I SPENT THE FIRST seventeen years of my life consuming this literature, passing through its sentences; absorbing its form, its structure, and its aesthetic; coming to know its rules of character, landscape, dialogue, and so on.
In her essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Sylvia Wynter writes, “we [by which she means plantation or New World societies] are all, without exception, still ‘enchanted,’ imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its bewitched reality.”17
A narratively constituted imaginary and existence are repeated, reinforced politically and socially, rewritten in every novel either as embedded or as dug up to examine difference or those outside the narrative. If blackness is one of the categories of this narrative schema, then it appears as immutable. This narratively constituted imaginary is a code that considers itself ever changing but is in fact ever elaborating itself as primary—reconstituting the same materials in which it is primary, from which it deals out violence as empathy, violence as love, violence as the daily enactment of itself. Code and algorithms, after all, are not neutral or value-free—they are embedded in, constitutive of, and also produce sets of political and social relations and, of course, literary ones.
Narrative is not just the simple transportation of language but of ideas of the self, and ideas of the self that contain negations of other people. What is it, then, to adopt or be indoctrinated into these narrative structures, those ideas, to come to know those ideas as your own, when you are the negated other people? The intravenous being, the being administered into being, through the idea of the universal that is, at the same time, self-negating?
The first strategy of counteracting the toxicity of colonial narrative may be the counternarrative. I tried to practise a version of this in my 1988 short story, “At the Lisbon Plate,” when finding no name for the murdered man in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger/The Outsider. I tried to imagine his day, his life before and when he encounters the colonial anxiety of Camus’s Meursault, a colonial anxiety whose elaboration is the death of the man on the beach. How Camus un-names the victim and is unable or unwilling to fill out his life or hear his voice. And so, in a brief few paragraphs, I attempted in my early writing life to fill in the register of existence, since the murdered man’s life fell out of the existential rhetorics of this period in French writing. The murdered man was outside of existentialism as I was outside of colonial subjectivity. Even a grand proposition like that of existentialism cannot contain the existence of the colonized. “Ahmed. Ahmed. Ahmed,” my story begins, naming the murdered man. “Ahmed came to the beach with Ousmane to get away…He dropped the bicycle, raced Ousmane to the water…Ahmed and Ousmane fell into the sea fully clothed, he washing away the sticky oil of the bicycle shop, Ousmane drowning his headache.”18 The story settles Ahmed into his life with his younger brother, Ousmane, their getaway to the beach, carving a space away from the penury, the emergencies of the town and their life. So I had read Camus wanting to enter that philosophy of existentialism, trying to find some method of understanding, for a way through, to find a way to that ideal of humanity, and I found that I had fallen out of the narrative. But it wasn’t inclusion that I wanted. I wanted to be addressed.
And that brings me back to the we—and to an and the. We has a certain barbarity to it—a force. It is an administrative category. Christina Sharpe says, “As one reads, one always encounters that curious ‘we.’ That ‘we’ constituted with no reference to one’s own being—a ‘we’ made impossible by ‘me.’”19 To read is to encounter this we at every juncture, even when the word is not invoked, even in its most benign well-meaning form. I ingested in those early years of reading the summons and expulsion of we. The desire to enter; the impossibility of entering if…
Within this narrative, what is this reader to be but nothing, no being, no present, since the reader whose autobiography is being written is always present—with no past and no future? A reader is being written with no character—a reader, inanimate, present as extension of “the being,” “the character.” That is to say, this reader experiences herself as a floating signifier in the narrative, perpetually escaping from and being captured in unwanted and unrecognizable signification.
I was influenced of course by Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. It is a counternarrative to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I imagine Rhys’s autobiography of reading was similar to this one, at least, in some partial way. And probably as an act of correcting the record or animating the inanimate in Brontë’s text, Rhys digs up Bertha/Antoinette to trouble the narratively constituted imaginary. Brontë’s Jane Eyre was published in the same year, just previous to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. In fact, Brontë dedicates the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray in admiration of his intellect and wit.
As a child I read Brontë. And later as a university student. Jane Eyre is a novel about submission. Confinement and submission—zones of submission. All spaces of the novel are enclosures of female submission—the Reed house, the Lowood orphanage, Rochester’s house—zones of submission and indoctrination to familial tyranny, institutional/religious doctrine, and masculinity. The major ethical event is how Jane will resist these zones of submission; the love plot is the next. Necessary to the form of the nineteenth-century novel is the overcoming of (white) female social dissonance through romantic entanglement. The colonial event is hidden in Jane Eyre, albeit elaborating itself and growling above in the attic at Thornfield Hall. The hidden violence, the hidden plantation, slavery, in Jamaica, all hidden. I have to think/extrapolate that everyday middle-class white experience in the nineteenth century must have been familiar with this growling for Brontë to have represented it. A one-paragraph quick summary of this (centuries-long and ongoing) event is performed three-quarters of the way through the novel. Rhys, reading, may have been alert to the hidden woman and the fact that the colonial could not be sutured by the marriage plot.
Imprisoned above in the attic is Bertha Mason and underneath in the drawing rooms and parlours is the gaiety produced by the excesses of the plantation, the violence un-regarded as violence; experienced as power, wealth, and well-being. Thornfield Hall is animated by all of this sublimated violence. It is the expression of violence that everyone is aware of that produces the excitement, the jouissance. The house—filled with guests running to and fro, masquerading, playing charades—is a macabre space. We read:
everywhere, movement all day long. You could not now traverse the gallery, once so hushed, nor enter the front chambers, once so tenantless, without encountering a smart lady’s-maid or a dandy valet.
The kitchen, the butler’s pantry, the servants’ hall, the entrance hall, were equally alive; and the saloons were only left void and still when the blue sky and halcyon sunshine of the genial spring weather called their occupants out into the grounds…
While Mr. Rochester and the other gentlemen directed these alterations, the ladies were running up and down stairs ringing for their maids. Mrs. Fairfax was summoned to give information respecting the resources of the house in shawls, dresses, draperies of any kind; and certain wardrobes of the third storey were ransacked.20
This busyness, this luxury, is produced by the political economy of slavery. As a reader, hailed by extravagance, I did not at first notice the excess, I only experienced the abundance as wonderful—not until later did I experience it as corrupt. The photograph at the beginning of this autobiography was itself a site of submission from which, with time and self-awareness and analysis, I would break free. The meta-data of the photograph demanded affiliation with the protagonist, Jane Eyre. The reader who I was identified herself with Jane—though sidelined and tangential but not disapproving. The reader who I was wished that the woman, the chimera in the attic, would not spoil things.
It is only when Bertha Mason’s brother arrives midway through the novel that we get a hint, fleetingly, of the other life that all this luxury is predicated on. This is the first mention of colony, of “some hot country”: “Presently the words Jamaica, Kingston, Spanish Town, indicated the West Indies as his residence; and it was with no little surprise I gathered, ere long, that he had there first seen and become acquainted with Mr. Rochester. He spoke of his friend’s dislike of the burning heats, the hurricanes, and rainy seasons of that region.”21
Soon after in the novel, when Mason is stabbed by his sister and Jane is enlisted to nurse him until Rochester gets the doctor, Jane hears
the snarling, canine noise, and a deep human groan. Then my own thoughts worried me. What crime was this that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?—what mystery, that broke out now in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night? What creature was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman’s face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey?22
Someone like me, reading, finds this a telling paragraph. Amazingly put. Someone like me reads this snarling and deep human groan as the unconscious speaking, as the plantation come to England. This noise—the noise of the plantation world, the suppressed, the made-mad, the sequestered—was blackness. This sequestered blackness would have travelled by boat (like my mother and my aunt and thousands more later had) as other manifestations of British psycho-social political economy.
After Rochester hurries the wounded Mason away before all is discovered, he speaks with Jane outside in the garden. Listen to the description:
He strayed down a walk edged with box, with apple trees, pear trees, and cherry trees on one side, and a border on the other full of all sorts of old-fashioned flowers, stocks, sweet-williams, primroses, pansies, mingled with southernwood, sweet-briar, and various fragrant herbs. They were fresh now as a succession of April showers and gleams, followed by a lovely spring morning, could make them: the sun was just entering the dappled east, and his light illumined the wreathed and dewy orchard trees and shone down the quiet walks under them. “Jane, will you have a flower?”23
It is a most strange turn of narration but completely understandable since where else could the narrative go given its colonial project? The trope of the English garden is employed here—the naturally pristine space. This appeal to the English natural world—the beauty and quiet, the less mad, the sane, the rightful order—it is the justification for all that must be done to maintain the colonial logic. England and the English psyche remain tranquil and uncontaminated.
But when Jane inherits, it is from her uncle of Madeira: Madeira, which was involved in the slave trade. So far in the novel, Jane has stood relatively outside of the taint, outside of the involvement with plantation/slave capital. But the solution to her full sovereignty is/can only be accomplished by being fully immersed in plantation economics. Madeira once engaged in the production of sugar from sugarcane using enslaved labour from Africa and the Canaries. At the time of the novel and having ended sugar production, for want of resources to exploit, it is now a producer of wine. So, Jane’s autonomy, her £25,000 per year so generously shared with her three cousins, is acquired through the same system that Rochester acquires his money. The contentment that she feels and that we are to feel for her is riven with violence.
Jean Rhys takes care of Rochester’s brief account (one or two paragraphs in Brontë’s Jane Eyre) of his involvement with Bertha Mason, whose real name we come to know is Antoinette, her name changed by Rochester in an act of possession and right to name. In an act of counternarration, Rhys un-names Rochester. While Rhys exposes the political economy of slave-holding and the marriage arrangement/plot as buttressing these relations, she leaves unopened the fantasy of the enslaved’s love for the master. The figure of Christophine is unexplainable as protector and mother figure to Antoinette and her mother. A Black woman formerly enslaved by Antoinette’s family is presented as Antoinette’s defender and protector against Rochester. A reader like me observes this. Christophine confronts Rochester about his true motives. “You think you fool me?” she asks him. “You want her money but you don’t want her…You do that for money? But you wicked like Satan self!”24 Christophine in the years since emancipation and Antoinette’s growing-up has been imprisoned for being an Obeah woman and healer—a status crime of colonial times since these women were usually at the forefront of fomenting rebellion. So, while Rhys presents the figure of Christophine as a powerful one, her love and caring for Antoinette is inexplicable—and only explicable within the same narrative construction as Jane Eyre—the underside of that violence is the narrative of mutual love, filial love as operating outside of violence. Wide Sargasso Sea also has these Black figures (as opposed to people) who populate the text, as crowd or townsfolk, whose actions and movements and whisperings are unexplainable, surreptitious, belligerent, without explanation, and therefore purely malevolent. (Malevolent as opposed to rebellious—or desirous of taking and making freedom.) Wide Sargasso Sea is told in two voices, Antoinette’s and Rochester’s, there could just as easily have been three voices. And the lack of a third voice is structurally unaccountable—except for that logic.
If one is a reader like me, one notices these things. One wants to completely embrace Wide Sargasso Sea, strangely as this same reader wanted to embrace Jane Eyre and had. Such a reader ignores the misgivings, or rather reads with a set of aches, like forming a callus at each reading. Such a reader has a mindbox inside of a mindbox inside of a mindbox and so on.
John Keene’s Counternarratives, a book of short stories and novellas, makes explicit the act of blowing life into the world of coloniality. In his short story “Rivers,” in the section of the book called “Counternarratives,” Keene offers a counter to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. At the centre of this story is James Rivers, whom we meet after the Civil War. James Rivers is and is not the Jim of Twain’s book. Rivers recounts the time when a reporter who is supposed to interview him about “the war and his service in it” instead asks him a question about “that boy” (Huck Finn), whom he has seen only twice in the intervening forty years. The story begins: “What I’d like to hear about, the reporter starts in, is the time you and that little boy…and I silence again with a turn of my head thinking to myself.”25 And what follows is a partial list of the places where he was and battles he participated in in what he names “the first great war for our freedom.”26 This our, italicized in Keene’s text, is very clear—this our references Black freedom, and it stands counter to that violent we I spoke of earlier.
Both the reporter’s question, and its narrative demand, want to return Rivers to a time and place he has worked to forget—or, perhaps more to the point, to return him to a point that is not the point of his life. The reporter’s question would take him back to Twain’s narrative in which the white boy/man and not James Rivers is at the centre, but Rivers has his own narrative. And Keene gives us James Rivers’s narrative at first, by way of a face turned away in refusal and then by way of a remembered encounter in which the necessary dissimulation, evidenced in the grammar of the past conditional, is on the page: “I silence him thinking to myself, I thought to say, I thought to say, I thought to tell the boy, I thought to say, I thought to say, I thought to recount, I thought to narrate.”27 The body of the story tells of River’s life, not of his performance in a picaresque about a white boy.
These works by Rhys and Keene, and my small contribution of “At the Lisbon Plate,” take linear mapping as a strategy—of unearthing, unlayering, and revealing. Using, perhaps, the same structure of storytelling—mirroring and correcting or mirroring to correct. My concern is if that is enough for decentring. What if one ignores entirely that which has been produced so far as it exists along a colonial schema? A schema that makes the narrative of empire addressable always, that leaves intact the history and method of colonial narrativizing, and presumes a unitary subject of narrative production?