effective history, according to Foucault, would then
function as what he calls a “countermemory” (93) that is interested in the accidental nature of
events rather than with their inscription within a linear progression, as can be found in the
“memory” of “traditional history,” the institutionalized historiography of official records which, as
shown above, D'Aguiar too has reasons to doubt, considering the relative erasure of the past of
slavery from Western archives (Baucom 2005, 11).
But if the “accident” corresponds to the irruption of a contradicting force, where does this
force come from? What is its geneaology? Foucault explains that “species,” groups, people, fight
against one another, until one species is victorious. Then, within that “victorious species,”
conflicting interests create inner differences that provide renewed conflicting forces (84). 138 In other
words, yet maintaining Foucault's philogenic vocabulary, this succession of exogenous and
endogenous forces corresponds to what has been defined in cultural terms as the dialectic interplay
of movements of introversion and extroversion in the conclusion to Part One above. Hence, in
137Given the German term, we must signal here awareness of an important, although for our immediate purposes
marginal, point: Historie in German (translated as “history” or histoire) is not Geschichte (also translated as
“history” or histoire). Their difference is extensively explained in Jacques Derrida's study of “history,” his 1964-65
lecture course entitled Heidegger: la Question de l'Être et l'Histoire (Paris: Galilée, 2013).
138Philogeny and filiation are hence, from that moment, complemented by culture and affiliation, confirming
Foucault's argument that genealogy cannot be reduced exclusively to the evolution of species (Foucault 81).
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“effective history,” in genealogy as filiation and affiliation, the “accident” is the irruption of dissent
between or within groups, the changes of allegiances, the breaks from hegemonic forces. But when
someone breaks from one's own homogenized species or genus, is not one orphaning oneself from
one's own genealogical inheritance? In this sense, is not the genealogical “accident” a claim to
orphanhood, the decomposable origin that presents itself as parent-less and/or unprecedented? In
this perspective, it does not sound fortuitous to find that Foucault claims, without further
explanation, that genealogy as “effective history” is “strictly anti-Platonic” (93): so doing, he
“orphans” himself from Platonist philosophy, probably because Plato and Socrates distrusted, for
instance, the emergence of writing, as the spread and dispersal of written texts away from their
authors made written speech unreliable, with no paternal/authorial figure to stand on their behalf, no
“traditional history” or continuous genealogies to speak of and rely upon (Plato a 63, Derrida 1972,
96; Young 2008, 10-11). In other words, Socrates and Plato rejected written texts as “parricidal
orphans,” accidents that threatened traditional filiation by breaking the linear progression of the
logos as oral speech proceeding sensibly from the patriarchal, authorial voice (Derrida 1972, 95-6).
Hence, following Foucault's argument, the crux of “effective history” would, in this sense, consist
in a genealogy that is aware of the contradicting force of (parricidal) orhpanhood, of the foundling
that breaks filiation by deciding not to affiliate to the father, the force of patriarchy, or traditional
history.
It is then quite stimulating, having reached such a conception of genealogy, to find that it
precisely is the theme of orphanhood that appears with striking recurrence throughout Fred
D'Aguiar's six novels. In that corpus, each work presents at least one of its main characters as bereft
of a father or a mother: in Bloodlines, again, the narrator and main character, Sow, is the son of
Faith, a slave who died giving birth to him, and of Christy, the son of a slave-master who becomes
an indentured boxer after being expelled with Faith from his father's plantation, and who will never
meet his son. Dear Future and Bethany Bettany are novels in prose whose main characters,
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respectively Red Head and Bethany Bettany, live with relatives but are deprived of father and
mother from their early childhood on. As for Feeding the Ghosts, which, as explained above,
fictionalizes the true story of the slave ship Zong, whose crew threw dozens of – not-so – sick
slaves overboard in order to get from an insurance company the money they could not have
obtained from the auction block, the main character, Mintah, a slave who manages to come back on
board the ship after having been thrown into the Atlantic, will never return to the African parents
she was severed from. The Longest Memory, which was awarded the prestigious Whitbread first
novel award and David Higham prize for fiction, narrates the story of Whitechapel, the oldest slave
on a Southern American plantation who, like Mintah, had to leave his motherland and parents
behind. Finally, in Fred D'Aguiar's latest novel, Children of Paradise, which narrates the communal
years leading up to the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, each child is forced into being an
orphan by having to sever filial bonds – or at least not manifest them and the affection they entail –
to the privilege of (af)filiation to a surrogate spiritual “Father,” who is presented as an orphan as
well. Even the commune gorilla, ironically named Adam, was captured and deprived of a mother
it/he often muses about: no mention of its/his “father” is made.
One of the “children of paradise” is the main character Trina, a fatherless six-year-old girl
who obeys “Father” (the pastor, Jim Jones, remains unnamed in the novel) into making up a show
staging her own resurrection – one of the preacher's schemes to reinforce his authority – and
subsequently earns his favors in the form of a flute, which she plays thinking of waterfalls and the
jungle's trees, making melodies pleasing to the commune people and Adam's – the gorilla's – ears
(D'Aguiar 2014, 96, 108, 249). Her ability to evoke nature with the flute is reminiscent of Orpheus'
musical skills and, in this context, it is also important to note that “Orpheus” and “orphan” actually
share the same Indo-European “orbh-” etymological root, which designates a change of allegiance,
the passage from one status to another, and was derived into “orbho-,” which signifies both
“fatherless” and “deprived of free status,” to give the Greek “orphos” for “deprived” and “bereft,”
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and “orphano,” orphan. The notion that “orbho-” means “deprived of free status” and that the
Slavic word for “slave” sprung from the same root – while the name “Slav,” in an (ironic) cultural
crisscross, gave way to the word “slave” after Slavs vanquished by Otto the Great during the 10 th
century were sold into slavery – interestingly suggests that the correlation of orphanhood and
slavery in such works as Bloodlines, The Longest Memory, and Feeding the Ghosts is not
accidental. The idea of a “change of status” deserves attention too, in that orphans such as Sow, Red
Head, and Bethany Bettany undergo events that make them, respectively, immortal, clairvoyant, and
able to become so flat as to achieve near-invisibility, just as Trina's sham resurrection – though only
a mock-Orphic metamorphosis here – leads to her acquisition of a flute and her link with Orpheus,
who changes status when bereft of Eurydice as much as he induces rivers to flow in reverse, trees to
dance, and stones to spring to life.
But orphanhood does not only partake of characterization in Fred D'Aguiar's novels. In fact,
if one agrees with Homer Obed Brown's argument that the novel either conceals its genealogy or
has no clear and arborescent one (Brown 1996, 12; 1997, 7), it is no longer surprising to find as
many foundlings as protagonists of 18th and 19th century texts139 to be affiliated to an orphan genre.
However, that every protagonist in all of Fred D'Aguiar's novels is, to some extent, orphaned,
suggests that orphanhood is of particular literary interest to the author, and that it might consist in a
specific device in the articulation and, hence, in the making of the “genus” of his novels. Moreover,
if the novel was an orphan form in the 18th century, it now corresponds to a secular tradition that
suggests it is today endowed with a genealogical history, although this history might be that of a
perpetual breaking of allegiances, of orphaning itself, for, if a novel is to be a novel, it has,
somehow, and as its name indicates, to come across as unprecedented. In this sense, in order to
unveil the singularity, or specificity of D'Aguiar's novels, one should find how these novels orphan
139Names that spring to mind are Tom Jones, Jane Eyre, Pip in Great Expectations, Joseph Andrews, along with all
their uncountable avatars who, like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, “jes' grew.” Aguably, even Crusoe's exile could be
read as a metaphorical, social orphaning, as he is severed from the society of his (mother)land, that is, Britain.
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themselves.140
More generally speaking, and again, written speech itself, according to Socrates in the
Phaedrus, is a metaphorical orphan: “[writing] always needs its father to help it, for it is incapable
of either defending or helping itself” (Plato a, 63, 275e). In his widely read “Plato's Pharmacy,”
Derrida comments on this passage from the Phaedrus and identifies “the distress of the orphan”
(Derrida 1972, 95, my translation) there, to suggest, again, that “the desire for writing is indicated,
designated, and denounced as a desire for orphanhood and parricidal subversion” (96, my
translation).141 According to this statement, and as far as orphanhood and literature are concerned, it
140To be more precise, Homer Obed Brown explains that “[…] the old family from which the novel is said to have so
stoutly denied its filiation is precisely romance itself” (Brown 1996, 12, my emphasis) and “the epic before it”
(Brown 1997, 14). He also states that the novel as a “new species” of writing in late eighteenth century England was
from the onset a diversity of “new species,” born not to one but to several “fathers” such as Austen, Richardson and
Fielding (7), and engendering more than one line of descent on the branches of its phylogenetic tree – the origin of
the “novel” itself is, thus, decomposable too.*
Brown also writes that Sir Walter Scott and Jean-Luc Nancy invoke the popular and oral tradition of the
folktale as one of the novel's forebears (Brown 1996, 11). Furthermore, he relates Scott and Nancy's arguments to
the mythological story of the patriarchs in Genesis (12:1-2) – if anything, a book about the genealogy of the world –
where Abraham is asked to deny his previous affiliations, his father, to start a new genealogy and found a nation.
This story of a change of filiation, of deviation, is transmitted by Abraham to his children, who transmit it to their
children and so on, with a progressive and inevitable alteration of the story from generation to generation, causing
its mystification from genetic story to genial myth. The newness of Abraham's line of descent, a change of
allegiance, only becomes an institutionalized story when turned into a myth. To the same extent, according to
Brown, the novel was mystified and institutionalized as a genre at the beginning of the 19 th century, but its break
from former traditions dates back to Middle-Ages romance. In fact, Brown, drawing from Scott, explains that
romance first was a language that broke away from Latin, the father language, and that was itself split into different
romance languages according to zones corresponding, roughly, to European territories such as England, France, and
Italy, giving birth to specific romance literary traditions in each of these countries. Hence, instead of relying on
classical Latin (and Greek) traditions, as had been done from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment era, eighteenth
and nineteenth-century European writers rediscovered and embraced these proto-national romance traditions of the
Middle Ages to found romanticism and the novel as a national literature, as a renewed quest for (national) origins, a
mythopoiesis breaking with the classical tradition (Brown 1997, 19), yet playing the same role as the epic, for
instance, except that the epic would refer to national origins as an isolated past, while the novel always maintains a
connection between nation-building and its contemporaneous context according to Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1978, 449).
The story of romance deviating from Latin to give rise to national literature is analogous to that of the
patriarchs breaking with their fathers to build a nation. Thus, the newness, or novelty, of the nineteenth-century
novel did not only reside in its quest for and erasure of origins, but in its breaking from the classically accepted
cultural origins of Rome and Greece (in the same way as the Romance language broke with Latin) to posit a new
line of descent starting with the romance tradition. A passion for the Medieval led to the presentation of romance as
the genius or (decomposable) original genus, as the unprecedented historical context that conditioned the advent of
the romantic movement and its idea of natural genius, and of the novel as a form of expression for national genus
(Brown 1997, 17-9).
*Tzvetan Todorov's arguments in Genres in Discourse reinforce this sense of heterogeneous and denied genealogy
by explaining that literary genres correspond to types of discourse which are related in turn to the vertiginous array
of discursive modes human beings experience and use, and by stating that “the narrative mode is characterized by
the insistent search for its own place of origin – which the novel mode effaces and conceals,” (Todorov 14, my
emphasis), as its name indicates. In this perspective, a novel would constitute a logos that problematizes its own
generation (genea-) in terms of orphanhood.
141Derrida thus does not intend to use the description of textuality as orphanhood in a decidedly metaphorical way. He
explains that oral speech is a “zôon” (97) – a live animal – in that it has a (finite) life and an organism. Moreover,
because the “father” of an oral speech can be identified thanks to his presence, he concludes that “logoi are children”
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may be seen that we have been following a genealogist's approach in Foucault's terms, from the
insubordinate offspring to the parent, from the accidental effect to the cause, ascending the breaking
branches of a family tree. Such a maneuver also allows for a descent of literary orphanhood to be
retraced as follows: a written speech can be perceived as a parricidal orphan, and, in this
perspective, a novel is a of foundling too within the hyper-category of “written speech,” and for
additional reasons: it is presented as unprecedented newness through the substantive “novel” and,
when it tells the story of orphans, as it often does, it arguably becomes a text that also selfreflexively represents its own (discontinuous) genealogy and (decomposable) originality (Derrida
1971, 72). Thus, by categorizing a text as an orphan, Derrida makes textuality a hyperonym for
what a novel is about, that is, newness and/or/as orphanhood. After making this statement in
“Plato's Pharmacy,” Derrida then wonders if this gift of writing, “this pharmakon,” is not “a
criminal thing, a poisoned present” (96, my translation). The phrase “poisoned present” is, of
course, not fortuitous here, for the English word “gift” (a present) derives, again, from the German
“gift” (poison) (162-3, n. 51) and illustrates the ambiguity of “pharmakon” – here metaphorically
related to written speech – in its designation of both a remedy and a harmful potion (164) prepared
by a pharmakos (a medicine man, magician, enchanter, poisoner, or even writer if written speech is
a pharmakon) who, in spite of his potential malevolence, has qualities which may be likened to
those of Orphic142 orphans such as Redhead or Bethany Bettany. Finally, the status of D'Aguiar's
slave characters,143 who are sometimes mistreated as a consequence to their acquisition of literacy,
is partly, and arguably, comparable to that of the pharmakos, since the word, in Greek culture, was
used to designate a scapegoat who is excluded from the body (politic) of the city (Derrida 162).
But then, what kind of “drug(s)” does Fred D'Aguiar, who started writing at the same time as
(96, my translation). As a consequence, written speech as a moribund logos with no father to answer for itself – the
father or author is either absent or dead – can be considered as an orphan who might even be parricidal in its/his/her
potential claim to fatherless autonomy. Writing is a foundling as much as the main characters of Fred D'Aguiar's
novels are. All subsequent translations from “Plato's Pharmacy” are mine, except where indicated.
142Orphism is used in its broad sense here, that is, basically the musical, the prophetic and the supernatural. For a
thorough discussion, a historical, literary overview, and a more precise definition of the term, see the introduction to
Chapter V.
143Again, slave itself is related, through etymology, to the idea of orphanhood as bereavement.
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he began to train – as a pharmakos – in psychiatric nursing (D'Aguiar qtd. in Joseph-Villain &
Misrahi-Barak 276),144 store in and with his novels? To which type of pharmacy or library does this
corpus belong? To doctor which diction and addictions (Derrida 1991, 7)? Derrida identified writing
as a pharmakon because it is presented, in the myth of Theuth, as a remedy for memory, but rejected
by the king or father of gods, Ammon, who sees it as a poison for memory insofar as it is a means
of re-collection that renders the exercise of one's memory unnecessary (Derrida 1972, 113). As for
Fred D'Aguiar, he once said in an interview that he “wish[es his] books to be read and written
about. [He] want[s] it to be done with feeling and intelligence. Beyond that it is out of [his] hands”
(Frias 2002a, 423). He thus forsakes his children/texts – did he really have the choice after they
were written? – to the good will of readers, but warns critics that, like pharmaka, and in the making
of other pharmaka-texts out of and on them, they should be handled with care.145 The problem of the
relationship between texts as orphan pharmaka and orphans as textual pharmakai in Fred D'Aguiar's
novels is, indeed, intricate, and must be explored cautiously: 146 etymology shows there is a
relationship between orphans, slaves, and Orphic characters such as pharmakai, while philosophy
demonstrates that texts or pharmaka and literary genres themselves can be Orphic, orphaned, or
enslaved to authors-pharmakai, and dealing with orphanhood in such a literary corpus as that of
D'Aguiar's novels thus entails putting two and two together about a weft that plaits orphanhood and
textuality as virtually interchangeable threads.
In order not to get lost in the process of trying to solve or remedy this problem, it seems
144With Derrida's description of writing as a pharmakon, a drug, in mind, it is intriguing to learn about this
coincidence, even more so when it is to notice the proximity in which Fred D'Aguiar could use drugging and writing
when he was a nurse often asked to soothe distressed black patients (the staff made the hypothesis that D'Aguiar's
blackness instead of their whiteness might consist in a more reassuring element to these patients who, perhaps, had
experienced trauma at the hands of “white authority in the despotic form of the police”): “I talked the person into a
degree of calm and then drugged them into compliance. When they woke up they met the same person, me, with
more meaningful talk, more of a willing and inclined ear to what they had to say (all duly noted) and more of that
grueling drugs regimen.” (D'Aguiar in Joseph-Villain and Misrahi-Barak 277, my emphasis). It is also interesting to
note that, another famous anti-colonial writer-psychiatrist of African descent, Frantz Fanon, reportedly influenced
Fred D'Aguiar at the time (275).
145Concerning this citation from D'Aguiar, I argue, in the third part to Chapter V, below, that the meaning he gives to
“feeling and intelligence,” is precise, and translates one of his literary affiliations, that is, early British romanticism.
146Pharmaka is the plural for pharmakon, the poison/remedy, while pharmakaï is the plural for pharmakos, the
sorcerer/pharmacist that prepares the pharmakon.
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suitable to study thematically the ways in which characters relate to the texts we find them in, and
to the texts they find or produce within the novels. In fact, the themes that have clearly been
developing in the texture of the few preceding pages are those of orphanhood in correlation with
slavery and literacy and/or literature, and of the articulation that may operate between Orphism and
the status of the foundling. These themes are to be studied as such and in this order in the present
discussion of orphanhood in Fred D'Aguiar's novels. It is hoped that such thematic treatment of
orphanhood, in the two following chapters, will show that D'Aguiar's apparently Platonist treatment
of orphanhood is supplemented by an Orphic input that, pace Socrates and his scribe, grants the
possibility to ascend presumably broken genealogical trees through writing and imagination as
reliable poetic and mnemonic gateways to the past.
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Chapter IV: Literate Slaves
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home. (Traditional Negro Spiritual, 19th century)
A strong relationship has established itself, through history and signification, between
literacy and slavery, and it plays a major role in three out of the six novels Fred D'Aguiar has
written so far. In fact, access to literacy for slaves was forbidden by plantation owners and feared by
most slaves because of the threat of severe punishment it would bring down on them if caught.
However, and as slave narratives testify, some slaves claimed their literacy as a means of proving
their humanity and, subsequently, their being unfit as slaves. Literacy as a means of acquiring
freedom, of course, was what slavers feared, and why they forbade slaves to write in the first place.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains: “After Descartes, reason was privileged, or valorized, over all other
human characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken
to be the visible sign of reason. Blacks were reasonable, and hence 'men,' if – and only if – they
demonstrated mastery of 'the arts and sciences,' the eighteenth century's formula for writing” (Gates
129). In other words, if people of African descent could write, they could no longer be relegated to
“a lower rung on the Great Chain of Being” (130), to a debased genus that slavers used in order to
legitimate their trade. This shows the hypocrisy of slave-masters at the time, in that they knew
slaves could write but prevented them from doing so in order to be able to keep on pretending that
people of African descent had no “reason,” and therefore no claim to freedom. The attempt at
acquiring liberty through literacy that can be found in many slave narratives is also interesting in
that it seems to have lived on until the Harlem Renaissance (and later, the Black Arts movement),
during which black intellectuals – such as Langston Hughes, Paul McKay, or W.E.B DuBois –
hoped to obtain “civil rights by copy rights” (Lewis xvi): recognition from the white majority
thanks to the creation of high-brow art and criticism.
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Such a bond between writing and slavery – or, later, the oppressed African-American
minority – is interesting, again, in light of the fact that the word “slave” is etymologically related to
orphanhood, while texts are defined as orphans by writers such as Plato and Derrida (Plato 63,
Derrida 1972, 95). And it is precisely orphanhood as a node between literacy and slavery that
appears to constitute the core of Fred D'Aguiar's interest in The Longest Memory, Bloodlines, and
Feeding the Ghosts. In The Longest Memory, readers come to learn that literacy might consist in an
indirect cause of the whipping and subsequent death of Whitechapel's son, which were narrated to
them in the novel's first chapters. The narrator of Bloodlines, Sow, is taught how to read and write
by Mrs Mason who, on top of being his owner's wife, almost serves as Sow's foster-mother. Finally,
Mintah's literacy allows her to register, in a book, what happened on the Zong, and this text plays a
climactic role during the trial opposing the ship's crew and investors to their insurers at the end of
the novel. In spite of its ineffectiveness at the tribunal, Mintah's text is very important in that it
consists in a trace of, or testimony to what happened on the Zong. In addition, Mintah's journal can
be viewed as one of the fruits of her several artistic, cathartic, and therapeutic endeavors following
her traumatic crossing of the Middle Passage, to which she lost most of her African companions.
Within D'Aguiar's work, comparing the relation Whitechapel's son has to writing to Mintah's use of
writing as a means of obtaining emotional and psychological relief is indicative of the ways in
which writing can work as a pharmakon too, as a drug that may function both as a a remedy and as
a poison, in that it both causes Whitechapel's son to be beaten and partly unburdens Mintah as she
preserves from oblivion those who were thrown into the Atlantic. The present chapter explores all
of these interconnections between orphanhood, slavery, writing, and medicine in each of the three
above-mentioned novels.147
147This fourth chapter on literate slaves was written in January 2014. As a consequence, finding out, in February 2016
that in a book entitled Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Fred D'Aguiar: Representations of Slavery and
published in 2011, Abigail Ward studies these same three novels by D'Aguiar in the same order as this chapter does,
and using “Plato's Pharmacy” as a philosophical background (Ward 131-79), has been a terrifying and petrifying
experience: the fear of being charged with plagiarism, the prospect of being accused of not having done enough
research before starting to write, the disappointment at the idea that the argument was not original and would thwart
later attempts at publication harrowed me for days. How would readers believe that I did not know of Ward's book
when I wrote this chapter? How could I avoid any reproach? Re-writing the chapter as if it were a response to
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I. The Longest Memory
In The Longest Memory, the story of two successive generations of a community from a
Virginian plantation is told by some of its members – such as slaves, overseers, and the latest master
– who give their respective names to the chapters they narrate. The oldest man on the plantation, the
slave Whitechapel, is the only one to have lived through both generations, and he therefore has “the
longest memory” on the plantation, which explains his status as main, and almost eponymous,
character, if the novel's title is accepted as a metonymy for him.148 Familial genealogies can be
Ward's work would amount to denying that I came up with this chapter without the help of her book and, since this
chapter's argument disagrees in many ways with Ward's, responding to it this way would lead to an oppositional
stance that is ill-advised, since the coincidence at play suggests that there is something deep that she and I
intellectually share. Nor could anyone be asked to just take my word and pretend that I truly was unaware of Ward's
work, all the more so since the discussion at stake incites one to be suspicious of texts as pharmaka, potential
poisoned presents. And “taking my word” is equal to the critique that my predicament – the word is justly fitting –
was my own fault: Ward's book, published in 2011, ought to have popped up when I did my research into existent
criticism. The malaise is, therefore, palpable.
But then, is not the actualization of this uncanny coincidence (uncanny like Freud's not recognizing his
image in a mirror when traveling on a train) a case of this fourth chapter's really being a “parricidal orphan” and a
pharmakon (Derrida 1972, 95-6)? Is this not a situation where I, an author, lose control over the gift of writing, lose
authority over my text (as something wrongly assumed to be “mine”), which has broken away from me, orphaned
itself to turn back at me with a mischievous grin? Theuth's present, writing, in this chapter, has become a poisonous
text against my will: a curse. And a blessing: for if this chapter works as a parricidal orphan and as a pharmakon, is
it not doing what it is actually dealing with? And if so, is it not the best illustration its argument, a “moribund
logos,” could hope for (96)?
Yet – and at the risk of overusing the first person, which nevertheless appears inevitable here – there is no
way I can leave things as such, pretending Ward's work does not exist. It is there, and it precedes the writing of mine
by three years. I cannot ward off Ward. What dark irony: this chapter turns against me as it is said texts do, yet I do
not expect it, and it turns against me by surprise thanks to another text/pharmakon the precedence of which makes it
authoritative, the repository of originality, the gatekeeper, the warden of the thought of someone named Ward.
Something must be done about it now. And since a straightforward, oppositional stance is not welcome,
why not exacerbating what Ward and I share: interest in D'Aguiar's work, and its study in Derridean terms? In
Living on: Borderlines (where Derrida is the only author), or in “Circumfession” (where Derrida forms an authorial
pair with George Bennington), Derrida uses a continuous infrapaginal note as a means of subverting respectively –
and respectfully – his own text or that of another author, from within. I propose to use the same device as a means to
make Ward's work rise up as a contrapuntal voice – hence, to use the musical language that both Ward, as a reader of
Said (recalling here that Said was also an excellent pianist and wrote, as scholar, on music) (Ward 55-6, 61), and I,
as a musician, also share, the co-presence of her voice and mine would not form dissonances, but tensions that
remain in tune with a certain score, script or stave, and offer a promise of (harmonic) resolution. This type of
internal margin, initiated here (and closed at the end of the present, fourth chapter), will, from now on, be indicated
by starting and ending with the following sign: […].
148[…] Out of the three D'Aguiar novels she studies, The Longest Memory is the work to which Abigail Ward dedicates
the most Derridean reading, using “Plato's Pharmacy” as her main, if not exclusive, critical and philosophical lens
(Ward 134-51). Her recourse to Derrida's work is not as sustained with the two other novels she reads, namely,
Feeding the Ghosts and Bloodlines, as she progressively and increasingly draws from Holocaust theory and gender
studies, while proportionately and decreasingly relying on “Plato's Pharmacy,” to study these two novels in the
(forty-nine-page) chapter she dedicates to D'Aguiar's writings. By contrast, our explorations of Feeding the Ghosts
and Bloodlines, below, will sustain the orph(an)ic and pharmaceutic reading where Ward leaves it off. As a
consequence, over the course of the next ninety pages, the series of footnotes will engage, with decreasing
frequency, with Ward's reading, as most of the contrapuntal bottom notes relating her work to ours will concern The
Longest Memory.
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traced in part through his knowledge, through the pieces of information other characters provide
with their specific modes of narration such as verse, prose, newspaper clippings, or personal diaries,
and through their family names. But unexpected genealogies also provide crucial and climactic
elements to the plot, in ways that bring orphanhood, slavery, and literacy to the fore.
The first chapters of the novel stage the whipping and subsequent death of Whitechapel's
runaway son, while the rest of the book can be considered as a long analepsis that lets readers know
what led Whitechapel's son to flee from the plantation. What they learn as they read is that, after the
death of two older slave women on the plantation, the slave-owner, Mr. Whitechapel, had decided to
buy a young woman to do the work of the two deceased others. This woman has, among other
things, to cook for the overseer, Sanders Senior, who cannot get around to telling his curious son,
Sanders Junior, that he was born at the expense of his mother's life. Being a lonely father, Sanders
Senior starts coveting the woman – named “Cook” after her function – whom he rapes twice, once
on Christmas eve, and the second time around on January 9 according to his diary (D'Aguiar 1994,
45-6), which means approximately one week before and one week after Cook's marriage to
Whitechapel. After the second rape, Cook denounces Sanders Senior to Mister Whitechapel, who
fines him. But the deed is done and Cook is pregnant, without knowing, between Whitechapel and
And as far as this novel's title is concerned, Ward does not interpret it as a designation of, or nickname for,
Whitechapel, but as a name primarily given to a written text that is, following Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus, a
title given to something that is “not the memory of a moment of slavery but an imagined remembering of, or
repeating monument to, the slave past” (Ward 137). In other words, Ward says that “The Longest Memory” is the
name of a text that is, by definition, hypomnesic (a re-collection, or remembering), and hence not an actual
anamnesis, a “living memory” of slavery. As a consequence, she argues that the novel's being titled “The Longest
Memory” rather than “The Longest Remembering” (149) amounts to its being “mis-named” (137). However,
considering, as is made clear below, that Whitechapel, the novel's main character, is illiterate and suspicious of
writing, on top of being the oldest slave on the plantation, and the only one to keep memories of Africa (without the
help of written records) (D'Aguiar 1994, 122-5), he is the only character in the novel whose living memory or
anamnesis crosses the Atlantic back to Africa. Thus, if the novel is a fictional and hypomnesic monument, this
monument's title nevertheless aptly alludes to its main character's living memory or anamnesis as the longest. In this
sense, the title is a metonymic (a part designates the whole, the “memory” points to the man who keeps it)
designation of Whitechapel. Ward perceives that Whitechapel epitomizes a living memory, albeit fictional or
prototypical, that is to die with him unless it is consigned in writing (a task D'Aguair undertakes), but fails to
associate this idea with what the novel's title actually conveys (Ward 141). This reading of the title as a misnomer is
also evocative of the perplexity that Ward voices more openly, later in her book, regarding this novel (151).
Apart from this, one may note that seeing Whitechapel as an allegory is possible too. In fact, being a man
brought from Africa to work as a slave on an American plantation to grow raw material that will be exported,
manufactured, and sold in the West, and bearing the name of a London area where sugar from the West Indies was
refined, Whitechapel might constitute a tropical embodiment of the triangular trade [...].
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Sanders Senior, who the father is, although readers soon learn that the son is, biologically speaking,
Sanders Senior's (34). In spite of this, Whitechapel accepts to remain with Cook and to rear the
child, Chapel, as his son. In order to avoid meeting Sanders Senior again, Cook is allowed to work
in the master's kitchen with her son, who befriends Mr. Whitechapel's daughter, Lydia, who in turn
teaches Chapel how to read and write, and they fall in love. Love between a slave-owner's daughter
and a slave's son being unachievable on a plantation, Lydia and Chapel prepare to flee in order to
meet again up North, where mixed-race couples are said to live. However, Chapel is caught and
brought back soon after his escape, to be whipped to death by Sanders Junior, his half-brother,
while neither of the two know they are kin: Sanders Senior is dead and Whitechapel, Cook, and
their master, Mr. Whitechapel, had kept the fact as a secret until the day following the whipping,
when Sanders Junior learns the fact from Mr. Whitechapel, who thought Sanders Senior had told
Junior (33). Once the story is told, the last chapter, “Forgetting,” consists in Whitechapel's internal
monologue just before his death.
a. Genealogical Substitutions
Thus, miscegenation is the germ of a story that leads to a tragic fratricide where two men do
not know they are genealogically linked. On top of the fact that Sanders Senior was supposed to
have told his son about his half-brother (which would, perhaps, have prevented the murder of
Chapel), what exacerbates the tragedy is that readers are led to suspect, through a slight atavism,
that Chapel and Sanders Junior could have found out that they were brothers, if racial prejudice had
not hubristically blinded them. In fact, at the time of the whipping, both Chapel and Sanders Junior
are orphans: their father, Sanders Senior, is dead, and Sanders Junior's mother died giving birth to
him, while Cook deceased shortly before Chapel's flight. Moreover, both have befriended and
acquired literacy from Lydia at different times. Sanders Senior actually complains in his journal that
Mr. Whitechapel warned him that he did not want his “boy running about his house because his
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daughter was being distracted” (37), while he felt that Sanders Junior would “read soon if he
mixe[d] with Mr. Whitechapel's daughter who is a proper little Miss” (49). As a matter of fact,
Lydia and Sanders Junior “play together at the front of the house before dusk,” and “she has taught
him counting games and rhymes which have taken the place of the usual slave songs he strains to
memorize” (49). D'Aguiar's pun on “strain” and “slave song” is interesting here in that it is
evocative of the different situations of slaves and masters on a plantation: a strain is a type of song,
and Sanders Junior, to the satisfaction of his father, sings/strains Lydia's teachings in order to
remember them, which has the effect of making him forget the “work songs,” or songs of straining
as hard work, he has learned from the slaves. One of these slaves, young Chapel, meets Lydia too,
but only in secret and after dusk, since Mr. Whitechapel caught his daughter with Chapel and found
out that she had taught him how to read and write. Memory is at stake here as well, since Chapel
will refuse to read or write again, but keep on composing verse from memory for Lydia, who will
return him the favor by memorizing poetry from the English canon in order to recite it to Chapel on
their nightly encounters (90-1). The name of Mr. Whitechapel's daughter, evoking the Lydian
musical mode, makes sense here, since she teaches songs to Sanders Junior and sings and is sung
for in her exchanges of poetry with Chapel. But what matters here is that Chapel and Sanders Junior
share, unknowingly, the same father, and readers realize as they read that the two boys could have
suspected it through their common status as – as far as Chapel's knowledge is concerned – maternal
orphans, their analogous approaches to literacy, and their striving to remember verse.
A last element that makes Chapel's beating more tragic, retrospectively, is that readers also
learn that Whitechapel, who witnessed the beating and was restrained from interfering with it,
actually knew that a fratricide was occurring. In addition, he feels responsible – and held so by
other slave relatives – for the beating because he denounced his son to Mr. Whitechapel, the master,
who had to leave the plantation on the day Chapel was caught. Before leaving, Mr. Whitechapel had
specified to his deputy that the punishment should not occur before his return, but on the night of
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Chapel's return, the deputy has gone awol to his wife's (19), and Sanders Junior, Chapel's unwitting
half-brother and overseer, is the only remaining substitute for the master, and he is so angry to have
spent the whole day looking for the runaway slave that he disobeys Mr. Whitechapel and whips
Chapel to death. These pieces of information, which readers learn after having witnessed the initial
whipping scene, are important in terms of orphanhood and patterns of surrogacy.
For instance, one striking thing is that names strongly relate three characters involved: Mr.
Whitechapel, Whitechapel, and Chapel.149 This may be explained through (changes of) filiation, in
that it has been seen that orphan and slave share a common etymological origin, which signifies
both a change of status and a loss of freedom. Loss of freedom is obvious for Whitechapel and
Chapel, since they both are slaves. But the change of status also resides in the fact that becoming a
slave entails a forced shift of allegiance from father to master: Mr. Whitechapel imposes himself as
a patriarchal figure at the head of the plantation and, to some extent, as a surrogate father to slaves
such as Whitechapel, who was taken from his parents and Africa as a young boy. Whitechapel, the
slave, literally is a surrogate father, or foster-father, whose son, Chapel, also a (maternal) orphan on
the day of the whipping, believes him to be his biological father. The overseer, Sanders Junior, is a
substitute for Mr. Whitechapel – he rules in the master's absence – and an orphan too since both his
parents are dead. All these patterns of substitution and surrogacy in terms of bloodlines and
patriarchy are woven together in the text and become meaningful if viewed through the lens of
orphanhood and writing as Plato and Derrida see it since, again, texts and orphans “always need
[their] father to help [them], for [they are] incapable of either defending or helping [themselves]”
(Plato 63; Derrida 1972, 95). In fact, Whitechapel explains that the “first lash ripped a hole in [his]
head and [he] screamed for [his] son who felt silent as the grass and the trees” (D'Aguiar 1994,
26).150 He also knows his son “was gone half-way into that beating when he stopped screaming
149[…] Abigail Ward explains that Whitechapel and his son, designated by the diminutive “Chapel,” bear the same
name as that of Mister Whitechapel, “because of the practice of naming slaves after their owners” (Ward 139). Her
historical interpretation completes the literary reading that I am providing here. For the sake of clarity, in the present
study, the master will always be designated as Mister/Mr. Whitechapel, his oldest slave as Whitechapel, and
Whitechapel's adoptive son as Chapel. [...]
150The muting of nature when Chapel dies away from his lover, Lydia, after being lacerated by a furious overseer
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'father' because he could see [Whitechapel] was being held down and was no good to him” (6).
Whitechapel's interference with the whipping is inefficient because although Mr. Whitechapel has
ordered – which amounts to a law on his plantation – that the punishment be put off until his return,
he is absent, and Whitechapel, as a slave-orphan, needs Mr. Whitechapel, the master patriarch, to
“defend and help” him to give weight to his voice. The patriarch's orders are bereaved of power and
will not be “carried out to the letter” (19) in his absence – they were not written and if they had
been, they would still have found no “father” to stand on their behalf, all the more so since the the
characters who heard the Master's orders, that is, Mr Whitechapel's guests, his deputy, and four
slaves, are either absent or deprived of authoritative voices (19) – or in the mouth of Whitechapel,
an orphan-slave at the heart of a text.151 To the same extent, Chapel sees his “father” is “no good to
him” because Whitechapel needs the patriarch and is restrained. Moreover, Chapel's actual father,
Sanders Senior, has died, and his mother also deceased on the day of Chapel's death. In other words,
Chapel, as yet another orphan-slave, likewise has no parent to “help and defend” him. And when,
after the whipping, Whitechapel actually comes to attend to the – hopeless – nursing of Chapel (by
slaves then acting as pharmakaï), the latter gives the cold shoulder to Whitechapel who explains:
“He turned his body and face away from me and I knew he must have heard I'd given him up” (21,
my emphasis). The use of the verb give up is intentional and consists in a double-voiced statement
here, since it puts abandon and denunciation of one's son on the same plane, but with a degree of
dark irony, for Whitechapel did not really “give up” Chapel but, rather, adopted him.
Nevertheless, Whitechapel's slave relatives and friends hold him responsible for the death of
consists, of course, in an intertextual evocation of the myth of Orpheus, who is wept for by trees and animals after
being decapitated by Bacchanals, away from his (defunct) lover. This aspect is discussed more thoroughly below in
relation to Chapel's poetic skills, and Orphism in D'Aguiar's novels is given sustained attention in Chapter V.
151[…] Abigail Ward writes that “The punishment administered to [Chapel] upon his recapture can be seen as an
attempt at reminding him of his place as a slave” (Ward 150, italics mine). In other words, she suggests that Chapel's
amnesia – interestingly, “amnesia” is the root from which “an-amnesis” is built, as if living memory derived from its
absence – regarding his status as a slave is corrected by the master's substitute with a surrogate for anamnesis, that
is, a hypomnesic text, or reminder consisting in the whipping wounds that will remain, as scars, to remind Chapel of
his position. This interpretation is interesting in the light of a study guided by Derrida's writings, since Derrida also
relates writing, this hypomnesic medium, to scars, through etymology, in Cicumfession (Derrida 1989, 91-2, 192-3).
Moreover, Ward's reading of Chapel's whipping leads her to conclusions that differ from mine, as shown below,
regarding Whitechapel's genealogical considerations on his adoptive son and Chapel's “forgetting” about his
enslaved status. […]
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Chapel. The reason why he told his son's possible whereabouts to Mr. Whitechapel is that he
counted on his master's leniency in punishing his son, so that Chapel would not be killed but
disciplined into remaining on the plantation, where Whitechapel believes life to be more secure than
in the rest of America, which he does not know. Whitechapel is the oldest slave on the plantation
too, and he also admits, in a fit of guilt, that he “killed [his] son because [he] wanted him next to
[him] when [he] died” (26). He also feels guilty because, when his wife died, he “promised her [he]
would not be long [to join her] but [he] sent his son in his place less than a full day later” (11). This
is another genealogical substitution between (foster-)father and son figures which extols tragedy, as,
for instance, the failed deputation – mediated by Whitechapel – between Mr. Whitechapel as the
patriarch and his representatives or surrogates. Chapel's mother herself was subjected to tragic
substitution: she was raped by Sanders Senior because he was in desperate need of a woman to
replace his wife and the mother of his son; more precisely, after the first rape, he offers to Cook to
choose a dress from his defunct wife's wardrobe, but she refuses to “step into a dead woman's
shoes” (46), although she will become Whitechapel's second wife. She will bear no son to
Whitechapel, who will nevertheless love Chapel as his son. The fact that Whitechapel's relatives
accuse him of having “killed his only son” (126) and that Cook bore him none, is reminiscent of the
Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah, with Chapel as an Isaac no angel saved from the
altar.152 Whitechapel, along with the master, would then be, as Abraham, another epitome of
patriarchy. Thus, although Whitechapel has also reared thirteen children, a number that echoes the
Last Supper, and in spite of his being compared, after Chapel's death, to one of the biblical thirteen,
Judas (8) by his slave relatives, Whitechapel is more of an Old Testament, Abraham-like figure, all
the more so since it is not a son that Judas betrayed. 153 Moreover, as far his relatives are concerned,
152[…] Ward also cites this passage, but, noteworthily given our subsequent investigation, does not note or explore its
religious resonance (Ward 141). […]
153 If Whitechapel was a New-Testament type of figure, he, as a surrogate father, would resemble Joseph more than
Judas. Also, since Whitechapel is said to have “killed his only son” (126), he might be comparable to God, insofar as
God is said to have “so loved the world he gave his only son” (John 3:16, emphasis mine), but an analogy with the
Christian god is very tenuous, since Whitechapel, contrarily to God, did not intend to “give up” his son (D'Aguiar
1995, 21).
230
they did not try to prevent Whitechapel from informing Mr. Whitechapel of Chapel's whereabouts,
but they rather “parted like the sea for him” (127), and yet did not think twice before being
reproachful to him afterward. If slaves “parted like the sea” for Whitechapel, he is then likened to
the other Old Testament figure of Moses – an orphan too. In other words, an intertextual syncretism
operates between the novel and the Old Testament through the figure of Whitechapel, who is said to
have “killed” his son as Abraham would have done if no angel had intervened, and who made his
way across the Middle Passage and his plantation relatives like a Mosaic orphan-slave.154
Fatherhood, orphanhood, slavery, and the other orphan that “scripture” is all intersect in the
character of Whitechapel. But as far as he is concerned, he views this syncretism in terms of slavery
instead:
Killer of children. Protector of the worst fate of your people or any people. Is that what I have
become? The master of my fate. No longer in need of control or supervision. One so accustomed to
his existence that he impinges on his own freedom and can be left to his own devices. A master of his
own slavery. Slave and enslaver (27).
His self portrayal as the “protector of the worst fate of [his] people,” of course, is another reference
to Moses, and a contrastive one, since Moses is said to have killed a slave-master, demanded the
emancipation of slaves, and led his people to the Promised Land before dying old and with this land
in sight, while Whitechapel does not question slavery, harm his master, or free his community, but
leads his son to an untimely death, soon before he dies far from Africa. Most importantly, and more
precisely, Whitechapel depicts himself as both master and slave, father and orphan, strong enough
to sacrifice a son to a slaver but insubordinate enough to try and intercede in a whipping he will not
manage to stop, partly responsible for the welts caused by the two hundred lashes on Chapel's back,
but also the man who will try, as a pharmakos would, to nurse and dress his son's wounds before his
death. Whitechapel is simultaneously deadly, healing, and protective: almost a pharmakos in the
pharmakon the novel is, paradoxically reminding one of the facts of slavery through the fictional
tale one discovers as one reads.
154For a more thorough discussion of the story of Abraham and its relation to responsibility and literature, see Jacques
Derrida's Donner la Mort (1999), and Chapter V below, concerning Bethany Bettany's family, the Abrahams
(D'Aguiar, 2003).
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b. Writing to Commemorate & Reciting from Memory
Chapel appears to share this ambivalent status with his foster father. In fact, Whitechapel
describes his adoptive son, at the end of the novel and through an imaginary address to Chapel, in
the same terms as he portrayed himself in the passage cited above:
You were born half a slave, half the master of your own destiny. You shake your head at me because
you can see only part of my argument. The rest of it takes you from me. I know that you belong to
another way of life. Yet I tell you everything I know, everything I see and hear and work out for
myself, as a slave. I tell you because I must. It should suit a son of mine, born a total slave. But not
you with your blood. What I say can never be enough for you. I want to keep you alive, that is all.
(D'Aguiar 1994, 135)
While Whitechapel describes himself as the “master of his fate,” that is to say, a slave who
“impinges on his own freedom” (27), Chapel is described as “half the master of [his] destiny”
because of his mixed bloodlines flowing from a slave mother and a white slaver. However,
“mastery” must not be understood in the same sense for both characters. Whitechapel is,
oxymoronically enough, viewing himself as a “master slave,” in that he has been in bondage for so
long that he does not need to be forced into servitude anymore. On the other hand, Chapel is half a
master because he is Sanders' biological son, which presupposes, according to Whitechapel, a
natural – or genealogically inherited – predisposition for freedom that is countered by his
obligations – and subsequent lack of freedom – as the son of a slave woman. But whatever
Whitechapel says, it “can never be enough for” (135) Chapel, who cannot resist freedom's call and
flees from the plantation an orphan, since both Cook and Sanders Senior are dead. In spite of his
good will, what Whitechapel says “can never be enough” because he is not Chapel's real father, the
one who might have been able to “help and defend” him (Plato 63), and because, as an orphanslave, his speech is deprived of patriarchal power. This was not Whitechapel's initial opinion, since
he tried to advise Chapel, but here, at the end of the novel, Whitechapel realizes that he could not
have rescued his adoptive son: “Maybe I am wrong, I say to myself, as I see myself doing it, wrong
to tell the master that my son is gone and say I want him back under my guidance and protection.
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Then I ask myself, after I see the entire scene, what guidance? What protection? […] I have been
wrong all my days” (136, my emphasis). Whitechapel's take on the issue is genealogical too, since
he believes the ineffectiveness of his pieces of advice to derive, along with Chapel's fate, from
Chapel's bloodlines. Whitechapel believes his words “as a slave” would have worked for a “total
slave” (D'Aguiar 1994, 135). But what is a total slave, or a total orphan for that matter?
Whitechapel expects a total slave to have no white descent and to act as a slave, that is to say, as
someone who “impinges on [their] own freedom” (27), who enslave themselves. This presupposes a
performative nature in slavery, meaning that no one is ever fully a slave until one is made to accept
their condition, their role, as such.155 One is not a slave, but as a slave, and this shift functions the
same way for orphanhood. In fact, Chapel was not born a “total” orphan, and he even benefited
from the affection of his mother during his youth. But his desire for freedom can be likened to a
“desire for orphanhood and parricidal subversion” (Derrida 96), since it leads him to flee from the
plantation where all his relatives live, and thus to disobey the pieces of advice he heard from
Whitechapel, whom Chapel believes to be his biological father.
Whitechapel's warning to “total slaves,” the one he can make, then, did not work for his
adoptive son, who is racially mixed and rejects bondage:
There are two types of slave: the slave who must experience everything for himself before coming to
an understanding of anything and he who learns through observation. The slave in the first category
behaves as if he is the only slave in the world and is visited by the worst luck on earth. That type of
slave is agitated, brings much trouble on his head and he makes the lot of every slave ten times
worse. It is generally accepted that the slave in the second category is brighter, lives longer, causes
everyone around him a minimum of worries and earns the small kindness of the overseer and the
master. I realized my son was in the first, troublesome category, that day he walked away from my
advice (D'Aguiar 1994, 15, my emphasis).
Here again, Whitechapel relies on genealogy to express his point of view. In fact, and as said above,
genealogy is the language of filiation and, by extension, of descent from a specific group, category
or (pheno-)type, and this is exactly the kind of discourse Whitechapel uses in this passage to
155I am not trivializing slavery as role play. Being a slave is a horrible role one is forced to perform. But reaching the
point where one does not need coercion anymore to work as a slave amounts to performative resignation: one never
is a slave.
233
designate two subclasses of slaves: “type” appears twice, and “category,” thrice (15).156
Furthermore, the fact that Whitechapel places his adoptive son in the first category and blames it on
Chapel's mixed genus attests again to the genealogical nature of Whitechapel's discussion. Then,
Chapel's category is that of “the slave who must experience everything for himself” and “behaves as
if he is the only slave in the world” at his own peril, when he “walk[s] away from [his fosterfather's] advice.” Experience and peril actually share the same pre-Indo-European root peri, or
“passing over,” and Derrida thus legitimately describes experience as “the voyage that crosses the
boundary” (Derrida 1991, 9). In other words, the category of slaves who learn through experience
and end up in trouble fits Chapel more than well: he blurs racial boundaries, walks away from his
father's advice and, after having trespassed the limits that Whitechapel's authority was to trace,
demarcate, or reinforce, he went out of the plantation and passed over into freedom at his own peril,
until he was caught and whipped to death. He acted at his own peril by behaving like “the only
slave in the world,” by acting like the orphan he is, which leads one back to the performative aspect
Whitechapel perceives in a life of bondage, and which links slavery to orphanhood again. Chapel
belongs to the category that disobeys category. He does not belong to the logic of the genus, but to
an orphan law that challenges the assumption that families, or groups of people, can be identified
and set hermetically aside from other families or groups: he is the embodiment of generation
through experience, of a genealogy that does not classify, at least not in ethnic terms. This “makes
the lot of the other slaves ten times worse” because it prevents them from pretending they are a
homogeneous group: Chapel has acted on his own and led Whitechapel to do the same by “giving
up” (D'Aguiar 1994, 21) Chapel to the master. The other type of slave that Whitechapel describes is
therefore more comfortable to the enslaved community. In fact, it is “generally accepted” (my
emphasis), or welcomed by the group as their kin, that it “causes them a minimum of worries” (15).
156For a reading of The Longest Memory as an attempt to complicate the stereotypical, binary opposition between the
image of the active, rebellious slave (Chapel) and that of its compliant, “Uncle Tom” counterpart (Whitechapel), see
Dave Gunning, “Reading the 'Uncle Tom' Character in Fred D'Aguiar's The Longest Memory” (in Misrahi-Barak,
Ed., 2005).
234
Whitechapel could not, of course, place Chapel in this generally accepted category, since Chapel is
actually no kin, no blood relative to him.157
However, although Chapel “learns from experience,” he also does so through “observation”
by watching over Lydia's shoulder when she reads, which proves again that he belongs to the
category that defies categorization, in that he does not only learn the way Whitechapel's first
category of slaves does. Moreover, Chapel crosses the boundary of what is generally accepted as a
slave's behavior by befriending a white girl, the daughter of a slaver, and attempting to acquire
literacy, but he always observes a distance of security that is yet just small enough for him to get
closer to the one he wants to learn from, as Lydia explains: “I begin as his big sister. […] This is
after I watch him for days out of the corner of my eye, edging his way into the reading room. The
scratching at the door is him, half-in, half-out” (79). Neither inside nor outside the master's library,
Chapel is right at the boundary, until Lydia takes him by the hand “without thinking” (79) into the
room and decides to teach him how to read and write. She specifies that she begins “as his big
157[…] Although Ward does not question the phrase “total slave” (150) or problematize the word “experience,” she
follows the genealogical interpretation provided above, through Whtiechapel's thoughts, and explains that “Chapel's
body is (…) the site of not remembering [the] past [of slavery]. As Whitechapel comes to realise, Chapel seems to
lack this remembered past […] because he is not, biologically, his son” (Ward 149). However, and although, as
shown below, epigenetics and Ward's use of the concept of postmemory suggest that memory can be genealogically
transmitted, this interpretation of Chapel's body as being the locus of an absence of memory, if not of the presence of
amnesia, because of his not being Whitechapel's son, might be a bit too unproblematic in the present Derridean
perspective. For it is not for forgetting that he is a slave that a hypomnesic reminder of Chapel's status is being
whipped onto his back, since it is, according to Derrida's vision of the orphan, precisely because he is an
orphan/slave that Chapel takes flight, transgresses the authority of his adoptive father who, as shown above,
epitomizes anamnesis. Thus, if Chapel acquires literacy, and then becomes the page on which a legal text (in other
words, the law of the plantation and/or the father's advice that is in keeping with it) is printed, causing his death –
that is, his becoming a “moribund” logos/child (Derrida 1972, 95-6) – it is not because he is an allegory of amnesia,
but of the blank page becoming text, of the becoming of hypomnesis as a subversion of anamnesis, of the becoming
of the orphan adolescent that challenges patriarchal control. Only then do I rejoin Ward's contention that
Whitechapel and Chapel form a contradictory pair, the father being a figure of submission and the son being
“connected to transgression” (Ward 149), to experience.* Interestingly enough, the constitution of such a pair helps
Ward to contrast Chapel's (erotic) acquisition of literacy with what I call, below, Whitechapel's “somatization” of his
memory onto his body as yet another hypomnesic text (149). Yet, and in light of what has been said above, if
Chapel's and his adoptive father's bodies both become texts as the novel unfolds, are the two characters remaining a
contradictory pair, or is the textualizing process a metaphorical representation of Chapel's tragically dying to
become (in every sense of the phrase) Whitechapel's son? This reading would be in keeping with Ward's argument
that “Finally submitting to the rhythm of slavery, as Chapel looks at his father and the surrounding slaves, his eyes
reflect his sudden identification with them” (Ward 150).
* If, still following Derrida's argument, experience is a form of transgression, it first appears contradictory for Ward to
associate Chapel with “transgression,” specifically when Chapel and Lydia explore “lines of poetry alongside the
lines of the[ir] bod[ies]” and then claim that Chapel lacks “the crucial lines of experience,” Whitechapel's
hypomnesic wrinkles (Ward 149, my italics). However, this surface paradox is solved if one considers that Chapel
“is experiencing” in the novel, while Whitechapel no longer is, although his wrinkles do suggest that he went
through experiences in the past. […]
235
sister” because, as readers already know from preceding chapters (the present, seventh chapter is
thus an analepsis narrated by Lydia), she soon falls in love with him in the process of teaching him
how to read. Chapel and Lydia's reading sessions, as described by Lydia, indeed appear to be highly
sensual: “I recline in my chair and let his voice cascade over my body. He watches me as he reads
so I close my eyes to let him look without my gaze meeting his [...]” (81). Chapel describes the
same scene in verse, when she sat
Back in her chair and closed her eyelids;
I watched her over the top of the first words
I must have got lost in the image of her
Or the story of two star-crossed lovers […] (60)
The reference to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is made clear by the mention of two star-crossed
lovers, and if Chapel actually is reading this play, it helps to make written verse and the poetics of
love intertwine again. Fred D'Aguiar actually riffs on the celestial theme every time the two young
lovers are together in the novel: after Lydia's father discovers that she has taught Chapel how to
read, he forbids them to meet again, but Cook has found out about Lydia and Chapel, and helps
them to plan secret meetings at “a special place to sit and look at the heavens,” “when the stars
sh[i]ne” (89). On one of these nocturnal meetings, they talk about the children they will have,
before realizing what it means: “Our children. We stop. The words hang in the air. Two stars that
have dropped from the heavens to a point just above our heads and as bright as two suns. Our
children. Yes” (103). Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed and meet secretly under the stars during the
balcony scene, just as Pyramus and Thisbe, in the Ovidian metamorphosis that inspired
Shakespeare, run away from their respective homes at night to see each other, without knowing the
tragedy they are about to go through. Conversely, Chapel and Lydia do not expect that their escape
plan will lead to Chapel's death as a runaway slave, to a tragedy the origin of which is racism. 158
158[…] While, as shown in the preceding note, Ward notices the erotic quality of Chapel and Lydia's relationship (Ward
149), she does not mention the Shakespearean intertext. Nevertheless, her reading of Chapel's relation to writing, to
the pharmakon, as accompanied by his falling in love with Lydia, allows Ward to show that the pharmakos can be a
love philter (Ward 144) as much as a dangerous elixir, which Ward find's in Chapel's punishment by Mr.
Whitechapel after the master caught him reading with his daughter (145). […]
236
Such stories of thwarted love are recurrent in Fred D'Aguiar's work, for as shown in this thesis' first
chapter, he revises “Pyramus and Thisbe” as a story of interracial love in British Subjects (D'Aguiar
1993, 60-3), in The Longest Memory, as the present chapter is demonstrating, and in Bloodlines,
where Christy and Faith flee from a plantation only to get caught and sold separately, respectively
as an indentured boxer and as a slave: they will never meet again. 159 The wall that separates
D'Aguiar's Pyramus's and Thisbe's is, thus, always that of racism or slavery.
But Chapel and Lydia's definitive separation is postponed after they are caught by Mr.
Whitechapel thanks to Cook, who knew about their affair and arranges for them to meet at night.
She found out that Chapel knew how to read when she was in the kitchen and heard a voice that was
her “son's and not [her] son's” (83). Intrigued by the sound, she comes to the door of the reading
room and spies on Lydia and Chapel, “with a book in his hands, reading. Chapel, reading. Chapel
speaking, not from memory but lifting words from a book with his eyes. My Chapel. [...] I have to
cover my mouth to catch the scream that parts my lips” (84, my emphasis). This scene conveys a
sense of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls the trope of the Talking Book in African-American
literature, a trope present in many slave narratives where “making the white written text speak with
a black voice is the initial mode of inscription of the metaphor of the double-voiced” (Gates 131).
Gates in fact believes that a genealogy of African-American writing, starting from slave-narratives
onwards, can be traced via its continuous use of double-voiced forms, which, again, he designates
as the Signifyin' tradition. Chapel makes “the white written text speak” and thus gives voice to an
author's logos the way the master would, in a voice that is both his own and not, making his reading
aloud a double-voiced moment of empowerment for a slave. It is also a way in which D'Aguiar
might be acknowledging the African-American literary canon by inscribing his work in its lineage.
But such a sight worries Cook, because slaves do not have the right to read, and Chapel's
experience in literacy might bring him trouble. Nevertheless, all she feels is pride when she thinks
159On the implications of such a revision of Ovid, in Bloodlines and D'Aguiar's verse corpus, see Chapter I. For a
reading of Bloodlines in terms of orphanhood and orphism, see the third section of the present Chapter and the first
section of Chapter V.
237
of the strength of her son's voice (86) and of the fact that he “can open a book and sound like the
master” (86), so she decides to act with Chapel as if she did not know, and not to tell Whitechapel,
who would subsequently put his son in his “first category” of slaves and punish him accordingly
(86).
It is already interesting to note that Cook finds it necessary to specify that Chapel is not
speaking from memory, not reciting, but reading aloud from a book, because it echoes, again,
Derrida's interpretation of the Phaedrus as Ammon's demonstration that the invention of writing is
not a remedy for true memory as anamnesis, but a means of being reminded, an elixir of recollection or hypomneme (as a repetition or imitation – a bastard children in Plato's mimetic view
of mnemonic genealogy – of anamnesis) that will lead readers, in the long run, not to exercise their
memory/anamnesis anymore, since they can supplement it through writing and/as hypomneme
(Derrida 1991, 4-5).160 Writing would then be a death-blow to anamnesis according to Ammon. Its
qualities as an anamnesic poison and hypomnesic gift are what justify the designation of written
speech as a pharmakon, and of those who use it as pharmakaï. Memory is not involved in Chapel's
speech as he reads, even though he sounds like he is reciting something from memory, as one would
do with a poem. In this sense, Chapel's reaction, when he learns from Lydia that he is not supposed
to write or read and should not tell anyone, sounds double-voiced:
She said I was the son of slaves and it was forbidden
For a slave to know how to write and read.
I said it was a mighty waste of a good head.
She reminded me that I took a pledge
Not to tell a soul. I watched her and felt grudge. (D'Aguiar 1994, 60, my emphasis)
This passage, in the light of what was said above, strongly seems to corroborate, and not without
irony, the nature of writing as described in the Phaedrus and in the reading Derrida makes of it in
160[…] Interestingly enough, Ward does not study Cook's reaction to hearing and seeing her son reading, while Cook's
reaction is clearly contrasted with that of Mr. Whitechapel in the novel, as shown below. While, as said in the
previous notes, Ward sets Chapel and Whitechapel as a contradictory pair, and the pharmakon as being both a love
philter and a poison that makes Lydia and Chapel fall in love but leads to Chapel's severe punishment by Mr.
Whitechapel, she does not proceed with the analogous, yet opposite, reactions of Cook and Mr. Whitechapel to
Chapel's literacy. […]
238
“Plato's Pharmacy” (Derrida 1972, 135) and “The Rhetoric of Drugs” (Derrida 2003, 23-4), all the
more so since the context and the use of the neutral pronoun it opens up the potential for a double-,
or “triple-voiced” interpretation of Chapel's statement. To consider the verses themselves: the
“mighty waste of a good head” might be due to Chapel's realization that his efforts to acquire
literacy are vain, since he is not allowed, because of his slave genealogy, to use his newly acquired
knowledge. Another, and more ironic signification of this line might be that segregationists, through
such restrictions, are foolishly wasting the intellectual and creative potential of enslaved people, to
the detriment of the whole community and of such poets as Chapel – all the chapters he narrates are
in verse. Finally, it might be “knowing how to read and write” that constitutes the “waste of a good
head.” This third reading of Chapel's statement makes writing useless or, at least, harmful to one's
“good head,” just as Ammon in the Phaedrus indicates that writing is a poison for good memory as
anamnesis, because it only consists in a means of re-collection, in a hypomnesic copy of actual
memory. It might be wasting Chapel's memory indeed and, in this light, it is not fortuitous that
Lydia, the one who taught him how to write, has to re-mind him of his promise not to let others
know about his literacy.161
But before extending this discussion (if it is ever to be gone beyond), it must be said that, in
the same conditions as Cook, Mr. Whitechapel, Lydia's father, catches Chapel, but he does not react
the way Cook did with her son at all when he surprises them reading, as Chapel explains:
And we were statues with dropped jaws
Waiting for her father to release the curse
With his words. He ordered Lydia out.
He drew his belt, signaled me to bend and shout
At my peril. As he lashed, he spoke. Do not,
I repeat, do not let me ever catch you reading
161[…] Ward cites the same passage about the “waste of a good head” as a sign of Chapel's thwarted use of literacy
because of slavery, and as a reminder of the fact that writing is the pharmakon that gratifies him with Lydia's love as
much as that which plagues him with the knowledge of being a slave (Ward 144). However, Ward's erotic reading of
Chapel and Lydia's literary relationship leads me to a fourth, provocative reading of this passage: if Chapel's relation
to Lydia is conditioned by his access to literacy, his not being allowed to read and write prevents him from gaining
Lydia's love and the sexual gratifications it may entail. Then, if Chapel's being denied access to Lydia is “a mighty
waste of a good head,” Chapel might be implying that it is a pity for him not to be allowed to get “good head,” or
fellatio, from Lydia. […]
239
[…] and tell no one of this. (D'Aguiar 1994, 61)
Chapel is whipped for being literate, in a scene that may be considered as a prolepsis for the other
whipping that will cause his death. Still in the perspective of Plato and Derrida's descriptions of
written speech, it is interesting to read that Chapel and Lydia are “waiting for her father to release
the curse / With his words” since, again, while writing is an orphan, an illegitimate child with no
father to stand on his/her behalf, and therefore who can be made to say anything, the “father” here is
the father of his logos, the master patriarch or figure of authority that – this time only – stands on
behalf of the orders he formulates.162 He in fact decides on what just treatment is as far as his slaves
are concerned, and tells Lydia, after the whipping, that “By teaching little Whitechapel how to read
and write when he can never use it [she has] done him the gravest injustice” (88), while Lydia, in
her answer, opposes both her father and the law by declaring “unjust” (88) the fact that slaves are
not allowed to be literate. In his speech, Mr Whitechapel also reminds Chapel of his will through
repetition – “Do not, / I repeat, do not let me ever catch you reading” – just as Lydia did a few pages
before. In fact, it is the father who has monopoly over the logos and its written avatar on the
plantation, and Chapel's literacy amounts to slander in the eyes of Mr. Whitechapel, despite his
usually lenient dispositions. Mr. Whitechapel tells Chapel to “shout at his peril” too as he is being
whipped, and the word peril, through its aformentioned etymological link with experience, appears
to confirm Whitechapel's characterization of his son as the troublesome type of slave that only
learns through experience, through the crossing of boundaries, in the eyes of Mr. Whitechapel
(D'Aguiar 1994, 14-5). Chapel thus crosses boundaries twice: first, with literacy, second, through
his escape and the disrespect of patriarchal authority it entails. 163 And when Whitechapel asks the
162As said above, Mr. Whitechapel is absent during Chapel's second, deadly beating. He also earns reproaches from his
fellow plantation owners for beating Chapel by taking his “belt to him as if he were [his] own offspring” (71), for
blurring genealogy, on which the partition between slave and master rests.
163[…] Abigail Ward also cites Mister Whitechapel's speech as he punishes Chapel for being literate, but only to
contrast it with Chapel's resulting submissive tone and (performative) behavior as a slave. She provides no thorough
(micro)reading of this passage, in spite of its importance in relation to “Plato's Pharmacy” and to Chapel's
characterization through transgression and experience (Ward 145). […]
240
master to spare his son, Mr. Whitechapel interrupts him and asks him “what [he] would have him do
with a runaway among his good negroes, poisoning their minds on a daily basis” (15, my
emphasis). To the same extent, here is the conduct that a journalist from The Virginian, another
narrator who intervenes in the novel through fictional newspaper clippings, suggests for runaway
slaves:
[…] I have known overseers who had advocated dispensing of that runaway slave altogether on the
grounds that he is a poison among other slaves and will himself never settle into the job again. This
does not excuse the use of bloodhounds to gorge on the flesh of that slave until he perishes. Nor the
use of the lash until death and then the public showing of the carcass beyond the point of decay.
It must add to the bitterness of slaves rather than remedy any dissatisfaction in them. The key
here is to punish firmly by using punishment as instruction. There is this too: the slave must be a
living example of someone who has failed in his attempt at escape; he must act as a living reminder
of that failure […] (107-8, my emphasis).
In sum, the journalist argues that runaway slaves, that is to say metaphorical orphans who disobey
the patriarchal figure that a slave-master is – and, in Chapel's case, their own (foster-)father – by
crossing the boundary between the plantation and the outside, freer world, are poisonous to the
organism of the plantation and must be punished accordingly by serving as the opposite of poison,
and remedy their potential inception of a desire for freedom in other slaves' minds by acting (the
sense of a performative view of bondage is discretely conveyed here again) as living reminders, or
means of recollection, of their failed evasion. In other words, runaway slaves are designated here as
parricidal orphans who function as pharmaka(i) that consist both in poison(er)s and remedies or
healers for slaves and their ability to re-member, their hypomneme: basically, runaway slaves, and
literate Chapel in particular, are described in the same way as texts are in the Phaedrus and “Plato's
Pharmacy.” This confirms the aforementioned idea that Chapel's literacy and subsequent whipping
announce, proleptically, his future escape and deadly punishment. It also indicates that The Longest
Memory is a mise en abyme, a text in the form of a novel, an orphan pharmakon about orphan
pharmakai, about poisonous slaves and their influence on hypomneme. If such a shortcut can be
made, The Longest Memory is thus a text about textuality.164
164[…] Ward agrees that D'Aguiar, with this novel, is trying to satisfy a “conscious desire to reveal the artificiality of
the text” (Ward 147). According to her, he does so thanks to the polyphony resulting from the presence of diverging
voices, such as that of The Virginian, which, according to her, represents “received remembrance,” that is, the
241
And textuality, in its written form, is what Chapel is forced to forsake after being caught by
Mr. Whitechapel, at least as long as he will be on the plantation:
I promised never to open a book or pick up a pen.
I compose in my head or aloud. I write nothing down.
I told this to the trees, the well, the stars.
They memorized it. Besides me. I told her.
He said Lydia was never to see me again.
We meet at night, back to back, without pen
Or paper. We talk. We speak from memory:
What she has remembered from books for me,
What I have composed in my head for her,
Back to back, in the darkness, at this hour. (D'Aguiar 1994, 62)
Chapel gives up reading and writing, but not verse: he composes poetry without writing it down and
memorizes what he composes, just as he remembers the punishment he has had to undergo for
being literate, which he recounts to natural elements and Lydia, whom he secretly continues to meet
on clear nights to “speak from memory,” as Lydia will learn books to recite them to him, so that
they can inspire him new poetry that she will memorize in turn to put it down on paper. While the
passage cited above contains an intertextual reference to the calypso song “Zombie Jamboree”
through the phrase “back to back” – as shown above, a phrase often used in Fred D'Aguiar's poetry
(D'Aguiar 1998, 39, 69; D'Aguiar 2000, 159) and Wilson Harris' (one of D'Aguiar's mentors) The
Infinite Rehearsal (Harris 1987, 10, 32, 58) – the texts that Chapel will revise include Shakespeare's
sonnets and plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Homer, Virgil, Goethe's Faust
“(Book One),” Donne's poems, Chaucer, and William Langland's Piers Plowman (D'Aguiar 1994,
96-7), suggesting that a poetics of tropical intertextuality or revision blending Caribbean and
Western literary canons is at play in both Chapel's and D'Aguiar's creations. 165 As far as Chapel is
“official, colonial remembrance of slavery,” and is set against the marginal, ex-centric (Hutcheon 35), minority
voices of Lydia (as a woman) and Whitechapel (as a slave) which she labels as expressions of “counterremembrance” (147). In this sense, Ward argues that Chapel's voice, emulating Milton and Shakespeare, functions as
a “replication of received forms of expression or remembrance” that “D'Aguiar wants to avoid in writing his texts”
(145-6). Although Ward's point is convincing, Chapel's literary taste is, most of all, and as explained in the next note,
related to his Orphic qualities, which Ward does not mention. Neither does she link Shakespeare and Milton as
Orphic figures. For more information on these subjects, also see the introduction to Chapter V. […]
165[…] These literary references, when read along with Chapel's singing poetry to the stars and the trees (D'Aguiar
242
concerned, the shift from written speech to spoken word equates a shift from the pharmakon and
hypomneme to anamnesis and the logos. However, since the logos is informed by written texts that
were memorized as a “treasure of recollection” (Plato in Derrida 1972, 194), as hypomneme which
exacerbates anamnesis, or true memory, until it helps Chapel to compose new verse, writing seems
to be less condemned than rehabilitated as something more than a source of recollection, as the
originator of new things to be created thanks to anamnesis, and memorized by listeners-scribes such
as Lydia. Thus, it appears that Chapel and Lydia's memorizing scheme entails a designation of
writing as a remedy that renews the logos rather than as a poison that causes amnesia in the long
run, as long as it is not only consulted as the copy of the author's actual speech, but as a means of
regenerating one's own logos through revision of written speeches. Writing as hypomneme might
excite anamnesis into the production of new logoi. Of course, a text is, therefore, still a doubleedged pharmakon, and revision could be perceived as a bastardization, an illegitimate reproduction
of an original text. But as far as Chapel is concerned, it allows him, an orphan, to restore genealogy
and legitimacy to his speech through affiliation to chosen canonical literary forefathers and, as a
1994, 62) which fall silent during his execution, away from a lover he failed to join (26), do not only serve received
remembrance (Ward 147) or the author's cross-cultural revisionary poetics. In fact, Chapel's interaction with natural
elements and his poetic skill relate him, albeit less than other protagonists in D'Aguiar's novels, studied in Chapter
V, to Orpheus, whose name, again, shares its etymological, prototypical Indo-European orbh- root – designating
bereavement – with the word “orphan.” With the exception of Homer and Langland, the list of Chapel's literary
references, mentioned above, supports this point: Virgil's Georgics (iv 453-527) tell the tale of Orpheus. Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde mentions Orpheus and Eurydice (Chaucer iv, 791). In the Faerie Queene, Spenser compares
himself to a British, national Orpheus (Cain 28, 30) and creates a genealogy that goes from Isis to Queen Elizabeth
(Delsigne 203, 206), and Isis' myth and mysteries are sometimes said to have served as initiations and rites of
passage for, among others, Moses, Orpheus, and Plato, then pharmakaï of sorts (205). As shown in the third section
of the present study's fifth chapter, Donne, another Renaissance poet, is re-presented by Wilson Harris – again, one
of D'Aguiar's literary forebears – as an Orphic figure in Palace of the Peacock. As far as Shakespeare is concerned,
it has been shown, above, that the repetitive use of starry images in The Longest Memory is related to Romeo and
Juliet. Moreover, Thomas Cain signals, in his article “Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus,” that Northrop Frye
claims Orpheus to be, to some extent, the hero of all of Shakespeare's romances (Cain 24). For instance, Prospero's
magical powers and retrospective rage, in The Tempest, are clearly Orphic, although his incantations are reputedly
drawn from Ovid's rendition of Medea's speech, as translated by Arthur Golding (Shakespeare 2008, 240-1). In
addition, L.M. Findlay argues that many passages of Hamlet revise the myth of Orpheus (Findlay 982-9). The 62 nd
and 3rd lines of Milton's poem “Lycidas” mentions Orpheus' head rolling down the Hebrus, and Charles Martindale
shows that these lines are revised in Paradise Lost (Martindale 322). Goethe's Faust, “book one” (D'Aguiar 1994,
97), stages Faust and the devil trying and failing to rescue Margaret from a death sentence by taking her out of
prison, like Orphic figures trying to draw Eurydice out of Hell (Goethe Bk. I, Sc. 25). Finally, “Zombie Jamboree,”
dealing with the living dead, addresses, like the myth of Orpheus, the theme of resurrection. Thus, even if some of
these connections are far-fetched, their number appears to support the argument that D'Aguiar also takes the pain of
making a precise description of Chapel's tastes in order to liken his initiation as a writer to an Orphic process that is
(etymologically) coherent with Chapel's status as an orphan/slave. […]
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consequence, to legitimize his revisions of these authors as his own, inherited logos, as an acquired
legacy. Chapel earns his voice as a poet thanks to literacy, in a way that seems analogous, again, to
that of Harlem Renaissance writers for instance, who tried to gain civil rights through the creation
of high-standard literature and criticism.
However, Chapel still relies on writing by using Lydia as his scribe, and because the
decision not to use a pen or open a book only consists in temporary obedience to Mr. Whitechapel,
the father and patriarch, before Chapel finally escapes. In fact, Chapel is forbidden to write, but
believes he is allowed to compose aloud (D'Aguiar 1994, 62). Although writing is forbidden,
composing aloud might be allowed, without risking to break one's promise to the Master, a thing
Chapel, as Lydia explains, does not at all want to do:
'Memorize something for when we meet next time.'
'And what will you do?'
'I will compose something in my head.'
He says he cannot disobey my father. He gave him his word. He refuses my offer to bring
him books and paper. He asks me to be his eyes and read for him and be his pen and write down
what he says to me on clear nights. Chapel, I want to say, all my memory is yours. (90-1)
Just before this passage, on the same page, Chapel tells Lydia that his“father is always right” (90),
which sounds quite ironic, knowing that Chapel disagrees with Whitechapel's understanding of
slavery and will disobey both his father and the patriarchal figure of Mr. Whitechapel in the end.
Here, obedience to the father corresponds to the status of the logos rather than to that of the
parricidal orphan that writing is described to be, and it is coherent with Chapel's forced change of
behavior166 from disobedient slave to conciliatory son – “He gave [the patriarch-master] his word.”
Chapel's shift from writing to telling is accompanied by a change from textual to temporary
“logical” – abiding by the father's logos and creating one's own language – attitude. But again, the
fact that Lydia remains a writer/pharmakos at Chapel's service suggests that such obedience is only
temporary. Just as Mr. Whitechapel told his daughter that she has done a “grave injustice” (88) to
Chapel by making him literate, she decides to offer him her memory as a gift: “Chapel, I want to
166Again, “change of behavior” and of allegiance is the shared etymological meaning of orphanhood and slavery.
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say, all my memory is yours,” as far as memorizing books is concerned. Although the word is not
mentioned as such in the text, the idea of the gift is present here and, again, creates a sense of
pharmacological oscillation between its respective functions as poison and present. If such a gift is
harmful, it is so to Lydia, who will use up all of her anamnesic potential to serve as hypomneme for
Chapel, as a means of reminding him of the contents of the canon, so that his own anamnesis can be
exacerbated. But such an anamnesic sacrifice on Lydia's part is effected out of love and contributes
to the rehabilitation of written speech – “the canon” – as a source of inspiration for Chapel, who
will in turn create “treasures of recollection” (Plato in Derrida 1972, 194) in verse that he will not
write down, but let Lydia memorize – and thus, return her with anamnesic exercise – so that she can
write them down and complete an actually healthy exchange where one lover always returns or
remedies what the other has sacrificed for his sake. And both lovers actually plan to go on with
writing and verses to recite if they succeed in eloping, as Lydia explains:
Chapel says he will write verses for a living. Verses for the birthdays of dignitaries. Verses for the
death of prominent citizens. Verses to commemorate the anniversary of this or that institution or
brotherhood. Verses for a gentleman to woo his lady. Verses on religion. Verses on the bounty of
nature. Verses, verses, verses. […] Chapel, you will write verses and make our lives and the lives of
our children rich. (D'Aguiar 1994, 103, my emphasis)
As Lydia speaks, her language progressively becomes metrical, and thus adopts the rhythm of what
she is dealing with, namely, verses. In fact, “Verses for a gentleman to woo his lady” is a trochaic
pentameter the ending of which would be conventionally called feminine (a stressed syllable
followed by an unstressed one), and aptly so since its last word is “lady.” “Verses on religion” is a
trochaic trimeter, like “Verses, verses, verses,” which is reminiscent of King Lear's “Never, never,
never, never, never” (Shakespeare V. 3. 307). Finally, “Verses on the bounty of nature” is a trochaic
tetrameter closed by a falling inversion (/_xx/_). 167 The idea that the subject of Lydia's speech,
coupled to the loving and admirative emotion she experiences regarding Chapel, affects her
language to the point of turning it to meter that, once, alludes to “the bounty of nature,” is highly
167In this study, as in Part One, it is, again, the model of single-line scansion as presented by Derek Attridge in Poetic
Rhythm: an Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008) that will be used. Stressed syllables are indicated with
“/”, unstressed syllables are represented with an “x”, beats can be seen as underscores “_”, and virtual offbeats
appear as “(x).”
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evocative of the link romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge found between passion and
poetry, in that a fit of passion was fit to form metrical expression (Wordsworth & Coleridge 3056).168 However, and in spite of the potentially romantic allusion to the bounty of nature, it appears
that the subjects Lydia suggests for Chapel's poetry, such as birthdays, religion, outstanding citizens
and institutions, or love, all constitute the main subjects of the collected poems of Phillis Wheatley,
the first female slave to have published a collection of poetry in the United States (Gates in
Wheatley x). In other words, Chapel's poetic themes might not have been chosen innocently or
naively, but in keeping with another poet-slave's topics of predilection, thus establishing another
intertextual parenthood, or genealogy, between D'Aguiar's characters and former writers, along
with, possibly, the author's discrete tribute to a corpus forming his inspirational legacy. Finally, the
idea that Chapel could write “verses to commemorate the anniversary of this or that institution”
indicates again, and tautologically so, that written speech is a means of recollection or hypomnesic
support.169
c. A Desire to Forget
But although writing as anamnesic nurture might be rehabilitated through Lydia and
Chapel's scheme, both anamnesis and hypomneme, or memory in its broad sense, are things that
Whitechapel has been led to reject, as readers learn from the very beginning of the novel, when
Whitechapel talks about the last time he cried:
That was me over the whipping of a boy who had to know better somehow and would have learned
with a good talking to, or even a beating in these circumstances but not this, not this. I don't want to
remember. Memory hurts. Like crying. But still and deep. Memory rises to the skin then I can't be
touched. I hurt all over, my bones ache, my teeth loosen in their gums, my nose bleeds. Don't make
me remember. I forget as hard as I can. (D'Aguiar 1994, 2)
The last time Whitechapel cried, then, was over Chapel's death, which he wishes he did not
remember, because such memory is hurtful, all the more so since it might have been avoided “with
168I am indebted to Thomas Dutoit on this fit view of romanticism as found in Wordsworth's definition of the function
of poetry in his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads. Romantic references in Fred D'Aguiar's novels are explored more
thoroughly in Chapter V, part III.
169[…] Ward does not address these aspects of Lydia and Chapel's memorial practices and poetic endeavors. [...]
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a good talking to” that was not for Whitechapel to utter, although he tried, since, theoretically
speaking, in a patriarchal system, only the father has power over his son and his logos (Plato 63,
Derrida 1972, 95). Whitechapel's memories from an existence of bondage are so hurtful that they
affect him physically, to the extent that he has transcribed the pain onto his face, and subsequently
earned the nickname “Sour-face” from his relatives. He wants to forget in order to get rid of the
pain, but how can he do so when his body is a living reminder of his past? Even traces of his past
dreams linger on his face: “The bags under my eyes are sacks of worries, witnesses of dreams,
nightmares, and sleep from which a man should not be allowed to wake” (3). His face and body
function as a page on which his past experiences are superimposed to constitute a palimpsest of
sorts. In other words, his body bears the grafted imprint, the text, of his past, and this text is a
constant reminder of painful memories, a hypomnesic trace which hurts him as it prevents him from
forgetting as he wishes.170 His body, being textual and harmful, is an almost auto-immune
pharmakon: “Worry cut these paths in my face. I let it happen because I didn't feel it happening and
only knew it was there when someone called me Sour-face one day and I looked in the mirror for
evidence and found plenty staring back at me” (7). Whitechapel's anamnesis being the cause of his
170[…] Ward cites the sames passages from The Longest Memory (Ward 147-8) and reaches a similar conclusion: “[...]
in the process of memory being inscribed, or 'written' on [Whitechapel's] body – as wrinkles, lines and bags – the
living memory, or mneme, is transformed into hypomnesis” (148). However, as soon as this point is made, she
appears ton contradict herself: “In The Longest Memory, counter-remembrance becomes articulated as a discourse of
the body, and D'Aguiar conceives of the body as being in opposition to books” (148). If, according to Plato and
Derrida, a text is, by definition, hypomnesic, and if Whitechapel's wrinkles are his anamnesis reproduced in a
specific form of (hypomnesic) writing onto his body, is not Whitechapel's body being textualized and, if so, how is
the body opposed to “books,” when books are physical objects of textuality? This paradox within Ward's argument
serves her purpose in her following point, when she tries to compare Whitechapel and Chapel as opposites. For just
after this apparent contradiction, and following Foucault's point, in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (an essay
mentioned in the introduction to the present chapter as well), that “the body [...] is the domain of the Herkunft”
(Foucault 80, Ward 147), that is, the realm of filiation, of genealogical traceability, Ward explains that while
Whitechapel's memory of slavery, imprinted onto his body, may be transmitted to his descendants, it cannot be
inherited by Chapel, since Chapel is not his biological son. Chapel is to lack, as a consequence, “this remembered
past” that could have saved him from his somber fate (149). This thought process is in keeping with Whitechapel's
above-studied biological argument (D'Aguiar 1994, 135) and, allows Ward to read the plot by opposing the
following pairs: Whitechapel/body, Chapel/books (149). Yet, although Whitechapel and Chapel do not relate to
memory in the same way – Whitechapel's anamnesis leads him to bodily hypomnesis, while it is physical
hypomnesis in the form of books and Lydia's body-lines that lead Chapel to the anamnesic, unwritten consigning of
poetry in his and Lydia's minds – their respective acquisition, albeit in opposed orders, of both hypomnesis and
anamnesis, affiliates them to one another by creating a metaphorical genealogy that virtually makes them less
strangers than kin, and suggests a potential (pharmaceutic?) complementarity of anamnesis and hypomnesis, rather
than a mere binary opposition. Thus, as far as this specific point is concerned, Ward, in spite of philosophical
contradiction, and although she notes that the novel is made up of divergent, polyphonic voices (Ward 140), seems
to be mistaking Whitechapel's argument for that of The Longest Memory as whole. […]
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hypomnesic body, he could also be designated as a pharmakos, which Sanders Senior does in his
journal, when discussing the cause of a runaway slave's death: “Mr. Whitechapel enquired if it was
his wounds that caused his death. I said no. Apparently Whitechapel, lately changed from slave to
Physician, had said, not fever, but the whip killed the runaway” (51, my emphasis). This statement
is very cruel, since Whitechapel is no physician and his asking for one to cure his dying wife was
refused. It is highly disdainful too, in that it suggests that for a slave to be a physician – a
pharmakos, someone literate or mastering the arts and sciences (Gates 129) – is an absurdity, while
Whitechapel's experience and textualized body, along with Chapel's literacy, indicate that it would
be quite possible were it not for slavers' restrictions. It is also interesting to note that this argument
is raised after the whipping of a runaway slave, for it creates a parallel between this slave and
Sanders Senior, and Chapel and Sanders Junior, both sons of Sanders Senior. Such a parallel
between Sanders Senior's and Sander's Junior's deeds is actually extended by Mr. Whitechapel when
he reprimands Sanders Junior for having killed the one he has just learned to be his half-brother:
“This whole mess cannot be ended anymore than it can be made as simple as it may have been at its
inception. Your father's action and that of countless others before him and since ensure that.
Whitechapel's longevity and living memory ensures that” (35). “This whole mess” resulting from
“inception” is the racially mixed and illegitimate genealogy of miscegenation that blurred, with
children like Chapel, the ethnically hermetic categories that the plantation conventions tried to
maintain. But the phenomenon, as Mr. Whitechapel indicates, is not limited to Sanders Senior's
actions only, and has repeated itself throughout history, a fact to which an old man like Whitechapel
can testify. He is all memory indeed, with an illiterate but anamnesic mind that writes hypomnesic
texts on the surface of his body. On the plantation, he really is The Longest Memory, the bearer of a
past, of a burden that becomes heavier with time.171
171[…] If Ward does not, again, read the novel's title as a metonymy for Whitechapel, her reading of this specific
passage, where Mr. Whitechapel describes plantation genealogies as “this whole mess,” is richer than mine: on top
of interpreting “this whole mess” as a designation of “the inextricable intermingling of black and white people”
through slavery (Ward 142), Ward relates the passage to an extended weaving metaphor of “carpet,” “thread,” and
“knotted mess” in the novel (D'Aguiar 1994 33, 136-7). Ward traces this image (shared between Mr Whitechapel
and Whitechapel's utterances) in order to show that Whitechapel's “knotted mess” is an apt counter-remembrance
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But although it is very hard for him to substitute memories for oblivion, there are different
ways in which he actually forgets elements of his past, even if, unfortunately, those are not
necessarily the ones he wants to forget, since oblivion usually happens unwittingly, and memory is
not easily made selective. The saddest of all, for instance, is that Whitechapel forgot what he was
like before he became “sour-faced”:
What was I before this? I forget. Did I smile? Laugh out loud? Don't recall. To laugh. What is that? I
think of a donkey braying. That is like a big laugh, involuntary, involving the whole body, noisy and
long and toothy. What could lead to such behavior? There is nothing in my past to make me bray.
Knowing this, I can say I will never laugh again if I ever did. Sour-face, that's me. (7)
Whitechapel does not recall: there are no hypomnesic traces, no text of a happy past written on his
body to remind him of a time when he wasn't sad. Happiness is so foreign to him that he actually
animalizes its attributes by comparing laughing to a donkey's bray. But the sentence “I can say I will
never laugh again if I ever did” creates a sense of doubt as one reads, as if to let one hope that
Whitechapel must have laughed in the past, although Whitechapel is so sad and happy times are so
far behind – leading back to his pre-bondage African childhood? – that he does not want ever to
remember this past and pretends he has forgotten it, just as he pretends he is Chapel's real father and
keeps, along with the rest of the community, his adoptive son's genealogy as a secret that will die
with him and others in the know. Whitechapel's past is actually so sad and painful that he, at some
point, wishes to be dead and wonders, having lived for so long, if he will outlive the sun: “Stare and
sneer and (hopefully) die. But no, the mornings repeat after snatched sleep. […] The sun begins
because it must. When will it die? Will I witness the death? Sun, see me out of this world. I have
more family on that other side [...]” (27).172 But death has not forgotten him, and the novel ends with
trope that, unlike Mr Whitechapel's “carpet” metaphor, does not fail to convey the violence that slavery entails
(Ward 142). On the other hand, in a Derridean perspective, addressing the interracial genealogies of slavery with the
lexical field of weaving could correspond to dealing with inter-ethnicity in terms of textuality too, since texture and
weft are etymologically related and can be synonyms in some contexts (Derrida 1972, 79), and this supports the
argument made above that The Longest Memory is a text about textuality – and its relation to slavery and
orphanhood. Finally, for Ward to trace these interracial and textual tropes is very helpful, all the more so when she
specifies that the violence of the “knotted mess” of slavery can manifest itself as rape (Ward 142), since this reading
bolsters the interpretation, provided below, of the extended metaphor of the plait, in Bloodlines, to designate Christy
and Faith's relationship. […]
172It may not be accidental for Whitechapel to address the sun. This star is a pharmakon in that it is indispensable to
earthly life but it is also endowed with the capacity to blind, burn, and kill in many ways. Besides, the sun has been
associated with many divinities, among which Ammon and Aton, the “flaming discs” (Freud 1939, 22), and
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his passing: “The light going out is death's shadow; death sitting up suddenly behind the plate glass
of the eyes. I must sit down. No, lie down. Rest these eyes, tired of trying not to see. Rest this
mouth. Stop tasting the sourness there. Forget. Memory is pain trying to resurrect itself” (137). This
last sentence is interesting in the present perspective on writing, memory, and genealogy: if memory
is understood as anamnesis here, its attempt at resurrecting itself might consist in its reproduction,
its being copied into a textual, and hence hypomnesic form. And since the text of Whitechapel's sad
past is written on his own body, the pain it provokes can be imagined to be both physical and
psychological. In sum, such a pain is psychosomatic and derives from the physical resurrection of
anamnesis into a hypomnesic bodily text that literally hurts Whitechapel, and that might,
theoretically, harm his “longest anamnesis” too. The idea that memory resurrects itself also
indicates that it can regenerate on its own and be its own parent, with no identifiable offspring or
ancestors but itself. This self-generative view of memory – anamnesis turning to hypomneme –
coheres with the relationship Derrida and Plato find between (hypomnesic) writing and orphanhood,
and with the status of orphan-slave Whitechapel, who expresses this view through the novel's final
sentence. And in this context, one understands why, for Whitechapel, it actually “takes a life” to
forget.173
In fact, and even at the end of his life, Whitechapel still remembers many things, be it
Whitechapel addresses it accordingly, as writers would call on the Muses to help them out. The sun is therefore a
pharmakos of sorts too.
173[…] The passage points to anamnesis as already being a re-presentation, a repetition, in the same way as
hypomnesis is a repetition, or reproduction, of the past. In spite of the argument that hypomnesis is the repetition of
anamnesis or mneme, and hence, the repetition of a repetition – the mise en abyme could apply to anamnesis too, for
instance, when anamnesis consists in the living memory of the repetitive, fractal, “proliferating regularity” of
plantation slavery in the Americas (Benitez-Rojo 74) – the presentation of anamnesis as resurrectional, and as a
mischievous, “painful” orphan suggests that anamnesis is not so different from texts as one may be tempted to
believe, and is a hypomnesic mediator between the actual past and the text as a moribund logos. In other words, this
take on anamnesis might rehabilitate writing as a good pharmakon that cures amnesia even if it does not fully
preserve anamnesis. Ward relates this passage about memory being “pain trying to resurrect itself” to Feeding the
Ghosts and Mintah's memorial practices after her traumatic experience of the Middle-Passage: “Hypomnetic
remembrance is not painless, and can be dangerous, not only because of its potential for retraumatisation, but also
because monuments of hypomnesis may unproductively pave the way to [the] forgetting” that Whitechapel and
Mintah yearn for (Ward 140). Yet, and here, too, we mark a difference with Ward, forgetting might also be relieving
for these characters, and their forgetting through the production of hypomnesic traces may, in keeping with the
nature of the pharmakon, be therapeutic as much as traumatic, and remind or teach their readers about the past of
slavery while ridding Mintah and Whitechapel of a painful, saturated memory. These problems are addressed more
thoroughly in the following part of the present chapter, on Feeding the Ghosts. […]
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willingly or not. One of his memories he shares with his great grand-daughter, through whom it will
live on. This memory dates back to his youth in Africa, and is narrated by Whitechapel's greatgrand-daughter:
'New England lice bite harder than African lice.' He dropped this in his little talks with me as he
supervised my wash. […] I asked him what African lice looked like and how New England lice
managed to get all the way to Virginia. He said he left Africa when he was a boy. One day he was
playing in a field of tall grass. The smell comes back to him all these years later unannounced. The
next he was marching. Several days after that he was facing the sea for a journey he thought would
never end and one that claimed many lives, young and adult. No one lifted a finger to help a ten yearold boy. Women and men were like children in the hands of those who held them captive.” (The
Longest Memory 123, my emphasis)
Whitechapel then proceeds to explain how African children like to carry lice on them because
African lice tickle, while New England lice hurt. This memory matters a lot in that it retraces the
experience of the first Africans who were captured and brought to America through the MiddlePassage as slaves. The crossing of the Atlantic actually coincides with Whitechapel's becoming,
simultaneously, an orphan and a slave, since he was alone and with no parent to help him as he was
at sea. Even the other adults could not take care of him because they were made child-like by their
loss of freedom and the Middle-Passage experience, according to Whitechapel. By becoming slaves
away from their motherland, they might even be said to have become orphans on the Atlantic. The
other reason why this memory is important is that it shows that Whitechapel represents both the first
generation of slaves, who were born free and knew Africa, and the last generation of slaves who
were not born in bondage and could recount African memories. Such a status also relates the novel's
title to Whitechapel, for he could be said to represent the longest attainable memory to AfricanAmericans. However, if his great grand-daughter never knew Africa, she gains imaginative access
to it through Whitechapel's tale and, interestingly enough, through her dreams. 174 In fact, she tells
her great grand-father she “had a dream about Africa,” where she met Whitechapel's parent in a hut.
They recognize her as their son's great grand-daughter when they give her something to eat which
174This illustrates Jamaican poet E. K. Brathwaite's argument, throughout his collection of poems The Arrivants: A
New World Trilogy (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), that memory does not stop at the Middle-Passage for American
and Caribbean members of the African diaspora, and that access to Africa can be gained through imagination and
dreams.
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she thinks “may be some potion that will turn [her] head” (the pharmakon is never far), and she
serves herself with the left hand, with Whitechapel's “left-handedness that all of [his descendants]
have inherited” (124). She then wakes up shouting “I am the third grandchild of his twelfth
daughter: his youngest great grand-child” (125). In other words, this dream, told almost at the end
of the book, suggests a hopeful closure where Africa and genealogy can be reconstituted poetically
through dreams for members of the African diaspora, and prevent them from losing the past to the
exclusive knowledge of those who, like Whitechapel, survived the Middle Passsage experience.
That dreams constitute a type of memory, of access to the past, would not, as shown in Chapter III,
have sounded unconvincing to Freud who, again, actually supported such an argument while
interpreting one of his dreams in On Dreams:
[...] I perceive that it is wrong to regard the dream as a psychically unimportant, a purely physical
process which has arisen from the activity of isolated cortical elements awakened out of sleep.
I must further remark that the dream is far shorter than the thoughts which I hold it replaces;
whilst analysis discovered that the dream was provoked by an unimportant occurrence the evening
before the dream. (Freud 1901, 7)
The dream Freud had was therefore the result of a substitution through which a past experience was
condensed and rearranged metaphorically into a dream that one may decipher. Of course, this only
suggests that dreams grant access to one's individual and lived past, and the idea that Whitechapel's
great grand-daughter, who never knew Africa, can dream about it and her ancestors goes further
than Freud by suggesting that, through dreams, one can reach further back than to one's lived past.
This remains a possibility, since no definite evidence can be given to support or oppose this
statement.175 Another way of understanding the great grand-daughter's dream could consist in
175[…] Moreover, “According to the new insights of behavioral epigenetics [which started developing in the 1990s],
traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Jews
whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; Chinese whose grandparents lived through the
ravages of the Cultural Revolution; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; adults of
every ethnicity who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents — all carry with them more than just memories”
(Hurley 2013). Or is it precisely “just memories” that they carry around with their DNA? Here, science can lead to
the drawing of an analogy between the experience of descendants, for instance, of the Holocaust, to that of the
descendants of victims of the transatlantic slave-trade, through their shared epigenetic mode of memorialization, or
inscription (as an innate hypomnesis, an “original prosthesis” of sorts (Derrida 1996) that corresponds to anamnesic
re-presentation). Ward makes the same comparison thanks to Holocaust theory. More specifically, she, in addition to
relying on “Plato's Pharmacy,” uses Holocaust theorist Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory, designating “the
belated 'memories' experienced by those who did not directly witness traumatic events,” the “'second generation' of
trauma witnesses” (Ward 132), as a lens that allows her to read Bloodlines as a postmemorialization of the past of
slavery. In other words, science can bolster her argument as much as it supports the idea, found through the dream
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interpreting it as an unconscious reworking of Whitechapel's African tale. But Whitechapel does not
give such consideration to his great grand-daughter's dream and tells her: “You dream about
something you don't know. Make your dreams here” (125). However, one must be suspicious of
Whitechapel's opinion, who says at the end of his life that he has “been wrong all [his] days” (136)
a few lines after having mentioned the possibility for him to have been mistaken concerning
Chapel's dreams on Lydia:
What you shout in your sleep is a young man dreaming. I hear but pretend I am deaf. Her name is a
young man dreaming. Lydia. A dream of love, desire, but a dream all the same. Something that
cannot be possessed; that will remain confined to the realm of sleep, fantasy. [...] Once awake it will
take a different form I tell myself, one suited to your life, your circumstances. I see now that the
name Lydia is a part of the dream you tried to make a part of your life. […] Lydia is part of it. Which
part I do not know. I am wrong in many things. (136)
Whitechapel does not realize that, before becoming part of a dream Chapel wanted to achieve in
real life by running away from the plantation to live with Lydia up North, Lydia was a part of his
life that turned to a dream. The event of the dream was conditioned by the near past of Lydia and
Chapel's falling in love, and was no fantasy. But Whitechapel looks down on dreams because he
associates them with hypomnesis: “I forget if I've dreamed an experience or really remember it. I
put most recollection down to fantasy” (4). In this passage, Whitechapel first likens dreams to
recollection – or hypomneme – and then to fantasy. He thus disbelieves dreams because they consist
in a reconstitution of the past that is not consciously guided: dreams are re-writings that, like texts,
made by Whitechapel's great-granddaughter (although Ward does not explore it), that memory might transcend
generations through non-linguistic means that might be imaginative as well as physical, or belonging to the
Herkunft, to what comes or came hither (Foucault 80, Ward 147). As early as in 1651, in Leviathan, Hobbes – whom
D'Aguiar read (D'Aguiar 1998, 41) – actually claims “that Imagination and Memory, are but one thing, which for
divers considerations hath divers names” (Hobbes 14). He then proceeds to show that memory derives from
experience,* before describing dreams and apparitions or visions, along with memories, as simple or compounded
forms of imagination (14-18). Thus, Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, could already conceive, like Freud, of
dreams (and hallucinations) as mnemonic phenomena. Following this line of thought, it is tempting to make the
syllogistic hypothesis that if memory may transcend generations without the help of (written) speech, as it does
through epigenetic events that affect behavior and phenotype, and if a dream is a form of memory, then is it not
possible for a dream to consist in an experience that transcends generations, in the same way as the dream of
Whitechapel's great-granddaughter does in The Longest Memory? If attractive, such a hypothesis has not been
scientifically verified so far, and is thus, for the moment, dependent on individual convictions and, thus, debatable.
For a more thorough, biological discussion of behavioral epigenetics, see Tabitha M. Powledge, “Behavioral
Epigenetics: How Nurture Shapes Nature,” BioScience 61.8 2011): 588–92. Also, see Freud friend Sandor Ferenczi's
Thalassa, where he argues that our bodies, behavior, and dreams (of drowning) are mnemonic traces of the evolution
of our species and of the anguish of birth (Ferenczy 34-5).
* Hobbes' claim that memory and experience are related (44) is also interesting in relation to Chapel's learning from
experience, or the transgressive acquisition of literacy, before he gets caught and starts to work from memory to
compound imaginative verse. […]
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orphan themselves from their father – the one who lived the past event – by not giving him his
(conscious) say in the process of revision. In Whitechapel's opinion, a dream is not anamnesic, not a
reliable type of memory, but a mischievous agent of recollection. This opinion is what distinguishes
him from his adoptive poet-son and his great grand-daughter, who perceive dreams as creative
gateways to the past, as a poetic process in which the subject, although asleep, is involved. In other
words, a dream, for them, is an anamnesic means of remembering what could not have been
retained otherwise, such as American slaves' African origins, or an inter-ethnic love that will not get
thwarted as long as one sleeps.176
Thus, The Longest Memory presents anamnesic access to the past as available to all at the
same time as it reminds us, through fiction, of historical facts of the deepest importance such as the
Middle Passage experience, slavery, miscegeneation, the African diaspora and the inter-ethnic and
intercultural relations that ensued to bear on the world to this day. The novel does this by
problematizing genealogy through substitution, and by relating it to issues of memory, literacy, and
slavery in ways that can be understood through the lens of Plato and Derrida's designation of
written speech as both an orphan and a pharmakon. This construct allows for a reflexion on the
forms memory may take in its anamnesic and hypomnesic guises for better or for worse, on a page,
on a human body, and in one's dreams. Memory and its expression on the body, in dreams, and other
media is actually at stake for Mintah too in Feeding the Ghosts, where it is said that “Her dreams
were a harbour for the past” and that the past “used her body as such” (223). Moreover, genealogy,
slavery and literacy play a major role in this novel as well, and it is towards its contents that this
study must now turn.
176[…] This corroborates, again, the impression that Ward follows Whitechapel's argument more than that of the other
characters, which leads to her interpretation of the text in terms that are more pessimistic and “perplexing” than
what the novel, as a polyphony of points of view rather than as the expression of a single narrator's thoughts, offers
(Ward 151). […]
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II. Feeding the Ghosts
First and foremost, Feeding the Ghosts itself, as a title, actually has a past, a genealogical
history, so to speak: as shown above, in Chapter II, “Feeding the Ghosts” also is the name of a poem
from Fred D'Aguiar's first collection, entitled Mama Dot (1985). This poem's last line says, in a
trochaic hexameter, that “Generations of dust, in floorboard creases, stir” (D'Aguiar 1985, 39), and
the sense of restlessness associated to previous “generations” is evocative of ghosts. In Feeding the
Ghosts, the poem's last line is revised in the first pages of the novel, since the sea on which the
slave-ship Zong sails is described as an ensemble of “loose floorboards” (D'Aguiar 1997, 9) making
up the peaks of waves spaced with their troughs or creases, in which the dissolved bodies of slaves
thrown overboard may appear to “stir” as well (4).177 Fred D'Aguiar actually riffs on the image of
floorboard creases in Feeding the Ghosts, where the Zong is “noisy as a rocking chair over loose
floorboards” (9), over the sea, and where “Along with creaking wood and some loose items
crashing to the deck, shouts and screams climbed up the stairs leading from below and escaped
through the barred hatches or else managed to squeeze through the grooves between the planks of
the upper deck” (15): through the interstices of the floor, the cries of slaves are audible, just as they
are said to be when the wind blows in the troughs of waves (4). Later in the novel, after Mintah and
a few slave companions are tied together, on the upper deck, and under the rain, after having tried to
rebel, the narrative voice describes the planks of the ship's floor in the following terms:
The wood was rough and its grain barely discernible under a thick sheet of water. Where each plank
met another there was a groove filled with wax, tar, dirt, and now water using it as a path to
somewhere. The grooves across the deck looked like lines, but the writing could not be read though
177[…] Abigail Ward also refers to the poem in relation to the novel:
D'Aguiar's poem 'Feeding the Ghosts', taken from Mama Dot (1985), also alludes to [the] missing and
ghostly past of Britain's history of slavery: 'A solid absence, picturing the lost gold / Of El Dorado; the
ruins of Great Zimbabwe'. This brief and overlooked poem's articulation of the existence of ancestral
'ghosts' that haunt the present not only suggests the continuation, or legacies, of the past but also indicates a
much earlier link between Africa and Guyana – widely believed to be the location of El Dorado – than that
forged by the transatlantic slave trade” (Ward 158).
However, apart from the suggestion of a potential mythological link between Africa and Guyana that would precede
the slave trade, and in spite of her claiming that the poem has been overlooked, Ward actually does not see that it is
precisely the poem's final line about “floorboard creases” that D'Aguiar riffs upon in his work, as shown in Chapter
II, and in the present chapter, to depict the persisting legacy of slavery. [...]
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it was there in that history of dirt and dust, in the wood worn by footsteps and chipped and scratched
by the passage of barrels and bags and boxes and the etchings of salt. (123)
Here again, the planks make up a miniature, allegorical sea floor the interstices of which constitute
the lines of a hypomnesic text where the past of slavery is, metaphorically, recorded, and may thus
be retrieved, in spite of its near invisibility under transatlantic waters. The image of dust in
floorboard creases is also used by D'Aguiar in The Longest Memory, but this time around to
designate former generations of slave-masters between the planks of the plantation owners' club, as
Mr. Whitechapel explains to himself: “The floorboards under your feet welcome you with their
familiar creak. Dust between those boards is yours as well as your father's” (D'Aguiar 1995, 67).
Another interpretation of this passage might be that the dust is still that of slaves, in that it is
designated as a slaver and his father's property. In any case, such an intra-textual network of spectral
images always appears to echo slavery as a haunting memory that has inspired D'Aguiar into
writing the three novels under study in the present chapter, namely, The Longest Memory, Feeding
the Ghosts, and Bloodlines. Finally, and again, since D'Aguiar's use of the image of “floors with
creases / full of trapped dirt / only light squeezes through” (D'Aguiar 2013, 11) is also found in a
poem entitled “Key West,” which is the name of an American locus on the shores of the Atlantic,
the image of “floorboard creases” seems to specifically refer to the Middle Passage experience.178
Then, more than confirming the genealogy of a title, the idea of dirt between planks of wood
also refers to the intratextual, residual elements from D'Aguiar's early works that can be found in his
later writings, if one reads between the lines as if they were loose floorboards on a floor-like page.
178The image of loose floorboards also appears in less obviously evocative ways in Dear Future, published just one
year between Feeding the Ghosts, where the protagonist's Guyanese grandmother makes noise with her “rocking
chair over the loose boards on the veranda” (D'Aguiar 1996, 32), sounds through which one might infer that she
descends from the African diaspora caused by the slave trade and such ships as the Zong, which D'Aguiar also
describes, again, as “a rocking chair over loose floorboards” (1997, 9). In Bethany Bettany, the eponymous character
experiences a period of convalescence, alone in a room, and listens for “loose floorboards” as a sign of presence in
the house, only to “hear faint drums” (D'Aguiar 2003, 190). As shown in Chapter V below, the image of the drum is
used in Bloodlines (2000, 127), but also by Walcott in Omeros (1990, 273) and in Brathwaite's poetry (97) to conjure
up Africa. Finally, and as in “Feeding the Ghosts” (D'Aguiar 1985, 39), in Children of Paradise, the “loose
floorboard” is what allows for concealment, be it for guards to hide a deck of cards – “playing cards is illegal” in
Jones' commune (D'Aguiar 2014, 107) – or for Jones to hide the passports of commune members and the bribes
from the Guyanese government (186). In order not to disturb Jones with their noises, commune children also try to
avoid stepping on “that one loose floorboard” (50).
256
By extension, the idea of the lines of a text as “loose floorboards” between which “generations […]
stir” forms an apt metaphor for the inter-textual nature of D'Aguiar's work and its inscription within
a tradition of writing on the Middle Passage too, since the Middle Passage is at stake in the works of
his forebears, such as Walcott and Brathwaite, and of his contemporaries, such as Caryl Phillips.179
Moreover, the true story of the Zong was not only narrated and fictionalized in Feeding the Ghosts
but, again, explored by M. NourbeSe Philip in her collection of poems Zong! (Philip 2008; Moïse in
Misrahi-Barak and Joseph-Vilain 217), and represented in J.M.W. Turner's infamous painting Slave
Ship (Gilroy 13, 16), which was bought, sold, and commented upon by John Ruskin, who led in
turn Anglo-Guyanese poet David Dabydeen to write his long poem, entitled Turner, also dealing
with the Zong, and its representation by the nineteenth-century painter. In his preface to Turner,
David Dabydeen actually reacts to Ruskin's treatment of Turner's painting, which meticulously
studies every aspect of the painting, except for slavery, its subject matter, which is “relegated to a
brief footnote in Ruskin's essay. The footnote reads like an afterthought, something tossed
overboard” like the slave in the foreground of Turner's painting, which led, in turn, Dabydeen to
suspect that Turner “in private must have savoured the sadism he publicly denounced” (Dabydeen
7-8). Paul Gilroy further explains, in The Black Atlantic, that although the painting was exhibited to
coincide with the world anti-slavery convention held in London in 1840,” it is as controversial as
the apparently hypocritical reception it was granted by Ruskin in Modern Painters, since although
Ruskin only studied the painting “in terms of what it revealed about the aesthetics of painting
water,” conceding a mere footnote to the theme of slavery, it is said that he actually sold it because
he found it “too painful to live with” (Gilroy 14).180 For Caribbean writers and descendants of the
African diaspora to take up the subject of the Zong might then not be surprising, because what it
represents and how it was viewed by authoritative nineteenth-century artists and thinkers calls for a
179For a reading of Fred D'Aguiar and Caryl Phillips' novels, including The Longest Memory, Feeding the Ghosts and
Phillips' Crossing the River, through the lens of polyphony (as cross-cultural catalyst), see Benedice Ledent,
“Slavery Revisited through Vocal Kaleidoscopes: Polyphony in Novels by Fred D'Aguiar and Caryl Phillips” (in
Misrahi-Barak, Ed. 2005).
180Paula Burnett makes the same remark about Ruskin's relation to Turner's painting (Burnett 18). Also see her article
for comparisons between Feeding the Ghosts and Dabydeen's Turner (22-3).
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re-exploration of the events and its related representations in ways that can restore the memory of
the slaves who perished in the sea, and grant them the centrality they have been deprived of in
former accounts of the past.181
And Fred D'Aguiar does make the ghosts of slavery, and by extension, of orphanhood,
occupy a crucial position in Feeding the Ghosts, which is peopled by many foundlings and slaves.
For instance, Mintah, an orphan woman and a slave, is not only the novel's central, main character,
but a fictional embodiment of the Muse behind the text itself: as shown below, her importance for
Feeding the Ghosts is so great that she actually is made to stand as the inspirational, spectral, and
authorial figure guiding the actual author's hand. In addition, many of the novel's orphans can
actually be related to the figure of the pharmakos, in that they all prove to be linked, in a variety of
ways, to writing, nursing, and sickness. It is, again, the question of the articulation of such themes
that is to constitute the central interest of the following study of Feeding the Ghosts, which is
intended to supplement the first commentaries that were made about its text in this thesis' second
chapter.182
181[…] Ward further shows that “Even twentieth century [scholarly] writing about Turner's painting has overlooked its
involvement with slavery” (Ward 99). She also explains that, from the early nineteenth century, when the “Zong
became notorious (…) because of its significant role in the cause of abolition,” to the present, “the case of the Zong
has become infamous – a true 'ghost ship' of mythical proportions” (155-6). However, she warns against the dangers
of such mystification, because she suggests that “mythologising the Zong enables its legend to obscure the early
years of [British] slavery” (156) by privileging the commemoration of British abolitionism over that of slavery itself.
Still according to Ward, such mystification leads D'Aguiar to problematize official historical accounts, or “received
history” in works such as Feeding the Ghosts, which he does, for instance when writing that Mintah's journal is
rejected by the court as unreliable, and the Captain's falsified ledger received as truthful, hence becoming the
officially accepted version of events (Ward 156; D'Aguiar 1997, 170). Yet, from a Derridean perspective, one may
qualify what Ward calls mythology as “white mythology,” as far as the Zong is concerned, since the scene of slavery
from which its tale arose has been erased, whitewashed, in order to be replaced by an account of abolitionism. It is
such erasure, such white mythologization, and the amnesia it entails, that Fred D'Aguiar wants to counter, by giving
slavery center stage in an his (hypomnesic) novel (Derrida 1971, 11). […]
182[…] By contrast with her study of The Longest Memory, Ward's discussion of Feeding the Ghosts relies more on
Holocaust and trauma theories, such as can be found in the works of Theodor Adorno (Ward 158-60), than on
Derrida's soundings of writing in “Plato's Pharmacy:” out of the fourteen pages (151-64) she dedicates to Feeding
the Ghosts, Ward only allusively relates to “Plato's Pharmacy” through Derrida's name and the words hypomneme
and mneme, in the last four pages of her discussion (161-4). The present chapter offers a more sustained Derridean
approach, and meticulously reads a multiplicity of specific passages from the novel that Ward had no room to
explore in a book studying the works of three authors. Hence, this part of the present chapter differs markedly from
Ward's discussion of Feeding the Ghosts and will, consequently, hopefully, provide significant complementary
information. [...]
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a. Transatlantic Foundlings
Basically, every African on board the Zong could be designated as an orphan in the Middle
Passage. In fact, every one of them has undergone a change of status and allegiance by being
deprived of their freedom, by becoming slaves to the captain and his crew. In other words, these
men, women and children chained below deck are characterized, among other things, by the shared
etymological definitions of orphanhood and slavery, which, as explained in the introduction to this
chapter, simultaneously points to genealogical bereavement and loss of freedom through the
common pre-Indo-European orbh- root, from which both “slave” and “orphan” derive. These
orphans/slaves have also been severed from their African families and motherland, places that have
hence been orphaned in turn, in that they were (forcibly) deserted: “Village squares were empty,
huts vacant. Acres of land had gone neglected, accountable to the hands and feet chained below.
Livestock wandered without being herded by their calls and whistles” (D'Aguiar 1997, 26). But the
foundling-making process did not stop on land, for, as explained above, weeks after the Zong left
African shores, its crew feared it might not make as much profit as it should have, because an
epidemic – a sickness caused by a bacteria, a virus, or a pharmakon – spread on the boat and sick
slaves would not be sold at their best prices at the auction block. As a consequence, the Zong's
captain decided that sick slaves be thrown overboard in order to ensure that the other slaves remain
healthy, assuming that the British insurance companies involved in the ship's venture would refund
the slave-owners for their lost “pieces of cargo” (12).183 This calculation of profit based on the
reification of living beings, being part of a true story, already represents the most horrendous
illustration of what capitalist thinking may be, and corroborates the idea that slaves were not
categorized as human-beings, but as stock in a racist West's genealogies of the chain of beings. 184
183The crew is not spared by the sickness (D'Aguiar 1997, 12), one symptom of which, throwing up, is interpreted by
Ferentz Lafargue as a proleptic sign of the throwing overboard of slaves into the Atlantic (in Misrahi-Barak, Ed.,
2005).
184For a thorough attempt at reconstructing a historical account of the Zong massacre and a reflexion on what it
implied, along with the transatlantic slave trade, in terms of justice and economy, see Ian Baucom's impressive book
Specters of the Atlantic (2005), and his 2001 article bearing the same title (full references in the present thesis'
bibliography).
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What makes it even worse, in the sense of “rational” de-humanization, is that the quest for numbers
and profit expectations took over the categorization of the sick and non-sick, and led to the
throwing overboard of 132 slaves of all ages and genders, and who were actually not necessarily
sick, since one of them – and this is, again, still part of the actual, historical, story (Baucom 2005
129) – managed to climb back on board. This decision to throw slaves to the sea reiterates the
orphan-making process in that those thrown overboard often are parents too:
[...] three more crewmen descended and selected another woman. She begged them to spare her and
pointed to the children's quarters, indicating that she had a child to care for, but in their eyes she was
sick. They dragged her away and her begging became screams. In an instant her weak body
transformed into that of a mother separated from her child and she fought them. She screamed the
child's name and the girl began to cry and call for her mother. (40)
Deprived of freedom and of relatives – either locked and chained below deck or in Africa – and
speaking in a language the crewmen cannot understand, her plea and her screams, like an orphan's,
are not endowed with the power to defend herself or her daughter, who was orphaned a first time by
becoming a slave, and a second time through the assassination of her mother, from whom she had
already been severed on the ship. And the future of the girl, as that of other slave-children on board,
is highly compromised too, since this unspeakable episode comes just one page after the captain's
horribly cruel order to his crew to “get some children” (39) to throw to the waves.
Mintah is a slave on the Zong too, but she only progressively became a “full-blown” orphan,
since she was separated from her father as a child, but captured and severed from her mother to
become a slave only years later, then becoming an orphan in every (etymological) sense of the term:
without parents, and enslaved. Readers learn about how Mintah became an orphan as she dreams of
her past just after she managed to climb back on board from the sea she was thrown in to drown,
and fell asleep, exhausted, inside the boat's storeroom. The idea that dreaming leads Mintah back to
her past once again corroborates Hobbes' and Freud's interpretations of dreams (Hobbes 14-8; Freud
1901, 7) as a form memory may take. In her dream, she is “running behind her mother leaving her
father standing, chisel in hand, at the gate of their compound after her parents had argued about the
gods. After the missionaries were welcomed among her people, their work had come to this: choose
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between gods” (D'Aguiar 1997, 56-7). Mintah's father, a carpenter, refuses to believe in the
possibility for one God to be in charge of all the things of the world, while his wife has been
convinced by the monotheistic proselytism of European missionaries. He therefore unsuccessfully
tries to negotiate with Mintah's mother by renouncing all gods, except the Christian one and the god
of wood, which would amount to a cross-cultural form of religious syncretism. But Mintah's mother
will not compromise, and this religious debate finally leads to the couple's separation and Mintah's
fatherless existence: “When it was time for the missionaries to leave for the coast Mintah's mother
and a small group decided to follow. Her father refused to uproot” and “Mintah ran to keep up with
her mother” (57), hoping her father would change his mind and catch up with them, which he never
did. Mintah thus becomes a paternal orphan because of her parents' disagreement on the number of
gods or geniuses at the origin of creation, on who the ones responsible for the genealogy of the
world are. In this sense, Mintah's orphanhood begins with her mother's willed change of allegiance
(the meaning of the prototypical Indo-European orbh- root that gave orphanhood) from a plurality
of divine forebears to a single “Father.” This implies that when Mintah's mother chose another
(religious) “Father,” she selected a new affiliation that made her filial and familial situation capsize,
for in deciding to orphan herself from African gods, she orphaned her daughter from a polytheistic
biological father.
Mintah's memory of parting with her father has actually had such an impact on her that she
repeatedly deals with her dreaming the event. The dream obsesses Mintah so much that the book
she writes to register what happened on the Zong – it is embedded in the novel as its eleventh, antepenultimate chapter, just after the chapters where it is produced in an English court by Simon, the
cook's assistant, who befriended Mintah and could not put up with the murderous proceedings that
took place on board – starts with a mention of this dream:
The second my eyes clamp shut the dreams start to run. I see not me but this girl who is just like me.
I don't think Mintah, that's me. I think that girl is Mintah. And I see her father holding a chisel in
front of him. He carves goodbye out of air. Goodbye, Mintah. Small strokes from left to right.
Goodbye. Again and again. Waves. (D'Aguiar 1997,183)
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Many elements here make this passage equivocal: such equivocal potential is important because,
first, the telling of the dream starts with “The second,” which designates the immediacy with which
the dream starts, but is also reminds readers that it is “the second” time they are told this dream, and
the dream itself is being narrated in a transcription Mintah has made of it into her journal (she found
writing material in the boat's storeroom [190]), while the first time the dream was described was
when Mintah was actually dreaming. Thus, from an extradiegetic point of view, the dream is written
twice. From an intradiegetic point of view, the dream is first experienced, and then consigned in
written form in Mintah's journal. In both cases, readers face the repetition of a repetition, since the
dream is a rearranged unconscious past (Freud 1901, 7) that is itself repeated and reproduced into
writing as the copy of the past event that Mintah's dreaming has become at the time she writes about
it. The dream reminded Mintah of her past and let readers know about it, and its written version in
her journal – a book embedded in D'Aguiar's book – consists in her commemorating the dream and
reminding readers of it through writing (again). The dream as a hypomnesic trauma written into
Mintah's mind is repeated to readers through the hypomnesic medium of a written text on the story
of the Zong within a written text on the story of the Zong, suggesting a pattern of doubles where
Feeding the Ghosts is a mise en abyme of Mintah's book: both books tell the same story, and Fred
D'Aguiar's novel repeats, rearranges, reproduces, and imbricates Mintah's book within itself like a
Russian doll. For here is the use of “Mintah's book[:] She had given it to [Simon] when he had
offered to buy her her freedom, and she had made him promise that he would make sure people
heard about what happened on the Zong, that the book contained everything they needed to know”
(152). Mintah gave her book to Simon as a “treasure of recollection” (Plato in Derrida 1972, 194)
for their contemporaries to know what happened. It is a fictional book that Fred D'Aguiar uses as a
fictional pre-text to write an extended version of the same book in order to remind his
262
contemporaries of the historical fact.185 In other words, Fred D'Aguiar partly186 creates Mintah, an
orphan slave who will survive to live the rest of her life in the Caribbean, as his Muse. Mintah is the
Afro-Caribbean (for) minter – the spelling of her name is evocative of the Caribbean pronunciation
the word may have, in the same way as “never,” to imitate such accent, could be spelled “neva” or
“nevah” – and D'Aguiar's diction in the novel deals with his (ad)diction to the haunting past she
represents and mints, coins, or dictates to him in Feeding the Ghosts (Derrida 1991, 7). Hence, the
two last sentences of the novel indicate that Mintah's book honors the memory of her slave
companions, while D'Aguiar's book honors them as much as his spectral muse's memory (the only
slave who managed to climb back on board): “The ghosts feed on the history of themselves. The
past is laid to rest when it is told” (230), and this is what “feeding the ghosts” means, and what the
book(s) at play do(es). In this light, it is no wonder that Mintah's book is defined, towards the end of
the novel, as “penned by a ghost” (169), a “ghost-book” (173), although pejoratively so, by the crew
and investors' attorney during the trial scene. 187 Neither is it surprising to read that Mr. Wilkes, the
insurers' attorney, “picked up Mintah's book and waved it at the captain and crew and at the public
gallery” (156): this is another embedded representation of what Fred D'Aguiar does with Feeding
the Ghosts: reveal the story of the Zong to the public by “brandishing” Mintah's book. The rest of
the few lines quoted above from Mintah's journal accentuate the doubling initiated by the phrase
“the second,” which has led to the interpretation of the novel as embedded copies of Mintah's
journal. In fact, in her dreams, and in the repetition she makes of it in her book, she does not
perceive herself as Mintah but as a remembered past avatar of herself: “I don't think Mintah, that's
185[…] Again, according to Ward, D'Aguiar reminds his contemporaries of slavery in order to counter received, official
historical accounts, which tend to privilege the memory of European abolitionists over that of slavers and slaves,
and to counter racism, which D'Aguiar perceives as the legacy of slavery (Ward 151, 156). […]
186The slave who climbed back on the Zong has existed and is a historical character (Baucom 2005, 129), but his/her
characterization as Mintah is fictional and created by D'Aguiar. Mintah is both a part of fiction and of the real world,
and this in between position corresponds well to her situation on the Atlantic and to her being depicted as a ghost
which, again, is supposed to be the remaining part of a being that has not yet fully made it to “the other side.”
187[…] Apart from that interpretation, Abigail Ward points to the suggestion that the book was written by someone else
than Mintah, that is, a ghost-writer (160), which would hence translate the attorney's assumption that people of
African descent cannot master the arts and sciences (Gates 129). By contrast, it is interesing to note, in this context,
that a “ghost-writer,” in French, was called “un nègre,” (a negro), before it became disused, for obvious reasons.
[…]
263
me. I think that girl is Mintah” (183). As a consequence, she, as a narrator, is doubled up as a
character, a repetition of her past self. The passage's final word, following two occurrences of
“goodbye” and another indicator of repetition – “Again and again” – is “Waves.” This designates, in
the third person, her father's gesture as she leaves, a repetitive gesture in itself, but it is also
proleptic of the experience she will have of the sea and its waves, the pattern of repetition par
excellence, on which the book might be patterned, as seen above, following Edward Brathwaite's
sense of a tidal dialectic or tidalectic, where the rhythms of tides and waves have an impact on the
bodies, political life and creativity of islanders and oceanic populations (DeLoughrey 2007b, 164),
such as that of slaves who crossed the Middle Passage and of all the members of the African
diaspora. Hence the novel's opening lines revising Derek Walcott's famous poem “The Sea is
History” (Walctott 1986, 364-6) also used, along with lines from Brathwaite's mythopoetic poem
“Calypso” (Brathwaite 48-50) as an epigraph to the novel: “The sea is slavery” (D'Aguiar 1997, 3).
Mintah meets the Atlantic as a slave after being captured by the Dutch at the Danish mission
where she lived with her mother. Already a paternal orphan, she then becomes a complete orphan,
and a slave, by being severed from her mother on the day of her capture:
[...] when the Dutch came with the cannons and guns there was nothing to do but run from the fort.
Many missionaries died. I ran with Mother into the bushes and we hid there with a small group for
two days before slavers captured us. Mother was separated from me when they divided us between
them. Her last words were that I should keep my learning a secret since it would get me into trouble.
(194)
The Dutch captured Africans from a mission where Mintah was converted to Christianity – although
she still practices polytheist African rituals – and taught how to read and write (194). The Mission
was conducting an experiment where Africans were paid for their labor and on their land rather than
transported to America, and European slavers were shown that the project was more ethical and
profitable than slavery. But the project was disapproved of because it made useless a whole part of
European business based on the slaves themselves and their transportation, threatening these
businesses with bankruptcy. Moreover, and as said above, educating Africans made them unfit for
slavery by invalidating the argument that they were not reasonable human beings because they
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could not master the arts and sciences (literacy, religion, and agriculture at the mission). These are
the reasons why the mission was destroyed and its African members enslaved (194). And like
Chapel in The Longest Memory, Mintah is advised not to reveal that she is educated, because it
could draw violent retaliation from slavers. Her ability to write actually – and fictionally – allows
for the climactic eruption of her book during the trial between the Zong's crew and investors and
their insurers, and, still fictionally speaking, for the novel itself, Feeding the Ghosts, to be written.
By the way, the preceding passage telling of Mintah's separation from her mother is an excerpt from
Mintah's book which, as for her being severed from her father, repeats an event that was already
narrated in free indirect discourse and internal focalization as Mintah's thoughts when she was
hiding in the storeroom:
What had she left behind, in her life on land? A mission, a mother. Before that a father, a chisel.
Before that little things. Short time-frames of things with no connection, stored haphazardly inside.
Disparate supplies lumped together in a room to support a balanced diet. A diet of recall, and a diet
of promises. She raided their storeroom periodically to sustain her, and far from being emptied by
her raids she found she was simply retrieving the same things time and again from that room and
they yielded nothing new and had now ceased to offer comfort. (61)
In this short excerpt, “things with no connection, stored haphazardly inside” Mintah's memory are
being compared with the contents of the boat's storeroom as objective correlatives of the difficulties
Mintah has to make sense of her experience from her leaving Africa to her crossing the Atlantic as a
slave. Her repeated search of the “storeroom” of her mind offers no other elements than the memory
of her bereavement of parents and freedom, and no peace of mind. But readers learn from her book
again that the repeated search of the actual room leads to her finding writing material and allows her
to write the journal, which consists in yet another repetition of her introspective search and a
reminder of, or hypomnesic gateway to, the elements thus found in the protagonist's past. And
although it brings no comfort, it is this initial search that conditions the composition of Mintah's
journal, and hence, fictionally speaking, of Feeding the Ghosts itself. By the same token, Fred
D'Aguiar operates a self-reflexive tour de force where both his inspiration – Mintah – and its result
(the novel) are part and parcel of the same text.
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Mintah only finds comfort in Simon, who does not, to use Whitechapel's words, “give her
up” (D'Aguiar 1994, 21) to the crew, but helps her to hide, provides her with the means to wash and
nourish herself, falls in love with her although she will gently rebuke him because of her feeling
unable to love on a boat where she has no freedom and where her companions are being killed
(D'Aguiar 1997, 103), offers to emancipate her thanks to his pay, and brings her journal to bear
against the Zong's crew in a British courtroom, although the crew and their investors are to win the
case against their insurers. Simon actually is the scapegoat of the crew and, most of all, of the cruel
cook, and is believed to be a “simpleton” (80) – to some extent, he could be described as innocent,
and a little foolish as far as practical things are concerned – but he actually is the only one to
understand the cruelty and injustice of slavery and of what is happening on board. He is the only
crewman to feel the weight of a tormented conscience over the story of the Zong and the investors'
and crew's victory in court. Finally, and interestingly enough, given the general argument here, he is
the only crew member to be openly described, by the cook and in the cruelest of ways, as an
orphan:
The cook had always told him he had no father and that he had killed his mother at birth. […] The
cook had told him his mother had given birth to him standing up, that she had dropped him from her
body on to his head and he had pulled from her all her vitals, which must have opened like a parasol
at her feet causing her to bleed so profusely she had fallen dead where she had stood and he had been
left there by everyone out of fear. No one had dared to step in that widening trench of her dissipated
life, and he had been silent beside her for an age with her fluid still in his lungs until an old woman
as foolish as he would become had taken pity on him and bitten through the cord, holding him upside
down to drain and take in air. Then she had swaddled him in rags off her shoulders and he'd been
silent throughout, and on account of all that he was irreparably stupid. (174-5)
Qui accuse s'excuse. To categorize Simon this way conceals the gesture of the categorization itself.
Moreover, the cook may well be lying, and readers, or even Simon, are given no means of verifying
if this statement is true.188 But if cook's version of events, regarding Simon, is of any reliability,
188The unverifiable nature of the Cook's tale, in addition to the designation of Simon as stupid, and, as shown below, as
simple, and helpless in a court of justice, are all reminiscent of Christian Andersen's tale “Simple Simon,” also
known under the title of “Jack the Dullard” (Andersen 64-7). In Andersen's story, Simple Simon has two brothers
who respectively epitomize the scholar and the lawyer – one knows the dictionary by heart and the other can recite
the laws – while he is thought of as being stupid. The three brothers are presented by the narrator as leaving their
father's castle to participate as suitors in a contest organized by a princess, who claims she is to marry the suitor who
masters speech best. The two knowledgeable brothers are the first to take turns meeting the princess, who dismisses
them after they fail to converse with her on cooking matters. On the other hand, when Simple Simon, who is late
because he stopped on his way to pick up random objects (a dead crow, a broken shoe, and clay) to offer them to the
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Simon's “silence” from the moment of his birth is of interest. In fact, since he is an orphan, he has
no parent “to help and defend him” – and literally so since he was left alone in the street beside his
mother's corpse until an old woman rescued him – and he is mute at birth, with no logos acquired
yet and without his parents' voice to speak on his behalf (Plato a, 63; Derrida 1972, 95-6). And with
an orphan's voice, he is helpless at court despite his being in possession of a piece of evidence,
Mintah's journal, which is deprived of power as much as him in that it is a text, or orphaned speech,
with no Mintah to claim and defend it as her progeny, and which she could not have been allowed to
defend, being an orphan, an African person reduced to the status of slave, and a woman in a
patriarchal and white-supremacist system she was forced into through the triangular trade. Simon is,
to the same extent as Mintah, one of the novel's main transatlantic foundlings, animalized through
the story of his mother's giving birth standing up, muted, illiterate (169), and persecuted by his
superior, the cook:
The cook had called him simple at least once a day during their five years together. And with the
name came a blow from anything within reach as if without a word he would be reminded daily of
his simplicity. […] When pressed anywhere on his body with his fingertips and it hurt he'd think
nothing of the pain, no word except the one for bruises, for kicks, jabs, shouts, oaths, lashes, prods –
'simple.' (175)
Beaten, orphaned, and illiterate, Simon is treated like slaves and, subsequently, understandably feels
princess, is introduced to her, he manages to talk with her by inventing a recipe out of the things he brought along.
The princess then chooses him as a husband, and he becomes king. Also, when he takes the liquid clay out of his
pocket, Simple Simon throws it in the face of the princess's head clerk, who is noting down all that is being said and
done. Readers learn, at the end of the story, that the information contained in the tale comes from the head clerk's
press and “corporation of printers – but they are not to be depended upon in the least” (67). Hence, the story of
Simple Simon is a narrative that builds itself up to bring itself down as the unreliable work of the (head clerk's)
press. If read allegorically, then, Andersen's tale suggests that scholarly, legal, and journalistic forms of erudition –
all related to writing (the dictionary, the laws, the press) – are powerless compared to the spontaneity of oral speech,
and the poetic ability of making something out of nothing (a dish with a dead crow, a shoe and some clay, the latter
ingredient of which is not any kind of “creative” matter, since it is the element God uses to make Adam in Genesis).
Finally, Andersen's written tale cancels itself as unreliable, then, because it should be spoken, told, instead of being
consigned in writing, if it is to be effective. In Feeding the Ghosts, Simon, like Simple Simon, has cooking skills (he
is the cook's assistant) and, in spite of his illiteracy and helplessness in court, he is the only one to gain friendship
from the novel's main female character, Mintah. Hence, Fred D'Aguiar draws from Andersen's tale – a story that
weakens the power of written speech – in Feeding the Ghosts, and the resulting intertextuality may help to
strengthen the problematization of writing that transpires through D'Aguiar's novels. Of course, there also exists a
nursery rhyme entitled “Simple Simon,” which consists in a dialogue between a “pie man” and Simple Simon, who
wants to taste what the pie man has cooked, but cannot afford it. There is a relation to cooking, here, that can also be
related to D'Aguiar's Simon's being a cook's assistant, but this is of little import for the present discussion. Benedicte
Ledent also notes that Simon, in D'Agauir's novel, is reminiscent of Simple Simon, but does not relate that feature of
the text to D'Aguiar's problematic presentation of written speech, as her interest leads her into other, polyphonic
considerations (Ledent in Misrahi-Barak, Ed. 2005).
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compassion for the slaves on board the Zong and understands the injustice of their treatment as he is
subjected to the same cruelty by the same men. He also is the only crew-member for whom readers
might empathize. Simon's characteristics are thus close to that of the slaves on the Zong, but also
very like that of another slave in The Longest Memory: Whitechapel himself.189 In fact, he, like
Whitechapel, has a psychosomatic perception of his past. But while Whitechapel's bad memories
have hypomnesically retraced themselves as a text onto his sour-face and body, Simon has
internalized the marks left by the blows received on his body as reminders of his alleged simplicity
of mind. Although he is illiterate, Simon has, like Whitechapel, been conditioned into a reading of
his textualized body. And as textuality and memory loom again to the fore, it is now time to study
more thoroughly the links that establish themselves between characters(' memories) and written
speech in the body of Feeding the Ghosts.
b. All Things Duly Noted
Written speech is in fact problematized through its linkage with a variety of characters and
elements of the novel, and through its different forms. Characters such as Mintah and the Zong's
captain are literate, and, as said above, such literacy plays a major role in and for the novel. The
captain, with a purpose quite opposite Mintah's, also registers in a ledger, and in his own way, the
proceedings that take place on the Zong: Mintah's journal and the captain's ledger are to be set
against one another during the trial chapters constituting the novel's second part out of three, 190
where yet another text matters even more than any other: the law itself.
As said above, Mintah acquired literacy at a Danish mission in Africa. Readers and the
Zong's crew learn about the conditions of this acquisition when Mintah is taken out of the slave-
189His mother having died giving birth to him, Simon can also be likened to Sow in Bloodlines, and Sanders Junior in
The Longest Memory.
190The book's first part narrates the story of the Zong, the second part consists in the trial between the Zong's investors
and their insurers, and the final part is made up of Mintah's book and the narration of the latest moments of her life
(as was done for Whitechapel in the epilogue of The Longuest Memory). These three parts are framed by a prologue
and an epilogue, both dealing with the sea, memory, and slavery.
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hold by Kelsal, the captain's first mate, who explains to them the cause of her fluency in English. 191
And the revelation of her being an educated slave worries the crew:
Most of them knew that time spent at a mission meant she was not like the other slaves. Her
prolonged contact with missionaries amounted to a familiarity with whites. The missionaries'
civilizing zeal did not stop at saving the heathen soul. She would have gained an education, would be
able to read and write, when most of them could barely sign their names” (31).
For a black woman to be literate directly contradicts the argument that Africans were no human
beings because of their inability to master the arts and sciences, for want of reason (Gates 129).
Such an argument was so popular in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe that the crew
certainly knew of it and saw it refuted in Mintah (Ibid.). By the same token, their superiority was
questioned, since Mintah mastered a skill that they themselves did not; furthermore, she was
baptized (32), which made her a Christian, like them. The same reaction to Mintah's being able to
read and write is conveyed again by the boatswain during the trial: “The African female had more
than eyes to see. She could read and write. That's a lot to have in this world. She had more than me”
(162). However, the boatswain does not perceive that literacy could make her unfit for slavery. He
rather believes that, had the crew known, she could have been sold at a better price: “She was sold
in Maryland at a price unlike anything she would have fetched were it known that in addition to her
having a good command of English she could read and write as well” (161). That is a lie that the
boatswain makes under oath at court, since the crew knew that Mintah might be literate (31). And
the boatswain actually goes so far as saying that “She could have helped the captain keep his
ledger!” (160) if they had known, which is very cynical because the register the captain kept was
filled with a list of slaves who were arbitrarily designated as sick and thrown overboard, and Mintah
was part of them. Captain Cunningham is, maybe to the exception of Kelsal, the only literate
member of the crew, and he is introduced to readers accordingly as a reader of sorts himself:
Captain Cunningham emerged from his cabin and peered at the dawn-lit sky and his assembled crew
with the squint he reserved for reading. Whatever he saw in the bunched men and thick grey clouds
speckled blue, drew the frown he ordinarily deployed against untidy writing or unrealistic
instructions from an investor. […] How to begin? He wondered. […] he answered himself, “At the
beginning, of course.” (9)
191The real, historical chief mate's name was Kelsall (Baucom 2005, 10).
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Captain Cunningham's192 first appearance thus characterizes him as the reader of an “untidy” text
metaphorizing the landscape and crew. The “squint” he is using indicates calculation and aversion.
What is meant by calculation here is both the captain's interpretation of what he “reads” and his
preparing himself to convince his auditory of the necessity of his scheme of disposing of more than
a hundred slaves for the sake of profit. Cunningham is cunning, if anything, and is soon to spend his
time counting dead slaves and calculating if enough of them have been disposed of to make a good
profit margin. His aversion for the crew is not different from the one he feels for slaves (11), and he
despises his sailors for their illiteracy, stupidity, and debauchery – they bribe slave women with
food in order to have sexual intercourse with them (even when they are pregnant) and rape them
when they remain reluctant (74). He “squints” because he has to “see through” his crew to make
them comply with the “unrealistic instructions from an investor,” that is, his own order to get rid of
so-called sick slaves to benefit from insurance companies. In fact, letting the epidemic spread and
the slaves die would not fetch insurance money, while disposing of slaves as “stock” because of the
necessity to preserve the rest of the “cargo” would. In other words, this introduction of Captain
Cunningham is, retrospectively, loaded with information on his intent and what is to happen when
readers, as opposed to Kelsal, manage to “read [his] mind” (13, my emphasis). And soon enough,
just after his utterance of a highly self-reflexive speech act for a novel's incipit – “How to begin?
[…] 'At the beginning, of course'” (9) – the captain gets his crew to take slaves from the hold, bring
them in front of him for him to register their loss in his ledger, and then throw them to the waves:
“[...] slaves were presented to the captain, who opened a ledger which he shielded against the light
and made [...] strokes in it” (21). It is not innocent for the captain to set his book against the light, in
that more than a posture allowing him to see its pages, it is a posture that, symbolically, hides the
truth, thwarts “enlightenment.” This act of concealment also reinforces the idea that, as written
192[…] Luke Collingwood was the name of the actual, historical captain of the Zong (Baucom 2005, 8). Abigail Ward
argues that D'Aguiar's decision to change the name partakes of his refusal to abide by the necessarily partial nature
of official historical accounts (Ward 156). Furthermore, and as shown below, D'Aguiar prefers, again, imagination as
a gateway to the past. […]
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speech, the text contained in the ledger creates a hypomnesic trace which, on top of requiring the
reader's suspicion for the reasons evoked by Plato and Derrida in relation to the bastardization of
true memory and the logos, makes the past lie by stating that only sick slaves were made to drown,
so that the action might be legitimized as necessary to stop the epidemic, and force insurers to
refund investors for their loss.
Although written with the same writing material, Mintah's journal – when its existence is
climactically revealed to readers and characters by Simon during the trial – and the Captain's ledger
can thus be set against one another as reliable and unreliable accounts of the past. And when
Mintah's book appears, judges have to decide which of the two accounts grants reliable access to the
past. At the beginning of the trial, only the captain's version of events is available, and consists in
the sole account of the past judges and attorneys have at their disposal. Consequently, “The counsel
for the investors carried himself as if he had a watertight case and Lord Mansfield's ruling were
merely a formality. There was the captain's ledger, evidence in black and white and a clause to
match concerning the action” (138). For the case to be called “watertight” is darkly ironic as far as
what happened on the Zong is concerned, and so is the qualification of evidence as “black and
white,” since black ink on white pages from the captain's ledger is black skin thrown to corrosive
white and salted surf. As for the law matching the action, “it states quite categorically that any
measure deemed necessary by the captain can be taken to protect his stock from further loss or
damage” (140). In other words, the captain might legitimize his action, make it legally acceptable,
by stating that it was necessary to throw 131 Africans overboard to prevent the others from getting
sick and causing the complete destruction of what the law categorized, at the time, as “stock,” that
is, African slaves. And if the judge, Lord Mansfield, who has no other desire than to make the trial
short so that he will soon eat his favorite dish, a cured pheasant (137), decides that this argument is
legitimate, it will then create a precedent, as the insurers' counsel, Mr. Wilkes, explains:
A ruling in favor of the investors would grant permission to every captain to use these extreme
measures if his stock were threatened with sickness instead of taking action to see that they are
returned to health. This would turn the trade into a use of stock in the most barbaric way where their
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deaths in great numbers would not matter and all that would govern their conveyance from Africa to
the plantations in the Indies or America would be profit. (142)
Mr. Wilkes, despite his sense of a barbarous quality in the proceedings that occurred on the Zong, is
not free of his times' prejudice that African people may be considered as stock and treated
accordingly. However, he ironically hits the nail on the head when he says that, if a ruling in favor
of the investors was granted, it would mean – as it did for Cunningham – that profit was the only
thing of importance in the triangular trade. And such a ruling would set a precedent, meaning, it
would consist in the first case to apply a law that would pave the way for the legality of other
similar cases of murdering hundreds of people for the sake of money. There lies the dangerous legal
genealogy that could originate from such a ruling. Law and genealogy are indeed not that distant
from one another, since law classifies the legal from the illegal and genealogy is the language of
classification. Moreover, legality and legacy share the same etymology of what is lawfully given or
transmitted. Finally, the law is written, and hence connected to orphanhood – all the more so when
an act of law is a precedent, that is, an original, orphan ruling (Derrida 1972, 95). In other words,
and in the case of the trial taking place in Feeding the Ghosts, the precedent would consist in the
genus or orphan parent the legacy of which could be lawfully and genealogically transmitted to
affiliated children cases comparable to that of the Zong, because as an original ruling repeated and
registered in writing by the court, it could serve as a hypomnesic argument for subsequent and
similar affairs to be judged the same way. Laws are geni, and the rulings deriving from them
constitute their respective genealogies. And the law at stake in the present trial is a bad pharmakon,
since it entails the possibility for the repetition of an injustice. In fact, if Cunnigham's false account,
as registered in his ledger, along with an abused law, allow for a ruling in favor of the Zong's crew,
it will create a genealogy of bastardized legal rulings that will not answer the condition of justice
anymore. Hence Mr Wilkes' claim that the law, a pharmakon in itself, must be “remedied” (157).
This much is at stake, but nobody, apart from Simon (hidden in the public assembly so far), really
cares – Wilkes only wants to win a case for insurers who want their money, in front of a judge
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whose only wish is to go to the restaurant – and the investors are to win because of the court's
racism, which is, in the end, to privilege the captain's ledger over Mintah's account.
After a first phase in the trial, Simon realizes that the truth is far from being established and
decides to go to the insurers' counsel, Mr. Wilkes, to show him Mintah's book and change the game
(152). Simon's action explains the reason of his presence after pages of suspense where the
information on the nature of the book he came with has been delayed (144), and introduces a new
piece of evidence that is consulted in private by judge Lord Mansfield, Mr Wilkes, and Simon, who
come back to court thirty minutes later for the trial to resume. Readers do not know the contents of
Mintah's journal at this point, as they will only read it in the part following the trial scene. But Lord
Mansfield seems disappointed by the crew, and asks them to come a second time to the witness box
and reminds them that they are under oath. For a representative of the law to remind a witness is no
wonder, since a law is a text, and a text reminds. As for Simon, he “does not wish to speak, and the
court has no desire to force him to do so. He maintains that everything that he would say is said ten
times better in this slave's book” (154). The only time he speaks during the trial is when he is not
invited to do so, and in reaction to Kelsal's claiming that Mintah was mad and that her testimony is
unreliable: “Simon jumped up to his feet and shouted at Lord Mansfield 'He is lying m' lord! He is
lying!' Lord Mansfield hammered his desk and silenced Simon” (158). Simon does not speak, and
when he does, his voice is denied power and is muted, just as an orphan's (which he is) or a text's,
with no one to help or defend him. And, again, the book he brings is that of an orphan-slave,
Mintah, and it is in itself an orphan in that Mintah is far away in Maryland and cannot stand on
behalf of her written account. In other words, the status of Simon as a foundling witness and of
Mintah as a slave whose orphan book cannot be defended both indicate that despite the reliability of
Mintah's account, it might not have the power to oppose the captain, who is present and can support
the contents of his ledger. However, and interestingly enough, when Cunningham is called to the
witness box, he feels that since Mintah's book came into play, the law that he thought guided his
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actions on the Zong is not on his side anymore, and finds himself speechless, unable to speak, while
one of his intentions was, as expected, to show that “He failed to see how they could weigh his
ledger and the testimonies of the crew against that slave's ramblings” (164). Kelsal's argument that
Mintah was mad and the captain's perception of Mintah's text as “ramblings,” knowing that her
journal opens with the description of one of her dreams, is reminiscent of Whitechapel's putting
down dreams and recollection to fantasy (D'Aguiar 1994, 136). The boatswain too, the second time
he comes to the witness box, looks down on Mintah's account as a “foolish book full of fanciful
claims” (161), and the Second Mate goes even further than that by stating that everything told in the
trial about Mintah must have been invented:
We dump her and think it's over with, and she turns up again. After we search the ship from top to
bottom. Now I hear she not only reads and writes but has left a book behind. I smell a rat. An African
female who can speak English, who is thrown overboard and climbs up the side of a sailing ship and
to crown it all finds the time to write in her hideaway on board! Not possible. I think she must be
able to be in two places at the same time. I look and I see not one woman but a lot of people playing
the part of one woman. I see insurers cooking up the whole plot [...] (162)
This statement is both sexist and racist, questioning the physical abilities of a woman, and her
intellectual potential as an African one. But the idea that she “turns up again” and might “be able to
be in two places at the same time,” on top of her relation to writing, which itself is a repetition or a
copy of a logos some believe to be inspired by genial agents, helps again to relate Mintah to the
image of the “ghost,” of the phantom-pharmakos at the origin of D'Aguiar's novel. The investors'
counsel, Mr. Drummond, takes up the second mate's argument in his last statement, convinces the
judge and wins the case over: “'It is my contention that this slave's account is a fabrication by the
insurers and as such it should not have been admitted as evidence because a slave could not have
written it” (168). By saying that a slave could not have written it, he means that the captain would
not have treated a literate African woman as a slave, and since he captured Mintah, he could not
have known of her literacy – Cunningham actually did know, but denies it during the whole trial.
As a consequence, the crew's hypocrisy and lies win over the honesty of Mintah's account
because of her absence and her status as an enslaved African woman:
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Simon couldn't work out what had gone wrong. Why had the ruling gone in the investor's favour
with no mention of the deaths? He didn't know. He felt sure he had betrayed Mintah. Everyone had
been reduced to stock and that was the end of it. Mintah's diary had been dismissed because she was
not free but owned as stock. He should not have given up Mintah's memory and that of the other
slaves to Mr. Wilkes. […] Simon grabbed the book and ran from Chancery Lane. (173-4, 176)
In this passage, Mintah's book is straightforwardly designated as Mintah's memory to indicate again
that her text is a valuable means of recollection that provides a reliable gateway to the past, and
such a hypomnesic quality is exacerbated by its embededness in D'Aguiar's text. In fact, Mintah's
text is a fictional support used by Fred D'Aguiar to tell a true story and rescue it from oblivion for
his contemporaries, as explained above. And Mintah's memory is of great importance for Simon,
since on top of her book, which he hoped would have had the power of making the court
acknowledge the horrendous nature of the killings that took place on the Zong, Mintah's memory
actually supplemented Simon's absent-mindedness on the ship and saved him from a few beatings
by the cook. Here is, for instance, an excerpt from Simon and Mintah's first encounter, part of the
above-mentioned mise en abyme of writing that is effected in Feeding the Ghosts:
'What did I come down here for?' He looked around him baffled. 'See what you gone and done. Made
me forget. Now Cook will beat me.'
He sat down with his head on his knees. Mintah edged closer to him. […]
'I'll help you remember.' (59)
Retrospectively, this dialogue appears to be loaded with implicit signification, for Mintah, as
readers learn at the end of the novel, is a writer, and writing is a hypomnesic medium that may alter
one's actual memory or anamnesis. In this sense, it is understandable that Mintah, as a writer or
pharmakos, is both a source of oblivion and recollection for Simon. Furthermore, her statement that
she will “help you remember” can be considered, in a second reading, as a prolepsis concerning the
writing of her journal, the aim of which is to remind those who will read it of what happened on the
Zong. In this sense, the pronoun “you” might not only mean Simon, but meta-textually address the
readers of Feeding the Ghosts, who too read Mintah's book and, subsequently, of the story of the
Zong. In her book, Mintah actually narrates one of Simon's visits to the storeroom, where he forgot
something again: “'I forgot to lock the door again.' 'I know. But you remembered and came back and
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locked it, that's good.' 'Why is it good, Mintah, if I forgot to lock it?' 'Because you remembered and
corrected your mistake.' 'But I forgot'” (201). The interplay between remembering, reminding,
forgetting, and repetition convey, in a book whithin a book, the sense of hypomnesic gift and
anamnesic poison that writers-pharmakos such as Mintah produce, with the intention of curing, but
sometimes without foresight, as far as anamnesically-harmful side-effects are concerned.
c. Pharmakaï
Mintah is a pharmakos indeed, so much so that readers learn from first mate Kelsal, at the
end of the novel's first part, that Mintah was Kelsal's nurse at the Danish mission: “For a moment he
saw, not Mintah, but the girl who had nursed him at the fort” (131). Such characterization, for one
thing, strikingly reinforces the analogical relation, suggested above, that one may sense between
Mintah and Fred D'Aguiar: both formerly were (psychiatric) nurses, and became authors of books
that remind their readers of the past of slavery. Moreover what Mintah cures Kelsal for is, as one
realizes as one reads Mintah's book, amnesia subsequent to a fit of yellow fever: “I tell him I know
him from his days as a thief at the mission when he had to work for his freedom and he did not
know his name and had to be told who he was time and again” (187). Kelsal had lived at the
mission, stole from it, and returned to it. As a consequence, the missionaries made him a prisoner
who had to work to compensate for his theft and earn freedom. He worked so hard that he fell sick
and amnesiac. In this sense, Kelsal has experienced a form of slavery, and a pharmakon, a virus, has
made him amnesiac. It is Mintah, acting as a nurse, who constantly reminds him of his name until
he recovers health: “I was one of the children who took turns to watch over him and mop his brow
and empty his waste and feed him. He opened his eyes and did not know his name or where he was
on earth. I had to teach him” (195). Mintah, both a nurse and a writer in the making, is a pharmakos
whose role is to cure and, like texts, to hypomnesically restore memory. 193 But Kelsal does not feel
193Ferentz Lafargue believes that, more than acting as a nurse, Mintah plays a maternal role for Kelsal, because she is
the woman who teaches him how so say his name (again) (in Misrahi-Barak, Ed., 2005).
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indebted or grateful to Mintah, since he denies her role at the mission during the trial: “My lord, I
accept that this Mintah may have remembered me from the fort, but I do not remember her” (158).
Ironically enough, Kelsal denies that Mintah cured his amnesia by saying he does not remember,
although he does, and his meeting her again on board the Zong is described as follows: “She had
returned into his life like a recurring fever” (131) In other words, she is the recurrence of the
ghost,194 of her writing, and of its hypomnesic role to cure the recurring fever and amnesia, or the
pharmakon and its side effects, that Kelsal was subjected to. He actually does not want to remember
because this part of his past as a kind of slave who fell sick and was cared for by African people,
whom he alleges to be inferior, is humiliating in his eyes, and he does not want it to be revealed to
white people. This explains why, during the whole trip of the Zong across the Atlantic, Kelsal is
suspicious of Mintah and afraid of what she might say from the moment he realizes she is in the
hold and keeps shouting his name. As a consequence, he beats and gags her (33). At some other
point (the time when this happens is not clearly specified), Kelsal watches her being punished and
does not intervene, despite the cruelty of her punishment, which amounts to a horrendous blend
between rape and torture, as pepper is daubed on her eyes and inserted in her genitalia (215).
Finally, when she comes back on board, organizes a mutiny among slaves (87), and finally gets
caught, the crew shackle her and her four companion mutineers on deck and make them watch the
other slaves being thrown overboard (87). As a consequence, at the end of part one, Mintah is
actually “near to distraction,” prone to madness and subjected to spasms, and crew members have to
wash her and force-feed her to restore her health – and value for the auction block (132-3). In other
words, this time around, it is the crew who nurse and play the part of pharmakaï for Mintah.
And several characters among them are in fact described in such terms. First, when the
epidemic of “vomiting and diarrhea” had spread from the slaves to the crew, the doctor, the only
one on board who might have been able to cure everyone, succumbed to the disease and died,
194In French, one word for “ghost” is “un revenant,” a literal translation of which could be: “one that comes back,” or
“one that is coming back.”
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leaving everyone on board panic-stricken (12). The professional pharmakos being dead, the captain
decides to get rid of the epidemic – and hence act a pharmakos in turn – by throwing all the sick
overboard rather than trying to nurse them, 195 appointing Kelsal as yet another pharmakos, whose
task consists in the tricky business of identifying the sick from the non-sick, those who are healthy
and those whose condition is altered by a pharmakon: “[...] he was here to identify the severest
cases when many picked at random would easily qualify as such” (20). Besides the difficulty of
identifying the good gift/pharmakon from the bad gift/pharmakon (the blessing of a resistant body
that might recover from the poison of a sickness that kills everyone on board), the darkness of the
hold below deck almost makes Kelsal unable to “distinguish between man and man” (19). Soon
after the proceedings have started, the crew no longer tries to make distinctions and healthy children
and adults – in the novel, one can guess how healthy they are, judging by the strength they can
summon to resist and fight the crew – are thrown overboard, including Mintah, an actual pharmakos
(experienced in nursing and writing) who might have been able to save some of her companions,
had the crew accepted to listen to her as a nurse despite her status as an orphan-slave. But Kelsal, at
the trial, tries to legitimate the attempted murder of Mintah by saying “she was not a doctor” (49),
but a mad and disobedient person whose ailment “infects the others into similar disregard for
authority” (158, my emphasis). Kelsal is designating Mintah as a bad pharmakon, as poison for
those on board, but hypocritically so, because he threw Mintah overboard just to avoid having his
past with her revealed to the crew. The captain, however, sincerely believes that Mintah's dissent is
viral: “Behavior liable to fuel discontent and promote an insurrection among the slaves was the
worst sickness of all” (48). In the same way as Mr. Whitechapel designated fugitive slaves like
Chapel as poisonous for his plantation (D'Aguiar 1994, 15), Captain Cunningham appoints himself
as the boat's pharmakos and defines dissent as “the worst sickness of all,” as a pharmakon, which,
in his opinion, makes Mintah part of the sick and lets him allow Kelsal to dispose of her. Moreover,
195In the historical version of the story, Captain Collingwood actually was the Zong's surgeon (Baucom 2005, 10). It is
also darkly ironic to find out, in this context, that the ship's name was the result of a misspelling, for she was
supposed to be called the “Zorg,” which means “care” in Dutch (Philip 208).
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and as said above, the captain is a pharmakos in that he produces writing that bastardizes the past
and, hence, alters one's memory of the Zong's slaves. His ledger is however not a fully orphaned
logos since he stands on behalf of it at the trial, and on board, by pushing his men “at their wits'
end” until he has traced the appropriate number of “strokes” for dead slaves to make the Zong's
venture profitable, and such a fathering of his book – “He looked as if he was nursing a baby and
trying to soothe it the way he had his arms clasped round his ledger” (96-7) – earns him the fact that
“the crew regard him as the progenitor of all their discontent” (D'Aguiar 1997, 128). Two pages
before in the novel, the captain is even described as a magician and his pen as a wand:
Captain Cunningham made stroke after stroke in his ledger; in his long black cloak, his elaborate hat
and with his attention trained on his book, pen like a wand in his hand, he resembled a magician
whose intention it was to bring streaming off the page every stroke that he'd recorded of these people
dumped into the sea, all of those lost in this expansive burial ground into which they'd been thrown
alive by his command, given up for dead, murdered, every man, woman and child, bring them back
with a bang and a puff of smoke, back before everyone's eyes, without a hair out of place,
unshackled, smiling and in perfect health. (126)
By being described as such a mischievous magician or sorcerer, it is clear that the captain is the
novel's evil pharmakos, set against Mintah as an actual nurse and a reliable writer as far as her
account of the past is concerned, and his intention does unfortunately not consist in bringing dead
slaves back.196 It is rather D'Aguiar's intention, in Feeding the Ghosts, to remind readers of what
happened on the Zong, to prevent them, thanks to writing, from forgetting about the horrors of
slavery. Finally, another figure of the pharmakos might reside in the cook, whose food is described
as poison: “He faced eternal abuse from the crew for his concoctions. Many of the ship's ailments
were often blamed on the unidentifiable contents of his pot. When the surgeon was alive he took
some of the abuse, but with his death the cook faced twice the invective overnight” (43).
Conversely, when Mintah comes back on board and tries to plan a mutiny among the slaves, she
tells them to “eat all their food, even if it taste[s] like poison” (93). The cook is thus the crew's
scapegoat, held responsible for the problems of the Zong because of his food, which is designated
as a bad pharmakon. He is thus a figure of the pharmakos too, since both poisoner and scapegoat are
196Of course, his “nursing” of books and his being described as a magician also indicate that Cunningham's
characterization owes something to the figure of Prospero (Shakespeare 2008).
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parts of this Greek word's signification (Derrida 1972, 162). However, the Cook knows well that he
is no pharmakos, but that he just has to make do with what food there is on board. When he feeds
the slaves, he knows his food is no pharmakon and is “wasted on them. They needed medicine or a
miracle” (44). In other words, they needed a real pharmakos with real drugs, or the intervention of a
genius, a god, a (holy) ghost.
But the inspirational phantom of Mintah only preserves these victims from oblivion, thanks
to her fictional journal, which D'Aguiar writes and embeds in a longer account of what happened.
But more than a journal actually figures among the elements that contribute to depict Mintah as a
pharmakos, since during all her life in America, after crossing the Middle Passage on the Zong, she
spends most of her time nursing herself, or rather, her mind, from the traumatizing experience she
had to get through, by using artistic and educational activities as means of catharsis. One of these
activities, as mentioned in this thesis' second chapter and announced in the novel in an openly
proleptic statement when Mintah is still at sea, consists in sculpting in wood the slaves who have
died at sea: “Wood might shape these things for her one day. A chisel and wood, in a wooden room
just for her” (63). After having been sold to Maryland and living there as a slave, she ran away
because slavers found out she was helping other slaves flee via the Underground Railroad (207),
arrived in Jamaica – where she is to witness the emancipation of slaves through Jamaica's Slavery
Abolition Act of 1833 – to live, in fact, in a wooden house she calls her “hold” (208). Not a mere
pun on household, her calling her house a hold is a reminder of the slave-hold in which she crossed
the Atlantic, a hold she cannot get out of (her mind) even decades after and free. In this “hold”, she
stores the sculptures she has carved out of wood: “There are 131 of them. A veritable army. And I
have been working on another for months now [...]” (209). The number 131 corresponds to that of
slaves who were thrown from the Zong and drowned, while the 132 nd is, of course, Mintah herself,
the only slave who climbed back on board. She has been working on “it,” on herself actually, for
months and years, trying to consign the memory of what happened in material form in order to get
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over it. The activity of sculpting is therefore therapeutic for Mintah, who thus uses art as a good
pharmakon to cure herself. However, visitors do not understand the sculptures they see and do not
want to take them home, because such shapes “unsettle a stomach” (209): “If only they could see
that what they lay their hands on is a treasure, that it harbours the past, that it houses the souls of the
dead [...]” (208). But some of them actually understand and see “figures reaching out of the depths,”
and the reason why they might not want to take such figurines home is that they actually know that
the past of slavery is being evoked, and that such a past makes them ill at ease, just as ghosts, the
returning dead, would. In fact, Mintah's late life is “a life of feeding the ghosts” (222), of “fighting
against forgetting with wood as her guide” (210) by sculpting the figures of the dead, statues she
calls her “progeny” because she “delivered them” (210). “Delivered” is polysemous here, and
designates the process of giving life as much as that of freeing the dead from the abyss and from
oblivion, and it also represents Mintah's artistic quest for deliverance from the weight of her past
without forgetting her lost companions.197 To the same purpose, she planted a coconut grove, “one
197[…] Abigail Ward argues that Mintah's sculputres have a hypomnesic role that prevent Mintah from forgetting her
experience of slavery, to the extent that her memory of it recurs to re-traumatize her, ultimately killing her, as the
hypomnesic traces of her trauma – the wooden sculptures – feed the flames that burn her “hold” and kill her at the
end of the novel, which is then a pessimistic closure according to Ward, because it implicitly suggests that the
weight of the traumatic memory of slavery cannot be alleviated (Ward 161-2). However, Mintah's failure to forget is
not as clear-cut as it might seem. First, as shown below, Mintah becomes amnesic in old age, and keeps her notes as
a personal diary (she does not tell her story to others) to compensate for “her failing memory” (D'Aguiar 1997, 222).
Second, Mintah does not seem to experience her death by fire – is is unclear whether it is suicidal or not – as painful
resignation into despair, but as a liberating moment: instead of panicking, as she burns, she thinks of the fire as a
hand that carves her body in the same way as she carved wood, and compares the sensation of heat burning her
lungs to that of water choking her when she was thrown into the sea. Conversely, she compares the flames as a
transubstantiation of her sculptures that is comparable to the dilution of slaves in the water. In this sense, she
obviously remembers, but is delivered – sculpted by fire – in the same way as the ghosts of her slave friends are
freed from the wooden sculptures as shadows: “The spirits carved in those figures fled into the wooded hills” (226)
of Jamaica, and this flight is evocative of slaves marooning, fleeing from the plantations to leave as free men and
women in the island's interior. Hence, Mintah progressively loses memory – even her memories of slavery, since she
needs her notes as reminders (222) – and is delivered, in the end, from the burdens of the past, albeit through death,
which may be viewed as a “pessimistic” finale, if it is considered final at all. Yet, since the “shadows,” or ghosts
resulting from the fire are freed into the Jamaican interior, the novel does not suggest death as an absolute end and,
to use D'Aguiar's words, in this sense, the novel's closure is pessimistic “save your belief in ghosts” (D'Aguiar 1989,
8). Also, if Mintah's death by fire is reminiscent of Bertha's – Mrs Rochester's first, Caribbean wife Charlotte
Brontë's in Jane Eyre – climactic and desperate passing, Mintah's death differs from it in intent. For more
information on Jane Eyre's relation to the Caribbean, and to its revision by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, see
Thieme 2001, 73-99. Paula Burnett sees Mintah's death by fire as reminiscent of the metamorphic Greek myths
telling the stories of nymphs and women turning to trees in order to escape rape, like Syrinx transforming into reeds
to escape Pan. Burnett also suspects that Mintah's death is an evocation of the Hindu ritual of sati , which has spread
to the Caribbean, and which D'Aguiar might be using as a discrete acknowledgment of Dabydeen's preceding work
(Burnett 23). […]
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tree for each soul lost on the Zong” (219). But not content with freeing as many American slaves as
those who died on the Zong, sculpting 131 figurines and planting the same number of trees, Mintah
sews, reads, writes, and teaches poor white children, black children and free black people how to
read and write. She sews as she waits, hoping for Simon to show up one day on the shores of
Jamaica, like a Penelope waiting for her lover's return to Ithaca, except that Mintah never seems to
undo her weft, but keeps on having a close relationship to writing and reading texts. Texture is
fabric (Derrida 1972, 79), and it is not fortuitous for Mintah to write as much as she sews. Like
Lydia in The Longest Memory, she teaches people how to read and write by “counting in song, the
alphabet tied to animals, multiplication tables in rhyme, spelling contests, places in the world, dates,
recipes for certain illnesses, hygiene” (204, my emphasis). Once again, Mintah uses her abilities as
a pharmakos to teach how to produce pharmaka, both as writing and as home-made remedies. The
importance she gives to hygiene is relevant too, considering the horrendous conditions in which she
and her companions had to live below the Zong's deck. But as far as her own writing is concerned,
Mintah uses it again in a cathartic way, as she explains at the end of her book:
How much can anyone remember? The head cannot retain everything. Why should it? Most of what
I do is not worth being stored in my head. Or it hurts too much to store it. So I let it go. I wrap it up
like the respected dead and release it with a prayer or fling it unceremoniously like the disrespected
living into the sea of forgetting. Writing can contain the worst things. So I forget on paper. (196).
By “forgetting on paper,” Mintah relieves her anamnesis of a burden she consigns in writing, in a
text that will nevertheless prevent her from completely forgetting her companions by remaining as a
hypomnesic trace. This way of doing also partly rehabilitates writing as a good pharmakon in that
the head, or anamnesis, “cannot retain everything” or put up with everything and, hence, writing
might come in as a good supplement rather than as a bad pharmakon in this case.198 This is a use of
writing that Whitechapel, as opposed to his son and Mintah, did not perceive in The Longest
198[…] In this sense, Ward's suggestion that writing offers no relief from the memory of slavery is debatable (Ward
163-4). Moreover, her contention that “Because [Mintah's] previous attempt at writing her story was discounted [by
a British tribunal] , rather than narrating her story again, she instead carves figures of those that were jettisoned”
(161-2), is tenuous, because the novel does not state whether Mintah knows what has become of her book and if it
has been of any help for the commemoration, by others, of those who drowned in the passage, and because Mintah
relies on writing until the end of her life. She does not favor carving over writing, but uses both. […]
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Memory, although he had hurtful memories such as Mintah's (he crossed the Middle Passage and
has lived as a slave in America too), so he had no way of getting rid of the pain of his past, and it
wrote itself on his body as a constant reminder of his hard life. Mintah, unlike Whitechapel, writes
cathartically “to forget” and get rid of the pain, but honors the memory of slaves through sculpture.
But with old age, her journal, again, helps her to remember: “No one knew her story, because she
had not bothered to tell it. All her notes were for herself, her failing memory, her recurrent dreams”
(222). Her notes are, textually – and not “logically” – a means of recollection as much as of
catharsis then, and they also deal with a specific form of recollection, that is, the “recurrent dreams”
of her African past. She has used these notes privately within the novel, but Fred D'Aguiar has made
them public as a fiction he created to talk about a real past, an actual fact. The narrative voice then
explains that as Mintah grew even older, “She could not write anymore. At Sunday School she got
the children to repeat after her, and when she lost her train of thought one of the older children
would remind her of where she had left off” (225). The fact that she cannot write anymore is
compensated for by the children she has made literate, and who can thus act as pharmakaï in turn to
help her to remember: she is a ghost, a genius, at the origin of a genealogy of white and black
children who can too “harbour the past” in writing and remind the following generations of the past,
which would thus be saved – registered and rescued.
In Feeding the Ghosts, Mintah's memory is rescued indeed, and it is actually preserved from
the most evoked and evasive pharmako-n-s of the novel, which has to be addressed now too. Last
but not least in the present study of this novel, this self-authored text, is, of course, the Atlantic
ocean, which Mintah calls, as seen a page above, “the sea of forgetting” (191). From the very first
pages of the book, in the Epilogue, the sea is described as follows: “The sea is slavery. Sea water
boils in its own current. Salt gives the sea the texture of fabric, something thick and close-knitted,
not unlike the fine dust of a barn seen in a shaft of light” (3). The sentence “The sea is slavery” is,
again, almost a paraphrase of Caribbean Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's poem “The Sea is
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History,” a fragment of which is quoted as an epigraph to the novel:
Where are your monuments, your battles, your martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is history. (Walcott 1986, 363-6)
The sea is the fluid in which the African past of slaves taken across the Middle-Passage has
dissolved, and where the origins (tautologically marked by “balls and chains gone green” to use the
words of Glissant (1990, 6) again) of the Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American populations are found.
The history at play in Derek Walcott's poem is hence related to Africa and slavery, and this is why
D'Aguiar's “The sea is slavery” can be seen as a paraphrase of “The sea is history.” And slavery is
the commerce of foundlings too, which might allow for yet another paraphrase: “the sea is
orphanhood.” In this case, it is no wonder for it to have the “texture of fabric,” since texture is
fabric, but it also is textuality, the weaving together of the threads of a plot that is historical too in
Feeding the Ghosts. The sea is a text, and a text is an orphaned logos. In this sense again, the sea is
orphanhood, a story no one stands to defend, like a father, until the stories it contains are taken up
by the heirs of its orphans, for instance Afro-Caribbean writers such as Walcott and Brathwaite, or
Cary Phillips, David Dabydeen, M. Noubrese Philip and D'Aguiar. The sea if more openly
textualized on the Prologue's second page, when what happens to the bodies of slaves thrown
overboard is described:
Soon all those bodies melt down to bones, then the sea begins to treat the bones like rock, there to be
shaped over time or ground to dust; Sea does not stop at death. Salt wants to consume every morsel
of those bodies until the sea becomes them, becomes their memory. So it is from the sea that all 131
souls are to be plucked. From a sea oblivious to time. One hundred and thirty-one dissipated bodies
find breath in the wind skimming the surface of the sea and howl. Those bodies have their lives
written on salt water. The sea current turns pages of memory. One hundred and thirty-one souls roam
the Atlantic with countless others. (4, emphasis mine) 199
The sea is therefore a text and an orphan as much as an orphan maker. It “turns pages of memory”
written with salt water for ink, and they remind those who can read them of the past it absorbed.
199The sentence “The sea current turns pages of memory” may be viewed as a romantic intertextual node, insofar as it
is reminiscent of Keats' epitaph “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” pointing to the fragility of posterity.
In this watery and romantic intertextual context, it is unsettling to find that Shelley, who mourned Keats in the poem
“Adonaïs,” died by drowning, a collection of Keats' poems in his pocket. (Stacey 2016, Shelley 1829).
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Being a text, the sea is also a pharmakon, as the way it dissolved the memories of slaves, like a
chemical agent, prove. In fact, the sea has eroded the corpses and bones of those who drowned in it
until it became itself, the text it constitutes and has constructed in the process, as a pharmakos. But
those who can read the text as a reminder are those who actually remember, and possess slavery and
the Middle Passage as an integral part of their anamnesis, which makes such a written register a
useless if not a bad pharmakon, unnecessary for those who read it and already remember, except as
a poetic means of reminding those who actually do not necessarily know stories such as that of the
Zong. As Levinas would put it, “The world of perception is thus a world where things have an
identity and it is visible that the subsistence of this world is only possible through memory” (148,
my translation). In other words, Fred D'Aguiar knows the contents of the sea and does not need it as
a reminder, but presents it as such so as to let people know about what happened across the Atlantic,
so that the ocean will act as a reminder to them every time they face it. Fred D'Aguiar metaphorizes,
or translates200 salted water for the sake of his reader's memory. The sea turned reminder will
awaken the ghosts and their haunting memory to one's consciousness once one has read Feeding the
Ghosts or experienced the story it tells. Mintah is one of them, and describes the Atlantic as a
“poisonous sea” (219) at the end of novel. So is Simon, whose experience of the Zong has, again,
“poisoned the sea he had dreamed about before ever seeing. His sea had become a dumping ground
for the living. Sea water turned red in his dreams” (172). If dreams do represent hypomnesic traces
of one's past, one can imagine the trauma even Simon experienced on the Zong through its
“sanskrit” (D'Aguiar 1993 26) transcript in blood on the ocean's surface.
Thus, Feeding the Ghosts tells a historical past through rich fiction replete with metaphors
that entail, again, a specific understanding of memory, orphanhood and/as slavery, and written
speech. In the novel, the fictional text of an orphan-slave, Mintah, the main character, whom
200Again, as Paul DeMan explains in “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” “[...] motion is passage and passage is
translation; translation, once again, means motion, piles motion upon motion. It is no mere play on words that
'translate' is translated in Geman as 'übersetzen' which itself translates the Greek 'meta phorein' or metaphor” (17).
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D'Aguiar imagined and recreated from the tale of the real, historical person who climbed back on
board, embeds the story of the Zong within a larger account of it, where the sea and all characters
involved are as many writing nurses and pharmakaï with either laudable or despicable intentions.
The book also inscribes itself within the legacy of a body of Caribbean literature written by a
generation of authors, such as Derek Walcott and Edward Brathwaite, preceding that of D'Aguiar,
and it connects itself in a variety of intra-textual ways to preceding works by the same author, such
as Mama Dot and The Longest Memory, as well as to contemporary writing by other Caribbean
writers such as Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and M. Noubrese Philip. The intra-textual and
inter-textual genealogy at play between these works extends itself into Fred D'Aguiar's other novels,
as is to be confirmed throughout all of the following parts of this study, starting with Fred
D'Aguiar's third and latest novel to openly deal with slavery, that is, Bloodlines.
III. Bloodlines201
A bloodline, as the name indicates, is a line of descent. However, adding a plural suffix to
the word already problematizes the notion. More than an indication that two parents, and hence the
genealogies of two families (consanguinity apart) who come forth from countless other couples of
families, are required in the conception of an individual, Bloodlines, as the title of Fred D'Aguiar's
fourth novel, also designates the two ethnic geni at play in the making of Sow, its protagonist and
main character: he, like Chapel in The Longest Memory, and as discussed in this thesis' first chapter
in an other perspective, was born of miscegenation, after Christy, a Southern slaver's son, raped
Faith, one of his neighbor's slaves. However, and again, the unexplainable happens during the initial
rape scene, as Faith and Christy fall in love and are subsequently banished when Christy's father
201[…] Ward's reading of Bloodlines relies on (Holocaust) theories of post- and counter-memory more than on “Plato's
Pharmacy,” and shows “that the trauma of slavery can never entirely be 'worked through.' Slavery, [D'Aguiar]
repeatedly tells us, persists in the racism of today” (Ward 178). In the fourteen pages (165-79) Ward dedicates to
Bloodlines, only three allusions (172-4) to the pharmakon and the distinction between anamnesis and hypomnesis
can be found. Of course, and again, there is nothing wrong with this at all: this remark intends only to show that the
present reading differs from and complements that of Ward by developing the argument concerning the mnemonic
and orph(an)ic structure of writing. [...]
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discovers that his son is in love with a slave. Like Chapel and Lydia again, they then try to go up
North via the Underground Railroad with the help of Tom and Stella, 202 whom they met on their
way. However, they are captured and Faith is sold back into slavery to the Mason family and
separated from Christy, who is forced to work as an indentured boxer. Faith is pregnant and soon to
choose to be operated – by a surgeon-pharmakos – and die to give birth to Sow, who will never
meet his father, rather than to live on and let Sow die. Hence, like Sanders Junior in The Longest
Memory, and Simon in Feeding the Ghosts, Sow became a maternal orphan on the day of his birth.
However, Sow's mother had the choice – if such a dead-end situation can be called so – to survive
through abortion, or to die giving birth to Sow, who explains that Faith “died that [he] might live. A
mother's gift / of life to her son” (D'Aguiar 2000, 44, my emphasis), a gift of life that is both a
blessing and a curse, a pharmakon of sorts for Sow, since he has to bear the burden of his mother's
self-sacrifice – inter-textually related to that of Christ for the sake of humanity according to
Christian “Faith” – and, as a consequence to all the racial hatred involved in the separation of his
parents and his being an orphan, he cannot die until he cures America from racism, which he
identifies as slavery's “offspring” (150):
I criss-cross four time zones looking
for faults to do with race and find plenty
to write home about. I try unhooking
myself from the obligation to empty
the States of hate so I can make a booking
with my flight from immortality. (152)
This is the “two-hundred-year-old headache” Sow is subjected to and does not manage to “nurse”
(156), until he apparently gets stabbed by the end of the twentieth century, when “Somehow black
people free themselves” (160) – at the end of the Civil Rights Movement? – but manages to “make
it to the other side of the century” (160) and die in 2000, “the new millenium” (150), the year when
Bloodlines was published. Slavery and its progeny are thus related diseases or bad pharmaka that
Sow, pharmakos against his will, has to cure to become mortal. Such a mission forces him, to live
202It is already clear – and has partly been shown above – that the names of characters in Bloodlines are all loaded with
inter-textual, religious, and metaphorical meanings. They will be dealt with at relevant moments in the present study.
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on for approximately 140 years, from 1861 (60) through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the
Civil Rights Movement, to the dawn of the 21 st century, and Bloodlines thus stands as a fictional
account of late African-American history, suggesting that the title also designates lines “written in
the blood of martyrs” (155), of those whose (interracial) love was thwarted and/or who died at the
hands of racists, verses tracing a genealogy of inter-ethnic love and hate in the United States: pace
Whitechapel, this makes Sow the character with “the longest memory” in Fred D'Aguiar's novels.
a. Plaited Plots
From its onset, Bloodlines is actually strongly related to The Longest Memory as a story
finding its starting point in miscegenation. But while Whitechapel, an orphan's adoptive father, is
the main character in D'Aguiar's first novel, it is the orphan himself, Sow, that readers follow from
birth to death – and even into his after-life (160-1) – in Bloodlines, a text metaphorically written
using blood for ink and dealing with inter-ethnic genealogy confronted to slavery and racism. As in
The Longest Memory again, the story is told by a multiplicity of narrators. However, in Bloodlines,
all narrators, Sow included, tell the story in verse, like Chapel in Fred D'Aguiar's first novel. In this
sense, both Sow and Chapel are mixed-race orphan narrators born out of miscegenation and
expressing themselves in verse, suggesting that the genesis of Bloodlines is inter-textually related to
The Longest Memory as one of its parents in the genealogies of Fred D'Aguiar's novels. Like
relatives, they share parts of the same genetic codes that have been plaited into different (textual)
identities. The image of the plait is very much present in Bloodlines to deal with the union of
Christy and Faith, and with Sow as the child resulting from it. For instance, when Christy and Faith
make love, their tongues are described as “two writhing cup- / snakes trying to make a reef knot”
(D'Aguiar 2000, 10). The erotic image of their tongues forming a plait of intertwining snakes is not
fortuitous, according to their names, and suggests that temptation – symbolized by the snake, as in
Genesis – is what relates Christy, or “Christ” as he is once nicknamed, later in the novel, (69) to
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“Faith.” At this point in the novel, Christy and Faith have fallen in love and their intercourse no
longer amounts to rape. Christy's being erotically tempted by Faith can be metaphorically read as a
temptation free of sin, in that it is natural, and recommended, for “Christ” to be tempted by “Faith,”
and counters the idea that not resisting to temptation is in every case considered a sin by Christian
standards, and that interracial love is sinful by the misguided claims of the Southern white
Christians among whom Christy and Faith live (38). However, the generally accepted Christian
views on interracial love that prevail in the South might announce the lovers' dark fate, Christy's
Adamic “fall” from his “father's plantation” and his and Faith's subsequent vagrancy and misery.
Yet, comparing a plantation to Eden is highly problematic, and the image of the “cup-snake,” in
relation to Christy and Faith's love, might require an alternative, non-Christian interpretation: the
“cup-snakes,” far from referring to the football-stadium game of making the longest possible chains
of plastic cups circulate in the audience, is evocative of the snakes that surround the respective
staffs and cups of medicinal symbols of doctors and pharmacists, deriving from Hermes' caduceus
and from the rod of Asclepius, the god of medicine in Greco-Roman mythology, whose daughter,
Hygieia, goddess of hygiene, is often represented with a cup and a snake that is about to drink from
it: the “cup of Hygieia,” is now known as the emblem of pharmacists. Then, on the one hand, if the
tongues of Christy and Faith intertwine like “cup snakes” into a knot, they might represent the
scepter of the messenger of gods, Hermes' caduceus, and contribute to a metaphorical definition of
the characters' (interracial) love as divine: this idea would converge with the religious nature of
Christy's and Faith's names. On the other hand, if their tongues erotically join to evoke Asclepius'
staff or Hygieia's cup, they might be indicative of the healing nature of interracial love in a world
poisoned by the racist system of slavery. In other words, in this sense, the two characters' love is
depicted as a good pharmakon, in spite of its being forbidden, and although it risks being punished
or condemned by plantation authorities.203 Both lovers are aware of these risks, and if their love is a
203[…] In this perspective, Ward's sense of “a pervading cynicism regarding te potential of relationships between
mixed-race couples” (166) in Bloodlines, along with her contention that D'Aguiar “questions the simplicity and
idealism of the transformative power of love” (Ward 172) and that “hopes for a harmonious future for black and
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present to them, it will indeed be seen by others as poisonous. They know their love is a
pharmakon, as they exhort it to “infect” them (8), but as they make love, Christy and Faith are not
worried by the potential consequences of their actions, for they are “Not thinking about diseases
[…] / Nor white redress; a sickness in itself.” (69). Here, and in two lines, Fred D'Aguiar compares
sexually transmissible diseases to “white redress” or the punishment Christy and Faith might face if
caught. Such punishment would derive from the racist codes of slavery, which are here defined as
bad pharmaka. But again, the lovers are not worried by any pharmakon, even the next day,
according to the description that is given of Faith:
She lay on her stomach with her knees bent,
her crossed bare feet swaying, pieces of straw
plaiting in her neat hands in an absentminded fashion, but not idle: she saw
those plaits as them under last night's big tent
punctured by stars […] (D'Aguiar 2000, 12)
Her thinking about them on a starry night is reminiscent of Chapel and Lydia's nocturnal meetings
to read to each other in The Longest Memory. The plait metaphor is extended here with the image of
Faith's “crossed bare feet” and the straws she plaits in her hands as a trope of how her body and
Christy's intertwined the night before. Sow takes up the metaphor later on too, explaining that his
parents “wove two threads, a black and a white life, / into one bolt of cloth shredded by their time”
(38). But before being torn from one another, they are banished from the plantation, and wander
until a storm breaks and forces them to take shelter at a crossroads below a tree where they sit “on
roots / spiraling above ground from that oak tree, / the tangled roots of their confusion if the truth /
be told...” (19). The fact that a storm breaks evokes the Flood and corroborates again the idea that
the plot of Bloodlines is not only plaited to that of The Longest Memory, but to that of the Bible or,
more precisely, Genesis too, which is, again, a book about the genealogy of the world. Christy and
white are dashed in Bloodlines” (170), since Christy and Faith are separated because of slavery, and since Faith dies
giving birth to Sow, showing “the ultimate failure of interracial love as a vehicle for transforming the legacies of
[slavery]” (170), may be qualified. For if slavery and racism do condition the tragic deaths of Christie, Faith and
Sow, it is only to make interracial love even more desirable in the present, as a means to avoid all the pain deriving
from the legacies of slavery, and such love is idealized as a heavenly – and hence, enviable – situation in the novel's
ending. Of course, the ending is sad, since only in death can Christie and Faith freely love one another, but it is not
presented in an ironic tone at all. Ward does not study the novel's close in her book. She only mentions that
“D'Aguiar declines to provide a happy ending” (170). [...]
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Faith are at a crossroads – where roads intersect like threads in a weft – sitting on “tangled roots,”
which are yet other images of the extended metaphor of the plait. In further plaiting, the image of
the “tangled roots” rings another inter-textual bell that leads back to Wordsworth's poem “Simon
Lee, the Old Huntsman” in the Lyrical Ballads he wrote with Coleridge. In “Simon Lee,” the poetic
persona is secluded in his poetic consciousness as he watches an old man struggle to rid his plot of
land of a bad root, an objective correlative of his swollen feet (Bonnecase & Porée 92), which
forces him to face his human condition as an aging and mortal being. Feeling sympathy for Simon
Lee, the poetic persona soon exits poetic consciousness towards a sociable state of being, takes the
old man's tool and breaks the “tangled root” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 108) with an ease that
accentuates the old man's weakness to the point of finally making the poetic persona feel ill at ease.
(Bonnecase & Porée 95). “Simon Lee” is a homo-social scene that shows men are related by their
common struggle against helplessness (98), and that another human being's help, though kind,
might just contribute to the helper's own sense of helplessness. Such “participatory pathos” (96) is
repetitively alluded to in the poem's four last stanzas thanks to derivatives of the word “kind”: one
reads “kindly” (Wordsworth & Coleridge 107) and “unkind, kindly” (108). The end of the poem
thus draws attention to the plural signification of “kind” as well, in that it is a poem about being
kind to one's kind, or kin, in times of helplessness that are a kind of moment drawing the attention of
human beings to their own condition. Thus, one kind of thing that relates human beings into a
common genealogy – genealogy being the language of kinship, of grouping kin kinds – is their
helplessness and their power (at their own consciences' peril) to invoke another person's kindness in
sharing one's potentially helpless condition.
As far as Christy and Faith are concerned, in Bloodlines, the “tangled roots” they are sitting
on, like the “tangled root” Simon Lee tries to cut, are openly described, in a pathetic fallacy, as
relative to their situation, as “the tangled roots of their confusion if the truth / be told” (19), and the
two lovers are quite helpless too, alone to face the storm. But helplessness and confusion are not the
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only things to link them: their love is another kind of link through which they become kind to one
another and made kin in spite of the racist prejudices that have surrounded them all their lives in the
South. In fact, Christy is described as “stranger and kin” to Faith (150) at the end of the novel,
because they do not have the same bloodlines but they, nevertheless, share the same human
condition and love one another, and Fred D'Aguiar's discrete allusion to the “tangled root” of
Wordsworth's poem of kindness shows that black people and white people are kin whatever white
supremacists might say, by infusing new meanings in a romantically rooted trope.204 Hence, in
addition to the Bible and images where physical elements intertwine, a romantic thread weaves
itself and adds to the texture of Fred D'Aguiar's novel, all the more so since it is written in ottava
rima, a form famously used by another romantic poet, Lord Byron, in Don Juan.205 Like Simon Lee
again, Christy and Faith are finally being helped by kind Tom, who takes them on his cart and into
the Underground Railroad that helps slaves to escape, in order to give them a chance to spend their
life together up North. But the trio is ambushed, the lovers captured and separated never to meet
again: their love-plait risks being undone.
Or so it seems, for the “tangled roots” are not only a trope of Christy and Faith's state of
mind or situation, but also, and by the same token, a metaphor via which the plot of land on which
they sit comes to represent the knotting of the novel's plot, in that it invokes the intertextual
204In this sense, and according to John Thieme's terminology in Postcolonial Con-texts, this passage from Bloodlines
may be thought of as a con-text, as a response to the pre-text of Wordsworth's poem that alters the way we read the
texts then involved (Thieme 2). For a thorough discussion of the intertextual links that operate between Fred
D'Aguiar's novels and Wordsworth's poetry, see Chapter V, part III.
205[…] Ward argues that D'Aguiar chooses verse over prose in order to avoid writing a slave-narrative “simulacrum,”
and to exceed the “normalizing” and/or stereotyping vogue of writing (fictional) accounts of slavery in prose (Ward
172-3). She also explains that ottava rima is an appropriate form for the 19 th century narrative, since it was first used
in that century by the likes of Byron (165). Considering the romantic intertextuality the novel shares with
Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, as has just been shown, one may confirm that the form is in keeping with its contents.
However, Ward persists in finding the form “awkward,” with a “faltering rhythm” and a language made “unwieldy”
by “anachronisms,” since the narrative voice makes twentieth-century references, to MTV (Ward 172; D'Aguiar
2000, 15, 17). Ward in turns explains that such a difficult language is deliberately used by D'Aguiar to prevent easy
access to the difficult past of slavery, and to avoid its simplification, its over-appropriation through fiction and overidentification with the story, which could foster re-traumatization through its dark tale of slavery. Although Ward's
argument is justified, some reservations must be formulated about it again: the rhythm of the text, mainly made of
hexameters, appears to be more regular than “faltering,” and the anachronistic relationship between nineteenthcentury form and twentieth-century language is in keeping with the period covered by Sow's supernatural longevity.
In this sense, the reception of the text as “unwieldy” might be based on a subjective impression rather than founded
an objective factors. Moreover, the relation between form and content also makes a lot of sense in terms of magic(al)
realism and historical inversion, as shown in (Orphic) detail in Chapter V. […]
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genealogy of Bloodlines as much as it is indicative of what is to come forth from the lovers interethnic union, that is, Sow, the double-helix of whose DNA is yet another plait that the weft of the
novel begets to become its main, mixed-race narrator: “this body with two bloodlines in its veins”
(D'Aguiar 2000, 2) which, at birth, was “folded like plaited dough” (41, italics mine). Moreover, all
of the initial (and plaited) events of the story told above are narrated, bound together by Sow in a
first chapter that bears the same title as that of the novel's last chapter, as if to frame the tale being
told: “I and I.” “I and I” is, of course, “a term borrowed from the Rastafarian, which refers in the
first 'I' to the social material and temporal self and in the second 'I' to the spiritual, perpetual self”
(Frias 2002a, 682).206 In this sense, “I and I” blends the novel's Biblical intertext to a Caribbean
reading of it, by way of which Sow, as the inter-ethnic offspring of Christy and Faith, becomes a
trope of races and texts that have crossed the tropics to gather into what I argue, above, for calling a
tropicality: a metaphorical manifestation of the cross-cultural. In the same sense, graphically
speaking, the two “I”'s in the novel, two vertical linear letters, evoke the two bloodlines that have
been plaited to conceive Sow as the first offspring, or gen(i)us, of Christy and Faith's inter-ethnic
genealogy. However, both the characters whom Sow meets in the novel and the way he deals with
himself in the body of the text seem to call for a designation of him as “hybrid,” in Homi K.
Bhabha's sense of the term, rather than as a tropicality. I usually prefer tropicality to hybridity
because, as explained above, tropicality does not evoke the porcine – a taboo in certain cultures –
and is not about the confrontation of one cultural element to another, but deals with the rotating,
tropic movement of the one becoming the other, becoming the one in turn again in the making of a
cross-cultural identity that is always-already in the making, and not necessarily in a conflictual way.
But as the etymology of the word hybrid and its relation to bastardy and to the animal that bears the
same name as Bloodlines' main character, a sow, show, interpretations of the way Sow is
206“I and I” is also the title of a Bob Dylan song, dealing with absolute, irreducible otherness, epitomized by the face of
the Christian, Biblical God in the song's chorus: “I and I / One says to the other, no one sees my face and lives”
(Dylan 1984). The religious character of the song, and its theme of inalienable otherness as found in the face-asdivine, also are features of Bloodlines (as shown above, in the Levinas-inspired reading of the rape scene), but
arguing that such analogies are indicative of a direct intertextual link between Dylan's song and D'Aguiar's novel
would seem tenuous.
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characterized might gain weight when hybridity is chosen to designate the (rejection of the)
tropicality at hand, as can be read in the following passage:
She called me, a boy, 'Sow', and 'Sow' stayed
with me among everybody on the plantation.
I was a sombre child, morose, sour-faced
No mother and no father to speak to anyone
about […]. (D'Aguiar 2000, 45).
It is not clear who “She,” the one who named Sow, is. 207 The only piece of information provided is
that Sow “fancies” Faith “said the name Mrs Mason / consented [him] having” (43) and does not
grant that it is Faith who named him in reality. Moreover, if the word “sow” designates the animal,
it, when capitalized, both animalizes and feminizes Faith's son and, as far as the animal is
concerned, it makes Sow's name a pejorative designation of his hybridity as a mixed-race baby, an
unlikely name for a mother to give to the substantiation of her inter-ethnic love. Sow is such a
substantiation indeed, as his self-depiction as a “sombre child, morose, sour-faced” (45) shows: in
fact, sombre and morose all evoke a dark mood as much as Sow's dark, but not black, skin. The
prefix mor- evokes the darkness of the “moor” and the fact that he is “more” too, in that he is both
black and white, and yet neither of the two. It also is reminiscent of Derrida's description of written
speech as a moribund logos and an orphan, both of which Sow is as he speaks through the pages
(Derrida 1972, 95-6), sometimes describing himself as a “blank book” (47), a space available for
the registration of facts and fictions in written form: again, “logoï are children,” who are orphaned
207[…] Ward believes Sow to have been named Christy after his father, and decides to call him “the narrator” in her
study, so as to avoid any confusion (Ward 214, n. 53). It is true that, in D'Aguiar's novel, Sow claims once, to Mr.
Mason, during his childhood, that his name is “Christy Mason,” but Mr Mason, who does not want the child to bear
his name, directly tells him he is a “liar,” and nothing specifies that “Christy Mason” is Sow's official name
(D'Aguiar 2000, 48), or that Sow is just a nickname, except, maybe, for Mrs. Mason's comparing him, as shown
below, to a “spoiled sow” just before Sow states that “She called [him], a boy, 'Sow' and 'Sow' stayed with [him]
among everybody” (45, my emphasis): if Mrs Mason did nickname Christy's son Sow, the discussion to which this
note is related is partly invalidated. Yet, I find this point undecidable, because the pronoun “she,” in the citation that
has just been made, could refer both to Faith and to Mrs. Mason, in my opinion. The family name, “Mason,” either
translates Sow's desire to affiliate himself to his adoptive “family,” or corresponds, as for Whitechapel, to the
tradition of naming slaves after their masters, although this is unlikely, since Mr. Mason does not want him to bear
his name. Also, as far as the name “Christy” is concerned, Sow might choose to replace his name by that of his
father, because it precisely is one of the only things that relates Sow to Christy, apart from his red hair. Finally, and
as explained above, the name Faith wants to give to Sow is not specified, although Sow fancies she told Mrs. Mason
the name he should be given (43). Nickname or not, “Sow” is the name that “stay[s]” in the novel (45), and would
have allowed Ward to differentiate Christy from his son more easily in her discussion. The present study will keep
on calling Christy's son Sow, so as to differentiate him from Christy, and because of the novel's metaphorical riffs on
the porcine and on the seed that are used to designate Sow and his parents, as shown below. […]
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once consigned on paper, according to Derrida and Plato (96). As far as his being “sour-faced” is
concerned,208 it also presents Sow's body as textual, since it draws a common point between him and
Whitechapel and is indicative of the fact that Sow might have somatised or transcribed his story (or
History for that matter) and the emotions it caused onto his body: he bears the weight of a racist
past that orphaned him, and the color of his skin symbolizes the black and white union of Christy
and Faith. Just before he deals with his own name and his personality in the passage quoted above,
Sow talks, at the end of the preceding stanza, not about his mother but about Mrs. Mason's bad
opinion of him, and it might therefore be more likely for Mrs. Mason 209 to have named him Sow:
“Mrs Mason said it to me once in anger, how she would be better off with [Faith] instead of me,
how / [Faith's] death was a waste for this spoiled sow” (45, my emphasis). However, in her
complaint about her loss of Faith (no equivocation intended), Mrs Mason might both designate a
porcine animal and a bastardized seed(ing) when she uses the word “sow.” Conversely, when
Christy finally finds Faith's grave at the Masons', “He castigates himself for planting the seed / that
cost Faith her life” (140, my emphasis). 210 In this sense, Sow's name itself does not only designate
the animal but the hybridized seed born from the fecundation of his black mother and white father's
gametes. The name, being polysemous, is thus a hybrid signifier designating a signified – Sow –
viewed as hybrid, all the more so since “sow” is used as a name while it actually is a verb the
metaphorical use of which mainly serves to introduce feelings or ideas causing trouble, that is, the
problems Christy and Mrs Mason blame on Sow. Just as Whitechapel found himself helpless with
his adopted son, Chapel, because he was of mixed-race and hence, in Whitechapel's view, half the
208The adjective “sour” also evokes bitterness, bile, and, by (metaphorical) extension, anger. In conjunction with Sow's
morose, or dark mood, this attribute contributes to a more precise vision of Sow as melancholic, prone to the effects
of “black bile” which, when constant, according to Aristotle, is the factor of genius in men (Aristotle 83).
Conversely, in Bloodlines, racism, the source of Sow's melancholy, is also the source of his supernatural powers. For
more information on this subject, see chapter V.
209Of course, “Mason” is a loaded signifier, and its meaning is explored below.
210[…] “Castigation” and “castration” share the same Latin root castus, “cut off, separated; pure.” In this sense, Sow's
self-punishment might correspond to a desire for self-castration in order to prevent his (his)story, initiated by his
father's seed (that became part of Sow), from repeating itself genealogically. In this sense, Sow's words evoke a
desire to cut slavery, miscegenation, and, in general, (the legacy of) slavery off. This wish for metaphorical
castration is in keeping with D'Aguiar's stated desire – also cited by Ward who, however, does not address the
castigation/castration theme – to “kill slavery off” (Ward 169; D'Aguiar 1996b, 125). […]
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master of his destiny, belonging to a category of trouble-making slaves (D'Aguiar 1995, 27), Sow is
seen and considers himself as “master, / slave and overseer bringing disaster” (152), “wrong-doer
and wronged” (153).211 In this perspective, the last lines of the novel's first stanza, where Sow
introduces himself, take on their full sense:
I could see clearly the moment I popped out
how my life would be because I had two seeds
between my legs and a pointer due South.
I must mention my two seeds brown;
in this time brown did not stick around. (D'Aguiar 2000, 1)
Sow's genitalia, the means of transmission of his genus, is marked by the conditions of his birth and
creation in the Southern, pro-slavery states of America, as a mixed-race child defying the black and
white categories on which the society he grows up in is based with his in-between shade. Like
Chapel, Sow is the category that defies (Southern) categorizations. Unlike Chapel, his adoptive
“parents,” the Masons', are slavers. Mr Mason, like Whitechapel, is quite helpless face to Sow's
hybridity, as he explains to the child: “you're nobody, neither black nor white! / You occupy a noman's-land! […] We don't quite / know what to do with you, so nothing's done!” (48). As for Mrs
Mason, she, like Mintah at the end of Feeding the Ghosts, is old, with failing sight and in need of
someone to help her to walk and to read to her. As a consequence, she teaches Sow how to “write
and read,” which “save[s him] from a life of slave labour; / [He]'d be freed when she went to her
Saviour.” (46). In other words, Sow is appointed to a position corresponding to his hybrid status: he
is a “reed” (46) that reads to Mrs Mason, and he is not a slave but still Mr Mason's property: Sow is
the bastard orphan par excellence, and all the more so since he reads and writes, and has a strong
relation to written speech, an orphan in itself, but finally privileges the logos to writing, as he
“spout[s] / poetry from memory – the best suitcase / [He] ever packed” (154). He is a mixed-raced
adopted orphan, a free slave, and a writer who hypomnesically reminds readers of AfricanAmerican history through poetry he says he utters rather than writes, and anamnesically so: it is no
wonder that the segregated bar in which he is stabbed to death, at the end of the novel, is called
211[…] Ward offer a similar interpretation of this passage (Ward 171). […]
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“Forget Me Not” (157). The form in which D'Aguiar lets Sow express himself in the novel, written
poetry, is thus in keeping with the protagonist's hybridity too, and may be understood as one of the
reasons why Bloodlines was written in verse.
But Sow's hybridity also appears to be localizable, to some extent, in the descriptions he
makes of his parents at different stages in the novel, and this in terms other than racial ones. Hence,
once Sow's status is understood, his genealogy can be traced back again and understood more
thoroughly as one re-reads. For instance, Faith undergoes a fit of madness at a moment when she is
away from Christy, and she has to be mastered by the overseer and slaves:
An overseer breezed in, glanced and issued
orders for her to be restrained; two men
tried to grab her and failed, then four used
ropes to bring her down, a slave like them,
a young woman, and they trussed
her up like a pig that had escaped its pen.
[…] She lay there in her own piss and vomit,
orphaned by her trouble, in this sense:
not a single relative wanted to admit
that they were related to a nuisance (D'Aguiar 2000, 15-6).
The scene and the description of Faith as a “pig in a pen” is reminiscent of Harlem Renaissance
poet Claude McKay's famous poem “If we must die,” the two opening lines of which are “If we
must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.”212 Apart from this
potential intertextual reference, the fact that Faith is penned – written about and restrained – as a pig
dehumanizes her into a hybridized being as much as her son, named Sow. Like her son again, Faith
is described as an orphan, and not because she is a slave, but because she has been mistreated by her
slave-relatives, who helped the overseer and denied kinship with the “nuisance” she was to slavers,
212http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/if-we-must-die (August 5, 2014), my emphasis. This description is also
reminiscent of Ernest J. Gaines' novel A Lesson Before Dying in which Jefferson, a young African-American, is
sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. During his trial, the defense attorney argues against the death
penalty by saying: “What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put
a hog in the electric chair as this” (Gaines 8, italics mine). Shocked by this comparison between him and a porcine
animal, Jefferson, “penned” in his prison cell to await death, repeatedly acts as a hog in front of relatives who visit
him, until Grant, a local teacher, convinces him to refuse being categorized as anything but a man, and face death as
such, for it would correspond to a heroic way of resisting injustice and racism. Hence, the porcine reference may
correspond to a sign through which Bloodlines and A Lesson Before Dying, two contemporary novels, inscribe
themselves within the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, and of its use of literature as a means to oppose racism in
its various guises.
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thus pointing her out as a bad pharmakon.213 As for Christy, he is related to his son through the
lexical field of the seed, as seen above (140) and, again, through his behavior with Faith as Sow
describes it, in relation to day and night, and the colors usually related to these times of day: “Her /
days are his and nights she hides from him. / He is white and black, stranger and kin” (150).
Although he is white, Christy, like his son, is described as a man of “mixed-race,” with night and
day as his two constitutive geni. But it actually is a religious intertext that mostly relates Sow to his
father.
After their separation, Christy spends all of his free time looking for Faith and Sow, finding
Faith's grave but never finding Sow, although “He criss-crosses four time zones / in search of
[him]” (147) before dying below the oak tree with the tangled roots where he once was with Faith,
213[…] Again, I am aware that readers attentive to gender issues may understandably be shocked by this passage, by
the fact that Faith fell in love with a man who raped her, and by my not discussing these features of Bloodlines here.
However, the problem of the rape scene has already been dealt with in Chapter I, and it is why the issue has not been
brought up again so far. Yet, this scene must be returned to now, in relation to Ward's lengthy discussion of it in her
book. Ward mentions Bruce King's pejorative review of the book, citing the following passage: “We are to believe
that a black slave raped at knifepoint by a lusty young white man will fall in love with him and he with her. It seems
more like Sade than the romantic tale that follows” (King 2001 qtd. In Ward 167). The first sentence, in this citation,
is hyperbolic, as D'Aguiar knows well that for a woman to fall in love with her rapist is highly unlikely, and does not
require that readers believe that any slave woman would fall in love with her master-rapist. The narrative voice
states: “Don't ask me how the worst moment she knew / switched on the best thing life can give to you” (D'Aguiar
2000, 6), and suggests, through Sow's narrative voice, that the author knew he would not easily obtain his readers'
“willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge 1817), which leads to King's definition of Bloodlines as a romantic tale
in which the sadistic rape scene is a jarring element: considering how much Wordsworth, who can be considered
here as the founder of romanticism, seemed inclined to describing grieving women in his poems (Betty Foy in “The
Idiot Boy,” Martha Ray in “The Thorn,” “The Mad Mother,” or “Ruth”), maybe describing sadism and romanticism
as opposed entities is a little dicey (see Pinch 1988). As a first interpretation of the rape scene, Ward clearly explains
that she finds the emergence of love unconvincing, and warns that D'Aguiar risks corroborating the “myth that
women essentially enjoy the masochism of violent relationships” and that “black women are sexually depraved”
(Ward 166-7), and Ward reinforces her argument by saying that Christy actually “dreams of [Faith] 'in an orgy
instead of her trials'” (Ward 166, D'Aguiar 2000, 73, italics mine). However, Ward is forcing D'Aguiar's text to fit
with her thought, for Christy actually has nightmares, not dreams, and it terrifies, rather than excite him, to imagine
Faith enjoying the gang rape (D'Aguiar 2000, 73). Hence, the gender implication might not concern Christy's
stereotypification of black women as sexual fiends, but that Christy patriarchally wants Faith to be his and only his
(like a slave, in sum). Finally, Ward contends that the rape scene serves a threefold purpose: (1) showing that
misogyny was a given of slavery, (2) describing the phantasms about and abuses of black women as a legacy of
slavery, (3) questioning the transformative and healing qualities of interracial love as a a means to overcome the past
of slavery (Ward 169-70). Although reservations have already been formulated, in a previous note, about the third
point, Ward's suggestion of this threefold purpose, by contrast with other critiques, must be saluted, because it tries
to come to terms with a very unpalatable issue, rather than dismissing it apodictically, which is a far easier thing to
do. Again, and as discussed in Chapter I, Gilroy's discussion of the “Hegelian impasse” (Gilroy 62) and Levinas'
description of ethics in relation to the face, might provide alternative, plausible interpretations to the rape scene.
Another tentative discussion of the scene, in Chapter V, will discuss that moment of the action as an almost
supernatural instant where hate turns to love – threatening to overstep the limits of a willing suspension of disbelief
– an instant the nature of which coheres with the Orphic, magic(al) realist quality of the novel and its historical
inversions and anachronisms – presenting as a more or less distant, Arcadic past, something that can only be
achieved in a desirable future (Bakhtin 1978, 464; Glissant 1989, 63-4). […]
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and where his son will find his grave before going on to “criss-cross four time zones looking / for
faults to do with race” in turn (152). In this sense, Sow and his Father spend their late life
wandering in the wilderness, like Moses and Jesus are said to have done, or like Orpheus in Thrace,
maybe getting Oedipus' or Simon Lee's swollen ankles on the way. Sow, having never met his
father, even tries to imagine him at some point: “If he wanted me he ranked / highly, he qualified, I
licensed him: Holy Father incapable of sin” (49). Christy, or “Christ,” is thus defined as the Holy
Father, or God of Christianity, while, according to his name, he should be the son. This apparent
contradiction actually makes sense when read in a metaphorical rather than Christian perspective in
that, as Derrida explains, the figure of the father has traditionally come, mainly in Western
philosophy, to represent value, origin, and the source of the logos, while that of the child, as tokos,
embodies the offspring, the fruit of what is sewn, or the interest of a capital (Derrida 1972, 101). In
keeping with such representations, Sow, the son, evaluates his father as God, or the origin of
creation, as much as a wandering Johnny Appleseed who has sewn him. However, he did not inherit
mastery of the logos from his biological parents, nor could he return to his parents their
“investment” in love: it is Mrs Mason who, seeing Sow as the son of a “property” she invested in,
that is, Faith, gains “interest” (D'Aguiar 2000, 39). The economy of the family is taken over by that
of slavery, genealogy is erased by orphanhood and constitutes the problem Sow unsuccessfully tries
to solve throughout the novel, throughout his life, keeping the haunting story of his parents in mind.
b. Haunted Heads
But Sow is not the only one to be haunted by stories of racial hatred. In fact, Tom and Stella,
the characters who try to help Christy and Faith to reach the Free States via the Underground
Railroad, are characters who occupy and narrate a significant part of the novel, and prove to have
been traumatized by racial hatred and its consequences as well. Tom is the man who finds Christy
and Faith at the crossroads, hides them in his cart, puts them up in Stella's house, and embarks on a
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row-boat with them on a journey down river where they are ambushed, the lovers captured, and
where Tom almost drowns but manages to reach the bank. More than that, Tom is a former slave
who fled from his plantation and was found on the road by Stella, who was already a cart-driver on
the Underground Railroad (87). Tom and Stella fell in love soon after and decided to share the same
mission of leading runaway slaves to the North. 214 Stella once was a slave too, and it is a
traumatizing memory from slavery that led her to work against it:
Stella remembered the moment she died
as a woman and person and the shell
of the rest of her days took over her insides.
She was nine or ten, she wasn't sure, you couldn't tell,
carrying a message for her master with pride
but with a child's bearing and on a child's stroll
At the crossroads she saw a man in a cage
hoisted from a tree, barely a man's age;
a battalion of flies; a mass of bones and flesh; (D'Aguiar 2000, 99)
What Stella remembers from her childhood as a slave is the corpse of a fugitive slave who was
lynched to death. Stella is thus depicted as bearing a message for her master, just as the logos is the
messenger of its father. As an orphan-slave, she was sent to bear the message – or the speech
orphaned on paper – of the plantation's patriarchal figure, but at the sight of a dead slave, she was so
shocked that she ran back to the plantation without having carried the message: the father-master
should have stood on behalf of his speech. Stella's saying that she “died” corresponds to this
moment when she was appointed to act as the transmitter of a moribund logos, and the sight and
smell of the dead slave shocked her so much that she spent days washing herself and refusing to eat:
she had to be force-fed and nursed with “sleep medicine,” a pharmakon, but it led her to dream the
traumatizing moment again: “It made her sleep but her eyes refused to close; / still seeing the cage
with that man in no clothes” (100). Her nightmares operate as hypomnesic reminders of a horrible
past that is to induce her, like Mintah, to integrate the Underground Railroad. On this road, Stella
meets and rescues Tom, who finally helps her to hide runaways, including Faith and Christy (24-5).
214[…] Ward argues that “the unsteadiness of [Christy and Faith's interracial] relationship is in direct comparison with
that of Tom and Stella, who are portrayed as starting off on a more even level; both are ex-slaves and able to find
happiness, despite hardship” (Ward 170). […]
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When Tom does not come back from his journey down river with Christy and Faith, Stella goes in
search of him at night to find him lying naked and numb on the muddy bank. This time, she is not
the one being nursed, but acts as a pharmakos and nurses Tom (92) as much as she helps him to get
over the traumatizing loss of Christy and Faith. Tom is so impressed by Stella's courage and
kindness that he describes her as follows:
as bees get on with business and sing
despite the poison in their tail that's a crutch
and a weapon, since it kills them if they sting:
for love to survive in this woman this long,
she must have laboured all her life with a song. (89)
Bees are pharmakaï because of their being both pleasant when they sing and harmful when they
sting. But the life they live is a pharmakon too in that their safety resides in a weapon that causes
their death when used. Stella is then too described as a good pharmakos-bee (she nursed Tom) who
gets on in life despite memory's hurt by spending her time singing, not any tune, but “field ditt[ies]”
(131), slavery's strains that Sanders Junior strains to remember in The Longest Memory. Finally, the
fact that Stella saved Tom at night twice, and that she is related to music through her singing
routine, might also provide a plausible interpretation of her name as a reference to the famous jazz
standard “Stella by Starlight,” in addition to the obvious fact that her name relates her to night and
stars. Moreover, the narrative voice explains that Stella did not see Tom until she almost walked on
him, when she found him on the bank, because she had “her face turned more / to the stars than
anything under her nose” (92), and did not even hear Tom's “heaven-sent chords” or cries for help,
hoping to see “Her face outlined by shifting stars” (96).
Apart from sweet tunes and despite hurtful memories, Tom and Stella also have more
pleasant thoughts after the American Civil War, when they (day)dream about Africa and their
ancestry. For instance, in a meditative chapter named “Peace,” coming just after the one named
“War” in which Stella and Tom are forced into hiding during the war, Stella thinks about her
genealogy as she and Tom confront their imagined visions of Africa:
She wonders when she stopped being African
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in this land. Born here to a mother whose
mother came from Africa, were not regions
of her, however remote, fashioned after those
strange parts? (125)
Like Whitechapel's great grand-daughter, Stella thinks about her African forebears and wonders if
some of their African selves have been genealogically transmitted to her. This thought process is
very important because tracing her family tree would help her locate individual roots outside
slavery: “In old age she would choose / to be African rather than the nothing / that a slave is. Africa
is something” (125). And as she goes on thinking of Africa, she pictures herself in a hut where she
lives with Tom – or is it (Uncle) Tom's cabin? – and stores empty calabashes she apparently talks to:
“This is Stella with her phantom lineage; / the flesh and blood she dreams she'll meet” (133). The
image of the phantom, combined with that of Stella shelving calabashes as relatives are reminiscent
of Mintah's “hold,” where she stores the sculpted figures of her transatlantic companions. Moreover,
Africa also is a thing Mintah dreams about in Feeding the Ghosts, mostly in relation to her father,
making her dreams genealogical explorations of her African past. Conversely, Stella and Tom hope
that the hypomnesic qualities of dreams might help them “bring down the ghost of Africa from
dreams, down through history, /and up up up through flesh and blood stories” (127) into far
reaching bloodlines.
But Stella is not the only character to share common points with Mintah. As said above, old
Mrs Mason, like Mintah at the end of her life, cannot write anymore. To the same extent, Christy
uses his hands so much as an indentured boxer that he cannot write anymore either:
His hammer hands – always healing – are a
boxer's dream, hard and quick and numb,
but he can't straighten his fingers or draw
or write since he can no longer hold a pen.
His brain is numb. He sleeps with his eyes open. (64)
Christy's hands, “always healing,” do not need any pharmakon, or are attentively nursed by the man
who spent all of his money to buy him for a five-year term as an indentured boxer for his traveling
fair (72), but they can no longer produce any textual pharmaka: his boxer's hands, unfortunately,
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cannot even write a “punch-line.” Moreover, the numbness that is good for his boxer's hands is also
attributed to his brain, then pejoratively so – attributing the ambivalence of the pharmakon to
numbness itself – in that the repeated shocks of fighting have deadened his senses. But despite his
being unable to act as a pharmakos through writing, Christy considers his fists as pharmaka that act
on his adversaries' bodies. In fact, when he trains, he “farm[s] /muscles pounding a bag until the
shape / of that bag for a body is a death-charm” (74, my emphasis): his fists can no longer produce
a moribund logos, but they may surely function as philters of death, as the epic-fight he asks to have
against the six men that captured him and Faith before being taken away to the trading fair show in
the preceding pages (64-72). Christy actually does his training thinking of that fight, sending “the
ghosts of six men into oblivion” (74) before going to bed to repeatedly dream of his separation from
Faith. This tragic moment of his life haunts him to the point of becoming an obsession, an addiction
to a past that dictates his present behavior, just as Mintah's terrible memories of the Zong lead her to
spend her time remembering her companions, sculpting their figures and planting one tree for each
of them. Conversely,
Christy and Mrs Mason plant tulips
around Faith's grave: one for each hour
Christy and Faith lay in love's tight grip:
a puzzling, grand total of ninety-four. (142)
Mintah's cathartic sculpting, writing, and gardening find their heterozygous twins in Christy's
boxing and memorial flowers, and suggest that Mintah, not content with being the muse of Feeding
the Ghosts, also haunts the making of Bloodlines. And muses are what Sow, as a narrator-poet,
invokes or refers to several times in the novel: after visiting the tomb of his father, he hopes for a
time when inter-ethnic love would not be opposed by hate but “sanctioned by the muse of love”
(149). More strikingly, Sow exhorts an outside force to act when Christy and Faith are alone and
helpless in the storm, at the crossroads: “Fortune lend a hand. Intervene for me. / They are as low as
you can get, two youths / against the times; two shoots, no, three, [...]” (19). This passage tells the
story of Sow's parents, and Sow is supposed to be its narrator: its interest resides in the tension at
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the core of its narration. Specifically, either another narrator (the poet? a poetic persona?) is taking
over Sow's voice unannounced, or Sow is calling on fortune to intercede in an event that has already
happened, as if he could alter the past. And Fortune does intercede in the form of Tom. Hence, Sow
might be acting as a narrative trickster, knowing what is going to happen and pretending not to, or
he, on top of his immortality, can influence the past to some extent, which draws attention to his
supernatural qualities, powers that will be addressed in the following chapter. But before that, an
array of textual forms, embedded in the plot Sow partly weaves, are represented in the novel,
sometimes as pharmaka, and remain to be dealt with.
c. Special Scrolls
Throughout this chapter, it has been said time and again – this repetition is not
unacknowledged – that written speech could act as a hypomnesic pharmakon, and novels like The
Longest Memory or Feeding the Ghosts have showed – through their analysis here – that Fred
D'Aguiar often presents writing as such, be it implicitly and intuitively or not. Bloodlines is no
exception to the rule: various embedded textual forms appear more or less strikingly as one reads,
and their role always seems to have a connection to memory. For instance, it has been said that the
segregated bar where Sow is mortally stabbed is called “Forget Me Not” (157). Such a signboard, in
Bloodlines, of course carries a double-voiced message. Sow's 139 years of life experience and his
task to rid the world of slavery and racism gives him a historical awareness that is unlikely to let
him forget anything, all the more so since he cultivates his anamnesis by reciting poetry. In this
sense, the name of the bar Sow visits sounds quite ironic. But the message is also one that Sow
might cryptically and metatextually be sending to readers as an injunction not to forget him, or
rather, what he represents, that is, more than a century of African-American history. Finally, “Forget
Me Not” is highly self-reflexive, in that it is writing advertising itself as a reminder, that is, writing
advertising itself as writing, since written speech is intrinsically hypomnesic. Just before going to
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that bar, Sow had spent a night in jail for washing himself at a stand-pipe reserved for white people:
“My crime? I only / failed to read the sign, Whites Only” (156). This is darkly ironic again, in that
Sow says he “fails” to read a reminder of segregation, while he has spent a life being reminded of
racism, which he struggles against, and he might therefore not have respected the sign if he had read
it anyway. Another sign appears at the beginning of the novel, explaining that sleep is relief from a
slave-master's oppression, when slaves enjoy
the nightly release
offered by dreams when he becomes the ants
under our feet, he eats crumbs from our feast.
'Welcome to Slavery,' the sunrise would shout
before the light of that dream was out. (5)
While such dreams re-arrange the slave's past into a potent reversal, reality, instead of the dream,
becomes the cruel hypomnesic reminder of the slave's condition.
Apart from these signs, also brought to evidence is how legal texts such as the law and the
Bible – Scripture, with its commandments, is a law for Christians too – were reminders to Christy
and Faith that public opinion and legal discourses in the South would consider their love as illegal:
“Faith and Christy reached beyond their skin. / The law said no; the church – their love's a sin” (38).
But Christy and Faith are indifferent to these “laws” by which they will not abide, because their
legality lies in the legacy of racism and slavery and in a segregated reading of sacred texts, which
Faith and Christy cannot support. Hence, when Christy's “Father reads him the riot act” and tells
him to “Stay away from those niggers, they're dirty” (16), Christy opposes him and gets banished,
with Faith, from the plantation. The fact that Christy's “Father” bears a capital F is reminiscent of
how names and pronouns designating divine and/or clerical characters are always capitalized in
Christian texts, and confirms that Christy and Faith's banishment from the plantation is being
compared to Adam and Eve's being banished from Eden, despite, again, the problematic nature of
describing a plantation as paradise.215 However, the Father-God-patriarch of the plantation does not
215Arguably, the plantation may have been a paradise to the extent of its being the place where Christy and Faith fell in
love. Their expulsion from the plantation leads to their being violently separated, and to their subsequent suffering
and death. However, like the snake in Eden, evil, or slavery, had been there all along in the story, from the plantation
on.
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rely on the laws of Scripture, but on Southern law to support his statement that Christy should not
befriend Faith. In this sense, he uses obscurantism to punish Faith and Christy for having eaten the
inter-ethnic fruit of knowledge and is not a forgiving and enlightening “Father,” but one who
bastardizes the truth – “they're dirty” – for his own sake as a slaver in a false Eden where
(color-)blindness is an unfortunate cause of banishment. Such judgments and punishments from
slavers, segregationists and white-supremacists function, both in Bloodlines and in real history, as
precedents generating a history of racial hatred, which Fred D'Aguiar morbidly registers as “shelves
of human spines in the dark” (121). In this perspective, it is no wonder that the American Civil War,
which, roughly speaking, opposed slavers to abolitionists, is described in the novel as a period when
“Sun and moon kept journals, / building a library of dead name-tags” (108), and such
historiographical necrology, Bloodlines argues both at its beginning and end, must not and cannot
be forgotten. In fact, in the first chapter, just before narrating the rape scene between Christy and
Faith, the narrator meta-textually addresses readers to tell them that such events have “happened /
countless times, will happen countless more. / Let the record show, for too few are penned” (6). At
the end of the novel, the lesson Sow draws from his quest is quite similar: “you can't side-step or
throw out history; / and the past is present in future stories” (152). In both passages, a temporal
syncretism operates where past stories are repeated in writing in the reader's present, and such a
present also consists in both the narrator and the reader's future, where remembering history might
(have) help(ed) to avoid the perpetuation of a genealogy, and hence of a historiography of racial
prejudices.
In this sense, Bloodlines, as a hypomnesic text, works against historical oblivion. And
besides its direct address to readers on this issue, the novel also fights forgetful textuality in the
form of water, as in Feeding the Ghosts. As seen above, when Tom, Christy and Faith are ambushed
on their journey down river, Tom almost drowns and recounts his experience:
I somersaulted under water, immersed
myself in the element that's my sign,
and should have died then and there, but first,
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so I kept telling my water-numbed mind,
I had to save that couple from the curse
of race in our colour-warped time;
take them above the thirty ninth- parallel
to a safe place far from the race peril. (80)
Tom struggles against the element corresponding to his sign which, again, certainly corresponds to
baptism, requiring immersion in water. He thus struggles against an element that, through the risk of
drowning, gives baptism a bad name here, just as racist readings of religion do. And slavery is the
reason why Tom wants to resist deadly water, in that he wants to lead Christy and Faith above the
39th parallel, which certainly is a reference to the Mason-Dixon line that separated the South (Dixie)
from the Free States, although its parallel actually was the 36 th. This line, another American
bloodline, is the boundary that is to be crossed for Christy and Faith to be safe, “far from the race
peril” (my emphasis), the frontier below which the crossing of ethnic boundaries is perilous.216
Water works against Tom's mission, and hence for the perpetuation of life in a world of racial hatred
for Christy and Faith. Besides, water, threatening Tom with death by drowning, also works against
the memory one could have kept of Tom as one of these historical characters who risked their lives
working on the Underground Railroad, since no sepulchral trace of him could remain in this fluid
milieu. In this sense, water, as in Feeding the Ghosts, works against historical memory, and the river
in which Tom almost drowns, as shown above, is actually described as such when the trio sails on
its ripples:
The river bared its back to the keel
making its incision. The river knew,
as the keel made its cut, that it would heal,
heal without a scar, heal and renew,
cure and remember how wood feels
hard as stone, and how stone is reduced
by water to dust, then less than dust;
that's why water turns the other cheek for us. (31)
216Again, peril and experience both are etymologically related to the crossing of boundaries. Also, the fact that Sow's
adoptive parents are slavers named “Mason” might find its origin in the Mason-Dixon line, unless Mrs Mason's
religiously motivated good actions, taking care of Sow, educating him, and freeing him are supposed to echo the
alleged ethics of free-masonry. Finally, one cannot avoid reading “Ma” and “Son,” in “Ma-son,” and it is through a
failure to go beyond the Mason-Dixon line that a “Ma” (Faith) and her “Son” (Sow) were separated. The Mason
household is the last place where “Ma” and “son” were together, the place of their parting, where the maternal role
is, then, taken up by Mrs Ma-son for Sow.
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The river, personified into a knowing being whose back is being cut or written upon by the boat, is
its own pharmakon, in that it heals itself, erasing every trace of Tom, Christy and Faith's passage,
and only remembers its own ability to dissolve elements into oblivion. The passage – and potential
passing – of the three characters is inconsequential to the river, which does not care, or register, and
hence finds it easy to apply the Christian principle of turning the other cheek. Water and Scripture
are thus once again related in a passage where some readings of both could either harm the
characters or, at least, their passage into posterity, unless, as Fred D'Aguiar does in Feeding the
Ghosts, someone knows about water and converts it into a hypomnesic text to non-initiated readers.
And Tom, with his knowledge about water, actually does this as he daydreams about Africa:
An African sea-bed is not littered with bones
But a bright alphabet of scattered and jumbled
letters in yellow seaweed and yellow sponges,
too porous to be read when reassembled,
yellowed by sea, erased by time and honed
in current, turning for fish until it crumbles
into yellow sand, adding to the hieroglyphics
of coral a new maths, biology and physics. (123)
This passage traces the genealogy of an oceanic text thanks to the yellow color of sand and aquatic
vegetation. Through this elemental filiation, Tom shows that the hyeroglyphics – African texts from
the past – can be deciphered when made still as silt and coral at the bottom of an abyss. In this
sense, the waters of the sea function as a pharmakos, author of its historically loaded depths, “too
porous to be read” unless readers are trained to rehabilitate water as a hypomnesic medium, and
always preferable to an indistinguishable mass of flesh and bones the bloodlines of which water
dissolved.
Thus, Bloodlines is verse that deals with color-lines and boundaries of racial hate,
geographically materialized by the American North and South separated by such scars as the
Ma(/)son-Dixon line. But its texture, its plot, uses hope to weave them into inter-ethnic plaits of
love at the origin of an open-minded genealogy epitomized by Sow, the novel's main orphan-
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narrator, who tries to vanquish the historical hurt of racist genealogies, where racism is both the
genus of slavery and its offspring, since slavery perpetuates and exacerbates racist prejudices as
racism's interest, as a tokos to its logos. Sow also reminds readers of the importance of
understanding and reading the problems of the past so as not to recreate them, even if it takes one to
decipher an ocean's pharmakon-like “jumbled alphabet.” As Fred D'Aguiar's fourth novel,
Bloodlines inter-textually affiliates itself to the preceding ones, such as Feeding the Ghosts and The
Longest Memory, both of which haunt Bloodlines as two of its seminal sources that come to weave
themselves with historical data, the Bible, and the works of romantic poets such as Wordsworth and
Byron into a different novel on the history of slavery. But as he immortalizes texts and fictionally
reminds readers of the past, Fred D'Aguiar also provides immortality to his main orphan character,
Sow, in the same way as he endows other orphans with powers verging on the supernatural in other
novels, and it is the Orphic character of these foundlings that is to constitute the core of the
following chapter.
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Chapter V: Orphic Orphans
Like a poem made from the sea,
Like a wave, I play for thee,
And even the desert sands know the feeling of love.
So let the praise fall with the dew
I'll make the mountains weep for you
Even the desert sands know the feeling of love.
(Keziah Jones, “All Praises.” Black Orpheus. 2003.)
Introduction: Orpheus in Retrospect
As shown above, Fred D'Aguiar is not only very familiar with Greek and Roman mythology,
but also with the European, American and Caribbean cultures and literary canons, to the extent of
being able to trace descriptions of Orpheus in them, as the aforementioned composition of the
library from which Chapel draws, in The Longest Memory, shows (D'Aguiar 1994, 96-7). As a
consequence, if Orphism and its implications are to be studied in D'Aguiar's novels, it is necessary
to start by tracing a broad history of representations of Orpheus in these canons and cultures, in
order to better situate D'Aguiar's work in them, and to fully grasp the often Orphic quality of his
novels. The myth of Orpheus proves to owe its longevity to a millennial tradition of artistic and
philosophical interpretations and re-presentations that is as rich as it is diversified, since versions of
the myth started to differ with Ovid and Virgil and went on being revised to the present, across
many cultures from Europe and, arguably, Asia, Africa and the Americas (Gros Louis 1967, 245;
Belmont 60).
A.
The ancient Roman versions of the myth of Orpheus privileged in this study are drawn from
Ovid's Metamorphoses (x 1-111, xi 1-84) and Virgil's Georgics (iv 453-527). The myth tells the
story of its eponymous character, the son of the god Apollo and the nymph Calliope, who is
endowed with supernatural musical abilities, as he can, with his song and music, induce inanimate
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elements – trees, water, stones – to move, and animals to temper their bestial instincts and gather
around him to listen to his song. His music also allows him to seduce the nymph Eurydice, with
whom he lives happily until her untimely death, when she is bitten by a snake. Refusing the death of
his lover, Orpheus, thanks to his skills as a bard, crosses the rivers surrounding the underworld, or
Hades – the place of the afterlife in Greek and Roman mythologies – tames the three-headed
Cerberus guarding its doors, and persuades Pluto and Persephone to restore Eurydice back to him.
Orpheus' success stops there, for, having sung Eurydice back to him, he still has to lead her out of
Hades and into the realm of the living: Pluto and Persephone allow him to do so under the specific
condition that he shall not look back until Eurydice and he are fully out of the underworld. Orpheus
cannot, however, resist the temptation of looking back, and subsequently loses Eurydice a second
time. As a result, he ends up wandering Thrace, an unwelcoming region of Greece, until he dies at
the hands of “female Bacchanals, devoutly mad” (Ovid xi 3) because neglected by him, who
literally tear him to pieces and throw his remains and lyre into the Hebrus river: his severed head, in
the stream, still sings, lamenting the loss of Eurydice, until it reaches the shores of the island of
Lesbos, while his specter is reunited with that of his defunct wife in Hades.
Although a “happy-ending” school, in the 1970s, used to contend that, in the original myth,
Orpheus successfully led Eurydice back to the world of the living, the classical versions of the myth
tell of Orpheus' failure. Conversely, John Heath, in his thorough scrutiny of pre-Christian versions
and interpretations of the myth in an article entitled “The Failure of Orpheus,” proves that Orpheus
is never found living happily once again with his revived Eurydice” (Heath 178). However, Heath
admits that successful versions of Orpheus appear with early Christianity and the assimilation of
Orpheus with Christ, which are to be dealt with below (194). Heath also points to many interesting
interpretations regarding the reasons for Orpheus' turning back, failure, and later death. The first
and most straightforward reading provided for Orpheus' failure, in Virgil and Ovid, is that he did not
only turn back to see if Eurydice was still there, but to look directly at divinity, thus breaking a
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traditional religious taboo, for which he was punished accordingly (193). 217 The second
interpretation of Ovid and Virgil consists in reading the myth as an allegory of the impossibility of
overcoming death or of satisfying the melancholic desire of resurrecting the dead. The third, most
intricate, ancient interpretation given by Heath comes from Plato's Symposium (179b-180b), where
Phaedrus explains that Orpheus' music did seduce the gods into restoring Eurydice to the bard.
However, he explains that Orpheus' descent to the underworld was a scheme to avoid having to
commit suicide to be reunited with his lover. Hence, Pluto and Persephone punish Orpheus'
cowardice – he did not dare to kill himself to be reunited with Eurydice – by tricking him, “only”
restoring the specter of Eurydice, and temporarily so, since he did not pay a true lover's price,
suicide, to be lastingly reunited with his defunct wife (Heath 178). Then, his turning back would
answer to the narrative necessity of having Orpheus realize that only Eurydice's phantom was
restored to him, as he sees her vanish back into Hades. This interpretation thus assumes that Pluto
and Persephone knew from the start that Orpheus, hence a slightly ridiculed character, would not be
able to resist the temptation to look back. One reason for his dying at the hands of angry women
could then be that he was judged – by these women – not to have duly loved his wife. However, in
Ovid's version, it is made clear that Orpheus renounces sexual intercourse with women after the loss
of Eurydice, yet engages in erotic relationships with young men he entices with his music (166-7).
Thracian Bacchanals then kill Orpheus because he sexually neglects them and deprives them of the
erotic favors of other men, whom he has seduced.
Yet, as far as Ovid's version is concerned, Elizabeth Young reads the myth, including
Orpheus' death, in a deeper, allegorical way, in her remarkable article entitled “Inscribing Orpheus:
Ovid and the Creation of a Greco-Roman Corpus.” In this essay, Young contends that Ovid's
agenda, with the myth of Orpheus, is to serve “the bold ambition of creating an organic synthesis of
217This taboo is, of course, best illustrated by the myth of Medusa which, as seen above, D'Aguiar repeatedly revises in
his verse corpus (D'Aguiar 1985, 1; 1998, 73; 2009 86-7). Moreover, the story of the gorgon appears to be evoked at
the end of Ovid's version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, when a serpent threatens to eat Orpheus' severed
head until it is literally petrified by Apollo (Ovid xi 56-63, Young 2008, 1).
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the eras extending from Homeric Greece to contemporary Rome,” following the Augustan impulse
to absorb “an entire universe of applicable symbols” and fuse “two distinct cultures into a single
whole” (Young 2008, 2). So doing, Young places Ovid at the origins of the construct that is often
taken for granted today by the West as a foundational, homogenous “Greco-Roman” culture and
proves, again, that origin is always-already decomposable, and the cultural is, by definition, crosscultural (Derrida 1971, 72, Glissant 1990, 169). In order to flesh out this thesis, Young points to the
strategic transitional position of the myth of Orpheus, in book ten of the Metamorphoses, as a pivot
articulating the Greek part of Ovid's work with the Roman one of the Metamorphoses' last five
books: “Orpheus stands as this triumphal epic's Greco-Roman centerpiece, appearing at the point
where the epic begins its evolution out of the Greek past and into the Roman present” (5). In
addition to this politics of cultural integration, Ovid also uses the myth of Orpheus, who mourns
Eurydice in his song, even after his own death, in order to provide a triumphal, immortal
representation of elegiac poetry, “[Ovid's] signature genre” (6). In other words, “Ovid's account
poses Orpheus as an erotic Greek lyricist only to transform him into a Roman love elegist,” and thus
follow an Augustan purpose, while simultaneously promoting elegiac verse as the most powerful
poetic form – the only type of poetry that vanquishes death (7). The third, decisive step in Young's
essay consists in demonstrating that it is not only the elegy that Ovid is supporting, but written
elegy, by contrast with archaic Greek song: after his second loss of Eurydice, Orpheus' singing,
which was so powerful as to set natural elements in motion, is inaudible, and powerless, drowned
out by the shrieks of angry women attacking him. In this passage in Ovid's text, Young points to a
grammatical ambiguity, on which the author might have been capitalizing, through which the spear,
thrown by a female Bacchanal at Orpheus and wounding his mouth, and leaving a mark (nota,
which also means letter in Latin), can be viewed as a giant stylus, while Orpheus' mouth may
momentarily appear to be “sewn over with leaves” or gagged with primary writing material,
reducing Orpheus' song to the silence of written verse: “the soft wreathes of ivy twisted round, /
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Prevent a deep impression of the wound” (Ovid xi 13-4) as much as Orpheus' song from being
heard. In this sense, after death, it is on the leaves covering his muted, “bloodless lips” that
Orpheus' elegiac lament of Eurydice might come out, in written form (Young 2008, 17). This
textualization helps Ovid to fulfill his Augustan agenda, since “The Thracian women are here
presented as grotesque versions of a belated Roman audience who can't hear the voices of their
beloved Greeks and so must take recourse in a violent form of textual possession” (15-6). However,
as Young shows again, the myth's double-ending might subvert the potential for such a “textual
possession” to fulfill the Augustan purpose of cultural assimilation for, while Orpheus' specter,
reunited with Eurydice, bears no stigma of his decapitation, constituting an unusually seamless
reconstruction of his bodily shape in the underworld (Eurydice is still limping from the snakebite
when he joins her), his decapitated head and body-parts remain scattered across land and sea, even
when gathered into a text (20-1), instead of forming a coherent, albeit reconstructed, Greco-Roman
organic whole, or corpus.
But what Ovid also offers then, through the myth, and according to Socrates' thought in
Plato's Phaedrus again, is hypomnesic, textual access to an archaic Greek past (Orpheus' song) that
is no longer available as living memory or anamnesis in the oral tradition of his contemporaries. 218
More than that, Young actually argues that Ovid's rendition of the Orpheus story is a direct response
to the reception of writing that is illusatrated in the Phaedrus and the Republic, a reception that was
itself conditioned by the spread of Orphism at the time:
With the rise of Orphism, this archetypal singer became increasingly enmeshed in the dubious
enchantment of writing and books. His identity as the founder of this cult posed him as the author of
the Orphica, a collection of hymns, cosmologies, and scriptural commentaries that circulated widely
among the group's adherents. Orphism broke from the protocol of earlier Greek ritual to center upon
a textual corpus that circulated in books [like the fragments of Orpheus' mangled body]. […]
And Orphic books became, in turn, an object of attack for authors in the classical period unnerved by
their era's increased dependence on writing. Not surprisingly, Plato has something to say on the
218In this perspective, “remembering” has never been so literal, since Ovid's writing of the myth re-members, reassembles Orpheus' dis(re)membered body or corpus (of song) in written form: such a link between writing,
remembering and dismemberment is quite reminiscent of Chapel's above-studied transgressive acquisition of
literacy and poetic endeavors in The Longest Memory, ultimately resulting in the inscription of multiple wounds on
his back by the “mad” overseer, causing Chapel's death (D'Aguiar 1994, 26; Ward 147-9). Orpheus' dismemberment
is also reminiscent, in the present context, of Oroonoko's gruesome execution in Aphra Behn's short novel which, as
shown in Chapter I, might well draw from Ovid too (Behn 76-7).
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topic. (Young 2008, 10-11)
Be it in Republic (Plato b, 364e) or in the Phaedrus as a whole, again, Plato's reaction to writing
“suggests anxieties about the inability to control a message once consigned to paper” (Young 2008,
11), to which Ovid answers by re-inscribing, within his rendition of Orpheus' song, the myths of
Apollo and Hyacinthus and of Venus and Adonis, both of which consist, like the story of Orpheus,
in tales where characters lose their loved ones and commemorate them in songs that soon become
texts: in the myths, Apollo transforms Hyacinthus into a flower onto the petals of which he inscribes
his mourning laments, and Venus follows Apollo's example by creating the anemone from the blood
of Adonis, the windflower on which traces of her moans for the young man are inscribed. The myth
of Adonis gave way to the Adonis festival, “a Greek ritual in which women killed off fresh-sprouted
seedlings then mourned their demise in a reenactment of Venus’s lament for her young mortal
beloved” (18), in anticipation of the transformation that should follow – the impression of the
lament on the petals of the anemone. In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes the ritual of the Adonis
festival as a sterile simulation of Venus' lament and its relation to inscription (on the windflower) –
because of the killing of young flowers and the absence of metamorphosis – so as to compare it to
writing as a lifeless simulation of speech (Plato a, 276b). On the other hand, “four centuries later in
a decidedly literate world,” in his inscription of the Adonis myth in Orpheus' song, “Ovid takes
Plato's seminal figuration of fruitless seed and troubles it by making the seed grow. With the
blooming of a windflower from Adonis' wound, a literate author reclaims a derisive metaphor for
writing as an image of promise and beauty, offering a more sanguine version of sowing words in
ink” (19).
Thus, as a means to oppose Socrates' argument in the Phaedrus, Ovid uses the myth of
Adonis to support writing as a generative medium, in the same way as Fred D'Aguiar, as shown in
the preceding chapter, rehabilitates written poetry as a basis from which Chapel may anamnesically
create verse. Moreover, the idea that clods of blood function as seeds for a form of flowery writing
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in the myth of Adonis is also reminiscent of the fact that the narrator of Bloodlines (a story “written
in the blood of martyrs”)219 is called Sow (a name that is evocative of the sowing of seeds), and that
his poetic endeavor – he narrates the story in verse – consists in a mournful tale of slavery and
racial segregation, which broke his black and white parents apart. In other words, Sow's name and
his being the narrator of a story written in the blood of his inter-ethnic forebears are evocative of the
myth of Venus and Adonis which, because of its theme – grieving for lost love – and place in Ovid's
Metamorphoses, can also be considered an Orphic tale.220 Hence, D'Aguiar's apparently frequent
reliance on Ovid's Metamorphoses – already explored in his verse corpus in Chapter I – is actually
indicative of the fact that he, like Ovid, feels the need to rehabilitate writing as a generative form of
memory: while Ovid used written speech as the only memorial medium through which archaic
Greek culture could be recovered, D'Aguiar seems to use it (most of all in novels such as The
Longest Memory, Bloodlines, and Feeding the Ghosts, but also in his verse corpus, as shown above)
as an imaginative gateway to the past of slavery and beyond, back across the Atlantic to Africa, as
the (day)dreams of Whitechapel's great-granddaughter or of Tom and Stella show (D'Aguiar 1994,
123; 2000, 116-39), and in spite of Socrates' suspicions.
As far as Socrates is concerned, it is also interesting to note that Douglas J. Stewart, in his
study of “Socrates' Last Bath” in the Phaedo, suggests that, if Socrates was not a disciple of the
Orphic religion, he was at least very aware of it, and “made references to the Orphic ideas of
purification and release to convey [his] particular thesis on the function of philosophy” (Stewart
255). On the last day of his life, Socrates, like an initiated Orphikos, takes a purifying bath and
wishes to make a libation to the dead before drinking the poison/pharmakon (258). It is also in the
Phaedo that, quite exceptionally, Socrates writes books, “and the discussion of them leads to the
first argument for immortality, which is of course based on the Orphic wheel of birth” (258). This
argument for Socrates' Orphic initiation and authorial practices is in keeping with, and specifies,
219D'Aguiar 2000, 155, emphasis mine.
220The reflexion on Orphism in Bloodlines is prolonged in part one below.
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Derrida's description, in “Plato's Pharmacy,” of Socrates' relation to writing as pharmakon and of
his being condemned for being a pharmakos, a sorcerer (Derrida 1972, 67). However, if it is in the
Phaedo that Stewart sees Socrates making “references to the Orphic ideas of purification and
release to convey [his] particular thesis on the function of philosophy” (Stewart 255), such allusions
can arguably be found in Republic too, and not only when Socrates refers to the proliferation of
Orphic texts (Plato b, 364e), but also at the beginning of Book VII, in the allegory of the cave
(514a-520a). In that famous passage, Socrates represents philosophy as “this art of turning around”
(518 d, “αύτου τέχνη άν εν εϊη […] τίνα τρόπον”) of diverting one's gaze away from “that which is
coming into being” (518 c, “τοϋ όντος το φανότατον”), the shadows on the wall of the cavern,
which he also calls phantoms (516 a), to look at “that which is” (518 c), 221 the objects that produce
the shadows, that can be perceived by turning around and climbing out of the cave to the outside
world, at the surface of the earth and beyond (517 b). Once s/he has acquired wisdom through this
rotation and ascent, the founding philosopher, according to Socrates, is supposed to turn back again
– although Socrates regrets that s/he is allowed not to – go down into the cave, and share his/her
knowledge with those who remain there, so that their then common science might harmonize and
bind “the city together” (520 a). The philosopher does so at the risk of being accused of having had
his/her eyes “corrupted” and, under this charge, dying at the hands of those who have remained
ignorant (517 a). In Donner la Mort, Derrida also reads the allegory of the cave, along with the
Phaedo, through the writings of Jan Patockă, and reaches an interpretation of “this art of turning
around,” philosophy, as the act of mourning, of accepting the death of one way of knowing – the
underground, subaltern knowledge of orgiastic mysteries related to the Dionysian cult followed by
Bacchanals – to the privilege of Platonist wisdom (leading to political responsibility) (Derrida 1999,
26-9). Thus, in this sense, becoming a philosopher would require the experience of a secret, Orphic
rite of passage, of turning from the underworld to the surface. Conversely, accepting one's social,
221The Greek script is cited from the three volume Greek text of Plato's Republic edited by Jowett & Campbell (pp.
299-300), listed in this thesis' bibliography.
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political responsibility as a philosopher corresponds to turning around and plunging into the cave
again.
But then, in a Platonist perspective, why is Orpheus punished for turning around to look, if
turning back towards the cave is laudable as a gesture contributing to the common good? There are
two possible answers to this question: either, the mad Bacchanals allegorize an uninitiated/ignorant
crowd (Plato b, 517a), or Orpheus' intent, was not to go back into the cave to enlighten the others,
but to revert to the shadows of Hades, to the phantom of Eurydice, and hence to refuse to mourn
her, which amounts to a melancholic rejection of enlightenment on the part of the bard, if the myth
is read as a source-text for the allegory of the cave. As a consequence, it is not because of
enlightenment that Orpheus risks being killed: it is because of his rejection of philosophical
responsibility, and hence, his refusal to contribute to common wealth, that he risks death at the
hands of uneducated (cave)men or shrieking Bacchanals, who were denied his service as an initiate
from the moment he turned back towards the ghost of Eurydice. Then, a Platonist reading of the
myth of Orpheus through the allegory of the cave would, roughly speaking, leads to a dismissal of
the poet as a solipsistic egocentric in his cave-like planetarium, to the privilege of the philosopher
as an erotic altruist evolving in the city.
Yet, this categorization is less hermetic than it seems: as seen above, Ovid, as a poet,
attempted to fulfill an Augustan politico-cultural agenda by bridging, albeit in a cryptic way, a
cultural gap between archaic Greece and the Rome of his time, through the writing of the
Metamorphoses – which, in this light, comfort Shelley's famous argument, in “A Defence of
Poetry,” that poets do have social responsibilities as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”
(Shelley 1821). Moreover, if, according to Socrates, in Plato's Republic, philosophy is,
metaphorically speaking, the art of turning around, of version, or conversion – from the orgiastic to
the Platonist mourning of the orgiastic (Derrida 1999, 27) – philosophy can be translated as the art
of troping, of making allegories (of the cave) and metaphysical catachreses (Derrida 1971, 11), as
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well as, if Socrates' recommendations are followed, endorsing the (mnemonic and political)
responsibility and consequences of making such tropes: this art of metaphorization is, according to
Shelley again, a vital quality of poetry, and leads him to claim that “Plato was essentially a poet”
(Shelley 1821) for, in this sense, philosophy and poetry are not incompatible, but potential versions
of one another. Moreover, the argument that poetry and philosophy may be kin appears to be
supported by the fact that Socrates' presentation of philosophy as an Orphic act of mourning is
analogous to Ovid's aforementioned defense of Orphic elegy as the most potent poetic form.
It follows, in this light, that Fred D'Aguiar's philosophical and poetic use of imaginative
writing as an (elegiac) gateway to the past, may be designated as Orphic. However, in case the
preceding argument would not suffice, it may be added that such a designation does not translate
any euro-centric intention to posit Ovid, or Western mythology, as the single source, or origin, of
D'Aguiar's actually tropical works, although it is clear, as shown in Chapter I, that they regularly
draw from Ovid and Greek or Roman myths (D'Aguiar 1985, 1; 1993, 60-3; 1998, 73; 2009, 86-7).
The word Orphic only serves the purpose of the present argument insofar as it designates several
features of D'Aguiar's works at once and, at times, one of their intertexts. 222 This chapter's following
description of D'Aguiar's novels as Orphic does not necessarily entail D'Aguiar's indebtedness to
European mythology for the writings in question. Rather, it reminds one of the fact that the
mythological genealogies underlying every language cannot be circumvented, no matter how
desirable such avoidance can appear to be (Derrida 1971, 11). One cannot use English, or French
for that matter, and avoid using the word Orphic to designate what is Orphic (subterranean, fluvial,
222Again, D'Aguiar's novels The Longest Memory, Feeding the Ghosts, and Bloodlines deal with the lives of slaves
who died anonymously, and gives them posterity, while translating concern for the ways in which anamnesis and
writing intertwine. “At the Grave of the Unknown African,” a poem in which the poetic persona is having a
conversation with the “eponymous” character (his name was forgotten), deals with the same issues (D'Aguiar 1993,
21-2). Other major works by D'Aguiar that do not directly deal with slavery can also have this memorial poetic
function that Young perceives in the myth of Orpheus, when, for instance, these works serve as means to remember
the victims of such massacres as those of the Virginia tech Shootings, in “Elegies” (D'Aguiar 2009, 49-121), or of
the Jonestown Mass Suicide, in Bill of Rights and Children of Paradise (D'Aguiar 1998; 2014). Moreover,
D'Aguiar's “Elegies,” as shown in Chapter I, and among other things, really are Orphic, since they offer posterity to
a victim of the Virginia tech massacre by actually revising both the myth of Orpheus and Keats' “Ode on a Grecian
Urn,” a vase on which a man is painted, trying to catch his lover, like Orpheus Eurydice, and leading the poet to
reflect on the (limited) power of poetry to grant posterity (Keats 1820, D'Aguiar 2009, 87).
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musical, supernatural yet in communion with nature, elegiac or resurrectional, and prophetic)
according to that (these) language(s) and its (their) accompanying Greek and Roman mythological
backgrounds. It is thus legitimate, in the present anglophone framework, 223 and in addition to what
Ovid and Plato's philosophical and poetic considerations on the myth entail, to say that Fred
D'Aguiar's work is indeed Orphic.224
B.
This claim being taken as seriously posited, and apart from classical Roman readings of the
myth of Orpheus as an allegory of the hypomnesic power of poetry to bring back the specters of the
dead, later interpretations of the story are of interest and relevance as well in a study of D'Aguiar's
works. For instance, Monica Gale, in her article entitled “Poetry and the Backward Glance in
Virgil's Georgics and Aeneid,” mentions a traditionally medieval reading of the tale: that Orpheus
cannot resist turning back because he erotically desires Eurydice (334). This interpretation of the
myth as a representation of (reasonable) man giving in to passion is similar to a widespread,
Middle-Ages, Christian and moralizing take on Orpheus' story, corresponding to what Kenneth R.R.
Gros Louis calls a “textual tradition” of reading the myth along with Boethius' Consolation of
Philosophy, as can be found in the work of the anonymous, medieval author of Ovide Moralisé, and
in multiple texts by other commentators from that period, such as Henryson (Gros Louis 1966, 6523).225 Although this erotic reading does not necessarily serve Christian morals in D'Aguiar's works,
223Of this “anglophone” framework, it is necessary to recognize its institutional, and thus artificial, construction.
Where does English start and stop, when it is question of the Caribbean, of this region of the world? To what,
moreover, do disciplinary boundaries attest, when literature is at stake? In a doctoral program the injunction of
which is to respect so-called “sections” or boundaries determined, in France, to be precise, by the Conseil National
des Universités (hence, the Eleventh Section, formerly designated as “Langues et littératures anglo-saxonnes,” and
since 2014, “Etudes anglophones”), this doctoral dissertation is beholden to respect the “anglophone framework:”
the preceding remarks on the Orphic tradition ought, however, to warrant the necessity of crossing linguistic, and
cultural, barriers, to the extent that competence in different languages makes possible.
224Considering the analogous uses, by Ovid and D'Aguiar, of writing as an imaginative, Orphic gateway to the past,
D'Aguiar's Orphism will be called “vatic” whenever it corresponds to Ovid's anamnesic relation to the myth, vates
being the Latin nickname – meaning both poet and prophet – given by the Roman mythographer to Orpheus in the
Metamorphoses.
225For instance, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a revision of the Orpheus and Eurydice story (Chaucer ca. 1380;
Gros Louis 1966, 653).
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it helps to perceive, in part three below, an Orphic quality of Children of Paradise, when characters
feel attracted to one another and progressively fall in love as they repetitively journey up and down
a Guyanese river together.
It is from this “textual tradition” of reading the myth of Orpheus through a Christian lens in
the Middle-Ages that, according to Gros Louis, another “popular tradition” of viewing Orpheus
emerged: “The parallels between the lives of Orpheus and Christ, and the importance of the singer
of tales to medieval society, combined to keep Orpheus alive in the popular imagination and to
make him attractive to oral poets” (Gros Louis 1966, 645), whose lyric songs of medieval romance
focused more, however, on Orpheus' lament after the loss of Eurydice than on the Christian
deprecation of the alleged sinful desire, lust, that led the bard to turn around.226 This popular
treatment of the myth contributed to the integration of Orpheus into the medieval world of chivalry,
and progressively became more widespread than the moral, allegorizing reception of the myth, to
the extent that insistence on Orpheus' skill and passion, rather than on his sin, triumphed in the
Renaissance, while “the moralization of mythology […] bec[ame] a kind of Renaissance parlor
game” (655). Yet, the importance of the “textual tradition” of reading the myth should not be
underestimated, since it is continued, albeit marginally, during the Renaissance, and because it
endows the myth with cross-cultural features by including elements of paganism within
Christianity:
From the earliest days of Christianity, Orpheus had been compared to David, the magical musician
who played in the wilderness, and Christ, the Good Shepherd, whose words drew all mankind and
who prophesied the day when the lion would lie down with the lamb. Although he was never called a
prophet, St Augustine and others gave Orpheus a place with the Sybils as one who had predicted the
coming of the true God. Justin Martyr is almost reverent in his picture of Orpheus teaching his son
Musaeus of the one God and his promise of immortality, and Eusebius parallels Orpheus' charming
of the animals to the power of Christ's words subduing the bestial desires of men (644).
Thanks to archeology, Gros Louis then traces the merging of Christian tales with the myth of
Orpheus back to antiquity in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. For instance, “a third- or fourth226“Orpheus exemplifies the man dominated by the senses who is forever looking longingly back on earthly things, and
Eurydice represents man's passion which constantly flees from virtue (Aristaeus) and, in so doing, runs through
fields and meadows symbolic of mortal desires where the serpent, or deadly sin, is waiting to strike” (Gros Louis
1966, 643).
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century ringstone of Christ on the cross […] bears the inscription 'Orpheus Bakkikos,' identifying
the Saviour with the Orpheus of Bacchic mystery” (645). Such archeological data, when followed
further back, actually leads to the Greek-Egyptian syncretism that was constructed in Alexandria
under the Ptolemies, for instance through the cult of Isis, that spread throughout Europe to its most
Northern, Celtic parts,227 and confirms, by relating Greek-Egyptian cults to Christian religion,
Derrida's argument that the Bacchic, Dyonisiac, or orgiastic mysteries suffuse Platonist philosophy,
which itself operates below the surface of Christianity (Derrida 1999, 49).228 In addition to the
intervention of the cross-cultural in the Orphic tale as found in Greco-Roman mythology, Gros
Louis also shows that many Orpheus-type myths exist all around the world:
In the Mahabharata, the grief-stricken Rourou recovers his young bride, killed by a poisonous
serpent, by giving her half of his life. The Japanese warrior Izanagi enters the subterranean palace of
the dead to regain his beloved Izanami, but he disobeys the tabu that he must not show a light and his
punishment is to see her in the process of decomposition. In New Zealand mythology, Mataore
successfully saves Nuvarahu from the underworld because she recognizes the melody of his song.
There are comparable tales from Hawaï, Samoa, Melanesia, and the New Hebrides. Among North227The relation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to that of Isis and Osiris is interesting in the present, crosscultural perspective: the Egyptian tale tells the story of Osiris, who was killed by his brother Seth, who, like the
Thracian Bacchanals of the Orphic myth, cut Osiris' body to pieces and scattered its parts across Egypt and into the
Nile. After a long search, Isis, Osiris' wife, manages to gather her lover's body parts again (some of which are drawn
out of the Nile), grows a pair of wings that she flaps over the corpse and, so doing, successfully brings it back to life.
She then makes Osiris the keeper of the underworld. In other words, all crucial elements of the Orphic story –
severed body parts thrown into a river (the Nile instead of the Hebrus), resurrection, love, the underworld and its
keeper – are present in the Isiac tale, and the presence of an Isis temple in Alexandria under the Ptolemies suggests
that syncretism between the Greek bard and the Egyptian goddess can have sprung from there to Europe: the Isiac
cult did spread across continents from Africa to Eurasia across history (Gonzales 153-64; Bricault 261-9) and, more
specifically, an important Isiac temple dating from the antiquity can be found in Thrace, the region where Orpheus is
said to have exiled himself after losing Eurydice (Bricault 266). Many literary and occult texts also corroborate links
between Isis and Orpheus and, as shown below, formed a source of inspiration for modern poets. For instance, Jill
Delsigne cites texts claiming that “Hermes Trismegitus taught Isis how to resurrect Osiris; according to legend, he
also passed his wisdom down to future generations in writings collectively known as the Corpus Hermeticum. This
chain of sacred teaching, – including Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and even Moses – was called the prisca theologia,
and it reconciled pagan, classical wisdom with Christianity (Delsigne 205). The prisca theologia relates the
Dyonisiac, the Platonist, and the Christian in a syncretism that would allow Spenser to write the Faerie Queene
(Delsigne 206). Finally, it is also curious to find that feminists have not, to my knowledge, drawn from the myth of
Isis to subvert that of Orpheus, whose story evokes “deep-seated gender conflict” (Sword 409). In fact, feminists
appear to have had their attention drawn by Eurydice's muteness (408-9) and her position as follower or leader of
Orpheus (Cixous & Jeannet 251), or by the Bacchanals as a representation of women as hysteric killers of male
poets – for example, Patricia Coughlan reproaches Seamus Heaney for exploiting this representation of Orpheus'
death at the hand of yelling Bacchants to depict himself as a victim of unfair female criticism (Coughlan 34).
However, the assumption, following the myth of Orpheus, that poetry is a man's prerogative, an endeavor taken up
amidst the shrieks of madwomen, could easily be subverted with the figure of Isis as a (re-)creator of sorts that
precedes Orpheus in cultural history. Following this thought, the present chapter's second part deals with “Orphic”
women as Isiac characters.
228Transferring power from Egypt to Rome, and from Rome to Roman Catholicism, “The Vatican itself embrace[d]
Egyptian myth as an analogue to Christian legend in the Sala Dei Santi of the Borgia apartments, commissioned in
1492 by Pope Alexander VI, who claimed he was descended from Osiris through the Egyptian Hercules” (Delsigne
204).
322
American Indian tribes there are hundreds of Orpheus-type myths (Gros Louis 1967, 245).
Far from meaning that all of these myths derive from that of Orpheus, these pieces of information
have the merit of showing that human mythologies across the world translate common human
interests and sensibilities and, hence, analogous narrative themes. 229 The adjective Orphic is thus
quite adaptable to different cultures, both Western and non-Western, and Fred D'Aguiar does draw
from several of these cultures, precisely in an Orphic way, when, for instance, he simultaneously
refers to the Afro-Guyanese myth of the flying Africans, the Roman myth of Orpheus and its
Romantic revisions in Bloodlines, as shown in the present chapter's third part.
Such possibilities for a cross-cultural enrichment of the myth have contributed to its
perennial, because it provided poets with new ways of reading and presenting Orpheus and
Eurydice, notably from the Renaissance to the late romantic era in the West, where writers from
Spenser to Hugo drew, albeit for different reasons, from the Isiac to the Christian in order to achieve
poetic singularity.230 Spenser's syncretic treatment of the myths of Isis and Orpheus in the Faerie
Queene apparently consisted, among other things, in a twofold attempt to serve a political, imperial
agenda, and it historically related the myth of Orpheus to the history of European colonization.
First, in the Faerie Queene, Spenser – in addition to presenting himself, like his French
contemporary, Ronsard, as his country's national Orpheus (Cain 28) – creates an affiliative
genealogy that relates him to Virgil and Orpheus, and Queen Elizabeth to Britomart, the Virgin
Mary and Isis, in order to speak as an authoritative bard on the legitimacy of the Queen's rights over
foreign lands: “By identifying Britomart, the mythical ancestor of Queen Elizabeth, with both Isis
and the Virgin Mary, Spenser invokes not only an imperial genealogy but a religious one” in the
Faerie Queene (Delsigne 212). In other words,
By deploying Egyptian mythology as the setting for Britomart's dream vision of English Empire,
Spenser sketches a translatio imperii from Egypt to Rome and from Rome to England, a transfer not
only of political but also of religious power; for England to vie for the inheritance of the Roman
Empire, it had to show a lineage to Rome, just as Britomart's dream vision shows Elizabeth's
ancestry
229For specific case studies of these Orphic tales from Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, also see McDaniel 1990 and
Belmont 1985.
230For more information on 19th-century Isiac-Orphic literary syncretism, also read Cellier 1958 and Spiquel 1999.
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(199).
In this process, empire becomes Elizabeth's legacy, and Spenser, by proclaiming himself a national
heir to Orpheus, implies that singing English imperial praise is up to him – and no one else.
Second, emphasizing his support of English imperialism, Spenser also alludes, in the same
work, to another, less famous part of the Orpheus legend, according to which the enchanter was an
Argonaut who outplayed the Sirens and tamed the sea with his song (Dekens 39, 46). As Cain
contextualizes,
In ordering and bringing concord to the watery world, the most available symbol of flux and
mutability but also the sea that Elizabethans are wrestling from Spanish control, Spenser also draws
attention to himself as a poet of national importance – 'in a festival piece celebrating a visionary
England – and Ireland – united in friendly alliance, and married to a sovereign whose policy
promises a strong and prosperous peace' (Cain 38).
A peace that would correspond to defeating the Spanish in the scramble for colonies by taking
control of the seas: “Britannia rules the waves” starts resonating with uncanny Orphic, or even Isiac
echoes. Such a relationship between Orpheus and British colonialism might consist in an additional
reason for the transcontinental diffusion of the myth, and Fred D'Aguiar might be aware of this
feature of Spenser's work, since he alludes to the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”
that closes every stanza in the Prothalamion (Spenser 1596), in the title of an unpublished poem –
only broadcast on the BBC “Worlds on Film” program in 1992 – addressing the link between
slavery, colonization, and the British sugar industry, ironically entitled “Sweet Thames” (italics
mine). Moreover, the Prothalamion is replete with mythological characters, such as Leda and
nymphs, and the first stanza's allusion to “hopes, which still do fly away /Like empty shadows,”
poetic diction aside, is curiously evocative of an allegorical and melancholic reading of the loss of
Eurydice-as-hope. Finally, in the same poem's penultimate verse paragraph, Spenser celebrates
victories of the British fleet over Spanish sails, and thus promotes, as in The Fairie Queene, English
oceanic, imperial endeavors under Elizabeth's reign.
In a broader perspective, Gros Louis explains, as he does for the Middle-Ages, that two
major ways of reading the myth successively prevailed in the Renaissance. Under Elizabeth's reign,
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and following an Ovidian desire to reconcile poetry and philosophy, Orpheus was celebrated as the
pastoral figure par excellence, a poetical-philosophical civilizer, whose song, taming wild animals,
was allegorically read as the sort of speech that could temper the passions of men (Gros Louis 1969,
64-71). Spenser followed this trend, not only because, as suggested above, a representation of
Orpheus as civilizer could be used to portray his support of English imperialism, but also because
granting such (political) power to a bard contributed to defending poetry and defining the poet's
social role: “To justify myth and poetry […] and to prove that the poet, as civilizer, comforter, and
moral teacher, should be the legislator of mankind, Elizabethan artists and critics turned to the
example of Orpheus” (68, my emphasis). By alluding to Shelley's above-mentioned “Defence of
Poetry,” Gros Louis also indicates, here, that romantic perceptions of poetry might derive from an
Elizabethan reading of the myth of Orpheus. Kirsty Cochrane points in that direction as well when
she explains that humanist poets and preceptors of rhetoric from that period used the myth to defend
speech (over song or music) as an effective, civilizing power of sorts: at the time, “the man
powerful by his wisdom and eloquence, and who uses the power for human good, is the Orpheus
the teachers preach. The civilizing sort of speech may easily seem more readily available than the
divinely effective harmony which the musicians sought in their Orphic ideal” (Cochrane 9), all the
more so since such a contention was already implied by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Golding's
translation of which was very popular in the late sixteenth century (1). Elizabethan poets developed
this argument to their advantage and, hence, at the detriment of music again:
for the poets the means of effective persuasion [was] narrowed from eloquence to its specialized
manifestation, as poetry. From Shakespeare, for whom 'Orpheus' lute was strung with poet's sinews'
(Two Gentlemen of Verona, III. ii. 78),231 to men as varied as Sidney, John Rainolds, Henry Vaughan,
Henry Reynolds, and Francis Bacon, Orpheus [held] this role. (11)
To recap, while Ovid had to privilege writing over harmony, precisely because Orpheus' Greek song
was not directly available to him as a Roman citizen, Elizabethan preceptors and poets favored the
231Although Shakespeare lived both under Elizabeth I and James I for significant spans of time, Cochrane thus
associates Shakespeare's reading of the Orpheus myth to a typically Elizabethan tradition. Like most Elizabethans
indeed, Shakespeare was very familiar with Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, to the extent that L. M.
Findlay claims that Hamlet is a blended, Orphic and Christ-like figure, most of all when he forfeits
Ophelia/Eurydice (Findlay 983-4).
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words of the bard as more powerful than his music, thus legitimizing rhetoric and verse as we know
it today: written, with no musical accompaniment, which is reminiscent of ancient poets, and
contrasts with the chanting minstrels of the Middle Ages. This privileging of words over music also
draws a trail that leads to the romantics, who used musical denominations from the Middle-Ages to
designate non-musical verse forms such as “Odes,” or “Ballads” which, when called “Lyrical” by
poets such as Wordsworth, strengthen the sense of Orphic legacy in modern verse. But more of that
later.
Apart from this first Renaissance trend, under Elizabethan rule, of presenting Orpheus as a
triumphant poet, rhetorician, and civilizer, Gros Louis identifies another tendency, which arose by
the end of Elizabeth's reign and lasted throughout the 17th century and, perhaps, beyond. With the
dawning of Enlightenment philosophy, the rise of Puritans – who attacked, like metaphysical
philosophers, classical mythology (Gros Louis 1969, 71; Derrida 1971, 11) – and the death of
Elizabeth, replaced by James I on the throne of England, poets such as John Donne (Gros Louis
1969, 70) felt lost in these changing times, and their treatment of Orpheus apparently turned from
triumphant portrayal to morbid representation, culminating with Milton who, in addition to drawing
on the Metamorphoses for his narration of Genesis in Paradise Lost (Martindale 310, 314), and also
on the myth of Orpheus in his preface to Book 7 of the same work (323), mentions Orpheus'
severed head floating down the Hebrus in Lycidas (Milton, lines 58-63; Martindale 322-3).232 His –
and his contemporaries' – emphasis on the dismemberment of Orpheus functioned as an allegory of
the poet's fallibility, and of his/her disappointment with the failure to achieve the social importance
s/he had predicted for him/herself during the Elizabethan period: poetry, then, only triumphed as a
means to gain posterity and, hence, it necessarily did so at the cost of the poet's life (Gros Louis
1969, 76, 78; Martindale 323).
Puritanism and philosophical insistence on rationality, from the end of Elizabeth's reign on,
were apparently so strong that they incited poets, until the late eighteenth century, to question their
232Again, Milton is one of the authors Chapel reads with Lydia in The Longest Memory (D'Aguiar 1994, 96-7).
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use of mythology in their works, so much so that “Restoration and eighteenth-century burlesque and
mock-heroic treatments of mythical heroes” where Orpheus was “travestied and used as mere
decoration” spread significantly (Gros Louis 1969, 80).233 This late Renaissance, superficial
treatment of mythology as ornamentation for verse might have been a part of what one of the first
Romantics, Wordsworth, would have integrated into the things he despised as “poetic diction”
(Wordsworth & Coleridge 365-70), all the more so since Wordsworth had a very special liking for
mythology and, more specifically, the myth of Orpheus, as presented in Virgil's Georgics, a book
from which Wordsworth translated no less than two hundred lines during a summer vacation after
his first year at Cambridge, in 1788, while he was still grieving for the loss of his parents (Graver
137, Wu 360).234 In this context, it is no wonder that “Wordsworth's version of Virgil's Orpheus
epyllion , Georgics IV. 423-527, is by far the most ambitious of his early translations” (Graver 146),
starting, specifically, with the passage where Orpheus is mourning for Eurydice:
He, wandering far along the lonely main,
Sooth'd with the hollow shell his sickly pain.
Thee, thee, dear wife, he sung forlorn,
From morn to eve – and thee – from eve to morn (Wordsworth 638, 1-4).
Further into the translation, Wordsworth progressively veers from Virgil's original by having nature
respond emotionally to Orpheus' lament, “Far round the forest heard the tones of grief / And felt the
[ ] through every trembling le[af] / Touch'd at the heart. –” (646, 49a-49c). Natural reaction to
Orphic song is thus emphasized and “excite[s] a feeling analogous to the supernatural,” which
precisely is the effect that Wordsworth would have to seek to produce in the Lyrical Ballads, ten
years later, according to Chapter XIV of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria.235 Moreover, and as
explained in part three below, Fred D'Aguiar recreates a similar scene of nature responding to
233Interest in mythology did not, however, die at all, as Dryden's translations, in the late 17 th century, of Virgil and Ovid
show. It is with these translations that Wordsworth would later consult with the intention of surpassing them in his
translation of Virgil's Georgics and Aeneid. See Spiegelman 1974. It also is Dryden's translation of Ovid that the
present study uses.
234I gratefully acknowledge my debt to Bruce Graver for his help and research on Wordsworth's relation to Virgil and
Orpheus.
235Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081h.htm#link2HCH0014 (May 11th , 2016).
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Trina's music in Children of Paradise, which exacerbates a sense of marvelous reality that might be
intertextually informed by Wordsworth's work.
An additional analogy between Wordsworth and D'Aguiar is that the latter rewrites other
authors' works and his own (as shown in the first part of this thesis) in the same way as Wordsworth
is said to have shaped his verse from Virgil's writings. Here is, according to Bruce Graver,
“Wordsworth's process of composition”:
a phrase from the Georgics is altered to fit a Cumbrian landscape and finally is incorporated into
[Wordsworth's] original poetry. […] Because of this elaborate process, sometimes extended over
decades, the Virgilian source of his poetry is almost unrecognizable, unless we trace his work back to
the early notebooks (Graver 145-6).
One can then imagine the importance of the pastoral and of the Virgilian influence in general over
Wordsworth's romantic descriptions of English nature and rural life. The English poet's translation
of the myth of Orpheus, which “tells of a bereft spouse who is destroyed both psychologically and
physically by the intensity of his grief,” is no exception, in that it was subjected to constant revision,
leading to feminized avatars of the grieving singer:
This is a tale Wordsworth tells and retells, in the beggar woman of An Evening Walk, composed at
about the same time as the translation, in 'The Mad Mother,' in Martha Ray of 'The Thorn,' in 'Ruth,'
and in Margaret of The Ruined Cottage. In exploring the power of the voice of Orpheus, Wordsworth
gives expression to what later became their voices (146-7).
As shown below, in part three, Fred D'Aguiar openly alludes to these poems of grief and to “The
Idiot Boy” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 131-45) by using, among many other details, the “Woe is
me” phrase spoken by bereaved mothers, such as Betty Foy and Martha Ray, to evoke the pain of
his own orphan and, in the present perspective, Orphic characters: while Wordsworth was an orphan
who mourned for his parents by re-writing the Orphic story, D'Aguiar's characters are orphans
endowed with Orphic speech and magical powers, as the present chapter is to explain at length. For
now, what must be noted, in addition, is that D'Aguiar, in the same contexts as he revises
Wordsworth's poems on grieving women, also alludes to “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth &
Coleridge 156-61), one of Wordsworth's most famous poems, taking place near a river, in Children
of Paradise (D'Aguiar 2014, 156). Although this allusion is also mediated by Wilson Harris' novels,
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it is not fortuitous that a river poem by Wordsworth should come into play in another Orphic
context, considering Duncan Wu's argument that the English poet's “Remembrance of Collins,”
“Lines Written while Sailing in a Boat at Evening,” and “An Evening Walk” are revisions of one
another that are related to Wordsworth's translation of Virgil's version of the myth of Orpheus too,
through the character of the “dreaming loiterer” who wanders at twilight on the bank: Wordsworth's
translation of Virgil's phrase “luce sub ipsa” describes Orpheus “treading on the edge of day” (Wu
357, 359). One could also contend, then, that the “Lines Written Near Richmond, upon the Thames,
at Evening,” also partake of this network of Orphic river poems, since they constitute the source
material for “Remembrance of Collins” (Wordsworth & Coleridge 146), and because of the
presence of “Some other loiterer beguiling” who should not be forgotten, according to the poetic
persona:
Remembrance! As we glide along,
For him suspend the dashing oar,
And pray that never child of Song
May know his freezing sorrows more (147).
Moreover, the manuscripts that Wu cites also contain, like the above-cited lines, a grieving Orphic
character (a “child of Song” in the lyrical ballad) and the “suspend the dashing oar” phrase (Wu
357). Hence, the importance of Orpheus to Wordsworth is far more than ornamental, and thus
breaks with the poetic tradition that had followed the end of Elizabeth's reign in this respect.
However, the sense of grief that pervades Wordsworth's Orphic poems corresponds to the
seventeenth-century melancholic insistence of poets, such as Milton, on the helplessness and
dismemberment of Orpheus as an image of the (cursed) poet (Martindale 323-4).236
236The rower who sails backward into darkness, facing the setting sun, in “Lines Written Near Richmond,” along with
his avatars in Wordsworth's other poems, might also consist in a figure Derek Walcott re-used for his long
autobiographical poem Another Life, and in his poem “Where Else to Row, but Backward?” (Walcott 1986, 217;
Burnett 11-2) where readers find a rower who faces – and assesses – his past as he is sailing backwards into an
unknown future he nevertheless hopes to better apprehend. Walcott, thus, and on top of revising Homer in Omeros,
draws inspiration from Greco-Roman mythology in several of his works and here, more specifically, on Orphism,
through the poetry of William Wordsworth. For a discussion of how, in “Lines Written Near Richmond,” “The
consequence of the forward movement is the backward stream, the trace made by the pursued path” by way of
which “The modality of the future opening is the uniquely backward glance,” see Dutoit 2014 (5). In addition to the
figure of the rower in Walcott's work, for a discussion of the rower's backward gaze in relation to Glissant's notion
of a “prophetic vision of the past,” see below.
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Intertextual links to Wordsworth apart, it has also been said, above, that D'Aguiar might
refer to romanticism when using the ottava rima form in Bloodlines, since Byron used it for Don
Juan. As far as this later Romantic poet is concerned, Christopher Stratham compares him to
Orpheus through their common experience of exile, and identifies an “Orphic poetics” in Byron's
work, which corresponds to the poet's obsessive and repeated representations of leave-taking, and to
an intertextual reworking of parts of the myth in the 1817 poem Manfred (Stratham 364-5, 371).
Considering the importance of the leave-taking/forced parting scene at the auction block between
Christy, Faith and Sow in Bloodlines (D'Aguiar 2000, 38), in addition to the the protagonist's
wanderings, and supernatural, Orphic powers (again, he magically vanquishes death several times),
one may suggest the – tenuous, but thinkable – argument that Fred D'Aguiar might also have relied
on the ottava rima as a type of stanza famously used by Byron in order to make the form of his long
poem echo its Orphic contents. Finally, to mention a last, Orphic romantic, Percy Shelley's
contention that poets are unacknowledged legislators has been seen to derive from an Elizabethan
reception of Orpheus as a civilizing figure. On the other hand, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein,
with its creature brought to life out of a plurality of body parts, is reminiscent of the re-membering
of Osiris, and lets one suspect the presence of the Orphic, or even of an Isiac author, behind the text
of the famous novel, published in 1818 and then again in 1832.
And Orpheus did indeed live on in major Victorian novels and French works of the
nineteenth century. For instance, Mathias Bauer explains that Dickens' novels David Copperfield
and The Mistery of Edwin Drood are partial revisions of the myth of Orpheus. In David
Copperfield, Bauer explains, Agnes can be perceived as a Eurydice and a Muse to David who, as a
consequence, stands as an Orpheus figure on top of an avatar of the Biblical David – a figure also
associated to Orpheus since the Middle-Ages, being “the magical musician who played in the
wilderness” (Gros Louis 1966, 644) – as his name indicates, and a potential alter ego for the author
himself, as his initials suggest (Bauer 309). Bauer also explains that John Jasper, the protagonist of
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The Mistery of Edwin Drood, is an Orphic figure, because he “is a musician, a singer who is
regarded as an author. […] Furthermore, he descends to the region of death, a journey most
strikingly visualized in Chapter 12, when he accompanies the death-like stonemason, Mr Durdles,
to the crypt, his nightly abode” (308). However, and in any case, Bauer warns us that
Dickens did not choose to retell the mythical story (which would probably have become a burlesque
under his hands), but rather to revitalize it by making its archetypal traits visible under the surface of
realistic description. These traits are, in the main, the descent into the underworld and the idea of the
poet as a man living near a border, which he oversteps in both directions. Both elements are present
in David Copperfield” (309).
Hence, some of the first anglophone novels to draw on the Orpheus pattern may apparently be
found in the Victorian age, in Gothic and/or realistic form. By contrast, one specificity of D'Aguiar
novels, in addition to their echoing most of the above-mentioned readings of the myth of Orpheus,
might be, as explained below, that they evoke Orphism through magic(al) realist modes of
representation.
As far as the nineteenth century is concerned, in France, the most notable references to
Orpheus were inscribed by Nerval and Hugo (Cellier 146). For instance, Gérard de Nerval, at the
end of the sonnet entitled “El Desdichado,” identifies himself with Orpheus, while in Aurelia, he
laments the loss of a Eurydice, and the Rhine operates as the Hebrus and refers to Faust as a
German version of the myth (Cellier 147, Fairlie 155). Many other allusions to Orpheus can be
found in Nerval's works ( Fairlie 156), one of the most notable of which can be found in the chapter
on pyramids in the Voyage en Orient, where Orpheus is made to drown near the monuments, which
are imagined as places of initiation to Isiac mysteries (164). Here, Nerval shows his knowledge of
the above-mentioned corpus hermeticum as a legend that genealogically relates Orpheus, Moses,
and Pythagoras to Isis, which he certainly acquired through the syncretist vogue that spread in
France after the 1789 Revolution (Spiquel 542), and which translates his orientalist assumptions
(544).237 It is in a similar syncretic context that Isiac and Orphic figures appear in the work of Victor
237Nerval, apparently, was also interested in the Orphic wheel of birth, in “le retour cyclique des destinées” (the
cyclical return of fates), that is also strangely evocative, in the present, nineteenth-century discussion, of Nietzsche's
notion of perpetual return and, hence, of Harris' variant, infinite rehearsal (Fairlie 160; Nietzsche 176-80, 236,
Harris 1987). As Steven Lautermilch later said, (Rainer Maria Rilke's) Orpheus and (Nietzsche's)
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Hugo who, for example, compares Orpheus to Job, Jacob, Moses, Dante (Cellier 151-2) and even to
himself, as the awaited poet/prophet of his time (149-50), while simultaneously using veiled images
of Isis in order to present the acquisition of knowledge as an initiation rite of unveiling (Spiquel
545, 548). Still according to Agnès Spiquel, for Hugo, as for French romantics in general, recourse
to syncretism and orientalism – in spite of its being culturally biased because of its prejudiced
image of the East (Said 1-2) – served to preserve a sense of the religious and the sacred in poetry,
while dodging the oppressiveness of Catholicism (Spiquel 546). These nineteenth-century
orientalist treatments of the Isiac and Orphic myths also find their counterparts, as implicit forms of
cultural stereotyping, at the beginning of the twentieth century in the surrealist's search for
exoticism, and Hugo's claim, in “Horreur Sacrée,” that “The serene poet contains the obscure
prophet; Orpheus is black” (Hugo 355, my translation) is echoed by Sartre's 1949 existentialist
defense of Negritude in the essay “Black Orpheus.” In other words, readings of the myth of
Orpheus also developed well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to which it is now time to
turn.
C.
Two relatively successive and divergent traditions of reading the myth of Orpheus appear to
have emerged in the twentieth century. The first has just been evoked, and is related to common
developments in philosophy and arts, through surrealism, modernism, Negritude, marvelous
realism, and existentialism in the first half of the twentieth century. The second reading, found for
instance in the works of Caribbean and African writers from the second half of the twentiethcentury such as Wilson Harris, Wole Soyinka, and Fred D'Aguiar himself, corresponds to, but does
not necessarily rely upon, a different philosophical background that is related to Maurice Blanchot's'
and Emmanuel Levinas' respective Orphic discussions of artistry and ethical relation to Otherness,
which Derrida would also discuss in Donner la Mort.
Zarathustra“worhsip at the same shrine” (Lautermilch 38).
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One of the earliest twentieth-century writers to have manifested a sustained interest in
Orphism is, of course, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire: as his poetic pseudonym indicates, he
was a self-proclaimed descendant of Apollo (Grojnowski 94), who is no other than Orpheus' father
in Greco-Roman mythology. To be more precise, in Alcools, “Apollinaire claims for himself a
mythical ascendancy in which Apollo, Mercury, Hermes […], Orpheus, Amphion participate” (98,
my translation). Daniel Grojnowski further explains, like Julie Dekens, that Apollinaire's view of
Orpheus was influenced by syncretists, in that the French poet thought of the bard as a prophet
whose life announced that of Jesus Christ; then, by identifying himself with Orpheus, Apollinaire
also compared himself to God (Grojnowski 100, Dekens 42). Apart from identification processes,
Dekens also emphasizes the fact that Apollinaire's first published collection of poetry, Le Bestiaire
d'Orphée, revisits the myth of Orpheus, and announces the link Apollinaire intended, from the
beginning of his career as a poet, to re-create between music and poetry, “between a necessarily
auditive art and a literary genre that ha[d] become mute over the centuries” (Dekens 39). However,
Dekens makes this statement without realizing that, arguably, and as seen above, it is precisely
through such a “muting,” operated by Ovidian and humanist readings of the myth of Orpheus, that
unsung written verse was actually legitimized: Apollinaire's enterprise, translating a desire to
“synthesize the arts, music, painting, and literature” (Apollinaire qtd. In Dekens 40), might then be
viewed, at least as far as the correlation of poetry and music is involved, as an endeavor to retrieve
Orpheus' lost voice, which is, in itself, an Orphic incentive – of bringing back to life what is
presumably, or partly, dead. Apollinaire's attempt at artistic synthesis can be observed in his famous
ideogram-poems, the forms of which correspond to that of objects, through which “one no longer
reads without seeing, one no longer watches without reading,” in a visual-verbal to and fro
(Whiteside-St. Léger Lucas 116). Apollinaire, in his notes on Orpheus, actually defines painting as a
“luminous language” (Apollinaire qtd. in Whiteside-St. Léger Lucas 120) which anticipates his
definition of the “new lyricism” implied by his synthetic project as “Orphic painting,” in Les
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Peintre Cubistes (Grojnowski 103). At the end of his life, Apollinaire would redefine what he had
called “Orphism” as “surrealism” (103).
The idea that surrealism may be Orphic corresponds to Apollinaire's idea at the time that
music, the craft of the mythical bard, was the only art form to have exploited its potential for full
abstraction. In this sense, Apollinaire's notion of Orphism implied his support of abstraction in the
visual arts, which he found in cubism and surrealist painting (103). In addition, it must not be
forgotten that the term “surrealism,” before it was taken up by André Breton to give birth to a
manifesto and a famous artistic movement, was coined by Apollinaire after he saw Parade, the
ballet composed by Eric Satie and written by Jean Cocteau, himself known for his cinematographic
Orpheus trilogy made up of the films Le Sang d'un Poète (1930), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament
d'Orphée (1959). In other words, Orphism appears to have haunted surrealism from its beginning –
1919 – to its end – 1939 (Bowers 133) – and beyond, in Cocteau's work and, as shown below, in
that of many other artists.
It is also through contact with French surrealists that Alejo Carpentier learned of Franz Roh's
definition of a series of post-expressionist paintings of the time as “magic realist,” a phrase that
Carpentier would re-adapt for his own purpose of defining the “marvelous reality” he perceived, in
American landscapes, as what surrealists could only capture artificially through synthesis and the
inclusion of exotic elements in their works. As Amaryll Chanady puts it, “the Cuban author coin[ed]
the expression lo real maravilloso in an obvious reference to the French Surrealists' exhortation that
reality should be considered as marvelous” (Chanady in Zamora & Faris 137). Yet,
His concept of the marvelous real acquired an entirely different function from that of the Surrealist
marvelous. Whereas the Surrealists criticized a hegemonic intellectual and literary canon and looked
toward the European other [understand “the Other(s) of Europe” as well] for inspiration in a
movement largely inspired by exoticism, Carpentier also used the concept of the marvelous real as a
marker of difference in a Latin American discourse of identity (137). 238
238Also consider the following statement: “I saw that the Surrealists' search in their daily lives for marvelous things
that were very hard for them to find, and that sometimes they used tricks, very often collecting different things in
order to create a prefabricated marvelous reality. And there, in Paris, I realized that we really had all those marvelous
things in America” (Carpentier in Zamora & Faris, 203, n. 4). Maggie Ann Bowers discusses Alejo Carpentier's
relation to surrealism and post-expressionism too in her book entitled Magic(al) Reaslism (Bowers 2004, 12-3, 223). It is her umbrella term, “magic(al) realism,” bridging the notions of “magic realism” (Roh) and “marvelous
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Carpentier's notion of marvelous reality, in its claim that the “marvelous” constructs of surrealists
corresponded to intrinsic, natural qualities of the American landscape, and in its being used to
define a narrative genre, has appealed to writers of all continents, still does so, and hence, like
Orphism, has outlived surrealism. But longevity is not the only thing marvelous realism shares with
Orphism since, in many marvelous realist writings, “'magic' images are borrowed from the physical
environment itself, instead of being projected from the characters' psyches” (Delbaere-Garant in
Zamora & Faris 253). The citation that has just been drawn from Jeanne Delbaere-Garant's work
actually is a definition of a type of magic(al) realism that she calls “mythical realism” (253), and
aptly so, for two reasons. First, this definition of “mythical realism” is in keeping with Carpentier's
sense of marvelous reality being found, again, in landscapes, and from which magic(al) realism has
sprung as a literary genre. Second, it is highly evocative of the enchantment of natural elements
effected by Orpheus in the myth and, hence, it is endowed with a mythical quality. In this sense,
Delbaere-Garant, by defining literary treatments of marvelous reality as mythical realism, unveils
the Orphic input of Carpentier's concept. Part three below further argues that this form of magic(al)
realism is characteristic of several works by Wilson Harris and Fred D'Aguiar, where it functions as
a contemporary and Guyanese equivalent of what Wordsworth's no less Orphic romantic project in
the Lyrical Ballads sought in the English landscape, in “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth & Coleridge,
pp. 156-61) for instance.
The Negritude movement, like magic(al) realism, according to Jean-Paul Sartre's preface to
Leopold Sedar Senghor's 1948 Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache de Langue
Française, can also be viewed as a development of French surrealism (Sartre xxii) and as an Orphic
artistic endeavor, in the vatic – poetic, prophetic, and introspective – sense (Sartre xv).239 More
reality” (Carpentier), that is to be used, in the present study, to designate any “narrative art that presents mystical and
magical elements as an integral part of everyday reality” (Bowers 131). Finally, as far as the present, Orphic context
is concerned, Bowers also describes a famous magic(al) realist novel from mainland Europe, namely, Hubert
Lampo's Kasper in the Underworld, as a revision of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (62).
239Again, although magic(al) realism and Negritude poetry, as Orphic emanations of surrealism, are granted a central
position here because of their relation, shown below, to Fred D'Aguiar's work, they must not eclipse the presence of
Orpheus in the works of artists from other movements of the twentieth century. To give a few examples, Richard
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precisely, Sartre understands Negritude as the internal essence of black men, as a Eurydice of sorts
that black poets, often exiles in the West and in the New World like Orpheus in Thrace (xvi-xviii),
must retrieve by plunging introspectively into the depths of their souls, in order to present it to the
world, to profess it, to become Orphic poet/prophets of sorts (xii). In other words, and again, Sartre,
in this preface entitled “Black Orpheus,” appears to have almost been taking what Hugo claimed in
“Horreur Sacrée,” to the letter, that is, that the dark prophet hides within serene poets, that “Orpheus
is black” (Hugo 355). However, in spite of Sartre's Orphic interest and founding role in twentiethcentury French anti-colonial theory, through “Black Orpheus” (1948) and his 1961 preface to Frantz
Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (Sartre in Fanon 17-36), many aspects of “Black Orpheus”
sound very awkward today, and appear to call for another angle of approach to (Orphic) crosstropical art and theory. For instance, Sartre designates extreme suffering – through the experiences
of colonization, slavery, and exile – as the specificity of black men, and claims, repetitively relying
on controversial Hegelian formulations, that it is thanks to that singularity, that “horrible benefit,”
that “black consciousness shall become historical” (xxix, xxxvi, my translation), thus assuming that
black consciousness – whatever that means – has lacked historicity, which is highly debatable.
Here, considering the type of historical suffering that Sartre takes into account, one may understand
that his view of what is “history” is biased insofar as he understands “history” as “the history of
Western modernity,” at the foundation of which one finds such facts as those of colonization and the
transatlantic slave trade, and hence, the suffering of black men.
However, in order to strengthen his – flawed – argument on the historicization of black
consciousness through Negritude poetry, Sartre cites, from the 1948 anthology he is prefacing, Jean-
Wright, whose writing career began during the Harlem Renaissance, drew from the myth of Orpheus – and from
Conrad's arguably Orphic Heart of Darkness, through the pattern of the journey upriver and into an “Other” world –
to compose his 1945 novella The Man Who Lived Underground (Cappetti 41). As far as modernism is concerned,
one may of course think of Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, or, as Brandom Lanson argues, to the “Hades”
and “Circe” episodes of Joyce's Ulysses (Lanson 255), a novel Fred D'Aguiar alludes to, again, in A Jamaican
Airman Foresees His Death (D'Aguiar 1991, 235). Finally, Tennessee Williams reworked the myth in his 1957 play
Orpheus Descending (Traubitz 57-66), adapted to the screen by Sidney Lumet in 1960 as The Fugitive Kind. A year
before, in 1959, Marcel Camus had won the Palme d'Or in Cannes for his translation of the story to Brazil, in Orfeu
Negro (Villeneuve 105-22).
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Fernand Brierre's poem “Me Revoici, Harlem,” written in memory of the victims of the 1946
Georgia lynchings: “… Souvent comme moi tu sens des courbatures / Se réveiller après les siècles
meurtriers / Et saigner dans ta chair les anciennes blessures....” [Like me you often feel that
soreness in your muscles / Rising again from the centuries of murder / And ancient wounds bleeding
in your flesh] (Brierre qtd. in Sartre xxxvi). Sartre then addresses the problematic fact that neither
the poet, nor his father, have experienced slavery, by explaining that descendants of the African
diaspora share the experience of suffering as a collective historical memory, and by giving another
example of memory that exceeds the limits of one's lifetime, namely, that of French people in 1789
who still were prey to panics harking back to the Hundred Years' War (Sartre xxxvi-vii).
Paradoxically enough, while presenting Negritude poets as extraordinary – because Orphic and
prophetic – people, Sartre does not seem prepared to openly acknowledge the supernatural quality
of the anamnesis suggested by Brierre's poem in a matter-of-fact tone that is, again, highly
evocative of the magic(al) realist emanations of surrealism. Yet, is not the Orphic nature of
Negritude dependent on such a memory according to Sartre's essay? If one follows Sartre's notion
that Negritude, the black essence, is the Eurydice that the black poet must introspectively find out to
be his fundamental memory of suffering, to then prophetically divulge it to the world, would it not
have been important for Sartre to underscore the predication of Negritude Orphism on some
supernatural anamnesis, like Glissant would later do by calling this “painful notion of time and its
full projection forward into the future” a “prophetic vision of the past” (Glissant 1989, 63-4)?
Moreover, this magical sense of a memory that is not dependent on lived experience is reminiscent
of the above-mentioned memory of Africa that Whitechapel's great-granddaughter shares in The
Longest Memory (D'Aguiar 1994, 123), and calls for attention in the present perspective, that is, a
study of Orphism in the works of Fred D'Aguiar. It is in this sense that this chapter's first part
studies “prophetic visions of the past,” in Orphic terms, in Fred D'Aguiar's novels.
Although Sartre does not explore it at length in his essay, this sense of a marvelous memory
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finds some of its theoretical counterparts, as shown in Chapter IV, in Holocaust studies, with the
concept of a belated postmemory (Ward 132), in behavioral epigenetics (Hurley 2013; Powledge
588-92), or maybe even in Hobbes' consideration of imagination as a form of memory (Hobbes 14),
and has interested many Sartre readers.240 For instance, in “Black Orpheus and Aesthetic
Historicism,” Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino reads what Sartre draws from Brierre, and “Black
Orpheus” in general, “through the lens of Vico's anti-Cartesian epistemology and his claims
regarding the important historical and cultural role of the poetic imagination” (Banchetti-Robino
121).241 By contrast with Cartesian instrumental, or hypothetico-deductive conceptions of reason,
Vico suggests a broader form of rationality by way of which he
240Sandor Ferenczi's sense of a pulsion of thalassal regression is an additional, speculative variant among these types
of hypermnesia, since it corresponds to a desire to return to the aquatic milieu of the mother's womb, a substitute for
the sea that allowed aquatic species to start evolving on dry land millions of years ago. In this sense, Ferenczi
evokes a biological, philogenetic link between motherhood and the sea, between “mer” and “mère,” that is not only
metaphorical (Ferenczi 129). Moreover, as such, according to Ferenczi, the pulsion of thalassal regression is a
mnesic phenomenon that surpasses the boundaries of lived experience and expresses itself, again, in human bodies
(the development of an aquatic milieu in a womb), behavior (the desire to penetrate or be penetrated by another
person as a protective/reproductive maneuver), and dreams (of drowning as an evocation of the anguish of birth and
of having to live on land) (33-5). As far as dreams are concerned, Ferenczi, of course, relies on Freud's theory of
dreams as mnemonic phenomena (115, 162).
Moreover, Ferenczi's contention that one melancholically* wishes to return to the womb, in the present
perspective, almost incites one to psychoanalyze [or bio-analyze, as Ferenczi would have it (34)] Orpheus' river
journey into the cave of Hades, and his irrepressible desire to turn back to a woman ,who could evoke the figure of
the mother, as expressions of a repressed desire for thalassal regression. As Ferenczi puts it: “It is still impossible to
predict what new developments are germinating in [his] conception, or what amount of unconscious knowledge can
be found in the naive legends of folklore, counts, myths and, most of all,in the luxuriant symbolism of dreams”
(176). For instance, Ferenczi argues that the Biblical Flood is related to the pulsion of thalassal regression, and that
Moses' parting of the Red Sea still has to be investigated in psycho-analytic terms (Ferenczi 118). Nothing, then,
prevents one from “naively” imagining what could be in store with Ferenczi's ideas: for one thing, if thalassal
regression is an actual, (super)natural hypermnesic Orphic phenomenon, one of its interests for the present study lies
in the argument that it may reinforce one's already keen sense of the counter-natural character of the Middle Passage
experience. Part two below will re-evoke this idea in more detail in relation to Mintah, in Feeding the Ghosts, of
course.
*Ferenczi's contention that ejaculation is a biological phenomenon that translates one's nostalgia for the mother's
womb or the sea and that, as a consequence, the introjected germen, on top of being a bodily fluid, is the
materialisation of the repressed pulsion of thalassal regression, of the melancholic desire not to have been born or to
have gone through the anguish of birth (28, 132), corroborates Aristotle's notion, in “Problem XXX” that
melancholia, or the morosity caused by “black bile,” can temporarily be annihilated thanks to sexual intercourse and
mastrubation (Aristotle 91-3).
241Another scholar, Michael D. Barber, explores the implications of the marvelous “anamnestic retrieval of subjective
experience” suggested by Brierre, and given as the Negritude poets' quest by Sartre, through Alfred Schutz's
“because motive analysis, a process of narrative self-constitution, [which also] renders plausible these linkages the
Negritudinists [and writers like D'Aguiar] draw between themselves and peasant or slave ancestors” (Barber 91).
Drawing from Fanon's notion that colonialism disfigures and destroys the colonized's cultural heritage, Stuart Hall
also explains, in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” that Caribbean filmmakers try to “unearth that which the colonial
experience buried and overlaid,” yet in an imaginative way, and thus produce – rather than rediscover – cultural
identity. He further warns that “We should not, for a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance of [this] act
of imaginative rediscovery” (Hall 224).
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offers an alternative view [to the hegemonic, Cartesian one] of history that connects imagination,
metaphor, and myth to the creation of [the gods] by the first theological poets. For Vico, reason need
not displace myth since myth and reason are not contradictory, but complimentary ways of knowing
that imply each other (Grant qtd. in Banchetti-Robino 122, my emphasis).
From a Hobbesian perspective, comprising memory as a form of imagination, Vico's philosophy
would be one that, contrarily to Cartesian thought, includes myth, metaphor, and memory within the
framework of historicity, and could therefore serve to support the view that imaginative, literary
works such as those of Brierre, D'Aguiar and, according to Banchetti-Robino, Césaire (BanchettiRobino 124), including elements of magic and myth, offer a rational gateway to the actual past, no
matter how fictional they may seem to be. 242 In other words, in this framework, D'Aguiar's
imaginative remembering of the victims of slavery, or his fictional characters' conjuring of a lost
Africa they have never seen, in works such as Bloodlines, Feeding the Ghosts, or The Longest
Memory, again, are not absolute fictions, but (mythical) memories in their own right. In this sense,
Vico's rationalization of myth as a form of historicity also corrects the above-mentioned amnesic
drawback, according to Derrida, of Western metaphysics as a (Cartesian) logic that has erased the
mythical scene from which it historically arose (Derrida 1971, 11). Thus, the form of memory that
conditions, according to Sartre, the Orphism of Negritude poetry, is a thing that D'Aguiar shares
with the Negritude poets and Ovid who, let us not forget, had to re-member Orpheus imaginatively
and in writing, because he had no access to the archaic Greek Orphic chants, in the same way as
Negritude poets and descendants of the African diaspora have no direct access to the Africa they
were taken from. Of course, Mintah, in Feeding the Ghosts, is not necessarily a slave who crossed
the Atlantic on board the Zong in reality, and Tom and Stella, in Bloodlines, do not reconstitute
Africa itself through imagination: rather, they, like Brierre in “Harlem, me revoici” or Césaire in
Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal, “are imaginatively creating a mythic and mystical [past]. In
other words, their goal is not an ontical description but an ontological summoning of Being”
242Yet, real responsibility “before the ghosts” of the past starts here as well (Derrida 1993, xviii): if imagination may
constitute a rational gateway to the past, it does not constitute an open door to revisionist denials of historical facts
such as, for instance, the Holocaust or the transatlantic slave trade. The postulate of the imagination absolutely does
not legitimate historical falsehood and negation.
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(Banchetti-Robino 128) that is historical, if one follows Vico's argument.
Apart from his contention, in 1949, that black consciousness had yet to become historical,
two other parts of Sartre's essay are problematic. First, he explains that, while Orpheus chose his
exile in Thrace, one problem for Negritude poets is that they were subjected to a double exile: their
ancestors had been torn away from Africa, and they no longer spoke African languages, but
expressed themselves in the language of the colonizer – French, as far as the Negritude movement
is concerned (Sartre xviii). This double exile is a fact, for sure, but Sartre's subsequent argument
that Negritude corresponds to an act of violent appropriation of the language is misguided (xvi). As
shown in Chapter II above, Derrida demonstrates in Monolingualism of the Other that no one can
ever appropriate language, partly because of its inescapable metaphoricity: that language is everelusive, escapes one's grasp, like a Eurydice or a specter of sorts, is both the foundation and the
illustration of the unsatisfiable desire of mastering a tongue, which Derrida associates with the
colonial impulse (Derrida 1996, 44, 47, 68-70). Hence, when Sartre identifies the following couplet
with a specifically Negritudinist submission of the oppressor's language, he willingly downplays the
importance of the residual European cultural presence that keeps pervading it: “Les mers
pouilleuses d'îles craquant aux doigts des roses / lance-flamme et mon corps intact de foudroyé”
[Seas infested with lice-like islands crackling under the fingers of rose-red / flamethrowers and my
intact thunderstruck body] (Sartre xxvii-viii, translation and emphasis mine). The phrase about the
fingers or rose-red flamethrowers, of course, and as Sartre notes, reminds readers of Book VIII of
Homer's Odyssey: “Who is dawn with her rose-red fingers?” In this sense, the couplet produces a
Caribbean revision of European myth, rather than an expression of black essence, since the Western
canon still metaphorically suffuses the lines. In other words, this couplet is cross-cultural and
functions as a tropicality rather than as a total appropriation of a white man's language by a black
man, as Sartre would have it. The couplet is a metaphorical expression of two related cultural
backgrounds. Such metaphoricity is precisely inescapable in language, and again, if, following
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Sartre's argument, Negritudinists (or any other group of writers) intended to fully subdue French (or
any other language) to their will, by erasing the mythological scene (Derrida 1971, 11) or cultural
background from which it rose, to the privilege of another cultural sphere (then mistakenly
presumed to be hermetic), their endeavor was, from the start, bound to fail (Derrida 1996, 44). Also,
Sartre's subsequent, Marxist claim that Negritude is the second phase of a dialectic – the antithesis
to French colonialism – that he expects will be solved into a synthesis when black men identify with
a worldwide proletariat (Sartre xlx) is invalidated once both French imperialism and the
Negritudinists' alleged wish to subject French language to their authority are seen to derive from
analogous, rather than absolutely antithetical, colonial desires (Derrida 1996, 68-70).243
Second, it follows that Sartre's repetitive binary ethnic distinctions between black and white
men, maintained throughout the essay in order to reach the above-mentioned dialectical, Marxist
theoretical conclusion, is highly misguided, and profoundly debatable, as it mistakes racial essence
and historical experience (Sartre xii, xiv). Donald R. Wehrs and Tomaz Jacques see through the
limits of such binary logic too (Wehrs 765, Jacques 9), and Michael D. Barber signals that Appiah
and Soyinka also “criticize racial essentializing in Sartre and the Negritude poets” (Barber 91). As
far as Soyinka is concerned, Anne Whitehead goes so far as to signal that the Nigerian writer's
Season of Anomy and The Man Died are revisions of the myth of Orpheus that seek, “in part, to
counter Sartre’s Europeanized vision of Africa as the exotic unknown” (Whitehead 29).244 In other
words, a different (Orphic) conception of cultural identity and its artistic representations is being
called for. Although he acknowledges the import of Fanon and of related views of cultural identity
such as those corroborated by the Negritude writers, as they entail a rich imaginative revisiting of
the past (223-4), Stuart Hall, in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” also mentions the need to go
beyond such cultural theories and suggests another conception of cultural identity as “undergo[ing]
243For instance, Sartre cites passages where Negritude poets such as Senghor compare the bodies of women to
territories they intend to explore (Sarte xxxii), in the same way as European explorers and missionaries described the
Americas (DeLoughrey 2007a; 22, 24).
244Also, that Soyinka, in these works, operates a syncretism between the figure of the Thracian bard and that of the
African deity Ogun suggests interesting tropical possibilities again (Whitehead 29).
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constant transformation” (Hall 225). In this sense, cultural identity “is not a fixed essence at all,
lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside
us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all” (226). This
conception allows for the play of difference within identity, leaves room for movements of
translation: Hall does not give this vision of cultural identity any specific name, but tentatively
suggests Derrida's notion of différance, to metaphorically depict the play of otherness within
identity as the singularity, or difference, of cultural identity evolving over time (228-9).245
However, in the present, Orphic context, Donald R. Wehrs offers a more promising
framework. In his article entitled “Sartre's Legacy in Postcolonial Theory,” Wehrs claims that
Sartre's and Fanon's “Manichean” logic has overdetermined “Western understandings of
colonization/decolonization” so far, and fails to provide good insight into non-Western phenomena
of acculturation and oppression, because of their contention that the West creates the Rest, so to
speak, that is, that the actions of the colonized are solely, and primarily, conditioned by those of the
colonizer, and hence, always defined, following a binary rationale again, in terms of reaction – to
the colonizer's actions (Wehrs 767, 769). Moreover, according to Wehrs, Sartre and Fanon evolved
in an “intellectual climate in which ethical reflection was displaced into a politics governed by the
assumption that since Marxist revolution would bring justice, whatever promoted revolution was
ethical” (Wehrs 763), even if the revolution was as violent, oppressive and, well, as colonial as
Western colonialism itself. As an alternative to this pitfall of Sartre's thought, Wehrs suggests that
Levinas could provide fresh air to so-called postcolonial studies: “Whereas in Sartre, the experience
of being colonized by the Other's gaze grounds both sociality and self-knowledge, in Levinas, our
inability to reduce others to mastered knowledge grounds sociality and self-knowledge” (Wehrs
771). Wehrs relies, of course, on Levinas' discussion of ethics in Totality and Infinity, where the
Other, or rather, his/her face, is not, as opposed to what Sartre suggests, totalizable, but alwaysalready, infinitely escaping into infinity as it expresses itself (Levinas 42-4) – in the same way as
245Again, as far as language is concerned, the present study suggests the word tropicality.
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language does according to Derrida (1996, 44). With Levinas, again, “the face-to-face is the starting
point […] of the ethical relationship” (Poirier 107), because the Other, through his/her absolute
singularity or opacity (Glissant 1990; 190, 194), which Levinas calls “face,” is infinitely expressing
itself and escaping one's totalizing grasp, forcing one to respond to, and re-spect, every other as
absolutely other, to paraphrase David Wills' translation of Derrida's shibboleth “Tout autre est tout
autre” in Donner la Mort, which heavily draws from Levinas' work (Derrida 1999, 110).246 In other
words, Levinas' definition of the face-to-face grants the preservation of the Other's inalienable
alterity, singularity, opacity, or face, and hence, grounds the possibility for ethical interaction
without the Sartrean necessity of relying on revolutionary colonialism or violence. Considering
Fred D'Aguiar's treatment of the cross-cultural through tropicality, and his work's openness to,
rather than hegemonic control of, differing or alternative discourses and voices, and although
D'Aguiar has not read Levinas' writings, it seems likely for his sense of ethics and relation to
Otherness to be closer to Levinas' thought than to that of Sartre. Moreover, Levinas' discussion of
the face-to-face turns out to relate to the myth of Orpheus again.
As Patrick Poirier explains, “It would be difficult not to recognize what, in this impossible
encounter with the other's face, is reminiscent of the myth of Orpheus and the reading Blanchot
proposes for it in certain texts from the fifties and sixties” (Poirier 108-9, my translation), such as
“Orpheus' Gaze,” in the Space of Literature (1955), or The Infinite Conversation (1969) (Blanchot
171-7, Poirier 109), all the more so since Blanchot and Levinas were friends (Poirier 99). Poirier
goes so far as explaining that Blanchot actually reads the myth of Orpheus, in these texts, through
the lens of Levinas' philosophy – if not specifically through that of Totality and Infinity (1961)
itself, as far as The Infinite Conversation is concerned (Poirier 109-10). The following passage from
“Orpheus's Gaze,” about the bard's backward look, appears to confirm this point:
Orpheus's error seems then to lie in the desire which moves him to seal and to possess Eurydice, he
246This amazing formulation, commented at length not only by Derrida but by his many commentators, including J.
Hillis Miller and David Wills, is strictly untranslatable, but has, among other forms, been rendered as “every other is
wholly other.”
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whose destiny is only to sing of her. He is Orpheus only in the song: he cannot have any relation to
Eurydice except within the hymn. He has life and truth only after the poem and because of it, and
Eurydice represents nothing other than this magic dependence which outside the song makes him a
shade and renders him free, alive, and sovereign only in the Orphic space, according to Orphic
measure. Yes, this is true: only in the song does Orpheus have power over Eurydice. But in the song
too, Eurydice is already lost, and Orpheus himself is the dispersed Orpheus; the song immediately
makes him “infinitely dead.” He loses Eurydice because he desires her beyond the measured limits
of the song, and he loses himself, but this desire, and Eurydice lost, and Orpheus dispersed are
necessary to the song, just as the ordeal of eternal inertia is necessary to the work (Blanchot 172-3).
In other words, Orpheus' looking back would correspond to his desire to literally make Eurydice his
own as a totalizable entity, and hence, the “error” would amount to his failing to acknowledge
Eurydice's irreducible Otherness. She can only be his solipsistically, in his imagination, in his
musical creations, where he too sings of her irreducible Otherness and his inability to fully get her
in his grasp, as she escapes it, as an evanescent specter: inalienable singularity, death – one's death
always being one's own, it is what constitutes the irreplaceable quality of the individual (Derrida
1999, 66) – is the infinite space that separates Orpheus from Eurydice as irreducibly Other.
Orpheus' “error” is necessary insofar as it serves to consecrate Otherness as irreducible, through the
becoming ethical of the face-to-face. Blanchot's argument goes further, again, as he allegorizes the
work of art as a Eurydice of sorts, in order to explain that the artist, Orpheus, must suppress himself
from his work, song, or poem, in order to free it into alterity as absolutely Other, and available for
every other person to relate to it without necessarily relating to him. So doing, the artist renders the
work eternal. As seen in Chapter I, parts of Fred D'Aguiar's “Elegy,” in Continental Shelf, both
revisit the myth of Orpheus and correspond to what Blanchot claims for the work of art (D'Aguiar
2009, 87).
Thus, one may draw several conclusions from this Orphic retrospective – if the pun is
acceptable. The myth has benefited from sustained artistic and philosophical interest for over two
thousand years, and can be found in a great variety of analogous narratives from all over the world.
The myth had such impact that it contributed to the legitimation of written verse, unaccompanied by
music, as an art form in its own right, and Fred D'Aguiar belongs to this Orphic literary tradition in
a variety of ways. First, his Orphism is vatic, because in the same way as Ovid, pace Plato, used
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mythography as a means to retrieve a lost, overseas Greek past, Fred D'Aguiar relies on myth in his
writing in order to re-explore the transatlantic past of slavery and pre-slavery Africa thanks to the
imagination. In this sense, he also places himself in the philosophical lineage of Renaissance
philosophers such as Hobbes and Vico, rather than in that of Descartes, which certainly explains
D'Aguiar's play on words on Descartes and Hobbes and “cart and horse” in Bill of Rights, where the
poetic persona says that placing “Descartes before the Hobbes / we know and love” would “put an
end to [imaginative] verse” (D'Aguiar 1998, 41). Conversely, and in addition to having read Ovid,
Fred D'Aguiar's erudition in Caribbean literature and position as an Anglo-Caribbean writer from
the African diaspora relate his imaginative treatments of the past to the legacy of Afro-Caribbean
writings such as those of the Negritude poets, although he is aware of the pitfalls of cultural
exclusivism, and his tropical treatment of cultural identity is closer to Stuart Hall's second definition
in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” and to the thoughts of French philosophers from the second
half of the twentieth century such as Levinas and Derrida. His knowledge of Negritude, but also of
imperial Western treatments of the myth of Orpheus, such as Spenser's verse, presumably entail his
awareness of the existing relationships that link colonialism and Orphic traditions. Finally, his
knowledge of both Western and Caribbean literary canons provide Fred D'Aguiar with a vertiginous
Orphic poetic data base that contributes to the cross-cultural quality of his work when, for instance,
his magic(al) realist treatment of Caribbean worlds is informed by British romantic poetry. The
following chapter proposes to give readings of Fred D'Aguiar's novels that will bring to light these
ways in which Orphism pervades D'Aguiar's texts, paying particular attention to “Orphic orphan”
characters such as (false) prophets and Isiac women, but also to the role of nature as the setting for
Orphic, underground journeys and hellish voyages.247
247In order to do so, a shift in style and mode of analysis, towards a more descriptive way of discussing Fred
D'Aguiar's novels, is necessary, and will be effected in this final chapter, for two reasons. First and foremost,
backward gaze and prophetic vision are Orphic constituents the temporal implications of which make it necessary to
reconstruct plots and follow narrative economies, as they often magically project into imagined futures by unfolding
from encrypted historical pasts. Second, three out of the six novels D'Aguiar wrote, namely, Dear Future, Bethany
Bettany, and Children of Paradise have not been explored yet, and thus require being introduced and summarized in
addition to being studied.
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I. Prophetic Figures
According to The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the word prophet derives from
phé, phànai, “to speak,” and pro-, which is evocative of all the meanings of the preposition “for” as
well as of a forward movement. A prophet, therefore, is someone who speaks forth and on behalf of
someone, hence the word's signification as the designation of someone who predicts the future
thanks to his/her being inspired by a deity on whose behalf s/he speaks. The OED completes this
definition by describing prophets as inspired teachers or bards, when the word in question does not
refer to “the prophet,” Muhammad, the founder of Islam, or “the prophets” as the authors of the Old
Testament, thus indicating that prophets may be professors as much as preachers or musicians, that
is, Orphic figures in the supernatural, religious and musical senses of the term. Prophets are
dictators as well, and literally so, in that they dictate messages, and predict the future, but these
messages themselves owe their authority to their potentially being dictated by deities and/or
supernatural powers: prophets are inspired or possessed authorial figures, oracular instruments, or
genial spokesmen subjected to supernatural authorities in the same way as artists have been said,
across history, to derive their diction from Muses or drugs (Derrida 1991, 7).
Such a correlation of artistry and prophecy has a strong significance in the history of
literature, as the legacy of the myth of Orpheus, described above, shows. As far as the novel is
concerned, prophecy may also be related to the genre through Bakhtin, who explains that the
“plenitude of time” is effected in the novel when the present is perceived in its relation with the past
and the future (Bakhtin 1978, 293, my translation). One way in which such a “plenitude” is effected
consists in the process of historical inversion, by way of which “one represents as past something
that, in reality, can or must only be achieved in the future,” such as the golden age, Arcadia, or,
later, the state of nature (294, my translation). In these cases, representations of the past are drawn
for posterior generations and serve as “future memories of the past” (454, my translation). In this
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perspective, Bakthine perceives the specificity of the novel to reside in the fact that the objects of
historical inversions are presented in “a zone of maximum contact […] with the present in its
imperfection and, as a consequence, with the future,” rather than in an absolute and isolated past,
where the plenitude of time is contained and distanced, such as in the epic (464, my translation).
Bakhtin differentiates novelistic historical inversion from other literary historical inversions – such
as epic prophecy which, according to him, is relegated to an absolute past – by calling it
“prediction,” and defining it as a “distinctive feature” of the novel that operates through “permanent
reinterpretation and re-evaluation” by way of which “the dynamics of perception and justification of
the past are transferred into the future” (464-5, my translation).
Moreover, and as indicated above, from a contemporary Caribbean standpoint, historical
inversion or prediction seems to be re-conceptualized to specific ends by Édouard Glissant, in
Caribbean Discourse, as a “prophetic vision of the past” (Glissant 1989, 64). In fact, according to
Glissant, in the Caribbean,
The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however,
obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore this obsession, to show its relevance in a
continuous fashion to the immediate present. This exploration is therefore related neither to a
schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of
time and its full projection forward in the future, without the help of those plateaus in time from
which the West has benefited, without the help of that collective density that is the primary value of
an ancestral heartland. That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past. (63-4)
According to Glissant, the Middle-Passage experience, the crossing of this tautological abyss that
would then have to be faced by members of the African diaspora in search of the past as a “vast
beginning marked by [...] balls and chains gone green” (1990, 6), represents a dramatic cultural loss
as much as a significant poetic source of identification for those who were severed from their
African “ancestral heartland” (1989, 4) in a way that makes a linear reconstruction of the past (and,
by extension, of genealogy), such as is done is European historiography, unachievable: “And so, in
Glissant's work, the prophetic voice puts tradition and the single root in question precisely in the
interest of breaking with colonial and authoritarian habits of thinking. In the place of what is
authoritarian, we find the affirmation of a multiplicity of roots, the mangrove, the rhizome as a
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figure for both composite culture and the meaning of subjectivity” (Drabinsky 10). As Drabinsky
suggests, Glissant's use of the word “plateaus” to designate clear-cut Western cultural legacies in his
definition of the prophetic vision of the past is not fortuitous, and refers to Deleuze and Guattari's
definition of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari 6), which offers a poetic, creolizing way for AfroCaribbean people (at least) to recreate their past, a re-constructive mode that writers must,
according to Glissant, make relevant “in a continuous fashion to the immediate present” (1989, 64),
in the same way as Bakhtin claims that the presentation of historical inversion in maximum contact
with the unfinished present is a pre-requisite of novelistic prophecy (Bakhtin 1978, 464). In this
sense, and with words that strikingly remind one of Bakhtin's “future memory of the past,” it might
actually neither be innocent, nor original, for Glissant to write that American writers, “from
Faulkner to [Alejo] Carpentier,” “are prey to a kind of future remembering” where
all chronology is too immediately obvious, and in the work of American novelists we must struggle
against time in order to reconstitute the past, even when it concerns those parts of the Americas
where historical memory has not been obliterated. It follows that, caught in the swirl of time, the
American novelist dramatizes it in order to deny it better or to reconstruct it; I will describe us, as far
as this is concerned, as those who shatter the stone of time. (Glissant 1989, 145)
If not original, Glissant's suggestion has the merits of re-contextualizing novelistic prediction in a
“New World,” American perspective, and of suggesting a productive way of re-asserting one's
identity. Moreover, his definition of a prophetic vision of the past, insofar as it apparently draws
from Wordsworth's poetry and reportedly adapts to Carpentier's marvelous reality, reinforces the
above-mentioned hypothesis that the Orphic, in its backward gaze and prophetic echoes, is the
common denominator of (American) magic(al) realism and (British) romanticism.248
Glissant's definition, including himself, of American novelists (in French, romanciers), as
those who “shatter the stone of time” could indeed be read as a romantic reference to Wordsworth's
“spot of time” in The Prelude, which is foreshadowed in the poetic persona's “shattering” of Simon
Lee's “tangled root” in Lyrical Ballads, itself revised by Fred D'Aguiar in Bloodlines, as seen above,
and thoroughly explored in part three below. As far as Fred D'Aguiar is concerned, he, in a 1992
248For a more sustained reflexion on this issue, see part three below.
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interview, actually appears to link, consciously or not, Wordsworth's poetry and Glissant's prophetic
vision of the past on an autobiographical scale, about his early poetic endeavors: “I was preoccupied
with childhood as an experience that was lost and replaced by adult life. I knew from Wordsworth's
Prelude, and other similar works, for instance, Derek Walcott's Another Life, that writers appear to
go through a period where they have to assess their early years in order to move on [...]”
(Birbalsingh 139, my emphasis).249
The following, first section of this chapter argues that children such as Sow in Bloodlines, or
Red Head, the protagonist of Dear Future, do act out a poetic and prophetic engagement with the
past in Fred D'Aguiar's novels, in a way that is in keeping with Bakhtin's definition of novelistic
prediction but which, instead of mainly focusing on the interaction of social classes in its
representations (Bakhtin 1978, 455-6), insists on the cross-cultural in transnational and interracial
modes, in the same way as Glissant's prophetic vision of the past does to reconstruct a culturally
and historically rhizomatic “plenitude of time.” In fact, while Sow's temporally syncretic narration
and quest for his parents as an irretrievable avatar of the past appear to represent a striving for a
future under the sign of interracial love in Bloodlines, Red Head, in Dear Future, is openly
presented as clairvoyant, and reassesses a thinly disguised Guyanese “ever-present past” (D'Aguiar
1996a, 180) in an epistolary correspondence with the future at the end of the novel. Finally, images
of the prophet in Children of Paradise, mostly in the figure of self-appointed oracle Jim Jones, must
be addressed in their relation to D'Aguiar's reassessment of the Jonestown Massacre.
a. Red Heads
“Red Head got his name and visionary capacity at age nine when he ran behind an uncle
chopping wood and caught the back of the axe on his forehead” (D'Aguiar 1996, 3): such are the
opening lines of Fred D'Aguiar's second novel, Dear Future. They introduce the protagonist
249Fred D'Aguiar may then also perceive a link between Walcott and Wordsworth, consisting in the above-discussed
metaphorical figureof the rower (Wordsworth & Coleridge 147; Walcott 1986, 217; Burnett 11-2).
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through the scene of his acquisition of a supernatural feature and the nickname that is indicative of
the color of his hair. Retrospectively, supernatural power and red hair instantaneously lead one to
make connections with Fred D'Aguiar's later novel Bloodlines, and its main character, Sow, who,
among other things, is endowed with extraordinary longevity, prenatal memory, and red hair, as if
he were next of kin to Red Head. Red hair apparently is perceived as an otherworldly feature by
Mrs Mason, whose superstitious reaction, when she first sees Sow, is to tell the midwife that “'Teeth
in a newborn bring bad luck – pull them out; shave the little devil's head before that cord is cut”
(42). As the midwife pulls Sow's teeth out with pliers, Sow “holler[s] / for mercy to spare [him]”
(42). His narrative voice describes the rest with precision:
Next the midwife grabbed a rasor and attacked
my curly, devilish-red hair. She wasn't bloodthirsty.
She merely followed orders and worked
as fast as she could to bring an end to my misery.
In thirteen deft strokes from front to back –
that made my hair grow backwards and caused me
to comb my hair in that direction ever since –
she cleaned my scalp and cleansed me of my sins. (42, emphasis mine)
Sow describes his birth – through phenotype, superstition, and subsequent cleansing – in mythical,
Biblical terms: he mystifies himself by relating the color of his hair to the figure of the devil, hair
cut in “thirteen deft strokes” that capitalize on beliefs concerning the (bad-luck) number thirteen, in
relation to the Last Supper, and he indicates, on the following page, that he is a premature child, his
gestation having lasted seven months only (43). Seven, of course, is not an accidental number either,
considering the frequency with which it appears in the Old and New Testaments, from the seven
days of Genesis to the seven seals of Apocalypse, through the seven deadly sins, the story of Able
and Cain (on sevenfold revenge), and so on. In addition, the emphatic indication that his hair is
shaved in backward strokes, grows backwards as a consequence, and has been combed backwards
by Sow “ever since,” apparently turns Sow's hair to an objective correlative of his obsession with
the past, and of his curse of not being allowed to die until the legacies of slavery have disappeared:
his backward stare at the past, told through the musicality of verse, and presented in a mythical
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mode, make him an Orphic child who, again, is soon to become an orphan.
However, “ever since” being made to rime with “my sins,” the passage also suggests that
Sow's supernatural longevity and access to the past are condemnable or, at least, condemned in their
phenotypical manifestation by Mrs Mason, who tries to deprive Sow of his extraordinary attributes
through superstitious and violent cleansing: the narrator does not specify whether the cleansing
ritual has any effect on his powers, but his designation of his features as “devilish” and sinful, if not
ironical, also implies a sense of guilt on his part through which he may imply that, somehow, he, as
a narrator, might not be as innocent as a newborn child. In other words, his self-mystification
through the scene of birth is so obvious, his insistence on having supernatural powers so strong
(while they might have been cleansed away form him), and his sense of guilt – for boasting about
his powers, for owing life to his mother's death, or both – so (thinly) veiled in the passage, that they
may induce readers to be suspicious of him as a narrator, and to wonder if he is as supernatural as
he claims to be, or if he is just implicitly asking readers to suspend their disbelief and take his
singularity for granted, for the sake of the subsequently and presumably singular telling of his tale,
which is specifically conditioned by his extraordinary longevity and prenatal and/or premature
knowledge.250 For instance, in the same passage, if it were not for Sow's supernatural powers, he
could not possibly tell of his “hollering for mercy to spare” him at a time of life (birth) when he is
not supposed to know what mercy is, all the more so since human beings, rarely, if ever, remember
their early life (42). Yet, if Sow has no supernatural powers, if one refuses to suspend one's
disbelief, one could choose to perceive his narrative voice as that of a mixed-race man from the
twentieth-century engaging with the historical past of slavery in an imaginative – and hence, to
some extent, transformative – way, all the more so since Sow's meta-textual addresses to readers,
drawing their attention to the unbelievable and/or gruesome nature of the events that are to be told
250As an orphan who never knew his parents, and only learned about them from the mouth of Mrs Mason, Sow could
not know the story of Christy and Faith as precisely and in so much detail as can be found in his telling of their tale.
An obvious instantiation of Sow's “prenatal” knowledge can be found when he listens and cries to his mother's
complaints while still in her belly (D'Aguiar 2000, 39).
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(“Don't ask me how [...]” [6];“This is not for the faint-hearted. If you are, / skip this page and the
next” [37]), or asking for a lenient critical reception (“wait, / he doesn't have to rhyme every other
line” [17]), are too direct and obvious to be taken exclusively in a serious way and, thus, forestall a
complete suspension of disbelief, that is, an agreement between readers and narrator to concede to
accept fictional features of the narrative as conceivable. For instance, the following passage from
the novel, where Sow describes his parents sleeping in the barn after their shipwreck and Tom's
apparent drowning (for what they know) and before the rape of Faith there, combines both an
address to the reader and an imaginative re-construction of the past:
What if they shared the same dream,
but from each other's point of view?
Would you raise your hands and scream?
Would you give up on me and them too?
The fact is they both conjured the same stream
shallow enough for the old man to pull through. (36)
That Sow's defense of the supernatural – more precisely here, of the telepathic – is part and parcel
of a deliberate metatextual presentation of the tale that repetitively thwarts a lenient suspension of
disbelief on the part of the reader does not entail that the novel can be dismissed as unconvincing:
questioning the necessity for incredulous response, the text suggests instead that Sow's presumably
hypomnesic autobiography actually corresponds to anamnesic imagination: he, as a twentiethcentury narrator, draws from what he is supposed to know and remember, in order to imaginatively
re-present an otherwise irretrievable past and, so doing, places elements of his present (the 20 th
century) in the past which is, as a consequence, directly connected to its future. 251 So doing, Sow
also presents imagination as a mnemonic faculty that exceeds the temporal limits of lived
experience – which, again, is an Orphic feature, according to Sartre in his description of Negritude
literature (Sartre xxxvi). The past that Sow imaginatively re-constructs is not entirely fictional, but
prototypical of recurring historical facts of slavery and their legacy in the present, and, to this
extent, functions as imaginative memory: “and the past is present in future stories” (152).
251This, for one thing, explains his apparently anachronistic language, describing nineteenth-century scenes through
references to “skyscraper[s]” (D'Aguiar 2000, 2), 1970s funk music (23), “MTV jams” (15) and contemporary slang
(16-7).
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Of course, Sow's resistance to death in the twentieth century, when he cannot die by jumping
from the roof of a skyscraper (2), or be burned to death by racists (156), is clearly described as
supernatural, but these punctual events, although they serve as evidence of Sow's immortality, are
only accessory to the tale: his jumping from a sky-scraper after his lover leaves him is anecdotal,
and his surviving a racist mob's incentive to burn him is given both a supernatural – he is “too
stubborn / to catch alight” – and a realistic (he is soaked in water, washing beneath a standpipe)
explanation. Sow's immortality or longevity is a pretext for his twentieth-century anamnesis to
reach the 1860s, in case readers would refuse to rely upon imagination as memory. Finally, the
placing of twentieth-century references in a nineteenth-century context may be viewed as an
attempt at historical inversion that brings contemporary legacies of slavery to the fore, to try and
propose, in the past, the image of a different, desirable future. Sow's powers over the past are not
without bounds, as his vain invocations for Muses to change the course of his story show (19-20,
149), and Sow cannot erase slavery from the past and pretend it never existed. However, he hopes
that slavery and its legacies (rape, racism) will be exceeded after the “new millenium” (150). In this
sense, the surreal scene of Christy's rape of Faith turning to mutual love might not be meant to be
taken at face value but rather, as an allegorical representation, in the past, of a desirable, future
change, by way of which the legacies of slavery would be exceeded by interracial love. Such a
representation is not naive wishful thinking, nor is it utopian, and the claim that interracial love is
desirable must not be disdained as a truism. As the novel explains, slavery's “offspring, Racism, still
breeds” (150), and messages of interracial love are necessary to counter it. Bloodlines turns to the
past to offer such a message to the future as a prophetic vision of the past (Glissant 1989, 63-4).
Such a relation to the future, again, appears to be corroborated by the intertextual links that
make Red Head (D'Aguiar 1996a) Sow's intertextual, “eldest brother.” Again, both are red-haired
orphans said to have supernatural powers: Red Head can see the future, Sow can reach distant
future and past through longevity akin to immortality. Moreover, both are premature children born
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after seven months of gestation (D'Aguiar 1996a, 21; 2000, 43). In addition to this array of shared
features, the following study of Dear Future is to show that, like Bloodlines, D'Aguiar's second
novel provides readers with a prophetic vision of the past. However, this time around, as is to be
seen, the historical past being described is not that of slavery, but of 1970s Guyana.
In spite of its initial disclaimer, stating that “this novel bears no relation to any places or
persons living or dead,” and that “Any resemblance is entirely coincidental” (D'Aguiar 1996, v),
Dear Future, Fred D'Aguiar's second novel, appears to present, in strikingly proleptic, prophetic
and poetic terms, the intricate historical and political past of 1970s Guyana. More than that, it
actually is the disclaimer that incites curious readers to try and unveil the actual, historical facts
concealed in the text, and to look for potentially metatextual features of the novel: such facts and
features are, indeed, numerous in Dear Future.252
For instance, the novel starts at the Santos' household in Ariel, “formerly Percival,
Cooperative Republic Village number –” (11) near the country's capital, where Red Head lives with
his older brother (nicknamed Bash Man Goady), his cousins, aunts and uncles, grandmother and
grandfather. In spite of the erasure of its number, the village's name, “Ariel,” sounds close to “Airy
Hall,” the place in Guyana where Fred D'Aguiar grew up, from 1962 to 1972 (Stade & Karbiener
127). Moreover, that the country where Ariel is found is called a “Cooperative Republic”
corresponds to Guyanese president Forbes Burnham's increasingly dictatorial and, officially,
communist turn away from the Western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by privatizing
foreign exploitations in Guyana, practicing an isolationist policy – the import restrictions of which
are mentioned in the novel (D'Aguiar 1996; 103-4, 111) – and declaring, on February 23 1970, that
the country was a socialist Cooperative Republic. 253 The impression that the novel takes place in
252This search for actual Guyanese facts, as shown by the following discussion, qualifies Heather Hathaway's argument
that “D'Aguiar's decision not to mention a specific location universalizes the plot, thus making the novel's political
commentary applicable to a number of post-colonial Caribbean nations” (Hathaway 506).
253Information on Guyanese history is drawn from www.guyana.org (June 27th, 2016), except where indicated.
Considering the instability of the country since its independence from Britain in 1966, and its recurrent recourse to
dictatorial censorship under the Burnham regime, that website is a highly valuable source, and might well consist in
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Guyana is confirmed by the description of the country's surroundings: the Amazon and Orinoco
rivers, and Surinam (8). Finally, the repetitive mention, in the book, of a border war, corresponds to
the long-lasting Guyana-Venezuela border dispute over the resources of the rainforest interior (100,
105-6).254 It can thus be assumed that, in spite of its disclaimer, the novel takes place near
Georgetown, Guyana, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, under the Forbes Burnham
regime/dictatorship. However, D'Aguiar is not writing a fully faithful and chronological account of
Guyana's historical past, since Red Head's orphanhood is due to his father's leaving his mother, and
to his mother's being recruited by Burnham as an overseas senior campaign secretary to increase
and falsify the number of votes from England in support of his party: such electoral practices are
those that granted the executive to Burnham in 1968, two years before Guyana was made a
Cooperative Republic.255 Hence, the designation, presumably in 1968, of the country as a
“Cooperative Republic” is anachronistic in the novel, or, perhaps, foreshadowing a near future.256
Foresight is, indeed, the main characteristic of the novel, first and foremost because of the
one of the very few existing reliable references. As a consequence, the website will serve as one of our only
historiographical sources on Guyana during the Burnham years, along with Shiva Naipaul's research, Jessie
Burnham's autobiographical pamphlet, and the Jagan family website, all listed in the bibliography, below.
254The dispute has virtually been lasting since 1830, when Venezuela won independence from Spain, to the present,
and concerns the region at the West of the Essequibo river, that is, five-eighths of the Guyanese territory's surface.
The threat of a border war, in Dear Future, certainly refers to the the 1966 Venezuelan intrusion on Ankoko island,
leading to the positioning of soldiers from both Guyana and Venezuela on the banks of the Cuyuni river, lounging
the disputed island.
255Shiva Naipaul explains that from the late 1950s to the late 1960s in the anglophone Caribbean, certain newly
independent countries realized that their governments were only outwardly independent and Afro-Caribbean, and
often remained puppets of the West. Unrest often arose as a consequence, and led to attempts at overthrowing the
governments in question. In this context, Forbes Burnham, an Afro-Caribbean man who was known for having
capitalized on racial divisions in the country (Naipaul 21, 85) and broken with his former “coolie” friend and true
communist Cheddi Jagan in order to be backed by the West to reign over Guyana – Burnham was “installed in
power by the CIA and the British colonial office” (34-5) in a Cold War context of containment policy, notably
attempting to avoid the spread of communism in the Third World – had to create left-wing credentials for himself in
order to avoid unrest from the Afro-Caribbean communities of Guyana, all the more so since he had managed to stay
in power in 1968 only thanks to “rigged elections” (36) won through to the “ethereal entities known as overseas
voters” (36).
As a consequence, in the lates 60s and early 70s, Burnham turned Guyana from a “model of neocolonial
obedience” to a co-operative republic, chose to embody the stereotype of the Big Black chief, created links with the
Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, participated in the 1970 Conference of Nonaligned Nations of Lusaka. In 1971 and
1975, respectively, Canadian-owned and American-owned bauxite mines and installations were nationalized. The
following year [1976] the British-owned sugar estates and sugar refineries were nationalized. Socialism […] had
come to Guyana with a vengeance” (37). Two years later, the Jonestown massacre would occur, and Burnham, who
had backed commune leader Jim Jones, “would remain a model of un-cooperative silence” (58). The same year,
Burnham would plan and rig a referendum for a re-writing of the Guyanese consitution that would and did give him
“sweeping powers” and made it “unnecessary to hold any more elections” (22).
256Of course, the 1973 re-election of Burnham was rigged as well, but did not involve the falsification of overseas
vote: “the Army simply seized ballot boxes and did with them as they wished” (Naipaul 22).
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fact that its Orphic-orphan protagonist, Red Head, becomes clairvoyant in the opening scene, when
his uncle Beanstalk inadvertently hits the child's forehead with an axe as Red Head runs behind him
while he is chopping wood. Just after the shock, Red Head falls down and enters a state of delirium
in which he has a vision that is not only prophetic in nature, as it metaphorically announces the
country's near future, but also proleptic, in that elements of the vision are tropologically connected
to the following anecdotal and fictional elements of the narrative. Of course, the presentation of a
historical past in prophetic and symbolical terms is not neutral in Dear Future, but full of dark irony
and, hence, critical, apparently warning readers about ominous Guyanese futures, which is why the
present study has been describing, from the onset, this novel as proleptic, prophetic, and political,
and is now to unravel the text's intricate weft of futuristic connections, starting with Red Head's
prophetic vision of the past (Glissant 1989; 63-4, 145).
Red Head's vision contains four figures, although only three are initially presented: Red
Head first recognizes himself mounting a russet horse, and then sees a presidential figure dressed in
“purple regalia” and mounting a white horse. Both characters are riding “in full gallop” on a red
beach and simultaneously focusing on a chess board levitating between them. Then, Red Head
perceives a man “wrecked by polio” cycling on a jetty, diving into the sea and swimming away into
the distance (D'Aguiar 1996, 5). The fourth image is not fully seen at once: Red Head describes a
kite flying without anyone steering it. It is then that a small creature – subsequently and alternately
named “Pint Size” and/or “Half Pint” – emerges from the wound on the protagonist's forehead and
tortures him by stomping his feet on the welt from whence he came, and insisting on the fact that
there was a fourth figure, and that “There will be red, then there will be black” (6, 10). Because of
Pint Size's telepathic persistence – he communicates with Red Head without needing to speak, and
only Red Head can see him – Red Head later focuses on the fourth phase of what he remembers
from his vision, while simultaneously playing a game of chess with his grandfather, or rather,
pretending to do so, as it is Pint Size, who guides the protagonist's hand. Red Head realizes that the
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kite is actually tied to a limousine riding on the red sand road that goes from Ariel to the capital.
That limousine is “emblazoned with the presidential seal” and, when Red Head concentrates on a
box that is tied to the tail of the kite, “his eyes on the bundle” act “like a detonator” and “an
explosion shatter[s] the limousine and its prized contents, not with a bang, this was soundless, but
with blackness” (62). Red Head's initial vision, now fully reconstituted, is, again, and
retrospectively, prophetic in its relation to almost every element of the novel's plot and historical
background, as shall now be shown, through a decoding of the images it contains. More precisely,
the following sounding of Dear Future is to try and reproduce the steps of the hermeneutic reading
that is spurred by the novel's disclaimer and Red Head's enigmatic vision in the book's incipit.
The first figure to whom Red Head is confronted in his vision, after having recognized
himself, is that of a presidential figure dressed in purple and mounting a white stallion. These colors
– purple and white – come as additional hints to the fact that the novel is alluding, as explained
above, to the Burnham regime: in fact, Forbes Burnham's presidential flag, or standard, corresponds
to three vertical stripes, two of them purple, and the middle one white. The central, white stripe
consists in a background on which is superimposed the image of a black alligator lying at the foot of
a palm tree. And if the amphibian is missing from Red Head's vision, it soon appears 257 in the novel:
following his shock, Red Head is prone to crises the symptoms of which correspond to those of
epilepsy. In order to counter such fits, an Obeah medicine woman, Miss Metage, whom the Ariel
children nickname Ole Higue, advises Red Head not to look at strong sources of light, and to eat the
“heart of young coconut trees” to “mend his mind” (27-8). 258 As a consequence, the Santos family
257The opening short story in contemporary Guyanese author Pauline Melville's latest collection The Migration of
Ghosts, entitled “The President's Exile,” uses the colors, and alligator of Burnham's presidential standard too (she
also mentions the president's white horse), to suggest that the dead leader, President Hercules, through whose eyes
most of the story is told, is not as fictional as he may seem to be (Melville 1998; 7, 15-6), all the more so since the
Guyanese context is clearly evoked, through mentions of the Potaro and Demerara rivers (20, 22). Since Melville's
collection was published two years after Dear Future came out, one may imagine the possibility for D'Aguiar's
treatment of the presidential flag to have been inspirational for Melville, unless, of course, if the similarity is
accidental.
258Ole Higue is a mythical figure in Guyanese folklore who is often represented as a reclusive old woman who, at
night, sheds her attire to turn to a ball of fire an visit houses where she will suck the blood of the young children she
finds. D'Aguiar's first collection of poems, entitled Mama Dot, which is supposed to tell of the poet's childhood in
Guyana, contains a poem entitled “Ol' Higue,” describing a woman comparable to Miss Metage, to whom, in the
poem as in the novel, children pelt sand stones (D'Aguiar 1985, 40; 1996, 28). The poem, like the novel again,
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soon goes on an expedition in the coconut grove to find the young growths the children call
“growee,” until they reach a water trench which uncle Beanstalk tries to cross on what he believes
to be a log, but turns out to be an adult alligator. Beanstalk, with the help of his brother Bounce,
escapes death and captures the alligator thanks to his lasso (53-4). The alligator, except when placed
and excited in a fenced field by the uncles to divert the children (who have baptized it “Bubble
Back”), is most of the time tied with a rope to a “guava tree devoid of fruit” (56), with enough slack
to go and hide underwater in a nearby pond (56). Although this detailed account of Bubble Back's
capture appears well into the narrative, it is actually briefly foreshadowed in the novel's first page,
where it serves for the characterization of Beanstalk, who is, again, the uncle who hit Red Head
with an axe:
This was the uncle who, when leading a party hunting for the unbelievably sweet young shoots of
coconut plants they'd christened 'growee', began to cross a trench on a log that bucked and flung him
off, and who, as everyone scattered and fought to climb the nearest tree, lassoed the log's head and
tail before the word 'alligator' had formed on anyone's lips. (3)
Hence, the alligator incident actually is an initial event that is completed by Red Head's vision, and
turns the presidential flag of Forbes Burnham to an imaginative narrative.259 Its full description,
coming later in the narrative, is, in other words, elliptically announced – readers are not told yet that
mentions a red sand road and contains the same playful song Guyanese children, in D'Aguiar's work, use to
designate who should catch who in their “catcher” game: “app-ten-dap-ten-dee-kalapten” (D'Aguiar 1985, 40; 1996,
57, 62). Airy Hall is, like Mama Dot, another collection of poems that is supposed to relate memories from
D'Aguiar's childhood, and describes a red sand road crossing Airy Hall (D'Aguiar 1989, 2). Finally, Fred D'Aguiar's
Continental Shelf collection also contains poems dealing with the poet's childhood memories, one of which is
entitled “Sabbatic,” and describes a strange character who “Drank methylated spirits and spat fire” (D'Aguiar 2009,
32-3): the same character, Old Sabbatic, is found doing the same thing in Dear Future (D'Aguiar 1996; 30, 86). Still
in Continental Shelf, two poems, namely, “Bring Back, Bring Back” (3) and “H2O” (11), describe children fetching
water from standpipes and coming back home with bucketfuls of water from which they try not to spill a drop: the
same standpipe anecdote is rehearsed in Dear Future (D'Aguiar 1996, 34), Bethany Bettany (2003, 6, 15) and
Children of Paradise (2014, 1). These details, in addition to the fact that it is during the Burnham years (1964-1985)
that D'Aguiar spent time in Guyana, from 1962 to 1972, let one suspect that D'Aguiar embroiders autobiographical
data into his novels as well. The autobiographical track will, yet, be left to hover here for now, for the aim of the
present study does not reside in an attempt – in any case bound to fail, and of no critical use – at unveiling the
author's private life.
259A similar alligator accident is recounted in a poem by Fred D'Aguiar entitled “Caiman,” in Continental Shelf
(D'Aguiar 2009, 21). The event is also reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's instantiation of de- and reterritorialization in “Rhizome:” “The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk any more than the chameleon
reproduces the colors of its surroundings,” they are not miming, but forming a rhizome with the world, according to
the two philosophers (Deleuze & Guattari 6, my translation). Conversely, Dear Future, as a narrative, is not simply
imitating the flag, but derives from its fabric a rhizomatic network of – then interconnected – metafictional and
intertextual events.
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growees are being looked for as pharmaka to cure Red Head260 – in the novel's very first paragraph.
That the alligator is captured and tied to barren a tree is a detail that is not on the flag and that may,
hence, be subversive, all the more so since it is made clear, as explained below, that the Santos
family is strongly opposed to the party in power, called the “People's Party” in the novel (38),
echoing the name of Burnham's People's National Congress (PNC). In the novel, however, the
alligator turns out to be female, as it gives birth to a young alligator who is discovered by the
children as a threatening presence, a “dark shadow” (57) below the surface of the shell pond where
they swim. As a consequence, the patriarchal figure in the Santos household, “Grandad,” decrees
that the alligator and its progeny shall be returned to the coconut grove and freed there after the
presidential elections (58), thus emphasizing the parallel being drawn between the amphibian's fate
and Burnham's fraudulent acquisition of total power in 1968. Hence, if the alligator represents
Burnham, and can be captured and mastered by the Santos uncles, it is ultimately to be freed, and its
progeny – a replica of Bubble Back, named “Double Back” and, hence, potentially standing for a
metaphorical representation of Burnham's legacy (58) – still threatens the Santos children, possibly
representing the future of Guyana, and most of all, the descendants of opponents to Burnham's
PNC.261
Reverting to Red Head's vision, it is interesting to find that the protagonist deciphers the
prophecy's fourth phase while playing chess games – with the help of Pint size – against his
grandfather, who trains Red Head hoping that his grandson will win the game's national
championship, because a chessboard figures in Red Head's initial vision. Yet, it is against the
president that the main character, in his delirium, was playing. However, such a correlation between
the two games (against Burnham, and against Grandad) makes sense, considering the fact that the
260As far as the relation between orphanhood, textuality, and the pharmakon is concerned, it must be mentioned that
Red Head, again, an orphan, partly uses his convalescence to hone his handwriting (D'Aguiar 1996, 22).
261The ominous emergence of Double Back from the pond might itself have been foreshadowed by another, earlier
pond incident in the novel, when Red Head almost drowns in the pond because of a fit subsequent to Pint Size's
insistence that there is more to Red Head's vision that he wishes to admit (D'Aguiar 1996, 25-6). This idea
strengthens the impression that the poetics of Dear Future is conditioned by prolepsis and prophecy. Moreover, the
same incident is recounted in Continental Shelf – again, a collection that is presented as partly autobiographical – in
a poem entitled “The Shell Pond” (D'Aguiar 2009, 34-5).
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grandfather is depicted as constantly trying to involve his relatives in national contests, as a
symbolical way of making the opposition win against national institutions and/or champions bribed
by the PNC, who is sponsoring events in order to win upcoming elections.
For instance, when Grandad, as he is called in the novel, brings Red Head to play chess with
adults at a local rum shop, there is a talk going on that Singh, the Indian wrestler (a true, historical
character, included in Dear Future as a, hence, definitely metafictional work), is coming to Ariel
and is looking for a challenger. The novel makes it clear, elsewhere, that Singh initially wrestled for
the opposition party, but has just changed sides, as Burnham's party made him “an offer he [could
not] refuse (72, 108). As a consequence, and to the surprise of his friends at the rum shop, Grandad
proposes his son Bounce as a contestant for Singh. A few moments later, when he leaves the bar to
go home and announce to his son the fight that awaits him, a truck of PNC supporters rolls past him
and its passengers throw a bucketful of urine and excretion at him (38). Up to the wrestling match,
political tensions increase, as the Santos' neighbors and friends get attacked in the night by men
armed with guns, and are rescued by the Santos uncles, who report that the aggressors shouted
“coolie lover” (48), indicating that the attackers were (“black”) PNC supporters opposed to the
(“Indian”) People's Progressive Party (PPP) of opposition leader Cheddi Jagan (Naipaul 85). When
the fight comes, Bounce magically wins against Singh by staring him down with eyes that shine so
bright that they are described as “two red sources of light which shone with menace” (D'Aguiar
1996, 80) even when closed, so much so that “It was like day from the light that shone behind his
clamp lids” (79). Singh's vision and focus are disturbed as a consequence – an eye the retina of
which was impaired during a preceding match progressively closes – and Bounce turns it to his
advantage by sending him into a coma with a single blow after several rounds that exclusively
consisted in a sustained stare. Such insistence on the supernatural powers of an individual's gaze,
sending someone else in a death-like state, is highly reminiscent of Christy's boxing “the ghosts of
six men into oblivion” in Bloodlines (D'Aguiar 2000, 74), and of Orpheus' backward gaze, sending
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Eurydice to the realm of the dead.
However, and as a consequence to Singh's defeat, PNC supporters and the audience who had
come for entertainment and a demonstration of Singh's prowess, are disappointed, work themselves
into a fury against the Santos family, known for opposing the PNC, and decide to go to the Santos
home, where the family has retreated (presciently again) in anticipation of the public's reaction. The
entire Santos family is locked up in their house, and Bounce goes out to meet the mob, and is soon
followed by his brothers. The fight apparently is a loosing one and the house, with the children
inside, is set aflame, leaving little hope for their survival. During the commotion inside the house as
the mob approaches, Red Head interprets his vision of “red followed by black” as red blood pouring
out of black skin and causing deaths that, he suggests, only Bounce could prevent, by going out to
meet the crowd. However, Bounce's self-sacrifice proves ineffective (86-90).
Earlier in the novel, Red Head provides another potential interpretation for the succession of
red and black: “The red sand road will be a river of blood. The river will dry but the red sand will
not re-appear. A hard, black road will run through the heart of the land” (25). Later in the book,
although Red Head's grandmother explains that the construction of a road relating Ariel to the
capital would bring them more people and electricity, Red Head panics when he learns that,
confirming his vision, the road replacing red sand will be made out of black bitumen (33).
However, the making of the road by the “road gang,” as the novel designates the inter-ethnic and
cross-cultural crowd of workers gravitating around the construction of the road in question, has
come to a standstill, as the government cannot pay for anybody anymore, except with coffee beans
(8-10), and tries to negotiate “more loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World
bank” (68). Readers later find out that the funds dedicated to the building of the road were
dilapidated by high-ranking civil servants, such as a minister, to “dig a garden swimming pool and
build a U-shaped drive leading in one gate up to the said minister's front door and out another”
(125).262
262The road is related to politicians in another, more direct way, as the presidential limousine passes Wheels and Red
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As a consequence to such state corruption, the road is not finished, and remains full of
bumps and potholes when the National Cycle Championship – in which another of Red Head's
uncles, aptly named Wheels, participates – takes place. Although for the most part of the race,
taking place on the red sand road from which a “dust storm” is raised by the competing cyclists,
Wheels remains in the leading pack, the transition to bitumen is so fast, surprising, and rough that
all leading cyclists fall, causing most of them to abandon the race, either for want of a second
bicycle, or because they are too badly injured. 263 Wheels is thus forced to give up, and is brought
back to Ariel by his father and his neighbor, to be treated, nevertheless, as the village champion (6371). Thus, the transition from red to black, when related to the road, keeps on being viewed
pejoratively, as it seals a dark fate for one of Red Head's estimated relatives, and is directly
connected to the wrong-doings of the political elite in power. Yet, Wheels' defeat, like the other
elements of the novel, was predictable and predicted, since one of the cycling uncle's trainings,
rolling around on a track behind the family house, is described, where Wheels raises a “floating
mountain” of sand on his trail after falling because of a bird that plunged into his racer's wheel. As a
result, “His left side, from his hip down to his ankle, had no skin; it had ripped off as he slid to a
stop on the track. Everyone stared at the reddening flesh. A single, black condor feather fringed with
white protruded from his lower calf” (43). Not only is the “sand cloud” present both during training
and race, but Wheels, re-Christened “Winged Feet” by Red Head after the training incident (the
Head on the red sand road as they cycle back from the hospital where Red Head's wound was stitched up: the
limousine slows down, a window lowers, and the president exchanges looks with the two cyclists, cordially waves at
them, and zooms away (D'Aguiar 1996, 14-5). It is when Wheels and Red Head get back home and tell of their
meeting with the president (again, foreseen by Red Head in his vision) that readers learn about the electoral context,
as Granny tells them: “He only stop because election coming up” (17). The black presidential limousine on the red
sand road also corresponds to Red Head's preceding vision. A more tenuous, yet possible, actualization of Red
Head's prophecy may correspond to the red Pontiac owned by the president's second right-hand man, aptly named
Gamediser, as he takes the dicey decision of visiting the Santos family and being bluntly rejected by Grandad, only
to find excitement in the anger resulting from his game of provocation – he can only have an erection when angry
(117) – before going to the local brothel, and pay for an infantile prostitute (119). The “country's only Pontiac,”
imported in spite of stringent isolationism (111), is both a symbol of governmental corruption and a conflation of the
car image with the red color of the road from Red Head's vision. Finally, it must be noted that the construction of a
road, the electoral context, and the supernatural elements of the text are features of the novel that can also be found
in Nigerian writer Ben Okri's 1991 novel The Famished Road.
263The same story is told in two poems by D'Aguiar, respectively found in Mama Dot and Airy Hall, and named “The
National Cycle Championship” and “National Cycle Championship” (D'Aguiar 1985, 36; 2009, 36-40), attesting to
the significance of that specific tale for the author.
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bike is named Wings), is clearly being associated to Hermes, the messenger of gods, that is, a
prophet of sorts. In other words, Wings is connected to the prophetic, and his training accident is,
like so many elements of Dear Future, proleptic of what is to happen next, that is, his defeat at the
cycle championship which, this time, as readers learn and contrarily to Bounce's short-lived victory,
is a definitive defeat against governmental adversity.
Wheels, unlike other characters this time, has a direct counterpart in the novel: the
president's “right-hand man” (111), “the capital's best-known polio victim” (95), aptly named
Brukup – a name that is very close to “broken up” and, hence, convenient for a man “wrecked by
polio” (5). He is Wheel's counterpart in that he, because of his illness, has weak legs and sore
wounds on his bottom that prevent him from sitting comfortably on his bicycle and/or being
competitive with it. Moreover, instead of taking care of children in the same way as Wheels took
care of Red Hair by carrying him on Wings to Miss Metage to be cured, Brukup abuses children, as
he takes pleasure making the young daughter of a prostitute cry in front of the brothel – in which
underage, barely pubescent prostitutes are found as well – he is about to enter to satisfy his sexual
urges (98-101). Most of all, while Wheels falls during the championship because of the transition
from red sand to black road, Brukup almost falls, and finally hurts himself as he leaves bitumen for
the dirt track in which he has not seen a hole, on his way to the crowded brothel (97), where he is
unhappy to meet colleagues from the Ministry of Defense: “'We have a border war on our hands and
the Ministry of Defense is having a ball,' he muttered to himself” (100). Brukup, as a civil servant
on the government's side, functions as a contrastive mirror image to Wheels.
But Brukup is also important to the narrative because, of course, he is the man ruined by
polio that Red Head perceives in the penultimate phase of his vision (5). It is indeed made obvious,
from the moment he appears, that Brukup is the man from the vision, as he is described cycling to
the beach and swimming away from the shore with a suitcase full of government papers revealing
the fact that overseas votes were “invented” (96), and getting rid of them awayfrom anybody's sight,
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into the sea: “all the papers about the overseas-votes initiative were indeed now undersea. The
seabed would be their archive” (97). 264 This event, the actual equivalent of what the protagonist saw
in his vision, is of great significance for Red Head, although he might not know it, for the falsified
lists of overseas voters that Brukup is disposing of were forged by Red Head's mother herself. As
readers are made to understand, Red Head's mother, deserted by her children's father, was seduced
by Burnham's rhetoric (140), and Burnham used her as a consequence as a sexual object, until he
unfeelingly deemed her “stunning-looking, but her pussy hang down to her knee from dropping
pickney every year since she seventeen” (103), got bored, and sent her to London as a senior
campaign secretary to help him rig the next elections. Her falsification of the list not being dimmed
credible by Brukup and the President, Red Head's mother (who remains nameless to the end of the
novel) is forced to start making up lists again without further government funding, and is thus led to
live in a slum with the three children she took along, and prevented from getting back to Guyana to
reunite the three sons with their two elder brothers, Red Head and Bash Man Goady. 265 Hence, the
novel blames the breaking up of familial links and the maternal orphanhood of the two elder
brothers on the (also unnamed) Burnham government too, and when Red Head foresees Brukup's
disposal of his mother's overseas list, what he foresees is the continuation of his own maternal
orphanhood: he dies at the hands of government supporters and disenchanted villagers without ever
264Apart from the under/oversea pun, the notion that the (Atlantic) ocean is an archive is not without reminding Fred
D'Aguiar's famous claim, in Feeding the Ghosts, the novel he published just one year after Dear Future, that “the
sea is slavery,” “turns pages of memory” and absorbs the body of slaves “without the evidence of a scar” (D'Aguiar
1997, 3). The sea is the eraser par excellence. But then again, it is a hypomnesic source as well, as each erasing tide
is the re-inscription of something else, which D'Aguiar uses in his works to remind readers of the past of slavery and
of the damages caused by tyrannical, violent power exerted on others.
265Living in the slum, she takes up a sewing job and falls in love with Ahmad, the man of Pakistani descent who
teaches her how to sew (146-8). As their love affair lasts, the mother is convinced to convert to Islam and to
circumcise her children (152-4) – one of whom willingly slows his breathing and cardiac pulse down to relax during
the operation, to the point of frightening the doctor, who believes he might have lost the child, until the same child
performs what looks like an Orphic, resurrection (153). However, she ultimately refuses to marry Ahmad, who turns
out to be polygamous, and asks her to become “wife number two” (156). Hence, in the novel, Red Head's brothers
are away from their clairvoyant relative (whom they liken to a parakeet, the repeating animal most comparable to a
mouthpiece [149]), but related to another type of prophet, that is, Muhammad, the prophet of Islam according to the
Koran. The couple actually only separates definitively after a bicycle incident involving Red Head's three younger
brothers and Shaheen, Ahmad's eldest son from “wife number one.” Shaheen and the oldest of the three brothers
challenge each other to a ride down a steep slope and Shaheen falls, ultimately breaking his arm. Ahmad taking his
son away to the hospital is the last Red Head's mother and readers see of Ahmad in the novel (169). The cycle
incident also serves to link the children metaphorically to Wheels, the cycling uncle to whom they are already
genetically related.
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seeing his mother again.
This part of the tale, of course, is also telling of how disrespectful the novel's presidential
figure, along with Brukup and Gamediser, are with women.266 As far as Red Head's mother is
concerned, she was the assistant of the president's dentist when she met the country's leader, and the
dentist, named Richmond, actually is a mole working for the opposition leader: in the chapter
introducing him as a character, Richmond uses Burnham's well-known taste for diamonds (Naipaul
40), sometimes serving as tooth-fillings, to place a bug within a cap he is to fixate in the president's
mouth, so as to enable the opposition leader to spy on the president and know his plans (D'Aguiar
1996, 107). The chapter in which the dental operation is carried out is aptly entitled “An Ear to the
Ground” (102), evoking the Amerindian technique of placing an ear on earth in order to hear the
sound of approaching objects and beings, and predicting their potential approach. In other words,
Richmond installs a prosthetic device that endows the opposition leader with short-term prophetic
powers. Due to the device, on election day, the (unnamed) opposition leader sonically witnesses the
president's morning ride on his white stallion, and his beating of the “infantile mistress” (126) that
accompanies him for the ride on the beach, as the president does not seem to be content with having
abused that same mistress at will over the preceding night (122, 124). When he tries to get back
onto his horse, the stallion goes mad and rears onto its hind legs because of the sounds – inaudible
to a man's ear – made by the bug in the president's tooth, which leads the president to suspect the
presence of the device on everybody around him except for himself, as he fails – because of
hubristic pride – to admit that he could be the bug carrier at the source of the problem. Not finding
any microphone, then, he shoots the horse dead and goes back home in his car (126-7). Since the
president does not find the bug, the opposition leader remains safe, and believes he is going to win
the election. As a consequence, he decides to dress up for the occasion and, as his wife hands him a
shirt, she mutters “something about how the closer he [gets] to presidency, the more pungeant his
266The mistreatment of women reportedly is a highly present, and harsh, reality in Guyana. For more information on
the subject, see Trotz 2004, 1-20.
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sweat be[comes]” (128), suggesting that the opposition, with its questionable spying practices,
might not be more promising than the politicians in power, leaving no real hope or place for selfassured prophecy in the reader's mind.
And it is with an absence of signs from the future, or so it seems, that the novel ends, as the
last, eponymous part of the book consists in Red Head's series of unanswered letters to the future,
all starting with the “Dear Future” phrase. Red Head writes to the future from his newly-acquired
position as an unbaptized child who died and landed in limbo, accompanied by his elder brother,
Bash Man Goady (181, 186).267 As his letters suggest, the context of 1960s Guyanese political
267In spite of the presumably clear Christian nature of the passage, through the pervading sense of brotherly love and
the notion of limbo as a place for unbaptized children, the tropical potential of limbo as not only a Christian locus,
but a Caribbean dance too, is not lost on readers, all the more so since the dance symbolizes a subversive, tricksterlike mode of resistance to oppression inspired by the Afro-Caribbean myth of the spidery figure of Anansi, who wins
against adversity thanks to creativity and imagination according to Wilson Harris (Harris 1970, 157): an Anansi
story actually appears at the very beginning of Dear Future, in the first chapter, named “Axe and Anansi,” a title
sounding close to “Asking Anansi,” as if a conjuration of the trickster into the tale was intended and, hence,
simultaneously effected, through the mention of the trickster's name.
The story told in that chapter is that of Anansi bringing home a hand of bananas, and distributing them to
his wife and four children, leaving no fruit for himself. As a consequence, in a gesture of solidarity (cunningly
predicted by the trickster), each member of the family gives him a third, or even a half, of their banana, ultimately
making Anansi's meal the biggest one (D'Aguiar 1996, 12-3). That story is echoed thrice in the London-based part of
the story. Fist, during an outing in the city, Red Head's mother buys three bags of crisps for her three sons, and the
youngest one, on the walk home, inadvertently spills part of his bag's contents as he opens it. As a consequence, his
elder brothers immediately pour part of their bags into that of their younger brother until his bag is full again, thus
letting him have more crisps than them (139). Second, when Ahmad first comes to the mother's flat to deliver a
sewing machine, he offers three tubes of smarties to the boys, and their mother forces them to share by making each
of them give her two chocolate-coated sweets (144-5). This recurrence of the Anansi pattern fulfills the doublepurpose of showing that the children keep memories of the Caribbean folklore they were severed from, and of
supporting the novel's parable of brotherly love, emphasized by Red Head at the epistolary end of the novel (206). A
darker appearance of the trickster comes up when the mother reluctantly accepts to make love with Ahmad at the
end of their relationship, and diverts herself away from her immediate, physical condition, by staring at her and her
lover's reflection in a lamp overhead, where she imagines them as an eight-limb, double-back creature, suggesting
that she has recourse to an Anansi-like reverie to escape, in spirit at least, a situation unpleasant to her (165-6).
As far as Red Head and Bash Man Goady's presence in limbo is concerned, the notion of limbo might
implicitly indicate, following Harris' interpretation, the transitory nature of the brothers' in-between experience, as
Harris, again, describes limbo as a dance symbolic of the Anansi-, spidery-like passing of a threshold, through
contortion, into an other world that might, in D'Aguiar's novel, consist in a hoped-for, brighter Guyanese future
(Harris 1970, 157). On the other hand, the two brothers' being stuck in such a threshold, with Red Head writing
letters to “Dear Future,” might be allegorical, and imply that the state of limbo in which they are, with a past to
speak of but in front of a mute future, illustrates the inescapable nature of the present. Conversely, the letters that
start with “Dear Future” are by definition letters that never arrive at their destination, and are thus kept in limbo, in
the same transitory state as that of Red Head and Bash Man Goady. Brothers in limbo, like letters to the future, are
still always on their way, always being “sent” from one world to another, only to end up stuck in a sort of median
space between the place of sending (past) and the place of arriving (future).
Moreover, as a consequence, the “Dear Future” that is on the cover of the book makes the entire novel into
a huge postcard, exposed to all, and therefore addressed at once to everyone and to no one. Everyone, since the letter
does not reach its intended destination (“Future”) because it is read by anyone who sees the book, but also no one
because the future, by definition, has never been lived. No one has ever or will ever be in the future. We, like the two
brothers and the letters to “Dear Future,” are always only in the present, before which what is to come always
recedes, like Eurydice escaping Orpheus' grasp into the realm of the dead.
But the future has the structure of anticipation: in one of his last letters, as shown below, Red Head accepts
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corruption, popular unrest, and general poverty in which Red Head grew up deprived him of any
future, which he defines as “a right that has been denied to [him]” (205). In this sense, it becomes
understandable that, through death, Red Head loses his clairvoyance, or prophetic foresight,
characterized by the future's apparent reluctance to send him any sign. As a consequence, he resigns
to his new condition and only asks the future to indicate his continuing existence to his surviving
relatives if he has any. However, this apparently morose, or maybe even pessimistic closure is
exceeded by the overwhelming presence of brotherly love – which, as an allegory, might in itself
represent a desirable future for Guyana – between Red Head and Bash Man Goady who, while
alive, used to fight over everything and anything (21), and by the notion that the future is a thing
nobody can be deprived of, thus leaving a place for hope:
As a child whose future is no longer a guarantee of his existence, I am allowed one or two
pronouncements.
One, my present is my future. Two, my future is there, will always be there, to be lived.
Three, another soul can leave that future on my behalf so long as I approve. That's all. (200)
That last statement might indeed be “all” that matters in Red Head's last attempt at prophesying in
the book: it is up for next generations to make up for the lost futures of children like him by
bettering conflictual situations into brotherly love. In this sense, the Orphic, backward gaze on the
Guyanese past that the novel offers in oracular terms through Red Head's clairvoyance is, again,
Orphically projected into the future as a hopeful and prophetic vision of the (Guyanese) past
(Glissant 1989, 63-4, Sartre xxxvi).
b. Aping Oracle & Prophetic Ape
As in Bloodlines and Dear Future, Christian intertexts, the theme of prophecy and an
that his future be lived on his behalf by someone else, since he can never see it himself (D'Aguiar 1996, 200). In
other words, the possibility for one to live what Red Head perceives as his future, and potentially resolve the
conditions of social unrest and political tension that dearly cost him (the price was his life), is what makes “his”
future “dear,” that is, expensive, valuable, insofar as it allows for prospects of betterment. Red Head's awareness of
that fact, in addition to the historical past of his lived experience, are constitutive of what readers may receive, then,
as his prophetic vision of the past. More generally, what the novel might thus indicate is that the future is, perhaps,
by definition a “dear” future, both in the sense of a vocative, an addressed, an apostrophized, unattainable thing (but
structurally necessary as such), and for that very reason, “dear” in the sense of precious, costly, of infinite value.
Speaking of which, I am deeply “indebted” to Thomas Dutoit for this final, and “timely,” remark.
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otherworldly ending can be found in Children of Paradise, Fred D'Aguiar's latest novel (2014).
Moreover, since that novel tells the story of the 1978 Jonestown massacre, it is related, like Dear
Future, to the period of Guyanese history when Forbes Burnham was in power, and shows, in
addition to the fact that Fred D'Aguiar had already written on Jonestown, in Bill of Rights (1998),
before composing Children of Paradise, that 1970s Guyana is of particular interest to the author. 268
Of course, and as said above, in Children of Paradise, the main character, Trina, is, like Red Head
and Sow, an Orphic orphan of sorts. Yet, her role in the novel and other aspects of the narrative will
only be addressed in this chapter's second and third parts, as the present section's aim is to address
another feature of D'Aguiar's latest novel, that might also constitute a residual trace from Dear
Future: in the same way as Wheels and Brukup are inverted images of one another in D'Aguiar's
second novel, two relatively prophetic figures, namely, Jim Jones and the commune gorilla, are
mirrored, compared and contrasted in Children of Paradise, and play an important role in the
unfolding of the novel's plot.
For one thing, both Jim Jones and Adam, the commune gorilla, are orphans: Adam lost his
mother to hunters (D'Aguiar 2014, 14, 22), and Jim Jones' father died in the Midwest, in the United
States, blown away by a tornado (46, 136-7).269 Yet, a significant difference surfaces in the novel:
while Adam's mother died at the hands of others, Jim Jones feels guilty for the loss of his father,
because it is, according to the text, after Jones asked for his dog that his father went out into the
tempest in order to get the dog, and never came back to shelter (136-7). In this sense, Adam is
comparable to a victimized foundling, while Jones views himself as a parricidal orphan (136-7).270
Another early event in the novel turns each character to an inverted, mirror image of the other: one
268The Burnham government actually gave a “warm welcome” to Jones' commune, along with other religious and
agricultural communes, which the government backed financially. The government sometimes went so far as to use
the members of such communes to break strikes or do unpaid work for high-ranking civil servants (Naipaul 63-4).
269The commune did have a pet primate, who was made to live in a “sumptuous roofed cage,” that contrasted with the
“primitive” buildings that accommodated Jones' disciples (Naipaul 65). D'Aguiar thus uses an anecdotal fact
concerning Jonestown to create a character that, as shown below, proves crucial for the unfolding of the novel's plot.
Adam will be designated as “he” instead of “it,” following the novel's designation and the obvious
anthropomorphism with which the gorilla is treated, as his name, that of the first man ever created according to the
Bible, clearly indicates from the onset.
270Thus, hidden in an underground shelter, and unwittingly sending his father to death, the novel's Jim Jones could,
arguably, also be viewed as a mock-Orphic figure.
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evening, Jones gets out of his house to go to the clearing where Adam's cage is. There, Adam puts
his back against the bars of the cage in order to earn a few pleasant scratches from Jones. When
Jones has scratched Adam's back, he turns around and puts his back against the cage. After a
moment of surprise, Adam starts scratching Jones' back,
tears Father's white shirt, and red spots blossom on the preacher's back, and he moves away quickly.
The commune leader steps out of reach of Adam's arms, smiling. Adam returns a mirror image of
that smile as if his face looked exactly like Father's face. The preacher yawns and stretches and heads
back to his house. Adam yawns loudly, stretches, and lumbers to the bed at the back of his cage. (39)
In spite of identical gestures, the apparent reciprocity, here illustrated by a literal representation of
the “scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours” proverb, is subverted by the opposition of Adam and
the preacher's respective pleasure and pain, and roles as captive and captor. Moreover, the effusion
of blood is proleptic of the fact that Adam will turn, at the end of the novel, against the priest's
authority. Another difference is that Adam does not “ape” Jones only: in the lines following the
above cited passage, when Jones has left, Adam “watches the entire commune's comings and
goings,” and “Looking at the people going about their business leaves him feeling he is all of them
rolled into one” (39). His identification with the commune is important in a symbolic perspective,
because it is for the commune members that Adam will ultimately die, trying to prevent guards from
thwarting the escape of disciples wishing to leave Jonestown. In other words, Adam, as his name
already indicates, represents the novel's Biblical figure, and his sacrifice for the sake of others
makes him a Christ-like martyr at the end of the novel (352), while the evolution of D'Aguiar's
Jones character follows a completely different trajectory throughout the story, as he progressively
sinks from relative sanity to a form of disarray that approximates delirium (336-40).
The novel also implicitly compares Jones and Adam by showing that the priest preaches and
prophecies through a twisted logic by way of which he turns every fortuitous event to his advantage
and self-empowerment as the commune's leader, as if every event of life were to prove him right,
while Adam's feelings of communion and predisposition for sacrificial love come spontaneously as
natural impulses that nevertheless grant him with a form of clear-sightedness that makes him the
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actual prophetic figure in the novel. The opposite, yet parallel trajectories by way of which Adam
and Jones are turned into inverted images of one another may best be perceived through a
chronological study of Jones' worsening sermons, along with Adams relation to them, and it is such
a study that the present, initial discussion of Children of Paradise now proposes to carry out.
First and foremost, Adam, at the beginning of the novel, almost kills Trina, albeit
unwittingly, by grabbing her as she inadvertently reaches his cage during a game with other
children, and it is made clear that Adam has no evil intention when he grabs the child, but is just
curious and “simply opens his tree-trunk arms and clasps them around the child,” who, yet, soon
lacks air and swoons (6). Jim Jones then hurriedly pronounces the child dead – while he knows
Trina is alive – and has her sent to the infirmary. The next day, he summons all of the commune to
Trina's open coffin, placed near Adam's cage, and resurrects the child (16-20). As a result, his
disciples are completely awed, and Jones has reinforced his authority as a religious leader.271 Yet,
during the resurrecting act, Adam is described as unsure of his senses, and does not immediately
believe in Trina's death (16-7). Moreover, other signs sent to readers suggest that the entire scene is
being performed. For instance, Trina's mother, Joyce, seems to be playing a part, as she desperately
throws herself against Adam's cage, but as soon as Jones' assistant, afraid of the primate, “halfheartedly” approach Joyce to take her away from the cage, she “surrenders readily” to them (16).
Moreover, in order to counter any doubt on his followers' part, Jones “picks out individuals at
random” to see for themselves and tell the others that Trina is really dead: ironically, “Two guards
are among the chosen” (18), and lead readers to suspect that they were briefed by their leader. Later
in the novel, the preparations for the show are actually unveiled, and every actor, including Trina,
are shown to have actually been sworn to secrecy an made to learn their scripts overnight (68-72).
This false resurrection, at the beginning of the novel, is contrasted with a true miracle, of
which Adam is the object, at the end of the novel: in order to secure the children's escape from the
271Relying on dubious healing sessions and false miracles was a specialty of the actual, historical Jones (Naipaul 5960). For a reading of the resurrection scene in Orphic terms, see part three below.
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commune, he tries to prevent the guards from reaching the commune pier by walking to them,
saying “Stop,” and, pounding on his chest, “God.” He reproduces the action several times, and the
effect of his miraculous acquisition of speech has different effects on the guards: some run away,
some kneel before him and pray, and others shoot and kill him (349-52). Hence, if there is any true
extraordinary mouthpiece somewhere in the novel, the end of the story shows that it is not Jim
Jones, but Adam. The miracle that occurs through Adam is itself proleptically announced in various
places of the novel, for instances when Adam is described as being endowed with thought, as the
narrative voice explains that he listens to the children at the commune school and “absorbs the
stories of sinners redeemed and the lost found” (52). Later in the chapter, the narrative voice
directly announces that Adam will interfere with the actions of the commune by explaining that
although “His place in the world is narrated in the creation stories read aloud by the children seated
in a semi-circle in front of a teacher and sheltered from the flames of the sun under the inclusive
canopy of a tree,” he will, nevertheless, “prove destiny wrong” (59).
In addition to thse proleptic signs, the contrasting of Adam's evolution, throughout the story,
with the worsening of Jones' sermons, again, also helps readers to view the two characters as a pair,
in which Jones plays the part of the false prophet, so to speak. For instance, during his first sermon
at the commune church, Jones wishes to convince his disciples of the necessity for them to have
“absolute trust and absolute faith” in him (73). In order to show them an example of trust , he
summons Trina – whose faith is so strong, says Jones, that she came back from the dead – and her
mother to the pulpit. He then has Adam brought into the church, gives a banana to Trina, and asks
her to give it to Adam. Trina obeys and Adam eats. However, when Jones hands a banana to Joyce,
who follows the instruction to feed Adam, the gorilla inadvertently grabs Joyce's hand along with
the banana, does not understand why the banana is not freed into his hand, and starts tearing Joyce's
clothes off, until guards are made to intervene and lead Adam out of the church, to prevent what
could have ended up as a catastrophe. Although the event is completely accidental and fortuitous,
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Jones immediately proceeds by asking his audience “Who trusts me? And who does not? Mother or
child?” (75), and the entire audience points to Joyce. Hence, Jones is the inverted image of the
prophet, in that he does not predict, but relies on chance, on the unpredictable, and then uses his
very own modes of interpretation to suit his purpose. Soon after the sermon, readers learn that
Adam had been drugged into compliance, had no complete control over his movements, and did not
“like the way he [was] put to use” (129).
During his second sermon, Jones has his guards distribute sticks to the children, and orders
them to beat their parents (135). The children hesitantly and reluctantly follow his orders, and Jones
“justifies” the beating by telling the story of his father's death, and of how something he had not
sensed in his stare made his father go out into the tempest. He explains that the power of his
searching look at his father is the same as that of an adult's gaze when searching for divine
salvation: “That look,” he proceeds, “is the rich man, ladies and gentlemen; that expression wants to
enter the kingdom of heaven, but we may as well be a camel and try to stream through the eye of a
needle. We must suffer the children because we are the children” (137). Needless to say, Jones'
argument is profoundly illogical (for one thing, how can a stare leading to the death of the father
correspond to a search for salvation by the Father?) and has the effect of disorienting the disciples
into compliance. But the sermon is actually, again, improvised from a fortuitous connection of
images that took place earlier during the day, in the preacher's mind, when he was woken up from a
drugged sleep by the screams of children who were being beaten for playing in the rain, and the
sound of their shrieks made him think of that of a tornado, which brought back the memory of his
father's death (45-7). In order to punish the parents for this unpleasant moment, he reproaches them
for having beaten the children and orders the children to hit them. After that sermon, Adam, who is
within hearing distance of what happens in the search, starts digging into the ground of his cage,
and plans to escape (141-2).
As the novel unfolds, the preacher's actions reach dramatic proportions: by the time of his
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third sermon, the commune's old seamstress has died, and in order to try and cheer up his disciples,
Jones has ordered the commune doctor to force the premature birth of a child (172), the immediate
consequence of which is the death of the baby's mother (180-1), who was too weak to bear the
surgical intervention, and is subsequently buried in secret below the old seamstress's coffin. The
baby survives and is presented by Jones as a “miracle child” by way of which God has provided a
life to compensate for a death, and the preacher explains that the mother is alive and well – he has
forced a nurse to adopt the baby and pretend it is her biological child (176). Finally, when Jones
learns that he has lost governmental support and that an American delegation is coming to the
commune (325, 339), he organizes suicide drills and preaches and harasses his disciples over the
commune loudspeakers, ultimately telling them of a childhood vision that he had, and which his
mother had told him not to recount, because it “blasphemed against all known teachings of the
Lord” (339). The vision consists in what Jones alleges to have been a prophetic dream in which he
was led by a figure he believed to be God, but who turned out to be the devil in the form of a hydraheaded, Cerberus-like creature made up of the inquiring faces of his disciples. He interprets the
image as an indication of the fact that he lives in a world of his own making, and that “the devil
operates out of [him]” (337-40). In this sense, if Jones is a prophetic figure in the novel, he is so as a
devilish interpreter, not as a divine mouthpiece: that role is reserved for Adam, who soon escapes
(348) to lead readers, as shown above, towards the closure of the narrative.
Thus, while Orphic orphans such as Sow and Red Head serve D'Aguiar's purpose of
providing “prophetic visions” of the respective pasts of slavery and Burnham Guyana in Bloodlines
and Dear Future, the author's return to the history of Jonestown functions, as far as the contrasting
of Adam and Jones is concerned, as a reminder of the dangerous nature of the deceptive promises of
false prophets such as Jim Jones. More precisely, the privileging of Adam, a wild animal belonging
in the jungle, as a supernatural (speaking) savior of sorts, over Jim Jones as a representative of
organized religion who progressively succumbs to madness, is implicitly indicative of a magic(al)
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realist favoring, inspired by romanticism, of the importance of nature as the most effective of
churches for the safekeeping, and health, of the soul. 272 Furthermore, the novel openly posits,
through Adam's sacrificial death – which is metonymically emblematic, as explained above, of all
the Jonestown dead, as Adam perceives his body as all of the commune members rolled into one –
that while the spontaneity of earthly love may sound less enticing than the prospect of heavenly
bliss, it nevertheless remains a sacred feeling available to all. Love is indeed the recommendation of
the novel's Biblical epigraph, taken from I Corinthians 13:13: “And now these three remain: faith,
hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (D'Aguiar 2014, 1, 362). It also is the novel's final
word, uttered by Trina, whose Isiac features, shared with other characters from D'Aguiar's prose
corpus, are now to be unveiled.
II. Isiac Women
As explained above, in this chapter's introduction, the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris is
closely related to that of Orpheus and Eurydice, which may have developed out of a GreekEgyptian syncretism in cities such as Alexandria under the Ptolemies. The myth, again, tells of how
Isis, (un)like Orpheus, successfully resuscitated – thanks to a metamorphosis involving the
acquisition of life-giving wings – Osiris after he was torn to pieces, some of which were thrown into
the Nile by his brother Seth, in the same way as Orpheus was decapitated by Bacchanals, and his
head thrown into the Hebrus river. While Orpheus tried to tear Eurydice away from Hades, Isis
made the resuscitated Osiris the keeper of the underworld, and bore him a child, Horus. 273 In
addition to such cross-cultural correlation, Antonio Gonzales also explains that the pagan, Isiac cult
was later assimilated to that of the Virgin Mary: the early Christian church recuperated significant
features of Isis in order to incite southern-European pagan populations to convert to Christianity
272For a deeper discussion of the relationship between magic(al) realism and romanticism through readings of
Wordsworth, Harris and D'Aguiar, see part III below.
273 To that extent, as the wife of the god of the underworld, Isis may be compared to the figure of Persephone, in
addition to that of Orpheus.
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(Gonzales 154). For instance, Horus, Isis' son, is reminiscent of Jesus, in that both divine sons
“occupy a similar position in relation to the tutelary god, be it God or Ra” (154, translation mine).
Moreover, the description Origen Adamantius makes of Mary as the Mater Dolorosa, grieving for
her murdered son, is highly comparable to Isis' suffering the death of her dismembered lover Osiris
(155). As a consequence, one may find, in Isis, an appropriate cross-cultural symbol for Orphic,
transformative, and motherly suffering and love, and it is in this sense that the term is to be used in
the present chapter. It is also important to note, again, that the figure of Isis has been related to
nation building and to an allegory of knowledge, respectively in the English renaissance and in
French romanticism, through Spenser's designation of Isis as an ancestor to Elizabeth I, and through
the poetry of Hugo and Nerval (Spiquel 545, 548; Fairlie 164).
To recap, Isis has been, through the ages, related to the feminine and the Orphic, to
motherhood and suffering (with metamorphic consequences), and related as much to initiatory rites
of passage as to the building of nations. In this sense, and as indicated above, it is surprising to find
that feminist critics dealing with the Orphic theme have focused more on the silence of Eurydice
(Sword 408-9) and her position as follower or leader of Orpheus (Cixous & Jeannet 251), or on the
Bacchanals as hysteric poet killers (Coughlan 34), than on the potentially subversive and
empowering figure that Isis could represent in an Orphic context, since, by lying at the foundations
of the myth of Orpheus, Isis contradicts the Greco-Roman conception of poetry as an originally and
exclusively masculine craft.
In Fred D'Aguiar's prose corpus, most of all in the novels Feeding the Ghosts (1997),
Bethany Bettany (2003), and Children of Paradise (2014), the relation of women to suffering,
fertility, and the supernatural or the mythical operates in Orphic ways that would, then, best be
described as Isiac.274 For instance, in Feeding the Ghosts, Mintah becomes sterile because of the
violent experience of the Middle Passage and, she believes, because of the rituals she performs on
274Bloodlines' Faith could also be included in that Isiac genealogy of D'Aguiar's female characters, as a mother
grieving for lost love and giving birth to an extraordinary child. However, these aspects of Bloodlines having already
been addressed, the present section will not revert to the narrative poem.
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board the Zong, and in relation to the moon. Her sterility leads her to alternative, artistic modes of
(pro)creation. In Bethany Bettany, the eponymous protagonist acquires the power of becoming so
flat as to achieve near invisibility, subsequently to her being repetitively beaten up by members of
her family, who accuse her of being a parricidal orphan. Familial relations are progressively
smoothed over, and recourse to supernatural powers become less frequent when Bethany Bettany
reaches puberty. Finally, in Children of Paradise, Bethany Bettany's flatness – allowing her to slip
below doors, remain unseen, and escape, at times, from her house – seems to be re-worked into
Trina's identification, simultaneously to her pubescence, with the Anansi trickster, whose limbocontortion serves as a means to get through thresholds and into other worlds: Trina's maturity and
identification with Anansi correspond to her attempts at escaping the violences of the Jonestown
commune. In sum, these women's (metamorphic acquisition of) supernatural powers, in D'Aguiar's
novels, are directly correlated to their feminine condition and bodily transformations or changes,
and to the violence and suffering to which they are subjected. It is in this sense, again, that the
present part proposes to address their characterization in Isiac terms.
a. Mintah's Moons
As seen above, Mintah plays an important role in Feeding the Ghosts, not only as the novel's
protagonist, but as the muse of the text, and as a crucial orphan-slave figure with a problematic
relation to writing and artistic creativity as hypomnesic gateways to the past. Moreover, and as part
three below will show, her navigating between the underworld of the Zong's hold and the surface of
the deck, her failed mutinies, and her involvement in the Underground Railroad on the American
continent are relatable to the Orphic, and intertextually echo works such as Caryl Phillips' Crossing
the River. However, some features of her character come across as specifically Isiac in their relation
to her femininity and the supernatural, and are to be explored here and now.
When she is introduced to the reader by being taken out of the hold for the first time,
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because of having been shouting Kelsal's name, Mintah is soon ridiculed by Captain Cunningham,
who forces her to skip and jump from one foot to another to entertain his crewmen as he lashes at
her feet with a whip. Mintah then decides to “dance the dance of fertility dance,” “fertility's
temporary death end eventual rebirth” (31) not out of compliance (even if she knows sailors will
mistake her dance for obedience), but because, in spite of her unwillingness to seem submissive, she
ceases the moment as an opportunity to carry out a ritual she has been feeling the urge to perform:
Now here was her chance. To transfer the pain of the whip around her legs to that of her womb. To
placate the fertility god. To touch imaginary soils with the balls of her foot, bow her head, contract
her shoulders and throw her open palms to the heavens in half-steps that would complete a circle of
her own following the direction of the moon, a circle within the circle made by these alien men. And
be cleansed by the rain […]. (D'Aguiar 1997, 31-2).
The thought of being washed by the rain brings the idea of baptism's lustral waters to Mintah's
mind, and she abruptly stops dancing to tell the captain and the crew that she not only speaks
English, but was baptized – facts which, again, question the legitimacy of making her a slave, as
explained above. Displeased by the information, Captain Cunningham asks Kelsal to beat her and
send her back below deck. While the Captain heads back to his quarters, and before Kelsal starts
beating Mintah – he leaves the whip aside and decides to hit her with a club until she swoons –
“The boatswain knelt before her and began to unbuckle his trousers. Kelsal pushed him away from
her so hard that the man fell on his side and looked up at Kelsal astonished. Rain on the deck pooled
red between Mintah's thighs” (32-3). This event was predictable insofar as the temporary “death of
fertility” and the subsequent return of fecundity described by Mintah beforehand corresponded to a
metaphorical, invocative and/or proleptic designation of a woman's menstrual cycle, a cycle that
Mintah reproduces in her dance and relates to the moon, a well known symbol of femininity (the
twenty eight-day cycle of which has the same duration as that of menstruation) as much as of
artistic creation, and an astrological correlative of Isis, along with the Sirius star. The flow of
Mintah's menstrual blood that saves her from rape is, thus, not described as coincidental, but
directly related to the ritual Mintah has performed, and the then supernatural nature of the event,
along with its correlation to the moon and the lustral power of water and baptism – another ritual
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indicative of rebirth and resurrection – could thus be described as Orphic, or rather, due to its direct
relation to womanhood, as Isiac.
In her book, Mintah remembers the event, and directly associates her escape from rape to the
ritual as well:
Kelsal changes his mind about my body: he pushes the boatswain away. What has brought about the
change? My dance. My blood in the rain. He has me turned on my stomach and he begins to beat me.
Not with his open hands or his fists. He uses a stick. My flesh and bones must pay for my tongue or
my blood. This hurt is not for crying. I cry because a dance I hated doing has saved me. The moon
rescued me. Blood, my blood, is my saviour. (186)
Again, the biological correlation of blood and moon is symbolically Isiac, and, according to Mintah,
its supernatural effect has prevented her from being the victim of rape, this time around at least. For
after her failed mutiny, her punishment amounts to the torture of rape, and is instigated, again, by
Kelsal and the boatswain who, not content with daubing paper on her eyes, viciously “rubbed more
pepper between [her] legs and pushed some into [her] body” (215). 275 At some point, Mintah feels
so desperate about her condition and what has been happening on board that she, somehow, regrets
having performed the sacred dance while being ridiculed:
Mintah thought about her performance above deck not so long ago. She felt ashamed. What fertility
gods? Fructification for whose benefit? Her womb ached and her blood flowed for nothing. Her
benediction to the gods was for what? None of it could save a single hair on the head of a child. She
wanted the blood to run dry and for the intricate apparatus that she harboured inside to dislodge from
its moorings and drift out of her; to expel it and never feel that particular pain again and never bleed
for any god, for any dance. (40)
Mintah is so helpless in front of the murders that are being perpetrated on the Zong that she wishes
275In addition to the dance and the arrival of menstrual blood through which Mintah avoids being raped, imagination is
another medium to which Mintah has recourse when she braces herself for the impending violation she believes she
is about to be subjected to, and what she imagines, although it does not involve the moon, is again turned skyward
since, as soon as the boatswain unbuckles his trousers, Mintah focuses on the sky, on clouds and the Zong's
mainmast, and imagines the ship rising from the waters to sail in the sky (186). This escapist recourse on
imagination is reminiscent of how Red Head's mother reluctantly accepts to make love with Ahmad but, during the
intercourse, escapes from her immediate physical environment throufh the diversion of picturing herself and Ahmad
as an Anansi-like, double-backed creature (D'Aguiar 1996, 165-6). The proximity with which Dear Future and
Feeding the Ghosts were successively published, respectively, in 1996 and 1997, also points to a possible
simultaneous composition that might come as one explanation to the analogous use of imagination in unpleasant
situations by Mintah and Red Head's mother. Another common point between Dear Future and Feeding the Ghosts
is that the protagonists, Mintah and Red Head, both die by fire. As shown below, the Anansi stance also functions,
arguably, as an imaginative escape way for Trina in Children of Paradise. The image of the flying ship, first
appearing in Feeding the Ghosts, is also re-invested in subsequent works by D'Aguiar, such as Bloodlines and,
again, Children of Paradise. For a more thorough discussion of the flying ship trope and its relation to Wilson
Harris' prose, see part three below.
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for death and for sterility, as she associates her inability to save the children on board to the absence
of motherly qualities in her character, and as she fears the children she could get might become the
victim of slavers such as those who torture her over the Middle passage. Moreover, and in a dark
irony of sorts, it is a “superstitious pregnant woman” who, taking Mintah for a ghost, and being
afraid of her, reveals to the crew that she is back on board, and thus seals her fate (97). More
importantly though, Mintah actually does become barren after her experience of the Atlantic:
On land I waited to bleed. Months became years. Lovers wanted sons and daughters from me. Not
for themselves, they professed, but for me, for someone like me, who should be made into newer
shapes of people. But the moon failed as a bribe. I remembered the dances but refused to perform
them. […] The sea had taken my blood from me and my ability to bleed. Yet I was surrounded by my
progeny. The figures came from me. My hands delivered them. (210, emphasis mine)
Of course, Mintah has certainly become sterile as a consequence to the psychological and physical
forms of torture to which she was subjected, such as confinement in a dark and insalubrious hold,
beatings, rape, being thrown overboard and seeing other slaves, including women and children,
being thrown to the sea to drown. Yet, as if they could restore her with fertility, Mintah refuses to
perform ritual dances again, which also remind her of the traumatic experience of the Middle
Passage, and she makes the Isiac suggestion that the silver disc, the coin of the moon, the bribe, or
the cycle that is the cost of fertility, no longer grants her with the ability to bear children. In other
words, it is as if her wish to become barren had been heard by the fertility gods, who would have
decided to curse her with sterility as a consequence to her turning away from them. As a
consequence, and in order to make up for the lives she could not save on the Zong, she has, as seen
above, recourse to a variety of arts, such as writing and carving, and she calls “progeny” the
resulting works (210), as if artistic creation corresponded to a procreation of sorts. Such artistry can
be viewed as Isiac as well, since it is not newborn beings that Mintah thus produces into the world,
but the recreated figures of her slave companions rising again from watery depths (208-9), in the
same way as Isis, through supernatural wings rather than procreative means, successfully brings
Osiris back to life from the depths of the Nile, and in the same way as Orpheus manages, but only in
a temporary and spectral way – and it is precisely to this temporal insufficiency, amounting to
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partial failure, that the Isiac is resistant, thereby granting what it (hypomnesically) brings back with
durability – to be re-united with Eurydice through yet another artistic medium, that is, music.
Mintah's wooden figures, on top of having the hypomnesic function of giving permanent posterity
to those who died in the Atlantic, also play another role, when they are compared to those of living
beings who, performing dances deriving from African culture to celebrate the abolition of slavery,
reinvest the rituals Mintah used to practice, along with her sculptures of mourning, into regenerative
elements. In other words, Mintah's witnessing of the celebration of emancipation in a square
induces her to reinterpret her creative output:
I thought the shapes were trying to rise from the sea, but I know now they were dances. Each figure
made by me was in this square. A man, woman or child in some movement to the music. Not
movements to the music of the sea, as I had thought. These were dances of freedom. The faces were
not scared on those figures, but excited. I had made them then read them wrong. Now they were hear
before me showing me their meaning, and I had helped to shape it. They were dancing not
struggling. Ecstatic not terrified. A young woman moves in front of me in a pattern I recognize. I see
myself at her age on the deck of the Zong in the throes of the fertility dance. (218)
As Mintah then points out, the dance is being performed on solid ground rather than on a shifty sea,
and is thus more promising that what Mintah's prospects on the Zong, across the Atlantic, were
(218-9). Thus, although Mintah never gets over the memory and trauma of the Middle Passage
experience, and ultimately dies, potentially through suicide, because the past has become too heavy
a burden for her to carry, the novel, through the transfiguration of slaves and sterility into liberating
regeneration, opens, pace Ward (179), a space for hope in (dear) future.
b. Foundling Flatness: Bethany Bettany
When viewed in the light of the orphan theme, Bethany Bettany (2003), Fred D'Aguiar's fifth
novel, is as complete as it is complex, for three reasons. First, the novel problematizes orphanhood
in its relation to textuality, the novel genre, and nation building. Second, by endowing the
eponymous protagonist with supernatural powers, the novel also points to the links that operate
between orphanhood and Orphism. Finally, by making the loss of supernatural powers simultaneous
to the female protagonist's pubescence and her affective “adoption” by the family that has been
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mistreating her for eleven years, D'Aguiar relates Bethany Bettany to his work's other female, Isiac
orphans, namely, Mintah, from Feeding the Ghosts, and, as shown below, Trina, from Children of
Paradise. As a consequence, the present study of Bethany Bettany proposes to explore the intricate
articulation of these three thematic branches of orphanhood in the novel.
Bethany Bettany tells the story of its eponymous protagonist, from her childhood to the
months following her seventeenth birthday, and from the points of view of most of the novel's
characters: every chapter carries the name of its narrator, except for Bethany Bettany, who
sometimes narrates chapters entitled “Dream One” up to “Dream 3” (D'Aguiar 2003; 55, 74, 159)
and “Georgetown Calling” (113, 132, 161),276 and whose double-barrel name is almost always split
in two, with chapters entitled “Bettany” (the spelling favored by her father and his Guyanese family,
used for chapters taking place in Guyana), “Bethany” (the spelling she uses at school, promoted by
her mother when they were together in London for the first five years of her life, and functioning as
a title to chapters the action of which takes place in London), except in the novel's last chapters,
four of which are entitled “Bethany Bettany” (287, 290, 306, 310). On the novel's first page, a
prologue-like paragraph narrated by the main character explains that she is a paternal orphan, and
that her mother has left her in her father's large family where she attracts “spit, slaps, jabs, curses
and sneers from adults and their offspring,” which – as explained in more detail below – lead to her
acquisition of the supernatural power of becoming flat and, hence, able to glide under doors and
become almost invisible (1, italics in the text). On top of sparking interrogations concerning the
reason why the protagonist is subjected to violent reprimands from her relatives, suspense also
arises from the mention of a mysterious letter from Bethany Bettany's father to her daughter, “a
letter he left for me that I must see one day, a letter that will tell me everything I need to know about
my early life with him and about his death and whom to blame for taking him from me ” (1, italics
not mine), suggesting that Bethany Bettany's father was murdered.
Readers soon learn that uncles and aunts from the paternal branch of Bethany Bettany's
276Probably a nod to The Clash's “London Calling.”
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family actually believe her mother to have killed the protagonist's father Lionel, that is, their
(favorite) brother, and they and their children make Bethany Bettany pay for it (2), all the more so
since she looks so much like her mother that they say she “is her mother” (1, italics in the text), and
functions as an unbearable “daily reminder” (2, 102, emphasis mine) of Lionel's presumed
murderer.277 The uncles and aunts also refer, albeit suggestively, to two attempts at parricide made
by Bethany Bettany during the first five years of her life in London: one with a razor, and another
by fire (4, 84-7, 255-6). Readers later learn that after the protagonist's parents migrated to London –
Bethany Bettany's mother is a high ranking civil servant in charge of government census and sent to
the English capital – their relationship degenerated into violence, partly because of their being
confronted to British racism, a subject on which their opinions diverge (261, 301), and partly
because Lionel, the father, cheated on the mother – remaining unnamed in the novel – before they
left Guyana for England: Bethany Bettany's mother actually used her knowledge of Lionel's
adultery in Guyana as a means to make him feel guilty and pressure him to move with her to
London, while Lionel originally wanted the family to remain in Guyana, where he was a land
surveyor. In England, feeling exiled from the land he loves, he fails to feel happy in spite of his job
as a river surveyor on the Thames. 278 Traumatized by conjugal violence and the image of her father
hitting her mother, Bethany Bettany tries twice to kill her father before she can even “face five
candles on a cake” (4).
277Actually, Lionel jumped off a bridge, imitating the birds he loved to watch while working on the Thames, after
separating from his wife and Bethany Bettany as a consequence to his daughter's double parricidal attempt. His
staying away from the house, as Bethany Bettany's mother explains, was supposed to be temporary, and serve as
time to rehabilitate Lionel in his daughter's eyes. But Lionel, unable to bear the burden of being away, commits
suicide in the meantime (308-9). For a discussion of the link between Lionel's suicide and the myth of the flying
Africans, see part three below.
278Of course, the Anglo-Guyanese context, the mother's namelessness, and her function as as a civil servant are
reminiscent of Dear Future, which actually is one of Bethany Bettany's intertexts, as other features, shared by both
novels and discussed below, are to confirm. Also, the family's confrontation to British racism, in the novel, is shown
through the description of a demonstration, witnessed by Bethany Bettany and her mother, in which people shout the
slogan “Niggers out!” (261). In his article entitled “Six Views of Britain,” Fred D'Aguiar describes a highly similar
demonstration in London in 1979, of which he was a witness, and after which he was arrested by the police and sent
to trial, until he was declared innocent (D'Aguiar 2015, 490). In other words, autobiographical undertones may
constitute another feature that Bethany Bettany shares with Dear Future, the autobiographical dimension of which
has been suggested above. For an in-depth study of the degradation of the marriage of Bethany Bettany's parents in
terms of gender, see Cecilia Acquarone's 2011 doctoral thesis entitled Barriers, Borders and Crossings in British
Postcolonial Fiction: a Gender Perspective (143-7), or its published version, under the same title. In the present
thesis, page references concerning her work are those of her thesis' manuscript.
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Thus, Bethany Bettany is a parricidal orphan who can become as flat as a page, and who is
designated as a “daily reminder” of her father's death. In this perspective, it then seems obvious that
the protagonist serves as an allegory of textuality, since, again, according to Plato and Derrida,
written speech may be defined as a hypomnesic, parricidal orphan (Plato a, 63; Derrida 1972, 95-6).
In addition, on top of having tried to kill her father, Bethany Bettany refuses to call her paternal
relatives by their names because of their violence and cruelty towards her, and thus gives them
nicknames corresponding to their ways of harming her:
Here comes The Sneer, I tell myself, and I avoid that body's stone-rendering look. Beware of The
Jab, from another body in a narrow corridor, those two fists are known by various areas of my body
for planting roses in them. Be wary of The Slap, her hands, their ambidexterity stamped and restamped on my face, lef a ringing in my ears. There are no corridors wide enough to dodge a leg, no
yard, no field with sufficient acres to contain a curse. And The Spit, with a wide gap between her two
front teeth that she fired spittle through farther than a child could throw a stone. 279 (2)
Hence, Bethany Bettany denies any genealogical affiliation with her paternal forebears, because of
their harsh treatment of her. But although she refuses naming them, readers soon learn from another
narrator, the headmaster of the village school, that the last name of the paternal branch of Bethany
Bettany's family is no other than Abrahams (23): in the novel, the Abrahams are known all over the
country for their founding role, as a family, in the making of Guyana as an independent nation, in
that they belonged to one of the first governmental coalition parties, from which they broke in order
to form the party that won independence, took power, and kept it until the moment of the action
(50). Considering that the novel repetitively alludes to an ongoing border war with Venezuela (7,
48, 161-2, 207-12, 267-82), one can infer that, as in Dear Future, the story unfolds in the Guyana of
the 1960s-70s, and that the Abrahams' founding party probably was the People's Progressive Party,
from which they broke, according to the novel, in the same way as Forbes Burnham did to create
the People's National Congress in 1958, then win the favors of the West and ultimately gain
independence in 1966.280 Finally, along with the novel's border war context, the precision must be
279Again, he description of bruises as roses derives from D'Aguiar's poem “A Gift of a Rose” (D'Aguiar 1993, 11), and
The Sneer's gorgon-like “stone-rendering look” is evocative of D'Aguiar's recurrent use of the Medusa figure (1993,
16; 1998, 73; 2009, 87).
280Again, all references to Guyanese history were found on www.guyana.org (July 3rd, 2016), except where indicated.
The “ham” ending of “Abraham” also is reminiscent of the “Burnham” name. That the Abrahams are a numerous
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added that Bethany Bettany's village is called Boundary, and that it is by going to the war front near
to the border, at the end of the novel, that the protagonist is finally reunited, there, with her mother –
a Guyanese minister – and her grandfather, patriarch Reginald Abrahams, who had left his family
for the country's interior to search for diamonds, because he had gambled and lost all of his money,
and because he refused to condone the confiscation of Bethany Bettany by his children as a means
to punish her mother – to whose political convictions he has been converted (294) – for the death of
their brother.281 Reginald also blames his family for having decided to support a party (the PNC?)
that is “obviously bankrupting the country” (294).
Needless to say, “Abrahams,” as a name, cannot have been chosen fortuitously, when used to
designate a founding national family in a novel the main character of which is an orphan. As
explained above, in the introduction to Part One, Homer Obed Brown shows that the history of the
advent of the novel is related by Jean-Luc Nancy and Sir Walter Scott to that of the myth of the
patriarchs, that is, of Abraham, who is asked by God to leave his country, his people, and his
“father's household” to found a “great nation” (Genesis 12: 1-2; Brown 1997, 15). In the same way
as the story of Abraham's break with, or orphaning from, his father, progressively was turned into a
myth within monotheistic scriptures, the novel progressively became an institutionalized genre long
after the dawning of its first, prototypical avatars deriving from the differentiation of romance
languages from one another, and from their Latin forebear, into national languages (Brown 1997,
family living in a Guyanese village and putting up an orphan whose mother is a civil servant is highly reminiscent of
Red Head's family, the Santos, in Dear Future. However, the Santos, as shown above, are clearly and fiercely
opposed to the PNC. D'Aguiar changes of perspective in Bethany Bettany by telling the story of a similar family that
is, this time around, apparently supportive of the PNC. The headmaster and only schoolteacher in Boundary, works
in the school that was funded and built by the Abrahams, but he belongs to the PPP, which has become the
“permanent and powerless opposition” (50) party since the PNC broke from it and assumed power. Hence, at one
point in the novel, the Abrahams mindlessly decide to burn down the school – thus ruining the education of their
children – and beat the headmaster away from Boundary for having punished the Abrahams children and telling
them that their “name will be [their] ruin […] and it will poison the land” (175), in an almost prophetic aphorism
that is, as in Dear Future again, highly critical of Burnham's – and, in the novel, the Abrahams' – PNC.
281The idea that Bethany Bettany's mother is a high ranking civil servant who broke with the Abraham's party is
reminiscent of Jessie Burnham's break from her brother Forbes' faction to join Cheddi Jagan's opposition party in
1958. She, at the time, had warned the Guyanese people about her brother's unquenchable thirst for power, in an
article entitled “Beware, my brother Forbes Burnham,” published in 1958 for the People's Progressive Party by the
New Guiana Company (Burnham 1958). Also see www.guyana.org and www.jagan.org for more information on the
subject. Jessie Burnham's split with her brother is turned to a climactic moment, again, in Pauline Melville's “The
President's Exile” (Melville 9-11).
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19). In other words, and roughly speaking, what both the myth of Abraham and the genesis of the
novel translate is nation-building through self-orphaning, through a break with the figure of
patriarchy and/or imperialism, a change of allegiance.282 Such an intersection between orphanhood,
nation-building, and the Abrahamic precisely is what Bethany Bettany, as a then profoundly
novelistic piece of work, recounts to its readers, using 1960s Guyana, the scene of a newly
independent nation, as a setting. In actual history, the People's National Congress's break from the
communist coalition of the People's Progressive Party, again, one of the country's first political
parties, led to the official (more than effective) independence of Guyana because the more moderate
– that is, less openly communist – political practices of the PNC, along with its leader's
corruptibility, temporarily reassured Western nations such as the USA and Britain, in the Cold War
atmosphere of the times, into relinquishing, in appearance at least, its colonial hegemony over
Guyana. In the novel, it is clear that the Abrahams belong to a faction analogous to that of the PNC,
in that, again, the family broke from a PPP-like coalition (50) that, among other things, led the
grandfather, Reginald Abrahams (whose first name is etymologically related to rex, regis, or king,
indicating his patriarchal role), to break with them in turn and leave for the wilderness of the
Guyanese interior. As a parricidal orphan that denies her paternal uncles and aunts their very names,
Bethany Bettany also challenges national patriarchy from within the microcosm of her family of
“founding fathers,” so to speak.283
Moreover, when Bethany Bettany escapes to the capital to find the central post office,
because she suspects the weekly letters she sends to her mother are, along with her mother's mail,
being withheld from her – probably by her uncle, the only postman in Boundary (14) – the district
282In the same way as the orphan nature of the novel is extended to written speech as a whole by Derrida through Plato
(Derrida 1972, 63-4), in Donner la Mort, Derrida also explains, for reasons too numerous and intricate to be
described here, that not only the novel, but literature itself is Abrahamic (Derrida 1999, 177), notably, because of its
relation to genealogy and secrecy (179, 191, 205-9).
283In addition, the protagonist is able to reach the sea or get to the capital, Georgetown, respectively through a one-day
walk and a simple bus-ride from a village near Boundary, called Mable. Although Boundary and Mable are fictional
places, looking at the nearby villages surrounding Georgetown on a map of Guyana, readers will find that a village
named Land of Canaan – the first country that Abraham inherits in Genesis 12: 6 – can be located on the East bank
of the Demerara river, approximately ten miles away from the capital. Perhaps the connection was not lost on Fred
D'Aguiar, and functioned as one of the inspirational inputs to his novel, all the more so since that village and
Georgetown are almost equidistant to Airy Hall, the littoral estate on which D'Aguiar grew up.
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manager there asks her, before checking if such withholding is the case, if she has proof of her
name, to which she answers: “I am living proof of my name” (161). Of course, if it is in the nature
of an “Abrahams” to orphan oneself, her presence as a foundling, without a father to speak on her
behalf and acknowledge her affiliation, is “living proof” of her identity. In the capital, Bethany
Bettany also meets Fly, a foundling who guides her around the city – and whom she incites to learn
how to read and write, that is, to learn an orphan skill (120). Just after her visit to the post office,
Fly tells her that he is considering joining the war effort at the border with Venezuela, along with his
friends from the orphanage – because, readers later learn, they owe their roof, the orphanage, to the
Abrahams, who funded it. Bethany Bettany immediately warns him that he does not realize he
could get killed if a war broke out, to which he replies, according to the protagonist:
War with whom? The border dispute with Venezuela is a national fixture, nothing new. I [Bethany
Bettany] do not know. This surprises him. He thinks my name determines the course of the
country. I [Bethany Bettany] tell him I come from a house in the countryside and that I know nothing
about the running of the nation. He tells me I need to look into the true meaning of my name. (162,
emphasis mine)
Fly's recommendation to Bethany Bettany is also one metatextually made to the reader, who should,
at such an advanced stage of the novel – actually five pages after its mathematical middle – have
understood that it is no accident for the protagonist's family to be named after Abraham. As
explained above, in a reading of Dear Future, the border war with Venezuela is indeed a “national
fixture,” a characteristic of Guyana, since the territorial dispute dates back to the 1830s. Yet, if the
making of a nation depends upon the delimitation of land and the violence such gesture implies, the
border conflict suggests that Guyana, at the time of the action, is still in the process of making itself,
of orphaning itself by drawing an imaginary line demarcating it from the rest of the world, to which
it nevertheless belongs. In this sense, and in addition to her last name, Bethany Bettany's ability to
become flat and almost invisible, on top of allegorizing her relation to the page of the text as a
parricidal orphan/novel, might metaphorically turn her to a representation of the boundary (at which
she is reunited with her mother and the family's patriarch/Abrahamic figure at the end of the novel)
as the condition for the founding of a new nation, all the more so since it is precisely boundaries
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that actually form paths across different landscapes – constituting other boundaries and worlds – in
the same way as Bethany Bettany's flatness allows her to cross into, or experience, the intimacy of
the relatives who beat her, which brings us to the Orphism, or Isiac nature, of the protagonist's
orphanhood.
Bethany Bettany's ability to become flat, and almost invisible, can indeed be designated as
Orphic, or even Isiac for at least three reasons.284 First, and as seen above, as a parricidal orphan
who entertains a relation to myth – the myth of the patriarch, which can be analogized with the
history of the novel genre – Bethany Bettany allegorizes a Platonist conception of written speech
that actually derives from the textual spread of Orphism (Young 2008, 10-1). Second, her flatness
makes her comparable so a very small amount of mist (D'Aguiar 2003, 45) that is reminiscent of
Orpheus' and Eurydice's spectral condition when they are reunited in the underworld. Finally, like
the supernatural powers that allow Orpheus and Isis to go back and forth between two worlds,
Bethany Bettany's flatness is a supernatural ability that helps her to pass thresholds from one
(public) world to another (private one) and, most of all, to heal from wounds inflicted to her body:
when her uncles and aunts furiously beat her like mad bacchanals attacking Orpheus or like Seth
(the epitome of the cruel brother/relative) trying to cut Osiris to pieces, Bethany Bettany is
irrepressibly led to enter her flattened condition to intrude upon her aggressors' intimacy, and her
wounds magically heal from such voyeuristic intrusion into their secret world, while it is made clear
that she should have died from the overwhelming violence of some of her beatings (108). In other
words, her power is almost a resurrectional ability that is comparable, again, to the powers of Isis
and Orpheus. Throughout the novel, Bethany Bettany undergoes such metamorphoses five times,
out of which four lead her to witness the erotic intimacy of her uncles and aunts, and readers
discover, in the process, that the sexual life of Bethany Bettany's family members almost always
284In addition to the discussion that is to follow, it must be mentioned that Bethany Bettany is relatable to at least two
of D'Aguiar's Orphic orphans, namely, Sow (D'Aguiar 2000) and Red Head (D'Aguiar 1996), because, on top of
having supernatural powers, she, like them, has red hair (D'Aguiar 2003, 3), and although, unlike her two male
counterparts, she was not born prematurely after seven months of gestation, her mother had to flee from an iguana
by literally running through a hedge when she was seven-month pregnant. The event left Bethany Bettany's mother –
because of the weight of the “evil” child in her belly according to her uncles – with permanent back pain (44).
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consists in non-procreative acts.
For instance, the protagonist's first transformation occurs after a horrible beating perpetrated
on her by Uncle the Jab.285 The uncle had hidden a marble in one of his hands, and promised to give
her to Bethany Bettany if she found the hand in which it was concealed. Unable to get over the
dilemma of choosing one hand over the other and risking to choose the wrong hand, Bethany
Bettany, somewhere between five and twelve years of age at that point in the novel, decides to point
at both hands, which surprises and displeases the uncle, who brings her to her father's tomb, blames
his death on her, and beats her there with branches that break with the blows and force him to break
other branches from a nearby jacaranda tree until he looses patience and hits the little girl with his
feet and fists until he is restrained by his sister Joyce, the only person on the estate who seems to
like Bethany Bettany (and whom the protagonist accordingly calls Kind Aunt) leaving the child
with a bleeding face and contusions all over her body (28). Shortly after, Bethany Bettany
undergoes her first transformation, which allows her to enter the room where Uncle the Jab has
retreated to cry, and where he finally masturbates until he ejaculates, all of which Bethany Bettany
witnesses unnoticed. As she sees – her power forces her to be there and watch – her Uncle going
through the act, all of her bruises magically heal (38).286
After another beating by aunt The Slap, who is also responsible for Bethany Bettany's
stutter, since she slapped the girl every time the girl tried to speak (16), Bethany Bettany watches
her aunt cry herself to sleep after an apparently abruptly interrupted sexual intercourse with her
husband and heals (52-3). After the third beating that threatens her with death – her bleeding ear
suggests severe cranial injury (108) – she witnesses Joyce's husband giving a cunnilingus to another
aunt, and survives (108-11). Finally, after Aunt Ethel has repetitively lashed and slapped her,
Bethany Bettany undergoes metamorphosis again to find out that Ethel goes so far as giving a
285Uncle the Jab's son, Rick, almost drowned in the estate's pond, like Red Head in Dear Future (D'Aguiar 2003, 26),
and became mad as a result.
286Acquarone associates the persecution of Bethany Bettany to that of Cinderella, and compares the precision with
which D'Aguiar describes the beatings to that of French naturalism (Acquarone 133-4).
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blowjob to the village Priest in order to convince him of performing an exorcism on Bethany
Bettany, who, Ethel claims, is possessed by the devil (136, 139-40). As a means to exorcise the
protagonist, the Priest has her restrained on a table so that he can peer at her genitalia while praying
for her soul. Although such “exorcism” translates perversity on the part of the Priest, his conclusion
that the child is not possessed incites the family to stop mistreating Bethany Bettany (143-4). The
event that seems to really bring an end to the mistreatment of Bethany Bettany, however, takes place
not too long after the exorcism, when the family Grandmother (Reginald's wife, who has never been
seen by Bethany Bettany, because she has been living as a recluse in her room ever since her
husband left and her son died) intervenes during a persecution scene by finally opening her window
and ordering her relatives to “leave the child alone” (156).
Hence, all of Bethany Bettany's violent relatives have an non-procreative relation to
sexuality, except, notably, for Kind Aunt, who gets pregnant and gives birth to a son in the novel
(127).287 That the only person to have a child in the novel is the one who is good to Bethany
Bettany, instead of being excessively brutal and punitive, suggests that the violence of elders is
barren, and that, contrarily to the violence with which a child may break from a father to found a
nation, a person threatening his or her younger relative with death goes against the order of things
and contradicts the potential for (national) regeneration. In this sense, it is not surprising to find that
the uncles who beat Bethany Bettany also arguably fail to serve their country's prospects when they
desert from the war front soon after having enrolled in the border conflict (210, 216) – they actually
went through conscription in order to avoid facing trial for burning the village school, which is
another action that is, arguably, in direct opposition to nation-building (194). 288 But the necessity for
287There actually is another exception in the novel, when Bethany Bettany heals through revenge, by throwing a stone
at the latrines while an aunt who has beaten her is urinating there: the aunt goes out and does not see Bethany
Bettany, who is invisible, and punishes other (innocent) children. If that un-named aunt is the Sneer, however, the
novel explains that the only sexual intercourse she has with her husband corresponds to his sodomizing her against
her will (101) which, on top of being another form of non-procreative sex, amounts to conjugal rape..
288Presumably, a nation cannot grow if the children that make it up are deprived of education. Moreover, when the
family learns that the uncles have deserted, Bethany Bettany suspects that they are hiding in the garden barn and,
once, at night, she has a nightmare in which she sees them all dead in the barn, one of them nailed to a cart wheel, as
a Christ-like figure of sorts, except that the cross has become a cycle, which is evocative of the Orphic wheel of
birth, the regenerative symbolic of which is problematized by the corpse superimposed to it: is the uncle a figure of
Christian sacrifice, of someone who died for the sake of others? His desertion, along with his other barren actions,
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Bethany Bettany to transform into an invisible being and spy on the intimacy of others is also built
into the novel so as to lead to yet another discovery, by way of which the novel's Abrahamic
intertext is further confirmed: the last metamorphosis Bethany Bettany undergoes takes place after a
battle breaks out – sparked by an insult thrown at the protagonist and concerning her orphanhood –
among the village's children, who throw stones at each other. The protagonist receives a stone on
the forehead289 and is led to follow and spy on the child who threw it at her, only to discover from
the words of the child's mother, who soothes her son (he feels guilty for having pelted a stone at
Bethany Bettany) and tells him that Bethany Bettany is his half-sister, and that he was born out of
Lionel's (again, Bethany Bettany's father) adultery with her when his wife was away, in England, on
a mission for the state. In other words, Lionel is comparable to the Old Testament Abraham who
gave him his last name, insofar as he, like Abraham, had two children from two different mothers
rather suggest that his presence on the wheel allegorizes the unproductive nature of the family's incentives, related to
war and violence, by shattering the regenerative symoblism of the wheel of birth. Another passage that appears to
allude tosuch a wheel can be found in Dear Future, when Red Head is being nursed by his grandmother to recover
from the blow to which he owes his clairvoyance:
[Grandmother] circled [Red Head's] head with her hand as she unwound the cloth. He thought he was being
blessed, but the sign was a circle, not a cross. Somehow the Crucifixion had occurred and the most
important motif that emerged from the event was a circle. He pictured the front of churches and Bibles with
a circle on them and light radiating out from the edges of the circles. Perhaps Jesus had been tied to a wheel
he had to carry in public to jeers and taunts and then lowered int water repeatedly until he drowned.
(D'Aguiar 1996, 23)
The wheel and light are evocative of the Orphic wheel of birth, all the more so since “the taunts and jeers” that
follow are evocative of the bacchanals' furious attack on Orpheus, resulting in his being thrown into a river: Red
Head's Orphic Jesus drowns instead of dying on the cross. Also, in the same way as Orpheus can syncretically be
related to Isis, the circle of light, on top of being reminiscent of the disc that crowns Isis' head, is the symbol of
Egyptian sun-god Aton, one of whose followers, according to some sources, was no other than Isis' lover, Osiris
(Freud 1939, 26). The presence of such references in D'Aguiar's writings reinforce both the cross-cultural nature of
his work and the notion that his supernatural characters are, to some extent, Orphic and/or Isiac. Such Orphic
features in D'Aguiar's texts, on top of being proof of the author's erudition, show that he self-consciously inscribes
himself within a literary tradition that expands from Ovid to the magic(al) realists of his time.
289Bethany Bettany gets bruised on the forehead twice in the novel. The first time around it happens is when she tries
to hit her father with a razor, and her father throws her away, the consequence of which is that Bethany Bettany
indavertently cuts her forehead with the razor blade (86-7). The second occurrence of a forehead injury takes place
in the passage in question. For Bethany Bettany to get bruised by the young boy on the same part of her body as
when her father bruised her might function as a proleptic sign of the upcoming revelation: that the boy is her halfbrother, Lionel's illegitimate son, acting like his father. Finally, Bethany Bettany's transformation subsequent to a
blow on the forehead is highly reminiscent, again, of how an axe hitting Red Head's forehead has the effect of
making him clairvoyant in Dear Future (D'Aguiar 1996, 3). A precedent to such symbolization and/or
announcement of revelatory moments through the image of a forehead wound may be found in Jean Rhys' Wide
Sargasso Sea, when Tia pelts a stone at Antoinette, wounding her forehad, and making white Antoinette and her
black friend Tia grow conscious, for the very first time, of the racial tensions suffusing 19 th century, postemancipation Jamaica, where they live (Rhys 23).
390
(181, 301).
Finally, and apart from Bethany Bettany being a tale that implicitly addresses the novel
genre's relation to orphanhood and the making of a nation, it must be noted that Bethany Bettany
starts being treated kindly by her kin, not only after a scene of exorcism 290 and an unexpected
intervention by her grandmother, but also simultaneously to the moment of her puberty, which is
related to yet another myth in the nov