The design that will later entail Sutpen’s Hundred begins with a geography lesson, or lack thereof. In a “one-room country school in a nest of Tidewater plantations”1 Thomas Sutpen’s teacher reads to the class from a book on Haiti and other Caribbean nations: “That was how I learned of the West Indies. Not where they were, though if I had known at the time that that knowledge would someday serve me, I would have learned that too. What I learned was that there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich, it didn’t matter how, so long as that man was clever and courageous.”2 Geography, or the “where they were” of points within and outside one’s own frame of reference, is obscured within the semiotic systems by which the Caribbean islands were represented to those inhabiting the industrialized metropolises and tidewater plantations of the United States. Haiti, as translated through the geographically impoverished narratives of Thomas Sutpen, becomes located not by latitudinal coordinates but by a colonialist cartography, symbolically mapped as a “spot of earth which might have been created and set aside by Heaven itself . . . as a theatre for violence and injustice and bloodshed and all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty, for the last despairing fury of all the pariah-interdict and all the doomed.”3
Ironically, the apocalyptic rhetoric used to define and locate Sutpen’s Haiti is not too dissimilar from popular ecological depictions of the US South throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By 1867 a malaria-ridden John Muir had already begun to cast “the border which sweeps from Maryland to Texas” within a diseased topography of fevers and plagues: “The world, we are told, was made especially for man–a presumption not supported by all the facts. . . . But when man betakes himself to sickly parts of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended for such deadly climates. No, he will rather accuse the first mother of the cause of the difficulty, though she may never have seen a fever district; or will consider it a providential chastisement for some self-invented form of sin.”4 If climates, ecologies, and theological renderings alone could usurp and reenvision the boundaries of the nation-state—and the Southern United States does share just as many ecogeographic traits with the Caribbean islands as with its Northern neighbors—both Haiti and Yoknapatawpha County might potentially be remapped together on one side of what Amy Kaplan refers to as the geopolitical “distinction between images of the ‘jungle’ and ‘wilderness,’” their ecologies and climates contained within a more expansive Global South.5
The jungle, as an incorporative concept of place, would speak not only to the shared ecological and geographic attributes of the Global South but to the common histories of exploitation, slavery, reconstruction, and military occupation that worked in part to define Haiti and Mississippi throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both the historical narrative within Absalom, Absalom! and the events contemporary with its publication were embedded in myriad historical specificities particular to and incorporative of each locale. The story of Sutpen’s Hundred, built and sustained by the labor acquired through a transatlantic voyage, and collapsing not long after the official conclusion to the Reconstruction of the southern United States, was simultaneously interpreted by an American readership immersed in news surrounding the 1915–1934 US occupation of Haiti, where certain technologies of antebellum plantation violence and military paternalism were exported from the US South and into presumably independent nations throughout the Caribbean.6 The Global South thus figures into Faulkner’s novel as a multilayered palimpsest where prerevolutionary Haitian sugarcane plantations, the antebellum South, military-based Reconstruction, and the twentieth-century occupation of Haiti are all condensed and conflated into a Judeo-Christian fable of the hemispheric jungle, its providential chastising, its exploitation, and its eventual collapse.
Yet to situate Yoknapatawpha County and Haiti within this homogenizing geography ignores the racially coded divides separating the wilderness from the jungle. Indeed, if such distinctions are to exist, they are determined by ideology and not ecology. The wilderness, as a signifying frontier of white masculinity, is often premised upon its contrasting binary, what Kaplan more specifically calls “the enervated ‘barbaric tropic’ marked by its unspoken connotations of blackness.”7 Race and its ideological constructs, as Thomas Sutpen learns on his voyages throughout both the Caribbean and the Southern United States, are far more determinative of Western cartography than any shared ecologies, histories, or geographic proximities.
Racial mapping, as a practice that supplants other modes of geographic organization, not only pertains to divides at the hemispheric level, but codes and contextualizes the more intimate geographies of nations, states, cities, towns, and even families. From genealogical geographies of racial miscegenation and antebellum lineage, to the de jure segregation of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow cities, to what Mary Renda refers to as “Woodrow Wilson’s wholly racialized vision of liberal internationalism”8 wherein diplomatic racism structured a nation’s, and an individual’s, potential for self-determination, race becomes the imperial mapmakers’ primary tool in exercising sovereignty. It is likewise an ontological exercise, as concerned with various peoples’ mappings of their place in space as it is with the cartographic construction of the subjects themselves.
Thomas Sutpen’s geography lesson then comes not from the abstract and obscured passages read in his one-room Tidewater schoolhouse, but through our own narrative recapitulations of the conflated routes by which he traveled. Geographic knowledge—to the slaveholder, the occupying marine, the imperial entrepreneur—is an active process of constant disassembly and remapping, wherein the Global South, its jungles, and its wildernesses are determined not by latitudinal degrees but through racist technologies of violence and the production of both sovereign subjects and life stripped bare, made base and expendable: what Giorgio Agamben refers to as homo sacer, and perhaps more appropriately, what Achille Mbembe calls the necropolitical subject, whose agency and voice, born as they are within the banality of everyday violent acts, must find alternate means and modalities for expression, outside and apart from the confines of social and civil death.9 It is this ontological path that I hope to chart as I, in my own right as a reader of Absalom, Absalom!, attempt to reconstruct and narrate the map of Faulkner’s Caribbean.
The story of Thomas Sutpen’s journey to acquire the slave labor necessary for his design is premised on the disavowal and abstraction of temporal movement through and between actual geographic coordinates within the Global South. As General Compson remembers, there was “no more detail and information about that than about how he got from the field, his overseeing, into the besieged house when the niggers rushed at him with their machetes, than how he got from the rotting cabin in Virginia to the fields he oversaw.”10 This strategic refusal to contextualize these distinct and specific places within a sequential travel narrative allows Sutpen’s listeners to imagine the “rotting cabin in Virginia” and the Caribbean “fields he oversaw” as both one and the same, providing the necessary overlaps that could arguably explain many of the tale’s inconsistencies and seeming impossibilities. Indeed, this conflation of both space and time opens the possibilities for not only a cartographic but a chronological recomposition of the Caribbean voyage. The absence overlaying the geographic particularities in Sutpen’s journey is matched, for instance, by a historical ambiguity that exposes certain contradicting discrepancies between Sutpen’s conveyed dates and the actual history of Haiti as an independent nation.
According to the timeline of the novel, Sutpen’s single-handed suppression of the plantation revolt occurred in or around 1824. This event, however, would have happened twenty years after the Revolution and subsequent declaration of Haiti as an independent nation. By 1824, the year of Sutpen’s profiteering in the West Indies, Haiti was under the leadership of President Jean Pierre Boyer, who had unified and asserted complete authority over the previously divided island. It was during this time that Boyer freed all remaining slaves in Santo Domingo. It was also in September of this same year that the American Colonization Society attempted to arrange for the transportation of 6,000 free African Americans from the United States to Haiti. By the early 1820s white ownership of any land in Haiti was both legally disallowed and culturally stigmatized.11 While Boyer’s presidency did institute the Code Rural, a law designed to tie formerly enslaved peasant laborers to plantation land by denying them certain rights of mobility, Sutpen’s account, which explicitly implies slave revolts and the transnational dealing of peoples as commodities, is, if not entirely inaccurate, at least suggestive of the possibility that these particular historical discrepancies might beg for a reading of Sutpen’s time in Haiti as an impossible journey.12
The obscurations and misrepresentations of geographic place and historical dates have often been interpreted via Faulkner’s interest in cyclical versus linear models of time, narrative, and history. The possibilities that cyclical history might disassemble and replace dominant Western teleology are embraced by many of Faulkner’s narrators who employ tactics of repetition as a means for unearthing deeper historical truths. As illustrated most vividly in a passage spoken by Quentin Compson, it becomes clear that the history of Absalom, Absalom! cannot be contained within a chronological trajectory of specific dates and locales but is transient and repetitive, a specter that continues to haunt contradictions left unresolved: “Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter.”13 Quentin’s tone, which shifts from an intricate allegorical articulation of historical understanding to near-abstract nihilism, opens up theoretical conversations concerning narrative time at the same moment that it forecloses possibilities for historical distinction and revolutionary agency. Indeed, repetition, like geographic abstraction, when treated as uninterruptible and unchanging, neglects the power of particularities to reveal historical injustice and alternative means for resistance and sociopolitical reimagining. Quentin’s unchanging sky, while aiding in a cross-historic, hemispheric critique of national narratives, ignores the fracturing power of events like the Haitian Revolution, as well as the very real diasporic movements of imperial investments and forced passages wherein both “poor men went in ships and became rich”14 and human beings from Africa were violently reshaped into transatlantic commodities.
This fluid state of retelling, that which presumes at its very center some unchanged primordial truth, or absence of truth, is subsequently bound to the contemporary perspectives of both its narrators and audiences. Constantly interpreted via the outward ripple in the pond, Thomas Sutpen’s voyage depends on both his storyteller’s and his story listener’s capacity for narrative reconstruction: “He went to the West Indies. That’s how he said it: not how he managed to find where the West Indies were nor where ships departed from to go there, nor how he got to where the ships were and got in one nor how he liked the sea nor about the hardships of a sailor’s life and it must have been hardship indeed for him, a boy of fourteen or fifteen who had never seen the ocean before, going to sea in 1823.”15 The journey, as a projected linear and temporal movement through abstract space, depends entirely on our ascertained historical imperatives and certainties, on our ability to discern what it must have been like. Faulkner’s history of the Global South and its relative geographies are thus part of a reconstruction project relying on the historical and geographic imaginations of Absalom, Absalom!’s many narrators, as well as the dominant readership base for the novel itself, readers who, like Faulkner, were immersed in their own contemporary narratives regarding Haiti and the United States.
Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! was first read by a US audience at the close of a full-scale military occupation that saw, by official US estimates, more than 3,000 Haitians killed—and, by a more thorough and recent historical accounting, over 6,000.16 Haiti, as a space for the exercising of violent paternalist discourse and US imperial sensibilities, served both as a stepping stone in what Barbara Ladd refers to as “new nationalism,” the shift from a “reunion of North and South after Reconstruction to the ideological rhetoric of Empire building,”17 and a romanticized backdrop by which these new “nationals” could picture themselves on a modern, imagined map of global circulations and imperial designs. As Mary Renda has documented in her detailed work on the culture of military imperialism in occupied Haiti:
The United States encouraged not only marines but others as well to see themselves as benefactors helping out a needy, if recalcitrant, child. . . . Popular narratives that sensationalized Haiti and positioned readers as voyeurs in an exotic land made that move all the more appealing. In this sense, sensational narratives reinforced official discourses and strengthened their ability to conscript ordinary citizens into the logic of empire. Together, popular and official discourses invited U.S. Americans to adopt an imperial perspective and fueled public fascination with Haiti as one means to that end.18
By the 1930s Haiti had become not only a site of military occupation but an exoticized travel destination that formed a crucial part of US Americans’ sense of the global exterior to their home empire. Best-selling texts like William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), John Vandercook’s Black Majesty (1928), Blair Nile’s Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa’s Eldest Daughter (1926), and Edna Taft’s A Puritan in Voodoo-Land (1938) provided pulp accounts of the authors’ voyages through a country contextualized by scenes of fetishized abjection and possibilities for new and contrasting definitions of white Northern subjectivity. The subjective agency that came with this new geographic imagination mapped Haiti not only as a “colony” within a wide-reaching US military presence but as a locatable point in the American middle-class formation of a modern, internationalist geography. Haiti, as portrayed by marines, journalists, and bourgeois travelers, was a space of both primordial perversity and capitalist possibility, where white American men and women could depict and embellish representations of the black Haitian Other as both a sexual grotesque and an irrational child in their paternalistic, global family structure.
This self-fashioning of white US identity via the ideological mapping of Haiti as “a theatre for violence”19 had its roots both in the contemporary anxieties of an early twentieth-century Jim Crow empire and in the former slaveholding society’s interpretation of postrevolutionary black nation-states. As Alfred N. Hunt notes, the varying means by which plantation owners distorted and manipulated postindependence Haiti to reaffirm their beliefs regarding distinctions between the races falsified and mythologized an entire century’s worth of national history and geopolitical understanding. Hunt claims that “Southerners looked to Haiti more than to the northern states to evaluate what freedom meant to blacks.”20 Indeed, Haiti was not simply a peripheral aberration in the racist narratives of antebellum slave society but a crucial focal point, hotly contested and debated for a symbolic value so significant, according to Hunt, that “the southern interpretation of the Haitian Revolution and the way it was used strongly suggest one of the reasons why it took a civil war to emancipate the slaves.”21
This interpretation of Haiti as a failed experiment in black liberation persisted throughout the US South and North well into the twentieth century, arguably forming both the ideological roots of the 1915–1934 occupation and, for US African Americans seeking to document and address the violence committed in both the supremacist domestic state and the transnational empire, a point of protest and critical reflection upon the colonialist roots of Woodrow Wilson’s so-called noninterventionist state. By the 1920s both US and internationalist newspapers like the Nation and L’Union Patriotique, as well as major African American organizations like the NAACP, called out actively in opposition to the occupation as a racialized US imperial war, recasting the official state narrative as a continuation of the Jeffersonian response to Haitian liberation. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s well-known authors, poets, and playwrights journeyed to Haiti both in political protest against US occupation and in search of ethnographic understandings and cultural connections. James Weldon Johnson’s “Self-Determining Haiti” (1920), Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), Langston Hughes’s “A People without Shoes: The Haitian Masses” (1934), and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) each voiced, albeit through varying degrees and tactics, a desire to place political concerns of the present in dialogue with a nineteenth-century history highlighting the Haitian Revolution as a nexus in postslavery diasporic struggles.
Central to both the state justifications for the violence committed throughout the US occupation and the subversions and protests against such imperial rhetoric was the construction of historical parallels that situated Haiti neither as an independently locatable nation-state nor as an indistinguishable point in the all-incorporative southern hemisphere but as an ideologically mapped zone of interpolation whose contours were drawn not by the Haitians themselves but by the sociocultural renderings of white and black Americans. Thomas Sutpen’s geography lesson is, of course, not exempt from this US project of remapping and rewriting the historical contexts for Haiti. The lesson, in this sense, is not an isolated or passive one, implanted upon the innocence of one young man through schoolteachers and transatlantic journeys, but a transgenerational praxis that Sutpen passes on to Faulkner’s readers via the racially inscribed remappings of an emergent American empire.
Absalom, Absalom!’s observational depictions of the Haitian landscape and the abstract and disorienting violence that leads up to the plantation revolts and leaves young Thomas Sutpen in a state of confused ambiguity, firing his rifle “at no enemy but at the Haitian night itself,”22 seem to allow readers to demap and reconstruct Haiti as an undefined Con-radian space of timeless American exploitation. This chaotic abstraction is premised on the presumed “innocence” of its educationally impoverished protagonist. Yet I would argue that the process of geographic and ecological abstraction is an intricately orchestrated one in which coordinates of both Haiti and the US South are aligned and simultaneously distinguished along carefully crafted socio-ontological lines.23 Indeed, even as the text acknowledges Sutpen’s inability to represent appropriately his cultural or ecological landscapes—the inability of Sutpen the overseer to truly and accurately “see”—he is all the while figuratively charting such landscapes as ecologically and geopolitically distinct from Jefferson, Mississippi24: “not knowing that what he rode upon was a volcano, hearing the air tremble and throb at night with the drums and the chanting and not knowing that it was the heart of the earth itself he heard, who believed . . . that earth was kind and gentle and that darkness was merely something you saw, or could not see in; overseeing what he oversaw and not knowing that he was overseeing it, making his daily expeditions from an armed citadel until the day itself came.”25 Sutpen’s absolution in “not knowing” presupposes that these observations, free from any knowledge or understanding that would otherwise infect them, might stand pure and unbiased. And yet the metaphorical language he uses—while there are volcanoes in Saba, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, and Grenada, there are none in Haiti or the Dominican Republic—situates the island within an abstract and generalized ecological geography additionally mapped by ethnically coded coordinates apart from US South. Expressed through certain cultural traits—“drums and chanting”—percussive music in Haiti is disengaged from its historical roots and circumscribed within “the heart of the earth itself,” an organic, primordial circumscription that privileges moral, theological renditions of the Haitian Revolution over its importance for modern politics and Western philosophy. Yet for Sutpen the plantation hand, the transnational entrepreneur, and the ersatz marine, seeing is not about accurate representations or understanding of the space and culture that one inhabits. Rather, seeing, like overseeing, is a matter of controlling the situation and the people themselves. It is of no import for Thomas Sutpen to acknowledge that there are no volcanoes on the island of Hispaniola, that there is a cultural code and historical context rooted in the percussive chants, that slavery was abolished twenty years prior to his arrival on the island. Sutpen’s responsibility lies not in understanding the ecologies or communities defining the space he exploits. Rather, he is responsible only for a violent maintenance and control over those conflated communities and spaces when the inherent conflicts make themselves most vividly present. Any contradictions that might arise will be remedied by the racially coded environment, their claims and testimonies removed from the political sphere and contained neatly within that imaginary volcano upon which he rode.
This simultaneous interplay of historical demapping and figurative remapping opens further possibilities for a mythologized portrait of Haiti, subject to white interpolation and the paternalist narrative of implicit US achievement. Just as the chronology and ecological depictions of Sutpen’s Haiti are irreconcilable to the actual nation-state, so too do Sutpen’s “super-human” feats inherently contradict the historical narrative of independence. In an almost biblical portrayal of white biological divinity, Thomas Sutpen’s suppression of the plantation uprising in the West Indies is, I would argue, a racially inscribed rewriting of the Haitian Revolution itself:
On the eighth night the water gave out and something had to be done so he put the musket down and went out and subdued them. . . . He just put the musket down and had someone unbar the door and then bar it behind him, and walked out into the darkness and subdued them, maybe by yelling louder, maybe by standing, bearing more than they believed any bones and flesh could or should (should, yes: that would be a terrible thing: to find flesh to stand more than flesh should be asked to stand); maybe at last they themselves turning in horror and fleeing from the white arms and legs shaped like theirs and from which blood could be made to spurt and flow as it could from theirs and containing an indomitable spirit which should have come from the same primary fire which theirs came from but which could not have, could not possibly have.26
Thomas Sutpen’s suppression of the plantation revolt comes not from military technologies, economic privileges, or accessibility to the necessary resources but from an “indomitable spirit” that is given material and historical grounding through the narrative recapitulation of otherwise unbelievable events. The notion that “on the eighth night the water gave out and something had to be done” sets up the premise for a retelling of the biblical Genesis wherein Thomas Sutpen, acting as the Israelite god, makes the Haitian world anew. The paternalist discourse driving the narrative, which Mary Renda suggests “should not be seen in opposition to violence, but rather as one among several cultural vehicles for it,”27 situates Haiti in a primordial history where white inheritance and black disability constitute the making not only of the social world but of an ontological one in which white subjectivity suppresses blackness for the sustenance and survival of its own excessiveness. Thomas Sutpen’s struggle, then, is not a historical one fought against Haitian nationals seeking to drive out foreign plantation owners but a violent forging of the Judeo-Christian narrative in the occupied Caribbean.
This biopolitical cartography, in which the excessiveness of civil society is premised upon the remapping of various “hearts of darkness,” calls back to an Enlightenment discourse regarding concepts of the human, where the Cartesian thinking subject was premised upon its asocial Other, the body of the slave. Sylvia Wynter refers to this ontological genealogy as the “coloniality of being,” wherein “the West’s new master code of rational/irrational nature was now to be mapped onto a projected Chain of Being of organic forms of life, organized about a line drawn between, on the one hand, divinely created-to-be-rational humans, and on the other, no less divinely created-to-be-irrational animals; that is, on what was still adaptively known through the classical discipline of ‘natural history’ as a still supernaturally determined and created ‘objective set of facts.’”28 As Wynter notes, Western subjectivity, as a conceptual category emerging within eighteenth-century Europe, was always already premised upon an ontological narrative that mythologized the various colonies upon whose goods and resources thinkers like Locke and Voltaire would come to rely. That the Haitian Revolution emerged less than a century after these conversations regarding political man, fundamental rights, and presumed states of nature, revealing the racist contradictions embedded in each, deems it, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, an “unthinkable history” for the West.29 As Trouillot, Susan Buck-Morrs, Joan (aka Colin) Dayan, and other scholars of nineteenth-century Haiti have noted, the fundamental fact of a successful slave rebellion and anticolonial revolution in Saint Domingue, the wealthiest colony in the Americas, belies the binary narratives of teleological European man and the ahistorical African that have served as the basis of Western philosophical thought from Hobbes to Hegel.30 Thomas Sutpen’s suppression of the plantation revolt and William Faulkner’s suppression of the first successful slave revolution in the New World can likewise be subsumed within a larger genealogy of silencing constituting the ideological dimensions for Haiti in 1804, 1824, 1936, and still continuing within our own historical and philosophical discourse today, with the belief that the tenets of liberal Enlightenment thought will be upheld and untainted so long as we forget to mention what was arguably the most important and necessary revolution of the nineteenth century.
By charting a path epistemologically aligned with the jungle-wilderness binaries of colonial cartography, in which particular parts of the globe are deemed inhabitable only by bodies void of reason and agency, Thomas Sutpen not only dismisses the Haitian Revolution but remaps it, or de-maps it, as a place outside and away from history. Standing as a no place of imperial exploitation, Haiti is not merely determined by the sovereign subjectivities of “civil society” but becomes one of the very foundations upon which they rest. It not only provided and continues to provide the material conditions necessary for the function of countries like the United States (from sugarcane to assembly shops) but stands as an ideological counterpoint to the overdetermined subjectivities present there. It is thus cognitively mapped by US Americans as any and all points resting outside and apart from their own perceived boundaries of sociopolitical community.
And yet, as Thomas Sutpen learns even prior to the inspirations for his journey and design, such ideological technologies of racial violence and ontological coding are not born from the late colonial project alone but have roots in the earlier, more intimate geographies of “civil society” itself. For it was not on his journey to Haiti but during his childhood movement from the mountains of West Virginia to the rural communities of the slave-holding South that young Thomas Sutpen learned of
a country all divided and fixed and neat with a people living on it all divided and fixed and neat because of what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own, and where a certain few men not only had the power of life and death and barter and sale over others, they had living human men to perform the endless repetitive personal offices such as pouring the very whiskey from the jug and putting the glass into his hand or pulling off his boots for him to go to bed that all men have had to do for themselves since time began and would have to do until they died and which no man ever has or ever will like to do but which no man that he knew had ever anymore thought of evading than he had thought of evading the effort of chewing and swallowing and breathing.31
Here we see most clearly mapped out the intimate contours of Western philosophy: the overdetermined Cartesian subject who cannot help but evade his own biology and all those others, those who must only chew, swallow, and breathe, and all the while serve as the very platform of (H)is being. A Global South, one that initiates conversations about hemispheric or national divides, often neglects these intimate geographies that run throughout both the greater Caribbean and the rivers and streams of Yoknapatawpha County, casting forth a topography that requires more complex and critical conversations about race prior to charting and outlining presumed geographic contours. Thomas Sutpen’s journey, in this case, is not a new lesson at all but a transatlantic recognition of the very near and close, racialized violence that he and his subsequent narrators have and will continue to negotiate throughout the Global and local South(s).
In his seminal work The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha defines the colonial fetish as that which “represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguously registers the perceived lack).”32 For Thomas Sutpen and all those who tell his tale, the young man’s journey embeds itself as a lesson wherein geography, that colonial fetish with its ability to dictate, define, and locate the coordinates of certain places, both veils the cartographic process as an unbiased means of observation and simultaneously reveals the hemispheric and intimate technologies of violence and racism inherent to its science. For Faulkner, the “umbilical water-cord”33 that universally connects histories and hemispheres through its cyclical narrative depictions is both a mask of historical rupture and an acknowledgement of the way in which Western science has used history and cartography to contain this rupture. Quentin Compson and Shrevlin McCannon, two Harvard roommates born in entirely separate parts of the continent distinguished by geographic contours, climates, and cultural attributes, are nonetheless “joined, connected after a fashion in a sort of geographical transubstantiation by that Continental Trough, that River which runs not only through the physical land of which it is the geologic umbilical, not only runs through the spiritual lives of the beings within its scope, but is very Environment itself which laughs at degrees of latitude and temperature.”34 Here the Mississippi River, Faulkner’s constantly appearing “umbilical water-cord,” sets the contours for an “Environment” that is capable of surpassing specific geographic trademarks and deterministic theories of climate and culture, evoking the possibility of a new map, where primordial contours of spiritual connectivity surpass and supplant the varying degrees of latitude and longitude.
Yet when the universalizing geography of the boys’ all-encompassing Eden is confronted with the specter of racial miscegenation, “Environment” quickly becomes the means by which these anxieties are contained, reassuring the boys that space is always produced by its sovereign subject35: “‘I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow.’”36 Responding to Southern fears of a miscegenation-apocalypse, the “Environment,” that “geological umbilical” which “laughs at degrees of latitude and temperature,” is simultaneously a source of containment for racial rupture and indeterminism wherein the colder climates can “bleach out” certain races “like the rabbits and the birds do.” Seemingly banal and disinterested discourses of geographic and ecological distinction are thus continuously employed in the maintenance of racial hegemonies, revealing the contradictions in the biopolitical project at the same time that they attempt to obscure and dismiss its violence.
What then can we learn from Thomas Sutpen’s geography lesson? Certainly not an objective, coordinated account of Haiti, its sociopolitical community, or its history. Indeed, not even a geographic or ecological representation that is mildly aligned with the nation’s actual landscapes or historical attributes. Rather, what we witness are the contours of a map defined by technologies of racially specified violence, developed in the antebellum US South and exported to a hemispheric South via the occupation and imperialist domination of formerly independent nations like Haiti. The latitudinal lines of this map are both global and intimate, carving spaces across entire islands in the Caribbean, rivers and fields in the Southern plantation states, and bathrooms and water fountains in the Jim Crow metropolis. It is a map that we continue to witness today, in the form of Third World zones of industry and free trade, as well as the racially coded prison-industrial complexes throughout cities of the Global North. Indeed as US popular response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti made clear—from the blatantly racist tirades of Pat Robertson to the perhaps equally racist paternalist rhetoric of a historically disengaged news media—“the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”37
I run the risk of some overt and perhaps even irresponsible present-ism here, but I cannot help, as a student of Faulkner’s works and as a reader of Absalom, Absalom!, wanting to engage in the same narrative retellings begun by General Compson, Jason, Quentin, and Shrevlin McCannon. Might I not also imagine Thomas Sutpen’s journey from some other time, some other place? Might I not recall him in December of 1929, standing alongside US marines in Les Cayes, Haiti, when ten unarmed farmers were gunned down while protesting against the occupation, bearing more than flesh should be asked to stand?38 Might I not recall him sitting in many a university history course today, where the Haitian Revolution is still abstracted and obscured, dismissed as an offshoot of the Enlightenment philosophies developed in France, Germany, England, and the United States—and all the while, albeit via new routes of global circulation and exchange, the Caribbean remains a place where poor men go in ships and become rich? I fear that whether we choose to recognize it or not, Thomas Sutpen’s journey is a story that continues to be retold in new contexts, by new narrators. The racially inscribed maps charting his route continue to surface, and the lessons learned will continue to haunt us all, so long as we fail to confront and challenge the contradictions left unresolved.
1. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 195.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 202.
4. John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), 136–41.
5. Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 3.
6. I am referring to the US occupation of Haiti by its officially designated dates. However, as embedded in both Hoover’s and Roosevelt’s disengagement agreements, the United States maintained direct authority over Haiti’s transnational economy until 1947. I hope the reader will not consider the 1934 withdrawal of marines from Haiti as a definitive endpoint to the occupation, but recognize, as Faulkner certainly did, that dates are tricky things.
7. Kaplan, 9.
8. Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 302.
9. For more on the theories of bio- and necropolitics, see Michel Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani, Arnold I. Davidson, Francois Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002); and Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. I cite Mbembe’s necropolitical subject as the more appropriate term here because, unlike Agamben’s homo sacer, which emerges from extreme historical forms within civil society (such as the European concentration camp), Mbembe’s subject exists in a space that is always already coded by extreme historical form (in parts of the world where concentrated violence has become the banal, daily reality).
10. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 201.
11. For more information on postrevolutionary Haitian history, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989); and Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
12. There are a number of insightful arguments regarding the conveyed dates of Sutpen’s Haitian voyage that I do not have the time or space to address in this particular essay. For more information on this topic see Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and John T. Matthews, “Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back,” American Literary History 16.2 (2004): 238–62.
13. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 210; emphasis removed.
14. Ibid., 195.
15. Ibid., 193.
16. For more information on the 1915–1940 US military occupation of Haiti and its reception both within the United States and in Haiti, see Renda.
17. Barbara Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 148.
18. Renda, 21.
19. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 202.
20. Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 132.
21. Ibid.
22. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 204.
23. I am elaborating on the work begun by Jeff Karem in his essay “Fear of a Black Atlantic? African Passages in Absalom, Absalom! and The Last Slaver,” in Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006, ed. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 162–73.
24. For more information on the ecologies constituting Faulkner’s “imagined” map of the Global South, see Matthews.
25. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 202–3.
26. Ibid., 205–6.
27. Renda, 15.
28. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 313.
29. Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 95.
30. See Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); and Joan (aka Colin) Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
31. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 179–80.
32. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 74–75.
33. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 210.
34. Ibid., 208.
35. The phrasing here intentionally signals toward the groundbreaking theoretical paradigms illustrated throughout Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).
36. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 302.
37. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, in William Faulkner: Novels 1942–1954, ed. Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner (New York: Library of America, 1994), 535.
38. For more information on this and other atrocities committed during the occupation, see Benjamin R. Beede, ed., The War of 1898 and U.S. Interventions, 1898–1934: An Encyclopedia (Oxford: Routledge, 1994).