Tell me what you think of a dictator
Trampling the Jews like Adolph Hitler
Tumbling them out of Germany
Some running for refuge in the West Indies
Some land in Demerara and Grenada
They land in Trinidad very regular
The way they are coming all of them
Will make Trinidad a new Jerusalem
Since Jews coming to this Colony
They are marrying and raising a family
In a couple of years, believe it’s true
Trinidad children will be only Jews
—Gorilla, “Jews in the West Indies” (1938)
In Germany I was the “Jew boy”; in Brussels I was the “dirty German”; in France I was “undesirable”; in Portugal I was the refugee; in Jamaica I was simply a non-entity.
—Fred Mann, A Drastic Turn of Destiny
Discussions of the relationship of the Holocaust to Black experience tend to understand the analogy as an abstract one between disparate historical traumas. Yet, in the Caribbean context, Holocaust memory and the postslavery landscape intersect in a more concrete and historically grounded fashion. In the late 1930s hundreds of European Jewish refugees arrived in Trinidad, where they formed a “calypso shtetl” and dubbed themselves the “Calypso Jews.” Moreover, not only Trinidad but a number of other sites across the Caribbean region, including Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and Curaçao, served as havens for Jewish refugees from the Nazis.
1
FIGURE 5.1. Gravestones of the Calypso Jews in the Bet Olam section of the Mucurapo Cemetery, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.
FIGURE 5.2. Gravestone of Walter Julius Hahn in the Bet Olam section of the Mucurapo Cemetery, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photo Sarah Phillips Casteel.
This little-known chapter of Holocaust refugee history, which has recently drawn the attention of Holocaust scholars, is a recurring motif in postwar Caribbean/diaspora fiction. Sam Selvon’s
A Brighter Sun (1952), for example, opens with the following lines: “On New Year’s Day, 1939, while Trinidadians who had money or hopes of winning money were attending the races in the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain, a number of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe landed on the island” (3). Refugee Jews make a more sustained appearance in Cuban American writer Margarita Engle’s more recent work
Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba (2009). Engle’s book-length poem for young adults tells the story of Daniel, a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy who arrives in Cuba in 1939 fleeing Nazi Germany:
My parents chose to save me
instead of saving themselves,
so now, here I am, alone
on a German ship
stranded in Havana Harbor,
halfway around
the huge world.
Thousands of other Jewish refugees
stand all around me
on the deck of the ship,
waiting for refuge.
(6)
Engle’s poignant poem is punctuated by the ships that continually arrive and depart, recalling the tragic journey of the SS St. Louis, the ship carrying refugees from the Nazis that was denied entry into Cuba when it arrived there in 1939.
In Achy Obejas’s novel Days of Awe, which I discussed in part 1 and that also invokes the journey of the St. Louis, the Holocaust refugee narrative is intertwined with a Sephardic Caribbean plotline. In Days of Awe Enrique, a crypto-Jew of Sephardic ancestry, works in the Havana flower shop of Gregor Olinsky, an elderly Polish Jewish refugee and Auschwitz survivor who had made his way to Cuba on a Spanish freighter during World War II. Much to their misfortune, Enrique and his father Ytzak decide to openly profess their Jewishness for the first time after five hundred years of suppression at the very moment in which modern antisemitism is peaking in 1930s Cuba. Strikingly, the central mystery in Days of Awe ultimately surrounds not Enrique’s crypto-Jewish origins, but a photograph of a passenger on the St. Louis whom Enrique met in 1939 in Havana harbor. Toward the end of the novel, the reader learns of Enrique’s connection to the tragic history of the St. Louis:
“When the ship was docked here—it was out on the bay for almost a week—your father was helping with mail and taking papers out there and stuff. He’d row a boat out and, with the passengers’ relatives who were already here, he’d toss up cans of food, that sort of thing. One day he managed to get about a half dozen pineapples up to the ship, a real delicacy for the Europeans. He was very proud of himself. The girl was someone he saw there, someone, I think, who noticed him, someone he had a fantasy about.”
(350)
When the
St. Louis is forced to return to Europe, an embittered Enrique begins to dissociate himself from his newly recovered Jewish identity and, in a moment of weakness and fear, he is swept up in an anti-semitic mob demonstration and joins in the mob’s chorus of “Heil Hitler!” (353). Thus in
Days of Awe, the Ashkenazi and Sephardic diasporas—Holocaust and inquisitorial narratives—intersect and commingle with one another.
Jewish doctors are perhaps the most commonly occurring variation of this figure of the Jewish escapee from the Nazis, briefly appearing in such Caribbean classics as V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1984). In A House for Mr. Biswas Mrs. Tulsi is treated by a Jewish refugee doctor who “came once a week and listened. The house was always specially prepared for him, and Mrs. Tulsi treated him with love. He resurrected all that remained of her softness and humour” (519). In Abeng the narrator recounts that “the doctor who had delivered [Clare] had escaped from Germany himself. He stopped in Jamaica for five years waiting for a visa from America, and left to find the remainder of his family there” (69). Cliff revisits this same figure in her more recent novel Into the Interior: “The doctor who delivered me had escaped from Austria through a pipeline that flushed him into Turkey, India, Ceylon, where he stowed away (for a price) on a British freighter servicing colonial ports of call. The doctor paid dearly for his flight. His mother and father were infirm, and he was forced to leave them behind” (12–13).
The figure of the Jewish refugee doctor also appears in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel
Mr. Potter (2002), which alongside John Hearne’s
Land of the Living (1961), offers a more sustained Caribbean literary treatment of the Holocaust refugee theme. Although neither
Mr. Potter nor
Land of the Living details the Jewish refugee experience in the colonies as extensively as Indian novelist Anita Desai’s
Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Hearne’s and Kincaid’s Jewish protagonists are defined by their refugee status, and their presence in the novels is understandable only in these terms. In this chapter I will preface my reading of Hearne’s and Kincaid’s fiction by briefly discussing calypsos of the period as well as refugee memoirs that illustrate the contradictory status of refugee Jews in the Caribbean. I will then argue that both Hearne and Kincaid introduce Holocaust refugee characters in order to negotiate difficulties surrounding the narration of the Black working-class figures who stand at the center of their novels: the back-to-Africa leader Marcus Heneky in
Land of the Living and the narrator’s estranged father in
Mr. Potter. While Hearne meets this challenge by employing a Jewish narrator who has privileged access to the Black subject, Kincaid incorporates a Jewish refugee presence to underscore the
inscrutability of her central protagonist. And while Hearne promotes an identificatory model of cross-cultural empathy, Kincaid resists this expectation. Ultimately, Hearne’s and Kincaid’s stagings of the Black-Jewish encounter signal their ambivalent authorial positionings while also illustrating their diverging approaches to the project of connecting diasporas and histories of trauma.
CALYPSO SHTETLS
With its lack of visa restrictions and refundable landing fee, Trinidad was one of the last doors that remained open to Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II. Yet, while providing a safe haven, Trinidad and other Caribbean sanctuaries were contradictory spaces where the refugees met with an ambivalent reception, including internment in the case of those who were classified as “enemy aliens.” One Jew who took refuge in Trinidad in the 1930s recalls that “Trinidadians were sympathetic and supportive. They loved the Jewish doctors, they found the traders likable” (Strasberg, “Forward” to Strasberg and Yufe). However, as discussed by Gordon Rohlehr in
Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, calypsos from the late 1930s that were censored by the Colonial Secretary’s Office for their criticism of the policy of admitting refugee Jews into Trinidad point to a more mixed response to the refugees, whose presence led to debates surrounding Jewish immigration that ultimately resulted in the closure of Trinidad’s doors in January 1939.
2Originating in the nineteenth century, the calypso served as an important vehicle of social and political protest. Patricia Mohammed emphasizes that the calypsos of the 1920s and 1930s in particular must be understood against the background of rising unemployment, urbanization, and internal migration as well as the heightened visibility during this period of the “distinctive features in the migrant groups that comprised [Trinidadian] society” (131). It was in this context that Gorilla’s “Jews in the West Indies” (1938) voiced public anxiety about the economic competition that an influx of Jewish refugees would bring at a time of labor riots and strikes. Another calypsonian, Growler, declared in “I Don’t Want Any Syrians Again” (1939) that although he preferred “the poor Jews” to Syrian or Chinese immigrants, the Jews “should be in Jerusalem or Palestine / Instead of in this country of mine.” Growler’s calypso is not unsympathetic to the displaced Jews’ plight:
That Mr. Hitler and Mussolini
Have no feeling for humanity
But the voice of the people is the voice of God,
How he treat the poor Jews like dog.
Yet it nonetheless conveys the concern that Jewish immigration might negatively affect the condition of local Blacks:
They can take a rest on this here shore
But remember pay respect to the poor,
A man is a man in this colony,
Don’t matter how black he may be.
Letters to the editor that appeared in the
Trinidad Guardian in the late 1930s similarly voiced apprehension, and in some cases outright opposition, to the Jewish refugee presence. An editorial entitled “The Fifth Column” that appeared after the outbreak of the war went so far as to call for mass internment (Siegel 31–36). Arguments against Jewish immigration were made by other colonies such as the Bahamas, whose governor insisted that the tourism industry would be adversely impacted by an increased Jewish presence (Newman, “Nearly the New World” 240).
3 Elsewhere, however, the
Trinidad Guardian expressed compassion for the refugees (Newman, “Nearly the New World” 245), as did calypsonians such as Atilla, who in “The Persecuted Jews” (1938) identified a common history of suffering that Trinidadians descended from slavery shared with the Jewish refugees:
Let’s give serious contemplation
To the question of Jewish immigration
Just like our forefathers in slavery
From the brutality of tyrants they have to flee
So it’s nothing but Christian charity
To give these oppressed people sanctuary
Negroes, our slave fathers long ago
Suffered all kinds of tribulation and woe
With yokes round their necks beaten day and night
Their only salvation remained in flight
So in remembrance of their agony
And gratitude to those who showed them sympathy
We shall extend to the Jews hospitality
As a monument to our ancestors’ memory.
Thus in her study of Jewish refugees and the British West Indies, Joanna Newman concludes that “Sympathy at the plight of the Jews, and an empathy based on a shared experience of racism and persecution, went alongside fears at the impact the refugees would have on Caribbean islands” (“Nearly the New World” 261–2).
For their part, the Jewish refugees also exhibited mixed feelings about their Caribbean havens, as is evidenced by their high rate of outmigration after the war. Most refugee Jewish settlers abandoned the Dominican colony of Sosúa in 1945, for example, so that, as historian Marion Kaplan remarks, Sosúa was “not a story about diasporic assimilation or integration” but instead “served as a ‘waiting room’ for some and remained a European village for most” (5). In the case of Trinidad, the community was longer lasting but was eventually diminished by its members’ desire to secure postsecondary educational opportunities for their children, as well as by the rise of Black Power (Siegel 296–303). One Trinidadian Jew remembered of Black Power, “It was very unsettling…. There were marches (and) a lot of anti-white sentiment. Having gone through racial discrimination and persecution once, one didn’t want to have to go through it again. A lot of people got fed up and wandered off, to the US and elsewhere” (McDonald 18).
In the self-published memoir collection Our Calypso Shtetl (Strasberg and Yufe, 1998), surviving members of the Trinidadian Jewish community paint an overwhelmingly positive picture of their Trinidadian childhoods, but they also identify some of the cultural tensions generated by their island upbringing. Esther Zaks Adler writes that the nuns at the convent where she was educated “were friendly, except for the ones who would say, ‘When are you going to Jerusalem?’” (Strasberg and Yufe). Another contributor, Arthur Siegel, recalls in his essay: “My personal life in Trinidad was filled with contradictions. Our home was as Jewish as it could be: I went to weekly Hebrew lessons with Dr. Ottensozor (a refugee from Germany) and my father made me study Pirker [sic] Avot with him every Saturday afternoon. My schooling was at St. Mary’s College—the College of the Immaculate Conception—run by the Holy Ghost fathers, mostly from Ireland. Their influence was so pronounced that for some years, after I left Trinidad, I would be asked if I was from Ireland” (Strasberg and Yufe). The contributor to the collection who most strikingly embraces these contradictions is Louis Strasberg, who, in an indigenizing gesture, composes his memoir in the form of a calypso:
Ah was a happy boy in the Calypso Shtetel;
Ah play sports, ah play mas; ah ha good friends, and ah go to Maracas;
Ah used to fete all night and sleep all day; drink coconut water, eat roti and never worry how to pay
Buh lemme tell you, with priests trying to convert meh; and the sweet life of this Jewish boy,
Ah still enh know how I enh become a goy;
But then again, you had to have a little sechel; to survive dem days in the Calypso Shtetel.
(Strasberg and Yufe)
Seamlessly blending Yiddish (e.g.,
sechel or common sense) with Trinidadian Creole (e.g.,
play mas or to masquerade during Carnival;
fete or to party, make merry), Strasberg capitalizes on the signature versatility and dynamism of calypso as an art form—its ability to accommodate “differences in music, dances, and lyrical experimentation, as the society develops” (Mohammed 162). Strasberg’s adaptation of a distinctively local Caribbean musical tradition offers an optimistic vision of the compatibility of Jewish and Trinidadian identities even as it thematizes the challenges that this cultural mix presented.
One of the primary sources of the Jewish refugees’ ambivalence about their Caribbean havens was the experience of internment. In Curaçao refugee Jews were sent to the island of Bonaire and interned on the grounds of former or existing plantations that were converted into prison camps or farms (Lansen 442). In Trinidad the reception center on Nelson Island that had originally housed indentured Indians was used for male refugees; later, it served as a prison for Black Power leaders (Newman, “Exiled to Paradise”). One former internee of Nelson Island recalled that the elders “could not help but feel bitterness and resentment at being thus mistreated, of being deprived of their newly found freedom and having just sent out new roots, being so abruptly and rudely uprooted once more. The stigma of being branded ‘enemy alien’ was almost intolerable to us” (quoted in Newman, “Nearly the New World” 198). In Jamaica Jewish refugees were confined for the duration of the war to Gibraltar Camp (so named because it was built to house large numbers of Gibraltan evacuees who never arrived in the expected numbers). Between 1941 and 1943 the British government transported roughly four hundred Jewish refugees from Lisbon to Gibraltar Camp, which later became part of the University of the West Indies campus.
In what is perhaps the most famous account of Jewish refugee internment in the Caribbean, in
Tristes Tropiques (1955) Claude Lévi-Strauss describes the hostile reception that greeted the boatload of refugees with whom he escaped from France to Martinique in 1941. Lévi-Strauss recalls that the soldiers treated the refugees as scapegoats upon whom they could blame the defeat of France and vent their pent-up aggression: “The non-French passengers found themselves classed as enemies; those who were French were rudely denied this distinction, at the same time as they were accused of having abandoned their country in a cowardly fashion” (28).
4 This historical episode is retold in Christophe Petit’s 2011 play
Vichy aux Antilles (
Vichy in the Antilles), which portrays Lévi-Strauss’s arrival in Martinique and encounter with Admiral Robert, the repressive Vichy loyalist commissioner of the French Antilles. Petit’s play reminds us that the same ship that brought Claude Lévi-Strauss to Martinique in 1941 also carried the surrealist poet André Breton, who met Aimé Césaire while on the island and subsequently became a champion of his work.
A more extended account of refugee internment in the Caribbean is contained in
A Drastic Turn of Destiny (2009), the memoir of Fred Mann, a German Jew who made his way through Belgium, France, Spain, and Portugal to Jamaica. Mann describes the shock of fleeing Europe for Jamaica only to discover that the Jewish refugees were to be housed in a camp for the duration of the war.
5 Another source of distress, however, was the response (or lack thereof) of the local Jamaican Jewish community, who according to Mann “did nothing to assist us and, at worst, ignored our existence” (196). Mann also recalls in his memoir that the refugees were surprised to encounter racial segregation between Blacks and whites in Jamaica: “We didn’t suffer from those prejudices and we were astounded to discover this phenomenon” (198). He relates one incident in which a Dutch girl from Gibraltar Camp was mistaken for a Mulatta and was prevented from swimming in a hotel pool: “I suddenly understood what was happening. Elly was quite tanned and had crinkled hair. I went up front and talked to the cashier who knew me, explaining that Elly was in fact a white Dutch girl” (214).
6 This episode offers a striking illustration of how some Jews who had been racialized in Europe as non-white once arrived in the Caribbean were able to claim the privileges of whiteness with relative ease.
7 Yet, while such episodes are riddled with contradictions, Newman observes that in the present-day Caribbean, “The story of Jewish immigration has been integrated into a history of the West Indies which emphasises tolerance and acceptance, and the role of the West Indies as a haven.” In this narrative, “the complex responses made up of elements of antipathy, ambivalence and sympathy is flattened in order to fulfill the celebratory needs of heritage nostalgia” (“Nearly the New World” 259–60). If, in the contemporary Caribbean, the Jewish refugee story has been assimilated to a narrative of Caribbean tolerance, what purpose does its invocation serve in postwar Caribbean fiction? I will argue that while Hearne suppresses the contradictions that adhere to the figure of the Holocaust refugee, Kincaid embraces them as part of her ambivalent poetics.
LAND OF THE LIVING: “BORROWED SUFFERING”?
In critical responses to Land of the Living that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the white Jamaican writer John Hearne came under attack for his use of a Holocaust refugee as narrator, a strategy that some judged to be escapist and inauthentic in keeping with his Eurocentric view of the Caribbean and more general failure to confront the racial inequities of Caribbean society. Rather than dismissing Hearne’s employment of a Jewish narrator as symptomatic of his compromised politics, I will suggest that this feature of the novel merits further consideration for what it can tell us about the resonance of the Holocaust in the Caribbean literary imagination. Revisited from a perspective that is less deeply invested in notions of authenticity, Hearne’s neglected 1961 novel proves to be limited not so much by its adoption of a Jewish narrator as by its uncritical reliance on a narrative of Jewish victimhood.
The narrator of
Land of the Living is Stefan Mahler, a German Jew who in 1940 flees Germany for England. After obtaining his academic credentials at a Midlands university, Stefan moves to the fictionalized Caribbean island of Cayuna (modeled on Hearne’s native Jamaica) to take up a post teaching zoology at the university. Stefan is an enigmatic figure who divulges few details about his background. It is only when he is questioned by the police at the very end of the novel that we are finally given a schematic narrative of his life: “Stefan Mahler…born Brunau-am-Rhein, 1925…. Refugee in Paris, Bordeaux, Lisbon, 1939…. London, 1940” (256). Referencing Stefan’s European past only sporadically, the novel instead details his postwar experience of resettlement in Cayuna, where he befriends the middle-class coloreds who are the primary focus of Hearne’s fiction. Simultaneously, he also forms a relationship with Bernice Heneky, a Black barmaid at a local tavern. Bernice introduces Stefan to her father Marcus, a visionary preacher in the Pure Church of Africa Triumphant with whom Stefan strikes up a friendship. Marcus eventually repudiates Stefan, however, as political tensions escalate, culminating in Marcus’s flight from the police and the violent deaths of Marcus and Bernice.
When we first meet Stefan at the opening of the novel, he has married one of the middle-class set, the troubled divorcée Joan Culpeper, and, after several years on the island, is rapidly acculturating to Cayuna. After escaping the concentration camps to which his parents and sister had fallen victim, Stefan had found it “difficult to believe that a real I had survived.” “But now in Cayuna,” he tells the reader, “I feel that some sort of obscure, powerful resurrection of myself has begun to stir. The island has claimed me” (13). Yet, even at this moment in which Stefan appears to have achieved a sense of belonging, he has the sense that he may be “thrown out” of this world (21). Later in the novel, when he receives a summons to appear at the police station, he is beset by a “tawdry, vague anxiety” (251) and carefully checks his passport and residence visa to make sure that they bear the correct stamps. Stefan’s sense of insecurity stems from a traumatic past that is only obscurely alluded to in the novel, but manifests itself in the mysterious illness that occasionally overcomes him as well as in his insomnia and sexual impotence.
But why employ a Holocaust refugee as narrator of a novel that is primarily a portrait of early postwar Caribbean society? I would suggest that Stefan’s Jewish presence signals
Land of the Living’s preoccupation with the problem of representation. Repeatedly throughout Hearne’s novel, the characters struggle to describe one another both pictorially and verbally. Sybil, the wife of Stefan’s friend Oliver, seeks to draw a good portrait of Joan but gets her “all wrong” (147), while another member of their set, the planter politician Andrew Fabricus, also finds that Joan “had a quality that’s hard to describe…. How d’you put these things into words, eh?” (143). Most critically, Oliver, a journalist, attempts to capture the essence of the back-to-Africa leader Marcus Heneky, but, while getting all the facts in the right order, feels that “there’s something missing” and that he hasn’t “placed him” (17). Instead, Oliver suggests that it is Stefan who may be best able to offer insight into Marcus. Stefan is puzzled by this notion:
“Why d’you think I should be able to tell you?…I’m not even a Cayunan. I couldn’t begin to see him in a context the way you can.”
“Balls,” Oliver said amiably. “You’re a Cayunan now if you’re anything at all, you damn Jew. And you’ve got a nose for these things. Besides, you knew him.”
(17)
In fact, it is Stefan’s alien status in Cayuna that qualifies him to serve as narrator of the novel and in particular as the interlocutor of Marcus Heneky. As the exchange with Oliver illustrates, Stefan occupies an ambiguous space in between national and racial identities. Oliver insists that Stefan is a Cayunan, but his description of Stefan as a “damn Jew” and racializing reference to his nose simultaneously undercut this assertion. Stefan’s in-betweenness is also suggested by the fact that he is darker-skinned than Bernice’s own mother, while Bernice is described as having “an almost Semitic bridge” to her nose (79).
Stefan’s perpetual shuttling between the different social classes of Cayuna that are represented by his two lovers, Bernice and Joan, enables the novel itself to bridge these worlds. Stefan is affiliated with the middle-class set and yet is not fully of them, as is signaled by his “Old Testament” beard, his accent, his relationship with Bernice, and above all his sympathy for Marcus Heneky and his vision. Stefan is both friendly with Oliver and Andrew and at the same time critical of their limitations. He is distressed, for example, by the “superficial brutality” that Oliver displays toward Bernice (78). Similarly, Stefan disputes Oliver and Andrew’s assessment of Marcus, who is imprisoned for six months on the cooked-up charge of preaching without a license. While Oliver and the party organizers dismiss the Black leader as “a poor old lunatic” (108) and as “trouble” (207), Stefan identifies a deeper value in Marcus’ message:
“He wasn’t just a common little fanatic…. Perhaps he didn’t even know what moved him or what he was really trying to do, but it was there all the same: the necessity to erase another bit of the lie that makes slaves of us.”
“I’ve lost you,” Andrew said. “What lie?”
“It all depends,” I said. “It varies from time to time and place to place. In Heneky’s case the lie was that the black man was faceless. What he had to do was try to change that, to give the black man the sort of vision of himself that would make him free. And make the whites and the browns free, because they were shackled to the lie too.”
(109)
Stefan thus serves as a skillful interpreter of Marcus, his outsider status enabling him to move beyond the status quo perception of the colored middle-class.
The novel strongly suggests a commonality between the Holocaust refugee and the disenfranchised Black underclass of which Marcus is a spokesman. Stefan has a rapport with a series of characters who share this background: Ruddy, the man whom Stefan hires to take him and his biology students out to sea; Bernice, with whom he has a tender affair; and finally Marcus, whose ideology is one for which Stefan alone among the middle-class characters has any sympathy. In chapter 2 Stefan has a tense encounter with a Rastafarian (here called Sons of Sheba) while leading his students on one of their specimen-gathering expeditions. When the Son of Sheba tampers with their equipment, Stefan prevents one of his students from attacking the man and instead seeks to defuse the situation. In this scene Stefan’s own experience of suffering (symbolized by the illness that overcomes him just prior to the incident) enables him to recognize in the man a “wild and enigmatic dignity” and “to acknowledge something pure, austere and dedicated: as if he were the solitary, indomitable witness to a persecuted but enduring truth” (48). Stefan’s sympathetic response to the Son of Sheba forecasts his role as Marcus’s privileged interlocutor later in the novel.
After Bernice seeks out Stefan’s help when Marcus falls ill with typhoid, Marcus makes an exception to his general mistrust of whites and invites Stefan, who understands him “a little bit” (158), to visit him. The two men’s sense of mutual understanding is based on a notion of shared experience. In a conversation with Bernice that immediately precedes his first meeting with Marcus, Stefan remarks in typically oblique fashion to Bernice: “A lot of people tried to make me ashamed once, but the inoculation never took” (105). This obscure reference to Stefan’s traumatic past sets the stage for his first encounter with Marcus and the moment of identification that accompanies it: “In the nearly imperceptible hesitation before his hand was slowly extended to join with mine, in the sudden doubtful flicker across his steady gaze, I thought: so that’s it, old man; we’ve both been wounded in the same accident; just as you’ll never completely believe that a white man can call you ‘sir’ without patronage, so I’ll never be quite sure that any Gentile of my world doesn’t make a reservation when he meets me; we both demand proof; and that’s silly dangerous; it’s an invitation to the world to hurt you again” (114).
Stefan’s response to Marcus is not so much one of “sympathy or affection, but of wry recognition; the fact that in each other we detected the same ailment and hurt of the psyche: we saluted each other with the distant yet intimate understanding of two veterans determined to survive the same campaign” (152). This sense of recognition is reinforced by the Rastafarian imagery that punctuates the novel. On the wall of the room in which Stefan first meets Marcus there hangs “a loudly coloured relief map of Africa on which Addis Ababa was symbolized by a huge, gilt Star of David” (106–7). The Old Testament references in Marcus’s and the Sons of Sheba’s commentary about “Israel’s children of Africa” (56) returning to their land underscore the analogy between Black and Jew, while the novel’s bipartite division into sections entitled “Exile” and “Return” further suggests correspondences between African and Jewish diasporic narratives.
Hearne’s alignment of Black and Jew is premised on his identification of Jewishness with an ethical perspective. Stefan, whom Bernice calls a “good man” (121), displays his compassionate nature by driving Marcus to the hospital to be treated for typhoid and later by hiring a lawyer to defend Marcus when he is arrested. When Andrew speaks of past injustice in Cayuna, Stefan is quick to correct him that injustice on the island continues in the present. After his release from prison, Marcus repudiates Stefan, telling him, “This is we place. Black man’s place…. Leave we now, an’ go back to your friends an’ your country, an’ don’t try to come into ours” (248). Yet Stefan remains loyal, refusing to inform on Marcus to the police. Notably, Stefan’s ethical character is presented as stemming directly from his victimization during the Holocaust, in contrast to the local West Indian Jews who have lost their ethical sensitivity: “‘You breast-beating, impossible Jews. I don’t mean the detribalized, trading post trash who are born out here, but the real Mosaic element like you, Stefan. You have this ancestral capacity for making an enormous moral drama out of the most ordinary material, don’t you? Of course, it’s the only art you have so I suppose you make the most of it” (181). Stefan himself concurs with Oliver’s assessment of Jewish character: “our conviction of identity must depend on this ‘capacity’, as he calls it, for believing that our every action is weighed” (181). Thus Jewishness is defined in the novel not as a religious or racial category but as an ethical one.
Hearne’s uncritical identification of Jewishness with a higher moral sensibility bears further examination in light of the contradictions that emerge in the calypsos and memoirs already discussed, both of which point to the significant access to the privileges of whiteness enjoyed by some refugee Jews in the Caribbean—particularly those of Western European background such as Stefan. In Mann’s memoir the refugee Jewish girl who is mistaken for a Mulatta gains entry to the hotel swimming pool as soon as it is established that she is in fact “a white Dutch girl.” Similarly, in Land of the Living, as Sylvia Wynter observes, once arrived in Cayuna Stefan easily “takes his top place in the system, a place accorded to him by his whiteness of skin; he is now the Aryan and the black Henneky [sic], the exiled Jew” (37). More specifically, Hearne’s positioning of Stefan at the moral center of the novel is at odds with the novel’s conclusion in which Stefan achieves a sense of belonging at the cost of Bernice and Marcus, both of whom are murdered by a renegade member of Marcus’s sect during a standoff with the police. If the novel charts a movement from exile to return, the figure who enjoys a return to home and self is Stefan rather than Bernice or Marcus. Moreover, Stefan’s “resurrection” is predicated on Bernice’s replacement as his romantic partner by the more eligible Joan and ultimately on both Bernice’s and Marcus’s excision from the narrative altogether. The ethical critique of Andrew and the others of his set that Stefan advances militates against the accusation often lodged against Hearne that he romanticizes the middle class. Yet, by identifying Stefan as the locus of the novel’s ethical perspective, Hearne elides Stefan’s own morally ambiguous positioning within Cayuna’s power structure.
In a 1969 essay, Wynter, who judged
Land of the Living to be Hearne’s “most alienated” novel, charged that Hearne needed to learn “how to see the white Mahler through the black Henneky’s eyes…. This new kind of eye…will mean that Hearne, having paid his dues, will have learnt how to really sing the blues for a Henneky [
sic]; he would then have no need of a borrowed suffering” (39). By contrast, another contemporary critique maintained that the problem with the novel was not that its perspective was insufficiently local, but that it was excessively so. For Frank Birbalsingh, the character of Stefan Mahler, who appeared “less a German Jew than a Caribbean insider,” was nothing more than an “‘escapist’ subterfuge” that typified Hearne’s evasion of the problem of racial inequity in the Caribbean (Birbalsingh 35). Yet, as we have seen, Stefan’s Jewishness is not simply a “guise” (35) or an “intellectual exercise” in “borrowed suffering” (Wynter 39), but rather reflects a particular historical experience of Jewish refugee emigration to the Caribbean. Moreover, far from being an insider, Stefan is a figure of exile and in-betweenness whose experience of racialization during the Holocaust is what enables him to serve as Marcus Heneky’s interlocutor and chronicler. Because of his Jewish distance from the middle-class set, Stefan is able to advance a critique of them, even if this critique is neither as radical nor as sustained as Hearne’s critics would have liked. Instead, the greater tension in the novel stems from its evasion of the political and moral contradictions that attend Stefan’s position as a Holocaust survivor who finds sanctuary in a racially stratified Caribbean island.
MR. POTTER: BLACK AND JEW “FACE-TO-FACE”
In such works as
The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and
My Brother (1997), Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid fictionalizes both her own autobiography and the biographies of various of her family members. In her 2002 novel
Mr. Potter, Kincaid turns to the subject of her birth father, an illiterate chauffeur in Antigua from whom her mother separated while still pregnant with Kincaid.
Mr. Potter is a challenging, poetic novel that, while ostensibly a biography of the narrator’s father, increasingly draws attention to the narrator herself as she seeks to redress the marginal place she occupied in her father’s life. Thus, as Jana Evans Braziel observes,
Mr. Potter is an example of “autobiography
as biography” (193). Strikingly, this auto/biographical project is advanced in Kincaid’s novel through the introduction of a Jewish character, the Czech refugee Dr. Weizenger, whose meeting with Potter occupies the whole of the opening chapter. In
Mr. Potter, Kincaid’s staging of the encounter between these two men calls into question the uncritical identification of Jewishness with ethics and the presumption of a natural rapport between Black and Jew that undergird Hearne’s novel. Yet ultimately
Mr. Potter suggests that there is a place for what Wynter calls “borrowed suffering” in the Caribbean novel.
One of the most curious—and for some critics, perplexing—aspects of Kincaid’s provocative novel is the opacity of its eponymous subject. The narrator provides us with only the barest outlines of Potter’s life: his abandonment by his father, the suicide of his mother when he was a young boy, the loveless household of his adoptive family, and, finally, his promiscuity in later life and abandonment in turn of his own children. Moreover, the novel gives us almost no entry into Mr. Potter’s consciousness. We learn little of his thoughts, and his few utterances are mostly made up of nonsense syllables such as “Eh” or of songs and ditties. Because Potter is illiterate, no written record of his voice is available either. His physiognomy, in particular his nose, which is his sole legacy to his daughters, is equally unrevealing of his character: “And all these daughters looked like him, they all bore his nose…and his nose was itself, just his nose, and could reveal nothing about him, not his temperament, not his inadequacies, not all that made up his character, his moral character, his nose revealed nothing about him, only that all his children, girls, bore his nose, their noses were exact replicas of his” (120). Instead we find that Potter is peculiarly absent from his own biography. I will suggest that Potter’s impenetrability, which has been the cause of significant discomfort to some reviewers, is both fundamental to Kincaid’s portrayal of the father-daughter relationship and accounts for the troubling presence of the refugee Jew Dr. Weizenger in the novel.
8In
Mr. Potter’s opening chapter, Kincaid introduces the novel’s eponymous protagonist by tracing his “face to face” (24) encounter with Weizenger, whose steamship he has been sent to meet.
9 Dr. Zoltan Weizenger is a refugee from Prague whose escape route has taken him to Greece, Singapore, Shanghai, and Sydney before finally depositing him in Antigua. The chapter is devoted in its entirety to the encounter between Potter and Weizenger: we see Potter drive to the jetty; collect Weizenger and his English wife May; drive the couple to the house in which they will be staying; and then finally drive away. The focus of the narrative is not, however, on actions or events, or even on dialogue, but rather on what the narrator calls “moment[s] held in a tight grip” (12). The first chapter details the attenuated moment of Potter’s and Weizenger’s encounter, circling around it in order to view it from different angles. Yet, after the middle of the second chapter, Weizenger virtually disappears from the novel for roughly a hundred pages, reappearing as a significant presence only in the final chapters. Why does Kincaid open her novel with this meeting of the Black chauffeur and the Holocaust refugee, one that delays the delivery of information about Potter’s birth and upbringing until the second chapter? According to one reviewer, the opening chapter sets up false expectations since the encounter between Potter and Weizenger “is not as crucial as one might expect of a meeting placed so prominently in the early pages of a novel” (Rhodes-Pitts 11). As I will show, however, the meeting is in fact central, not so much to the unfolding of Potter’s life, but to the novel’s associative narrative structure and anti-mimetic approach to making meaning. Weizenger’s significance is not confined to his role as a conduit between Kincaid’s parents, as another critic suggests (Matos 94), but instead needs to be understood in terms of the novel’s formal as well as thematic imperatives.
Mr. Potter is an imagistic novel in which causal connections are withheld and meaning is generated associatively as well as through rhetorical techniques such as repetition, chiasmus, and parataxis.
10 As biographical subject, Potter is fundamentally opaque and inaccessible to both the narrator and the reader. It is largely by setting Potter alongside other figures of displacement, in particular Dr. Weizenger and the Lebanese entrepreneur Mr. Shoul, that the novel yields insight into its subject. This juxtapositional technique offers crucial perspective on Potter while at the same time thematizing his fundamental disconnection from others and suggesting the narrator’s own problematic relationship to her subject. In this regard, Kincaid’s associative strategy functions on the level of emplotment much like the parataxis that she employs on the level of sentence structure. If, as Nicole Matos suggests, Kincaid’s stylistic parataxis, which places clauses side by side without indicating their relation to one another, signals her characters’ “inability to connect meaningfully” with each other (84), so too does the novel’s paratactic narrative structure, which juxtaposes Potter, Weizenger and Shoul without directly stating the significance of their relationships.
In Mr. Potter meaning is consistently deferred and denied. Passages that appear to be heading in one direction go off on unexpected and seemingly inexplicable tangents, only to circle back eventually to their original subject and then digress once again. In the opening pages of the novel, we witness Potter walking to Shoul’s garage and taking in sights along the way such as that of a dog. “But,” we are told, Potter “did not think that this dog, pregnant and weary from carrying her pups, seeking shelter from that sun, was a reflection of any part of him, not even in the smallest way” (4). Next he sees a blind beggar, but again “Mr. Potter did not think that any part of him was reflected in this sight before him” (5). These passages set the stage for Potter’s encounter with Weizenger, which follows shortly thereafter and in which a sense of relation similarly will be denied.
Whereas, in Hearne’s
Land of the Living, Stefan and Marcus recognize one another as being “two veterans determined to survive the same campaign” (152), the relationship between Weizenger and Potter is characterized by
misrecognition. Throughout the opening chapter the two men fail to comprehend and relate to one another: “Such a dead man, thought Mr. Potter to himself when he saw Dr. Weizenger (‘E dead, ‘e dead). Such stupidity, thought Dr. Weizenger to himself when he met Mr. Potter, so much ignorance” (10). Weizenger finds Potter repulsive and appears incapable of empathizing with him. Because Weizenger understands the Holocaust to be a unique event in world history, he is unable to detect the five hundred years of suffering that resonate in Potter’s voice. For his part, Potter’s attitude toward Weizenger is one of disdain: “people like that—Dr. Weizenger—cannot even speak properly, so said Mr. Potter to himself” (15). After they arrive at the house in which the Weizengers will stay, Dr. Weizenger asks Potter’s name, but Potter’s response does not register: “the sound of Mr. Potter’s voice, so full of all that had gone wrong in the world for almost five hundred years that it could break the heart of an ordinary stone, meant not a thing to Dr. Weizenger, for he had been only recently inhabiting the world as if it were composed only of extinction, as if it were devoted to his very own extinction” (23). Potter, who in a resonant gesture repeatedly names himself to Weizenger, remains unheard and unacknowledged by Weizenger in what is a missed opportunity for mutual recognition.
For a brief moment a space of potential connection opens up when Mr. Potter “made a gesture…as if to say, Here! All this in front of me is mine and I want to share it with you, let us live in it together” (21–22). But this sense of possibility quickly dissipates: “Dr. Weizenger, so recently placed on the very edge of extinction, did not want to share anything with Mr. Potter, a man so long alive in a cauldron of terror” (22). In marked contrast to Hearne’s and other Caribbean writers’ depiction of Jews and Blacks as sharing a common experience of persecution and displacement, in Mr. Potter Kincaid presents Weizenger’s suffering as an obstacle to empathy. Indeed, the narrator suggests that Weizenger’s anguish is the very cause of his racism toward the Antiguans among whom he now finds himself:
Dr. Weizenger was in a new place, but for so many years now Dr. Weizenger was constantly in a new place. For three hundred years he and all that he came from lived in that place once called Czechoslovakia, he and all that he came from lived in its villages, its towns, its cities, its capital, its provinces, and then, without notice, he and all he came from could not live in Czechoslovakia or its environs anymore. And so Dr. Weizenger had been here, there, and everywhere, and now he was in front of Mr. Potter and this would be his final place, his place of rest, which might account for his hatred and lack of sympathy for Mr. Potter (and all who looked like Mr. Potter).
(8)
At his medical practice, Weizenger expresses his racial phobia when he insists that his nurse Annie (the narrator’s mother) scrub his patients before he attends to them. Accordingly, when Weizenger dies at the end of the novel, his Antiguan patients do not mourn his loss.
It is important to note that, although Potter’s and Weizenger’s relationship is characterized by misrecognition and failed connection, the novel itself works to bring the two men, as well as Black and Jewish experiences, into relation. It is in large part by juxtaposing Potter, Weizenger, and a third displaced and even less sympathetic figure, Potter’s Middle Eastern employer Mr. Shoul, that the novel generates insight into Potter’s condition. Through such juxtapositions, Kincaid implies that Potter’s behavior reflects a deep historical background of trauma and displacement that is only obliquely referenced in the novel. For example, the description of Weizenger’s arrival employs repetition to suggest a relationship between the historical traumas that underlie each man’s condition:
And on that day Mr. Potter drove Mr. Shoul’s car to the jetty to await a large steamer coming from some benighted place in the world, someplace far away where there had been upheavals and displacements and murder and terror. Mr. Potter was not unfamiliar with upheavals and displacements and murder and terror; his very existence in the world in which he lived had been made possible by such things, but he did not dwell on them and he could not dwell on them any more than he could dwell on breathing. And so Mr. Potter met Dr. Weizenger.
(7, emphasis added)
This key early passage establishes a loose parallel between the Holocaust and slavery through the incantatory repetition of the phrase “upheavals and displacements and murder and terror” while at the same time alerting the reader that historical trauma is
not something that preoccupies Potter. Weizenger’s presence thus becomes a means of introducing that which remains unspoken, unreflected upon by Potter, and perhaps by Antiguan society at large. Much like the opening passage in which Potter rejects any possible relation between himself and the pregnant dog and blind beggar he encounters en route to Shoul’s garage, Potter and Weizenger reject the notion that their conditions may be related; yet this is precisely what the novel implies. Shoul’s displaced condition is also suggestive of Potter’s: “and Mr. Shoul then entered into his world of the transient, the immigrant, the person without a real home, and he was on ships and the ships were tossed about on the ocean and the seas and when inside the ships he was tossed about” (110). Shoul, however, is a more monolithic and exploitative figure than Weizenger, his sense of a traumatic past not as acute, his exile being “deliberate” (155) rather than forced.
Mr. Potter works, then, not by building understanding or mutual recognition between Black and Jew but by setting Potter and Weizenger alongside one another in a manner that reveals how both men are psychologically damaged as a result of their traumatic pasts. Both Potter and Weizenger are shown to be unable to fully reflect on their identities. Both are displaced and incapable of connecting with others, instead withholding themselves from the world. Indeed, their very inability to relate to one another is a symptom of the traumatized condition that they share.
11 These commonalities are established not directly or through causal logic but associatively as well as through rhetorical strategies such as repetition, restatement, and chiasmus. Chiastic sentences such as “And Mr. Potter saw Dr. Weizenger and Dr. Weizenger saw Mr. Potter” (9) double back on themselves, generating a slippery, tensive relationality: “And Mr. Potter and Dr. Weizenger were standing face-to-face and Dr. Weizenger and Mr. Potter were standing opposite each other” (24).
The opening chapter is organized around a series of densely resonant images that also convey relationality without suggesting neat correspondence. These images draw Potter and Weizenger into association while simultaneously disassociating them. For example, the two men are connected throughout the chapter by their joint preoccupation with the sunlight, but are also differentiated through their diverging responses to it. For Potter, the tropical sunlight is merely familiar; for Weizenger, on the other hand, it is “radiant” while also connoting the furnaces of the death camps. Notably, the scene of their encounter takes place against the backdrop of the sea, an image that connects the two men still more insistently: “The sea, the sea, the sea that was so vast, so vast, and vast again, lay in front of them, Mr. Potter and Dr. Weizenger, and for both of them it held such peril, such dark memories. On Dr. Weizenger’s suitcase were the words ‘Singapore’ and ‘Shanghai’ and ‘Sydney,’ but Mr. Potter could not read and so did not know what they meant. And on Mr. Potter’s face was written ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe,’ but Dr. Weizenger had never had to and would never be able (as it turned out) to read the language in which these words were written” (10–11). In this passage Potter’s illiteracy is emblematic of his and Weizenger’s lack of mutual understanding: he cannot read the place names on Weizenger’s suitcase, just as Weizenger lacks the ability to decipher Potter’s face. Yet through the multivalent image of the sea, which is also associated in the novel with “wails, screams, cries…grief, remorse despair” (12) and later with the suicide of Potter’s mother, Kincaid encourages the reader to recognize a relationship between the two men’s conditions of displacement that goes unacknowledged by the characters themselves.
A second organizing image, the cathedral’s clock tower, takes on a different resonance according to each man’s experience: “And time was Dr. Weizenger’s enemy: the past certainly; the future he did not know how that would turn out. And Mr. Potter’s lifetime began in the year fourteen hundred and ninety-two but he was born on the seventh day of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-two” (177). As in the opening chapter, here Kincaid introduces a densely loaded image that freezes the moment in order to establish connection and disconnection between the two men simultaneously. Like Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being,” Kincaid’s “moments held in a tight grip” allow meaning to proliferate unbounded by the narrative constraints of realism.
12 Kincaid’s imagism, while in some respects reminiscent of modernist fiction, also can be compared to what Walcott refers to as “triangulation.” As I discussed in
chapter 1, in his long poem
Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott triangulates the artists Pissarro, Monet, and his own father, each of whom gazes at the same Turner painting. Just as Walcott’s method of triangulation forms connections without collapsing differences, Kincaid’s imagistic technique establishes the relationality of Black and Jew while at the same time resisting a straightforward identification between them.
Throughout Kincaid’s novel, Potter remains an inscrutable figure, his interior life largely inaccessible to both narrator and reader. However perplexing his opacity may be to Kincaid’s readers, it is necessary because it illustrates the troubled nature of his relationship to his daughter. As the narrator of Potter’s life, the daughter is cut off from access to his consciousness just as she was cut off from the father who refused to acknowledge her—whose legacy to her is that she has a “line drawn through the space where the name of the father ought to be” (101). Moreover, not only is Potter always at a remove from the narrator, but so too is the historical trauma of slavery. Slavery is referenced through the metonym of 1492, which the novel suggests lies at the root of the ruptured parent/child relationship, but the slavery past remains oblique, alluded to only in passing in such lines as the “whole history of evil directed at [Potter] and at all who looked like him” (84). With both Potter and slavery so remote, the novel needs the mediating presence of the Holocaust refugee Dr. Weizenger, with his more immediate and better documented traumatic past, to shed light on Potter’s condition.
By the same token, Weizenger’s and Potter’s inability to relate to one another and their asymmetrical power relationship also are emblematic of the problematic status of the daughter as biographer of the father. When Weizenger first appears in the novel, the narrator remarks that “this sentence should begin with Dr. Weizenger emerging, getting off the launch that has brought him from his ship which is lying in the deep part of the harbor, but this is Mr. Potter’s life and so Dr. Weizenger must never begin a sentence; I am not making an authorial decision, or a narrative decision, I only say this because it is so true: Mr. Potter’s life is his own and no one else should take precedence” (8–9). And yet it is the narrator herself who increasingly comes to “take precedence” over Mr. Potter and displace him as the subject of his own biography. In Mr. Potter the failure of connection between Black and Jew—between survivors of the Middle Passage and the Holocaust—underscores the failure of connection between parent and child, subject and narrator.
It is not an accident that the figure of the Holocaust refugee should make an appearance in two novels that have met with mixed critical receptions. In both novels the Jewish refugee’s ambivalent presence becomes thematic of the author’s own uneasy relationship to Caribbean collectivities. In
Land of the Living Stefan’s in-betweenness, which is presented in both racial and national terms, is suggestive of Hearne’s standing as, after Naipaul, “quite possibly the most controversial and enigmatic of [Caribbean] authors” (Márquez 240). In
The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming famously complained that Hearne’s “key obsession is with an agricultural middle class in Jamaica…. He is not an example of that instinct and root impulse which return the better West Indian writers back to the soil” (45–46). In a more measured contemporary commentary, John Figueroa identified in Hearne “that special predicament of West Indians of a certain background, upbringing and experience: the predicament of being ‘caught between’: between the Old World and the New, between Africa and Europe, gradualism and revolution” (72). In
Land of the Living this condition of in-betweenness is signaled by Stefan’s ambivalent Jewish presence.
Although Kincaid is more readily integrated into Caribbean literary canons, she, too, is a polarizing figure. Because her writing is characterized by a focus on individual experience rather than on the Caribbean collective (Bouson 2), some critics have found it to be excessively self-absorbed.
Mr. Potter in particular has been deemed “sour and self-regarding” (Jaggi par. 7) because of the extent to which the daughter/narrator’s presence overwhelms that of the father, upon whom she takes revenge by supplanting him as narrative subject. Just as Kincaid provocatively recasts the father-daughter (or subject-narrator) relationship in
Mr. Potter, so she restages the Black-Jewish encounter as one of disconnection rather than meaningful exchange. Emphasizing estrangement over empathy, Kincaid eschews the straightforwardly identificatory model that had seemed more natural in the mid-century context of Hearne’s writing. Despite important critiques of this model, this kind of identificatory impulse remains strong today, making Kincaid’s intervention all the more powerful.
13At the same time, Kincaid also departs from narratives of Black-Jewish relations that are couched in terms of competing claims to victimhood.
Mr. Potter neither advances an uncomplicated identification of Black and Jewish histories of suffering nor pursues a discourse of ethnic competition. Instead, the novel adopts an imagistic and associative strategy in which Jewish refugee experience allusively illuminates the impact of the slavery past on the twentieth-century Caribbean psyche. In so doing,
Mr. Potter demonstrates how the Holocaust and slavery can be brought into relation without relying on neat parallels, presumptions of cross-cultural empathy, or an identification of Jewishness with ethical conscience. Rather than resolving the incongruities that inhere in the figure of the refugee Jew, Kincaid’s taut, challenging novel works to heighten these tensions. Walcott has said of Kincaid’s prose style that each of her sentences “heads toward its own contradiction” (quoted in Garis 42). In
Mr. Potter this poetics of contradiction enables Kincaid to engage with and capitalize on the ambiguities of Holocaust refugee experience in the Caribbean and, more broadly, to call into question dominant understandings of the relationship between slavery and the Holocaust.
