A NOVEL IDEA:
GLOBAL HUMAN RIGHTS AND U.S. AMERICAN LITERATURE AFTER 1945
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE PROGRAM IN MODERN THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN
MODERN THOUGHT AND LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES
Nigel De Juan Hatton
June 2010
© 2010 by Nigel De Juan Hatton. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/fq773fq7007
ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Shelley Fishkin, Primary Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Michele Elam
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Andrea Nightingale
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.
iii An Abstract of the Dissertation
The fantasy of absolute justice has resulted in the marginalization of literature, the
arts and the voice of poets in the development of a productive human rights culture. The
separation is nowhere more apparent than in the United States marketplace of ideas
despite a rich American tradition of novels, novellas and stories related to human rights.
The increasing presence and development of global human rights culture,
humanitarianism and international human rights law has created unprecedented
protections and justice apparatuses for human beings and groups who previously had
neither the power nor the legal, social or political capital to defend themselves against
harm inflicted upon them by abusive governments, evil dictators or any factions
benefitting from the use of harm. Despite these global advancements, billions of human
beings remain vulnerable and some activists and scholars argue that the very cultures of
human rights designed to offer protections have only resulted in more problems and
increased exploitation. The Western origins of these discourses, they point out, lead to
principles, paradigms and practices that do not respect cultural diversity and difference.
This dissertation argues that literature that enables readers to re-imagine the
centrality of human beings to human rights culture can help bridge this divide; it suggests
that listening to the voices of imaginative writers alongside those with special
knowledge in legal, political and philosophical spheres can help mediate between these
competing views and help us to move beyond the impasse at which they leave us. While
scholarship has begun to acknowledge the poetic traditions of human rights outside of the
United States, mainly in post-colonial outposts, the literature from within is left out of the
project. Yet, a tradition within nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. American literature
iv comprising novels, novellas and short stories developed alongside and in light of the
global debates about human rights, and later, international humanitarian law, the United
Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). They were conceived,
imagined, staged, published, and consumed by readers in those same geographic,
discursive and theoretical spaces that gave birth to the legal, political and social rise of
cultures of human rights. In the post-1945 era, for example, writers like James Baldwin,
William Styron, Henrietta Buckmaster and Sarah Stone merged human rights and
literature to produce novels that both problematize the field and practice, and extend its
reach and relevance to forgotten quarters and populations. They anticipate those debates
human rights practitioners and scholars consider timely and imagine nuanced cultural
answers that benefit from the symbiotic relationship between the particular and the
universal in literature.
These novels, and the tradition they are part of reveal unique ways in which
human rights is dealt with as a subject in literature; demonstrate how the human rights of
literature differs from, relates to and/or interrogates political, social and legal notions of
rights; contrast the rights of human beings in literature with the rights of human beings in
the public sphere; differentiate the rights, recognition and dignity of minor characters in
literature from the subjectivity of disenfranchised citizens in the nation-state system;
provide literary critiques of the professionalization of human rights; add nuance to
philosophical concepts central the human rights narrative; explore gap between the
literary trial/tribunal and the law; and display the connectedness of ethics, aesthetics and
equality in fiction. We can still hope for Plato’s absolute justice, but we need to revoke
the banishment of the poets.
v Preface
I developed my philosophical sense and understanding of justice and beauty from my
grandmother. As a child, I would accompany her for walks across the property where we
lived in the rural Mechanicsville Community outside of Darlington, South Carolina. We
would pick up fallen pecans and collect them in a brown paper bag. The tranquility of
that place and our time together belied the reality of segregation and inequality
surrounding us in the southern United States. My grandparents raised twelve children,
many grandchildren and tens of children who seemed to just appear on the land my
grandfather acquired from his father, who acquired it from his father, an ex-slave, Elias,
who acquired it from his slavemaster. Income came from sporadic construction jobs for
my grandfather, cleaning jobs for my grandmother, and money sent home by the older
children (including my mother) who had moved on to jobs in the military and factories.
When I walked those grounds and collected pecans with my grandmother, one of the
main incomes for the tens of people living in our house was my aunt’s $47 per week
salary at an electronics plant. It was a wonderful, beautiful life, nightly falling asleep on a
twin bed next to a cousin, or maybe your aunt, or both, waking up the next morning with
another familiar face, perhaps your mother’s, by your side. It is in this place where I
learned phrases like, “have some,”—what you always say to someone when they
encounter you during a meal, literally pushing your plate into their face, “love all people
and pray to God,”—my grandmother’s greatest wish for us, “give them the shirt of your
back,” a saying I understand as rooted in reality and not just a metaphor. As my first
mentor, the poet Nikki Giovanni, famously wrote (or poeted), “though you’re poor it isn’t
poverty that
vi concerns you/ only that everybody is together and you and your sister have happy
birthdays and very good Christmases.”
Later in life, when education and work would take me to murder scenes,
executions, former war zones, and lead me to spend years battling and analyzing the roots
of racism, discrimination, and economic exploitation, I would always imagine a return to
that small community in Mechanicsville, those phrases, those mornings that began by
pushing my cousin’s forearm out of the way, putting on clothes that did not belong to me
solely, eating a meal off of shared plates, and then heading out of the door to go pick up
pecans. In imagining this time, I wanted to believe again that I was part of a humanity
that had learned from past evils and vowed never to let them happen again. Not quite
innocence, but solidarity and full belief in the importance of being human. The Rwandan
genocide shelved that fantasy as did the daily reports of human beings bringing harm to
other human beings just about everywhere in the world.
This dissertation is the latest attempt to return to that rural place of my youth—the
original scene of justice and beauty for me—by going to several places like it around the
world via literature, novels, novellas and short stories. The restoration of justice and
beauty to the world at a rate that exceeds that of the rate at which it departs requires a
return to the relationship between human beings and the art of storytelling. I want to
make clear how that basic idea, and boundless form, fits into the supposedly complex
architecture of human rights discourses, which some suggest require special knowledge
and expertise that is available to only certain human beings, lawyers, scholars,
humanitarians, journalists, politicians, etc. Storytellers and readers play a role, I say,
because they can recreate, imagine and confirm those scenes of justice and beauty that
vii are familiar to all of us, help us see what led to their destruction, and dare to think we can
get them back.
Acknowledgments
I am lucky to have family, friends and mentors who have supported my work over
the years. Without them, as my mother reminds me, I “might not be here.”
I am especially thankful to Shelly Fisher Fishkin, my brilliant and passionate
advisor, whose teachings, counsel and example have helped me to understand the
importance of rigorous scholarship. She has been unwavering in her support and
development of my intellectual life. Working with her has been an honor and a pleasure
that I give thanks for everyday.
Michele Elam has pushed me to remember the ascetic life, and I am thankful to
her for further developing my ability to interrogate and spend hours alone with the texts
and ideas that form the center of my intellectual interests. I am thankful to my ancestors
for leading me to her, and I am even more thankful that she agreed to work with me.
I wish I could have a lifetime pass to Andrea Nightingale’s classics seminar, one
of my most memorable and enlightening experiences at Stanford University. In addition
to opening new worlds of knowledge to me, she has taken great care to read my work and
develop my love for literature and philosophy.
Eamonn Callan is an amazing philosopher who has the ability to listen to my
ideas and then help me expand upon those ideas in remarkable ways. He helped me soar
to new intellectual heights. It bears repeating that, without him, “I would not be here.”
viii I would also like to give special thanks to Larry Bobo, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Harry
Elam, Hester Gelber, Nikki Giovanni, David Holloway, Laura Enriquez, Ted Glasser,
Josef Jařab, Marcyliena Morgan, Jesper Myrup, David Palumbo-Liu, José David
Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar, Karin Sanders, K. Brian Söderquist, Jane Stanley, and Ula
Taylor. You will always be my teachers and mentors, and I am grateful for everything
you have done to make life in the academy possible for me.
My cohort in the Modern Thought & Literature program included Jayson Sae-
Saue and Peter Samuels. I wish to acknowledge them for their friendship and intellectual
companionship. I express similar thanks to the entire MTL and Graduate Program in the
Humanities families.
Monica Moore (thank you, Monica!) and Jan Hafner are two of the most amazing
people I have ever met. When I think of them, Mahalia Jackson’s “How did I make it
over,” immediately comes to mind.
I also want to thank my parents, sisters, aunts and uncles, and friends. All of you
have made this life possible for me. I will be thanking you for all of my life.
ix
Contents
Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………….iv
Preface …………………………………………………………………………………...vi
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………..…viii
Introduction …………………..…………………………………………………...….….1
I. Nineteenth Century Literature and Human Rights.….…………………………...……..3 II. Human Rights Culture ………………………………………………….…………….16 III. ‘a justice system that can cross national boundaries’……….………………...……..17 IV. Twentieth Century Literature and Human Rights ……………………...………...…22
Chapter One: Restoring the Poets: ……………..……..……………………….……..28 I. Antigone: ‘for the dignity of human life’ …………………………………...……………..…29 II. Dante: Embracing the Damned in the Middle Ages ………………….………………32 III. Condorcet and the Tensions of Humanism and Enlightenment ………………….….47 IV. Voltaire’s Outrage ……………………………………………………….……….... 62
Chapter Two: Human Rights in the Novel After 1945: …………….…………….…66 Sarah Stone’s The True Source of the Nile
Chapter Three: Diverging 1948s: James Baldwin vs.…………………………..143 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Chapter Four: What’s in a Name? Humanization in…………………………...…..219 William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness
Conclusion ………………………………………………………..…………………243
References …………………………………………………………………………. 254
x
Politics are what verse should Not fly from, or it goes all wrong.
—William Empson
xi Introduction
The rise of international human rights discourse has always had literature as its enfant terrible, and the histories, formations and inter-relatedness of the two fields across at least three centuries, from the Enlightenments to the present, has resulted in a powerful collection of global stories and novels about vulnerable human beings striving for agency and recognition in republics and social spheres spectacularly adorned with documents, treaties, and heroic pronouncements of equality and freedom. I am writing about that relationship in transnational U.S. American literature from 1945 to the present, with extensive explanation about the literary and philosophical foundations that make such a focused study—human rights and American literature after 1945—possible and necessary. Why American literature from the United States? Because recent scholarly focus on human rights and literature has placed American literature from this period aside, preferring instead to deal with novels about the dramas and workings of human rights, humanitarianism and international humanitarian law in postcolonial outposts, places where heroes and elites steeped in the intellectual traditions and moralism of the western world go to rescue destitute human beings burdened by evil dictators and religious intolerance in the developing regions. In the familiar reversal, human beings who escaped those drastic conditions, formed themselves as if in their own
Bildungsromans, tell and publish their horrible stories in cosmopolitan capitals, leading to their own heroic status and celebrity flanked by self-congratulation among elites proud of their ability to listen and save lives. These fantasies are emerging despite a literary tradition that has understood the fictional story as an art form about linking human beings and the vulnerabilities they have in common (love, pain, emotion, joy, failure, success) rather than defining them against one another and their inequalities. In “Twentieth
Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” an essay that Ralph Ellison started in
1946 and completed in 1953, Ellison situates American fiction of the nineteenth century
in a context that those interested in global human rights and literature would be wise to
remember. Drawing upon Huck’s refusal to send Jim into slavery in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, Ellison writes, “Huck Finn has struggled with the problem posed by
the clash between property rights and human rights, between what the community
considered to be the proper attitude toward an escaped slave and his knowledge of Jim’s
humanity, gained through their adventures as fugitives together. He has made decision on
the side of humanity” (87).
Indeed, the United States presents a paradoxical case in Twain’s time and now: it
is the leading source behind the development of human rights as a theoretical frame, practice and profession, yet this distinction is joined by the fact that it has often violated the very rights and protections it asks other nations to adhere to and uphold, both historically and in the present. The International Criminal Court in The Hague is a case in point: American lawyers and jurisprudence are an integral part of how the court functions; to date, however, the United States has not ratified membership and the only people currently on trial hail from African nations: black and brown faces in a drama designed, administered, and argued by white elites and the black and brown designates they have appointed from the scenes of corruption. Scholars, eager to discuss the paradox on a political level, generally leave this paradox alone when it comes to the study of
American literature and human rights. This is neglect is regrettable, since American writers watching the preliminary stages of those systems of justice and morality that we
2 see influencing jurisprudence and humanitarianism abroad thoroughly examined,
satirized, and re-envisioned those systems in the pages of American prose fiction.
American literature hits too close to home and places a big dent in the aspirations of a
nation positioning itself as the progenitor of rights culture in law and global
humanitarianism. The description of the law in a Baldwin novel is all about dilapidation
and harm. Who would recommend such a system for appropriation globally? But hitting
close to home is one of the great values of scholarship and criticism and it is imperative
work if the culture of human rights is to ever be deemed universally valuable and
genuine, not just a western tool of neo-colonialism. It is important to understand critique as a positive act: “true novels, even when most pessimistic and bitter, arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core,”
Ellison writes. “Thus they would preserve as they destroy, affirm as they reject” (162).
There is a tradition of American writers who wanted to make the nation a more inclusive place, to bring erstwhile forgotten lives into the public sphere, to make forgotten human beings matter in a way that awaken? the conscience of readers and move them to consciousness if not action. I am interested in these writers.
Nineteenth Century Literature and Human Rights
What Ellison calls the humanity of nineteenth century writing is central to the humanity I analyze in the fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. According to
Ellison, “if humanism is man’s basic attitude toward a social order which he accepts, and individualism his basic attitude toward one he rejects, one might say that Twain, by allowing these two attitudes to argue dialectically in his work of art, was as highly moral an artist was a believer in democracy, and vice versa” (90).
3 The frontispiece to William Wells Brown’s Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter
(1853), a trans-Atlantic narrative in conversation with Rousseau, Voltaire and Paine, announces that it will place the “Declaration of American Independence” in dialectic relationship with “A Narrative of Slave Life.” The Jeffersonian character Henry Morton
“often made himself obnoxious to private circles
owing to the denunciatory manner in which he condemned the “peculiar
institution.” Being one evening at a party, and hearing one of the company talking
loudly of the glory and freedom of American institutions, he gave it as his opinion
that, unless slavery was speedily abolished, it would be the ruin of the Union. “It
is not our boast of freedom,” said he, “that will cause us to be respected abroad. It
is not our loud talk in favor of liberty that will cause us to be regarded as friends
of human freedom; but our acts will be scrutinized by the people of other
countries. We say much against European despotism; let us look to ourselves.
(151)
Henry Morton is alluding to the foundations of our culture of human rights. Documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776, and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, for example, are forebears of the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Proclamations derived from the multiple
Enlightenments of the eighteenth century (American, French, English, Scottish, etc.) show up in the vocabulary of the human rights revolutions taking place in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Literature—the creation of novelists, artists, memoirists, short story writers--has smirked at these developments. Writers have acknowledged the significance of what treaties and rights talk in the political sphere have done to provide
4 human beings with greater protections in a world once known for medieval barbarism and religious cruelty. At the same time, writers found ways to question universal abstract ideas about equality, freedom, justice and liberty when they felt those abstractions cast aside particular lives.
In Frederick Douglass’ novella The Heroic Slave (1853) a an officer aboard the slave ship Creole shows the limits of the Declaration and its universal application:
“I would have followed willingly and gladly in any honorable enterprise. Our
difference of color was the only ground for difference of action. It was not that his
principles were wrong in the abstract; for they are the principles of 1776. But I
could not bring myself to recognize their application to one whom I deemed my
inferior.” (66)
The principles Tom Grant has in mind belong to the declarations of the United States,
Virginia, and now, the global UDHR, yet when uttered, performed, explained, or applied to the life of a perceived other, the principles, for Grant, no longer apply. Douglass cast the criticism in a fictional tale based on an actual slave rebellion because the fictional story allowed him to change details necessary for evoking an empathy in readers based on equality of character, humanizing characters no matter their social status, and giving them space for authentic speech acts and human expression. In the real world, as the culture of human rights has shown, rallying hearts and minds to identify with the plight of an actual slave or oppressed human being has its limits; these limits can be challenged through fiction. The Declaration of Independence is a rights document and below I point to its direct lineage with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Douglass interrogates the earlier Declaration through a novella; writers after him similarly
5 interrogated rights ideas (not just documents) and revised them through fiction in order to
account for forgotten lives. If the Declaration shows how the principles were limited in
their application, The Heroic Slave points out who was cast aside and why the exclusion matters. The list below shows the evolution a central belief about human beings and rights from the Declaration of Independence to the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Brown and Douglass use fiction to show its beauty as well as its flaws, a practice common in American fiction across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
1. The Declaration of Independence We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
2. Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776 (June 12) 1. That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
3. Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.
4. The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (September 1791) Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.
5. Condorcet’s Plan for a Declaration of the Natural, Civil and Political Rights of Man (1792) Clause one The natural, civil and political rights of men are: liberty, equality, security, property, the social guarantee and the right to combat oppression.
6. The “Humphrey Draft” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights A Draft Outline of an International Bill of Human Rights (Prepared by the Division of Human Rights of the Secretariat) (date) Art. 1. Everyone owes a duty of loyalty to his State and to the [international society] United Nations. He must accept his just share of such common sacrifices as may contribute to the common good.
6
7. The “Cassin Draft”(date) All men, being members of the one family are free, possess equal dignity and rights, and shall regard each other as brothers.
8. The June 1947 Humans Rights Commission Draft Suggestions of the Drafting Committee for Articles of an International Declaration of Human Rights
Article 1 All men are brothers. Being endowed with reason and conscience, they are members of one family. They are free, and possess equal dignity and rights.
9. Geneva Draft (Date) Draft International Declaration of Human Rights Art. 1 All men are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed by nature with reason and conscience, and should act towards one another like brothers.
10. The Lake Success Draft (Date) Draft International Declaration of Human Rights All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed by nature with reason and conscience, and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
11. The Third Committee Draft (Date) [Text of the Third Committee] All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
12. The Third Committee Draft [Text of Subcommittee] (Date) All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
13. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (current) All human beings are born free and equal dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Glendon)
In order to contest or modify what they viewed as the limitations of documents, principles and proclamations, writers like Twain, Douglass and Brown relied on the
7 equality of fiction to imagine unions and solidarity that had become forbidden in the
social sphere. The master narrative of United States history is one of black and white
division; nineteenth century authors found ways to restore solidarity or at least display
the ills of its absence. After listening to an American slave recount the brutality he has
faced under slavery, Listwell, the humanitarian The Heroic Slave, “remained in motionless silence, meditating on the extraordinary revelations to which he had listened”
(12). He then says,
“From this hour I am an abolitionist. I have seen enough and heard enough, and I
shall go to my home in Ohio resolved to atone for my past indifference to this ill-
starred race, by making such exertions as I shall be able to do, or the speedy
emancipation of every slave in the land.” (13)
Listwell is not characterized as a hero in the novella nor does his interest in abolitionism come across as patronizing or condescending. Douglass relies on the equality of character in fiction to restore the common humanity of human beings that time and history had forced apart. Ellison says that in Twain’s novel Jim “is not simply a slave, he is a symbol of humanity.” Listwell does not look at Madison as merely a slave either. He is likewise
“a symbol of humanity.” The characters in Clotel, unequal before law, have a different type of equality in the novel.
Twain, Brown and Douglass are not alone in their use of fiction to create human rights stories. In the literature and human rights tradition of the nineteenth century, themes about equality, justice, personhood, humanitarianism, empathy-- the obligation between the self and others--arise in the stories, novellas and novels of Harriet Beecher
Stowe, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
8 Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, and Stephen Crane (and even those stories that appear in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman [Do you need a footnote here since we don’t think of any of these writers as writing ‘stories’?]). The nineteenth century contains narratives that directly impact the moral, ethical and aesthetic desires of writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially those interested in human rights. The emergence of the Bildungsroman in Europe and the novel as a forum for critiques of slavery, women’s inequality, and intolerance in the United States helps to substantiate the relationship between human rights and literature. Joseph Slaughter, in his book Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, suggests that “through the figure and formula of human personality development central to both the Bildungsroman and human rights, their shared assumptions and imbrications emerge to show clearly their historical, formal, and ideological interdependencies. They are mutually enabling fictions: each projects an image of the proper relations between the individual and society and the normative career of free and full human personality development” (4). Slaughter’s analysis, however, discounts the centrality of American fiction. It is well documented that women’s suffrage, labor organizing and abolitionist movements of the nineteenth-century paved the way for the present-day human rights movement (Sikkink and Smith). I suggest a similar genesis in our understanding of human rights and literature I point to one more example as exemplary of the nineteenth century tradition in human rights and American literature that I argue carried over to the twentieth.
9 Stephen Crane’s electric novella, The Monster, appears in 1898, a pivotal year in
the rise of American Empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The servant Henry Johnson
imbues himself with his own dignity via dress and posture in a small town where the
people view him as nothing more than a “coon.” As he had done in earlier works like
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Crane makes
the equality of character in fiction one of his central concerns and devices. A fire
challenges the town’s toleration of people of color and human beings deemed as others.
Henry Johnson risks his own life and runs into the throes of a raging fire in order to save
young Jimmy. The fire literarily effaces Johnson and the town struggles with how to
prioritize the human being-ness of a human being already marked and de-merited because of his race. The loss of his face further complicates a racial drama, as town members black and white struggle with how to respond to Henry Johnson, hero, coon, faceless human being, former dignitary among the black community, loyal servant, dandy. As
Jonathan Tadashi Naito argues, “Henry Johnson’s status as a person rather than a thing is at best provisional; and it is this as much as the injuries that he sustains that enables the residents of Whilomville to treat him as an experimental subject” (55). The town, before
Johnson’s heroic act, “had not known enough to give him a hand and a lift” and “they judged themselves stupid and ungenerous for this failure” (356). Among the exceptions is
Johnson’s employer and Martha Goodwin, “a woman of great mind” who “had adamantine opinions upon the situation in Armenia, the condition of women in China,” and “the duty of the United States toward the Cuban insurgents, and many other colossal matters “ (367). Crane provides details about her interest in international affairs through a scene in which Goodwin’s sister Kate enters after “she had drifted down from the novel
10 in her room” (368). Kate is upstairs reading and downstairs Martha Goodwin laments the
problems of the world. In her outrage Martha Goodwin “contended that all the Turks
should be pushed into the sea and drowned” (367). Writing in 1898, Crane’s character
anticipates the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the first of the twentieth century. Similarly,
she is against the town’s treatment of Henry Johnson, and expresses her dismay in both
local and global contexts. In other words, she finds the Turkish treatment of Armenians,
and the fate of women in China, to be equally as horrible as her small town’s treatment of
Henry Johnson. Crane stresses the transnational and importance of thinking about the foreign and domestic in relation to one another:
The situation was without definitions. Martha made definitions, but she devoted
them entirely to the Armenians and Griscom and the Chinese and other subjects.
Her dreams, which in early days had been of love of meadows and the shade of
trees, of the face of a man, were now involved otherwise, and they were
companioned in the kitchen curiously, Cuba, the hot-water kettle, Armenia, the
washing of the dishes, and the whole thing being jumbled. (368)
Her sister Kate cannot understand her defiance, particularly because the defiance of a
woman in 1898 has consequences that link directly to her status within society. Speaking
out can only lead to problems and further ostracizing. Crane’s narrative demonstrates the
corruptibility of crowds and Martha Goodwin dares to resist public opinion. When Kate
tells her sister she can’t possibly go against public opinion, Martha, described by Crane
as an “unknown woman,” indicts group thinking:
“Oh, I don’t care what everybody says,” said Martha.
11 “Well, you can’t go against the whole town,” answered Carrie, in sudden sharp
defiance.
“No, Martha, you can’t go against the whole town,” piped Kate, following her
leader rapidly.
“The whole town,” cried Martha. “I’d like to know what you call ‘the whole
town.’ Do you call these silly people who are scared of Henry Johnson ‘the whole
town’?”
“Why, Martha,” said Carrie, in a reasoning tone, “you talk as if you wouldn’t be
scared of him!”
“No more would I,” retorted Martha. (373)
The cry of “everybody” repeats, and Kate and Carrie clarify the pronoun to include not
“only women” but “men too.” Martha continues to resist, and I believe her resistance, her internationalism, her interest in human rights issues foreign and domestic, are tropes within American fiction.
I show these dialectical processes in American fiction, whereby American writers witness the good and bad of their nation’s policies, foreign and domestic, and then take to fiction to express through art what they cannot get across in the social and political sphere. They borrow from centuries past to cast and re-cast a human rights culture that dares to value all human beings. The result is a tradition in American literature that links with the global rather than makes the global possible. Readers are asked not to identify with a character because she lives in a miserable place and we want her to have safety like ours; rather, readers are led to identify genuinely and emotionally, to say, these crimes taking place across the globe are a threat to humanity everywhere. The woman I
12 am reading about is human like me and for that reason I must remain vigilant and aware of the ways in which my society and hers require change. Jim and Huck are alike in their humanity, equally important in the text despite the material of history that changes their status when we close the book. Listwell and Madison have obligations to one another based solely on their common humanity. Literature, in myriad ways, is trying to show this. Ellison calls his work and profession “art” even if it sounds like he is describing a battle against injustice: “I wasn’t, and am not, primarily concerned with injustice, but with art,” he says (211).
Overview of Chapters
Chapter 1 of my dissertation is concerned with the foundations of literature and human rights, from the classical period until the present. I show early instances of art and justice in relationship with one another, and address criticism of the relationship. As great attention has been paid to the connection between the Enlightenment and modern and contemporary human rights discourses, I return to this period to argue for ways in which we might better construct its significance so that it includes reference to more human lives and not just those in parts of the United States and Western Europe. Without a resituating of the Western intellectual tradition, my dissertation will succumb to the totalizing ideas that it argues twentieth-century American writers have attempted to displace. At the same time, “resituating” does not make the mistake of discounting a tradition that is integral to ideas about justice, freedom and equality.
Chapter 2 examines texts that literally employ the discourse of human rights, meaning they are either set in the United Nations, like Henrietta Buckmaster’s The Lion in the Stone, or contain the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights within
13 chapters, like Sarah Stone’s The True Source of the Nile. These novels also involve narrative threads about human rights organizations and NGOs. The texts are neither propagandistic nor didactic; rather, they animate the discourse of human rights using the elements of fiction and relying on the literary tradition of human rights as one of literature’s primary theme. The U.N. Charter and the UDHR are two of the more important human rights documents yet few people have read them. Stone’s and
Buckmaster’s novels bring the documents to life and raise questions about their viability for a readership beyond legal scholars, activists and jurists. The chapter ends with a critique of the only novel ever to be published by the United Nations, a gesture affirming the human rights possibilities of the genre, on the one hand, and demonstrating, on the other hand, the problems that arise when an agency that deals with human rights on a political and nation-state level employs a cultural form as an initiative or task. Then-
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan made a pointed remark about his intentions
for the novel: the “story may upset and even alarm you,” he writes in the foreword. “But
this is as it should be. It is right to be shocked when brutal things happen to innocent
people. We must use our sense of outrage to stop them happening” (Foreword).
Chapter 3 looks at the literary production of James Baldwin, a writer who fled the
United States just as the discourse of human rights began its ascent in 1948. Baldwin’s
fiction challenges the liberalizing discourse of human rights from its inception. In the
late 1960s, he famously rejected an invitation to join Jean-Paul Sartre on an international tribunal in Copenhagen to bring war crimes charges against the United States for its activities in southeast Asia. If we want to have a trial about international justice and human rights, he reasoned, let’s have it in Harlem so as to make it impossible to “escape
14 the sinister implications of the moral dilemma in which the facts of Western history have
placed the Western world.” The impoverished conditions and disenfranchisement of
Harlem, for Baldwin—who aimed to “destroy the rhetoric which operates in effect to
obscure your humanity and mine”—would prevent elitist moralizing that elided the
complexity and universality of oppression.1 Baldwin’s international court in Harlem has
yet to materialize, but the setting of Harlem in his fiction should be read as his attempt to
construct the tribunal and the parameters of international justice and human rights on his
own. I approach these issues by analyzing his short story “Sonny’s Blues” and novel
Giovanni’s Room.
Chapter 4 focuses on the significance of the minor character in fiction. Alex
Woloch has shown how the minor character is integral to the understanding of the
protagonist of any work of art, and attempting to discuss the latter without the former
leads to incomplete analyses and literary misunderstandings. The major/minor metaphor
can be applied to the discourse of human rights, as some human beings around the world
find their experiences, challenges and concerns deemed less important than those who
live in those nations that drive the culture of human rights. Fiction challenges this
inequality, as I demonstrate through a comparative analysis of William Styron’s first
novel, Lie Down in Darkness, a southern ode and challenge to two of Styron’s literary
ancestors, William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.
Having argued for a more accurate understanding of the relationship between
human rights and the literary tradition, and human rights and American literature, I
conclude my dissertation with a turn to the contemporary global. I return to those texts
1 James Baldwin, Interview by Elsa Knight Thompson and Fred Leonard. Pacifica Radio. KPFA. Berkeley, Calif. 7 May 1963. Radio.
15 regularly understood as “human rights narratives”—novels about the Rwandan genocide, for example—in the global sphere or in postcolonial studies and attempt to describe and unpack their intertextuality with American texts. What emerges, I suggest, is a better understanding of human rights and literature, and how the genre can participate in discussions currently reserved for the political, social and legal sphere. Indeed, politicians, jurists and social scientists remain important for helping us understand the needs of human beings and how to protect human beings in a world that continues to be marked by violence, inequality and betrayal. But the answers do not remain solely in those realms. Literature has always asked these questions of itself and the societies it imitates.
Human Rights Culture
In 2008 the United Nations commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The most translated text in the world—the
UDHR is available in more than 350 languages including some spoken by as few as 50 people—it is certainly not the most widely read. While the drafters of the UDHR wanted
the document to “provide basic rights to individuals in every part of the world” and
inspire countries to incorporate the goals of “freedom, justice and peace” into their
constitutions, they didn’t have any means of enforcing those rights or motivating people
to make them a reality. Even they recognized that in every country specific cultural
traditions and mores would need to coalesce around the recognition of the value of these
rights, they were still faced with an overwhelming challenge: how do you motivate
people to recognize the importance of extending basic human rights to everyone in their
society, particularly those people for whom such rights were most tenuous or precarious?
16 The extension of “basic human rights” to the marginalized, vilified, reviled and forgotten victims of human rights abuses around the world requires that those whose rights are honored in the breach be recognized, first of all, as “human” — a category in which they belong biologically, of course, but on which they were often excluded from morally.
According to Hannah Arendt, “the conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human”
(297). Richard Rorty puts it this way: some “people are morally offended by the suggestion that they should treat someone who is not kin as if he were a brother, or a nigger as if he were white, or a queer as if he were normal, or an infidel as if she were a believer. They are offended by the suggestion that they treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human” (“Human Rights, Rationality and
Sentimentality” 75). Then there is the issue of sovereignty: “the very first act of the new global police usurping the right to punish sovereign states for their wrongdoings already signals its end, its own undermining, since it immediately becomes clear that this
‘universality of human rights’ as its legitimization is false, i.e., that the attacks on selective targets protect particular interests” (Žižek 265).
‘A justice system that can cross national boundaries’
The international community and promoters of international humanitarian law posit trials as a valuable institution for the prosecution and deterrence of human rights abuses, but trials have not been as effective as imagined and the scope, benefits and limitations of their power should be reassessed in relation to a broader range of human rights cultural forms and practices. The United Nations Security Council established The
17 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 in order to prosecute the perpetrators and architects of violations of international humanitarian law that took place during conflicts in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina beginning in 1991. In 1994, the Security Council created the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to punish criminals responsible for the Rwandan genocide, a period of 100 days that resulted in the death of one-tenth of Rwanda’s population and at least 500,000 rapes. The two international tribunals have led to the detainment, arrest, trials, and sentencing of more than 100 individuals in connection with atrocious crimes committed in the 1990s. They have also inspired the creation of more international courts: international tribunals or special courts also exist to sort out justice in the aftermath of conflicts in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Lebanon, and East Timor. The permanent International Criminal Court, created by ratification of the Rome Statute in
2002, is currently trying Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga for crimes committed during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other international courts include the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.
Before these courts, “there simply was no international law to protect individuals from the cruelties of their own government, and whatever atrocities states carried out within their own borders were treated as purely domestic matters, beyond the purview of the international community” (Gibney 49). According to Michael Ignatieff,
This is the enforcement revolution in human rights. The International Tribunal at
Arusha secured the first convictions under the Genocide Convention since its
promulgation in 1948. The prosecutors at The Hague have secured the first
international convictions for war crimes since Nuremberg. The tribunal has done
18 much to break the cycle of impunity in Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Kosovo. Each
arrest of a suspect and each conviction by a tribunal help to substantiate the reality
of a universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity. (12)
Despite the promise they hold, international tribunals have been criticized for lacking
credibility and jurisdiction, slow processing and denial of individual liberties. Mark
Gibney argues that “practically all states have shown virtually no interest in pursuing and
prosecuting those who have committed human rights abuses” (49). Michael Ignatieff
believes that United States exceptionalism affects the power of international courts.
While the United States supports international prosecution abroad, it does not allow
prosecution of its own citizens in international tribunals. Serbian paramilitary leader
Zeljko Raznatovic said, “I will go to a war crimes tribunal when Americans are tried for
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama (8)!”2 Other critics have labeled the
courts as vehicles of victor’s justice or nothing more than alleviators of Western guilt.
Accordingly, many have scoffed at the notion of a court that is markedly inspired by
ideals of democracy and Western thought, and run according to American and British
rules.3 Another criticism of the courts has been the slow administration of justice. In its
2001 report titled “The Rwanda Tribunal: Justice Delayed,” the International Crisis
Group (ICG), a Brussels-based global NGO, expressed little faith in the ICTR’s ability to
meet its United Nations mandate to bring justice in the region. Yet legal scholars and
human rights activists believe trials remain the best remedy for addressing crimes against
humanity:
2 Quoted in Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance 3 Bass’ introductory chapter to Stay the Hand of Vengeance complicates the notion of victor’s justice and shows the influence of American and British court systems on international trials. Before concluding the term “uninformative” (16) Bass discusses the term as it relates to winners and losers in war. Later, Bass asserts that in Nuremberg the Nazis faced “full-blown Western legalism as it had developed in its domestic context” (25).
19 No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system.
Or for a society at peace. And I suspect it will be a long time indeed before three
Africans in black robes sit in judgment of the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld for their endorsement of torture, or Vladimir Putin for his war in
Chechnya, or Chinese officials for their actions in Tibet. But if we are serious
about the idea that basic human rights belong to all people on Earth, no matter
where they live—a principle enshrined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of
Human Rights—then a justice system that can cross national boundaries is
essential. And it is not a pipe dream: the European Court of Human Rights, to
which citizens of member countries can appeal over the heads of their own
governments, marks its 50th anniversary this year. (Hochschild)
Even when the limitations of trials are acknowledged, some scholars argue that trials have value as a “congenial public opportunity for collective mourning of the victims of administrative massacre” (Osiel 67) and provide “a ritual that is helpful for family members and a sympathetic public in coming to terms with melancholia in even the most traumatic cases (67).” Drawing upon literary, performance, narrative and cultural theory, and the Eichmann, Nuremberg, Buenos Aires, and other international trials, Mark Osiel argues that justification of “procedural revisions necessary to enhance a trial’s impact on collective memory [...] rests simply on their capacity to make for telling a better story about where the country should be heading” (66). Cornel West makes a similar argument about legal practices in the United States:
Progressive lawyers can be politically engaged narrators who tell analytically
illuminating stories about how the law has impeded or impelled struggles for
20 justice and freedom. Like rap artists of the best sort, progressive lawyers can
reach out to a demoralized citizenry, to energize them with insights about the
historical origins and present causes of social misery in light of visions, analyses
and practices to change the world. (242)
Unconvinced of the power of the trial as trial—an autonomous judicial apparatus—Osiel and West argue for the need for an Aristotelian story, complete with a
“plot, providing an intelligible beginning, middle, and end, located within a meaningfully delimited spatial context, a given community” (Osiel 71). For Osiel, if “the law is to influence collective memory, it must tell stories that are engaging and compelling, stories that linger in the mind because they are responsive to the public’s central concerns” (80).
Legalism, defined by Shklar as “the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules” (1) is in direct conflict with Osiel’s and West’s narrative claims.
Courts have narrow intentions, guided by structure, that often do not fit with the desire of the public. But lawyers telling stories to address the needs of a nation or cultural groups might compromise the rights of individual defendants. Additionally, as Arendt argues, storytelling and show trials like those posited by Osiel cannot match “the weight of hair- raising atrocities” (9). The tension is between “criminal judgment and historical representation,” legalism and storytelling. While manipulation of the law and trials through story appears to be unethical, Osiel argues that trials already “distort such public understanding either by excessive narrowness (‘legalistic’ blinders) or by excessive breadth (straying beyond their professional competence)” (80). In other words, courts have never employed the legal objectivism they claim to uphold. Officers of the court
21 have always been aware of the “dramaturgical demands of monumental didactics” and
“sought to influence judicial conclusions toward this end” (293-4).
Trials play an important but limited role in justice, reconciliation, and helping
communities cope in the aftermath of tragedy. While morality plays and lawyers as
storytellers in court and trial settings pose threats to the effectiveness of the law, this does
not discount the importance of narrative and storytelling in the larger realm of human
rights redress. Lawyers should not espouse to tell stories; rather, they should be cognizant
of the importance of storytellers within a community—novelists, filmmakers, memoirists,
artists, etc.—whose work can complement the trial process. Storytelling and the law are
indeed distinct modes for bringing about reconciliation in a community, but that
distinctiveness should not be understood as the privileging of one over other. Fiction
should be kept out of the human rights courtroom, but fiction should not be removed
from human rights culture and strategies for redress and reconciliation.
Twentieth Century Literature and Human Rights
While trials can facilitate the prosecution and sentencing of criminals, they cannot
produce imaginative stories that help conflict-ravaged communities reconcile in the
social, cultural and political realm. The novel has shown this tendency in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, but novels, formulated in the elusive and indeterminate world
of aesthetics, have not traditionally been understood as substantive human rights tools.
The omission of literature is starting to change. Increased attention is being paid to
human rights and literature,4 a field that some define as consisting of “human rights
4 This scholarship includes but is not limited to Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava. “And Justice for All? The Claims of Human Rights. Special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004); David Atwell and Barabra Harlow. “Introduction: South African Fiction After Apartheid.” Modern Fiction Studies. 46.1 (2000), 1-9; John Lewis Gaddis,
22 stories” that “have begun to coalesce as a self-contained set of texts sharing key formal
properties, an emerging global subgenre” (Dawes 190). Scholars like James Dawes,
Joseph Slaughter and Lynn Hunt have published recent manuscripts on the topic, edited
special scholarly journals dedicated to the subject, keynoted and sponsored conferences,
and developed human rights and literature teaching curriculum. J.M. Coetzee, writing on
post-apartheid relations in South Africa, Michael Ondaatje, detailing the work of NGOs
in Sri Lanka, and Dave Eggers, assuming the narrative voice of a Sudanese refugee, are
seen as exemplars of this type of fiction and both the organizers of literary prizes and
academia have recognized the human rights themes in their novels. In 2005, the Modern
Language Association of America hosted a Human Rights and the Humanities
conference, chaired by Judith Butler and Domna C. Stanton, that brought together literary
scholars and professionals in the field of human rights, and led to a special edition of
PMLA5 featuring articles related to human rights and literature. In a 2009 special edition
of Comparative Literary Studies, “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms; or,
The Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,” editors Joseph Slaughter and Sophia
“History, Theory, and Common Ground.” International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1997), 75-85; Barbara Harlow, After Lifes: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing, and Resistance Literature (New York: Verso, 1996). Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997; Maslan, “The Antihuman: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2004); Bruce Robbins, “Temporizing: Time and Politics in the Humanities and Human Rights,” boundary 2, 32:1 (Spring 2005), 191-208; Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress; Robbins, “Sad Stories in the International: Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on Culture and Human Rights.” Public Culture 1997, 9: 209-232; Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” In On Human Rights: The 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lectures, eds. Susan Hurley and Stephen Shute (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 111-134; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge, 1989); Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford UP, 2007); Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave, 2003). 5 Domna C. Stanton, Jacqueline Bhabha, Omar Barghouti, Samera Esmeir, Pheng Cheah, Eduardo Cadava, Margaret R. Higonnet, Kay Schaffer, Sidonie Smith, Alisa Solomon, Meena Alexander, Thomas Keenan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lila Abu-Lughod, Leti Volpp, Bruce Robbins, Michel Feher, Iain Levine, Judith Butler. “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics.” Conference Papers. PMLA, 121.5, (October 2006): 1515–1661.
23 A. McClennen survey the field and call for collaboration while emphasizing that there are
limitations that cannot be overcome:
While we understand that law alone is generally inadequate in the face of human
rights abuses, humanities scholars and teachers cannot afford to discount or
disregard the legal condition of human rights, just as political scientists, legal
scholars and practitioners would do well to recognize that human rights are a
cultural discourse as much as they are a set of legal standards. (Slaughter and
McLennen 6)
Acknowledgment of the presence of human rights talk in global fiction has led to productive analyses, particularly of the ways in which literature archives, promotes, revises, interrogates and calls into question social, legal and political notions of human rights principles. But it is important to remember that at least from the time of Greek epic poetry and, later, Greek tragedy—The Iliad and The Odyssey, and Antigone are oft-
cited examples and the art of storytelling have had some kind of relationship and contemporary assertions that there is an “emerging” new synchronicity between the two deny centuries of interplay, continuity and contingency—what is easily identifiable as a tradition (the kind espoused by Eliot or Auerbach). J. Peter Euben characterizes the classical version of the relationship as “the continuities between Greek tragedy and classical political theory” (The Tragedy of Political Theory 45), and modern instances of
that relationship became readily apparent during the revolution in scientific and philosophical thought known as the Enlightenment. I argue for a greater acknowledgement of that tradition in our understanding of human rights and contemporary literature; I also argue for the importance of as critical analysis
24 frameworks that recognize the inter-textuality, equality and value of human rights
narratives from across the world, whether the texts of writers working amid the presence
of publishing houses, academies and literary establishments that promote book culture or
writers working in less ideal conditions—places hindered by censorship and cultural
exclusion. (It is interesting to note, for example, that Robert Bernstein, head of Random
House for 25 of its most influential years, is also the founder of Human Rights Watch, the
world’s leading human rights organization; Bernstein has published authors from within
and outside of the United States—William Styron, Toni Morrison, Václav Havel, for
example—whose work can be categorized as including human rights themes.)
Fiction after 1945 has been situated in myriad ways—modernist, naturalist,
ethnic, Marxist, feminist, political, existentialist, postmodern, postcolonial—but none of
these modes has centered on fiction in relation to the rise of human rights, a political
discourse that has since become the lingua franca of cultural capitals in the United States
and western Europe. Mining this period of literature for its human rights content can add
to the discussion of what scholars mean by human rights and literature or human rights
and the humanities, and provide refreshing and expansive ideas about how writers play a
role in the culture of human rights. I mean what David Kennedy has called, in his essay
“The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?,” 6 the
“professionalization of human rights,” which offers
a mechanism for people to think they are working “on behalf of “ less fortunate
others, while externalizing the possible costs of their decisions and actions. The
6 David Kennedy, The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?, 15 Harv. Hum. Rights J. 101 (2002): 101-125.
25 representational dimension of human rights work—speaking “for” others—puts
the “victims” both on screen and off. The production of authentic victims, or
victim authenticity, is an inherently voyeuristic or pornographic practice that, no
matter how carefully or sensitively it is done, transforms the position of the
“victim” in his or her society and produces a language of victimization for him or
her to speak on the international stage. The injured-one-who-is-not-yet-a-victim,
the “subaltern” if you like, can neither speak nor be spoken for, but recedes
instead before the interpretive and representational practices of the movement.
The remove between human rights professionals and the people they purport to
represent can reinforce a global divide of wealth, mobility, information and access
to audience. Human rights professionals consequently struggle, ultimately in vain,
against a tide of bad faith, orientalism and self-serving sentimentalism. (121)
Narrative alone does not provide answers to the “professionalization of human rights” and its problems; rather, I believe that novels and novelists have posed different questions, brought erstwhile unheard perspectives and voices to the fore—strategies that lead to better answers in the drive for universal agreement on human rights standards. A woman in New Orleans and a man in Rwanda have rights in common, but articulating those common rights poses a problem that, as I suggest, narrative and storytelling, can help to solve better than doctrine alone. Literature should be taken as seriously as the fields of law, the social sciences, philosophy, and religious studies as a mechanism or source for addressing current human rights curriculum development, and policy and decision-making. According to Helen Stacy,
26 Some analysts point out that the human rights offered in international treaties that
are grounded upon European philosophical and political writings reflect the
individualism of Western legal and political thought and make little sense in
cultures that do not share these intellectual roots. Still others criticize the concepts
of international law as so inextricably entwined with Europe’s harmful history of
colonialism that the rights anchored in modern constitutions may simply repeat
the sins of the past. U.S.-based African scholar Makau Mutua makes this
argument sharply when he analogizes the human rights movement to earlier
religious crusades, suggesting “the globalization of human rights fits a historical
pattern in which all high morality comes from the West as a civilizing agent
against lower forms of civilization in the rest of the world.” (4-5)
I read western philosophy differently, and in the section that follows I establish the foundation of ideas on which my analysis of twentieth century fiction relies; I also make the case for why we must understand literature and philosophy as “neighbors” in important discussions about justice, subjectivity and obligation. The current trend is to think of literature as secondary, a heuristic for the sake of philosophical discussion. For example, Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes, in their Philosophy of Literature:
Contemporary and Classic Readings suggest that “students of philosophy need not care deeply about literature in order to find something of interest in the philosophy of literature” (xii) as the focus is more about “how can literature be philosophical or philosophy literary?” I think literature and philosophy, their relationship to one another, is far more serious and does require deep care.
27 CHAPTER 1 Restoring the Poets: Literature and Philosophy
Plato considered some aspects of poetry to be a threat to absolute justice. As Socrates famously says in The Republic,
Because, we shall say, I imagine, that writers of poetry and prose both make very
serious errors about mankind. They say that lots of people are unjust but happy, or
just but miserable, and that injustice pays if you can get away with it, whereas
justice is what is good for someone else, not damaging to yourself. We shall stop
them from saying things like this, and tell them to say just the opposite in their
poems and stories. (Book III, 392b)
Plato banishes poets from his ideal republic, prompting a debate about art and politics that has remains with us in the present. Plato’s ban has played an important part in the separation of ethics and aesthetics, and from where we derive ideas about justice, liberty, and freedom. American writers have made these ideas and concepts central components of their creative work and the novels, novellas and stories they produce, rather than presenting a threat to justice, pose scenarios for the restoration of justice. In this chapter, I draw upon Sophocles, Dante, Condorcet and Voltaire, to show ways in which the western intellectual tradition serves as a marketplace of ideas from which writers draw in order to make literary claims on behalf of humanity. Where the ambiguity of political discourse leaves behind, the ambiguity of literature includes. In reading justice in the lines of
Sophocle’s tragedy, Dante’s poetry, Condorcet’s Enlightenment thinking, and Voltaire’s satire, I show how they complement or challenge the political, and provide for an altered vision respectful to more human lives. Too often the critique of human rights points to its
28 Western origins as a totalizing source of inequality and disregard for diversity of culture.
As I point out here, Western origins can mean respect for minorities and women
(Condorcet), genuine concern for the condemned (Dante), anger with the law (Sophocles’
Antigone), and outrage over torture (Voltaire). Poets and philosophes may have not always met with success in their artistic rage and protest, but that did not stop them from producing countless texts that helped to form the tradition of literature and human rights.
Antigone: ‘for the dignity of human life’
When Hillary Clinton addressed the United Nations in 1997, she argued that human rights have always been with us. In particular, she cited Sophocles’ Antigone as a seminal text in the formation of human rights. Hegel called Sophocles’ play “the most excellent and satisfying work of art” among “all the fine creations of the ancient and modern world” (74). He lauds the pathos apparent in Greek tragedy, and what he calls the one-sidedness of pathos that leads to reconciliated collisions or “the resolution of specific ethical and substantive facts from their contradiction into their true harmony” (73).
Antigone buries her brother despite Creon’s state decree forbidding such an act. The one- sidedness is so intense and absolute that the only means for removal is through a shattering of the individual. According to Hegel, Antigone and Creon “stand fundamentally under the power of that against which they battle, and consequently infringe that, which, conformably to their own essential life, they ought to respect” (73).
Whereas Antigone and Creon take separate stances regarding to whom they should find themselves ultimately responsible (divine law vs. state law), they also exist in the ethical universes of the other. Antigone is beholden to state proclamations, and Creon is, at the same time, a human being subject to the doings of the gods. In affirming and
29 transgressing their worldviews and the worldviews of the other (also their own), they are
both innocent and guilty. The greatness of Creon and Antigone lies in their resoluteness
and volition, their refusal to choose, and their demand to become “absolutely just that
which they will and achieve” (70). These general oppositions have become central to
ethical readings of Antigone. According to Helen Foley,
Whereas Antigone’s ethics derive from a dual responsibility to the unwritten laws
and the gods below and to family relations and the care for others, Creon’s derive
exclusively from a commitment to general principles as the major determinant of
moral action that is entirely familiar in later Western tradition. In his view the
interests of the city-state are primary and enemies to the state should not be
buried. (183)
Despite its power, scholars remain skeptical about linking Sophocles’ play to human rights and political life. Elaine Pagels, argues that “the example, proves little, if anything, for the idea of human rights” (1). In The Challenge of Human Rights: Their Origin,
Development and Significance, John Maloney writes that “although we cannot find any language or theory of human rights in ancient Greek thought, nevertheless the basis of human rights, the concept of justice, is strongly present there” (2). Mervyn Frost agrees, but asks why students of political theory are not required to study tragedy if it covers concepts of “justice, equality, liberty, democracy, and human rights,” ideas students are asked to trace in their readings of “the works of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Kant, Hegel, Locke, Bentham, Mill and Rawls” (480).
30 In Platonic Noise, J. Peter Euben argues that while it is unclear if tragedy “altered political practice, tragedy dramatizes loss by depicting its consequences for women, slaves, and barbarians.
At least in the confines of the theater and dramatic festival the excluded and
closeted appear on stage. In this space and moment the defeated survive; the
indigestible, unassimilated and cross-grained, and otherwise effaced possibilities
have at least a shadowy presence. And while it is true that a tragic sensibility
precludes the idea of redemption, the beauty of its poetry provides a redemptive
moment by transforming suffering and loss into a story of human endurance. (94)
Tragedy, for Eubens, “provided an opportunity for men (and perhaps women) to reflect on themselves as definers and redefiners, as boundary creators and boundary violators”
(The Tragedy of Political Theory 56).
Despite the debate about whether or not Antigone is a text that informed early political ideas about human rights, novelists continue to link human rights as a theme in literature to Greek tragedy. They similarly consult the entirety of western intellectual thought and other global cultural and religious traditions for ideas, but the example of
Greek literature and culture is particularly important for the number of writers who have turned to the period in order to evoke human rights themes. The Czech writer Ivan Klíma, for example, believes that Antigone’s “story still moves us, though we may also feel astonishment at her sacrifice. We no longer see that she died not for the sake of a proper funeral, but for the dignity of human life.” Yet he asks,
How can we understand it, when we have stood by while the bodies of countless
brothers and cousins, whom they have tortured, beaten, shot and gassed, have
31 been thrown into common holes in the ground, like garbage? When we have
looked on in silence while they have scattered the bones and ashes of others over
fields and tossed them into rivers? When we have pretended not to hear their
voices crying for help? (46)
Klíma, like many writers, has appropriated Antigone’s ethics, or “dual responsibility to the unwritten laws and the gods below and to family relations and the care for others.”
Foley’s description of Antigone’s ethics contains the core themes of human rights narratives, themes I suggest are undervalued when human rights as a political, legal and social discourse aims to locate “general principles” that can apply universally and scientifically. Fictional stories, as writers like Klíma suggest, directly challenge and enlighten us on issues that cannot be dealt with in the political sphere on its own.
Dante: Embracing the Damned in the Middle Ages
Where has your mind been gazing? Don’t you recall A passage in your Ethics, (XI, 77-78, 89) —Virgil to Dante in The Inferno
A just act consists in giving to someone his due. —St. Thomas Aquinas
As a volunteer teacher at San Quentin State Prison, I often found myself in a desolate place (the prison) engaged in compassionate exchanges (through education, discussion of beautiful texts concerning the human condition—Gogol, Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, Joyce, Hemingway, Ellison) with students convicted as murderers, rapists, drug addicts, and thieves. Their crimes are unknown to me until students sometimes mention them through an analogy to Dostoevsky’s troubled character Raskolnikov or a scene, dialogue, character, or dilemma from another work of fiction.
32 The Inferno, for example, and the way Dante’s poem negotiates the tumultuous medieval period, it seems, is a text that shows how readers and publics can make the problem of the prison, crime, and solutions for changing society so that these crimes might not occur, a greater part of public discourse.
The Inferno and relationship of Dante and Virgil, suggests that the modern task of change requires unusual embraces. Medieval people, I contend, could not have removed the condemned out of sight and mind in the way that moderns do. As John Freccero argues, in his introduction to Robert Pinsky’s translation of The Inferno, “exchanges with the damned serve to call into question all of the comfortable conventions that most of the time serve to mask from us our own morality. Hell is a limit situation, like the prison camp or the cancer ward, where all the illusions are stripped away and one has no choice but to acknowledge one’s powerlessness” (xii).
As Pinsky notes, Dante’s inferno has been recast in the modern sphere, for example, as
Camus’ Amsterdam in The Fall and Leroi Jones’ (Amira Baraka’s) inner-city Newark,
New Jersey, ghetto, in The System of Dante’s Hell. The adaptations underscore the parallels between the sublime elements of the inferno made clear by Auerbach and the surreal nature of modernity and incarceration. John Dagenais and Margaret Greer argue that we must “learn to use the Middle Ages as a staging ground for a disruption and critique of Modernity from within Modernity itself” (438). Like T.S. Eliot and his Waste
Land, though in a scholarly and not poetic way, I want to “arouse in the reader’s mind the memory, of some Dantesque scene, and thus establish a relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life” (128). Eliot took Dante’s text as inspiration for scenes of his own — city clerks “trooping” across London Bridge, chaos in the aftermath of an
33 air-raid, a powerful signifier of post-war modernism that has had great cultural significance. The Great War and its destruction led to a despair and alienation reminiscent of the Dantesque scene. The Divine Comedy, for Eliot, “expresses everything in the way of emotion, between depravity’s despair and the beatific vision, that man is capable of experiencing.
It is therefore a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find
words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even
feel, because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that
the explorer beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to
return and report to his fellow-citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the
realities with which they are already acquainted. (134)
Dante may have moved and startled his medieval audience but they remained generally familiar with the working of justice in his text. Though he appears as a likeable being in
The Inferno, Virgil can never be returned to the human world. He represents one of many ironies or inexplicable phenomenon in the text–a seemingly just being delivered upon recommendation (by Beatrice) to guide the path of an innocent soul. Virgil is an unbaptized, damned soul, and, according to King, “Medieval Catholics who rejected the very idea of implicit faith tended to fall back on the stern view of Augustine that only baptized Christians could pass through the portal of faith into Purgatory and Paradise, though their Baptism of course did not guarantee salvation” (86). Miller finds any vexation over Virgil, any attention to his fate in the text as, perhaps, a special case, or questions about his afterlife unnecessary; they can only lead to misreadings. This belief misses the significance of Dante’s poetic expression as an ethical commentary and the
34 complexity of the medieval reader. According to Allen, “Medieval speakers and hearers,
writers and readers, were disposed to accept comparison, or assimilatio based on
convenientia, in all its modes, as a very superior resource of exposition and explanation
[…] because they believed that their world really operated in structures of parallel, and in
so operating included everything from the merely material to the moral and spiritual”
(198).
Allen demonstrates how the literal (text), allegorical (beliefs), tropological (behavior), an
anagogical (‘spiritual reality’) levels of interpretation in the typology of assimilatio
existed independent of one another in the Middle Ages, and provided “a range of possible
kinds of reality a text may assimilate because of the interaction of words and the world,
past and present and future” (214). The simultaneous interaction and preservation of
these levels makes it difficult to cast Virgil as unworthy of attention or the source of a conceit on the part of Dante.
What seems evident from Allen and medieval scholarship is that readers had agency and
room to make choices in The Inferno even if those choices did not have to do with what
ultimately happened to sinners. One of those choices may have been to pause on the
embrace of Virgil and Dante, relate it to their own subjectivity, participating in the range
of possible realities. What I have called the inexplicable, others have deemed unorthodox,
daring, revolutionary, or sublime. Virgil as fictional character further complicates our
understanding of reality; yet his relationship in the system of the Inferno remains clear.
The system of justice cannot be shifted, but Dante uses the poetic to express
revolutionary ideas. Even in their judgment, readers make a radical statement by relating
their subjectivity to that of the condemned. The simultaneous rigidity and radicality of
35 justice in the medieval period as shown through The Inferno encompasses what I would like to appropriate for the modern sphere. Hester Gelber talks about the movement within the Medieval period away from the didacticism of an Anselm toward a type of text that opens space for irony and reflection. Narrative voice and ambiguity emerge in texts that leave readers with no clear space to stand, but allow them the last word of interpretation.
The plundered reader, says Gelber, is presented with a chilling vision of the cosmos.
On the one hand there is the rigidity of justice, evident through the writing of
Aquinas, who had an effect on the writing of Dante. Auerbach tells us that the Thomist-
Aristotelian psychology “provides the background and foundation of his poetic endeavor to portray the individual character or soul as forcefully as possible through the gestures of the body attaching to it” (86). Aquinas casts original sin as equal in all men, but indicates a differentiation in the unleashing of desire. For him, “since man has lost the control of original justice which once kept all the powers of his soul in order, each power tends to follow its own natural movement, and to follow it more vehemently the stronger it is.
Now some powers of the soul may be stronger in one man than in another, because bodily characteristics vary” (124). The loss of original justice bears responsibility on all, as we equally face the consequences of original sin; however, this “does not destroy the natural good in man,” (125) as some human beings have greater original sin/desire in them than others. Original sin, then, is something we must all deal with even if it has led to varying acts of our respective wills. It is clear to see how this philosophy filters into
The Inferno, where likable human beings, fictive and real people who have, in some cases, only slightly erred, find themselves relegated to cruel circles of damnation and bestial realities. Dante wants to reach out to them, but he cannot. Virgil is always there to
36 remind him of his proper place. When Dante sees men moving backwards, twisted necks and faces “above the middle of their backs,” the sight brings him to tears. Here, he goes against the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. He is supposed to celebrate this cruelty, just as he had applauded the punishment of other sinners in the inferno like Filippo.
Allan Gilbert, in his Dante’s Conception of Justice argues that the Commedia is entirely about justice, citing a letter in which Dante says, “If the work is taken allegorically, the subject is man, as by meriting or demeriting through his freedom of choice he is subject to justice, which has the function of rewarding or punishing him”
(67). A disputed letter, Gilbert nevertheless finds it point clear:
Dante’s vision is morally and intellectually acceptable only when the justice of
the punishment s he describes is accepted. If their justice be denied, the poem is
chaos or burlesque. Its effectiveness and value as a whole depend on the truth and
fitness of the treatment accorded to men by the divine government. Unless the
reader feels that the punishments of the wicked and the rewards of the good are
rationally ordered, the purpose of Dante is unfulfilled.
Gilbert reads into Dante an understanding of punishment that is well established by the time of the Inferno. Boethius, for example, wrote, “the wicked are more wretched when unjustly absolved than when they receive a just retribution” (99). The exchange in The
Consolation of Philosophy is strikingly similar to that between Virgil and Dante and retains the same conception of justice. Keeping this rigid formula in mind, Virgil as guide, I think, is part of the revolutionary poetic act in Dante’s allegory. It is both the presence of theological rigidity and poetic expression that make the text unique for its time period and an apt metaphor to recover for the modern sphere. How can the
37 condemned inform the free believer? In Aquinas’ world and that of the medieval reader,
God is held high while the rest of us exist below, working diligently in hopes of the
attainment of grace. Where does Virgil acquire the agency to lead? His revolutionary
possibility rests in the irreversibility of his condition. He may command and push Dante,
but he ultimately remains in his state of being, suspended there with no opportunity for
redemption. Yet he is the guide, commissioned by Beatrice, who is connected to Mary
and St. Lucy. The rigid combines with the revolutionary in the form of Virgil and Dante
on a journey. According to Freccero,
Dante’s other world seems more real to most of his readers than the faith which
inspired it. It is an imaginative construct meant to embody the poet’s religious
convictions, but in the course of our reading, it seems to acquire an autonomous
existence, independent of the message it was intended to convey. We read it as we
might read science fiction, drawn in by the plot in spite of the religious premises.
(1)
At this point, I would like to point to those moments in the Pinsky translation where we
see the interaction of Dante and Virgil that motivates my argument. In Canto II, Virgil
explains why he has agreed to guide Dante through the Inferno, referring to the eyes of
Beatrice. Because of Beatrice, he says, he rescues Dante, and uses the moment to build
trust in Dante. If Beatrice moved Virgil, then, “Why, why should you hold back? Why be
a coward rather than bolder, freer,” (16) he asks. Auerbach connects the welcoming of
Dante by the poets of antiquity to the style of the stil nuovo young poets Dante grew up with, all of whom had a “mystical beloved.” According to Auerbach in Dante: Poet of the
Secular World,
38 the gifts which Love bestowed upon them all (or denied them) have more in
common with illumination than with sensual pleasure; and all of them belonged to
a kind of secret brotherhood which molded their inner lives and perhaps their
outward lives as well—but only one of them, Dante, was able to describe those
esoteric happenings in such a way as to make us accept them as authentic reality
even where the motivations and allusions are quite baffling. That in itself bears
witness to the poetic genius of their author, and it is hard to understand why so
many critics regard an erotic experience accessible to all as a better source of
inspiration than a mystical illumination carrying the force of reality, as though
poetic mimesis had to be a copy of appearances and did not distil its reality from
the infinite treasure of images stored up in memory. (61)
Auerbach, I think, opens the possibilities of how we can read the embrace between Dante and Virgil, physical for the sake of illumination, the journey of the poet, like a pilgrimage. Virgil has accepted the challenge to guide Dante, and Dante has agreed to go with Virgil— “In his expression to encourage me, he placed/His hands on mine; so, trusting to my guide,/I followed him among things undisclosed” (19). Somehow Beatrice is at the center.
In Canto VIII, as elsewhere in the text, Dante engages in conversation with the shades of the inferno, this time with Phlegyas, the boatman who weeps and complains of his plight. Before their exchange becomes to heated, Virgil intervenes. Dante tells us,
And then my guide (line 40)
Embraced my neck and kissed me on the face
And said, “Indignant soul, blessed indeed
39
Is she who bore you. Arrogant in his vice
Was that one when he lived. No goodness whatever
Adorning his memory, his shade is furious.
In the world above, how many a self-deceiver
Now counting himself a mighty king will sprawl
Swinelike amid the mire when life is over,
Leaving behind a name that men revile.” (line 49) (63)
The compassion of his weightless shade and companion Virgil is real to Dante. He would be lost otherwise, and would rather return to his starting point than venture into the inferno alone. “If we can go no farther,” he says, “let us instead (65, lines 94-96) Retrace our steps together” (67). Virgil replies with a sense of compassion evoked consistently in
Pinsky’s translation of his words:
None can deprive us of the passage One
Has willed for us to have. Wait for me here
And feed your spirit hope and comfort: remember,
I won’t abandon you in this nether sphere.” (67, lines 97-99)
Virgil, the one that scholars remind readers to keep fixed in the underworld, stays true to his word. He does not abandon Dante, and guides him through the inferno. Of particular interest in the above passage is Virgil’s use of the One to refer to the Divine. According to Gerhard, “Virgil’s surprising affirmation of the power of prayer in his own work
40 makes a far more emotionally powerful statement about the workings of the Divine
Justice system than any denial of prayer we might expect him, as a pre-Christian pagan,
to make out of mere ignorance” (113). The supplement of Virgil’s writings further
complicates his figure in the inferno and brings greater complexity to the notion of justice that I see occurring in the text, rigid and revolutionary. It is not my intention to underscore every moment of embrace between Dante and Virgil in The Inferno but I would like to draw attention to a few more passages like those of Canto IX, where Dante writes, “He turned me around himself, and to make sure, (line 52)/Not trusting mine alone he covered my face/With his hands too. O you whose mind is clear:/Understand well the lesson that underlies/The veil of these strange verses I have written” (71).
In Canto X, Virgil sets “firm hands upon Dante” (79) as he, struck with awe, moves among the “souls and the sepulchers they fill” (77). With Virgil’s touch Dante can boldly ask about their pasts, and question their actions. It is not exactly judgment, but productive discourse between the damned and living. Dante knows he has not given into desire but understands the relationship of original sin to himself and the occupants of the underworld. Virgil underscores Dante’s tendency toward collective responsibility in
Canto XI:
Heaven’s hatred is injustice—and each end
Of this kind, whether by force or by fraud, afflicts
Some other person. But since fraud is found
In humankind as its peculiar vice,
It angers God more: so the fraudulent
41 Are lower, and suffer more unhappiness.
The whole first circle is for the violent;
But, because violence involves a deed
Against three persons, its apportionment (XI, line 30, 85)
And fabrication are in three rings: to God,
To one’s self, or one’s neighbor, all violence
Is done—to them, or to their things instead,
As I’ll explain. By violence, death and wounds
Of grievous kinds are inflicted on one’s neighbor;
And on his property—arson, ruinous offense,
Extortion. So the first ring is the harbor
Of torment for the homicides and those
Who strike out wrongfully: despoiler, robber,
And plunderer, in various companies. (XI, line 40, 87)
One may lay violent hands on his own being,
Or what belongs to himself, and all of these
The tone of the passage intonates anxiety and despair on at least three levels: that of the
Dante the poet, Dante the character, and in the speech of Virgil. Aquinas calls despair a
42 sin but makes reservation for the kind when a “doctor despairs of curing a sick man”
(331). Despair, it seems, would be inconsistent with belief. If someone believes in the
grace of God, how can they experience despair? Virgil, as an unbeliever, has many
reasons to express despair. Yet Aquinas says despair and belief are not inconsistent,
meaning in the medieval period people could have simultaneously believed in the
operation of justice in the system outlined by Virgil in Dante’s text and the feeling of
despair that might arise from such a seemingly cruel fate. A similar belief can be found
earlier in the work of Boethius, who wrote, “It is the nature of human affairs to be fraught
with anxiety; they never prosper perfectly and they never remain constant” (30). The
ambiguity of despair, and its insignificance to belief, further opens the space for the
reflective medieval mind. What I find useful in Aquinas’ conception of despair, which is
ultimately a sin because it opposes the virtues, is that the sinful characteristic of despair is
listlessness: in other words, despair along with belief that the source of your despair
cannot be overcome by the good is a sin. This seems to suggest a link to action, praxis, or
the belief that all causes of anxiety and despair might be overcome if one has belief in the
good and grace of God. In essence, the incarceration of human beings you feel are in their
proper place does not remove the need to believe in a moment in which those violent acts
and the violent place will be removed and replaced by good. This notion of despair is
important for the distinction I want to make between the medieval and the modern.
Throughout their journey Virgil stands by Dante’s side, particularly in those moments when a sight or sound becomes to grave to bear, or, as in Canto XXXI, an argument escalates out of hand. He navigates the circles of hell, combining his physical ability with his knowledge of the place. After Dante witnesses the tearing of limbs in
43 Canto XIII, “and then they took/ The wretched members away. Then my escort/Led me by one hand to the bush—which spoke,/ Grieving in vain through places where it was hurt/ And bled” (XIII, 121-125, 107).
One moment, Virgil has “opened his arms, after he took some time/To consult himself and study the ruin well,/And taking hold of me began the climb” (197). The next,
Dante tells us, Virgil “took [him] by the hand, with love” (265) and began to present the poet with another lesson about the inferno. According to Freccero, their journey is familiar yet strange. Readers would recognize the pilgrimage as well as its slight variations and have no problem reconciling the two. Auerbach suggests that the medieval period underwent a turn away from dogmatism even if the narrative of Christianity remained. According to Gelber, medieval people could contemplate, reflect and respond.
Thus, Dante’s revolutionary and rigid text, and its sense of justice would not have started readers, but encouraged them. Freccero points to the upheaval provided by Dante’s text by the end of Dante’s and Virgil’s journey:
East is the right hand of the cosmos, and South is “up.” In order to rise “up” from
the northern hemisphere it would be necessary first to descend to the center of the
earth and from there to ascend to the southern hemisphere. This is literally the
trajectory followed by the pilgrim, but metaphorically, it represents the descent
into humility urged by Augustine in the Confessions as a prelude to
transcendence. The pilgrim retraces the steps of Christ, Who also descended into
Hell. Going down into Hell was thought of as a symbolic death of the self, the
necessary prelude to conversion. At the turning point of their journey through
Hell, Dante and Virgil act out the etymology of the word “conversion,” that is,
44 they turn upside down, translating the spiritual process of conversion into a
physical movement. That infernal inversion transforms the coordinates of the
Aristotelian cosmos into the poles of a spiritual drama about which the ancients
could know nothing. (4)
One of the enduring images of Dante and Virgil in The Inferno is of them in
embrace or close proximity as they move from one circle to the next, or as the poem
transitions between cantos. The image is significant to the rhyme of the poem, and the
importance of embrace as solidarity between free and condemned human beings. A
passage from Canto XIV is but one example of these connections and transitions:
From there we proceeded to the boundary line
At which the third and second rings divide:
And there a dreadful form of justice is seen.
To make these new things clear: we two now stood
On a plain whose bed rejects all plants—bare, flat,
Garlanded all around by the woeful wood
Just as the wood is by the sorrowful moat.
And here we stayed our steps at the very edge. (XIV, 11, 111)
In his translation of The Inferno, Pinsky suggests that to “the image of Virgil skidding downhill on his back, while clasping Dante to his chest, Dante adds the simile of water coursing through a sluice to turn the regularly spaced vanes of a millwheel. This simile can serve as an image of the relation of lines and stanzas, like regular vanes, to the
45 surging fluid of the sentence. At the same time, the motion of the embracing poets represents a related dynamism of spirit, word, and matter” (xxii).
He uses the metaphor to explain the imperfect project of translation, where flaws are inevitable as his “arrangement of rhyme, sentence, line, and stanza attempts hopefully, sometimes perhaps desperately, to find a commensurate relation of elements […] trying to turn the wheel surely enough to accomplish what work it can” (xxii). The desperation of the translator, the despair of Dante, the ethical mind of the medieval reader and thinker—this is what I have attempted to recover for the modern sphere. Though I am not suggesting a return to the barbarity of the medieval period, I am claiming that the relationship of human beings to barbarity and the doers of barbarous acts is radically different for moderns: we might despair and there is even truth to the alienation experienced my modernity in the aftermath of the Great War (T.S. Eliot’s appropriation of Dante mentioned above). But the despair differs in that the contemporary moment has found a way to remove the condemned from reality. Rethinking our relationship to incarcerated human beings is bound to be an imperfect project, but like Pinsky, the translator, I believe we should “turn the wheel surely enough to accomplish what work
[we] can.” Dante’s text seems appropriate for the task.
According to Lewen, the San Quentin educator, “long before we ever realize it, we are learning to imagine people in prison as grotesque, subhuman caricatures – ‘Criminals,’
‘Prisoners,’ ‘Ex-convicts,’ ‘Parolees’ – they’re the stuff of horror movies, nightmares,
Halloween costumes, prime time television, and off-hand jokes. One of the most powerful and potentially world-changing aspects of the program at San Quentin, is that it
46 allows outsiders to actually meet, and get to know, human beings who are literally subject
to these categories.”
Lewen, drawing upon a verse from Hebrews and certainly Dante, suggests we should,
“Step across those lines, and above all: remember every person in prison as if they were
bound to you.” It is does not mean we forget what they have done; rather, we want to
embrace them, have dialogue about how we can remove and prevent further injustice in
the world, restore beauty, and stop the fast flow of human beings into the inferno.
The Enlightenment
Condorcet and the Tensions of Humanism and Enlightenment
The eighteenth-century mathematician Marie-Jean-Antoine-Caritat de Condorcet
(1743-1795) wove a humanist strand through an Enlightenment movement more known
for its advancements in scientific rationalism and method. He merged his genuine
concern for society with “a mathematical scientific model: a model that that not only met
the epistemological requirements of science as he defined them but found a historical
matrix in the very development of bureaucratic absolutism to which [his] political theory
was a response” (Baker 261). A protégé of D’Alembert, and friend to Jefferson, Franklin
and Paine, a man who crossed paths with Hume and Smith, Condorcet wrote works and engaged in political activity that placed him in intimate philosophical conversation with his more famous peers. A product of Parisian salons, academies, and social spheres, he seems to have held the pedigree necessary for authorship of “the authentic testament of the Enlightenment,” the description Keith Michael Baker provides for Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. But if the Sketch symbolizes an authentic expression of that remarkable period, then it is important to illuminate what,
47 no matter how elementary, in that text and others by Condorcet is notably absent or less foundational in the writings or ethos of those other philosophes seen as central to
Enlightenment thought. Namely, what I refer to as Condorcet’s humanism complicates or expands the variety of attitudes the philosophes had toward the subjectivity of people unlike themselves—slaves, women, Africans and non-elites. Keeping in mind the framework of the sharp distinction Michel Foucault makes between eighteenth-century humanism and the Enlightenment, I argue that Condorcet signifies a strong example, perhaps one of many, of where that divide conflates and converges. Whereas evidence shows Condorcet may have seen himself as human in the same way as women and slaves—denying constrictions of gender, race, and class—what I interpret as a clear humanist expression cannot be generalized into the Enlightenment as an epoch. This is why in
recent years, an attitude of suspicion toward the modern Enlightenment has
become a familiar and indeed prominent feature of the contemporary landscape of
social, cultural, and political theory. The eighteenth-century European
Enlightenment, so it is argued, constituted a universalizing project aimed
aggressively and systematically at displacing the varied traditions of rationality
and morality that characterize the nonmodern world and at imposing in their place
a singular standard or calculus of instrumental reason. In this view, the
Enlightenment’s rationalism, historicism, individualism, and foundationalism has
had an impoverishing effect on our moral, intellectual, cultural, and political
worlds. Far from initiating a period of unparalleled freedom and toleration, as its
48 protagonists believed, the Enlightenment merely opened a new and more far-
reaching chapter in the history of domination. (Scott 177)
Scott rejects this postcolonial view as part of a narrative that Foucault calls the blackmail
of the enlightenment: “you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach), or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality” (Foucault 313).
Foucault warns against blackmail in his reading of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”
(1784) in an article of the same name; the essay is a helpful tool for illustrating the distinction or departure I want to explore. Foucault differentiates between the
Enlightenment and humanism by labeling the former
an event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a
certain point in the development of European societies. As such, it includes
elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of
knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological
mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these
phenomena remain important today. Humanism is something entirely different.
(313)
Whereas Enlightenment is ultimately a particular and situated type of critically engaged philosophizing, Foucault speaks of humanisms, negative and positive, across time.
Seventeenth century humanism interrogated Christianity and religion; Christian humanism differed from theocentric humanism; in the nineteenth-century separate humanisms both expressed suspicion toward and lauded science; Marxism,
49 existentialism, personalism, state socialism, and even Stalinism have all advertised
themselves as humanisms, Foucault argues. As a thematic that “serves to color and to
justify the conceptions of man to which it is, after all, obliged to take recourse,”
humanism, for Foucault, exists in conflict with the Enlightenment, and their differences
cannot be resolved dialectically. By separating humanism and the Enlightenment,
Foucault creates a space for a form of critique that is archaeological not transcendental,
for “criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with
universal value but, rather, as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to
constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing,
thinking, saying” (315). He seems to accept the critical ethos of the Enlightenment but
with an emphasis on limits and a denial of its universal appeal. Foucault calls for a move
away from “global and radical” attempts to understand our historical ontology because
such attempts—breaking away from Enlightenment thought, for example or “to escape
from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another
society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, [have]
led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions” (316). Human beings will never
reach full maturity, he concludes, and it is unproductive and impossible to seek complete
knowledge of the self. Yet the critical gaze of the Enlightenment can be retained for
“diverse inquiries” (319).
It is into the realm of Foucault that I want to introduce the divided attention of
Condorcet, the passionate philosophe inhabiting what in Foucault’s articulation is the space of tension between the Enlightenment and 18th-century humanism. Condorcet, I
argue, concerned himself with both practicing the critical discourse of Enlightenment and
50 with developing a universal moral science about the human being. The approach was
neither dialectical nor separate, but compassionate and methodical, genuinely human. In
his example we discover new ways to talk about the universal, fraternity, and rights, or who counts as a person or human being. The sources? His Sketch, his abolitionist writings, his feminist writings, his Plan for a Declaration of the Natural, Civil, and
Political Rights of Man, all of which I visit here. It is useful initially to outline brief fragments from Condorcet’s biography, though I do not mean to align them exactly with developments in his philosophical writing. Rather, just as details about Kant’s empirical world —he never traveled beyond a 15-mile radius of his home, never married or loved, and neighbors would keep time by his precise and routine daily walks—help us to imagine that systematic and methodical philosopher, so too can Condorcet’s presence in the world, his female influences, the people he came into contact with, the shear breadth of his interests, bring clarity to our knowledge of his 18th-century ideas and beliefs.
Condorcet was born September 17, 1743, in Picardy, France, the same year as
Thomas Jefferson in Albemarle County, Virginia. McLean and Hewitt note that he never knew his father, a cavalryman killed in battle five weeks after Condorcet’s birth. His pious mother raised him alone and dedicated young Condorcet to the Virgin Mary. She dressed him in girl’s clothing until he turned eight, at least two years longer than the norm. He had no formal schooling or contact away from home until around nine years of age, when he began to study with a Jesuit tutor. At 11 an uncle arranged for him to attend a Jesuit school, where he remained for four years. Of this experience, Condorcet said,
They teach children that they cannot do good acts without grace, and that there are two sorts of sins: the venial, for which you are burnt for a few centuries, and the mortal, for
51 which you are burnt eternally […] For protection against limited hellfire, it is enough to
flog yourself or, which is shorter and sweeter, to give enough money to priests. (McLean
and Hewitt 3)
The all-male environment led Condorcet, who would later defend men having sex
with men so long as no one was harmed, to suggest that it promoted
homosexuality and featured priests who seduced male students. In 1758 he
matriculated at the College of Navarre, a division of the University of Paris
known for its strengths in the sciences: the opportunity enabled him to study
disciplines other than Latin and religion. More than likely he showed advanced
abilities in mathematics here and also came under the tutelage of a follower of
Newton. (McLean and Hewitt)
He gained membership into the Academy of Sciences in 1769, due in large part to the sponsorship of d’Alembert, one of the major influences in his life. Others were Ann-
Robert-Jacques-Turgot, a follower of the physiocrats and local administrator, and Julie de
Lespinasse, who operated an influential salon associated with the French Academy, to which Condorcet was elected in 1782 (Baker). Early on his closest colleagues saw him as passionate – passionate for scientific truth, and passionate about his friends, for whom he showed great affection. His poor oratory skills, offset by a powerful writing ability, would come to haunt him later in life, especially in the political sphere. At the salons, friends admonished Condorcet for his bad habits and de Lespinasse would warn him against biting his lip, biting his fingernails, reading in bath, and allowing chalk to build up in his ears. (McLean and Hewitt). Baker points to de Lespinasse’s observations about le bon Condorcet as revelatory of “a passion for humanity that was the essential
52 characteristic of the philosophe, an unselfish devotion to the public good, [] and an unrelenting rage in pursuit of this goal that threatened to rob him of his sobriquet almost as soon as he had earned it” (24). Mlle. de Lespinasse referred to
the most distinctive and most absolute quality of his soul, its goodness. His
physiognomy is sweet and calm; simplicity and negligence mark his bearing […]
He has received from nature the loftiest mind, the most considerable talent and the
fairest of souls; his talent would have been enough to make him famous, his mind
to make him sought after; but his soul wins him the friendship of all who come to
know him at all well. (qtd. in Baker 24)
The calm demeanor of Condorcet gave way to an occasional ire or penchant for critique that he used against colleagues in some instances, burning the occasional social connection, and against what he viewed as state oppression in others. His early relationship with Voltaire found them conspirators decrying the tyranny of the law and lawyers who abused their power in making laws, mostly in towns. In particular, Voltaire and Condorcet protested the murder of La Barre, a man detained for not taking off his hat while walking by a religious event and taking a stick to a crucifix made of wood
(McLean and Hewitt). At the other end of the spectrum, scholars like Lavoisier, for example, became the subject of Condorcet’s funny and searing polemics. His assessment of the mathematician Jean-Charles de Borda is telling, especially since we know that some of de Borda’s work would be just as influential as Condorcet’s:
[A] few of his papers shows some talent, though nothing will ever come of them
and nobody has ever discussed them, nor ever will. But […] he is what people call
‘a good Academy man’; that is […] he speaks at Academy meetings, and likes
53 nothing better than to waste his time writing prospectuses, examining machines,
etc. Above all […], feeling himself eclipsed by other mathematicians, […] he has
abandoned mathematics for petty examination. (qtd. in McLean and Hewitt 9)
The picture that emerges is of a vulnerable man accomplished in the sciences, someone who has benefited greatly from reason and enlightenment, and seems interested in combining his compassion and critical gaze with scientific knowledge and concern for humanity in a time of simultaneous progress and volatility.
The Ninth Stage of Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human
Mind echoes the same Enlightenment march of influential philosophes like Diderot and d’Alembert, but elsewhere in that text we find evidence of Condorcet’s self-fashioned definition of the human, the philosophe, and their relationship to one another. The concepts may appear the same, but differ, even if slightly, according to the author.
Condorcet’s human is more universal than d’Alembert’s, if that is possible, his understanding of the law more humanist than Montesquieu’s. The Ninth Stage honors a familiar roll call of scientific thinkers—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Bacon, Descartes,
Newton, Leibniz, Locke, Franklin—and, in classic Enlightenment form, narrates the centrality of reason and scientific method to a new era of discovery and progress in the arts and sciences, medicine and law. Newton not only gave us a “general law of nature,” but he also “taught men to admit in physics only precise and mathematical theories”
(Condorcet 140). D’Alembert changed the face of the mathematical sciences, and even the errors of Descartes helped forge a new chemistry. Scientific method greatly aided architecture and “the progress of mechanics, astronomy, optics, and the science of measuring time” helped with the art of shipbuilding and navigation. Parallels can be
54 made between The Sketch and d’Alembert’s earlier Preliminary Discourse to the
Encyclopedia of Diderot and his The Human Mind Emerged from Barbarism. The immortal Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton and Locke all show up here as men who altered scientific progress considerably. For d’Alembert, when
we consider the progress of the human mind since that memorable epoch, we find
that this progress was made in the sequence it should naturally have followed. It
was begun with erudition, continued with belle-lettres, and completed with
philosophy. This sequence [memory, reason, imagination] differs, it is true, from
that which a man would necessarily follow if left to his own intelligence or
limited to exchanges with his contemporaries. (d’Alembert 60)
In universal language Condorcet and d’Alembert describe the Enlightenment Foucault later argues should be understood contextually, a European phenomenon separate from the threads of humanism. The exclusive narratives, Condorcet’s, d’Alembert’s, and others, showcase the same group of men, privilege reason and critique in like manners, and explicate the place of error in scientific processes that ultimately lead to great discoveries. The commonalities across these texts greatly support the notion of a singular
Enlightenment. Yet, contrary to Foucault, I see indication of the humanist desire, less so in d’Alembert and other Enlightenment thinkers, exemplarily in Condorcet. In The
Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert shows how man discovers his body and the
“misfortune of the human condition that pain is our most lively sentiment” (10).
D’Alembert’s man encounters other men in the same predicament, desire for pleasure
over pain, and this leads them to communication, knowledge and survival discourse,
“because we find it advantageous to join with them in finding out what can be beneficial
55 to us and what can be detrimental to us in Nature” (11). The ethos is more enlightenment than humanist, more rational than fraternal, and differs in that regard from Condorcet, who I am suggesting displayed an allegiance to both traditions. The human dilemma in d’Alembert’s text—pleasure and pain—can be found in The Sketch, but the response
“between [man] and his fellow-creatures ties of interest and duty, to which nature herself has wished to attach the most precious portion of our happiness and the most painful of our ills” (Condorcet 210). Their relationship is more communal, less individualistic. The enlightenment infatuation with the removal of error becomes, in Condorcet, a removal of error, ignorance and intolerance of humanity.
The Ninth Stage contains what must be regarded as humanism or artifice. Condorcet extends his “understanding of the rights of man” far and wide, to “the whole of humanity without distinction of country, race, or creed” (232). He injects Enlightenment with a sense of “universal philanthropy,” philosophes in solidarity with “the black races whom their foolish tyrants disdained to consider as members of the human race.” In some countries, Condorcet argued,
these principles formed a public opinion sufficiently widespread for even the
mass of the people to show a willingness to be guided by it and to obey it. For a
feeling of humanity, a tender and active compassion for all the misfortunes that
afflict the human race and a horror of anything that in the actions of public
institutions, or governments, or individuals, adds new pains to those that are
natural and inevitable, were the natural consequences of those principles. (232)
Condorcet borrows from his mentors in method and influence, surpasses them in his concept of a universal human being. He differs from them in that he is working toward a
56 humanist social science, a demonstration “that the moral and political sciences could
achieve the same certainty and precision as the physical sciences” (Baker 197).
Reading The Spirit of the Laws with Condorcet’s moral/political scientism in
mind, it is possible to see what he appreciated from that text and what he found
inconsistent with his own beliefs. Because of the centrality of slavery as a problem to the
philosophes, I point to the section titled “How the Laws of Civil Slavery Are Related to
the Nature of the Climate,” where Montesquieu defines slavery as “the consequence of
establishing the right of one man to own another, to become absolute master over his life
and property” (201). This premise–with its emphasis on property and recognition before
the law—underlines Montesquieu’s historical global critique of slavery. It is a work of
political theory brandishing reason to argue why enlightened societies cannot justify
slavery. In it, pro-slavery “arguments by Roman jurists make no sense” (201), and
Aristotle “falls short of proof” (204). Humanism and enlightenment are divided here: reason is abundant in Europe, “where [slavery] has been so happily abolished” (205).
Other parts of the world rely on something other than reason, thus, Montesquieu says, slavery can be justified.
Baker, reading a fragment by Condorcet that responds to The Spirit of the Laws, shows how the text may have influenced Condorcet’s understanding of social science. Yet
Condorcet was equally critical of Montesquieu, especially for his relativism and the fact that he “had demonstrated that there are reasons for the historical variations of customs of legislation. But he did not thereby prove that these laws are in themselves reasonable: for only those laws are reasonable which are in accordance with the invariable moral principles derived from human nature” ( Baker 222).
57 We cannot deny Condorcet’s role as a mathematician consumed with science and reason, but I hope The Sketch makes it possible to discuss him as a humanist among his peers, mixing Enlightenment and humanism for his own theory of human relations. I think we must arrive at similar conclusions concerning his regard for the law: he held it in high regard so long as it respected human beings. Montesquieu has gathered the necessary historical facts to show abuses of legal power, but his exhibition is not enough.
As the center of Enlightenment discourse and activity in the eighteenth century,
Paris afforded Condorcet the opportunity to meet with leading French philosophes.
Through salons, he also met important intellectuals from England and America, though he never traveled to either place. He shared ideas with d’Alembert, Voltaire, Hume,
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and possibly Adam Smith. He appreciated the scientific inquiry of Franklin, whom he met in Paris salons. Likewise, he appealed to the scientific amateurism of Jefferson–both hoped to create universal systems of measurement (McLean and Hewitt). He helped Paine, who did not speak French and needed it as a form of linguistic capital in Paris. According to Condorcet biographers,
Paine, author of pamphlets like Common Sense and Rights of Man, returned his debt to
Condorcet’ by shaping his thinking on human rights (McLean and Hewitt 16).
Jefferson and Condorcet represent a striking way in which we can further distinguish humanist freedom and liberty and how those concepts might differ in a construct where enlightenment and humanism are at odds. The comparison can be made through an examination of their abolitionist work, namely Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Condorcet’s Reflections on Negro Slavery. Condorcet’s letter to Jefferson, in which he expressed, “our Republic was founded like yours on reason, on the rights of nature,
58 and on equality,” leaves us in a quandary. We must choose from among a variety of interpretations: either the concepts require nuance, or Condorcet is engaged in artifice. As concepts applying to separate Enlightenments, the American and the French, reason, freedom, and liberty, can be persuasively applied to a limited spatial and cultural milieu.
Though The Declaration of Independence made its claims universally and based on natural rights, its authors had a select group in mind, and in the case of that particular group of white male property owners, the document is undeniably revolutionary.
Similarly, as we learn from Foucault, the European Enlightenment, even with its gesture toward universality, actually applied to a certain European world. They may have understood reason as revolutionary, but calling for its spread to bring justice to other parts of the world appeared mostly at the level of rhetorical flourish. In essence, Jefferson
(and Montesquieu) expresses the universal, even though he means it relatively. Jefferson
“was able both to own slaves and to think it self-evident that all men were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” (Rorty 67). Freedom, liberty, and equality, for Jefferson, applied to the group he called whites, not those he demonized as blacks.
The contradiction was unsurprising for American Enlightenment thought, and contemporary shock has led to negligent suggestions
that slavery should have nothing to do with freedom; that a man who holds
freedom dearly should not hold slaves without discomfort; that a culture which
invented democracy or produced a Jefferson should not be based on slavery. But
such an assumption is unfounded. We make it only because we reify ideas,
because we fail to see the logic of contradiction, and because in our anachronistic
arrogance we tend to read the history of ideas backward. (Patterson ix)
59 Condorcet, as I have suggested, operated differently than the man he admired across the
Atlantic. In his work we find expressions of brotherhood and solidarity with blacks, and a
sweeping assailment of slavery in the Americas. He refused to accept the perverted
misapplication of personhood and property to blacks, and his writing consistently views
them as agents and humans caught up in a tremendous world crime. Historian Susan
Buck-Morss argues that, “The Haitian Revolution was the crucible, the trial by fire for
the ideals of the French Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the
bourgeois reading public knew it” (837). Condorcet, however, included his anti-slavery
vision as part of a larger call for reform, “including the restoration of the civil rights of
Calvinists, the elimination of torture in the judicial process, and the suppression of the
last remains of serfdom” (Hunt 55). He dedicated Reflections to Negro slaves, addressing
them as, “My Friends.” Only John Brown (1800-1859) in popular United States
American history recognized black humanity in a similar unapologetic way: historians
note how Brown would have friends (slaves) to his home for dinner and introduce them
on a first name basis to his shocked guests—abolitionists who were willing to denounce slavery but could not imagine sitting next to black people. The ethos of Condorcet is similar, but without Brown’s religious zealotry. Whereas color had formed the basis of
Jefferson’s and so many others’ dismissal of African humanity, Condorcet shattered in his day the ridiculous notion that still haunts so much of social, political and religious life. The epistle to the Reflections says,
Although I am not the same color as you, I have always regarded you as my
brothers. Nature formed you with the same spirit, the same reason, the same
virtues as whites … your tyrants will reproach me with uttering only
60 commonplaces and having nothing but chimerical ideas: indeed, nothing is more
common than the maxims of humanity and justice; nothing is more chimerical
than to propose to men that they base their conduct on them” (Hunt 56)
What would have been the cost of Jefferson coming to similar conclusions about race and
humanity? A nation, perhaps. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, addressed to a French aristocrat and made available in France in 1784 or 1785, Jefferson wrote that blacks “are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” in imagination, and “are inferior to whites in the endowments of both body and mind.” These remarks are relatively mild and the least troublesome of the unfortunate debasement of blacks in the Notes; a full analysis is unnecessary, as the departure in the ideologies of Jefferson and Condorcet, both admirers of liberty, should be clear. Condorcet disagreed with Jefferson on the issue of black humanity and apparently told him so. Jefferson’s response was to tell Condorcet about the African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker: “I have seen very elegant solutions of geometrical problems by him,” wrote Jefferson. “Add to this that he is a worthy and respectable member of society” (qtd. in Popkin 42).
My intent here has not been to dismiss the contributions of Jefferson, one of the architects of democracy and passionate defender of freedom and liberty. Rather, I hoped to show how freedom that tolerates slavery (Jefferson, Locke, Smith, Montesquieu) and freedom that does not (Condorcet) look quite different. The implications burden the world we live in today, one where the contemporary equivalent and descendant of the Enlightenment is a culture obsessed with human rights.
61
Enlightenment II: Voltaire’s Outrage
Philosophes like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Condorcet not only wrote essays,
treatises and speeches in favor of rights for women, children, slaves and the poor, they
also wrote novels for this purpose. According to Hunt, the “magical spell cast by the
novel thus turned out to be far-reaching in its effects” (58). In 1759, for example,
Voltaire, then the most prominent man of letters in western Europe, published Candide, a novel designed to attack the religious optimism of thinkers unwilling to adequately account for injustice in the world. Voltaire’s satirical novel, conversely, describes conditions of disaster and horror, largely inspired by his reaction to the destruction caused by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years War. Voltaire, wealthy and accomplished, understood himself as a happy man in a miserable world, and he wrote
Candide because “he object[ed] to those whose optimism [led] them to belittle or dismiss the suffering of others.” In his 2000 translation and introduction to Voltaire’s text, David
Wootton calls Candide “a book about the educative and therapeutic power of storytelling” that
invites us to rethink the story we might tell of our own lives, to find a way of
telling our own story so that it helps us discover a reasonably happy ending. Both
purposes require us to rethink the dervish’s advice to be silent. Conventional talk
about metaphysics, even about politics, is dismissed at the end of Candide as
worthless; but there are other things to talk about, such as happiness. Indeed such
conversations might even lead to a new way of talking about both philosophy and
politics. (xxii-xxiii)
62 Risking censorship and punishment from authorities, Voltaire wrote Candide “to bring
about some change in the world around him” (xxxi). In chapter six of the novel, for
example, Voltaire satirizes the Portuguese Inquisition, basing his account on an auto-da-
fé (act of faith) he believed took place in 1756:
After the earthquake, which had wrecked the three quarters of Lisbon, the wise
men of Portugal had identified no more effective method to prevent the rest being
destroyed than to hold a fine auto-da-fé to educate the people. It was decided by
the University of Coïmbra that the spectacle of few people being burned over a
slow fire, accompanied by the most elaborate rituals, was an infallible, if little
known, method for preventing earthquakes.
In view of this decision they had arrested someone from Biscay who was
convicted of having married his godmother, and two Portuguese who, when
eating a chicken, had thrown away the fatty bacon in which it had been wrapped.
After the dinner they came and seized Dr. Pangloss and his disciple Candide, the
first for having spoken, and the second for having listened with an air of approval.
[…] Candide was whipped in time while the congregation sang; the chap from
Biscay and the two men who had not wanted to eat fatty bacon were burned; and
Pangloss was hanged, although this was a break with tradition. The same day the
earth trembled once again, making a blood-curdling noise. (13)
Voltaire uses the novel to expose the cruelty of the auto-da-fé and its public murder
(hanging, beheading, burning, shooting) of human beings charged with heresy. Candide met with great success upon publication, and remains the most widely read of Voltaire’s works and a central text in French and Western literature. The Enlightenment period
63 included not only advancements in science, technology and philosophy, but also in the rise of the novel as a form and forum for the narration of injustice. Human rights and the novel form a powerful blend of aesthetics and ethics, a resilient form embodying the
“[v]arious forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth)”
(Bakhtin 261) that attempt to narrate violence, loss, treachery, and, in the end, a glimmer of hope, reconciliation or redemption. According to Robert Harrison,
When Voltaire ends Candide with the famous declaration “Il faut cultiver notre
jardin,” the garden in question must be viewed against the backdrop of the wars,
pestilence, and natural disasters evoked by the novel. The emphasis on cultivation
is essential. It is because we are thrown into history that we must cultivate our
garden. In an immortal Eden there is no need to cultivate, since all is pregiven
there spontaneously. Our human gardens may appear to us like little openings
onto paradise in the midst of the fallen world, yet the fact that we must create,
maintain, and care for them is the mark of their postlapsarian provenance. History
without gardens would be a wasteland. A garden severed from history would be
superfluous. (x)
The garden, in this instance, represents the seedbed of hope amid massive destructions.
What a garden represents for Voltaire is symbolized by other artists through different metaphors that require intellectual and emotional engagement to understand.
Comprehension relies on innate humanness or what Cora Diamond calls the “sense of mystery surrounding our lives, the feeling of solidarity in the mysterious origin and uncertain fate; this binds us to each other and the binding meant includes the dead and
64 unborn, and those who bear on their faces ‘a look of blank idiocy’ those who lack all power of speech, those behind whose vacant eyes their lurks a ‘soul in mute eclipse’”
(55). Voltaire is participating in the ethical and aesthetic project of melding human rights and literature. Just as the Enlightenment contains intellectual scientific and philosophical antecedents to the human rights discourse circling the globe since the mid-20th century,
Candide represents an example of how the novel of the Enlightenment also functions as an important literary source for and about human rights. Why did Voltaire choose the novel? He is not a good source for extolling its virtues, as he considered the novel less important than his work as playwright, poet and historian. Yet, Candide stands out as his most popular and successful work, largely because of how it impacted and continues to impact readers.
65
CHAPTER TWO
Human Rights in the Novel: Sarah Stone’s The True Sources of the Nile
One group argues for the legitimacy of one or more countries intervening in another country once there’s been some gross violation of human rights and there’s a capacity to do something about it. The other half of the international community argues for the primacy of sovereignty and is extremely reluctant to contemplate the legitimacy of countries intervening in any circumstances outside of the U.N. Charter. We need to stand back from this increasingly sterile debate and try to rethink its basic issues. It’s really not about anyone’s right to intervene in someone else’s internal affairs. Rather, it’s about the responsibility or obligation to protect those who are going to be, or are already, victims of human rights abuses, including the violation of their rights to life. —Gareth Evans, former CEO of International Crisis Group in an interview with Foreign Policy Magazine, March/April 2001
One reason “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” [sic] remains so affecting and so profoundly threatening is that Huck shows us what it meant to grow up in a slave-holding society and learn to navigate its pathologies. Huck compels us to believe him, which means that we are obliged once again to acknowledge that we live in a country in which ordinary citizens actually bought and sold human beings like Jim. It’s easier for the novel than for even the most incisive biography or historical study to make the reader experience the subject from the inside. The liberties and devices of fiction (dialogue, voice, characterization and so forth) enable the writer to take us into the mind and heart of a person not unlike ourselves who talks to us from a distant period and place, and so becomes our guide to its sights and sounds, its sorrows and satisfactions. — Francine Prose, “The Lost Boy,” a review of Dave Eggers’ What Is the What, New York Times Book Review, Dec. 24, 2006
The late historian and human rights activist Alison des Forges recalled being at home in New York in April 1994 when genocide was taking place thousands of miles away in Rwanda. Des Forges was talking on the telephone with a Rwandan friend in
Kigali who would abruptly end the phone call when her life was taken by genocidaires.
66 Des Forges had studied and spent time in Rwanda for many decades, beginning with her
doctoral studies at Yale in the 1960s. She was seen as a leading authority on Rwandan
history, and she wrote extensively on the causes and aftermath of the genocide for
Human Rights Watch, where she was a longtime researcher. Ten years after the genocide,
in 2004, I interviewed des Forges, author of an important book on the Rwandan genocide,
Leave None to Tell the Story. Des Forges, who died in 2009 when the plane she was on
en route from Newark, NY, to her home in Buffalo, NY, crashed in foggy weather, said
that ten years after the genocide, “ I am doing a lot of speaking, trying to remind people
of what happened and raise their consciousness. I also continue to be involved in
prosecution with the international tribunal and national court prosecution.” Her activism
and close relationship to Rwanda (victims of the genocide as well as their families) took
its toll on her life, but she said, “My kind of anguish is just nothing compared to the
anguish of the Rwandan people who I deal with everyday. That’s the key to keeping it all
in balance.”7
A statement similar to des Forges’—“My kind of anguish is just nothing
compared to the anguish of the Rwandan people”—appears in the acknowledgements
section of Sarah Stone’s novel The True Source of the Nile, part international human
rights drama, part love story set between the San Francisco Bay Area and Burundi, a
country bordering Rwanda and similar to Rwanda in ethnic makeup and civil conflict.
Stone writes in her afterword, “No attempt to understand what happened and what it
means, what provokes and continues the cycles of killings, is useful for the dead. But it is
a human urge to cut a gravestone, out of whatever materials we have” (289). Her novel
7 Personal Interview. Human Rights Watch. New York City. April 2004.
67 about an NGO worker’s experience in Burundi in the midst civil strife and warfare represents a cutting of a gravestone, yet, like des Forges, she acknowledges the limits of her ability to feel the suffering of the people in Burundi whose lives provide a large portion of the subject material for her novel. Des Forges and Stone, both Americans who worked for separate NGOs in troubled central African nations, represent two latter twentieth century trends in the intersection between humanitarianism, on the one hand, and arts and letters on the other. Both worked with NGOs at a time when NGOs were acquiring increasing importance in international relations and both had experiences that are now commonplace plotlines in contemporary fiction.
Both Stone and des Forges are part of the rise of the NGO in international relations, a phenomenon Bruce Robbins describes as “the dramatically increased impact, especially since the end of the cold war, of the so-called NGOs, or nongovernmental organizations—units that are precisely other than nations.
Before 1970, NGOs had no voice at the United Nations. But we can see that
something has changed when, for example, the French Communist Party petitions
the United Nations for status as a sanctioned NGO and wins, thus winning the
right to speak officially at the UN Social Summit. At the World Conference on
Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, attended by some five thousand representatives
of nine hundred organizations, these nongovernmental groups were arguably the
decisive force that broke the sterile, state-induced impasse between the First
World universalists and Third World relativists—especially, it should be noted,
NGOS from the so-called Third World. (139-140)
68 The second trend is related to the first: the appearance of novels about NGOs, and the experiences of international actors in global settings and international human rights dramas. Fictional accounts of the experiences of des Forges and Stone, women who work for NGOs or human rights organizations, has its own cataloguing category at the Library of Congress: “Women and human rights workers—Fiction.” A simple search returns
Underground People by Lewis Nkosi, City of Light by Michael Doane, Activist’s
Daughter by Ellyn Bache, Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, Burridge Unbound by Alan
Cumyn, Work of Idle Hands by Jonathon Platz, Alma by Jay Higginbotham, A Changed
Man by Francine Prose, Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo, The Secret Keeper by Paul
Harris, Angel of Vilcabamba by David E. Stuart, and Stone’s The True Source of the Nile.
Stuart writes about a human rights investigator in Peru while Prose begins with a neo-
Nazi who has a epiphany about brotherly love and joins a human rights organization.
Harris uses a familiar trope—that of a journalist from an industrialized nation (Britain) trying to make sense of the tragedy and conflict in a war-ravaged nation-state (Sierra
Leone). Caputo’s novel crosses Africa and focuses on the good acts and corruption of humanitarian workers, medical supply deliverers, airplane pilots, missionaries, and renegades in Sudan. Higginbotham’s Alma is about women’s rights as human rights;
Plazt tells a story about a Canadian working for Amnesty International. Cumyn’s protagonist creates his own human rights organization and truth commission on an island attacked by terrorists in the South Pacific. Nkosi’s fictitious tale is about the leader of the
South African National Liberation movement in the final years of apartheid. Ondaatje’s novel about human rights workers in Sri Lanka is well known and is the subject of most human rights and literature analyses currently dominating scholarship in the academy.
69 Below I provide an analysis of one of these novels—Stone’s True Source of the
Nile—with reference to one of its literary predecessor, Henrietta Buckmaster’s novel
Lion in the Stone (1968), a fictional account of an international crisis involving the
United Nations. I focus on Stone’s novel because it elucidates the relationship between
human rights and literature and represents a narrative that is trying to tell a story about
war and tragedy abroad from an American perspective without the American-ness of the text creating uncritical renderings of the relationship between the self and the other, between Americans and other human beings. Like Des Forges, she has told the story of another place, a war torn place, but she has not substituted her understanding for the emotions of the people she writes about—in this case, Burundi. The novel does not neatly portray the valiant efforts of a progressive American woman doing good on the Dark
Continent. It complicates the work of NGOs, the relationship of elites to former colonial outposts, the intentionality and goodwill of humanitarian workers.
I turn to the work of Buckmaster in order to demonstrate that there is precedent for Stone’s work, as well as that of Ondaatje, Eggers, and Coetzee. In unpacking texts by these authors I aim to expose elements that demonstrate what a fictional story about human rights and international affairs can do that is unique to the form. Ultimately, this chapter shows the significance of the NGO and humanitarian worker as tropes in human rights and literature. It also challenges those analyses of human rights stories that posit the work of mostly male writers as exemplary of the form. This type of thinking has appeared in James Dawes’ That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity
(Harvard University Press, 2007), Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc.: The World
Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham UP, 2007), and Lynn Hunt’s
70 Inventing Human Rights: A History, (New York: W. W. Norton and. Company, 2007).
This is not to deny the fact of male participation; rather, I see the omission of women writers as inaccurate and peculiar, particularly when the record suggests that they are centrally involved in the writing of these types of novels and stories. Dawes writes that his study focuses
on the most widely known authors of human rights fiction (J.M. Coetzee, Michael
Ondaatje, Dave Eggers) together with a small but, I believe, representative cluster
of novelists I’ve talked with who have significant experience in human rights and
humanitarian work—novelists who were in some sense compelled to write their
stories because of the experiences they had. (191)
Coetzee, Ondaatje, and Eggers are no more or less popular than Toni Morrison, Nadine
Gordimer and Louise Erdrich, who have all contributed novels that can be situated in the study of human rights and literature. In this case, something is problematic with Dawes’ methodology — his choosing of “the most widely known authors of human rights fiction” as well as “novelists I’ve talked with.” This ahistorical approach is just as troubling as the deeply historical analysis of Joseph Slaughter, which provides an excellent discussion of the philosophical deliberations behind the language of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but links the rise of personality in the nineteenth century Bildungsroman and international human rights law without an adequate examination of the translatlantic slave trade and what dehumanization of Africans and
African Americans meant for any attempts to define personality, citizen, human being or person in the nineteenth century. What Slaughter fails to point out is that the whole of the modern world found itself caught up in the throes of slavery for four centuries and even if
71 the nineteenth century signaled a remarkable effort to bring that the slave trade to an end, it still contained deeply troubling practices, traces and legacies that demand critical attention. Slavery and abolitionist efforts to end slavery have a central place in any discussion of human rights literature, whether we trace its Enlightenment origins, nineteenth-century relationship to the Bildungsroman and international human rights law, or twentieth century rise after World War II. Eleanor Roosevelt’s valiant championing of human rights must be told complete with the less admirable chapters about her dismissal of the demands made by U.S. minorities who wanted the Declaration to include protections related to their subjectivity. How can scholars make claims about the nineteenth century Bildungsroman or the contemporary work of Ondaatje, Eggers and
Coetzee as the creators of human rights stories when the historical record shows the earliest human rights stories included the likes of fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the nineteenth century and Buckmaster in the twentieth? Further, why do the literary works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century minority writers in the United States like William
Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Anny Petry get left out of these analyses? These kinds of omissions, I contend, relate directly to the sensational and misguided scholarly handling of contemporary human rights stories by global writers narrating human rights abuses in places other than western Europe and the United States. Ignoring a nineteenth- century human rights narrative that interrogates slavery or gender inequality, for example, results in a paternalistic and fetishizing reading of something like the Rwandan genocide in the twentieth. The message sent is that the telling of these stories is best handled by male writers from the metropole who, like Conrad before them, go into a dangerous place, chronicle their observations and then interpret those findings for the
72 folks sitting at home. For these reasons and caveats, I aim to place Stone’s and
Buckmaster’s novels into the critical discourse about human rights and literature. For
Slaughter, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost,
proposes a dialectical view of the relation between a text and a public sphere in
which the two are interconstitutive: the group determines what counts as an
interpretable object that in turn describes, through the collaborative activity of
interpretation, the shape and scope of the collective. If terrorism, insurrection, and
counterterrorism have rendered the national public sphere anamorphic, these
surrogate micropublics not only substitute for it in complex ways that cross
national, political, linguistic, ethnic, class, and gender boundaries; they also offer
a counterperspective on the nation-state that brings to light the deformation of the
national public sphere and the destruction of both a common, national public text
and a coherent social texture.
The disarticulation of grand historical narratives is reflected in the temporal and
spatial disjunctions and unconventional conjunctions that plot Ondaatje’s novel
and that replay, at the level of literary form, the recombinant associations that
spawn counterpublics. (192-93)
Slaughter’s useful analysis is otherwise indicative of several related studies on Ondaatje’s novel that undermine their own claims by eliding discussions of human rights and literature as they relate to the United States before September 11, 2001, and the susbsequent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. I will point to two recent examples of this tendency, both strikingly similar to Slaughter’s, both dissertations that show the popularity of this approach (human rights and literature through a postcolonial lens) and
73 the footing it continues to gain in academic circles. Both dissertations (now published
manuscripts) analyze the same writers and works: Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. The contributions are valuable but appear as if in a vacuum.
Second, both of these typical manuscripts rely on the postcolonial analyses of texts
written by writers from outside of the United States, in order to, in the end, offer a
critique of U.S. human rights policy. The external is meant to pressure the internal. I am
suggesting that the internal is already battling the internal—U.S. fiction battling U.S.
policies —and that battle can inform the external. In Imagining Justice: the Politics of
Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation (2009), Julie McGonegal sets out to
“profoundly rethink the way the way that justice is ordinarily conceived by contemplating its representation in the work of four novelists in particular: David Malouf in
Remembering Babylon (1993), Michael Ondaatje in Anil’s Ghost (1999), Joy Kogawa in
Obasan (1981), and J.M. Coetzee in Disgrace (1999)” (4):
Although none of the writers whose work I consider here idealizes fiction as, say,
an eminent expression of forgiveness and reconciliation, they nevertheless draw
attention to the capacity of the medium to enable their possibility. All four texts
cast profound suspicion on the potential for the sanitizing language of
bureaucratic discourse to facilitate person and social transformation. There is an
underlying recognition that official documents alone cannot efficaciously mediate
processes of reconciliation. Fiction, in this sense, supplements the public address
(and redress) of grievance and pain with a form of discourse that recognizes the
limits of legal remedy and that inhabits an affective register that may well aid in
the creation of a future in which forgiveness and reconciliation are possible. (14)
74 The writers she examines write about post-apartheid South Africa, Australian aborigines,
interned Japanese Canadians, and the Sri Lankan ethnic war. But in the end of her
project, she turns to a non text-based critique of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which
appears to have been the intent of her study all along:
unfolded in the context of the U.S.-led War on Iraq, and while that war has been
peripheral to the explicit content of my study, it has shaped its driving ideas in
immeasurable ways. Most obviously, it has confirmed my sense that the
abandonement of the language of reconciliation for a discourse of enemy warfare
and terrorism is a potentially fatal political decision. (186)
Another manuscript, Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the
Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid and J.M. Coetzee, by
Katherine Stanton, also analyzes Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Coetzee’s Disgrace.
Stanton analyzes four texts that, for her,
take as their subjects and their objects of scrutiny the unification of Europe, the
human rights movement, the AIDS epidemic, and the end of apartheid and the
South African state’s shift to neoliberalism. Like their authors—a Japanese-born
“Englishman,” a Canadian born in Sri Lanka, or, as Ondaatje calls it, Ceylon, an
Antiguan-born US resident, and an English-speaking white South African—they
possess international viewpoints. These works historicize the movements and
networks of the transnational or the global, keeping their sights on the multiple
histories of colonialism and imperialism. (1)
Testing the demands of justice against the shifting borders of the nation, the
fictions I have gathered here recognize that ethical and political agency overhangs
75 those borders. My readings demonstrate that they expand our capacities for ethical
and political action into a global or cosmopolitical field. But they do more than
that. Confronting the pervasiveness of ethical claims, the disjointing of the global
field of action, and the impediments to social redistribution, these works, I argue,
insist on a necessary negotiation between the ethical and the political. (3)
On the rare occasion when analyses like Stanton’s do incorporate the United States into their global critique, they do so merely in passing. Stanton, for example, argues that
“Ondaatje’s work makes clear that human rights violations do not happen only outside the West” (27). But this is an aside she makes to another text written by Ondaatje, not
Anil’s Ghost, the central focus of her study. Stanton argues that Ondaatje’s Coming
Through Slaughter, “(about the abuses endured by African-Americans in Louisiana) offers ambiguities and contingencies, gaps and pauses,” and “affirms the critical edge of the narrative: its evaluation of an unacknowledged debt to African-American cultural innovation” (27).
This remarkable aside is where Stanton should have begun as she herself acknowledges: she cites John Updike’s claim that Coming Through Slaughter “sets the tone for the fiction that follows” in Ondaatje’s oeuvre. Why cite the claim and leave it hanging?
Slaughter, McGonegal, Stanton, and Dawes all read Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and make important contributions to the critical field of human rights and literature; alas, the missed opportunities to understand the place of American fiction in their postcolonial work, even when they acknowledge its necessity, seriously damages the power of their arguments.
Conversely, an even more helpful reading of Anil’s Ghost is available in
SuzAnnie Keen’s Empathy and the Novel. Firstly, Keen uses the novel to show how
76 Ondaatje, through a narrative about the experiences of a human rights anthropologist in
Sri Lanka, shows the limits of empathy in human beings. Keen is weary of the claims for
empathy that many scholars are making for literature. But she shows this not only
through an examination of Ondaatje’s human rights novel, all the rage for postcolonial
critics, but also through the analysis of the work of Octavia Butler. Her novel Parable of the Sower deals with Los Angeles, drug-addiction, slavery, the American Civil War and a protagonist suffering from a brain disorder. Keen’s examination of empathy is innovative: she relies on social science and reader surveys to draw conclusions about the power of novels in evoking empathy in readers. Then she reads novels within and outside the United States to complicate the discussion. The omissions, asides, or inductive approaches of postcolonial theory are not present. She dares to think about Sri Lanka,
Amnesty International, human rights forensics, (from Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost) in relation to Los Angeles and Gettysburg (from Butler’s novel):
Embodied human characters, for both Octavia Butler and Michael Ondaatje,
present fearful dangers to one another. The extreme risk entailed in empathizing
or indentifying with others underscores the problems of empathic inaccuracy and
the amorality of empathetic responsiveness to suffering. The victim with whom
the empath resonates emotionally may be an assassin, an assailant, a person with
blood on his hands. According to both writers, not until the archaeological
surround of a fact can be established could one begin to know whether to trust an
empathetic impulse. That process may require too much time—even the distance
of historical regard—to be of any use in the immediate moment. In this sense it
77 may be a consoling fact to know that empathy rarely leads directly to altruism.
(159)
I have reviewed critical treatment of Anil’s Ghost in order to express a fundamental difference in my approach to reading the field of human rights and literature, an approach which I demonstrate below.
The True Source of the Nile is set between Healdsburg, Calif., and Burundi, a small central African nation bordered to the north by Rwanda, to the west by Congo and to the east by Tanzania. Healdsburg sits in the heart of Sonoma County, adjacent Napa
County in northern California’s lush wine country. Stone links these two worlds in a semi-autobiographical story about Annie, a thirtysomething human rights worker who leaves the comfortable world of Sonoma for war-torn Burundi to work as an AIDS prevention educator with a nongovernmental organization. In Burundi she meets and falls in love with Pierre, a Burundian man whose relationship with the people of his country is complicated by ethnic divisions imposed by former colonial powers, his birth into a royal klan, and his years spent pursuing an education in Paris. He is an elite within Burundian society, an official with the Ministry of Defense, and a pacifist whose ethnic affiliation sometimes trumps his allegiance to the nation. Several dramas unfold in the course of
Annie and Pierre’s relationship, and professional and personal lives.
A human rights story has the difficult task of creating equality among characters in a text, as I attempt to show through the example of The True Source of the Nile. By equality, I do not mean that every character should have the same political, social, cultural and legal recognition from the start of a story until the end. Rather, I mean the equality of recognition of characters, the author, readers, and every being associated with
78 the novel world, as human beings—the undeniable fact that both Huck and Jim in
Adventures for Huckleberry Finn, for example, are human despite the material and facts of history denying the humanity of one, affirming the humanity of the other. Some readers will resist this, but writers who author human rights stories try to address this problem in their fiction or at least problematize the inequality of actual human life and fictional renderings of human life, and make it a major theme of the novel. The novel, as a form, welcomes the writer’s intentionality, and, in fact, is unable to hold the prejudices imposed by states, societies and individuals, and authors themselves. A character might come from a wealthy background or hold an important position in his society, but the equality of fiction poses the possibility that the wealthy person’s life will not be regarded
as more important than a person facing poverty. Indeed, fiction allows a reversal, an
emphasis on the life that finds itself neglected in reality. It is not true that a mere
emphasis on lives in jeopardy in fiction brings that life into the public sphere. When Dave
Eggers assumes the narrative voice of a Sudanese refugee in What is the What, his narrative remains that of an American elite telling the story of a refugee who does not have the same social and cultural capital in the public sphere and marketplace of ideas.
This inequality means that Eggers must mediate on behalf of the Sudanese voices he is interested in providing with agency. But how does that mediation look and what are the strategies for bringing about equality? In the “The Proximity of the Other” section of his
Alterity and Transcendence, Levinas raises several of the issues I wish to address in The
True Source of the Nile:
My search for justice presupposes just such a new relation, in which all the excess
of generosity that I must have toward the other is subordinated to a question of
79 justice. In justice there is comparison, and the other has no privilege with respect
to me. Between persons entering into that relation, a relationship must be
established that presupposes comparison between them, i.e., presupposes a justice
and a citizenship. A limitation of that initial responsibility, justice nonetheless
marks a subordination of me to the other. With the arrival of the third party, the
problem of fundamental justice is posed, the problem of the right, which initially
is always that of the other. Jankélévitch worded it well: ‘We don’t have any right;
it is always the other who has rights.’ It was indispensable to know what number
two is in relation to number three, and number three in relation to number two.
Who comes first?
That is the main idea. I move from the order of responsibility, in which
even what isn't my business is my business, from mercy, to justice, which limits
that initial priority of the other that we started out from. (102-103)
The True Source of the Nile, I contend, is interested in Levinas’ “relation in which there is reciprocity, equality, between the members of a society.” The American human rights activist-protagonist Annie rejects membership in societies she has automatic entrance into, forms new societies and faces the rejection of societies she wishes to enter as part of the project of equality and reciprocity. Firstly, she seeks to create a society with
Jean-Pierre, the Burundian elite with whom she falls in love. The equality of their relationship is burdened by differences of race, nationality, gender, language, and familial obligation. The True Source of the Nile was first published in English, but the language of the world of the novel is French. Jean-Pierre speaks fluent French (a colonial legacy) as well as the local language Kirundi and the language of trade Kiswahili. He speaks
80 English “with difficulty.” Annie speaks “rapid but awkward French and a little Kiswahili,
so we always talked in French, with Kiswahili words thrown in” (9). French and English
are the official languages of human rights, and proceedings at the United Nations and
international criminal tribunals are always available at least in these two languages. In
international tribunals, witnesses and defendants have the right to speak in the language
they feel most comfortable for expressing their ideas. Thus, in a courtroom at the
International Criminal Court, for example, a trial may feature up to four languages at
once—French, English, the language of the accused, the language of the victim. The
public gallery includes devices that allow visitors to listen to the trial in any of the
languages. Simultaneous translations take place, making translation a major component
of international justice. The True Sources of the Nile embodies a similar linguistic complexity, reflecting the translation and synchronicity of ideas in colonial, native, local and trade languages. Stone writes a novel in English that is meant to portray a lexical order that is French and Kiswahili. The problem of language destabilizes the English of the text; indeed, English represents the language through which the story is told, but it does not solely account for the discourse of the novel and its linguistic worlds. Annie and
Jean-Pierre create their own language, made up of varieties of English, fluent French, halting French, and local languages. These languages allow for wider expression, each character relying on his or her knowledge of nuance to express ideas in one language they
feel they cannot in another. In contrast, Annie cannot take such liberties in the company
of her fellow American human rights workers, who express themselves in English only
and reify the dominance of the language, its inevitable hegemony. Annie’s boss at a
human right agency once finds himself frustrated with Annie’s movement between
81 languages, with her cultural awareness and code-switching, and exclaims, “’I wonder what your real native language is. Something they write on the moon, maybe’” (110-11).
I do not want to suggest that the problematizing of language is absolutely necessary for a human rights story. Instead, I aim to point out that destabilizing English in a narrative written in English for an English-speaking audience opens up the possibility of equality among characters in a human rights narrative. This problematizing does not necessarily mean perfect equality or remove the practical problem of linguistic difference. Often
Annie and Jean-Pierre struggle to understand particular words in the language of the other, particularly concerning marriage. Yet, they find it useful to express their love for one another using phrases drawn from all of the languages they know. Further, when discussions of human rights arise, the hegemonic presence of English and the complicity of human rights and English as global lingua franca is lessened. Jean-Pierre, a man from
Burundi, speaks in a western novel and is not overshadowed by the history of western ideas. Language, or the problem of language is one of the equating factors in the text. It attempts to recover an equality of human beings that has been lost over time, wars, self- interest, the rise of nation states. As Derrida points out concerning the relationship of the self and an other, the two “would not be together in a sort of minimal community—but one which is also incommensurable with any other—speaking the same language or praying for translation within the horizon of the same language, even were it so as to manifest a disagreement, if a sort of friendship had not already been sealed before any other contract: a friendship prior to friendships, an ineffaceable, fundamental, and bottomless friendship, the one that draws its breath in the sharing of a language (past or to come) and in the being-together that any allocution supposes, including a declaration
82 of war” (“The Politics of Friendship” 636). Indeed, that a human being from one place on earth could form a partnership with a human being from another place is a basic idea at the core of human activity. The quest for uniqueness, power, and diversity over centuries has led us to situations in which that simple act of forming a partnership has complicating factors of race, gender, ethnicity, religion and class. The task of the human rights story, then, is to remain respectful of these layers and what they have come to mean and contribute positively to human progress while at the same time returning to the notion of the equality of human beings in order to expose the corruptible war-mongering aspects of those layers.
Annie and Jean-Pierre are not only merged on the level of language, but they also form a discursive world in which they yearn for the equality of meaning and knowledge production. When she is with Jean-Pierre, Annie feels the “sense, again, of seeing in tandem, of being half of a two-part unit of perception and analysis” (5). Annie displays a physical attraction to Jean-Pierre that is at times ravenous—“I would have eaten raw on a stick, the heart of anyone who tried to keep us away from each other” (29)—, yet the relationship in the novel reflects more of a metaphysical connection that towers above their physical love making and objectifying of one another. This pleasure of the mind and body pushes them to exceed the limits of normative ethical deliberation occupying their respective communities, families and friends. Annie’s profession of love for a Burundian man bothers her sisters Margaret and Susan, who, from the family’s Sonoma home, ask,
“Is he foreign?” (29) and, “He isn’t a native, is he?” Annie responds to the first query with an irony consistent in her character throughout the text. She turns the notion of home on its head, forcing Susan’s worry of foreignness to be considered in the context of
83 another space, another home, the home of the other. Says Annie, “Not at home, he isn’t.
He would be here.” The label of foreign is what Stone and the novel want to resist, evident by the caricature of Susan’s naïve question. Foreign-ness that divides Sonoma and Burundi, white and black, American and African, is placed in a scene of ridicule, with Annie’s irony controlling the action. The ironic expression serves a release, a release from the immediate world, that world where, “Is he foreign,” would be answered with a simple, Yes, and not the re-ordering of home and our understanding of home. The transportability of home reconfigures the concept of the foreign, letting Susan know that
Jean-Pierre’s foreignness is as equally portable and contingent as her own. The ironic expression allows Annie to break away and respond from a distance. She is not beholden to the familiar colonial and otherizing discourse or naïveté that make, “Is he foreign?” or
“He isn’t a native, is he?” questions that people do not hesitate to ask. Margaret follows
Susan’s query about foreignness with a question about whether or not Jean-Pierre is a native, as if the answer to foreign would not suffice. Native here is a stand-in for backward, primitive, uncivilized, and, “is he?” represents Margaret’s greatest fear.
Margaret sat down at the table and took my hand. “Annie. It’s wonderful
to be in love. Congratulations. But think. Don’t say to yourself, ‘Margaret’s never
been anywhere, she can’t help being a bigot.’ Marriage is hard enough under any
circumstances. And when you try to put together such different backgrounds,
histories, cultures, expectations, even—especially—races ... now don’t stiffen up
on me. I’m talking to you in our family kitchen and don’t have to pretend. Do you
want to walk down the street and have everyone stare at the two of you forever?
You want your children to have to face racism their whole lives? What do you
84 have in common with this guy? Can you really imagine being eighty with him?”
(29)
Margaret’s ethical concerns are for how her sister’s union with a man from
Burundi will affect the public as well as the discrimination children of the union will encounter in the United States. She is not concerned about Annie or Jean-Pierre. She airs her views from the safety of the family kitchen, which the novel makes transparent. She has associated home with compliance with racial and cultural codes that encourage discrimination and division, and ethical discourse about those codes in private places
“where you don’t have to pretend.” In effect, she encourages hatred and silence. Annie breaks away with irony, humor and making light of the situation. She suggests that
Margaret need not list imagining “being eighty with him” as one of the reservations, as
“The average life expectancy in Burundi is still just over forty” (40). She has used an unfortunate fact about Burundi’s life expectancy rate to separate herself from the seriousness with which Margaret asks her to reconsider her relationship to Jean-Pierre.
After Annie’s irony, Margaret responds back, “’Oh, for Christ’s sakes, would you shut up?’”
Annie knows that trying to reason with her sisters will get her nowhere. Susan and
Margaret represent real attitudes in the reading public of novels about human rights and certainly of the larger public that does not read these types of novels. Margaret’s concerns are partially legitimate. What would be the experience of a child of an interracial marriage between a Burundian and American citizen living in the United
States? Yet the philosophical basis of her concern is troubling. She reacts to what she sees as Annie’s attempt to “put together such different backgrounds, histories, cultures,
85 expectations, even—especially—races.” Annie sticks to her primordial motivations for
seeking out Jean-Pierre when she set eyes on him at a humanitarian dinner in Burundi:
“’He’s the smartest, most perceptive man I’ve ever known. Extremely passionate about
the things he cares about, but open to reason. Reserved. But he can also be really funny. I
want to spend my life with him’” (29). Two of her three sisters find the idea absurd and
tell her so. The third, enlightened Lizzie, takes on a “pretense of ignorance” when
Margaret and Susan begin to quiz Annie about her love interest. Annie has appealed to
Jean-Pierre’s perception, reason, humor and passion, qualities human beings have prior to
the categories preoccupying Margaret: backgrounds, histories, cultures, expectations, and
races. The discussion between Annie and her sisters joins in the process of equating the
humanity of characters in the text. Margaret and Susan expose themselves as racists but
they remain human. The text rejects their rejection of Jean-Pierre’s human-ness and
underscores Annie’s attempt to show two seemingly different human beings as so
enjoined that they perceive, reason and analyze together. From the work of W.E.B. Du
Bois to contemporary narratives of interracial unions, literature across the world, from
Germany to Brazil and certainly in America, has been, in part, occupied with the
possibility of mixed-race unions and how they might represent a more unified world, perhaps even a race in which everyone has melded into a similar skin color. While The
True Sources of the Nile does not elide the politics of black and white sexual and racial politics, it does seem to invest great time and energy in explicating the sensual, spiritual and metaphysical joining of beings. That does not entail a discussion of so-called interracial union or mixing over time and theories about what that does to appearance and ability; rather it is focused on the human being-ness prior to race, class and even gender.
86 Annie wants Jean-Pierre’s soul, the “sense, again, of seeing in tandem, of being half of a two-part unit of perception and analysis” (5).
Margaret employs a definition of home that contrasts with Jean-Pierre’s. She rightfully acknowledges the kitchen as a space for real talk, but then shows that real talk means hammering out the parameters of difference and white supremacy. She says, “I’m talking to you in our family kitchen and don’t have to pretend,” and alludes to a sacred
“family” structure that Annie threatens by bringing in someone “foreign” or “native.”
Jean-Pierre’s notion of home differs:
I asked, “Jean-Pierre, when you think of ‘home,’ is it your family? Or a
particular place and the memories of that place? What did you miss most when
you were at school? Or when you’re in France or Belgium?”
He considered this. The open, engaging upper half of his face, his compact
forehead and nose, gave him a boyish look when he was laughing. When he was
serious, though, the way his long jaw and round chin pushed forward could make
him appear stubborn, even when he was just being thoughtful.
“My first instinct is to say my sisters and brothers, my elders, my friends.
Or bananas in palm oil. Or the gray light after rain. But perhaps, most of all, it is
the sense of what I am here, the way in which I am a part of a structure and my
place and tasks are clear. In Europe, I am only another African. I become visible
merely as a representative of a culture, a symbol of immigration in Paris, and so
on.”
“Almost the opposite for me. Because in the U.S., I'm just another
American.”
87 “So this may have to do with the smallness of Burundi. Another
characteristic, for me, of home. It is all known. Nothing here can be unfamiliar.”
(12)
Jean-Pierre anticipates Margaret’s and Susan’s fetishizing attitudes about Africans and other foreigners. He realizes he is invisible in the West, and becomes visible only through tropes and metaphors that he need not be present to confirm. His likeness is known in
Paris even before he arrives. In the United States, Margaret and Susan have cast him as foreign and native long before he ever step foot in the United States. Jean-Pierre places home at first in the familial and friendly (sisters and brothers, my elders, my friends), then in the natural/organic of life (bananas in palm oil, the gray light after rain).
Ultimately he places home as a type of comfort with the self: consciousness of one’s existence: “the sense of what I am here” (12). He knows this existential agency will not be available to him in the United States or Western Europe, where, “I am only another
African. I become visible merely as a representative of a culture, a symbol of immigration in Paris, and so on.” In other words, Jean-Pierre is seen as a problem. He prefers the familiarity of Burundi where he can be part of the “known” and does not risk being part of the “unfamiliar” or disregarded.
While two of Annie’s sisters reject Jean-Pierre on principle, Jean-Pierre’s sister
Christine forms a community with Annie, despite their seeming differences. Initially competing for the mind and heart of Jean-Pierre, they unite against his African male chauvinism and complicate the politics of kinship, heterosexism and marriage. The categories of male, female, African, American, white, black, become hazy, subjugated to basic idea of human interaction. Their dialogues, exchanges and intimacy show how the
88 equality of character in a text can transcend difference: in other words, Christine and
Annie come from what many would describe as different worlds, Burundi and Sonoma, but the novel has provided a space for them to be recognized as human. Their initial encounters are marked by jealousy, distrust and suspicion. Annie is a white woman from the United States loving a man from war-torn Burundi, a man with deep commitments to family, community and his small nation, a place he claims because it is “known” and not
“unfamiliar.” Christine and Jean-Pierre have a close relationship, closer than any other sibling unions in their family. Christine’s suspicion echoes the suspicion any sibling might have for brother’s lover, but relationship between Jean-Pierre and Annie poses even greater challenges and reason for concern. Not only does she represent the United
States and the West, but she is also a human rights worker, symbolic of the human being from an elite background who comes Africa for a “professional” career in human rights.
During a dinner, Christine says to Annie,
“I don't mean anything against you. I have a fondness for all the charity
workers, escaping their bad love affairs into the exotic life of darkest Africa, and
meanwhile so earnest and full of efforts on our behalf.”
“Are you classing me with the charity workers, then?”
“Would you consider yourself a profiteer?”
I said dryly, “It could be argued that human rights is a question of self-
interest in the end. That a world where rights are suppressed is unlivable.”
“And there are no human rights violations in your own country.”
“You might not deny that the situation is nothing like as urgent," I said.
And then, to her silent waiting, “To fight for human rights in the U.S. takes either
89 great patience for organizational work or considerable money, and I have neither.
And, in fact, by the time a person has considerable money, he or she has usually
talked himself out of the necessity. The world begins to seem very fine as it is,
and preservation becomes the order of the day.”
She laughed then, unexpectedly, and, switching to the familiar for the first
time with me, said, “Tu es assez sympa, mzungu” —a slangy mixture of Parisian
French and central African Kiswahili, which I would translate, very loosely, as
“You're OK, white girl.” Though the gender in mzungu isn’t specified. (87)
Christine calls out Annie and her reason for being in Burundi. It is important to remember
David Kennedy’s essay, “The International Human Rights Movement? Part of the
Problem,” in which he calls the human rights profession a “mechanism for people to
think they are working ‘on behalf of’ less fortunate others, while externalizing the
possible costs of their decisions and actions.” For him, this leads to a “remove between
human rights professionals and the people they purport to represent,” which “can
reinforce a global divide of wealth, mobility, information and access to audience.”
Christine has identified Annie as one of these professional workers or “charity workers.”
I have suggested that Christine’s question is one that the human rights community rarely
asks itself or attempts to dissect in the mAnnier of Kennedy’s essay or Stone’s novel. Do
elites from the United States and western Europe genuinely consider the implications of
their adventures in developing countries? This is not to discount the tremendous good that takes place through humanitarianism. As Christine and Annie continue their exchange, Annie pushes back, readily accepting Christine’s challenge and defending the genuine motivations behind her work abroad. This does not mean she defends the human
90 rights movement part and parcel; on the contrary, she critiques the practices of both
people in the elite spaces providing the humanitarianism as well as the targets of that
humanitarianism. Responding to Christine’s query about the presence of human rights
violations in the United States, Annie points out that the United States is guilty of human
rights violations, though not as “urgent” as the crises taking place in other parts of the
world. The ready response is neither defensive nor dishonest and the beneficiary is the
human rights movement. This is an example of art criticizing life, the novel serving as a
forum for helping us see an encounter the human rights movement too often fails to
facilitate on its own. The American Annie and the Burundian Christine work through
their differences, neither compromising their respect beliefs. Christine begins the
conversation by addressing Christine in formal French; by the end she has switched to the
familiar and then Kirundi. She has reverted to slang, completely welcoming Annie into
her world. Like Annie and Jean-Pierre, Annie and Christine have forged a kind of bond;
they are different in innumerable ways, but the equality of fiction allows all of their lives
to matter in the text.
I have underscored the point that equality does not mean constant agreement and
harmony among the characters who are part of a story about human rights. Conflict, in
fact, is the genesis of these novels and that conflict is often the place where the human
rights novel has its most productive encounters. Christine and Annie, as I have said, share separate fierce loves for Jean-Pierre, described as Christine’s brother and Annie’s lover, but in reality a human being who complicates those boundaries, forcing readers to rethink normative interpretations of kinship and erotic love. Christine is his favorite sister, raising questions about what it means to identify one sister as the closest among others. Annie
91 loves Jean-Pierre on a metaphysical level and the metaphysical love they share has
Christine as apart. When Jean-Pierre and Annie have a conversation about equality among men and women, Jean-Pierre’s sexism threatens to mar his nobility in the text. But his antiquated views do not go un-interrogated and the interrogation represents another moment in which The True Sources of the Nile attempts to meditate on inequality.
I slid my spoon into the fork he was holding, pushing the fork into his
finger, stabbing him accidentally. We both began to laugh.
“How vicious women are.” He held out a knife, as if to defend himself.
“Is that what you think?” But I was uncomfortable. He saw this and put
down the knife.
“What I think about women—I struggle with myself. I have two minds,
two sets of beliefs. The one I grew up with. And the one I acquired at the
Sorbonne. My education tells me that women are not inferior to men, that the
workers are not inferior to us. I read Das Kapital, you know, and John Stuart Mill
and Simone de Beauvoir. All of that. But my feelings come from my childhood. I
feel that you’re inferior to me. And I also feel this about Phillippe, Deo, and so
on.”
“And Christine?” I thought, So I’m jealous of her, am I? 1 hadn’t known it
until that moment. (88)
He looked at me more sharply.
“You see? I underestimate you. No, not Christine. She is me, so how can
she be inferior?”
92 I was silent. I hated what he was saying, but he was so earnestly beautiful, so full of light, trying to identify the truth. After a moment, I took up a pair of knives, adding them to the tunnel between our towers.
“Maybe I will change your mind about women. Over time.”
“Yes,” he said. “I am hoping for this. At least, the part of me I prefer is hoping.”
“There you go, Jean-Pierre. When you say that, I think, well, he has no intention of changing. And am I to encourage this?”
He ducked his head down, grinning sheepishly, so that 1 could see what he must have looked like as a small child in trouble.
I said, “Explain to me: what makes a woman inferior?”
His expression became serious, and he started and stopped once or twice.
“If I say that a woman is more emotional, that she is not capable of the same bravery, you will point out to me the women who run countries, do scientific work, everything I know. So it is ... it is about boldness. It is about making the decision that has to be made.”
I want to say that I have seen women, be ruthless on behalf of their children, or their ambition, but then it seems to me that you’re defining the terms of superiority. What about kindness, compassion, wisdom, humor, imagination?
Why is bravery the ultimate value?”
“Do you believe that women are kinder and more compassionate?”
He had a small grin of impending triumph.
Well, I do,” I said.
93 “Because they are mothers? Because they have the biology to nurture, the
instincts selected for by tens of thousands of years of being patient with infants
and children?” He was pressing home his point, and, even as I nodded,
reluctantly, he said, “And you believe that these qualities are superior.”
We both began to laugh. He pointed a fork at me.
“But if, at the beginning of our conversation, (89) I had said to you that
you believe women to be superior, you would have denied it.”
“I believe that either sex is capable of any emotion of behavior,” I said,
but Jean-Pierre was still laughing. “Too late,” he said. “You have given yourself
away.” (90)
Jean-Pierre’s troubling views highlight a serious problem with the international
human rights movement. The exchange between Jean-Pierre and Annie begins and ends
with laughter, but the laughter is meant to bookend a pressing human rights issue.
Couched in an encounter marked by love and humor, Stone takes the opportunity to critique the prevalence of gender inequality and sexism in human rights culture. If Jean-
Pierre is one of the more enlightened men working on behalf of human rights, imagine the impact of those who do not share his relatively progressive views.
In an influential article written 15 years ago but even more applicable today,
Charlotte Bunch argues that the “human rights community must move beyond its male- defined norms in order to respond to the brutal and systematic violation of women globally” (237). Decrying the human rights lawyers and activists who act as gatekeepers to what is recognized as a human rights issue, Bunch calls for a new human rights paradigm that addresses women’s rights as political and civil rights; women’s rights as
94 socioeconomic rights; women’s rights and the law; and the possibility for a feminist transformation of human rights. While progress has been made in each of these areas since 1990 (the case of South African women is one example), radical change remains necessary. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has called for “the establishment of a new, independent United Nations fund or program for the empowerment of women and gender equality.” In addition to Johnson Sirleaf, other influential human rights activists, scholars and state officials have called for a shift in thinking about human rights and women’s rights including Susan Rice, United States Ambassador to the United Nations,
Nkosazana Clarice Dlamini-Zuma, foreign minister of South Africa, Benedita da Silva, the first female senator of Brazil and governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Gabrielle
Kirk McDonald, former president and presiding judge of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Gay McDougall, the United Nations independent expert on minority issues and former head of Global Rights, Dambisa Moyo,
Zambian author and former World Bank economist, and many others. In addition to advocating on behalf of a global citizenry these women have placed special emphasis on the empowerment of women and children, and recognized the ways in which war, conflict and inequality have uniquely impacted women and children’s lives. They have relied not only on the political arena to resituate human rights, but also, as Catherine
Powell argues for, “new modes of deliberation over human rights” that go “beyond the formal political realm.” Arguably, their positions have brought increasing voice to traditionally neglected segments of society and negotiated on their behalf in political, legal, economic and cultural spheres. The True Sources of the Nile exposes what Johnson
Sirleaf calls “women’s access to- and participation in-decision-making processes” in a
95 world where women and children remain “the poorest and least educated people
everywhere.”
Annie’s conversation with Jean-Pierre ends with laughter, but elsewhere in the
novel she cannot make light of his discrimination.
He said, “I suppose you want me to chatter like a woman.” I had a flash of
thinking, I can’t seriously want to marry this testosterone case. When there are a
million sensitive Californians back home. I could meet a man in a cafe, reading
about meditation or the emotional capabilities of animals—fleshy, strong-nosed
face, hair pulled back in a ponytail. He would be smiling, highly educated and full
of theories about metaphysical matters. Respectful of my feelings. Humorous,
gentle, peaceful to come home to—and, above all, familiar. I felt a rush of distaste
for this imaginary man. Jean-Jean-Pierre is the only man.
I said, “Didn’t you want me to help you redefine your ideas about women?
The concept that talking equals chattering, for instance.”
He turned away, showing displeasure at my tone of voice, waiting to be
coaxed into a good mood. Christine lay on her back, holding her book up to shield
her face from the sun. She appeared to be reading, but she had a little smile on her
face. I stretched out on my stomach and picked up my own book. I was not going
to baby him. I was thinking, just then, that on the whole I'd rather marry Christine
or Zöe, and that it was inconvenient to prefer men to women, romantically and
sexually. (98)
Jean-Pierre, Christine and Annie are at the beach, and Jean-Pierre’s comments nearly ruin their good time. Sexism poses a major threat to the human rights movement, and Stone
96 has chosen to wrap the difficult subject up in the safety of kinship and romance, the lines of which blur in the novel, rendering Jean-Pierre, Christine and Annie in what is virtually a single union. How can genuine conversations about human rights take place in the public sphere with sexism so rampant and tens of countries around the world still silencing the voice of women? Does the novel create a space for non-polarizing discussion of the topic? Jean-Pierre speaks in The True Sources of the Nile, but the components of his sexism do not override the voice of female characters. Annie, though she loves him and considers him so irresistible that even in her most angry moments, “she felt herself wanting to punish him, but couldn’t,” challenges Jean-Pierre (99) on several fronts. Christine challenges him indirectly. As Jean-Pierre points out, he cannot see her as inferior because they come from the same womb. She is a part of him, he, a part of her, and his theory of the sexes falls apart when he is confronted with kinship. Christine finds
Jean-Pierre and Annie’s disagreement amusing, a gesture that Annie says “would have made him furious, coming from anyone else, but he smiled at her” (99). Yet, Annie forms a kinship with Christine and even imagines herself in a union with her, if only she did not have an attraction to Jean-Pierre. The union of Annie, Christine and Jean-Pierre is a re- articulation of the parameters of kinship, friendship, and erotic love. Jean-Pierre finds his lover inferior because of her gender but refuses to label his sister inferior for the same reason. He seems to have privileged kinship over gender, yet, in reality, his confusion has only shown the limitations of the categories in thinking about equality, knowledge, desire and ability. Women are equal, Jean-Pierre, says, if we are talking about one’s sister; women are not equal, he says, if we are a talking about one’s lover. Yet, women who are lovers are also sisters to their respective brothers. Jean-Pierre’s nonsense represents his
97 multiple struggles with masculinist codes in human interaction. Clearly, there are spheres
in which he neither has to discuss nor justify his sexism and its bizarre underpinnings. He
can sit with other men or even with women who might not have the agency to speak in
his presence fearing the backlash that can take place in their families, communities and
professions. In other words, the female maids and servants who work for Jean-Pierre are
not speaking in a mAnnier similar to Annie’s. Jean-Pierre is indeed a tyrant, an adorable
one to Annie, but the limits of his tyrannical ways are conjointly set by Annie and
Christine. After the beach, the three brainstorm a getaway trip, and Christine and Annie
suggest places like Bali or a boat ride on the Amazon. Pierre responds,
“You are both soft. Women.” He waited to see if we would respond to this
provocation. “You want to be warm. I will leave you to your rivers and beaches,
and I will go to Antarctica. To live in the snow, to carry out research, always
fighting against the cold.”
“In fact,” said Christine, “we should all go to Paris together. Jean-Pierre,
why don’t you find our what we can do?”
At this point, Jean-Pierre has taken on a performative role, resembling a character out of an Ernest Hemingway novel or Peter Matthiessen adventure. Christine ignores his ploy: she knows her brother does not mean what he says. Annie, satisfied with her part in the debate, spent “the night at Jean-Pierre’s house, our small quarrel forgotten” (99). Sexism
poses a challenge to human rights culture and requires candid conversations about gender
politics. Part of this process requires a rethinking of normative orders of kinship and
romantic relationships as well as hierarchies and networks of power. Jean-Pierre’s
awareness of his ganwa or princely duties has him deflecting colonialist ways one
98 moment, affirming them the next. His sister and lover challenge him like no other human
beings can. And he listens and responds.
The discourse of human rights is an important exegetic tool and meta-text in The
True Sources of the Nile. The novel breathes new life and argument into debates about
the relevance of human rights treaties that have become stale and polarized. One group
champions treaties whereas another questions their foundations and enforceability. The
novel takes neither side, but places the debate into the discourse of the novel already
taking place. And, as I have argued throughout, the discourse of the novel is one in which
equality of characters is more conceivable than equality of individuals in the public
sphere. Instead of two human rights scholars making passionate and even well-supported
arguments about human rights treaties at a conference attended by fellow elites and
members of the professional human rights community, the novel offers a neutral
discussion about the relevance of treaties woven into a narrative about love, triumph,
violence and human solidarity. According to Hathaway, “Declarations of rights that are
not easily defined and measured, or that are not accompanied by an effective plan for
securing true remedies for violations of those rights, may actually be counterproductive”
(2023). Stone contemplated including the entire text of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights in her novel but opted instead to place different Articles throughout the
narrative.8 Because the novel appears after a half-century of progress in building human
rights paradigms in the social and political sphere, the possibility for equality among
characters is greatly enhanced. Again, I must underscore that by equality, I mean,
recognition as human. The absence of such an extra-textual discourse in the nineteenth
8 Personal Interview with the Author. Berkeley, Calif. Feb. 16, 2009.
99 century underscores the feats accomplished by writers who relied on sentimentality,
humor and satire to use fiction as a form to protest against slavery and imperialism. They
did not have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights or human rights culture to form
the backdrop to scenes of outrage. Torture, lynching, rape, slavery and the like could not be denounced by characters quoting treaties and global mandates. Yet, the availability of these treaties presents another challenge for the artist who does not want the novel to come across as propaganda or overtly political. Stone wanted to include the entire
Universal Declaration of Human Rights but opted not to; instead, particular articles (1, 3,
8 and 16) are carefully woven into sometimes humorous, sometimes serious scenes with
relevant content. When Annie announces to the most progressive of her three sisters
Lizzie that she will elope with Jean-Pierre, Lizzie asks why must their union be kept a
secret. Contrary to Margaret and Susan, Lizzie, a natural healer by profession, approves
of Jean-Pierre and Annie’s wedding. Asks Lizzie,
“Why is this a secret?”
“So no one will make a big to-do about it. He doesn’t want that. We’ll tell
people Thursday night.”
“Wow,” she said. She silently dried a dish, over and over, wiping the
towel in slow circles. “I’m glad you told me, at least. Can I help you buy a dress,
or did you do that too?”
I put my arm around her shoulder and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “‘The
family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to
protection by society and the State.’ Article 16, Universal Declaration.”
100 “Could you stop? Everyone here already believes in human rights, Annie.
You don't have to talk us into it.” But she was smiling as she rested her head on
my encircling arm. (240)
Lizzie, in her claim that everyone “here already believes in human rights,” is referring to
the relative safety she has known growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, birthplace
to the United Nations and several progressive racial, ethnic, environmental, and women’s
movements, and a relative seedbed for left politics and social justice campaigns. In this
sense, Lizzie makes human rights treaties banal and passé, idealism that no one in their
right mind would go against. It is like what Baldwin says of writing against racial
oppression in his essays. Who is going to publicly disagree? Yet, in Lizzie and Annie’s
own household lies the threat to Annie’s desire to build a family with a Burundian man.
Annie is highly skeptical of the northern California brand of liberalism. When Jean-Pierre
angers her with her sexism, she immediately thinks of the typical northern California
leftist, educated at Stanford and Berkeley, well traveled. But she immediately dismisses
the idea of this human being as necessarily more enlightened than the Jean-Pierres of the world. He may be so on the surface, but his life is equally infused with its share of masculinist, implicit, accidental or overt, allegiances to inequality.
Lizzie tells Annie that everyone “here” already believes in human rights, but this is not true and does not even apply to her own household. Margaret and Susan are not believers—there understanding of family would not include a union between Annie and
Jean-Pierre. The limitations of the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that
Annie quotes— “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”—is rendered useless in the private
101 domestic sphere, which does not bode well for what will happen upon entrance into the public realm. Annie asks Lizzie to keep the union a secret, hardly an allusion to the transparency and protection the Article suggests. According to Hathaway,
In recent decades, faith in the power of international law to shape nations’ actions has led to a focus on the creation of international law as a means to achieve human rights objectives. The treaties that have resulted may have played a role in changing discourse and expectations about rights, thereby improving the practices of all nations. Yet, based on the present analysis, ratification of the treaties by individual countries appears more likely to offset pressure for change in human rights practices than to augment it. The solution to this dilemma is not the abandonment of human rights treaties, but a renewed effort to enhance the monitoring and enforcement of treaty obligations to reduce opportunities for countries to use ratification as a symbolic substitute for real improvements in their citizens’ lives. (2025)
Hathaway points out the danger of Lizzie’s belief that “Everyone here already believes in human rights.” Indeed, if everyone believes, then not much energy is necessary for implementation and treaties become a stand-in for progress. Countries adapt an
“everybody here already believes” attitude and ratify treaties for the ethos or atmosphere of human rights they bring about. That safety Lizzie alludes to exists in spirit only.
At this point, it is necessary to be more specific about the conflict in Burundi in order to develop points I want to make about NGOs, novels and human rights abuses.
Burundi lies in the Great Lakes region of central Africa and has a history closely related with Rwanda. Similar to Rwanda, the country is populated by members of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa ethnic groups, though the rigidity and/or fluidity of those categories is the
102 source of contentious debate that requires an analysis of colonialism, social status, tribalism, and genocide. Many people from Rwanda and Burundi refuse to acknowledge the categories, as they consider them a source of colonial-imposed violence and division.
They prefer instead to refer to people from their countries as, respectively, Rwandans and
Burundians.
However, legal, social, political and historical documents, varying in nuance, continue to employ the categories. In both Rwanda and Burundi, roughly ninety percent of the population identifies as Hutu, 10 percent as Tutsi, and a small number as Twa.
Originally distinctions that had more to do with class and wealth than ethnicity, the ethnic identifications were promulgated during colonialist rule, which led to a number of power struggles and conflicts throughout Rwandan and Burundian history.
Prior to colonial rule, Burundi had a monarchical structure with a king and several princes occupying different regions of the country’s borders, which remain roughly the same as the republic in the present. Whereas analysis of the Rwandan genocide has made clear the significance of Hutu-Tutsi divisions to the cause of that tragedy, Burundi did not traditionally feature a similar clear-cut divide. Rather, power struggles took place between ganwa or princely parties who considered it in their best interest to gain as much
Hutu and Tutsi support as possible in order to stay in power. Pierre, Annie’s love interest in The True Sources of the Nile is considered a member of the ganwa, a distinction still relevant in the late twentieth century, when the events of the novel take place.
Burundi was part of the German colony of East Africa from 1889 to 1918 and under Belgian rule from 1918 to 1962, when both Burundi and Rwanda gained
103 independence. According to Rene Lemarchand, author of several books on the Great
Lakes region, colonial rule included
crushing burdens imposed on the masses through the familiar litany of prestations,
or obligations-ranging from corvee labor and porterage to compulsory crop
cultivation and taxes-as well as the sheer brutality of the "pacification." The net
effect was to greatly intensify the potential for conflict inherent in the traditional
order: conflict not only between poor and rich, cultivators and pastoralists, Hutu
and Tutsi, but also, and most important, between princes (ganwa), especially
between Bezi and Batare, each seeking to manipulate the colonial authorities to
bolster their territorial claims as well as their claims to recognition. (42)
Soon, however, the Hutu-Tutsi division did gain ground in Burundi. For
Lemarchand, whose study focuses on myth-making, collective memory, and their relationship to violence, “In the collective psyche of Hutu and Tutsi, two genocides compete for recognition-and for condemnation: the 1972 genocide of Hutu in Burundi and the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. Far from canceling each other, the result has been an unbridgeable moral distance between Hutu and Tutsi” (xii).
In the case of Burundi’s 1972 tragedy, intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic struggles for
state power led to a Tutsi-dominated government structure, even though the majority of
Burundi’s population was Hutu. A Hutu insurgency in 1972 was followed up by Tutsi
repression of Hutu and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Thus to the 1993
preface to the first edition of Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, Lemarchand would
write,
104 Nowhere else in Africa has so much violence killed so many people on so many
occasions in so small a space as in Burundi during the years following
independence. Since 1965, when thousands perished in what turned out to be only
the premonitory sign of even greater horrors, Burundi society has been torn by
ethnic conflicts of unprecedented scale in the country's history. The 1972
bloodbath took the lives of an estimated one hundred thousand-some say two
hundred thousand-in what must be seen as one of the most appalling human rights
violations in the annals of postindependence Africa. Informed estimates suggest
that as many as twenty thousand may have been killed by government troops in
1988 and another three thousand in 1991. Seldom have human rights been
violated on a more massive scale, and with more brutal consistency, anywhere
else on the continent. Whether the demons of regionalism and ethnicity can be
exorcised long enough for democracy to put down roots remains an open
question. (xxv)
A moment of hope shined through the record of terror in June 1993 when Burundi held democratic presidential elections. The transition from violence to democracy was widely trumpeted as a model for other African nations aspiring to end corruption and civil turmoil. Alas, Burundi’s window on peace was brief:
in the early hours of October 21, when units of the Tutsi-dominated army stormed
the presidential palace and took into custody and subsequently killed President
Ndadaye, along with two of his closest collaborators, Pontien Karibwami and
Gilles Bimazubute, respectively president and vice president of the National
Assembly, and three of his ministers, while the remaining others, including Prime
105 Minister Sylvie Kinigi, sought refuge in the French Embassy. As the news of
Ndadaye's assassination reached the hills, Hutu supporters of the Frodebu were
seized by a collective rage that transformed almost every Tutsi in sight (and not a
few Hutu supporters of the Uprona) into a legitimate target for ethnic cleansing.
Tens of thousands of innocent Tutsi civilians, including women and children,
were hacked to pieces or burned alive. No less horrific was the retribution visited
by Tutsi soldiers on Hutu communities, causing a huge exodus of refugees to
neighboring countries. (xxxi)
Lamarchand says, “the picture that emerges is one of unadulterated savagery. In one commune after another, scores of men, women, and children were hacked to pieces with machetes, speared or clubbed to death, or doused with kerosene and burned alive” (xiv).
The True Sources of the Nile opens on the eve of these historic elections in
Burundian history as well as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a massive killing spree that involved brutal rapes, torture, dismemberment, and the burial alive of victims. Annie, who arrived to the country initially as an AIDS prevention specialist, tires of her work and joins another organization, FreeAfrica!, focused on advocacy. She and her new boss
Jack “met at a dinner-dance at one of the American embassy houses, and he’d noticed the way I listened, the way people told me things they perhaps hadn’t meant to. In desperation, he’d offered me the job. Since the funding for my condom project had appeared to be on the verge of drying up altogether, and since I passionately wanted a change from public health work and AIDS testing, I’d accepted” (48).
The ease and randomness with which Annie finds an advocacy position symbolizes the loose unregulated and undefined nature of NGOs in the international
106 human rights movement. The dinner-dance, the embassy house, networking, NGOs in
desperate need of bodies, instant job offers—all are characteristic of how the NGO world
sometimes operates. For some, the deregulation and independence is a great asset. The
True Sources of the Nile interrogates that unregulated independence. According to Gareth
Evans, former president and chief executive officer of the International Crisis Group,
NGOs can deliver a whole new level of response that is beyond any government’s
capacity to provide. Governments just carry too much baggage. They are not
necessarily very good at divorcing humanitarian aid from other, cruder national-
interest objectives. Governments are not very good, often, at even the basic
analysis of the causes of a conflict or potential conflict because so often they see
things through the veil of the accumulated in-house culture. So right across the
spectrum, whether you’re talking about thinkers, talkers, or doers—and the NGOs
in the peace business cover that entire spectrum—they do have a role to play if
they’re performing their functions well. (Foreign Policy 36, 38)
I follow Keck and Sikkink in defining NGOs broadly as “private, voluntary, nonprofit groups whose primary aim is to influence publicly some form of social change,” (6) and equally recognize the need to nuance this definition depending on the complex characteristics of singular organizations. Fisher emphasizes the desire for
“transformations of relationships of power” (445) among NGOs, and suggests “we question the selective use of examples to illustrate the claimed advantages of these organizations, unpack the asserted generalizations about the relative advantages of
NGOs, and attend to the ideology and politics of both the associations and the analysts”
(447). He distinguishes, to provide a partial list, among community-based organizations,
107 people's organizations, grass-roots organizations, intermediary support organizations, membership support organizations, grass-roots support organizations, government- organized NGOs, quasi-autonomous NGOs, Northern NGOs, Southern NGOs, voluntary organizations, and private voluntary organizations. Similarly, NGOs cannot be viewed as new phenomenon; Sikkink and Smith, for example, identify the Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights (1839) as one of the first and argue that current NGOs can be contextualized by looking at parallels to the women's suffrage, labor organizing and anti-slavery movements. One way to understand the formation and interaction of
NGOs is to use the framework of transnational advocacy networks set out by Keck and
Sikkink. Instead of viewing NGOs as operating in vacuous spaces, they, like international relations constructivists, emphasize and “draw upon sociological traditions that focus on complex interactions among actors, on the intersubjective construction of frames of meaning, and on the negotiation and malleability of identities and interests” (4). These networks can wield soft power through the politics of information, symbolism, accountability and leverage. Similarly, they can harness their impartiality and independence into powerful assets.
Networks use the international arena as a stage or mirror to hold state and
international organization behavior up to a global judgment about
appropriateness. They attempt to display or publicize norm-breaking behavior to
embarrass public authorities and private firms so they will conform to norms.
Human rights activists have called this action the 'mobilization of shame.'
Activities that might have stayed hidden before the advent of transnational
networks are exposed to the glare of international scrutiny. In these efforts to
108 publicize norm breaking, the media can be a crucial outlet and an ally of networks
and much network activity is directed at gaining media attention. (16)
Annie is hired because she can coax people into revealing information that they
should not reveal. Part of her job entails going to fancy receptions and discussing politics
and poverty with global elites. She might be at an embassy standing next to a “handsome
swimming pool, drinking imported South African Cabernet” or “discussing the
continuing economic implications of reunification with a junior assistant to the German
ambassador” (49). When she sets eyes on Jean-Pierre at one these events, Annie says her
boss Jack “was thinking contacts while I was thinking contact” (51). Whether networking
with someone who can potentially provide assistance to her NGO or talking to a man for
the sake of pleasure, Annie knows the performative acts necessary to move about in the
human rights community.
My strategy would be sober and brief responses to questions, with an ironic,
knowing smile and the occasional display of human rights data or obscure facts
about Burundian history. But nothing about Hutu or Tutsi warfare, nothing about
Imana (alternately luck, fortune, or God) or about the spirits of the dead who give
out God’s messages, nothing about family structure or private life. The facts had
to be very obscure, very neutral, not to trespass on the Burundians’ sense of
privacy. I would be on stronger ground when we got onto matters covered by the
International Herald Tribune. (51)
The True Sources of the Nile dramatizes an important area of necessary inquiry. Analysis of NGOs as complex actors in transnational advocacy networks not only explains their emerging presence in the global order, but it also presents new challenges for political
109 theory, international relations theory and international relations historiography. Looking at gender and race through international relations, NGOs and human rights presents an important moment where international relations theory and international relations history might benefit from sociology. The addition of a sociological perspective “provides a framework with which we can ask questions about issues that realism and liberalism treat as assumptions and thereby remove from the research agenda” (Finnemore 337). These assumed categories come alive in the novel. While paying necessary respect to blackbox theories in international relations, transnational advocacy network analysis through a literary text poses one way in which opening the blackbox can help us identify actors and value the significance of ideas. On the one hand, Zara Steiner notes, “international theory must look at the human beings who are, despite claims to the contrary, at the centre of the black box, the state, the foreign ministry, the international corporation or any other institution engaged in international affairs” (536). On the other hand, following Holloway and his analysis of the significance of Gorbachev in the transformation of international politics, the examination of transnational advocacy networks and the opening of the black box can provide a way to understand the importance of ideas, which “can provide a guide to action, … can help to create political support by giving a rationale for policy, and … can reassure other states by providing a context in which a state’s policies can be understood” (7). This holds true not only for states, but also for those organizations interacting with states in the international community, which can be defined as a constantly changing collection of “actors on the international stage who are capable of influencing for good or ill the course of events” (Evans 28). Annie’s encounter in the embassy shows the power she wields even though she has relatively little experience in
110 international relations. The novel makes her ideas transparent. We can sympathize with her interest in accurately representing Burundians or question her seemingly aimless and spontaneous discussion of their lives. Most importantly, the novel provides a forum to think about the increasing influence of NGOs and their effect on the lives of human beings where those NGOs operate.
The elitist nature of NGOs and the international human rights movement poses major challenges to the architecture of global human rights—when Annie moves about the embassy sipping on imported South African wine, the scene is meant to subtly make transparent the elitism of human rights work. Evans conceives of international politics as a world stage with many changing actors who can participate in different dramas regardless of the extent of their monetary capital. Whereas he believes “you can force your way onto that international stage and become a relevant and much admired actor for reasons other than the size of your wallet,” (29) he also acknowledges the United States as the most important of all actors, and understands that “getting a politician or a diplomat to do something where their success won't be noticed is about as easy as trying to bathe a dog or drawing teeth without anesthetic” (38). This places NGOs interested in global impact and spreading human rights in a quandary: while they promote ideas designed to protect individuals everywhere, they must do so in a way that catches the attention of global elites in world capitals. Victims and non-elites can participate only as objects of sentimentality or go-betweens. Indeed, global justice has become its own field of adventure in which actors in positions of power with elite university degrees lead most efforts to bring about change. Whereas grass-roots and people’s organizations may incorporate into transnational advocacy networks, they usually organize themselves
111 around a dominant NGO like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International or
International Crisis Group. Steiner asks an important question of actors on Gareth Evan’s stage: “What are the prevailing social, racial and religious mores of the society into which each actor was born, and how do these affect his or her perceptions or misperceptions of the ‘foreigner’” (537)? Secondly, she reminds us to realize that we are writing about “people of flesh and blood” and not cardboard figures (539). She is asking us to place a human being at the center of the moral and political thought and action. And if the objection is that focusing on particular human beings threatens the potentiality for a universal discourse of human rights, then the novel remains a viable candidate with its human beings who are both particular (a story about a certain place) and universal (as fictional, they welcome identification from readers anywhere).
Annie’s job as an international human rights advocate is made more difficult by her status as a woman. She says, “We don’t always get on, Jack and I. I wouldn’t sleep with him when I first began working for him, and he holds that against a woman” (41).
The marginalization of women in international politics embodies a central problem with emergence of humanitarianism and human rights in a transforming global order. While challenging disparities on some levels, NGOs too often relegate the important issue to later analysis. After the NATO bombing in Kosovo, for example, only men were appointed to head local organizations concerned with the process of transitioning to peace. According to Abdela, despite “an absolute immensity of warnings signalling that the overwhelmingly men-dominated international missions were getting things wrong, the women of Bosnia and Kosovo remained excluded from any concrete involvement in negotiations, post-conflict reconstruction planning, and policy making, and even from the
112 democratisation process itself” (209-210). Too often women are cast as what Del Zotto calls the “’touchy feely’ peace activist” (143). The exclusion of women allowed classical paradigms of war and pillage to take place in Kosovo: women as young as 19 found work providing sex for American troops. Writing in Focus Kosovo, an English-language monthly published by UNMIK, Flora Brovina, a poet, pediatrician and president of the
Movement of Women in Kosovo, argued that
Women have managed to build bridges all over the world. We should and can do
that as well. There have been some initiatives and a few joint projects are still
functioning; however the basic consensus that would make our home a peaceful
one is sill missing. I am sure that women have the courage to be leaders in a
process that would bring us peace and harmony.
We have to understand that the violence in ex-Yugoslavia has affected us
women the most. We were victims of violence in society and victims of violence
in the family. Therefore peace, understanding and tolerance are our common
interests.
Brovina’s remarks can be applied to conflicts in most regions of the world as well as The
True Sources of the Nile, as the knowledge production and needs of women are usually placed secondary. How can the international community ask about transformation of global life when that transformation does not include renewed thinking about the status of women? Focus “on the strategies and discourses of elite actors” succeeds only in supporting “elite masculinist interpretations of conflict, informed by ‘official’ voices”
(Del Zotto 142).
113 Most human rights novels written by male writers include intense love affairs in
which male protagonists from the West fall in love with a woman from the region where
human rights abuses are taking place. The True Sources of the Nile somewhat reverses
the trend, making the protagonist female and the “foreign” love interest male. The sexual
politics of the human rights movement needs to come up for air and reverse the trend of
silence and secrecy. The True Sources of the Nile shows how these types of intimacies often benefit men and reify the trope of the heroic human rights activist in need of a female partner or partners to help him deal with his anxieties and despair (see, for example, Charlie Johnson in Flames, a novel by leading human rights theorist and historian Michael Ignatieff). By reversing the relation, Stone not only tells a story from the perspective of a woman, she also opens for analysis categories, scenes, and dialogue that are non-existent in male-centered novels. The figure of Jack is not uncommon in the international human rights movement. One of the most celebrated human rights activists was also known for his affairs with women in all of the countries where he was assigned with the United Nations. Consider the following description of the late Sergio Vieira de
Mello, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who died in the bombing of a United Nations building in Baghdad in 2003. According to a Boston Globe review of a documentary about Vieira de Mello,
His name is unknown to most of us, but Sergio Vieira de Mello was for a time the
United Nation’s rock star problem-solver who did his work in harm’s way across
the globe. Before his death, in Baghdad in 2003, he was widely recognized as the
go-to guy for diplomatic missions impossible.
114 You must consider de Mello’s good looks to grasp his legend, however silly that
might sound. His appearance was part of his famous charisma. His smile was
devastating. He kept in great shape and dressed beautifully. He was the picture of
robust, on-the-ground diplomacy.
De Mello’s private behavior, in contrast, was hardly commendable. He had
affairs, numerous and sometimes public, and was an absentee father to two sons.
“Sergio’’ [the documentary] doesn’t probe deeply into that side of his life,
choosing instead to dwell on de Mello’s plans to marry Larriera and retire.9
Far from suggesting that it is wrong for men and women to engage in intimacy, I am
instead pointing out that removal of this complexity–elites and the people they mean to
save, in love—from the discursive sphere is counterproductive. Some might argue that
Vieira de Mello’s sexual politics belongs to the private sphere. But this cannot be true
when sexuality and desire are tied up with his diplomacy. Candid conversations about
sexuality do not take away from an individual’s legacy. Rather, the dialogues serve to
build important bridges in world where sexism and masculinity can often cause harm.
In the novel, for example, Jack’s anger with Annie for not sleeping with him is
compounded by his disdain for Jean-Pierre and love between an American woman and a
Burundian man, or love between someone like him and someone not like him. He takes
possession of Annie’s whiteness and female-ness when he sees her with a black man.
Annie says she “couldn’t ask [Jack] about Jean-Jean-Pierre. There was this look that
came onto Jack’s face when he saw us together. I don’t suppose he could help it, or
maybe even knew it was there. I’d heard him, more than once, make sneering remarks at
9 Allis, Sam. “The man who died trying to save the world.” Boston Globe. May 6 2010.
115 the boites, the nightclubs—the Cadillac or the Black and White—watching Peace Corps volunteers dancing with Burundian men, about ‘cultural experiences’ and ‘suburban babies on the loose.’ Or even, when he was feeling really nasty, about the spread of AIDS in action” (41). Part of Jack’s inability to relate to local men and women in a genuine way is his failure to understand the roots and tradition of the international human rights movement. His ignorance toward the relationship between the human rights movement and movements related to women’s rights and civil rights leaves him with an ahistorical perception of his place in the world. Part of the problem is Jack’s very presence in
Burundi. He is there, in part, because he has an interest in making the world a better place. Yet, the United States produces activists within its borders who, though they might not have the credentials or papers for international human rights work, embody the care, love, and compassionate intellectualism necessary for genuine human exchange and reciprocity. Why does the international human rights movement lack adequate participation from African Americans, whose history with the land in which they reside is imbued with a struggle for human rights at every turn?
The failure of international NGOs to adequately engage with racial issues in places of conflict as well as in their respective organizations limits the depth of their contributions to human rights and international relations. Scholars of international relations history (Carol Anderson, Mary Dudziak, Charles Henry, Michael Krenn, Brenda
Gayle Plummer) have developed an extensive analysis of race and human rights at the mid-twentieth century point that would inform international actors of the significant role of race in international relations both historically and in the present. In the recently
116 published Eyes of the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for
Human Rights, 1944-1955, Carol Anderson explains that,
toward the end of the Second World War, the African American leadership, led
by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
had already decided that only human rights could repair the damage that more
than three centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism had done to the African
American community. Civil rights, no matter how noble, could only maintain the
gap. The NAACP, therefore, marshaled its resources […] to make human rights
the standard for equality. (2)
Anderson thinks the time has come to revive the African-American human rights effort, to begin the “Third Reconstruction,” and recover the actual prize of universal equality and justice. Former congressman Ron Dellums, now mayor of Oakland, Calif., is equally hopeful, and believes that because “our communities are among those most in pain, and it is we who understand better than most how deeply our national security is threatened by the fragility of our social fabric,” African-American “leaders and scholars can contribute enormously during this fleeting moment of opportunity to redefine United States national security strategy.” This blend of history (Anderson) and theory (Dellums) can also inform global thinking: In the 2004 United Nations report A More Secure World: Our shared responsibility, the authors point out that “Rwanda experienced the equivalent of three 11 September 2001 attacks every day for 100 days, all in a country whose population was one thirty-sixth of the United States” (19). Yet the international community’s immediate response to Rwanda paled in comparison to the attention devoted toward the American tragedy. And as Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu points out in his
117 article, “On the Rwanda Tribunal’s Tribulations,” there are great disparities between the
ways in which NGOs, the United Nations and the media attended to the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, and the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania. These disparities represent the
elitism associated with global justice that implicates NGOs as caught up in their own
versions of realist politics.
In a 1974 Foreign Policy article titled, “In Captive of No Group,” Donald
McHenry, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under the Carter
Administration, argued that “foreign policy should be based on broad U.S. interests and
should not be tied to any single religion, race, nationality, or economic interest.”
Reflecting on his controversial stance twenty years later, McHenry, who is African
American, told me his feelings remain the same: “I suppose people would say I was the
odd man out because my approach is and always has been looking at broader issues,” he
said10. For McHenry, groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty offer greater
opportunity for African Americans to engage in broader human rights conversations
concerned with “human beings” and not just members of a specific group. Here, I think is
an important moment in which it is possible to see theory and history in a symbiotic
relationship. McHenry is right to suggest that blacks would find greater benefit in global
human rights groups concerned with broad issues; at the same time, Anderson and others
demonstrate the efforts NGOs and the international community must take to fully
incorporate non-elites or groups traditionally removed from the international relations
order. Doing so would either remove the Jack’s of the world from the equation or place
10 Personal Interview. April 2004. Telephone.
118 them within communities or networks that maximize their positive skills for advocacy,
management, networking, etc., and discourage the negatives—sexism, racism, hatred,
white supremacy, bigotry, and the like. The Rev. Eugene Rivers explains the human
rights thinking of one constituency that has the potential to counter negative impact of an
activist like Jack:
The black church in the United States is in a unique position as a political actor to
influence American foreign, economic, and development policy by working as
advocates. Because of their prominence and legitimacy in the most powerful
country in the world, black churches are uniquely positioned to serve as advocates
for the needs and interests of millions of orphans—for an entire sub-Saharan
region of a continent where we have extraordinarily high infection rates. Churches
should advocate on behalf of these women, these children, this region of the world:
Not just inform government and the American people, but develop and promote
constructive political solutions.11
African-American participation in human rights builds upon African-American
participation in movements throughout history. The abolitionist campaign, movements
for civil rights and women’s rights are the precursors for the international human rights
movement. Second, the subjectivity of African Americans means that foreign and
domestic divides cannot continue to take hold. African American participation can
counter Jack’s separation of Africa and America, his disavowal of the humanity of one
and fierce privileging of the humanity of the other. When W.E.B. Du Bois said, “The
Negro is primarily an artist,” he wanted readers to realize the importance of African-
11 Thorne, Eva. “An Interview with Reverend Eugene Rivers III.” Boston Review. April/May 1999.
119 Americans in finishing the portrait of democracy and equality that is so often referred to
as complete:
Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of the
creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty of the realization of Beauty, and
we must use in this work all the methods that men have used before. And what
have been the tools of the artist in times gone by? First of all, he has used the
Truth—not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon
whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the
one great vehicle of universal understanding. Again artists have used Goodness—
goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor and right—not for the sake of an
ethical sanction but as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human
interest. (Du Bois 327)
Literature has a central role to play in analyzing the effectiveness of international relations. Novels like The True Sources of the Nile can dramatize both sides of humanitarianism and the actions of humanitarian workers like Jack. In doing so, they can complement the problem-solving abilities of other areas of international relations. Novels can also help with the public relations problem of human rights or the perception of human rights as a professionalized field of elites. Gaddis provides compelling arguments for how international relations theory and international relations history can inform one another, and the interaction of the fields can ultimately help actors on the international stage. States can better negotiate the attempt to become what Evans calls “good international citizens,” and they can equally pursue what Sikkink refers to as a
“cosmopolitan community of individuals.” Gaddis argues that “counterfactual analysis
120 and process-tracing methodology are promising opportunities for cooperation between
historians and political scientists” (qtd. in Elman and Elman 20). Similarly, Elman and
Elman demonstrate that because they believe “hypotheses are historically contingent and
not universal for all times and places, historians can dissuade international relations
theorists from producing generalizations that are too sweeping and can assist in the
formulation of more qualified and time-bound theories” (11). Historians also reject
“laundry list explanations” in favor of complex multicausal explanations, which suggest
that an outcome may have been arrived at through the interaction of several factors” (11).
Literature can contribute to the process. The novel or human rights story does not have all
the answers to the problems of the international human rights movement nor does it
suggest this exceptional status for itself. The novel has several limitations when it comes
to the administration of justice and the intent of this chapter is not to place literature, the
novel and stories above the work of social science, the law, anthropology, politics, medicine and several other fields that are commonly associated with human rights. Yet I want to insist upon the importance of having literature as part of this conversation.
The discussion of violence in a novel, for example, creates meaning in those
spaces where it is difficult to comprehend the gravity of a crime or human rights abuse.
Human rights stories, after all, are about violence, whether that violence has already
taken place or is in the midst of or on the verge of taking place. War novels highlight the mechanics of war, its toll on the psyche of the soldier and victim, the maneuverings of states versus their enemies. The human rights story, on the other hand, is interested in the international community’s (in)ability to come to terms with such destruction and the layers that must be peeled away in order to get at some level of legibility or
121 comprehension. Whereas the war novel can be used as an anecdote for a report or analysis, the human rights story or novel interrogates the report, incorporates international relations theory into its pages, and focuses less on the spectacle of war. In
The True Sources of the Nile, Annie introduces war and conflict in a scene that combines violence with themes of romance, racial discrimination and sexism. Annie reasons,
I’m not leading up to any philosophical or moral points here. I haven’t developed
any answers. I just find myself reluctant to remember even as much as I can,
wanting to gloss it over, to put down only the essentials as I remember them or
have worked them out. Because my memories of that drive, of that whole
period—the days and weeks that followed—are very patchy. Ordinarily I
remember everything; it was always a joke, sometimes an annoyed joke, in my
family, the way I could remember interactions and conversations, word for word,
for years. But great chunks of my memory of this time have disappeared entirely.
Other parts of that drive, and the following nightmare, are so vivid that I have
been possessed by them forever afterward, uncontrollably and constantly in the
first months, but recurring with sudden force, sometimes out of nowhere, for
years. I spent so much time learning not to remember, and now I’m back in it. But
I have to tell it. I see no way out but through. (122)
Ten minutes later we came around a bend in the road and were in another
world. Suddenly, there were bodies beside the road, bodies in the ditches, people
running after us with their hands held out, some of them bleeding. We couldn’t
encompass it at first, couldn’t believe what we were seeing. It had been such an
122 ordinary day; we weren’t prepared for it in any way. The panic set in before the
accompanying understanding.
Jack said, “Jesus God,” and began to drive faster and faster. The
roadblocks we passed through had been abandoned, rolls of barbed wire and
burned-out cooking fires marking where they had been. We saw more people
running, shouting, and then there were actually piles of bodies, heaped up every
which way, broken and unreal. Blood ran over the dirt in thick rivulets. 1 hunched over and wrapped my arms around my belly, as if 1 could protect it. A young woman ran out of the cluster of houses, her arms over her head to protect herself, wailing. She couldn’t have been more than three feet from the Land Cruiser. For a moment, she put out her hand to us, begging us to stop, to intervene. Our eyes met. She was tall and slender, with a heart-shaped face, a kerchief over her head, a gap between her teeth. A face for mischief, telling jokes, but now it was full of desperate refusal. The knowledge of death. 1 felt a shock of recognition; 1 didn't know her, but it seemed as if 1 did. 1 was up on my knees, leaning toward her, unable to speak. Then the man behind her sank his machete into her, and she just fell to the ground. Houses behind them were burning. Jack put his foot all the way down on the accelerator to get past the soldiers. 1 was craning around to see what had happened. Charles had put his head down onto his knees and was moaning. 1
suppose he could take it in—he was Burundian—he understood what was
happening. He whispered, “They're killing us,” but 1 didn't know then whether he
was identifying with the people outside, or if he thought he, Jack, and 1 were
going to die. (124-5)
123 The word “remember” is from the Latin rememorari, which means “to call to memory,” and has a common definition, to “have in or be able to bring to one’s mind (someone or something from the past)” (OED). The Latin-derived prefix ‘dis’ expresses negation, reversal, removal, separation or expulsion. Thus, Annie’s act is one of both remembering and disremembering, both acts of free will. To disremember, furthermore, is an overt action more pronounced than ‘to forget’ or to fail to remember. As homologous to dismember, disremember signifies both the act of forgetting horrible things one has seen and the brutality of those acts. I am a suggesting that Annie begins this meditation with a blurring of reality and memory creating a dissonance that allows her to let readers know she has encountered violence but that she cannot fully narrate the violence out of respect to the dead and the need to tell their story. Violence will overshadow the narrative yet it must be told. A war is taking place yet the human rights story, in its critique of war and bloodshed, cannot let the war take over the text. Annie disremembers as much as she can while still acknowledging the severity of the violence with a scene of dismemberment—
“Then the man behind her sank his machete into her, and she just fell to the ground.” In her attempt to understand, Annie says that she cannot understand. In her attempt to remember, she says she cannot remember. The tale of horror, from Annie’s memory, includes the plight of herself, Jack, a young Burundian woman, and the Burundian character named Charles. The young woman has died, and certainly if the scene were told accurately—Annie really disclosing everything she remembered—hundreds of other young women would die within Stone’s paragraphs. Instead Annie has provided details that suggest she could remember it all if she wanted to but that she would rather zoom in than zoom out: of the young woman, she says she “was tall and slender, with a heart-
124 shaped face, a kerchief over her head, a gap between her teeth.” Perhaps the detail
humanizes the woman in her last moments of life. Otherwise, she is the body in the
background in the dust on the CNN footage. In the narrative, she is remembered. Out of
respect the protagonist disremembers the rest of the scene and the fragments remaining
unite the subjectivity of herself, Jack and the Burundian man into one—“he, Jack and I.”
This remarkable joining of selves from seemingly different worlds occurs throughout The
True Sources of the Nile. The violence is muted yet pronounced so that it can be seen as a
human problem.
Annie brings the violence of Burundi to the comfortable world of her family
members, friends and colleagues in the United States through sheer exasperation and the
culture shock she experiences when returning home or leaving for Burundi. The
disruption that occurs when she is no longer able to participate in the everyday language
of privilege and safety symbolizes a key feature of the human rights novel or story. The
key feature, in other words, is a protagonist’s reaction to the disparity of wealth and
resources in her homeland and the place where she is employed as a humanitarian
worker. Returning to Sonoma, a simple visit to the drug store overwhelms Annie: the
“candy aisle held me for five minutes. Then I tried to rake in the whole store at once and felt such a rush of nausea that I had to run outside, dropping onto a planter box, my head between my knees, teeth clenched. Susan followed me out, which doubled my determination not to be sick in the parking lot.
She said, “Aunt Annie?” So serious, so concerned.
I answered, my head still between my knees, “In Bujumbura, the capital,
there are half a dozen pharmacies the size of one of those aisles in there, dusty,
125 the shelves half empty. Closed much of time. Old medicines, mostly for malaria,
parasites, pain. And, even that, people can’t afford. They have to take the ones
that make them sick and deaf.”
Margaret, holding Bobby’s hand, came out of the store while I was
talking. I lifted my head and said, “I’m trying to be good.”
She said, “If you weren’t so sure you were succeeding, it’d be easier to
have you around.” I was speechless. She went on, “A friend of mine from college
went into the Peace Corps. Cameroon. When she came back, she was totally
unbearable for the first month, unpleasant for three months, and it was six months
before she could just go to the store like a person and get milk and pretzels
without treating us all to lectures on advertising and world markets, the
oppression of the Third World, and the voracious planet strip-mining of our
consumer society. Fortunately, her condition turned out to be fully treatable with
regular television and intravenous frozen yogurt.” (24)
The disparity of access to basic needs between human beings in Burundi and human beings in Sonoma changes Annie’s homecoming into an unfamiliar experience.
Something like a trip to the drug store, which she has taken for granted for most of her life, becomes a site for global economic analysis. As she does with her description of violence, Annie focuses in on a specific element and describes with precision instead of trying to account for the whole of the inequity. The trace becomes appropriately recognizable as a symptom of the larger problem. The comparative description of stuffed aisle shelves on the one hand, and empty dilapidated aisles on the other economically and poignantly drives home the point of the disproportionate distribution of resources to
126 human beings in different parts of the world. Statistics might have also made this point
known, but the dramatization taking place in the novel provides an additional effect. The
continued development of a character like Margaret and her representation of American
indifference turns her apparent innocence into guilt. Margaret does not see the problem as
one of inequity. Her task, she thinks, is to bring the American scarred by conflict
elsewhere back into the habit of safety, entitlement and expectancy. The disconnect
between her experiences in Sonoma and Burundi leads an exasperated Annie to exclaim,
“How is it that you can get onto a series of planes and be flung from one universe into
another in just a couple of days”? (39)
Annie’s global commuting creates an awareness in her that forces her to reconsider even familial commitments in relation to a larger family structure that bonds her into kinship with people around the world. The privilege of Sonoma gets to her so much that at one point in the novel she confesses, “If my mother were not dying [of cancer], I could not think of one reason to stay in Sonoma County, sleeping through my life. In a few weeks it would all be sunny and predictable again. Life was peaceful, ordinary, unvarying. The people on the sidewalks went about their business. Thinking of their lunches, their dentist appointments, their diets, their afternoon meetings, their children’s grades. Here, AIDS prevention information was in books, every magazine, on the news, distributed in leaflets and newsletters” (264). Her indictment of Sonoma life continues:
Everywhere I went, people said, “It’s a tragedy. What a terrible thing to happen.
Did you hear about the old man in Healdsburg?” They remembered other years
when flooding had damaged (256) houses up and down the river flats. They
127 commiserated with each other in low, shocked tones. My great accomplishment of
those months was keeping my mouth shut; I never screamed at anyone, much as I
longed to shout, You insulated, stupid, provincial …but to them it was a tragedy
and what made them so lucky was to not understand their own luck. (256)
In contrast, Annie finds herself immersed in a different reality, working on the ground in
Burundi, a daughter longing to be near her mother while she battles cancer, but conflicted by the mothers who surround her dying of AIDS, losing their lives because their male partners refuse to wear condoms on cultural grounds. She is watching women die from wounds inflicted by machete-wielding men. Kinship, her relation to her dying mother faces the challenge of unbelievable circumstances in another universe. She remains loyal to her mother, making the visits, but the reconfiguration of kinship in the novel, whether between her, Pierre and Christine, or between Annie, the women she encounters in her
NGO jobs, and the women she encounters on the streets, symbolizes how the novel poses an argument suggesting the radical rethinking that must be done in NGO communities and the greater international human rights movement. In her first NGO position with the
AIDS clinic, Annie learns that most
HIV transmission was male to female, the men acquiring the virus, giving it to
their wives, denying that they had it. And then there was the problem of maternal-
child transference. If a mother were positive, her child might be born without the
virus, but then acquire it through her milk. If we could get the mothers to stop
nursing before the child was six months old, the child had a chance of escaping,
but the mothers had so many good reasons to go on nursing, and we had such a
long tradition to fight. (53)
128 In personal encounter with these women, Annie rids herself of an attitude of
comfort. One woman tells her,
The babies are well enough. But my second boy is gone-an accident. They
strike us and drive on.” She meant the Tutsis. “My fourth brother died. A cancer
in the bones. And my youngest sister is sera-positive, diagnosed this week. We
did the tests here.”
I put my arms around her, and she allowed it, though it was odd for both
of us. I don't know what I said; I was full of horror and sorrow.
She said, “They’re in God's hands now. Each week that I’m still alive, I
give thanks.”
I felt myself hung all over with stupidities, like Christmas ornaments—my
foolish lovesickness, my hysteria over the imminent death of my mother, already
older than most Burundians would ever be, though by her age any woman who’d
managed to survive would be shriveled, toothless, used up. And then all the
imaginary problems on which I wasted most of the resources, such as they were,
of my mind. My little career frets. Worries about my goddamn fucking weight.
Day after day in some kind of stupid dream. (55)
The novel does not position Annie as a saint or martyr and readers will have to make up their own minds about her character. The fears and hang-ups she is aware of one day seamlessly inform her decisions the next. Here is where the novel as love story complicates the psychology of human decisions and rational choice. As readers might suspect the arrival of Jean-Pierre in Sonoma leads to all kinds of fireworks in the novel.
For my own purposes, his travel from Burundi to the United States represents the
129 realization of his own worst fears and the voraciousness of American elitism and
patriarchy. Want to get away from the violence? Come to America and pursue the
American Dream in the land of opportunity. Annie wants Jean-Pierre to see the United
States because she believes they can easily have a life there. She tells him that
universities and companies will salivate when reading his resume, that of a Burundian
man fluent in many language and educated at the Sorbonne and prestigious schools in
Belgium. “Jean-Pierre needed to get to Sonoma County, to breathe the clear air,” she
reasoned. “Away from Burundi and its heavy gray skies, the almost visible poisons of
fear and hatred. The blood in the dirt” (145). If Annie experienced culture shock in her
native land, then the response of Jean-Pierre to northern California life, the reception of
Annie’s sisters, the consumerism and perception of safety, is predictable. He winces often
during his visit and is particularly perturbed by the “wildness of American children,” the stories of kids toting guns to school, taking and selling drugs. Margaret scoffs at his critique, saying, “’You find violence hard to understand?’ (238).
The topic of violence is one that Annie and Pierre cannot escape. In Burundi she
finds out information that indicates he might have a role as officer in the army, a position
that Annie believes means he has killed, given the prevalence of killing among different
factions in the country. Love, the quest for family, as well as her interest in safety, has led
Annie to confront Jean-Pierre about the rumor. She felt she had thoroughly understood
the parameters of conflict in Burundi, the challenges facing her beloved, a man she
understood as her educated and polyglot prince with dashing good looks and a
testosterone overcharge that could be tamed through sensible minds like hers and
Christine’s. Alas, the layers of conflict as well as the complexities of kinship that she
130 seems to have felt she deftly negotiated rise to the surface and expose the side of conflict that has its cultural specificity, that resists the humanitarian impulse. Perhaps it is an entirely Burundian concern as the members of Jean-Pierre’s family see it during one of the human rights dialogues placed within the text. Annie walks in when Pierre says,
“We were just discussing Western influences on Burundian society. Won’t you
join us for lunch?”
“Burundian society has been degraded by too much Western influence. I
am afraid I think it is a very bad thing, this betrayal of our traditional culture,”
Bertrand said to his brother, as if he were apologetic, but favoring me with
another enormous smile.
Francoise, who’d studied economics in Kenya and London, and who
appeared to be speaking to a larger audience than the family in the room, said, “In
some ways, yes, we have more than we would have had. Cars, radios, the dubious
benefits of technology. Something resembling an international market, though
with our dependency on coffee and tea and the rates set by the Europeans . . . still.
But colonialism reinforced our society’s divisions, and Western culture has
destroyed our traditions. What we lost when we lost the king, the rule of the
dynasties—we lost our self as a people. How can this be replaced by electronics’”
(43-44)?
Jean-Pierre crossed his arms, staring at his older sister, his beautiful face
rigid and unfriendly. “Nonetheless, I, for one, am not prepared to return to the
fourteenth century and a life of cattle herding and boasting over banana beer. Life
in the fields.”
131 Christine, amused, tolerant, put in, “Ninety percent of our peasants still
spend their lives in the field. Ninety-eight. In any case, we were never in that
position.” (45)
“Democracy. An idea of the Americans, French, Belgians. The Belgians
ran our country for forty years, treated us, treat us, like goats, worse than goats,
and now? An alien political system forced upon us. Monarchy is a stable form of
government. Military rule, perhaps, became necessary at a certain point, as a
result of Western meddling. With democracy, there will be trouble.”
Jean-Pierre asked, “When has there not been trouble in Burundi?”
It is a rare instance in the novel when Annie is silenced. In part, Jean-Pierre has silenced
her by introducing her to his family in the formal, using her full name, Annie Copeland,
and deflecting any notion that they might be lovers. The other silence is caused by a
postcolonial critique implicating western society and the naming of America as one of the
specific sites of culpability. Injured by Jean-Pierre’s insult of their union, Annie cannot
respond to the insults made by Jean-Pierre’s siblings. She is speechless and the room of
Burundian elites seize upon her silence. It is a deafening kind of silence in which the
knowledgeable human rights activist must sit quietly while the citizens of the nation state
and conflict on which she is an expert have the entire floor. Annie’s silences (amid
Burundians discussing the evil of the west), the moments in which she speaks confidently
(human rights events, at home), her decisions to disremember (in the face of violence) vs.
the choice to remember, her confusion (upon first arriving home in Sonoma from Burundi
or vice versa), her multilingualism (English, French, Kirundi, Kiswahili), her
disembodied remarks concerning love, marriage and childbirth (usually in reflections
132 concerning Jean-Pierre)—all of these form the spectrum of the speech acts taking place in the novel, speech acts that let us gauge the range of her emotions and her connection to
the various worlds, speech communities and cultural and political spheres in the novel.
The myriad emotions converge at the novel’s end, Annie and Jean-Pierre’s relationship
facing its biggest challenge, one that encapsulates important questions in the effort to
rethink human rights. Jean-Pierre’s truth-speak hits Annie harder than any of the violence
she has seen prior. He resents her inability to understand his commitment to his country
and even his need to avenge the death of a sister who was killed by Hutus. Annie wants
to build a family with Jean-Pierre in a safe place, hence her reading of Article 16 of the
UDHR.
Finally, he burst out, “For such a bright woman, you can be relentlessly stupid.
Even now, you don’t see what it means. They want to eradicate us. Look at
Rwanda, where they have the power. Don’t you know our history? Do you think
it’s some accident, the way they slaughter us? They want a world with no Tutsis
in it.”
Jean-Pierre quickly apologies and realizes “I’m punishing you for being alive, for not
being her,” (237) but the damage has been done, or the essence of their conflict, erstwhile
romanticized as union that could transcend their subjectivities, revealed. Pierre tells
Annie,
“In the end, like any American, you patronize Burundi. And, therefore, me.
Because I am Burundi. You can’t imagine I would see your big playground and
not piss myself to get here on any terms. You want a plaything. Not me—some
image of me, a cardboard cutout to watch TV and send the children to bed. You
133 still don’t know me. You still don’t take any account of Burundi. Burundi is as
real as America. Not as big, not as powerful, but it is one actual and essential little
country on this big planet, and it is my own.”
And then he said, scornfully, “Did you really think I would be so
overcome by your world? Yes, I love you. No, I will not marry you and come live
your life.” (250)
Jean-Pierre is essentially the developing world talking back to the international human
rights community and its desire to spread the discourse of human rights and democracy.
The True Sources of the Nile is a novel complementary to international relations theory
and international relations history; it can help international actors like NGOs to see how
their place in transnational advocacy networks require them to think about their own
relationships to these networks and the ways in which they amass and wield power. My
suggestions becomes more clear through the use of fiction, arguably a site where history
and theory merge seamlessly. Steiner explains the problems literary sources, as well as sociological data, pose for historians who prefer to work with maps and the archive. Yet,
Gaddis suggests how imagination and fiction can be of use:
Everything we do, in this sense, is a thought experiment, a simulated reality—in
short, a story. A few brave historians have even begun relying upon what they
have acknowledged to be fictional fragments to fill gaps in the archival record;
many others have no doubt done so without being quite so honest about it.
And what of the obvious next step, which is the construction of explicitly fictional
accounts—novels, plays, poems, films? Do these also not simulate reality by
revealing aspects of human behavior that would be difficult to document in other
134 ways? Surely Shakespeare’s contribution to our understanding of human nature
was at least as great as Freud’s—even if he did take liberties with the historical
record at least as great as those of Oliver Stone. (77)
The importance of this gesture is already underscored by the countless writers from regions of conflict using the novel to tell their stories, providing a perspective that complements the tradition of moralist writers in the West (Twain, Conrad, Joyce, etc.) employing the novel to narrate the conflicts of the less fortunate.
At this point, I want to turn to one precursor to The True Sources of the Nile that I
think forms part of tradition that the novel can be placed in; I am suggesting this tradition
to counter and/or supplement that tradition privileging mostly male writers like Ondaatje,
Coetzee and Eggers. Thus, I point to what is arguably the first human rights novel to
appear in English in the United States, Henrietta Buckmaster’s Lion in the Stone. Placing
Stone’s The True Sources of the Nile in a tradition that includes Buckmaster realigns the
parameters through which we can examine the human rights novel or story as a device for
discussions about the equality of human beings.
Written by the pseudonymous Henrietta Buckmaster (Henrietta Hinkle Stephens,
(1909-1983)), Lion in the Stone is the first novel by an American writer to fictionalize an
international relations drama using the United Nations as a setting as well as employing
the discourse of international human rights throughout the dialogue and ethos of the text.
It is a rare example of narrative employed to illustrate realism in international politics,
zero-sum games and the premiums placed on human lives. It is also unusual in that the
novel caught the attention of international relations theorists, who appreciated its attempt
135 to deal with high political theory, even if they disliked its moralizing (“soliloquies on the
moral predicaments facing the servant of peace,” as one theorist deemed it).
In the novel, Secretary-General Devar Moragoda guides the U.N. as it tries to
prevent a nuclear war in the years after the conflict in Vietnam. The actions of a small
nation, Mongolia, prompts a power struggle among the more powerful nation-states,
particularly Russia, China and the United States. Moragoda, on the eve of retirement,
works for peace over 500 pages of deep reflection and intellectual dialogue with
international elites. He disdains his own emotional belief in the power of love as a
concept, but “after he had painstakingly examined and discarded the language of
diplomacy and of power, it seemed there was nothing left but that unhandy, ontological
love” (5):
“Our main concern is how to live together. These are days of Asian nationalism.
We must re-examine our attitude and make our choice for the future. We have no
permanent enemies. We must make sure we have no temporary ones either. We
are still guilty of many sins. The rich countries are growing richer, the poor
countries poorer. Tonight every second human being will go to bed hungry, and
most of them will be dark-skinned. Yet no one needs to be hungry. We have the
technical answers to hunger. This is a tragedy for which we have only ourselves
to blame-our political fears and greed.” (20)
Other characters include the diplomat who reasons he came into politics from the best discipline in the world, science, and another who “never doubted his humanness.” A professor calls politics “bewildering” and suggests that because “two-thirds of the human race is inexperienced and the remaining third overly compensated, politics make demands
136 we’d never agree to under ordinary circumstances.” An exchange between a Russian and
Chinese diplomats and the Secretary-General is illustrative of the novel’s attempt to
mimic the proceedings of the world’s most influential global organization. He tells the
Russians, “to first destroy some illusions. We do not have time to learn from mistakes.
‘Do not want war’—! War is a crime. Say so.” When a Russian official responds by saying, “I’m not here for philosophic discussions,” Moragoda reminds him that,
“Philosophy! It’s the principle of the chair you're sitting on. We’re committed to peaceful means in this place—we have no alternatives.” (424) Moragoda handles the challenge of the Chinese differently, indicating his deft understanding of different models of political maneuvering:
Mr. Huang, gifted with the ability to live in the East and the West, had
begun to draw a certain satisfaction from indirection and word-play with the
Secretary-General. He had, Devar suspected, received a call from one of his
ambassadorial friends; he reflected with a fair precision, the candid suspicions felt
by Peking as well as Peking’s more subtle and irrational fears. He asked one or
two very sharp questions and received full replies.
Then Devar shifted gears. He moved with his own adroitness into the field
of friendship, its joys, sorrows and obligations. The bonds of trust that bound him
and his friend, the Deputy Foreign Minister, must not be strained at such a time. If
enemies were preventing his telephone calls from reaching his friend, he asked
Mr. Huang to intercede.
“The United Nations is considered an instrument of the West,” Mr. Huang
answered without beating around the bush.
137 “That does not affect a man’s relation to his friend.”
Mr. Huang, a successful New York businessman, knew perfectly well that
direct access at crucial moments had many advantages for all parties concerned.
He said he thought there was a way. (431)
The United Nations is an international relations playing field reserved for the elites of the nation states who hold membership within the organization. Yet, Buckmaster’s novel has taken that elitism and put it on display for readers who might not otherwise have a window to its process. Indeed, propaganda might posit the United Nations as one entity trying to bring about peace; the novel dramatizes the organization, its propaganda machine and the inter-cultural actions, exchanges and transactions that take place on a daily basis. The external vision is that of an organization trying to barter peace among nation-states, prevent wars, remove the possibility of nuclear obliteration. The internal vision pauses upon gender, race, skin color, class, physical appearance, wealth, romance, desire, attraction—all factors in the fate of the world no matter how much we want or do not want to admit it. It is this novel that I contend is a precursor for the human rights stories or novels that come after it, and no reading of Coetzee, Ondaatje or Eggers is complete without some reference to this work.
Lion in the Stone employs fiction to create more inclusive dialogues about international relations, human rights and political theory. The negotiation at the level of content and form, I suggest, provides a compelling example of the convergence of human rights and literature. Buckmaster was a Jewish American writer whose novels, historical writings, and children’s books, took up the causes of women, African-Americans and
Native Americans. Among her writings were, Let My People Go: A History of the Anti-
138 slavery Movement and the Underground Railroad and The Seminole Wars. By the time
The Lion in the Stone appeared she had already created a moral vision and understanding of the human as inclusive of women, African-Americans, and Native Americans in the
United States. Through the novel she places this vision in dialogue with the realism of international relations, exposing how the human of one departs from the human of the other. In other words, whereas a discussion of the United Nations in any contemporary context would not automatically include the experience of women, Native Americans and
African Americans in the United States (see my discussion of Charlotte Bunch’s
“Women’s Rights as Human Rights” above), an international discourse incorporating women and minorities is inherent is central to Buckmaster’s novel. She has a different idea of the human that must be considered, as she anticipates American exceptionalism and provides an alternative. Jean Siotis, of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, reviewed the novel in Vol. 13, No. 4, of Conflict Resolution and offered the following:
In its essence, The Lion in the Stone is a book about leadership in the United
Nations: about the frustrations of those who assume it as well of those whose
interests clash with the powers that be; about the political and moral dilemmas
facing decision-makers; and, above all, about the central figure in the complex
jigsaw patterns of UN politics. The Secretary General, Devar Moragoda, is a
plausible one—at least in the eyes of an informed “outsider”—probably because
the author chose to make him a mixture of Dag Hammarskjöld and U Thant. He is
an Asian, but his own image of his role is much closer to Hammarskjöld than to U
139 Thant’s. His actions, however, are those of the present Secretary General,
especially in his relations to the great and small powers. (524)
Siotis recommended the book as a basis for a course in game theory or Bloomfield-MIT game scenario. What is striking is how the novel incorporates concepts of history and theory (realism, cold war politics) with the role of the novel as an exploration of the human condition and human emotions. In this way, the novel addresses the problems of race, gender, desire, obligation, reciprocity and cultural difference that I have analyed previously in The True Sources of the Nile.
One of Moragoda’s closest allies is the African-American Charlie M. Morgan, who is second in rank to the U.S ambassador to the United Nations. Buckmaster writes that, “To both friends and enemies of the United States, Charles M. Morgan, a black man from Tennessee, was known as the delegation’s multiracial answer to its critics. He was the first so to identify himself it was rumored” (77). As the No. 2 ranking official in the
United States delegation at the United Nations, it is likely that Morgan is based on the
African-American diplomat Ralph Bunche, who would win the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Morgan is developed as a foil to his boss, Ambassador Hope, a career academic who symbolizes international relations theory in its purest form. When it comes to communicating with the United States, the Secretary-General prefers Charlie Morgan to the Ambassador Hope.
It was not until he saw Charlie Morgan’s black face that he realized Claudie had
not said, “Ambassador Hope.” He thanked God it was Charlie Morgan, for
Morgan was very human. If he, Devar, swept his deskful of hypocritical,
untruthful, revolting papers onto the floor, Charlie Morgan would merely go
140 down on his knees to help gather them up, talking all the while. (417)
Moragoda trusts Morgan because “Morgan had had to spend most of his life learning who
he was while the world was judging him in other terms” (417). Morgan believes his
double-consciousness makes him unique in his perspective on international relations
issues involving American policy making. He believes “’Americans are the greatest self- examiners in the world, and because I’m a black American I double it’” (418). The reference to Du Bois’ notion of the second sight available to African Americans because of their status as both citizens and non-citizens of the nation-state is meant to remove the veil from the activity of the United Nations. International relations theory, in the form of
Professor Hope and work of other career diplomats and elites in the United Nations, is countered by the double consciousness of a black man from Tennessee. We might see this as coincidence if not for Buckmaster’s past—the histories about civil rights, women’s rights, Native Americans—record as well as her future, the novel she would write after Lion in the Stone. In 1972, she published The Walking Trip, an anti- colonialism novel set in Rhodesia in which blacks overthow their oppressors. It is the presence of Morgan in the narrative, and others like him, that allows Buckmaster to blend cultural perspectives, focus in and out on the twists and turns of cultural difference without having the meditations come across as hagiography. Dag Moragoda’s interests are Buckmaster’s as well:
There is no formula for humanity unless perhaps the Judaic ‘Do not do unto
others what you would not have them do unto you’: I talk about choice—I believe
in it. Yet I cannot always make out a very good case. In our lifetime, Chinese
have been butchered by their warlords and by foreign imperialism, Indians have
141 died in famines that could have been prevented, four million souls are still held in
physical slavery, eight million Jews were tortured to death. The Soviet Union was
bled by Stalinism. Americans are still guilty about Vietnam. Africans are roiling
in agonies of identity. Ceylon is almost bankrupt! And no one’s willing to admit
he’s self-centered and opinionated.” (442-3)
Sarah Stone and Henrietta Buckmaster both create the universe of the international human rights movement in their respective novels. Instead of copying its elitism and exclusivity, they lay the movement bear, expose its good and bad, its desires, anxieties and desperations. They offer renderings of the United Nations, NGOs, humanitarianism, international conflict, and human rights workers that invite readers to comment, applaud and/or dislike. Through literary convention and characterization, they create the equality of character that so often eludes the international human rights movement in the public sphere. How do the ideas of someone from Burundi receive equal recognition as someone from the San Francisco Bay Area? How do the politics of sexuality, race, gender, and/or class affect human relations in human rights culture? These important questions often meet with polarized responses in the global community. The novel dares to dramatize the conflicts in a transparent way.
142
CHAPTER THREE
Tribunals, Translations and the Post-1945 Fictions of James Baldwin and the United Nations
I have no credentials as a terrorist, but I think I know where terrorists come from, what produces this creature called a terrorist. They are produced by human need, a human need exacerbated by the chilling performance of the defenders of the status quo. —James Baldwin
FLOWER in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies;— Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Children erupted, like beautiful, doomed flowers. —Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
The lily is the human being. — Søren Kierkegaard
“Children erupted, like beautiful, doomed flowers.” The line comes from Book
Two of James Baldwin’s fourth novel and critical failure, Tell Me How Long the Train’s
Been Gone, a story about a famous black actor who suffers a heart attack that is the occasion for him to flash back on his life, from its despairing beginnings in Harlem to the adventurous rise that takes him across the world. The actor-narrator is describing a group of black children playing in a small town outside of New York City in the 1950s. In them, he sees himself at one point in time. As children, they are portrayed as beautiful and innocent, human beings who have every right to be alive and playing—in this instance, on the porch where the actor-narrator encounters them. Yet he senses the doom
143 these children will face because of their location—a small town in racially divided
America; their race—African American; and the ensuing danger or inopportunity that will engulf their lives. They are flowers stuck in “the crannied wall” of society and the narrator projects his sense of the arc of their misery over three pages. These “beautiful, doomed flowers” and “flower in the crannied wall” metaphors are familiar and recurring in the African-American literary and cultural tradition (from Phyllis Wheatley’s “Ye blooming plants of human race divine” to the “furious flower” of Gwendolyn Brooks’
“The Second Sermon of the Wardpland”). The African-American theologian Samuel
Dewitt Proctor, former pastor of The Abyssinian Baptist Church, a black congregation in
Harlem that dates back to 1808, interprets Tennyson’s poem as a reminder that society must remove the flower from “the crannied wall” to a safer space, a garden, perhaps, that can signal prosperity and growth. Like Kierkegaard, Proctor sees the flower as a human being, and the fate of that flower/human being is burdened by external factors, not the internal. The lily, the flower, the human being are all beautiful. The “crannied wall” is a material factor. For Kierkegaard, the flower, or lily as human being, faces an additional danger: constantly being antagonized by deceitful birds of the air, who tell the lily of more beautiful lilies or flowers existing in other parts of the field. If being stuck in the
“crannied wall” is not enough, the birds of the air speak of a serene place.
Then the lily became worried. The more it listened to the bird, the more worried it
became; no longer did it sleep calmly at night and wake up joyful in the morning.
It felt imprisoned and bound; it found the purling of the water tiresome and the
day long. Now in self-concern it began to be preoccupied with itself and the
condition of its life—all day long. (Kierkegaard Upbuilding Discourses 167-8)
144 The lily eventually asks the bird to take the lily to be among the more beautiful lilies.
This might also be seen as Proctor’s removal of the flower from the crannied wall.
During the journey—the bird carrying the lily to greener pastures—the lily withers and
dies.
I begin with Baldwin’s hopeful, then hopeless line because I want to rescue a
philosophical thinker and his prose from the critical spheres that have rendered him
mainly a prophetic, passionate and rhetorically gifted commentator and essayist on
twentieth-century race relations in the United States. Critics value his interrogation of the external; I am asking us to pay more attention to his analysis of the internal. He is indeed
the brilliant mind that produced work on race, but he is also a thinker who has concerned
himself with “beautiful, doomed flowers.” I have taken one line from Baldwin’s
thousands of pages of prose and tried to place it in the crucible of western intellectual
thought and debates about beauty, justice and human relations. The line is devoid of
hope, though it is told to us by a narrator who recalls being a child facing a similar fate.
Years later, he is famous and successful. He escaped the crannied wall, the doom. We
know this is true because Baldwin says the narrator-actor of Tell Me How Long the Train
is Gone, his fourth novel that I have been describing above, is a version of or the
reincarnation of Rufus, the character from Baldwin’s second novel Another Country.
Both characters grow up in the inferno of Harlem. Rufus jumps to his death off of the
Brooklyn Bridge. The actor-narrator of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone lives,
becomes famous. I have taken one line from Baldwin’s prose to illustrate my point. I
suggest we do this with all of his fiction, whether a line from his first novel Go Tell it on
the Mountain (“In nineteen hundred, when she was twenty-six, Florence walked out
145 through the cabin door” (71)) or his last Just Above My Head. If we do, we will come
across the architecture of his moral universe and encounter questions, answers, claims,
and demands, that are far more compelling and revealing than even the fiery and
prescient rhetoric of his nonfiction—the Fire Next Time, for example—that captured the
conscience of a nation. With Baldwin’s fiction, because it is fiction we have more tools
with which to unpack its metaphors, syntax, literary forbears, etc. Like the majority of
Baldwin’s novels, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is told through flashbacks.
Kierkegaard and Baldwin both subscribed to the belief that life may be understood
backwards, but it is lived forward. If stories about horrible pasts are to be told (one effect
of human rights and literature), how then are they still able to help us move forward?
Baldwin’s prose, I think, holds these answers, if only we would give it the philosophical
concern that we give to a writer like Henry James, to whom Baldwin pledged literary
allegiance through imitation of his sentences.
Political theorists, biographers, philosophers, journalists, and literary and religious
scholars 12 have published important studies on James Baldwin and the impact of his
work on American society, particularly when it comes to discussions of race and
12 Political theory: See, for example, Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (New York: Cornell, 2001), and George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Biography: the most authoritative remains David Adams Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1994), but also see James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (New York: Viking, 1991). Philosophy: See the work of Cornel West, as well as Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth- Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Journalism: see Quincy Troupe ed., James Baldwin: The Legacy (New York: Touchstone Press (Simon & Schuster), 1989), and Herb Boyd Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008); Literature and religious studies: this list is vast, but two good starting points are Dwight A. McBride, ed. James Baldwin Now. (New York: New York UP, 1999), and D. Quentin Miller, ed. Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2000). For religious perspectives, see Clarence E. Hardy III, James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture. (Chattanooga: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), and Qiana Whitted, A God of Justice? The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
146 inequality. These analyses carefully unpack Baldwin’s political ideas, religious thinking,
transatlantic existence, and present-day relevance. Mainly, the studies derive their
material and arguments from Baldwin’s essay collections and speeches, interviews with
his family, collaborators, and friends across the globe, as well as the hundreds of
uncollected essays that can be found in journal archives and library collections around the
world. By the same token, a vast archive of analysis of Baldwin’s fiction does exist—
full-length studies of his novels have occasionally appeared and brilliant and global
multi-disciplinary scholarship on particular novels, plays and stories have and continue to
come out in important journals, book projects and dissertations—but these approaches to
Baldwin are usually understood as interested primarily in literary convention,
characterization, setting and thematic content, or canonization and comparative analysis
with other novels and novelists.13 Typically, they center on a novel, dramatic work or
short story, rely on the essays for context, anecdotes and confirmation of arguments, and
enrich the depth of writing on Baldwin in the field of literary studies.
Building on and merging these two veins of scholarship, I am interested in taking a
related but identifiably different route to reading Baldwin: focusing primarily on his
fiction (like the literary scholars who carefully read the novels, plays and stories to talk
about literature), I develop ideas about Baldwin’s political philosophical ideas (like the
political theorists and philosophers who rely primarily on his nonfiction). This chapter, in
particular, develops his thinking about the principles of human rights—a discourse that
emerged after World War II in the United States and western Europe and aims to spread
13 See, for example, Stanley Macebuh, James Baldwin: A Critical Study (New York: John Okpaku Publishing Co./The Third Press. 1973), and Lynn Orilla Scott, James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey (Michigan State University Press. 2002).
147 globally—from the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” and the novella Giovanni’s Room, which
I read alongside the foundational text of human rights, The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948).
Here are the two main reasons why: firstly, I believe that Baldwin is one of the main creators of what I refer to as post-World War II American human rights narratives, a type of short story or novel that is interested in the same goals and objectives as the political discourse of human rights that began to rise in the United States, western Europe and other parts of the world after 1945. Just as bodies like the United Nations wanted the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights to represent a set of global protections for all human beings, writers of human rights narratives had a similar intention, only they considered the novel or story a more appropriate vehicle or technology for generating their ideas. Baldwin was one of these writers—the list includes but is not limited to
Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, Harper Lee, FlAnniery
O’Conner, William Styron, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Louise Erdrich, David
Bradley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, N. Scott Momaday, Edward P. Jones,
Edwidge Danticat, Michael Chabon, Aleksandar Hemon, Sherman Alexie, Ha Jin, Dave
Eggers, Carolyn Chute, and Junot Díaz. For them, as Robert Harrison argues in an essay about narrative and the human condition in general, nothing enhances human relations and the bonds of community more than the mastery of the art of narrative. Stories provide a form of social pleasure, even when they are read (or nowadays seen) in the solitude of one’s private chambers. Beyond their power to delight
(or maybe this is part of their delight), they reaffirm in exemplary, dramatic, or allegorical modes the values that bind communities together. (93)
148 The second reason I take my methodological approach is that, though the essays of
Baldwin have received greater acclaim than his novels, he always maintained that he was
first and foremost a novelist. Baldwin biographer David Leeming points out that Baldwin
never felt “intellectually comfortable” as an essayist. After writing The Evidence of
Things Not Seen, in which he covers a child-murder case in Atlanta in the 1980s, Baldwin
admitted to feeling like a novelist disguised as a journalist. “I am a novelist,” he told Elsa
Knight Thompson in a May 1963 radio interview shortly after the publication of The Fire
Next Time, a cause célèbre that landed him on the cover of Time magazine. “Essentially,
it is much easier to read my essays, essays are easier to read,” he said. 14 Essays do not
require readers to step out of their own comfort zones. Readers laud his essays
denouncing racism, white supremacy and inequality, Baldwin suggests, because “it is not
fashionable to be a racist, but on the other hand it is not easy to be a person.” If Baldwin
denounces racism and its effects, what reasonable reader will disagree, particularly when
the denouncement is hammered out in a compelling way? On the other hand, Baldwin
associates “person” with the novel and the work of the novelist, an art form that forces a
reader to engage on a “private, personal, sexual, emotional” level. Many agree with Joyce
Carol Oates in deeming Baldwin “the preeminent essayist of the American twentieth
century,” (xxvi) and Herman Beavers is right to say that “Baldwin’s stature as a novelist
is overshadowed by his public life” (201); but Baldwin makes clear that even his
compelling essays have limitations and provide readers with life preservers unavailable in
14 James Baldwin, Interview by Elsa Knight Thompson and Fred Leonard. Pacifica Radio. KPFA.Berkeley, Calif. 7 May 1963. Radio.
149 the unpredictable diegetic and Bakhtinian worlds of the novel.15 For Magdalena
Zaborowska, author of James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile,
Baldwin’s hypothetical narrative mapping American identity seems to be a genre of its
own. In setting out to circumnavigate the New World, it takes for the granted the
instability and unreliability of its terrain and peoples. In attempting to write down
incoherence, fluidity, and shapelessness, it has to focus on sounding repressed, silenced,
and unspoken discourses. The ‘discovery’ it thus proposes implies doing what all
Baldwin’s texts do: delving into the murky depths of American character, exploring the
reasons for its ‘incoherence’, and mapping the ways in which it resists representation.16
(120)
15 Interesting comments on Baldwin as essayist and novelist that my project attempts to address come from Langston Hughes, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Shelby Steele. Hughes: “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. To my way of thinking, he is much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is in arousing emotion in fiction.” See Langston Hughes, “From Harlem to Paris,” Review of Notes of A Native Son, by James Baldwin, New York Times Book Review, 26 Feb. 1956: 26. Gates: “The paradox of James Baldwin’s career as a writer is that he wrote essays with all of the lyricism and subtlety of a great novelist; when it came time to write the novels, however, he approached his craft, especially in his later years, as an essayist—a didactic, heavy-handed essayist, at that, and not the subtle master of the form that Baldwin-the-essayist, at his best, could be.” See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Cabin Fever,” New York Times Book Review 22 Oct. 2006. Also published as the introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe, et al. The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007). < http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Gates.t.html?pagewanted=all>. For Steele, the “goal of the Baldwin model is to link one’s intellectual reputation to the moral authority— the moral glamour—of an oppressed group’s liberation struggle.” Baldwin, reasons Shelby Steele, suffered from this condition in the late 50s, after he returned to the United States from Paris. In the process, he compromised his role as an artist and “literary master,” something Ellison did not do. Baldwin became “an embodiment of black protest, an archetypal David—frail, effeminate, brilliant—against a brutish and stupid American racism.” But even Steele limits his curious analysis to Baldwin as essayist. Although he considers Baldwin’s first three works of fiction full of “human complexity” and “depth,” Steele reasons that Baldwin’s turn to the polemical after 1957 created the troubling paradigm for a whole generation of African-American intellectuals, particularly the Princeton scholar Cornel West. See Shelby Steele, “The Age of White Guilt and the Disappearance of the Black Individual,” Harper’s Magazine November 2002. 33-42. 16 Magdalena Zaborowska, “Mapping Transcultural Masculinities: James Baldwin’s Innocents Abroad, or Giovanni’s Room Revisited,” Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism, ed. Zaborowska. (Aarhus and Oxford: Aarhus University Press, 1998) 119-31.
150 Zaborowska traces the characteristics of Baldwin’s fiction as he set them out in an essay titled, “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” which is based on a lecture Baldwin delivered at
San Francisco State University in 1960. As an American writer with the obligation to represent “incoherence,” Baldwin begins to list the possible people and places and things that might come up in his “hypothetical novel”: the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age,
Mussolini, Josephine Baker, Patrice Émery Lumumba, Germany, junkies in New York streets, his father, the black church, the Scottsboro case, executions of Italian-Americans,
African-Americans, people from China, Puerto Ricans, Idaho, Birmingham, San
Francisco, Eisenhower, Nixon, the Beat Generation, Frenchmen, Cadillacs, refrigerators, and more. After providing his transnational cosmopolitan list that defies cultural, economic and social consistency, he then suggests that the problem for the American writer is “how to unite these things, to find the terms of our connection” (229). He concludes that a focus on “the person” (230) or personhood is the one possible route to uniting this incoherence. Personhood is also a core principle of the Declaration in that it aims to recognize the personality of all human beings. Thus, the Declaration and
Baldwin’s “genre of its own” narratives have the project of personhood in common. I suggest ways in which personhood in the two aligns and differs.
Along the same lines, “incoherence” as a defining characteristic of American identity contradicts what Baldwin calls “an illusion about America” (229) that people hold onto in order to feel safe. In his reading of The Fire Next Time, Richard Rorty argues that Baldwin’s critique of the nation in that seminal text was made ultimately to make the nation a better place. And though Rorty thinks “there is no point in asking whether Baldwin made the right decision” he does take note of Baldwin’s desire to build
151 a narrative and to make that narrative into a “treatment of moral life”: “Stories about
what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation,
but rather attempts to forge a moral identity”(Achieving Our Country 13). Rorty is right
to acknowledge Baldwin’s storytelling ability and its relationship to “moral identity,” but
the moral stories he found in the nonfiction Fire Next Time are dominant, more complex
and detailed in Baldwin’s fiction.
Detailing the moral universes in the fiction of a writer like Baldwin is productive
for thinking about human rights culture in a pluralistic world that continues to struggle
with difference. The philosopher Robert Pippin, for example, has written a manuscript on
“the treatment of moral life” in the novels of Henry James, and I aim to produce a complete exploration of the “treatment of moral life” in the novels and stories of
Baldwin, one of James’ literary disciples and the most prominent example of an
American writer who inherits James’ mimetic moral worlds and re-principles and re-
inscribes them for the social, political, and cultural complexities of a shifting modernity.
Pippin’s Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2005) is an important antecedent because
it relies on fiction to survey the architecture of morality, a methodological approach
placing literature and philosophy as neighbors as opposed to antagonists or unequal
partners. This method will unveil Baldwin’s work and thought in new ways and properly
situate him in African American studies and, more specifically, African American
philosophy, an area of inquiry that, though curiously marginalized, “takes seriously both
the Western philosophical tradition and the African American experience” (Shelby 13). I
underscore this point in my analysis of Baldwin: he interrogates the Western
philosophical tradition with vigor and relies on African-American experience to correct
152 its omissions. He does not aim to tear down but rather to build up. As he writes in
“Autobiographical Notes,” the introduction to Notes of A Native Son,
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this
reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are
suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be
pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own
moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one
aright. (9)
Similar to the parameters of Baldwin’s moral project that first began to emerge as he published essays in left-leaning and literary journals in the late 1940s, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights is a list of rights protections developed by the United
Nations Commission on Human Rights and translated into hundreds of languages with the understanding that signatory and ratifying states would incorporate the spirit of the
Declaration into their own constitutions and modes of governance. According to Mary
Ann Glendon,
The Declaration, as we have seen, was far more influenced by the modern
dignitarian rights tradition of continental Europe and Latin America than by the
more individualistic documents of Anglo-American lineage. The fact is that the
rights dialect that prevails in the Anglo-American orbit would have found little
resonance in Africa or Asia. It implicitly confers its highest priority on individual
freedom and typically formulates rights without explicit mention of their limits or
their relation to other rights or to responsibilities. The predominant images of the
153 rights bearer, heavily influenced by Hobbes, Locke, and John Stuart Mill, is that
of a self-determining, self-sufficient individual. (227)
But not even a “modern dignitarian” rights model has proven sufficient in translating the
Declaration into more a widely understood collection of rights for a greater audience.17
The United Nations has provided translations of the translations, meaning the
organization has produced “plain language”18 versions of the Declaration in English and
French, suggesting that the widespread criticism of its intelligibility for the very people
and populations it aims to protect contains some truth.
Despite the U.N. translations, I suggest that the work of translation (Baldwin’s
concept, taken from his exchanges with Margaret Mead) of principled rights into
language for diverse peoples in diverse communities and states is what writers like
17 Naturally, the United Nations brought to the United States many people from different countries around the world, including from Latin America and Africa. Often the most accomplished citizens of their respective countries, these people reacted bitterly to the racism they faced in the United States. Their experiences led to a number of treaties that in word and spirit make profound denunciations of discrimination. I maintain that these denunciations did not and still do not apply to African Americans. For another account of the impact of race and the Cold War on the shaping of the United Nations, see Paul Gordon Lauren. “Seen from the Outside: The International Perspective on America’s Dilemma,” in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 ed. Brenda Gayle Plummer, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003) 21-43. Also, to see how the African-American human rights struggle fell victim to associations between human rights and communism, see Carol Anderson’s Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (New York: Cambridge, 2003). According to Anderson, near the end of the Second World War, African Americans and the NAACP “had already decided that only human rights could repair the damage that more than three centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism had done to the African American community. Civil rights, no matter how noble, could only maintain the gap. The NAACP, therefore, marshaled its resources […] to make human rights the standard for equality” (2). Anderson calls for a revival of the African-American use of the human rights paradigm, what she calls a Third Reconstruction. 18 “The plain language version is given only as a guide. For an exact rendering of each principle, refer students to the original. This “simplified” version is based on a French text prepared in 1978 for the World Association for the School as an Instrument of Peace by a Research Group of the University of Geneva under the responsibility of Prof. L. Massarenti. In preparing the French ‘simplified’ version, the Group used a basic vocabulary of 2,500 words in use in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The English translation of the French version was prepared by the United Nations. Teachers may adopt this methodology when they translate the text of the Universal Declaration into the language in use in their region.”
154 Baldwin had in mind for their novels and short stories. 19 A more effective effort of
human rights translation took place during the sixtieth anniversary of the UDHR in 2008
when The Irish Times published stories by many of Ireland’s leading writers who were
each asked to take one of the thirty Articles of the Declaration and respond with a story
that exudes the themes of that particular Article, directly or indirectly.20 The stories
affirm, resist, and trouble human rights principles, and it is not easy to decide whether
they promote or devalue the discourse of human rights—the decision rests in the minds of
the readers. Baldwin’s fiction, as I show here, engaged with the liberal discourse of
human rights in a similar way, only his engagement began much earlier than the current
explosion of human rights narratives and stories filling bookshelves, landing on syllabi in
the social sciences and capturing awards from the concerned literary establishment. In
1948, the Declaration and Baldwin were both in transition, Baldwin as a 24-year-old
aspiring writer fleeing the racism and discrimination of New York for Paris, and the
Declaration as a document lauded during the deliberations that Eleanor Roosevelt led in
New York and that the U.N. ultimately adopted at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris.
19 See Margaret Mead and James Baldwin, A Rap on Race. (1st ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971). Baldwin: “So how are we ever going to achieve some kind of language which will make my experience articulate to you and yours to me? Because you and I have been involved for all our lives—I am younger than you but not very much younger—in some effort of translation. Isn’t that true? Mead: “Yes.” Baldwin: “Some effort to translate what it means to be born here, what it means to be born there, what it means to be born at all. What time means. And the fury in me is involved with time now because I have no right—I may be a philosopher, but I have no right—given the situation of this time now, and my role in it, my role in the present. … On a very serious level, the trap I’m in is that I can’t afford the historical point of view. And yet I know something about time present and time now. (168-9) 20 The series was sponsored by The Irish Times and the Irish section of Amnesty International and all of the stories are available on the Amnesty International Website. See Seamus Heaney, “Human Rights, Poetic Redress.” The Irish Times. 15 March 2008. Reprinted at Amnesty International. Web. 12 Aug. 2008.
155 Baldwin’s life in 1948 represented the very paradox he would expose about liberal
celebrations of human progress such as the Declaration of Human Rights. As he told an
interviewer for the Paris Review,
I arrived to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New
York. My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people. Reading had
taken me away for long periods of time, yet I still had to deal with the authorities
and the cold. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a
nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I
was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend
had committed suicide two years earlier, jumping off the George Washington
Bridge.21
Whereas the United Nations found cause for celebration in 1948, Baldwin tried to come
to grips with conditions that he felt could lead to his demise. The adoption of a
Declaration acknowledging that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and
inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom,
justice and peace in the world” could not provide for Baldwin the solace and hope it
provided for others. As Michael Ignatieff points out, because “human rights activists take
it for granted that they represent universal values and universal interests, they have not
always taken as much care as they might about the question of whether they truly
represent the human interests they purport to defend” (10).
21 James Baldwin, “James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction No. 78.” Interview by Jordan Elgrably. The Paris Review. 91 (Spring 1984).
156 Baldwin, I suggest, tries to account for those lives taken for granted. His writing is the fictional attempt and equivalent of the unsuccessful appeals made by W.E.B. Du
Bois and other African Americans to the United Nations in the 1940s. They wanted the
United Nations and its treaties to reflect and include protections that covered discrimination faced by African Americans in the United States. As I show below, they were told that domestic problems were not the work of the United Nations, an international organization. Baldwin, the transatlantic commuter, challenged this idea.
I read Baldwin’s six novels and his short stories as a response to and translation of liberal principles of human rights into scenes, scenarios, characterization, settings, possibilities that sometimes affirm, sometimes interrogate, and sometimes revise ideas found in the
Declaration, in a form that is capable of being read and understood by a larger audience.
On one level, I am suggesting that his work in particular and literature in general can reposition the Declaration and other rights documents—the Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted 1989, entry into force 1990) or The Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, adopted 1979, entry into force
1981), for example —to become more universal than they actually are and to bear universality that holds meaning to an international citizenry. My work as a whole unpacks Article 18 of the Declaration (“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”) as an idea in Baldwin’s debut novel Go Tell it On the
Mountain. I trace Article 16 (everyone is “entitled to equal rights as to marriage”) in his second novel Giovanni’s Room. I analyze Article 2 (freedom from discrimination based on “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”) in his third and fourth novels, Another Country
157 and If Beale Street Could Talk. I similarly examine Article 22 (the concepts of
“economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity”) in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and Article 3 (“the right to life, liberty and security of person”) in
Just Above My Head, the fifth and final novels, which, for many, signaled Baldwin’s
demise as an effective author. I will continually address what some might call Baldwin’s
aesthetic compromises that rendered his work reminiscent of the protest literature he
famously decried.
In the section of the project that follows I focus on Baldwin’s most anthologized
short story, “Sonny’s Blues” and his second novel Giovanni’s Room as an introduction to
my reading of Baldwin’s “treatment of moral life” and moral ideas that can be found in
both the Declaration and Baldwin’s fiction. I focus on the short story because of its
popularity with readers and because of the events taking place in the world and in
Baldwin’s life during its publication. I analyze the novel because it is the most popular
Baldwin novel across different spectrums and identity groups. In other words, it has been
claimed by scholars and readers representing canonical American, African American, and
gay and lesbian literatures. It has been cast as a cold war novel, a gay novel, and an
African-American novel, even thought it contains not one single African American
character. It is also important for me that both of these stories were published at the
beginning of Baldwin’s literary career; they show his interest in and commitment to the
novel and short story (and not the essay), and they represent a starting point for the type
of prose writing he would do throughout his life.
“Sonny’s Blues,” which appears in the years after African-American appeals for
anti-racism legislation to the United Nations were rejected, is about Sonny, a struggling
158 jazz musician living in Harlem and the Village in New York City before and after World
War II. Unemployed and battling drug addiction, Sonny searches for meaning in his life
through his ability to play the piano. The drug-infested streets of Harlem, “the danger he
had almost died trying to escape,” (840) and Village life are the source of his despair, but
he manages to cope in those moments when he can find an opportunity to play with other
jazz musicians. Sonny’s ups and downs are told through the narrative voice of his older
brother. The narrator-brother is Sonny’s foil. He is married, has children and a good job,
and does not understand Sonny’s obsession with music. He comes in and out of Sonny’s
life, partly out of his own obligation, partly because of their late mother’s request that he
look after Sonny no matter what: “you got to let him know you’s there” (845).
I not only analyze “Sonny’s Blues” in its print form, but also look at instances of the
story’s translation, travel and entrance into extra-textual milieus: I incorporate material
from a theatrical adaptation of “Sonny’s Blues” performed in San Francisco and Paris, as
well as reader responses to the story in a space of unfreedom, namely the education
program at San Quentin State Prison, located across the bay from San Francisco, a liberal
outpost that Baldwin maintained was one of his favorite cities, despite the fact that
during a 1963 visit, he likened it to Alabama.22 Taking the story from text to stage, from
text to prison classroom, I suggest, illuminates the ability of fiction to animate human
rights discussions in more productive ways than the normative deliberative practices of
global public spheres. How does fiction take up philosophical ideas we also find in the
Declaration and then prepare them for translation and travel to wide readerships?
22 See the film, Take This Hammer, a recording of Baldwin’s 1963 visit to San Francisco. San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive. < http://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/187041>.
159 “Sonny’s Blues” finds audience with the solitary reader, in the theater, in the prison, in
universities and high schools, in black churches, in jazz lectures—in those spaces, both
familiar and unfamiliar, that amplify and extend the universal human rights discourse that
circulates in law schools, international tribunals, universities and NGO conference rooms.
All human beings and cultural groups rely on stories for existence; recognizing this basic
fact can enliven those treaties and documents we want to regulate human interaction.
Giovanni’s Room
The protagonist in Giovanni’s Room, David, is a white American Midwesterner who has also spent time in New York and San Francisco, a brief stint in the Navy, and now finds himself in Paris, approaching 30 and wondering what to do with his life. He has asked Hella to marry him, but she questions his sincerity and runs off to Spain to consider his proposal. In the time they are apart, David makes his way to the bars and suddenly finds himself entangled in an intense affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender who escaped the Catholic conservatism of his Italian village for a Parisian life; Giovanni urges David to recognize their relationship as genuine, and constantly calls into question
David’s insistence on maintaining his American identity—understood in the novel as a commitment to the strenuous life and a happy life with an obedient wife and model children. David holds to views consistent with an orthodox American life, and ultimately rejects Giovanni, described throughout the narrative as darker than David, who is blond and tall. The decision is symbolically fatal, as Giovanni leads a hustler’s life after their breakup and ends up accused of a crime (killing one of his benefactors, a gay man from a prominent family) that leads to his death by guillotine. Hella returns to Spain ready to marry David, only he reveals the truth of his actions during her absence. The novel ends
160 and begins with David narrating this story as he prepares to return to the United States; everything is revealed as a flashback, and David is rendered as responsible for Giovanni’s death. Of the novella, Baldwin said, it “is not so much about homosexuality, it is what happens if you are so afraid that you finally cannot love anybody” (206). Even the
Parisian setting is less about Paris than about a space to contrast with the United States, for the “genesis of Giovanni’s Room is in America” (Conversations 239).
“Sonny’s Blues”
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. — Article 1, UDHR
When children are born, they are free and each should be treated in the same way. They have reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a friendly manner. — Article 1, UDHR, “Plain Language” English Version
When the protagonist of “Sonny’s Blues” reunites with his older brother after a long absence, the two take a taxi ride that goes from downtown to uptown New York
City, “between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood” (838), providing readers with a panoramic view of the streets of Harlem just after World War II. Sitting in the back seat of the taxi, they move through their native Harlem “where, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster” (839). In this section I show how the entire architecture of Baldwin’s prose erects alternative rights remedies: the many elements of the story, from characterization and setting to ontology and atmosphere, reposit rights culture and realign its coordinates to apply to a more inclusive humanity. Baldwin’s short story pays attention to lives that find themselves
161 “smothering” and “encircled by disaster,” lives that fall through the cracks in political
discussions of human rights principles, greatly impairing the claim for universality of
rights that political institutions and human rights organizations believe should be
available to all. Baldwin creates characters that exist and occupy the same ground,
breathe the same air, witness the same landscapes as the human beings making human
rights policies. Similarly, Baldwin’s story challenges the adequacy of reason-based rights
alone and international justice apparatuses such as courts and the administrative bodies
that occupy them; though he does not reject their importance, he sheds light on their
limitation and the lives affected by these limitations. He is positing jazz and the blues,
and the social, political and cultural life of Harlem, as equally important in configuring
international justice principles as reason, referred to as “wisdom” and “sense” in the
story, and courtrooms in cosmopolitan capitals.
The very setting of “Sonny’s Blues” is a challenge and corrective to the discourse of human rights, which derived its principles mainly from Enlightenment-inherited discussion in places like San Francisco, (downtown) New York, and Paris. The Harlem world of Sonny and his brother is the world Baldwin wanted international actors and decision makers to have in mind when they made important decisions about the economic, social, political and cultural dimensions of human rights standards. Baldwin also shows different sides of the cosmopolitanism of Paris and San Francisco, respectively, in Giovanni’s Room and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, but he begins by showing the paradox of his native New York. In a 1967 Freedomways essay titled “War Crimes Tribunal,” Baldwin explains his decision not to participate in
Englishman Lord Bertrand Russell’s War Crimes Tribunal, which convened to
162 investigate whether or not charges should be brought against the U.S. government for its activities in southeast Asia. One of the key voices of the tribunal was French intellectual
Jean-Paul Sartre. Baldwin’s searing dissent not only contains his familiar rhetorical ability to expose paradoxes, but it also reveals his ideas about international justice and human rights, discourses that largely informed the tribunal’s framework and intent. His suggestion that the trial take place in Harlem also explains what he earlier wanted to achieve in writing the story, “Sonny’s Blues” and his other Harlem narratives. Calling the tribunal “both misguided and inept” Baldwin writes,
It might be more logical, for example, for any European, and especially any
Englishman, to bring before an international tribunal the government of Rhodesia,
which I would do, if I had the power, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. No
Englishman has suggested this. Neither did Jean Paul Sartre suggest that France
be brought before an international tribunal during the war which we have
inherited from France, or during the French-Algerian war. […] If I should make
the attempt to accuse the Western powers of the crimes they are now committing
in Rhodesia, Angola, South Africa—to leave it at that: or should I attempt to bring
to the world’s attention the actual intention, and the actual result, of those treaties
the Europeans, who were not yet Americans, signed with the American Indian; to
say nothing of what happened to the blacks, concerning which we know at once
too much and too little; I would certainly encounter from the Western powers the
very same opposition that Lord Russell’s Tribunal has encountered. And for the
very same reason: such an attempt not only brings into question the real morality
of the Western world, it also attacks what the world considers to be in material
163 self interest. Such a trial should be held in Harlem, USA. No one, then, could
possibly escape the sinister implications of the moral dilemma in which the facts
of Western history have placed the Western world. [my emphasis in italics] (242)
Baldwin suggests that the problem of global justice is more likely to find genuine answers in Harlem, New York, than in any of the international outposts—downtown New
York, Paris, Geneva, The Hague, San Francisco (founding location of the United
Nations), etc.—that have come to be associated with the human rights movement. Human rights in Harlem sheds an entirely new light on the discourse of human rights, and thinking about the discourse through a text like “Sonny’s Blues” demonstrates the power of literature in making the international human rights community address human rights in all of its complexity, paradoxes, and contradictions. The space in between, inhabited by those left outside of the universal, find recognition in Baldwin’s prose. His motivation is, in part, autobiographical: the United Nations, its Declaration and many important right documents were created immediately after World War II, in the same period in which
Baldwin felt the need to escape the United States. Eleanor Roosevelt’s delight was equaled only by Baldwin’s despair. The point of holding the trial in Harlem is not to render it moot, colonialist and useless; rather, Baldwin genuinely wanted international human rights bodies to be effective and universal. In essence, if deliberations about human rights, the United Nations, and the Declaration took place in Harlem or any geographic space that finds itself marginalized from the mainstream, rights culture and rights talk would look and sound slightly different from what has arisen today.
“Sonny’s Blues” values the concepts of justice, freedom and dignity that can be found both in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and at the foundation of African-
164 American philosophy and freedom struggles. It is important to remember that W.E.B. Du
Bois and other African-Americans attempted to participate in the molding of human
rights discourses from the beginning in San Francisco and New York. They were
rebuffed. In those founding moments for the United Nations and the UDHR, African
Americans watching the United States and Eleanor Roosevelt play such an important role
in this global justice organization, had questions about how it would address racism and
discrimination in America. Indeed, Du Bois and The NAACP made themselves heard at
the founding of the U.N. in San Francisco and later during the negotiations over the
UDHR by the Commission on Human Rights. In 1947, Du Bois drafted An Appeal to the
World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of the
Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United
Nations for Redress. According to the petitioners,
It may be quite properly asked at this point, to whom a petition and statement
such as this should be addressed? Many persons say that this represents a
domestic question which is purely a matter of internal concern; and that therefore
it should be addressed to the people and government of the united states and the
various states.
it must not be thought that this procedure has not already been taken. From the
very beginning of this nation, in the late 18th century, and even before, in the
colonies, decade by decade, and indeed year by year, the Negroes of the United
States have appealed for redress of grievances and have given facts and figures to
support their contention.
165 It must also be admitted that this continuous hammering upon the gates of
opportunity in the United States has had effect, and that because of this, and with
the help of his white fellow citizens, the American Negro has emerged from
slavery and attained emancipation from chattel slavery, considerable economic
independence, social security and advance in culture.
But manifestly this is not enough; no large group of a nation can lag behind the
average culture of that nation, as the American Negro still does, without suffering
not only itself but becoming a menace to the nation.
In addition to this, in its international relations, the United States owes something
to the world; to the United Nations of which it is a part, and to the ideals which it
professes to advocate. Especially this is true since the United Nations has made its
headquarters in New York.
Du Bois’s appeal, though translated into Russian and of great interest to the Soviet
officials at the United Nations, did not make it beyond the Commission on Human
Rights, the body debating the language of the Declaration. 23 After the international body
23 In 1947 Du Bois drafted An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of the Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. Initially told that only governments could make petitions to the U.N., Du Bois, according to David Levering Lewis, “respectfully challenged Trygve Lie to honor the spirit of the international organization” (528). The U.N. Division of Human Rights relented and met with Du Bois and other NAACP officials in October 1947. The document was made public in 1948 and was meant to influence the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite attempts by Russia and Poland to use the document to expose United States hypocrisy in the human rights movement (and to one- up the United States in the Cold War), the petition, which Eleanor Roosevelt and others said embarrassed the nation, ultimately became “an early casualty of the new Cold War civil rights politics” (529-30). Also, see Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, (1937-1957, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997). Dudziak details how Roosevelt refused to introduce the NAACP petition in the United Nations out of concern that it would harm the international reputation of the United States” (45). Von Eschen discusses the African-American presence at the meetings to found the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. Du Bois and the NAACP were the only official black organization with consultation status. According to Von Eschen, “Although the United Nations Charter did finally contain numerous clauses on human rights with provisions for equal
166 approved the Declaration in December 1948, any hope for “a specific provision with the
question of minorities in the text of this Declaration” fell to the cutting-room floor:
FATE OF MINORITIES The General Assembly,
Considering that the United Nations cannot remain indifferent to the fate of minorities, Considering that it is difficult to adopt a uniform solution of this complex and delicate question, which has special aspects in each State in which it arises, Considering the universal character of the Declaration of Human Rights, Decides not to deal in a specific provision with the question of minorities in the text of this Declaration; Hundred and eighty-third plenary meeting, 10 December 194824
An Appeal to the World was not the only petition to the United Nations on the part of
African Americans. In 1951, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson submitted to the
United Nations a document titled We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government
Against the Negro People. It contained what they called “tragically voluminous”
evidence that the United States had committed genocide against African Americans.
Similar to the approach of An Appeal to the World, the authors of We Charge Genocide
chose to couch their claims in the language of human rights:
rights and self-determination, these principles did not translate into a commitment to practical or effective means of implementation” (81). For an account of how the tensions of civil rights and Cold War politics affected President Truman’s decisions, see Michael L. Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945-1969, (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999). According to Krenn, “In a talk to the Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization Conference, [President Truman] suggested that his civil rights legislation had to be passed “if we are to maintain our leadership in the world. We can’t go on not doing the things we are asking other people to do in the United Nations” (36).
24 See item C of the United Nations General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/043/88/IMG/NR004388.pdf?OpenElement.
167 Your petitioners will prove that the crime of which we complain is in fact
genocide within the terms and meaning of the United Nations Convention
providing for the prevention and punishment of this crime.
We shall prove that the object of this genocide, as of all genocides, is the
perpetuation of economic and political power by the few through the destruction
of political protest by the many. Its method is to demoralize and divide an entire
nation. its end is to increase the profits and unchallenged control by a reactionary
clique. We shall show that those responsible for this crime are not the humble but
the so-called great, not the American people but their misleaders, not the convict,
but the robed judge, not the criminal but the police, not the spontaneous mob but
the organized terrorists licensed and approved by the state to incite to a Roman
holiday.
“Sonny’s Blues” appears after these dramatic appeals and before the
advancements of the civil rights movement. The story incorporates ideas about human
rights that do not deny human rights in the domestic sphere. Instead, the domestic
sphere—Harlem—is seen as equally important as the global sphere. Second, the African
American experience is not cast aside as “the question of minorities.” The experiences of minorities become representative of the majority.
Baldwin’s representation of the dimensions of African-American oppression in
“Sonny’s Blues” come not only from Baldwin’s personal life, but also from his tutorial in
African-American culture of the South in the 1950s. Baldwin wrote parts of “Sonny’s
Blues” in 1955 while at Howard University, a historically black institution in
Washington, D.C. The story was published in the summer of 1957 issue of the Partisan
168 Review and collected in Going to Meet the Man, which appeared in 1965. Owen Dodson
had invited Baldwin to Washington to see Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner performed
by the Howard Players. At Howard Baldwin enjoyed the intellectual company of
renowned African-American scholars E. Franklin Frazier and Sterling Brown, and met
Amiri Baraka, then a student named Leroi Jones. Brown, in particular, served as an
inexhaustible resource, “an intellectual father,” on subjects related to African-American and southern life. Leeming writes that Brown provided Baldwin with an archive of experiences about the terror of life in the American south for African Americans, an experience Baldwin, a native of Harlem, never faced on his own. Sonny’s struggles in
Harlem are preceded by his father’s memories of terror in the South, linking the vulnerability of African-Americans with different experiences across generations and geographies. In his early twenties, the father character would spend time with his brother on Saturday nights. Sonny’s mother says, “’you’re father’s brother would sing, he had a fine voice, and play along with himself on his guitar’” (843). Walking home one night after a performance, the father witnesses his brother get run down by a car of white men out joyriding, “’having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do sometimes, you know,’” (843) the mother says. The event stays with Sonny’s father for all of his life and contributes to his despair. Sonny’s mother tells the story to the brother-narrator, not
“to make you scared or bitter or to make you hate nobody. I’m telling you this because you got a brother. And the world ain’t changed’” (844). The incorporation of terror in both its Northern and Southern forms foreshadows Baldwin’s interest in expanding what must be taken into account when trying to understand the subjectivity of human beings not only across but also within lines of race, gender, class and sexuality.
169 Brotherhood is a philosophical underpinning of both the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and Baldwin’s fiction but Baldwin’s short story provides greater insight
into its requirements. Article 1 of the UDHR suggests that “All human beings are born
free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and
should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” In its “plain language English”
version of the Declaration, the United Nations translates “in a spirit of brotherhood” as
“in a friendly manner,” but the dimensions of either “brotherhood” or “a friendly
manner” remain vague. Leeming sees “Sonny’s Blues” as the first instance of
brotherhood as an important theme in Baldwin’s work, inspired mainly by Baldwin’s
relationship to his brother David. The brothers motif shows up again in Baldwin’s novels,
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and Just Above My Head, considered by
Leeming, an extended version of “Sonny’s Blues.” Yet, as important as the theme of
kinship among brothers is to these Baldwin texts, that kinship is symbolic of kinship that
extends beyond the biological, masculinist and familial. Baldwin had a different father
than his nine siblings, but he never waivered in his understanding of complete kinship
with his father, brothers and sisters. In “Sonny’s Blues,” Sonny’s brother watches his
brother at a jazz session with a diverse audience and realizes that, in that particular world,
“I was only Sonny’s brother” and, “Here, it was not even a question that his veins bore
royal blood” (860). Sonny’s brother allows familial brotherhood to be usurped by a larger
community of brotherhood that comprises or resembles the diverse community, what he
calls “Sonny’s world,” (860) in the “jam-packed” jazz club, a crowd in which “some
were musicians, working there, or nearby, or not working, some were simply hangers-on, and some were there to hear Sonny play” (860). Second, brotherhood in “Sonny’s Blues”
170 or any of the brotherhood narratives cannot be discussed exclusive of the role of women in each of the narratives. At every turn, the dialogue and characterization of female characters (in the case of “Sonny’s Blues,” Mama, Isabel, and Gracie) helps form the story’s complexity and its examination of the human condition. In fact, only rare scenes in Baldwin’s prose exist when brothers find themselves alone and in dialogue that indicates a brothers motif. Brother-to-brother exchanges are always mediated or intertwined with female experiences. Brotherhood, translated into “in a friendlymanner” by the United Nations translates, for Baldwin’s story, into friendship, sisterhood, brotherhood, and solidarity across race, gender and class. As Baldwin famously wrote in one of his last essays, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” “we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other” (828). As a global document trying to account for the lives of all human beings in the world, the
UDHR cannot aspire to the specificity of Baldwin’s short story about a struggling musician in Harlem, yet it is the particularity of “Sonny’s Blues” that makes it effective in being universal. The same is true of Tolstoy writing about Russia, Joyce about Ireland, and Garcia Marquez about Mexico. Literature has been marginalized or given a mere ceremonial role in the effort to promote human rights standards around the world. Stories like Baldwin’s suggest that a larger role is necessary even if that role insists upon a redefinition and renegotiation of human rights standards and principles.
”Sonny’s Blues,” like most of Baldwin’s fiction, locates and exposes the disconnect between institutions and individuals, and the gap is representative of the challenges
171 facing the effort to apply human rights standards universally. Institutional membership is not always an evil, but “Sonny’s Blues” poses the question of what to do with those who lack membership or the social, cultural, or economic capital to be recognized in public spheres. Sonny’s brother is an algebra teacher who is married to Isabel and has spent some time in the Army. He wants to help his younger brother (they are seven years apart) lead a good life but seems helpless in his effort to do so. In the opening of the story he laments the news of his brother ’s arrest for using and selling heroin, and then flashes back a decade or so to that moment when he noticed his brother starting to become restless. Sonny, in his final year of high school, wants to quit an educational system in which “I ain’t learning nothing in school,” (849) escape the lure of drugs in Harlem (“I don’t want to stay in Harlem no more, I really don’t.” (848)), and make it as a jazz musician. The Navy, he reasons, will help him accomplish his goals, and he plans to join even if he has to lie about his age. The arc of Baldwin’s signature flashbacks in the story move the narrator from a mind frame of naïveté about his brother’s despair and musical passion (Sonny’s brother has no idea who the jazz musician Charlie Parker is) to moments of tragic illumination and epiphany. The position of the individual and society in the story is transposed creating a anti-Bildungsroman. Whereas the individual in a typical narrative progresses through society, learning from his or her experiences at every turn, Baldwin’s story has society make progress in its understanding of the plight of the individual.
Sonny’s brother represents someone who has gained access to society and institutions, and symbolizes multiple institutional state apparatuses: as an algebra teacher
Sonny’s brother symbolizes the importance of education and access to education. He
172 leads a life that provides him with the social and cultural capital necessary to feel recognized in Article 16 of the Declaration, which stipulates that “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.
Elementary education shall be compulsory.” As a married heterosexual male with two children, he represents the head of an idealized American family structure. Article 16 proposes to protect him and his family: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” As a military veteran, he represents the state itself and the opportunities provided by state service. He served in the Army and after his retirement he received education benefits which led to his stable job: Again, Baldwin is aligning the brother’s life with the Enlightenment- inspired Declaration. Article 21 says, in part, “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.” As a churchgoer and someone married in the church, the brother represents the institution of religion. He has expressed his right to enter into a religious marriage (protected in Article 16) and he regularly exercises his right to
“freedom of thought, conscience and religion” (Article 18). The brother-narrator has worked hard and made several sacrifices to enter these worlds and he expects his brother and others to take a similar path.
The brother-narrator is determined to resist the pull of Harlem’s streets and institutional membership helps him remain afloat. His connection to the public sphere is evident from the opening line of the story: the way he learns about his brother’s addiction and a related arrest for heroin use is, “I read about in the paper … I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story” (831). The newspaper functions as a device of the
173 mainstream and status quo in Baldwin’s prose. In his second novel, Giovanni’s Room,
two characters discuss a French newspaper’s decision to cast the murder of a homosexual
man from a prominent French family as if he were heterosexual. As Hella tells David, in
Giovanni’s Room, “’There’s another truth they’re not telling. But newspapers never do,
that’s not what they’re for’” (344). In “Sonny’s Blues,” The brother-narrator opens the pages to see Sonny listed in the crime section along with other common criminals selling and using heroin. The brother-narrator confesses that he “couldn’t believe it: but what I
mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room for it in anywhere inside me” (831). His
resistance is this: helping his brother threatens his membership in those institutions he
escaped in order to stay away from danger and despair. It is the right thing to do, and his
critique of anyone who diverges from a similar approach is rigid and unforgiving. He
sees, watches and observes Sonny in the beginning, and this is the problem. Seeing and
watching allow him to regard his brother only in rational terms—literally through a
newspaper, one of the lasting symbols of the Enlightenment and French Revolution.
Thus, while the narrator-brother shows that even those who face oppression can find
themselves as subjects covered by and recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, the institutional memberships necessary for recognition are costly and not so easy
to acquire. Sonny, his brother, does not have them. “Sonny’s Blues” does not answer the
question of who is right or whether or not membership in church, state, family, and
education are valid requirements for access to the public sphere, but it does raise an issue
that Baldwin discussed in his writings as early as a letter he wrote to a friend at the age of
22:
174 In every country now the gov’t is a cloak which hides the people, does not have
any concern with their free expression, But I also submit that there is an inhuman
lack of consciousness in people themselves; and since we depend on all people
everywhere to create our brave, new world, the prospects seem exceedingly dim. I
very much question the glib theory which holds that people are environment and
environmental changes, presto, change the people. I am extremely wary (not to
say weary) of formulas moreover, behind that theory is the supposition that it is
possible to create an ideal environment! If you consider, as I do that each being is
subtly and irrevocably unique so that no two people share the same environment;
and that an ideal environment is one which is ideally suited to the individual’s
needs; and that for each individual born there exists only the most fragmentary
and general rules by which he can be illuminated—and considering the American
passion for standardization, and our emphasis on cash value as being the most
admirable goal—then, most of us are born into a trap which takes our lifeline to
be quite thoroughly defeated and the entire social question must become a very,
naked personal one. People must learn to live with themselves before they can
learn to live with each other. (Schomburg)
Baldwin’s places the problem at the level of institutions and individuals. Having already rejected organized religion at the age of 14, he now finds himself disillusioned by the government as well as the activism of his left-leaning friends involved with communism and socialist groups. To start his letter, he writes, “modern society, also by its nature, irresistibly creates the unmanageable few; who are so bitterly on the defensive that they very seldom make good revolutionists. The most they do in times of stress is to form an
175 avante-garde.” He accuses them of having “no concept and no feeling for the human
beings like themselves who inhabit the same globe.” These human beings are clearly the
Sonny’s of the world, people who dominate pages of Baldwin’s fiction.
Raising the issue of institutions through “Sonny’s Blues” literally took center
stage in 2008 when the story was translated into a different medium and performed at the
Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, an African-American theater company in San Francisco,
California. The company produced the play in cooperation with Word for Word, a
separate theater group that specializes in bringing short stories to life on the stage. Actors
read the text of a short story in its entirety, word for word, while acting out key scenes.
“Sonny’s Blues” played for several weeks in San Francisco followed by performances in
Paris and on the Stanford University campus. San Francisco jazz artist Marcus Shelby composed the score for the play. In writing the music, he aimed “not to get into the way of the words, and the tension and color, created by James Baldwin.” Second, he wanted the score to represent the concept of “freedom” in the story and play. Peter Macon, a
Yale-trained actor who first read Baldwin at the age of 16, played the character of the brother-narrator. He called acting in the play a cathartic experience that allowed him to deal with his own family issues:
There’s a cycle that I feel is being addressed in the play that is still relevant today
in terms of not growing up fatherless but not fatherful and the ramifications of
that. I am an older brother myself, and the issues I deal with are very close to
[those dealt with by] the brother-narrator character. [Baldwin] is writing about
these systems that are in place that are very common in dysfunctional black
families, and not just black families. I could relate to it on a very personal deep
176 level because the cycles still go on. I feel like as a man with an amount of earned
intellectual property—having learned the idea that intellectual property even
exists—and being able to translate it into my own life and break out of those
cycles, it was cathartic and painful and personal to tap into those things because I
feel like I was dealing with those things in my own life.25
Macon, citing the institutions of family and education (“earned intellectual property”),
said the play reminded him of his struggles with his younger brother, who did not have
the same opportunities as he did. Macon had access to classes in art, speech, dance,
literature and poetry, and, went on to attend Yale. As his brother came of age,
institutional funding for these types of programs evaporated, and, “my brother did not get
any of that. I watched my brother suffer without those things.” His brother chose a life of
the streets and sawed-off shotguns, Macon recalled. The institutions Macon credits with
saving him relate entirely to the arts, demonstrating the power of the aesthetic sphere, and
the connection between human creativity and living a good life. Second, he points to
being able to translate “earned intellectual property” into his “own life.” I read this
translation as Macon’s engagement with the institutions of the Western intellectual
tradition and his ability to merge them with his life as an African American. It does not
always work, and sometimes institutions serve to corrupt. Macon’s brother and Sonny
attest to this. Thus, the question is open as to whether institutions can help or hinder a
human being’s development. But this institutional ambiguity and the translation of
broader principles into one’s own life is not easy to comprehend in the language of the
25 All interviews are from a post-play panel I moderated on 14 February 2008 at the Hotel Rex in San Francisco.
177 Declaration. The complexity is more like a despairing jazz lament or the haunting chords of a blues song, forms Baldwin admitted that he wanted to emulate in his prose.
Only when the narrator-brother in “Sonny’s Blues” listens to and hears his brother, does he realize the complexity of Sonny’s lifeworld or what, following Habermas, can be described as the mutually shared world as seen from Sonny’s point of view (this mutually shared world looks different in the eyes of Sonny and the narrator-brother). Sonny does not seek institutional membership as a means for citizenship. Institutions, for Sonny, represent the prison, the drug clinic, and inadequate systems of education—all institutions he wishes to escape. He wants to play jazz, something less institutional and defined. Society, treaties, principles, concepts, reason, objective thinking, rationale—all have difficulty syncing with the improvisation and uncertainty of a jazz lament and/or someone who expresses herself through the philosophy of jazz and the blues. As
Kierkegaard suggests in Either-Or, music is the most sensuous form of expression and for that very reason it is more difficult to understand and pin down.
Many people and events help the narrator-brother come to his new-found understanding of Sonny: his mother, his wife, personal tragedy, trauma, stories about his father, and, most importantly, the chance to hear Sonny play the piano. These voices collectively assist him in seeing and hearing problems and dilemmas “of another order” that he cannot access in his institutional capacities. The brother is the classic case of a
Kantian being, someone who believes “I ought never to conduct myself except so that I could also will that my maxim become a universal law” (18). This fundamental maxim of Kantian ideas, with its inherent reliance on reason, has come to dominate moral conceptions of human rights and moral philosophy. When Sonny tells his brother he is
178 interested in Eastern philosophy as a means to acquire wisdom, the brother-narrator responds, “it sounded to me as though they were getting away from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on me for that” (839). In addition to discounting non-Western epistemologies, the brother-narrator divides the boys in his neighborhood into those who are “good” and bad, and those who do and do not “’got good sense’” (842). His mother, a woman informed by African-American Christianity, corrects him: “’It ain’t a question of his being a good boy,’ Mama said, “’nor of his having good sense. It ain’t only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under’” (842).
Actor Da’Mon Vann, whose credits include soap opera appearances on All My
Children and Guiding Light, portrayed the role of Sonny and called the performance an
“exercise in dealing with me.
Looking at myself. I have two brothers who I have had a tough relationship with.
I have a twin brother, and when I tell people I have had a tough relationship with
him, people are surprised because they always expect twins are right there with
each other. For a number of reasons that did not happen.
Though Vann played the role of Sonny in the play, he considered himself more like the narrator. In portraying Sonny, “I was putting on my twin brother’s shoes.
It’s about him, seeing what it’s like to be him. That’s how I went about it at first.
His struggles that he had gone through. It did not take long before I realized this
role is a lot about me as well. I just came to understand that this brilliant man
called James Baldwin was speaking about the individual. Not in one way.
Different ways in different situations. It was a tough place to be with something I
179 didn’t want to look at. I’ve grown tremendously from having done it. I was
believing myself to be a certain way and came to see there’s a whole lot more for
me at 39 to learn about myself and to learn about my brothers.
At this point, I wish to return to that opening Article of the Declaration, all people
“are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” or, as the plain language English version says, “They have reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a friendly manner.” Reason and conscience are repeated and deemed untranslatable into plain terms. Reason and conscience are the brother-narrator’s “wisdom” and “sense,” categories the mother says are not enough to consider in the category of the human being. The imagined moral universe, Kant’s, the narrator-brother’s and the Declaration’s, presupposes rational beings who operate like Sonny’s brother: they can live and participate in a world of universals in which it seems “that with a will free of the impulses of sensibility, he transports himself in thoughts into entirely another order of things than that of his desires in the field of sensibility, since from that wish he can expect no gratification of desires” (Kant 71). This removal of “gratification of desires” and the “impulses of sensibility” is central. Kant cannot deal with the erotic, the sexual, the emotional, jazz, blues, vulnerability, uncertainty, indeterminacy. Cora Diamond has pointed out the error in this type of thinking in Kant’s philosophy, relevant here because the Declaration is a Kantian document and the narrator-brother in “Sonny’s Blues” is a Kantian being: for Diamond, the “kind of respect (Kant) had in mind could not be extended to a human being who is not capable of rational thinking; and it would have to be extended to any Martian who shared our capacity of reasoning. Concern for our fellow human beings and their fate, if it
180 is not a concern for them as rational beings, is irrelevant to ethics as Kant conceives it”
(36). I have characterized the tension in Baldwin’s short story as one between seeing and watching, on the one hand, and listening and hearing, on the other. Jürgen Habermas thinks that, in his moral philosophy, “Kant pays the price of the rigidity of an ethics of conviction” that includes “a contractualist concept of society that denies any inherent moral quality to a life reduced to calculations of self-interest” (122).
Habermas does not think we can benefit from such a rigid justice model that requires calculations. For one, he believes it is “doubtful whether any concept of justice can claim universal validity,” and, secondly, he thinks lifeworlds “are totalities that exist only in plural form” (122). It is difficult for an individual to translate her morality into a morality for everyone. Instead, she must understand a pluralized lifeworld, one that welcomes a priori accepting. This world requires seeing, watching, listening to and hearing people you have previously ignored. Sonny’s brother says to him, “these friends of yours,” “they seem to shake themselves to pieces pretty goddamn fast” (856). The narrator-brother assumes that Sonny and his friends once represented whole human beings who might easily sustain themselves through institutional memberships of various kinds. Like Kant, like the Declaration, he believes “these friends of yours” deserve protection, but that protection requires them to change their lives to resemble that of
Sonny’s brother, rational human beings, or those “endowed with conscience and reason.”
Sonny’s response to his brother is that people are trying to survive anyway they possibly can and that he must look and recognize those efforts beyond a Kantian rationale mold.
“You’re just hung up on the way some people try,” he says. “—it’s not your way” (857).
181 In the section that follows I outline the discourse or philosophical foundations that
someone like Baldwin felt society would need in addition to the Kantian- and
Enlightenment-inspired Declaration. The crux of his dilemma with Kant is this:
Negroes want to be treated like men. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel,
Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.
A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves on the
edge of a steep place.26
Like many black writers, Baldwin understands jazz and the blues as a form of
African-American philosophy, and “Sonny’s Blues” dramatizes the ways in which
these types of African-American cultural expressions can hold meaning for
justice. Baldwin has often spoken of his attempt as a writer to mirror the practices
of jazz and blues musicians, and “Sonny’s Blues” is a prime example of his
literary aurality. “A lot of Negro style,” Baldwin said in 1969, “the style of a man
like Miles Davis or Ray Charles or the style of a man like myself—is based on a
knowledge of what people are really saying and on our refusals to hear it. You
pick up on the beat, which is more truthful than words” (Miles, Stanley, Pratt 74).
Baldwin effectively captures what Fred Moten refers to as “the music in black
literature, of the black aesthetic and philosophical tradition in the discourse of
psychoanalysis, of all of these in the text of western philosophy” (174). Jazz and
blues have not only helped to to shape and make audible rights in African-
American culture, but also in cultures across the world, from the Czech Republic
to Japan, that have heard the philosophical content of its melodies. This is an
26 qtd. in Irving Howe, “Nobody Knows My Name.” The New York Times. 2 July 1961.
182 important point because it shows how “Sonny’s Blues” reaches greater
universality. According to Josef Jařab, “it was precisely because open, direct, and
explicit protest was hardly possible and rarely effective in modern Czech history,
and because Czechs are used to reading and learning and even teaching „between
the lines“ that our people, even in the reception of American art and letters of any
ethnic description have been traditionally more open to identifying with cultural
rebels, to identifying in human rather than political or ideological terms ... and
therefore it became quite obvious that even African American literature would be
more appealing when introduced through the frequencies shared by writers and
musicians, that is, through the echoes of blues and jazz in the writings“ (172).
Jařab’s distinction between the political or ideological, on the one hand, and the human,
on the other is useful for reading the tension I have been describing in the philosophical
gap between the UDHR and “Sonny’s Blues.” Jařab has equated the jazz and blues with
the human, though the human is also the stated and philosophical basis of the
Declaration. Thus, Jařab is discussing a different understanding of the human, and that
human is the human of the jazz and blues as philosophy.
This understanding of jazz and blues in “Sonny’s Blues” was common among the
students in an introductory writing class I taught at San Quentin State Prison in summer
2008.27 Students read “Sonny’s Blues” and then provided reader responses to the story.
One student noted the following about the narrator-brother of the story:
27 English 99A is an introductory writing and critical reading course offered in the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. The program is accredited by Patten University in Oakland, Calif., and all teachers are unpaid volunteers. I taught this course in summer 2008 with Helen Min and Nancy Bourne. Students read the text for discussion on 20 May 2008, and wrote in-class reader responses after an initial discussion of the aesthetic, ethical and religious stages in Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. I have
183 He projects his and his brother’s childhood on the students that he teaches. He sees two
people in everyone: the poor naïve blissful child with big dreams and the broken, sad
adult who was coldly and shrewdly awaken from their dream only to be faced with the
reality of real life. He is only able to see that the dream world can become the real world
after he is touched by Sonny’s music. The music is a gateway, a bridge that closes the
gap between reality and fantasy. It brings them into one. He then realizes there is another
world, for the most part, it’s Sonny’s world. Sonny has made the third world his own.
The older brother never understands any other worlds until he is shown it through the
beauty of music. He sees the past two worlds of light and dark and sees something better
than both. He also sees people kind of the same. He sees these worlds. He sees a hopeful
child and a broken adult.
The students’ powerful reader response points to a “third world” created when “the music
is a gateway, a bridge that closes the gap between reality and fantasy.” As Baldwin
himself writes in, “Notes on A Hypothetical Novel,”
this collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always
very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the
collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and
try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will
certainly perish. (230)
The separate worlds, the colliding worlds, are the worlds of the two brothers, the worlds
of the Declaration and “Sonny’s Blues,” the worlds of the ethical and aesthetic, the
intentionally changed students’ names and their comments are reprinted with their permission and the permission of the program. For more information on the prison university project, please see http://www.prisonuniversityproject.org/
184 worlds of the rational, and that of jazz and the blues. My student points to the third world as a merging of the two worlds, Baldwin’s collision. Following my student’s keen insights on that day in our San Quentin classroom, I am suggesting that Baldwin’s story is gesturing toward that third world, which acknowledges the importance and collision of reason, conscience, jazz and the blues as all part of the “importance of being human” or personhood. Below I provide additional commentary from students in the course:
Gary:
I understand why Sonny wanted to escape the darkness of Harlem. Who would
want to live in a low-class, broke down, drug infested community? But at the
same time it’s hard to escape from a place where you have deep roots which keep
bringing you back. Because this one look for substitutes, different ways to escape
which can be positive or negative. It seems in Sonny’s situation it was negative.
Music was actually positive. It may be that Sonny should have found peace within
himself. Darkness can follow you if it’s deep in your heart. Even to the army. No
matter what solutions one resorts to, he will always come back to reality. This
darkness set between Sonny and his caring but critical brother. This darkness
brung conflict. This darkness led to more darkness. However, I believe love will
eventually conquer it.
Mitchell:
His brother is a married school teacher with structure in his life. Sonny on the
other hand is a wild kid, hungry to blaze his own path in life. Sonny has a love for
jazz music & playing the piano. But also has a drug habit like a lot of musicians in
this era. Also a very had way to make a living a that time. Sonny’s mother knew
185 that he would need someone to watch over him, and so she sorta left his brother in charge of looking out for him. I guess this is where the guilt & obligation came in for the brother. It’s a trip to the brother to see Sonny carrying on like a grown man after he gets out of jail. At one point he even confesses to himself that he doesn’t even really know his brother.
Kevin:
Sonny’s brother’s intentions are good but good for who? Sonny’s brother after the death of their mother is now trying to take on the role of father. This ideal is not the role that Sonny is looking for nor is it one he accepts. This causes bad blood between each of them. All Sonny wants from his brother is his acceptance of what he, Sonny, wants to do with his life, no matter what the outcome maybe.
Clinton:
The intimacy between the two is real and affectionate, to the point that Sonny felt ashamed to write his brother, because of his falling to the wayside. Sonny did not know how to explain how he got caught up in the vicious cycle of addiction and he felt ashamed.
Tran:
One is a well-rounded, family man who loves, cares, willing to sacrifice to bring his brothers on the right path, but doesn’t know how, because he doesn’t understand his brother. On the other hand, Sonny is more of an inward, carefree type of a person, he lives life following his heart and passion. He loves playing music, because in music he can express himself the way he can’t in words.
Gary:
186 I believe Sonny actually recognized the darkness he faced in the streets of
Harlem. Because he recognized the suffering he had to endure, he sought many
ways to escape, As humans we always search for ways to avoid suffering. When
we’re no longer under the care and protection of our guardian we must carry the
burden and responsibility and accountability on our shoulders. So we seek ways
to lighten this burden of suffering.
What becomes clear, I think, in the testimony of stage actors and students in the San
Quentin classroom, both performing “Sonny’s Blues,” is the introspection caused by the
Baldwin text, and its ability to provoke difficult questions and self-examinations related to freedom, kinship, identity, responsibility, and obligation. The discussion about human rights generated by a Baldwin text can lead to substantive and practical answers that help human rights become a useful discourse for people living in Rwanda, the Ninth Ward,
Manhattan or remote provinces in China. The professionalization of human rights is denied at every turn, as Baldwin’s text relies on despair, indeterminacy, discomfort, ugliness, stink, and imperfection, to narrate the everyday reality of individuals searching for hope and a way out of difficult situations. This is in direct contrast to a document like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is widely acknowledged as one of the main tools for bringing about dialogue and action in the area of global justice.
Both “Sonny’s Blues” and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights incorporate human declarations of the right to innate and inalienable protections. The
Declaration’s is reason-based, a manifestation of Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum and the declarations of the Rights the American Declaration of Independence (1776), and the
French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). A different type of
187 declaration takes place in “Sonny’s Blues,” the declaration of the jazz musician about to
take flight with his instrument and improvise a melody. Near the end of “Sonny’s Blues,”
the narrator, previously ignorant of world-renowned jazz musician The Bird Charlie
Parker explains,
All I know about music is that not many people every really hear it. And even
then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters,
what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing
evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is
dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the
air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has
no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he
triumphs, is ours. (861)
The “imposing of order” is how the short story articulates a declaration, and this
declaration is different from the reason-based only declaration of rights documents and
their forebears. Baldwin’s story adds another dimension, “another order” to the project of
the Declaration. Whereas the Declaration endows all human beings with reason and
conscience, Baldwin’s story additionally endows all human beings with the blues and
jazz. Whereas Kant, the narrator-brother and the Declaration insist that human beings transport themselves “into entirely another order of things than that of his desires in the field of sensibility” Baldwin, Habermas, Diamond, jazz, and the blues require, as Sonny’s brother explains, “another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason.” The human being, musician or artist, “his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.” This is what Habermas means by lifeworlds as already “plural.”
188 By adding jazz and blues to conscience and reason, the form, content and
characterization of “Sonny’s Blues examines the human condition symbolically through
the creative dilemmas of the human being as artist-musician in a world of despair. The
way in which characters see, look, watch, hear and listen to one another in the story reads
like a literal translation of jazz musicians in a tense and powerful jam session. What is
complicated in the chaos of it all is the notion of safety that the narrator initially hoped to
secure for his brother—that Kantian safety that can be gained through membership in
institutions, if only one would follow the right path. The narrator-brother and Sonny are
at odds over the concept, the narrator wanting to find order and calm, Sonny using his
music to withstand the storm of suffering that is post-war Harlem and African-American
subjectivity.
I was trying to find something out about my brother. I was dying to hear him tell
me he was safe.
“Safe!” my father grunted, whenever Mama suggested trying to move to a
neighborhood which might be safer for children. “Safe, hell! Ain’t no place safe
for kids, nor nobody.” (840)
The Declaration suggests that safety is possible if only we act towards one another in a friendly manner. Yet the fiction of safety is challenged by the prevalence of danger and destruction in the world, not only in those places that lack stable governments and democracy, but also in democracies that find it acceptable to provide safety for some while others drown in misery and despair. Safety is the image projected by the institutions of family, religion, education and marriage when those institutions place restrictions on who has membership. The Declaration protects these institutions and tries
189 to find ways to extend them to a global citizenry. This is the declaration of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, strong, virile, and removed of uncertainty and vulnerability
that mirrors the unpredictability and occasional treachery of a cold modernity. The
UDHR, in short, is assured in its claims.
In contrast, “Sonny’s Blues” ends with a shaking image that leaves the reader to decide
whether or not Sonny will turn his life around. He might kick his drug habit, find a job,
get married, live, perhaps, as a successful jazz musician. He might find a way to gain
acceptance into institutions. Alternatively, he might continue to struggle. He might also
succumb to those streets he so desperately wants to escape. At the end of the story, Sonny has just finished a performance in the Village. His brother, who is in the audience, is mesmerized by Sonny’s playing ability and finally starts to understand his brother’s struggles. In celebration of Sonny’s performance, the narrator asks the waitress to send a
Scotch and milk to Sonny: “he sipped from it and looked toward me, and nodded. Then he put it back on top of the piano. For me, then, as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling” (864). Derrida reads
trembling as a type of secret, and the application can be carried over to Baldwin’s short
story and the honest uncertainty it conveys. Trembling, Derrida argues,
at least as a signal or symptom, is something that has already taken place, as in the
case of an earthquake [tremblement de terre] or when one trembles all over. It is
no longer preliminary even if, unsettling everything so as to imprint upon the
body an irresponsible shaking, the event that makes one tremble portends and
threatens still. It suggests that violence (54) is going to break out again, that some
trauma will insist on being repeated. As different as dread, fear, anxiety, terror,
190 panic, or anguish remain from one another, they have already begun in the
trembling, and what has provoked them continues, or threatens to continue to
make us tremble. (55)
“Sonny’s Blues” read alongside the Declaration suggests that any text aiming to provide universal protections to human beings based on their “reason and conscience” should also tremble and allow space for the jazz and blues, and other cultural forms or ways in which human beings across the world express their humanity. If the Declaration cannot do this alone, an endless archive of literature and the arts exist to help with translation. The
United Nations has concluded that multiple linguistic translations and even plain English and plain French translations will make the UDHR more accessible and capable of universal recognition and enforcement. As I show in my final chapter, the United Nations even published its own novel in 2000. “Sonny’s Blues” points out the additional work necessary in order to complete translation and move toward at least making it possible for a wider global citizenry to recognize their lives in the language of the Declaration.
International actors, those who, Ignatieff suggests, “take it for granted that they represent universal values and universal interests” (10) will need to see, watch, hear and listen to the Declaration and the people it aims to represent, understand their blues, something reminiscent of Sonny’s Blues. Sonny’s brother, marveling at his brother’s performance in the jazz club, says,
It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I
seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had
yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and
191 I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he
would never be free until we did. (863) [my emphasis, italics]
Giovanni’s Room
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. —Article 16, UDHR
As soon as a person is legally entitled, he or she has the right to marry and have a family. In doing this, neither the colour of your skin, the country you come from nor your religion should be impediments. Men and women have the same rights when they are married and also when they are separated. Nobody should force a person to marry.
The government of your country should protect you and the members of your family. — Article 16, UDHR, “Plain Language” English Version
Does Article 16 of the Declaration support marriage between two members of the same sex? Some people think so while others ask for greater specificity. Both the official and plain language versions of the text are vague on the issue. Since the UDHR does not aim to be so particular, I think we must look to texts that are willing to take the risk.
While Giovanni’s Room does not address the issue of same-sex marriage directly, heterosexual marriage and same-sex love are the dominant themes in the novel. It contains a story about what happens when one man fails to form a partnership with a man he has feelings for because he is unwilling to risk the societal consequences. Second, so interpellated is the man that he chooses to marry a woman. Marrying a woman, after all, is the right thing to do, an objectifying measure that props up sexism and gender inequity.
If society approved of same-sex unions and their normal existence in the public sphere,
Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956, would have to be rewritten. Alas, same-sex unions
192 remain a thorny issue in the twenty first century and the novel is as timely today as the
day it was published. I choose to analyze the novel against Article 16 of the UDHR
because the novel is not vague where the UDHR celebrates vagueness: failure to love is
fatal, and society contributes to the failure by creating conditions that lead one to deny
the impulse/desire to love. Thus, laws prohibiting same-sex marriages are part of this
denial and the prohibitions can be implicated in the negative impacts on the lives of gays
and lesbians: men and women who do not marry first loves; men and women who live
shadow lives or marry someone of the opposite sex out of obligation; married men who
lead double lives, heterosexual and married by day, homosexual and risky by night,
placing themselves and their wives in danger. The vagueness of the Article lets states off
of the hook when it comes to addressing the rights of their homosexual citizens.
My reading of Giovanni’s Room is largely Kantian and turns to Kierkegaard when Kant
does not provide adequate answers. And while I do not think it is fair to apply
Kantianism directly to the issue of same-sex marriage, it is possible to illustrate when
individuals have seized the political to deny the humanity of their fellow human beings. I
would argue that this is the case in the debate concerning same-sex marriage. How can
human beings see marriage as fit for themselves but not for other human beings? For
several reasons I rely on a fictional narrative to make this connection to Kantianism. As
Nussbaum notes, empirical application of an issue like same-sex marriage to Kantianism
would not be fair to his moral theory; as Diamond has pointed out, moral theory like
Kantianism lacks a proper conception of the human being, as the “kind of respect he had
in mind could not be extended to a human being who is not capable of rational thinking;
and it would have to be extended to any Martian who shared our capacity of reasoning.
193 Concern for our fellow human beings and their fate, if it is not a concern for them as
rational beings, is irrelevant to ethics as Kant conceives it” (36). Second, as Wood has
shown, Kant’s actual views on marriage (the sexual aspect of it, actually, for he has
profound things to say about friendship) are problematic: “Even at its best, the marital
relationship as Kant portrays it is fundamentally a system of mutual exploitation: Each
partner uses the other by taking advantage of the other’s vulnerabilities. The man
victimizes the woman’s physical and intellectual weaknesses, which is ramified in her position of social and economic dependence. The woman uses her allurement, emotional sensitivity, and self-control to play on the man’s passions and affections” (257).
Setting aside Kant’s specific remarks on marriage (they can be set aside using the same
explanation provided for setting aside his view of blacks) and focusing on Giovanni’s
Room I want to suggest how the categorical imperative makes it clear that human beings’
denial of the right of union to their fellow beings is dangerous, immoral and, according
to Kant, “will bring the same misfortune down on the heads of other, innocent parties
who would otherwise have been well disposed and would have used their freedom
lawfully and hence in a way which is conducive to what is best for the world!”
Currently, 41 states, including California, have statutes defining marriage as a union
between one man and one woman or between two members of the opposite sex; 27 states
have incorporated such language into their respective constitutions; Connecticut,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Rhode Island are the only states
that do not have legislation expressly prohibiting same sex marriages. Massachusetts is
the only state that grants marriage licenses to same-sex couples; Connecticut, New
Jersey, and Vermont permit civil unions, and California allows domestic partnerships for
194 all couples. Limited rights are available to unmarried couples in Hawaii, Maine and the
District of Columbia.28 The consequences of these statutes becomes clear through a
reading of Baldwin’s novel.
Giovanni’s Room is a cruel and difficult to bear novel in which the American
protagonist begins a passionate affair with another male character, only to spurn his
newly beloved because he fears how society will react to their same-sex union. David
loves then rejects his Italian friend Giovanni and the decision leads Giovanni into despair
and confusion in the streets of 1950s Paris, the setting of the novel. Turned away,
Giovanni searches for love in dark places, working as a hustler and, eventually,
murdering a patron who refuses to pay him. Because Giovanni’s Room is told from the
perspective of the protagonist David and through a series of flashbacks, the opening
scene involves David standing before a mirror and contemplating his complicity in the
fate of Giovanni, who, at this point, awaits death by guillotine. The novel insists that we
read with what I identify as a Kantian attitude: Giovanni murdered another human being,
yes, but the true culprit is David, for he is the one who gave in to self interest, failed to
obey the ultimate command, denied universal law, and, in doing so, brought, as Kant
says, “the same misfortune down on the heads of other, innocent parties who would
otherwise have been well disposed and would have used their freedom lawfully and hence
in a way which is conducive to what is best for the world!” What is remarkable about this
book is that, although it contains only white European characters, is set in Paris, and takes
up themes of homosexuality, it is part of the African-American literary canon and
regarded as an illuminating understanding of the African-American experience in
28 National Conference of State Legislatures
195 America. I ask the question, how can a book that is claimed by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities also represent a primary text for African-American scholars and readers? The answer is a Kantian one, as the book tells us what happens when we do not act according to the categorical imperative. As I move into the particular passages of the novel, it is important to note that we do not see the principles of Kantianism in clear and defined form; it is impossible to devise a Kantian calculator equivalent to the utilitarian kind. According to Habermas,
The cognitivisim of Kantian ethics has repeatedly met with the incomprehension
of those who judge practical reason by the standards of what Kant called the
understanding. Thus, empiricism disputes whether moral questions can even be
decided in a rationalmanner. Normal language use—so runs a prima facie
plausible objection—should already make the cognitivist wary: when we act
immorally, we are not necessarily behaving irrationally. This is indeed
indisputable if we understand “rational” in terms of intelligent, pragmatically
astute, and, hence, purposively rational action. But then, of course, our way of
using language can no longer serve as an unbiased witness, since it is already
informed by an outlook that limits the rational to the sphere of purposive action.
Certainly we cannot simply assimilate moral insight to the epistemic knowledge
without further ado, for the former tells us what we ought to do, whereas we only
know something, strictly speaking, when we know how things stand in the world.
Practical questions do not seem to admit of theoretical treatment. In fact, our
everyday moral intuitions neither depend on an ethical theory nor can they in the
normal course of events derive much benefit from one. But it does not follow that
196 intuitively mastered everyday knowledge is not knowledge at all. On the contrary,
questions appealing to reasons suggest rather that we associate a cognitive claim
with moral judgments. Kant too shows no small regard for the moral knowledge
cognizant of the fact “that neither science nor philosophy is needed in order to
know what one ought to do.” (Justification 20-21)
Following Habermas, the Declaration could never provide us with the answer for same- sex unions. Isn’t a novel or story more conducive to facilitating the reflection prompted by human beings’ “everyday moral intuitions” and help us see “what we ought to do” in light of the experiences of other human beings with whom we share the earth? And if we have already done this with the prose of Henry James, wouldn’t reading Baldwin philosophically represent a continuation of that project?
Baldwin acknowledges Giovanni’s Room as a rewriting of James’s The Ambassadors.
Baldwin considered James his literary model, and he understood The Ambassadors as a novel about the “end of innocence … about what happens to you if you don’t tell the truth to yourself ... about the failure of innocence” (255). Philosophers suggest that Kant is the greatest moral ethicist of our time and Baldwin was aware of his influence and the need to reckon with his ideas. Thus, Baldwin’s valiant attempts to form dialogue with
“people who have mastered Kant” but could not relate Kantianism to marginalized populations. In Kant, we get moral theory that insists we must do good for the sake of good itself, with no incentive connected to our actions. In this way, Baldwin is indebted to Kant—there is a moral good that the characters in Baldwin’s novel should adhere to, but they are compromised by self-interest, something Kant connected to the evil inherent in all human beings. Am I suggesting that Baldwin is a Kantian being? Partially—the
197 ideas embodied in Kant can be located in any number of thinkers and societies that
preceded him. Kant is useful, though, for his connection to the philosophical
underpinnings of our national and international legal judgment, our national and
international moral conscience. Like Kant, I think Baldwin has some sense of a
categorical imperative, an innate and core principle of good that exists in all human
beings from birth. It leads them to make right and moral decisions. Like Baldwin’s, the
morality of Kant is cold and cruel: if protecting your mother requires telling a lie, then
you are to dispose of the responsibility to protect. Baldwin’s is even crueler, meeting the
Chekhovian demand that if you wish to show compassion in your stories you must be as
cruel as possible. As one contemporary reviewer of Giovanni’s Room wrote in
Commentary Magazine, the novel is “written as if Locke and the Enlightenment had not happened.” Both Baldwin and Kant are indebted to religion for helping them form their moral theories; likewise, they both chose reason over religion, leaving the church an influential yet deconstructed presence in their lives. Kant grew up in a household that stressed pietism; Baldwin, a storefront child preacher at 14, was raised in the crucible of the Baptist church. The morality of Baldwin and Kant is universal—what they believe
about human good applies to everyone. In fact, when making a decision, you should act
as if your decision is something another human being in your situation would choose to
do. Here is where, as Nussbaum suggests, a narrative like Baldwin’s and moral theory
like Kant’s can help one another. The universal of Kant that many fail to see themselves
incorporated into becomes more inclusive through Baldwin’s narrative, and Baldwin’s narrative can be analyzed in greater complexity through the principles of Kant. We can extract from the pages of Baldwin’s prose and show what happens when societies fail to
198 recognize the humanity of all within their borders. For Baldwin, a “ruling principle” is
“knowledge that human beings are more important than real estate;” he similarly
believed, “All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than
the man goes with him.” As a result, people should act as “custodian[s] of a quantity.”29
Narratives like Baldwin’s show how the universal principles of Kant and those of the
UDHR can apply to everyone, a controversial claim that the UDHR cannot defend on its
own.
The protagonist of Baldwin’s novel begins and ends in the same place, standing before a
mirror in the south of France while shards of human experience surround him. Placed at
the center of a tragic morality play, David flashes back to the recent past of his life as a
United States American émigré in Paris. He is engaged to Hella, an independent-minded
Midwesterner; David’s love for Hella is complicated by his affair with and desire for
Giovanni, the novel’s namesake and sacrificial lamb. The two endure a short and
tumultuous relationship, with David initially embracing his desire for Giovanni and
ultimately rejecting their same-sex union on the grounds of its violation of hetero-
normative experience. Indeed, the homo-erotic thread of the novel unfolds beneath the
heterosexual world, David living dual lives at a cost expensive to the moral semblance of
larger society. Spurned by David, Giovanni is left dehumanized and alone in the
underworld; he resorts to crime. Giovanni operates in an underworld that the novel
depicts as separate from mainstream Paris; only when he kills (in contradistinction to
when he makes desperate cries to be recognized in the Parisian milieu as a human being)
does he matter to authorities, who cast Giovanni and his victim as heterosexuals—an
29 Baldwin, James and Richard Avedon. Nothing Personal. New York; Atheneum, 1964.
199 important distinction needed to make reportage, and judicial inquiry into the crime
legitimate. “’There’s another truth they’re not telling,’” David reasons. “’But newspapers
never do, that’s not what they’re for’” (151). The need to preserve a heteronormative
Paris, France, Europe and World order, drives David’s choices, what he thinks he ought
to do, in the novel; after the homicide, families and officials “were all desperately
anxious that the case be closed, so that things might, in effect, go back to normal and the
dreadful whiplash of public morality not fall on their backs” (150). Giovanni’s Room
should be read as a public morality play structured, cast, and narrated for the sake of
filling its audience with a feeling of collective responsibility for the ruin that occurs
within its pages. Indifference to racial, gender, and sexual oppression kills, and
individuals must return to the mirror stage to re-establish their commitment to the
language of humanity.
David grows up in a hetero-normative world that informs his decisions later in life. His interactions with family, the United States’ metropolises, and relationships with others within his age group, place him in a powerful matrix with clear rules that he finds difficult to escape or resist. The information of his past is revealed as part of the series of flashbacks that fill his mind as he stands before the mirror. The first flashback takes him to adolescence when he meets Joey, “a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing” (6). David and Joey become best friends who go swimming near Joey’s
Coney Island home, go to the movies together, play around in the showers, and walk through the Brooklyn streets in each others arms, oblivious to the adults “sitting shrill and disheveled on the stoops and all the world’s children on the sidewalks or in the gutters or hanging from fire escapes” (7). The global audience Baldwin describes symbolizes the
200 public morality that will work as a chorus throughout the novella. They see Joey and
David, approve of their interaction on account that they are boys playing together innocently on a summer day in the Brooklyn sun. Removed from the public, however, the homosocial between Joey and David turns to the homoerotic, and, for the first time in his life, David feels “really aware of another person’s body” (8). For David, holding Joey seemed like holding in [his] hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which [he] had miraculously happened to find” (8). I want to suggest that Joey as “rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird” represents the first opportunity for David to escape a heteronormative life and configure the world on his own terms. The vulnerable bird is an important metaphor, one that saves human lives in mineshafts, for example, and also, if
Judith Butler is correct, connects to the possibility of language:
Toni Morrison refers specifically to “the violence of representation” in the 1993
Nobel Lecture in Literature. “Oppressive language,” she writes, “does more than
represent violence; it is violence.” (16) Morrison offers a parable in which
language itself is figured as a “living thing,” where this figure is not false or
unreal, but indicates something true about language. In the parable, young
children play a cruel joke and ask a blind woman to guess whether the bird that is
in their hands is living or dead. The blind woman responds by refusing and
displacing the question: “I don’t know … but what I do know is that it is in your
hands.” (11)
Morrison then elects to read the woman in the parable as a practiced writer, and
the bird, as language, and she conjectures on how this woman write thinks of
language:
201 “she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one
has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences. So the question
that the children put to her, ‘Is it living or dead?,’ is not unreal, because she thinks
of language as susceptible to death, erasure … .” (13) (Butler 6-7)
If language is a “living thing” with agency, represented by Morrison as the living or dead bird in the hands of the children, then the vulnerable figure of Joey opens a new world for David, if only he dares to take the risk of engaging himself with the unknown and transformative; If he follows his heart in his experience with Joey, their language lives—the bird in the hands of the children is alive. David admits, “I was very frightened;
I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes” (8). The morning after their night in one another’s arms, David awakes first, watching Joey and realizing “his body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen till then” (8). David wants to touch Joey and awake him, “but something stopped me. … above all, I was suddenly afraid. It was borne in on me. But Joey is a boy. …That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood” (8-9). David chooses to destroy language, and rejects Joey in way that creates a “constriction” neither of them can “arrest.” It is clear from the novel that his decision is driven by something exterior to David. He sees himself as unable to articulate his decision to Joey, for doing so “would have broken my will” (9). The idea of the will as breakable conflicts with notions of free will from Augustine to the present. David’s will cannot be corrupted by another; he might choose to reject Joey because their love represented a homosexual relationship, but it is not possible that it was done against his will. Society creates conditions, certainly, but the will ultimately rests with the individual.
202 David’s experience with Joey, that “rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird,” and the language their relationship represents, foreshadows the irresponsibility to come in his adult life. That this flashback comes first in the novel is crucial to the archive of seemingly innocuous crimes committed by David that flash before him as he stands in front of the mirror in the south of France. In a dishonest act, he rejects a boy to whom he his attracted because he fears what will happen if others find out he harbors desire for someone of the same sex. That rejection is a rehearsal for future rejections and dishonesty.
David lives in a household with his father and aunt. His mother dies when he is five, a tragedy for which he is, “grieving still” (11). The household arrangement provides a way for the characters to protest what is out of joint between their familial relations and the established heteronormative order. The following exchange between David’s father and his aunt, Ellen, is indicative:
“I certainly don’t care,” said Ellen, “what you do with yourself. It isn’t you I’m
worried about. It’s only that you’re the only person who has any authority over
David. I don’t. And he hasn’t got any mother. And he only listens to me when he
thinks it pleases you. Do you really think it’s a good idea for David to see you
staggering home drunk all the time? And don’t fool yourself,” she added, after a
moment, in a voice think with passion, “don’t fool yourself that he doesn’t know
where you’re coming from, don’t think he doesn’t know about your women!”
The family, one of if not the most important units in human experience, can consist of many different actors who fulfill varied roles. Indeed, it might mean the unit of father, child, son and daughter, living in socioeconomic comfort and attending Protestant service
203 on Sundays, but the possible configurations are endless. Yet, a particular paradigm seems
to exert hegemonic power over others. Ellen decries David’s lack of a mother and father
who fulfill those roles as traditionally understood in the narrative of U.S. American
society. A single father is no more acceptable than a non-biological mother whose
authority is compromised by her apparent lack of authority. David, too, is confused by
the seeming abnormality of his situation. Listening to the irreverence with which Ellen
and his father speak of his mother, David feels he “had no right to be the son of such a
mother” (13).
The conflicts of family, sexuality, and identity, fill David as he prepares to forego college
and visit Paris to figure out what to do with his life. His girlfriend Hella accompanies him
to Paris; he has asked her to marry him, but she questions his sincerity and runs off to
Spain to consider his proposal. In the meantime, he meets Giovanni.
David feels compelled to reciprocate the marital tradition that precedes him even if it
means denying his desire for a relationship with another man; his dishonesty destroys
both prospects—life with a man or life with a woman. The pressures of marriage show up
in the novel in various ways. Contemplating why he asks Hella to marry him in the first
place, David admits he did it “to give himself something to be moored to” (5). Even after
he has an affair with Giovanni, the allure of family leads him to desire a wife and
children, the chance “to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood
unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed” (104). After being away in
France for several months, David’s father urges him in a letter to come home. Implicit in
the message, reasons David, is the query, “Is it a woman, David? Bring her on home. I don’t care who she is. Bring her on home and I’ll get you set up. He could not risk this
204 question because he could not have endured an answer in the negative” (91). When David
rejects Giovanni in order to return to the United States to marry Hella, Giovanni accuses
him of adhering to the “mythology of your country” (142).
Giovanni knows that David is bowing to the pressure of American life: marriage is for a
man and a woman, and no other configuration need apply. When David assures Giovanni
he is making his decision out of love for Hella, Giovanni, the novel’s truthsayer, replies,
“You lie so much, you have come to believe all your own lies” (140). We might not agree
with the Kantian principle that one should never lie, but it is true that a similar principle
dominates the ethos of Giovanni’s Room. Giovanni accuses David of wanting “to kill him
in the name of all your lying little moralities” (141). He calls David immoral, a man in
love with his “purity,” “the most immoral man I have met in all my life” (141). Giovanni
foreshadows his own ruin, urging David to realize the consequences of his failure to
honor truth. In his admonishment of David’s sin, Giovanni speaks from experience. He
left his native Italy and his wife after their baby boy was stillborn. Once he “knew that it
was dead, I took our crucifix off the wall and I spat on it and I threw it on the floor and
my mother and my girl screamed and I went out” (139). Giovanni felt betrayed by God— he and his wife lived an ideal life in a beautiful Italian village where “she took care of me” and “there never was any trouble between us, never” (138). Giovanni was content to stay in his village and “eat much spaghetti and drink much wine and make many babies and grow fat” (138). His reasons had less to do with adhering to religious understanding of marriage and more to do with a life “dripping and bursting and beautiful and terrible”
(139). The loss of his child changed everything, marking “the day of my death—I wish it had been the day of my death” (139). Why is Giovanni’s untroubled life contingent on
205 perfection and incapable of overcoming adversity? I think his failure to overcome the
loss of a child has less to do with the loss of child than with Giovanni’s inability to
perform an identity that does not reflect his true beliefs and desires. Living according to
the Catholic doctrine, he thinks, will reap just rewards and make up for the suppression of
desires deemed abnormal. He has accepted the grand narrative and the grand narrative
has betrayed him.
After the experience in Italy, Giovanni runs from his metaphorical Garden of
Eden and falls to Paris, the Babylon of both James’s nineteenth century novels and
Giovanni’s Room. Giovanni imagines that his sin is spitting on the crucifix, but the novel
does not confirm this. Kierkegaard questions the common belief that the sin of Adam is
one that all of humanity after him must deal with; he posits that each human being brings
sin into the world and this results in an endless anxiety and despair. Baldwin imagines a
similar world, each person accountable for his own sins and redemption. Baldwin’s
universe is the place where innocence has been lost; even if Giovanni acts in accordance
with his own moral order or religious doctrine his life is contingent upon the presence of
his self-interest and the self-interest of the human beings surrounding him. The reading need not be religious: even in the schema of Kantian reason where human beings are imbued with a categorical imperative to do good, self interest leads to decisions that veer away from the moral order. In this case, the evil that enters Giovanni’s village is the hypothetical ugly American (David) “coming through our village in the ugly, fat,
American motor car you will surely have by then and looking at me and looking at all of us and tasting our wine and shitting on us with those empty smiles Americans wear everywhere … and driving off with a great roar of the motors and a great sound of tires
206 and telling all the other Americans you meet that they must come and see our village because it is so picturesque” (138). Giovanni is burdened by both the Edens projected by himself and the Americans who come into his village after the war.
At one point in Part One of the novel, David provides a reflection that I must quote at length. The character Jacques has said to David, “‘Nobody can stay in the Garden of
Eden,’” followed by “‘I Wonder Why?’”
I have thought about Jacques questions since, (David said). The question is banal
but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after
all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most
treacherous, when it seems most bright—and it’s true that nobody stays in the
garden of Eden. Jacques garden was not the same as Giovanni’s, of course.
Jacques garden was involved with football players and Giovanni’s was involved
with maidens—but that seems to have made so little difference. Perhaps
everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their
garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the
choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to
remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually
recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of
madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the
world is mostly divided between madmen who remember, and madmen who
forget. Heroes are rare. (25)
207 Giovanni has fallen from his garden of Eden, and David believes life in the garden of
Eden remains a possibility. Giovanni only acknowledges his pain once he has been betrayed by the garden of Eden (the loss of his child). Innocence is no longer credible to him and he lashes out at David’s insistence on holding onto innocence. David, on the other hand, will do everything to keep alive his vision of a perfect life, even if it means ignoring the collateral damage, the lives affected by his determined mission to .
Baldwin’s either/or is between “madmen who remember” and “madmen who forget,” with the rare third category, a hero who can do both. Earlier, in my analysis of “Sonny’s
Blues,” I quoted Baldwin’s allusion to the “collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is” and the resulting choice it creates: “you can meet the collision head- on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish” (230). In his most famous text, Either-Or, Kierkegaard divides the choice into one of an aesthetic life, driven by desire and pleasure, and an ethical life, in which one makes decisions based upon rational choices in relation to society. “Every person who lives only esthetically,” writes Kierkegaard, “therefore has a secret horror of despairing.” Neither the aesthetic nor ethical life on its own is enough—rather either/or is best understood as both/and, meaning a collision must occur: “That is whereby a person becomes what he becomes. It does not want to make the individual into someone else but into the individual himself. It does not want to destroy the esthetic, but to transfigure it. For a person to live ethically it is necessary that he become conscious of himself so thoroughly that no accidental element escapes him.” Baldwin’s hero is Kierkegaard’s aesthete/ethical human being, both adhering to a third world, a higher place caused by a collision. That collision for
208 Kierkegaard is religious consciousness and one’s personal relationship with God;
Baldwin’s is love. The collision of worlds, for Kierkegaard, creates the unique human
being, and while, “to be the unique human being is not so great in and by itself, for every
human being shares this with every product of nature, [but] to be that in such a way that
he is thereby also the universal –that is the true art of living.”
Because of his failure to love or become “the unique human being” David destroys the lives of most of the characters in the novel; grasping to his American identity, one derived from “ancestors [who] conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past“ (3), David makes decisions that conflict with the recognition of a universal humanity that is at his core. Unwilling to admit his sexual ambivalence he chooses marriage as an option “to give myself something to be moored to” (5), a fateful decision, he realizes, because
“people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents” (8). In the end David admits his relationship with Giovanni, leaving Hella devastated and blaming Giovanni and Europe:
“Americans should never come to Europe,” she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry,
“it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.” (165)
She returns from Spain ready to marry David. Desperately grasping at his American identity, one derived from “ancestors [who] conquered a continent, pushing across death- laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past“ (3), David fails to be honest with her about his life with Giovanni. Even after he rejects Giovanni and clings to Hella by day, David roams the streets and bars in search of
209 men by night. One evening in Nice he “climbed the stairs of a dark hotel in company with a sailor” (163). He and the sailor have a short affair. Near the end of their time together, they hang out in a gay bar. At one point, David looks up and, “In the mirror, suddenly, I saw Hella’s face” (162). The hall of mirrors that is Giovanni’s Room forces characters, and in-turn, readers, to reflect on their own lives. The mirror that begins and ends the novel frames even more mirrors and windows that break and reflect and shed light on people’s true actions. When David sees Hella, it is in a mirror along with his own reflection. Exposed, he and Hella take to the “stone-cold streets, in silence” (163). The recurring stone-cold streets and mirrors of the novel symbolize the fragility of human lives and the human psyche. A familiar scene unfolds, as Hella objects to David’s failure to be just. Like Giovanni, she despises David’s dishonesty. She seems less concerned with how his decision affects her personally. Rather, she charges him with crimes against a larger universe of human beings. “If you had only told me the truth then,” she says.
“Don’t you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or hadn’t you heard? (164).
By failing to be honest with Hella, David denies Hella as his equal, and the act is seen as a violation. David’s dishonesty undoes her life in the same way dishonesty on her part would have ruined him. The novel understands Hella and David as equals, humans eligible for the same privileges on earth. By using Hella as a mooring post for marriage,
David privileges masculinity and does not act in the best interest of society. Hella, as she does throughout the novel, struggles aloud with the prospect of marriage, of the
“humiliating necessity” (124) of having a man in a society that understands marriage in a
210 fixed way. Because of these conditions, she believes a woman “is always a stranger”
(125) for a man, and that “there’s something awful about being at the mercy of a
stranger” (125). An incredulous David laughs at his fiancée and reasons that he cannot
imagine Hella at the mercy of anyone. “You may laugh,” Hella replies, “but there is
something in what I say.” Hella then equates her freedom with being committed to
another, yet in her marriage she vows to remain intelligent, “read and argue and think and
all that—and I’ll make a great point of not thinking your thoughts” (126). Her confusion perplexes David, but Hella is making clear the difficulties of entering into a relationship with a man in the 1950s when she is expected to be his “obedient and most loving servant” (126). David seems open to her defiance; little does she know his betrayal will be even greater. Women are seen as equals in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, but the document is less immediate and open about portraying the violence of sexual inequality and patriarchy. Giovanni’s Room shows how such inequality and indifference to it ruins lifeworlds. After betraying Hella, David wants “her to forgive me.
But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already” (70).
Echoing Henry James’s Lambert Strether, David completes his introspection with the realization that “the great difficulty is to say Yes to life” (8) or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, to be a unique human being. Unwilling to say yes, to live all he can, and pliant to the demands of American orthodoxy, David performs his most destructive act by refusing to love Giovanni. Contrary to David’s decision, Giovanni has chosen to pursue life, even if it means realizing his love for men in the face of hegemonic forces that embrace traditional roles for men and women. Despite the demand by minor characters such as
211 Jacques for David to love Giovanni, love him on planetary account that nothing “else
under heaven really matters” (57), David chooses to pursue a patriarchal life, one of
“light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children
to bed” (104). His choice legitimates the myth of America that he has run away from to
Paris, and Baldwin makes the decision fateful for a character other than David. Whereas
Lambert Strether suffers the consequences of his own decisions, David’s decision, though
not directly, places Giovanni on the guillotine. Giovanni in his spiral toward madness and
the eventual murder that causes him to be executed, exposes David’s American
allegiance in one of the last conversations before the two end their relationship and
Giovanni takes to a life of the streets:
“You want to leave Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You
want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are
immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look,
look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did
not love you? Is this what you should do to love?” (141)
Giovanni, referring to himself in the third person, shows why David is metaphorically responsible for his death, which has yet to take place in the novel. David disregards the prophetic announcement, but the seriousness of it becomes clear when Giovanni later commits a crime of passion, killing another man, and is condemned to death. America, the myth of America, has turned both David and Giovanni into inhumane monsters; although David has done nothing criminally wrong, his innocence is similar to
Santiago’s, an innocence that resembles a crime. As Donald Gibson asserts in “The
Political Anatomy of Space,” Baldwin’s novel presupposes a particular kind of individual
212 responsibility, in which “injustices committed by groups against other groups, and individuals against other individuals, come about because individuals do not know themselves, cannot be honest with themselves or others, and do not possess, therefore, the capacity to love. The idea of love is central to Baldwin’s thinking and lies at the heart of his system of values” (12).
The execution at the heart of Giovanni’s Room is difficult to bear, but the structure of the novella as a series of flashbacks removes its concrete centrality. In other words, the state murder of an individual is symbolic—symbolic of the cost of one individual failing to uphold his responsibility to another in the moral universe. In thinking about Giovanni’s Room, it is important to remember the novella’s original working title,
Ignorant Armies. That these two titles were at one point in competition explains the movement between the abstract and concrete, which occurs in the novella in a way absent in Baldwin’s other fiction. In his analysis of the first paragraph of The Ambassadors, Ian
Watt argues that the abstraction and indirection in James’ work leads naturally to universals that show, “that behind every petty individual circumstance there ramifies an endless network of general, moral, social, and historical relations. Henry James’s style can be seen as a supremely civilized effort to relate every event and every moment of life to the full complexity of its circumambient conditions” (204-05). James achieves such complexity through use of a third-person dual narrator; Baldwin does so with the first person, a perspective he did not particularly care for and saved only for Giovanni’s
Room. James’s narrative results in a dizzying introspection into the mind of the main character; Baldwin, on the other hand, has little concern for readers to fully examine
David’s interior. The novel is meant to stir public imagination, and the first person comes
213 across as a confession to the reader. David is on trial; the reader is the juror. In the
opening two paragraphs of the text, Baldwin uses no proper names; instead “I” appears
eight times as David locates himself physically in front of the mirror and historically in a
long line of ancestors who “conquered a continent” (3). A tragic tale unfolds in the
ensuing pages, but Baldwin returns to his nameless protagonist for the novella’s closing
four paragraphs, David again standing at the mirror. He has returned to the “I,”
emphasizing it even more with a verse from the Bible: “When I was a child, I spake as a
child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away
childish things” (1 Corinthians xiii, qtd.in Baldwin 168). The ending is a hopeful one,
Baldwin intimating that perhaps divine intervention has provided David with another
chance to redeem himself as he heads back to the United States. The character David
makes his final plea to the reader: “I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of
God, which has brought me to this place, is all that can carry me out of it” (169). He
thinks he can start his new beginning without the memory of Giovanni, and to do so, he
rips apart the letter he received informing him of Giovanni’s death. The scraps of paper
dance and the wind begins to take them away, but, as the last line of the novel tells us, “as
I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.”
I have provided this analysis to suggest that Giovanni’s Room makes clear for readers how we should read something like Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights:
214 • Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or
religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal
rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
• Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the
intending spouses.
• The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to
protection by society and the State.
Like most treaties and covenants, the language is ambiguous. We might read gay marriage as a human right protected in the Article; conversely, we might see the exclusion of sexuality from “race, nationality or religion,” as preserving marriage as reserved for a man and a woman. Baldwin, I argue, reframes the issue, placing love at the center and obligating human beings to honor what they feel in the hearts lest the dishonesty of their actions ruin the lives of innocent human beings. According to Eleanor
Traylor,
The Baldwin narrator-witness has dramatized that tale in now six novels and one
collection of short stories, and has staged it in two plays. Its theme of the perilous
journey of love which, if not risked, denies all possibility of the glorious in human
life, which, if risked, ensures [not] the depths of sorrow but the ecstasy of joy;
which if betrayed, leads to madness and death; and, which, if ignored or avoided,
is directly responsible for the misery that afflicts the human world.
Writing as if “Locke and the Enlightenment had not happened” (echoing that conservative reviewer of Giovanni’s Room) and with love as the “First Principle of human existence,” (Wole Soyinka) Baldwin creates a novel with a literal crime (Giovanni
215 has murdered Jacques) only to make sense of a metaphysical crime (David’s
unwillingness to love Giovanni). Seen in this way, there really should not be a debate about same-sex marriage. The metaphysical crime is ruining lives as we speak.
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
It is difficult for even the most fervent advocate to defend “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” an oddly depthless novel about a famous black actor, which, on its publication, in 1968, appeared to finish Baldwin as a novelist in the minds of everyone but Baldwin, whose ambitions seemed to only grow. —The New Yorker, February 9 and 16, 2009
Children erupted, like beautiful, doomed flowers. —Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
Kierkegaard writes that if you really want to create a debate about ethics, make
that debate between two brothers. The other requirement is that one of them should be a
priest and the other, an actor. The protagonist of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been
Gone is an actor; his brother Caleb is a preacher. In Book Three of the novel, Leo and
Caleb have the following exchange:
“Leo,” he asked me, after a moment, “can you tell me what it is—an
artist? What’s all about? What does an artist really do?”
I had never known Caleb to be cruel, and so I couldn’t believe that he was baiting
me. I stared at him.
“What do you mean, what does an artist do? He—he creates---“
He stared at me with a little smile, saying nothing.
“You know,” I said, paintings, poems, books, plays. Music.”
“These are all creations,” he said, still with that smile.
“Well, yes. Not all of them are good.”
{…}
“Why are you asking me these questions?”
216 “Because I want to know. I’m not teasing you. I don’t know anything about it.
And you say you want to be an actor. That’s kind of an artist. Isn’t it? Well, I
want to know.”
“I think it—art—can make you less lonely.” I didn’t trust this answer, either.
[…]
“Sometimes,” I said, “ you read something—or you listen to some music—I don’t
know—and you find that this man, who may have been a very unhappy man—and
—a man you’ve never seen—well, he tells you something about your life. And it
doesn’t seem as awful as it did before.” (386-8)
James Baldwin is trying to tell his readers something about life, attempting to make life less awful than when the lives the led prior to encountering his prose. The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights has this intention as well. People are asked to read the text and then spread its gospel and feel as if the world contains protections that it did not previously. There is evidence to suggest that the UDHR has had this effect in countries around the world. Citizens living under the rule of oppressive governments feel a sense of relief when they come across the Articles listed in the UDHR. The text is enumerating rights they would like to have access to and practice in their everyday lives. But after the initial euphoria or delight, the UDHR loses some its luster. Questions arise concerning the vagueness of the document, its enforceability. I believe there are novels and stories that can address the vagueness, and by doing so, force us to reconsider how we might address enforceability. I’ve tried to show the immediacy here through an initial analysis of a James Baldwin short story and novel. As Rorty says of Baldwin and his writing,
“Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate
217 representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” The UDHR wants to forge a moral identity, but its success stands to benefit from the importance and use of stories.
218 CHAPTER FOUR
What’s in a Name? Humanizing Minor Characters in the Novel, Minority Human Beings in the World
1. I could hear the nigger woman puttering around in the kitchen, humming to herself about her and Jesus.
—Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men (1946)
2. In the kitchen, amid the distant clumsy rattle of pots and pans, Ella Swan was humming a wordless tune, submissive and remote and full of ancient woe.
—William Styron, unpublished earlier draft, Lie Down in Darkness
3. In the kitchen, amid the rattle of pots and pans, Ella Swan was singing a tune. About Jesus.
—William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (1951)
4. Rabbit turns on the radio. After a hum a beautiful Negress sings, “Without a song, the dahay would nehever end, without a song.”
—John Updike, Rabbit, Run (1960)
5. What would have been the cost, I wonder, of humanizing, genderizing, this character at the opening of the novel?
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Minor characters in a novel are equally as important as the protagonists around whom most of the action of a story is centered. As Alex Woloch shows, it is difficult to separate the life of the protagonist from the lives of the people surrounding her in, for example, the nineteenth century British novel. Thus, to be called “minor” is a misnomer: the minor character is no less important than the main character. Their lives have equal importance, even if one makes a brief appearance or disappears suddenly and the other dominates the page from beginning to end. In the actual world, we do not use the
219 distinction “minor” and “major” to designate the significance of people’s lives in relation to one another, yet clear hierarchies exist based on nationality, ethnicity, gender and social position. Whereas in fiction a character can be referred to as minor and still have equality (they are important to the function of the novel), in real life a human being will never be referred to as “minor” (minority, yes, but not minor) even though systems of power and inequality will render their life minor in relation to those who have social, cultural and material capital to create recognition, dignity and prosperity for themselves.
How can we make life more like fiction, that is, how can we, despite the differences in social position in society, allow for equality to prevail? This is a fundamental problem of the discourse of human rights, and I suggest that fiction and the fate of the minor character provides answers applicable to the real world. Even the naming of a minor character imbues that character with capabilities and dignities central to his status as a human being. Writers knew this. For Ian Watt, this phenomenon includes “the way that the novelist typically indicates his intention of presenting a character as a particular individual by naming him in exactly the same way as particular individuals are named in ordinary life” (18). Minor characters and the naming of minor characters are integral aspects of human rights stories.
By way of demonstration, I want to point to an act of revision in American arts and letters just after World War II: it occurs in William Styron’s first novel, Lie Down in
Darkness. It involves minor characters in the novel, minor characters that critics have treated in a minor way, missing out on the power of fiction to make the minor major, to show equality of character, no matter how often a character appears in a narrative.
Further, I contend that the act is important for understanding what happens when liberal
220 thinkers and states do and do not take the time to specify what they mean by human
being, whether in literature, politics, social science, philosophy, or for my larger
argument and impetus for an examination of American literature after the war—universal
human rights. Clarifying “the importance of being human,” I argue, is central to the work
of a large number of American writers from after World War II to the present; literature
provides a clarification—that is, intense interrogation of the concept human being—that
can complement other fields and disciplines that have had and continue to have an
important bearing on human life, especially, the discourse of human rights and the North
American epistemological contributions to its rise. This chapter shows how that happens
through an analysis of how one effaced human being, a minor character, can go from
being deemed “nigger woman” to “Ella Swan.” The problem with the first term is this:
Allotting to black people the brand of “nigger” indicates a desire to void the
possibility of meaning within the “blackened” shell of selfhood, thereby reducing
substance to the repetitive echo of a catachresis. “Nigger” is a mechanism of
control by contraction; it subsumes the complexities of human experience into a
tractable sign while manifesting an essential inability to see (to grasp, to
apprehend) the signified. […] “Nigger,” as the white name for the blackness-of-
blackness, is a name for difference which serves the ideological function of
imbuing “whiteness” with a “sense” it primordially lacks. (Benston 5)
The term means to dehumanize, and I am interested in a writer’s choice to disavow the act. Despite the exhaustive critical treatment Styron’s novel, little has been written about the act of dehumanization that occurs, and even less criticism points to the attempt to restore humanity to a previously dehumanized being. Critical failure to locate,
221 acknowledge and document those literary acts of inhumanity and humanity deny an important function of literature—clarifying the importance of being human—and justify similar elisions in the discourses—political, economic, social, cultural—literature should be helping to improve. In other words, if no one takes notice of a writer’s insistence to correct the misrepresentation of an African-American woman as “nigger woman,” no matter how subtle the correction, then how can we make similar corrections, nuances and revisions in the abstraction of ideas about a discourse like human rights, which largely needs to clarify its position on “the importance of being human” and who falls into that category. If I am meditating too long on a particular line, that is precisely my point: human rights passes along human lives that require greater meditation and care.
Lie Down in Darkness centers on the world of a southern aristocratic family living in Virginia in the decades before and after World War II. Milton and Helen Loftis are coping with the loss of their daughter, Peyton, who battles discontent with her surroundings and takes her own life in New York City. A locomotive has returned her body south to her native town, Port Warwick, Virginia, and the return is occasion for narrative flashbacks that provide insight into her life and the life of her family. The Loftis family appears to be an idealization of southern gentility on the outside, but their private world is marked by alcoholism, infidelity, incest, bigotry and betrayal. Their world is contrasted with the morality and seemingly simple lives of the black servants who work in their homes during the day and return to their own homes in an isolated section of the city in the evening. Lang’s Christian reading of the narrative, notable for its unpacking of
Biblical illusions in the text, focuses on Peyton’s parents’ inability to acknowledge their sins and despair vis-à-vis Peyton’s own genuine struggle with the truth of innocence lost
222 in the world. For Lang, “In contrast to Milton and Helen, Peyton actively addresses herself to the problem of personal salvation conceived as a religious quest” (36). Peyton’s quest is one of two in the novel, which ends with Styron’s description of a religious revival in the black community where the Loftis’ servant Ella Swan and her family reside. Though the black housekeepers and laborers are minor characters in the novel, receiving only brief mention throughout, Styron chooses to devote detailed attention to their religious ceremony at the end of his narrative. The religious striving of black characters in the novel is equally important for Styron and represents one of the ways in which he attempts to equate the humanity of all human beings in his prose. Thus, close attention must be paid to minor characters like Ella Swan and Harry Miller, a Jewish painter married to Peyton Loftis. Simplistic readings suggest that “Harry the Jew, and the
Negro maids exemplify the power of compassion as they represent the two most persecuted races. They have experienced violence, endured suffering and are therefore compassionate through their understanding” (Ruderman 73). In contrast, Ruderman shows the destruction of the white protestant family in the narrative and argues that
Styron is affirming the experience of the persecuted and condemning the lives of the privileged. This kind of analysis hovers at the surface. Instead of seeing Styron’s examination of the human condition, it reifies difference and maintains Harry Miller’s and Ella Swan’s status as outsiders. Quite the contrary, Styron aimed to include them in the humanity of the text.
Early critics of Styron’s work made great efforts to place him in a Southern literary tradition alongside writers like Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner. While the connections are clear, Styron diverges from Penn Warren and Faulkner in his resistance
223 to staging the inequality of black and white lives. Whereas “a writer of his time” or
“historical context” might be arguments for explaining away the use of terms like nigger, negress, or the objectifying of black human beings in the prose of Penn Warren and
Faulkner, Styron, in his debut novel, calls such analysis into question even as he occasionally performs the dehumanizing acts of his literary predecessors. He mimics them in once instance; defies them in another.
Particular focus has been placed on the stylistic similarities between Lie Down in
Darkness and Warren’s All the King’s Men, a classic of American fiction. Styron himself
admitted to patterning the beginning of his novel after Warren’s opening; he admired his
literary mentor’s use of the second person, an approach that not only draws the reader in
(addressing him or her as ‘you’) but also acknowledges the reader as human. The
similarities are striking:
All the King’s Men:
To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a
good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up at the
highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the
center coming at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the whine of the
tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths
and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and
you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the
black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back but you can’t
because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the
ignition just as she starts the dive. Then a nigger chopping cotton a mile away,
224 he’ll look up and see the little column of black smoke standing up above the
vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows, and up against the violent, metallic,
throbbing blue of the sky, and he’ll say, “Lawd God, hit’s a-nudder one done
done hit!” And the next nigger down the next row, he’ll say, “Lawd God,” and the
first nigger will giggle and the hoe will flash in the sun like a heliograph.
Lie Down in Darkness:
Riding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed
on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze
of acrid, sweetish dust and past the rows of uniformly brown clapboard houses
which stretch down the hilly streets for miles, it seems, the hundreds of rooftops
all reflecting the pale light of dawn; past the suburban roads still sluggish and
sleepy with early morning traffic, and rattling swiftly now over the bridge which
separates the last two hills where in the valley below you can see the James River
winding beneath its acid-green rows of clapboard houses and into the woods
beyond. […]
And most likely, as the train streaks past the little log-road stations with names
like Apex and Jewel, a couple of Negroes are working way out in the woods
sawing timber, and they hear th whistle of your train and one of them stands erect
from his end of the saw, wiping away the beads of sweat gathered at his brown
like tiny blisters, and says, “Man, dat choo-choo’s goin’ to Richmond,” and the
other says, “Naw, she goin’ to Po’t Wa’ick,” and the other says happily, “Hoo-ee, dat’s a poontang town, sho enough,” and they laugh together as the saw resumes its hot metallic grip and the sun burns down in the swarming, resonant silence.
225 Neither Penn Warren nor Styron names the human beings in the openings to their
respective narratives. Instead, they write in general terms and aim to give a sense of
place: the use of “nigger” for Penn Warren, following the context argument, correlates to
the level of oppression in the setting (Louisiana) and time (1930s) of the novel, just as
Styron’s use of “Negro,” in contrast, suggests a slightly less harsh racially divided
moment (post-World War II) and space (Virginia, the upper South). The use of nigger and Negro, then, are signs of the times and readers are expected to keep this in mind when reading a text from a particular period. The reality is that Penn Warren and Styron both perform a cultural fetishizing of the human experience of African Americans, and the gaze they place upon Negro lives greatly resembles the gaze elite human rights actors place on the human beings they encounter in parts of the world in crisis. This does not discount the possibility for humanitarian exchange or authentic care. The openings of these two novels do not necessarily suggest that Penn Warren and Styron deem African
Americans inferior. They have used them for scenic description of landscapes, “a nigger chopping cotton” for Penn Warren, “a couple of Negroes are working way out in the woods sawing timber,” for Styron. I will show how Styron’s narrative, reifying the act of objectification in the opening pages of the novel, resists this practice elsewhere. Proper readings of Styron’s later work, particularly the controversial Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice, require returning to Styron’s ambivalence in his first novel.
A literary relationship has also been forged between Styron and Faulkner. The closing religious ceremony in Lie Down in Darkness has resonances with the ending of
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929). This leads James West to suggest that As I
Lay Dying offered “little in the way of redemption for Styron’s characters: only Ella
226 Swan, the aged black servant, would finally understand and endure—much as Faulkner’s
Dilsey had done in The Sound and the Fury” (157). Interpretations like Ruderman’s contrast the complex religion of white characters in the novel with the “carnival” religion and “primitive faith” of blacks like Ella Swan. Such simplification and segregation of religious and racial themes in the text, scenarios that would render characters guilty of what Kierkegaard refers to as “small-mindedness,” miss the point of Styron’s novel as a meditation on despair and the struggle for religious consciousness that applies to everyone regardless of, as Kierkegaard writes in Sickness Unto Death, “whether you were man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or independent, fortunate or unfortunate, whether you ranked with royalty and wore a glittering crown or in humble obscurity bore the toil and heat of the day, whether your name will be remembered as long as the world stands and consequently as long as it stood or your are nameless and run nameless in the innumerable multitude, whether the magnificence encompassing you surpassed all human description or the most severe and ignominious human judgment befell you” (27).
While it is tempting to read Lie Down in Darkness as providing redemption for the oppressed in the novel, the characterization of Ella Swan is better understood as an unsentimental act of humanization, the understanding of the category of human being as
“raised above” diversity and racial difference. She is based on a real-life woman who helped raise Styron and impacted his view of religion during his childhood. The name
‘Swan’ is taken from a woman who worked for the Styrons. The Swan family lived in
Newport News, Va., Styron’s birthplace and hometown, and the setting for Lie Down in
Darkness. The first name, Ella, is fictional, but also has a local explanation. The songstress Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News in 1917. Thus, Ella Swan in Lie
227 Down in Darkness is a symbolically rich character and the scenes in which she sings
spiritual music are central to the novel.
In A Tidewater Morning, “imaginative reshaping of real events” from his childhood,
Styron writes, “Ordinarily, if I was up this late,
I would sit and listen with Florence [the basis for Ella Swan] to these evangelical
jamborees. I loved them, although I would never have admitted this to my friends.
I loved them mainly for the music. The hysteric preaching was beyond my grasp,
but the singing stirred my blood, thrilled me, aroused in me a latent sense of
Christian joy and glory long stilled by “Abide with Me” and other such whiney
Presbyterian solicitations. When the far-off choirs burst into gospel hymns like
“Precious Lord” and “Didn’t it Rain!” I got a charge that began to encircle my
bottom and then moved straight up my spine to my skull, where it climaxed in a
mini-electrocution, setting all the hairs of my scalp on end. (95)
Similarly, Ella Swan symbolically represents the dignifying of a dehumanized character from Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. In that 1946 novel, Warren introduces a black female character in a manner typical of American fiction of the period in general: “I could hear the nigger woman puttering around in the kitchen, humming to herself about her and Jesus.” (42) She appears, then disappears, never to be heard from again. Styron borrows the scene and makes important revisions in Lie Down in Darkness: “In the kitchen, amid the rattle of pots and pans, Ella Swan was singing a tune. About Jesus.”
(25) [italics mine] The women of both novels are working in the domestic sphere for their respective employers; as servants, they spend the majority of their lives caring for the needs of wealthy white families and tend to their own families and communities after the
228 work day. Warren describes the scene in the form of a gaze: the narrator stands from afar, imagining the animal-like movements and sounds of the black female character,
“puttering” and “humming” serving as stand-ins for sloth and primitiveness. The intelligibility of the humming leads the narrator to see the woman engaged in an act of religious consciousness. As she is “humming to herself,” his presence is an interruption or a destructive gaze. A throwaway line for Penn Warren, one in which he aims to describe scenery and not a human being, nevertheless retains some humanity. But that humanity is a result of fiction itself and not the efforts of Penn Warren, whose fetishization of African Americans in prose is exceeded only by his description of them in real life. In Penn Warren’s presence, Styron accepts Penn Warren’s terms, regurgitates them:
Warren: What I’m saying is that in the South there was little flinch from black
flesh compared to that in the North, where there was a great flinch from the black
flesh and concubinage occurred quite frequently.
Styron: When I reflected on my boyhood in a Southern town, not a Southern rural
environment, in retrospect I was astounded by my total unfamiliarity with black
flesh. I mean, even as a presence, even as a part of the ambiance of my life. It was
nonexistent, except for the ones who worked in the kitchen. After the day was
done they evaporated, they went somewhere else. The myth was quite the
opposite. This miscegenation myth you’re talking about was a myth, because after
the modern South began and after Jim Crow began, everything legislated against
any contact. (Cronin and Siegel 130-31)
229 The exchange between Styron and Penn Warren shows their respective discomfort with and confusion about African American life. The difference, I contend, is that Styron, through literature, tried to reconcile his confusion from his childhood until his death.
By naming Ella Swan, Styron attempts to make his narrative, contra Warren’s and the impulse in Southern fiction at the time, one in which all characters are understood as human and struggling before God equally in their individuality. According to Ian Watt,
the problem of individual identity is closely related to the epistemological status
of proper names; for, in the words of Hobbes, ‘Proper names bring to mind one
thing only; universals recall any one of many’. Proper names have exactly the
same function in social life: they are verbal expression of the particular identity of
each individual person. In literature, however, this function of proper names was
first fully established in the novel.
Characters in previous forms of literature, of course, were usually given proper
names; but the kind of names actually used showed that the author was not trying
to establish his characters as completely individualised entities. The precepts of
classical and renaissance criticism agreed with the practice of their literature in
preferring either historical names or type names. In either case, the names set the
characters in the context of a large body of expectations primarily formed from
past literature rather than from the context of contemporary life. (18-19)
Whereas a proper name could denote a type in classical or renaissance times, Watt suggests, the modern novel allows no such act of dehumanization. Naming naturally imbues a character with personality, and neither Penn Warren nor Faulkner is unaware of this. The marginal or unseen, not minor, character cast in roles with the seeming
230 significance of non-philosophical furniture recur in the whole of Western literature.
Often, they are nameless, speechless, and described as animals or freaks. But the tenor of
their ignorant origination does not preclude their humanity. Even in Faulkner, who knew
this approach best, it is possible to extract the attempt to bring justice where injustice
dominates. An unexpected but believable scene divides Absalom! Absalom! Throughout the first half of the novel, Thomas Sutpen and the named characters move around the furniture of a band of wild niggers, beasts half tamed, strange niggers, negroes ordered in the schema of man, woman, nigger or mule, or the ladies and children and house niggers, a negress, a bright gigantic negress, negro boys, a negro child, and the classic collage of a moiling clump of negro backs and heads and black arms and hands clutching sticks of stove wood and cooking implements and razors. The tragic tale of a wanderer turned patriarch whose materialistic spirit moves him to create his own plantation empire that is eventually unwound by the traces of blackness, the novel benefits from the advantage of tropes endemic to U.S. American fiction. Morrison pinpoints both the dilemma and good of Faulkner’s powerful signifiers:
Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a
palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and
erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render
timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and
fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom. (1993:
7)
Faulkner, then, as mere observer and artist, narrates what he sees and knows to be true. If he resists the racist urge in his rendering of the South, of humanity caught in racial chaos,
231 perhaps his work does not weave and complicate with such urgency. In rendering
something honest, he opens his text, willingly or not, to formidable critique and
discourse. Because he chooses to write the truth, he succeeds in seamlessly dropping in one of the novel’s most promising and risky scenes. Justice Jim Hamblett has words not only for Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, but also for the masses—“At this time, while our country is struggling to rise from beneath the iron heel of a tyrant oppressor, when the very future of the South as a place bearable for our women and children to live in depends on the labor of our own hands, when the tools which we have to use, to depend on, are the pride and integrity and forbearance of black men and the pride and integrity and forbearance of white; that you, I say, a white man, a white—“ (Faulkner 1990: 168). I believe Hamblett’s words mark the only use of “black” and “men” next to one another in the text, and furthermore unite black and white in a similar fate; the appearance of “black men” in Faulkner rises to cause for celebration. It does not mean the homogenization of the so-called races; rather, it seems to hint at an increase in solidarity, a surge in sentimentality, as Rorty has used the term. Asking Faulkner to name, however, is to ask too much, for he realizes the power of naming in a text. As the French writer Alain
Robbe-Grillet argues, “A character must have a proper name, two if possible: a surname and a given name. If he has possessions as well, so much the better. Finally, he must possess a ‘character,’ a face which reflects it, a past which has molded that face and that
character. His character dictates his actions, makes him react to each event in a
determined fashion. His character permits the reader to judge him, to love him, to hate
him. It is thanks to his character that he will one day bequeath his name to a human type,
which was waiting, it would seem, for the consecration of this baptism” (27). A name
232 provides a character with an immediate personality in contrast to the personality of an
unnamed character, which requires the reader to consult external sources and construct
humanity separate from the author. “Nigger woman” is, after all, a human being, but
Penn Warren and Faulkner both want to suppress that inalienable fact. As D.S. Izevbaye
points out, “if we smear a name in a novel we damage, not a reputation, but a page of our
book” (165).
Penn Warren and Faulkner’s anxieties noted, I am most concerned with Styron’s
Huckleberry Finn moment. He has the opportunity to abandon Ella Swan or acknowledge
her existence. In writing his first novel, he borrows scenes from his mentors, but when
the scenes involve the “nigger woman” in Penn Warren’s kitchen, Styron cannot comply
with Penn Warren’s racism and attempt at exclusion. At first he tries. An earlier draft of
Lie Down in Darkness contains the following version of the passage involving Ella Swan:
“In the kitchen, amid the distant clumsy rattle of pots and pans, Ella Swan was humming
a wordless tune, submissive and remote and full of ancient woe” (100). He has named,
her, yes, but he has also made her “wordless” and filled her with “ancient woe,” a
mammy figure enduring the struggles of a long hard day working for a white family. She
is not human here, despite her name. Inequity and discrimination have defeated her. I am
interested in the revision of the revision, Styron’s rewriting of his own rewrite on the
long-form yellow notebooks he used to pencil the prose of his novels. Once again,
criticism has placed normative focus on familiar elements in the novel, linking Styron to
his literary predecessors and modernist tendencies: “Though the plot of Inheritance is markedly different from that of Lie Down in Darkness, the elements of the later novel are already present: alcoholism, adultery, failed love, suicide, the dissolution of an upper
233 middle-class family, and the decadence of postwar southern society” (xv). Here is the
only imaginable description for Styron’s novel, given the lack of interest in exploring
across the racial lines, delving into the lives of minor characters and foregoing the usual
division of black and white in “postwar southern society.”
In those earlier drafts, Styron almost betrays himself and Ella Swan, giving in to
the “nigger impulse” that enamored his predecessors. At one point in Inheritance, Ella
Swan shows her allegiance to her employer with the following: “No sir,” she said, and her lips began to twitch gently. “I’m stayin’ right here with you like I said. You need a woman right now even if she is a nigger and I’m stayin’ right with you like I said.” (36)
The scene does not appear in Lie Down in Darkness, meaning it did not appear in print.
Ella Swan is not referred to as nigger in the text. Yet, these earlier drafts reveal Styron’s conflict and ambivalence. In reflecting on his relationship with Florence, the real-life on whom Ella Swan is based, Styron wrote in his memoirs that his family considered her
“hopelessly sullen. I knew better since I simply knew her better, and as a little kid I’d hung for interminable hours around the kitchen, where I learned that her sullenness was in truth a grim, grievous equanimity, the outcome of a daily struggle to keep her composure in the face of unending family catastrophes” (97). Styron’s reflection resemble scholarship on the lives of black women domestics in the 1940s and 1950s:
These women realized that they wee “locked behind a racial cast barrier which
offered no immediate escape”—and so they relied on workplace strategies of
survival and resistance. On one level they exercised some control over their
choice of employer: One woman responded to the unreasonable demands of a
white housewife by declaring, “This job is not the type of job that I have to live
234 with the rest of my life. I lived before I ever came here and I could leave here and
go back to the city and find another job.” On a daily basis they set limits on their
work assignments (“Well, you said your girl cleans the floor, and I’m not your
girl … and I don’t scrub floors on my hands and knees”) and used their own
judgment when it came to handling tantrum-prone children (“if he kicked me on
the shins, I’d kick him back …”). Jewell Prieleau recalled that in the postwar
period she and other domestics formed their own social clubs that met every
Thursday night. These support groups served to inform job hunters of openings
and to shield members against the snobbery of their neighbors who worked in
institutional settings: “the girls [who] work in bars and … in restaurants, they
always look down at domestic workers.” Confronted each day with white people
who knew “nothing about a hard life” and who were able to provide their own
children with the finest educational advantages and material possessions (if not
always firm discipline), Dill’s interviewees varied in their ability to balance their
own family lives with the rigors of their job. But for all these women, the end of
the world war meant a return to old-age battles within white households. (Labor
of Love, Labor of Sorrow 259-60)
William Styron knew the struggles black women faced living in the American south, and his knowledge of their struggles intervened in his art. Whereas he knew he could easily write scenes depicting black women and men in the manner of his literary ancestors, he chose not to in his first novel and the decision should be kept in mind as we read his later work.
235 In fact, I suggest that my analysis above is central to any understanding of Styron’s subsequent work. The publication of Lie Down in Darkness made Styron a budding celebrity in literary circles on both sides of the Atlantic. The book won the prestigious
American Academy of Arts and Letters Prix de Rome, reserved for promising young writers, and as part of the award he was required to complete a residency in the Italian capital. Before his arrival he spent a week in Copenhagen and then, like many writers before him, journeyed by train from Denmark to Paris. After his arrival in Rome, West says Styron familiarized himself with the work of French existentialists like Sartre,
Camus, and De Beauvoir. He read them in English translation, though later in his career
Styron would have a fluent knowledge of French and work closely with translators on
French editions of his work. In particular, Styron enjoyed the work of Camus, whom he called his favorite among his contemporaries in France. The Norwegian writer Knut
Hamsun’s novel Hunger also moved him. Though the influence of and intertextuality with French writers is recognizable in Styron’s authorship, the religious themes of his work would make it difficult to situate him entirely in a French tradition of existentialist ideas. After the publication of a war novella titled The Long March Styron returned to the introspective meditative novel form.
His second novel, Set This House on Fire, has received the most attention as a narrative informed by Kierkegaard. Lewis Lawson, Gunnar Urang, Kenneth A. Robb and others have pointed to the allusions to Sickness Unto Death in Styron’s text, a transatlantic story that moves between the American south, including the Port Warwick setting of Lie Down and Darkness, and the cityscapes of western Europe. The narrator of
Set This House on Fire, Peter Leverett, a thirtysomething American lawyer, flashes back
236 to an encounter in Sambuco, Italy, with a pair of troubled archrival figures, the alcohol-
fueled Cass Kinsolving and Mason Flagg, an affluent womanizer bold enough to justify
his sexual inclinations with “Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and the Dionysian—a
marvel of romantic yet totally acceptable logic, really” (424). Like Lie Down in
Darkness, the narrative approach of Set This House on Fire looks backward in order to
posit possibilities about the future action or inaction in the lives of the protagonists.
By the 1960s Styron was widely acknowledged as a writer comfortable in the use
of existentialist concepts, but commentators parted in their assessment of the existentialist
meditation at the heart of his third novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which
garnered him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Howells Medal of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. The novel is based on an historical event that has become
important in African-American history and cultural memory: In 1831, Nat Turner and a
group of fellow slaves in Southampton, Virginia, killed 55 white men, women and
children in an attempt to gain their freedom. Turner cited Divine inspiration (one day
while working in the fields he was told from above that he was designated to be great) for
leading the rebellion, saying, “I would never be of use to anyone as a slave”30 (Clarke
101). Turner and the group he gathered were executed for their actions, and slaves
throughout the colonies were punished or killed by their masters in the aftermath of the
insurrection. Styron knew the story well: as a child he came across the marker for Nat
Turner’s slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, during a school field trip. He was born
30 The quote comes from Thomas Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). Gray transcribed a confession from Nat Turner shortly after his capture and incarceration. Scholars differ on the authenticity of language Gray attributes to Nat Turner. The text is the only source from which the Rebellion can be reconstructed. It is available in the appendix of William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Clarke, John Henrik, and Nat Turner. William Styron's Nat Turner : Ten Black Writers Respond. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987; 1968.
237 and raised in nearby Newport News, Virginia, the basis for Port Warwick, the fictional
settings in Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire. At a point when he was
among the most successful American writers, Styron decided to assume Turner’s identity
and write a novel from his point of view. He based his understanding of Turner on the
controversial document that is ostensibly a white lawyer’s transcribing of Turner’s
confession in a Southampton jail after his capture. A voracious reader, Styron researched widely in the area of African-American history and various studies of slavery in the
Americas and other societies. In his “Author’s Note,” preceding the start of the novel,
Styron writes that he has “rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt” and reminds readers looking for moral suasions that it has mainly been his
“intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an
‘historical novel’ in the conventional terms than a meditation on history” (ix). His approach brought about the ire of many African-American intellectuals, some of whom collected their dissent in William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. The controversy that ensued after the novel’s publication far overshadowed any critical assessment that built upon those analyses of Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire. Writing in 1977, Styron’s biographer James West argues that The Confessions of
Nat Turner “must be the focal point of any discussion of Styron’s current American reputation” (Xv). In “The Failure of William Styron,” collected in Ten Black Writer’s
Respond, Ernest Kaiser calls Styron “alienated and psychologically sick” (65), a condition he says prevents Styron from writing a novel that accurately depicts the conditions Turner faced as a slave. Kaiser derives his language from the Kierkegaardian analyses of Styron’s previous work:
238 Now Finkelstein, in his book Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature
(1965), calls Styron a disciple of Faulkner and an existentialist whose fiction is
technically good but more subjective and narrower in focus than Faulkner’s thus of
less significance.
John Howard Lawson, in an essay “Styron: Darkness and Fire in the Modern
Novel” (Mainstream, Oct. 1960), disagrees somewhat with Newberry. He calls
Styron a brilliant and sensitive writer who has moved from the Freudian,
psychoanalytic frame of reference of his first novel to the existentialism of the
third.…Lawson says that Styron is angry at the evil of the social environment
which destroys people but also feels that the trouble is mystical and hidden in the
soul. (51)
For Kaiser, whereas writers like Styron have employed the concepts of Kierkegaard and existentialism with the intent of “humanization” of a character and historical figure like
Nat Turner, “their view of society and of other human beings is colored by their subjective, Freudian views of their own problems and the effect of their art is further alienation rather than humanization” (65). In a sermon at the Duke University Chapel on
June 14, 1968, the Rev. Professor James T. Cleland vowed to give a “meditation on
Styron’s meditation” in order to properly understand the author’s attempt to explore the intricacies of racism and its effect on human beings. Styron, who stood behind his portrayal of Turner despite backlash and boycotts, emphasized his intent to explore a human problem, not a racial one:
I would never have written a book having to do with Harlem or contemporary
black experience because I didn’t know the idiom—I don’t know the idiom now.
239 But I felt that writing about slavery in 1831 in Virginia was to deal with an area of
experience in which I was as knowledgeable as a black person because the lifestyle
and the manner of speaking—indeed the entire culture—were entirely accessible to
me, no more or less than to a black writer. Also, it seemed to me that for a black to
deny me the attempt to enter a black skin would be to deny our common
humanity.31
Styron contends that he felt the period when Kierkegaard lived was more “accessible” to
him than even the material history of the twentieth century. The “entire culture” he can
relate to is one in which human beings had been denied their freedom and, rightly or
wrongly, embarked on religiously motivated quests to break away from immediacy.
While Styron underestimated the power of racial and cultural identity politics as well as
the importance of legends, myths and heroes to cultural groups, his decision to examine
the despair, religious consciousness and anxiety of a human being denied his freedom, is
consistent with the approach and intent of his first two novels and further underscores his
preference for a “common humanity.”
Undeterred by the Nat Turner controversy, Styron published his fourth novel,
Sophie’s Choice, about horrors of the Holocaust, in 1979. Styron’s novel, pro forma,
prompted controversy:
I have been criticized in some quarters for “de-Judaizing” and “universalizing” the
Holocaust by creating, in my novel Sophie’s Choice, a heroine who was a Gentile
victim of Auschwitz. Such was not my intention; it was rather to show the malign
31 Styron made the remarks during an interview that was published in The Paris Review, a publication he helped found. Plimpton, George. “The Art of Fiction No. 156: William Styron.” The Paris Review, 150, Spring 1999.
240 effect of anti-Semitism and its relentless power—power of such breadth, at least in
the Nazis’ hands, as to be capable of destroying people beyond the focus of its
immediate oppression. At Auschwitz, as in the Inferno, Jews occupied the center
of hell but the surrounding concentric rings embraced a multitude of other victims.
Styron’s decision to make the protagonist of Sophie’s Choice a Polish Catholic refugee
did not take away focus from the novel’s meditations on the horrors of Auschwitz and
Nazi oppression and murder of Jewish human beings. The Holocaust and the
mistreatment and genocide of Jewish populations had always haunted Styron, especially
during his last year as an undergraduate at Duke University, where he came across, Five
Chimneys, a memoir by Auschwitz survivor Olga Lengyel (West). Sophie’s Choice is
Styron’s lament. Like in Lie Down in Darkness and Confessions of Nat Turner, he makes decisions based on his interest in a universal humanity, even when it brings about controversy and criticism. The criticism is often warranted yet so is Styron’s attempt to explore the human condition through any human being he can bring to life—Ella Swan,
Harry Miller (the Jewish character from Lie Down in Darkness), Nat Turner, or Sophie
Zawistowska. Styron says that he is interested in “the autonomy of the character: how characters become more real than real,” because “ultimately character is the sine qua non of fiction.”
In my analysis of William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness I have attempted to show the importance of a minor character to a text. I have also tried to demonstrate the significance of naming in fiction. I argue that these practices are important lessons for the public sphere and the culture of human rights. On the one hand, my analysis can help critics rethink their understanding of William Styron’s exploration of the human
241 condition in his work and his ambivalence about racism and black/white relations. On the other, my analysis should demonstrate the possibilities for fiction as a site of mediation and discourse for improving human relations.
242
Conclusion
More than 500,000 of Rwanda’s men, women and children were brutally and swiftly murdered in a genocide that began in April 1994 and lasted only a few months.
As a narrator in Julian Pierce’s novel Speak Rwanda searches for answers to how societies can rebuild after genocide, he concludes that international criminal tribunals will not help the process of reconciliation, retribution and redress. “For all the grand pronouncements about universal justice,” he reasons, “this tribunal is a measure of
Western justice, not of ours. They are trying to prove that the West needs to police us for our own good” (275). From his perspective, “Westerners talk in the courtroom as if Hutu and Tutsi live on different planets. On my hill they lived next to each other” (276). Speak
Rwanda is one example of several novels, films and documentaries that attempt to do what their creators believe international tribunals and the law cannot: tell the story of how people came to murder neighbors, fellow citizens, friends and family, and subsequently offer some sense of hope, dignity, reconciliation and a future free of conflict. These stories are told in Rwanda-based novels like Julian’s Speak Rwanda, Boubacar Boris
Diop’s Murambi: The Book of Bones, Hanna Jensen’s Over A Thousand Hills I Walk
With You, and Uwem Akpan’s short story, “Fattening for Gabon,” from the collection,
Say You’re One of Them (An Oprah Book Club selection in 2009). Feature films like
Beyond the Gates, Hotel Rwanda, Sometime in April, The Last Dog in Rwanda, and the documentaries As We Forgive, God Sleeps in Rwanda, Ghosts of Rwanda, In Rwanda We
Say: the Family that Does not Speak Dies, also attempt to make sense of the Rwandan
243 genocide, a conflict during which there were between 250,000 and 500,000 rapes32 one-
tenth of the country’s population was murdered. If successful, each of the stories, novels,
films and documentaries do “what a creative and transformative work alone can do. It
distills this history and gives voice to those who can no longer speak—recovering, as best
we can, the full, complex lives concealed in the statistics of genocide and rendering their
humanity” (Julien).
Novels, films, documentaries and other creative works about human rights abuses,
international conflict and reconciliation do not apply to Rwanda alone. A growing
number of visual and textual works tell stories about horrors—some legally defined as
war crimes and crimes against humanity, others escaping legal definition— in Sierra
Leone, Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa, the republics of the former Yugoslavia, and Sri
Lanka. I am interested in assessing the value of works like the ones I describe above
when they enter into the English-speaking world and marketplace of ideas. I want to ask
difficult questions like, Do these works do more than tell horrible stories? Do they
provide more than an outlet for the writer? Do they do more than elicit banal sympathy
and empathy from western readers? Do they have any effect on the effort to bring about
justice and end circles of violence in the real worlds they imitate? Are postcolonialism
and anti-imperialism the only lenses through which we can examine novels from writers
living on either side of those historical divides? Is there a way of reading that traces the
equality of human beings in a text and renders the destruction of any human as a global
problem? My initial answer is Yes, and my dissertation attempts to explain why. In doing
32 See Elizabeth Neuffer, The Key to My Neighbor’s House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda (New York: Picador, 2001), 276.
244 so, I re-examine the texts of the western intellectual tradition that are said to have
informed our rights tradition and attempt to find meaning in neglected traces, threads and
strands. I return to Greek tragedy, Plato and his thinking on republics, Dante’s
underworld, and the myriad Enlightenments. That is one block of homes in the
neighborhood that is my dissertation; imagine each street named after a philosopher
whose political and/or moral ideas bear reflection on justice, solidarity, reconciliation,
obligation, universalism, etc. The adjacent block is a relatively new development,
twentieth century American writers interested in the same ideas as their neighbors and
expressing them through literary convention and a keen knowledge of the traditions of
ideas that came before them. They borrow from, challenge and build upon the ideas of
their philosophical neighbors.
Their work is important. Narratives about human rights in places like sub-Saharan
Africa, Latin America and Eastern/Central Europe are greatly affected by the
exceptionalism of literature in western Europe and the United States. Because the
advancement of societies in western Europe and the United States presupposes the
relative absence of the violence, war and inequity that is of great concern in other parts of
the world, the Rwandan protagonist decrying the ravages of war in the Rwandan capital
Kigali will be viewed more as a spectacle in need of civilizing than a human being whose
life must be valued equally as any other. Whereas current scholarship requires what
Eileen Julien33 calls the “extroversion” of those narratives—i.e. engagement with the
ideas of Enlightenment or modernity—in order to matter in the literary marketplace
(publishing, education, readership), I posit human rights and literature frameworks and
33 See Eileen Julien, “The Extroverted African Novel.” The Novel: History, Geography and Culture. Vol 1. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton U Pr, 2006. 667-702.
245 modes of analysis that equate subjectivity and value the democratization of human life in the novel, whether in the United States or Burundi. I attempt to deny the blackmail of the
Enlightenment and the blackmail of human rights as all-encompassing discourses and focus on them as two of many world discourses that include powerful and formative self- critiques, as Habermas maintains is true of the Enlightenment. Self-critique makes it simultaneously possible to affirm and value the origins and development of human rights and render all of the societies and literatures of the world as equally vulnerable, interdependent, and striving for greater justice. This first requires a re-situating of
American literature from 1945 to the present in the context of discourses on human rights. Gareth Evans observed that
One might have thought Hitler’s Holocaust would have laid to rest once and for
all the notion that whatever happens within a state’s borders is nobody else’s
business. Certainly major gains were made in the immediate postwar period. With
the drafting of the Charter of the Nuremburg Tribunal in 1945 came the
recognition in international law of the concept of “crimes against humanity,”
which could be committed by a government against its own people, and not
necessarily just during wartime. Individual and group human rights were
recognized in the UN Charter of 1945 and, more grandly and explicitly, in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (which was supplemented—after
eighteen years of painful further negotiation—by the two 1966 covenants on civil
and political rights and on economic, social, and cultural rights). And 1949 saw
agreement on the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, regarding the treatment
of prisoners of war and of civilians under occupation, respectively, providing in
246 each for state parties to exercise universal jurisdiction. All these characters and
agreements set the foundation for the development of the modern human rights
movement, both domestically and internationally. (The Responsibility to Protect
19)
The center of these deliberations was the United States, and despite historical accounts that render the discussion one based solely in legal and political spheres, I contend that artists and writers played a crucial role in challenging and interrogating the very human rights notions that began to take hold in the modern human rights movement from its inception. To the important scholarship on Holocaust literature that has taken place we must add studies of fiction and film from American writers who concerned themselves with both domestic and international dramas. This means mining American literature for its universal and its particular, its presence as an interwoven tapestry of cultural experience and tradition, and its particularity as several literatures, among them European
American, Native American, African American, Chicano, and Asian American. Present in the texts of an organic and multiple transnational American literature are many threads of knowledge production and deliberations on justice, universality, human being-ness, reconciliation, solidarity, and countless other concepts and issues central to debates within human rights discourses. These texts approached the questions the Rwanda narratives asked well before the Rwandan genocide took place. I fear our failure to listen to these texts in the context of human rights then is burdening how we perceive human rights now and has resulted in a rehashing of old debates that provide coffee conversation for elites (universalism or cultural relativism?) and continued misery for those living on the wrong side of wealth and power. A new generation of novels about rights is coming
247 out and they face a similar fate. I think we can revive the voices of those older narratives
and call for genuinely empathic audiences for those new narratives. I cannot determine
how they will affect our understanding of human rights, NGOs, the United Nations,
international human rights law, sovereignty, and the like. But I can locate where in these
texts discussions of these issues are taking place and suggest that we let these ideas enter
into the public sphere and stop denying them voice because they appear as art. Quite
simply, I am asking for a restoration of poets to their central place in the republics.
Thus, in this dissertation I resituate American literature so that genuine and
equality-based readings of other literatures can take place. As I understand the literary intentions and production of men and women writing fiction in the United States in the postwar period—that period when human rights discourses began to rise with great momentum—they wanted their explorations of the human condition through literary means to genuinely apply to a global community—even when the protagonists and narratives of their work remained entirely local.
The relationship of human rights literature in Rwanda to literature in the United
States, for example, should resemble Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee’s understanding of Liberian women’s activism and its transnational inspirations. Her work relying on women to broker peace in Liberia, land of Africa’s only female president, led
“us to step out of our safe space, to step out of our boundaries, to step out of our poor
homes and to step into Sudan and to step into Zimbabwe, to step into Sri Lanka, to step
into Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and to step into schools in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in
other parts of New York. And to use the words of the great African-American freedom
fighter, Harriet Tubman: ‘If you’re hungry, keep walking. If you’re thirsty, keep walking.
248 If you want a taste of freedom, keep walking.’” Like many of the artists I examine in this
study, Gbowee envisions a global mapping and that mapping equates the vulnerability of
people in the United States with the vulnerability of men and women in supposedly
developing nations. Sovereignty might prevent this solidarity and complementariy from
taking place in the political sphere, but activists like Gbowee see no walls. I would
suggest the same for literature. Indeed the literature of the United States, if we are
honest, comes from a tradition that features Harriet Tubman and African American slave
narratives, as well as the whole of the western intellectual tradition.
The arts have become a commodity that has turned human suffering into a
spectacle. Often that process begins with a story or testimony that is presented to a court
or used for the material for a novel or film. Legal scholars and practitioners, novelists and
filmmakers have differing ideas about how their respective mediums contribute to,
interrogate, inform and revise ideas about justice and human rights, but critical paradigms
have yet to adequately and collectively assess their value, interdependency and public
reception. For instance, former Liberian president Charles Taylor, educated in the United
States, is currently on trial for crimes against humanity committed in Sierra Leone,
including the conscription of child soldiers, a violation of the United Nations Convention
on the Rights of the Child and other international treaties. The United Nations, producer
of thousands of human rights documents, has published only one novel in its history:
Marie: in the Shadow of the Lion, a story about rebel conflict and the use of child soldiers in an unspecified African country. The writer Emmanuel Dongala, inspired by Gabriel
García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, has also written a novel about the experiences of child soldiers set in an unnamed African country. His Johnny Mad Dog
249 was recently made into a film directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire. Set in Sierra Leone,
the film uses former Liberian child soldiers as actors, and the director inspired his cast
with viewings of Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and The City of God. New York
Times reviewer Manohla Dargis calls the film adaptation a series of “skillfully shot,
rapidly edited scenes of dead-eyed children walking, running, dancing, shooting,
screaming and killing, killing, killing.
Without context, information or explanation, the movie plunges you into horror
— yet, to what end? There’s no pleasure here, certainly, just effort and craft and a
lot of black bodies, children and adolescents mostly, though also some adults, in a
surrealistic and violent pantomime.34
Dargis attended a screening of the film that included an introduction that assured “that
Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and all the people of the republic stand behind
Johnny Mad Dog. Afterward, still reeling from what I’d just seen, I wondered, Who am I
to argue?” The reality of human rights abuses, and legal, social and aesthetic attempts at
redress and representation require greater analysis. In light of the centrality of
sovereignty to the nation-state system, how can the legal community respond to Taylor’s
claim that an international court does not have jurisdiction to try him for crimes? Can
narrative fiction be commissioned as an object to address audiences of interest to the
United Nations in the effort to prevent conflicts, wars and massacres? When novels about
war crimes are translated into films, does the technology of film turn death, suffering and
violence into fetish objects at the cost of history, context and human agency? Finally, are
34 Manohla Dargis, “Where Children Fight the Wars, Innocence Dies First.” The New York Times (22 May 2008).
250 trials, novels and films helping to prevent human rights abuses or merely documenting
the events of a violent world in administrative, prosaic and spectacular fashion?
In 2000, the United Nations published its first and only novel to date, Marie: in the Shadow of the Lion. The novel is about an 11-year-old girl in an unnamed African country—clearly Sierra Leone— that is in the middle of a civil war. The novel opens with a universally understood and innocent scene: Marie is at school, laughing and playing with friends. By the end of the novel, rebels have murdered her teacher, recruited and initiated six-year-old boys into their forces by having them kill other six-year-olds, snatched infants from their mothers' arms and slung them into rocks, and recruited Marie as a concubine for the leader of the rebel forces. The novel spares no detail, and the influence on the rebels is telling: “American rap music blocked out the sounds of the
African night while rebels drank and danced in their best Calvin Klein jeans and Nike sneakers” (86).
Here is one unfortunate example of the violence the novel narrates:
“He asked you what was in the rag?” another soldier said. “Let’s see.”
The soldier grabbed the sheet. He reached in and pulled Mary out by one of her
legs. Now Mary shrieked and wiggled in the air. Without a thought, the soldier
tossed baby Mary to the side of the road. She hit some rocks, and didn’t move.
“No!” Inez screamed and broke through the soldiers. She ran to her still baby and
held her to the chest.
The soldiers smirked and walked away. One of them tucked the sheet into his
pocket. He could use it to clean his gun. (44)
251 Marie escapes the rebels and runs away with the help of a boy from her school, Joseph.
Marie and Joseph are playing together on the school playground when the novel opens; by the end, Joseph has been recruited and indoctrinated by the rebels. He has killed three people. When he sees Marie brought to the camp, he helps her escape. Marie tells him to escape with her but he chooses to remain behind to hold off the rebels while Marie runs away.
“Come with me, Joseph. They’ll kill you. You know they’ll kill you.”
“Don’t you understand?” Joseph said without emotion. “They already did.” (104)
The United Nations suggests the book for 11 – 15-year-olds in the West, and advises them, if outraged by the life Marie has faced, to set up Humanitarian Clubs in their schools, write articles in their school newspapers, write to their local media outlets and petition their respective government leaders to support international treaties. The postscript to the novel informs readers that, “So far, no generation has been able to stop these terrible things from happening. We hope that maybe, just maybe, yours will be the first.” Kofi Annan tells the readers, “Marie’s story may upset and even alarm you. But this is as it should be. It is right to be shocked when brutal things happen to innocent people. We must use our sense of outrage to stop them happening” (Foreword).
While the novel represents a remarkable effort on the part of the United Nations to employ the power of fiction in the name of human rights—getting readers who lead lives of calm and privilege to identify and sympathize with, and help human beings in less stable environments—ultimately the work of fiction proves merely that the United
Nations should not write and publish novels.
252 Yet, the question remains: How is the United Nations to publicize, respond to and ultimately conscript the international community to prevent the daily violence of Sierra
Leone or Kosovo? The answer is complex, but I argue that it will require everything we have: men and women from every part of the world regardless of race, social class, gender identification or nationality; novels, stories, tragedy and imagination from writers everywhere; NGOs, international relations history, international relations theory; a loss of elitism, and a tremendous amount of love.
253 REFERENCES
Abdela, Lesley. “Kosovo: missed opportunities, lessons for the future.” Development in Practice, Vol. 13, No. 2 & 3 (May 2003), 208-16.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun. New York: Anchor Books, 2007; 2006.
Akpan, Uwem. Say You’re One of them. Thorndike, Me.: Center Point Pub., 2008.
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d, Richard N. Schwab, and Walter E. Rex. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Allen, Judson Boyce. The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1982.
American Speeches. The Library of America; 166-167. 2 vols. New York: Library of America: Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Putnam, 2006.
Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955. New York: Cambridge, 2003.
Anderson, J. J. Language and Imagination in the Gawain-Poems. Manchester Medieval Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Annan, Kofi. Foreword. Marie, in the Shadow of the Lion: A Humanitarian Novel. Piasecki, Jerry, and Felicity O. Yost. New York: United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2000.
Anselm, Brian Davies, and G. R. Evans. The Major Works. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Appiah, Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. New York: Meridian, 1958.
Auerbach, Erich. Dante, Poet of the Secular World. [Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
——. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 50th anniversary ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Augustine, Anna S. Benjamin, and L. H. Hackstaff. On Free Choice of the Will. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964.
254 Bache, Ellyn. The Activist’s Daughter. 1st ed. Duluth, Minn.: Spinsters Ink, 1997.
Baker, Keith Michael. Condorcet, from Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Baldwin, James. “Autobiographical Notes.” Collected Essays. 5-9.
——. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998.
——. Early Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1998.
——. “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood.” Playboy. Jan. 1985. Collected Essays. 814-29.
——. Giovanni’s Room. Collected Essays. 217-360.
——. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
——. Introduction. We Are Everywhere: Narratives Accounts of Rhodesian Guerillas. Michael Raeburn. New York: Random House, 1979. vii-viii.
——. “James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction No. 78.” Interview by Jordan Elgrably. The Paris Review. 91 (Spring 1984).
——. “Notes for A Hypothetical Novel: An Address.” Collected Essays. 222-30.
——. “Sonny’s Blues.” Early Novels and Stories. 831-64.
——. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. New York: Dial Press, 1968.
——. Baldwin, James. “War Crimes Tribunal.” Freedomways 7.3 (Summer 1967): 242- 244.
Baldwin, James, Fred L. Standley, and Louis H. Pratt. Conversations with James Baldwin. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.
Banfield, Ann. “Narrative Style and the Grammar of Direct and Indirect Speech.” Foundations of Language: International Journal of Language and Philosophy 10 (1973): 1-39.
Baraka, Imamu Amiri. The System of Dante’s Hell. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966.
Barthes, Roland, and Roland Barthes. “Writing and the Novel.” Writing Degree Zero ; &, Elements of Semiology. London: J. Cape, 1984. 26-34.
255 Bass, Gary Jonathan. Stay the Hand of Vengeance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Beavers, Herman. “Finding common ground: Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, Ed. Maryemma Graham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 189-202.
Bemrose, Stephen. Dante’s Angelic Intelligences: Their Importance in the Cosmos and in Pre- Christian Religion. Letture Di Pensiero E D’arte. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1983.
Benston, Kimberly W. “’I Yam what I Am’: Naming and Unnaming in Afro-American Literature.” Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 3-11.
Boethius, and V. E. Watts. The Consolation of Philosophy. Penguin Classics. Rev. ed. London; New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Bronner, Stephen Eric. Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Brown, Peter Robert Lamont. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Haskell Lectures on History of Religions; New Ser., No. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Brown, Wendy, and Janet E. Halley. Left Legalism/Left Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
Brown, William Wells. Clotel: or, The President's Daughter. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Buck-Morss, Susan. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. (Summer 2000): 821-865.
Buckmaster, Henrietta. The Lion in the Stone. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.
——. Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.
Brovina, Flora. “Let Women Build the Bridges.” Focus Kosovo. October 2002.
Butler, Octavia. Parable of Sower. Boston: Grand Central Publishing, 2000.
Camus, Albert. The Fall. 1st Vintage international ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Canetti, Elias. Auto-Da-fé. New York: Continuum, 1982; 1947.
256 Caputo, Philip. Acts of Faith. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 2005.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Nevill Coghill. The Canterbury Tales. Penguin Classics. London; New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Clarke, John Henrik, and Nat Turner. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987; 1968.
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat. Condorcet: Selected Writings. 1st ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.
Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Iain McLean, and Fiona Hewitt. Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory. Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vt.: E. Elgar, 1994.
“Condorcet Studies.” Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984. 2 vols.
Crane, Stephen. The Monster. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 97. Aug. 1998.
Cronin, Gloria L., and Ben Siegel. Conversations with Robert Penn Warren. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Cumyn, Alan. Burridge Unbound. Toronto: M&S, 2000.
Dagenais, John, and Margaret Greer. “Decolonizing the Middle Ages: Introduction.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 431-48.
Dante, Alighieri, Sandow Birk, and Marcus Sanders. Dante’s Inferno. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004. Dante, Alighieri, Robert Pinsky, and Nicole Pinsky. The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
Dante, Alighieri, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Barbara Reynolds. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, the Florentine. Harmondsworth [Eng.]; Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Dawes, James. That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Del Zotto, Augusta C. “Weeping Women, Wringing Hands: How the Mainstream Media Stereotyped Women’s Experiences in Kosovo.” Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (July, 2002), 141-150.
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
257 ——. “The Politics of Friendship.” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 85, No. 11, Eighty- Fifth Annual Meeting American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (Nov., 1988) 632-644.
Diamond, Cora. “The Importance of Being Human.” Human Beings. Eds. David Cockburn and Royal Institute of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 277-35-62.
Diop, Boubacar Boris, and Fiona Mc Laughlin. Murambi: The Book of Bones. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Doane, Michael. City of Light: A Novel. 1st ed. New York: A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1992.
Dongala, Emmanuel Boundzéki, and Maria Louise Ascher. Johnny Mad Dog. 1 American ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Douglass, Frederick. The Heroic Slave. Wilder Publications, 2008.
Drakulić, Slavenka, and Marko Ivić. S.: Novel about the Balkans. New York: Viking, 2000.
Du Bois, W. E. B., and Eric Sundquist. The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Eggers, Dave. What is the what: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel. San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2006.
Empson, William, and John Haffenden. The Complete Poems of William Empson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001; 2000.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
——. “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” In Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Ed. John Callahan. New York: Random House, 2003 :81-99.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
——. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methune, 1920.
258 Elman, Colin and Miriam Fendius Elman. “Diplomatic History and International Relations Theory: Respecting Difference and Crossing Boundaries.” International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1997), 5-21.
Euben, J. Peter. Platonic Noise. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.
——. The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Evans, Gareth. The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All. Washington: The Brookings Institution, 2008.
——. “True Believer: Gareth Evans of the International Crisis Group thinks that genocide is one habit that humankind can break.” Foreign Policy Magazine. March/April 2001.
Farah, Nuruddin. Gifts. New York: Arcade Pub., 1999; 1993.
Faulkner, William. Novels, 1936-1940. The Library of America; 48. New York: Library of America, 1990.
Fielding, Helen. Cause Celeb. 1 American ed. New York: Viking, 2001.
Finkelstein, Sidney Walter. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. 1st ed. New York: International Publishers, 1965.
Finnemore, Martha. “Norms, culture, and world politics: insights from sociology’s institutionalism.” International Organization, Vol. 50, No. 2. Spring, 1996: 325- 347.
Fisher, William F. “DOING GOOD? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices.” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 26 (1997), 439-464.
Foley, Helene P. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: New Press; W.W. Norton, 1997.
Franke, William. Dante’s Interpretive Journey. Religion and Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Freccero, John, Dana E. Stewart, and Alison Cornish. Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and Its Aftermath: Essays in Honor of John Freccero. Binghamton Medieval and Early Modern Studies; 2. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000.
259 Frost, Mervyn. “Tragedy, Ethics and International Relations.” International Relations. 17.4 (2003): 477-95.
Gallagher, Joseph. A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s the Divine Comedy. Liguori, Mo.: Liguori/Triumph, 1999.
Gbowee, Leymah. Acceptance Speech. Profile in Courage Award. John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Boston, MA. 18 May 2009.
Gelber, Hester. Medieval Seminar. Lecture. Stanford University, 2006.
Gerhard, Mira. “Sacrificing Virgil.” Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. 107-20.
Gibney, Mark. “Why the World Needs an International Criminal Court, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 26:2 (Summer/Fall 2002): 49.
Gibson, Donald. “The Political Anatomy of Space.” in T. O' Daniel, ed. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation.Washington: Howard University Press, 1977.
Gilbert, Allan H. Dante’s Conception of Justice. New York: AMS Press, 1971.
Glass, Suzanne. The Interpreter: A Novel. 1 US ed. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2001.
Glendon, Mary Ann. A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2001.
Goodell, Edward. The Noble Philosopher: Condorcet and the Enlightenment. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994.
Gracia, Jorge J. E., and Timothy B. Noone. A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy; 24. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003.
Habermas, J. and J. Habermas. Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993.
Harris, Paul. The Secret Keeper. New York: Dutton, 2009.
Harrison, Keith, and Helen Cooper. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Verse Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Harwood-Gordon, Sharon. A Study of the Theology and the Imagery of Dante's Divina
260 Commedia: Sensory Perception, Reason, and Free Will. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1991.
Heaney, Seamus. “Human Rights, Poetic Redress.” The Irish Times. 15 March 2008. Reprinted at Amnesty International. Web. 12 Aug. 2008
Henry, Charles P., Ed. Foreign Policy and the Black (Inter)national Interest. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Higginbotham, Jay. Alma. Philadelphia, Pa.: Xlibris Corp., 2002.
Hochschild, Adam. “The Trial of Thomas Lubanga.” The Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 2009.
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.
Hughes, Langston. “From Harlem to Paris,” Review of Notes of A Native Son, by James Baldwin, New York Times Book Review, 26 Feb. 1956: 26.
Hunt, Lynn Avery. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History. Bedford Series in History and Culture. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
——. Inventing Human Rights. New York: Norton, 2007.
Ignatieff, Michael. Charlie Johnson in the Flames. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
Ignatieff, Michael, and Amy Gutmann. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Izevbaye, D.S. “Naming and the Character of African Fiction.” Research in African Literatures 12.2 (1981): 162-84.
Jařab, Josef. “Black Stars, the Red Star, and the Blues.” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994:167-173.
John, Eileen, and Dominic Lopes. Philosophy of Literature : Contemporary and Classic Readings : An Anthology. Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies; 22. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004.
Julien, Eileen. “The Extroverted African Novel.” The Novel: Volume I: History,Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 667-700.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present. New York: Random House, 1985.
261 Kaiser, Ernest. “The Failure of William Styron.” Clarke, John Henrik, and Nat Turner. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond
Kant, I., A. W. Wood, et al. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy in the Novel. New York: Oxford Press, 2007.
Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1998.
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Penguin Classics. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.:Viking Penguin, 1985.
Kierkegaard, Søren, et al. Fear and Trembling; Repetition. Vol. 6. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Kierkegaard, Søren, Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Either-or. Vol. 3-4. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
——. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Vol. 19. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.
——. Upbuilding Discourses in various Spirits. Vol. 15. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Kierkegaard, Søren, Reidar Thomte, and Albert Anderson. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Vol. 8. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.
King, Ed. “Saving Virgil.” Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. 83-106.
Klíma, Ivan. My Golden Trades. 1st American ed. New York: Scribner; Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994.
Krenn, Michael L. Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945- 1969. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999.
Lauren, Paul Gordon. “Seen from the Outside: The International Perspective on America’s Dilemma,” in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 ed. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003: 21-43.
Lang, John. “In Quest of Redemption: The Religious Background of Peyton's Monologue in Lie Down in Darkness.” The Critical Response to William Styron. Ed. Daniel William Ross. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1995. 33-44.
262 Lawson, Lewis. “Cass Kinsolving: Kierkegaardian Man of Despair.” University of Wisconsin Press 3.3 (Autumn 1962): 54-66.
Leeming, David Adams. James Baldwin: A Biography. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Lemarchand, René. Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Lewen, Jody. “The Promise of Higher Education at San Quentin.” Peter E. Haas Public Service Award Lecture. University of California, Berkeley, 2007.
Macebuh, Stanley. James Baldwin: A Critical Study. New York: John Okpaku Publishing Co./The Third Press, 1973.
Mahoney, John. The Challenge of Human Rights: Origin, Development, and Significance. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2007.
Makine, Andreï, and Geoffrey Strachan. Human Love: A Novel. New York: Arcade Pub.: Distributed by Hachette Book Group USA, 2008.
Marcom, Micheline Aharonian. Draining the Sea. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
Marks, Michael P. The Prison as Metaphor: Re-Imagining International Relations. Studies in International Relations, V. 1. New York: P. Lang, 2004.
McGonegal, Julie. Imagining Justice: the Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. McGill: Queens University Press, 2009.
Mead, Margaret, and James Baldwin. A Rap on Race. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971.
Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Meyer, Howard N. The World Court in Action: Judging among the Nations. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002.
Miller, James L., ed. Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005.
Miller, James. “Retheologizing Dante.” Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression.
Moghalu, Kingsley Chiedu. “On the Rwanda Tribunal’s Tribulations,” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 26:2 (Summer/Fall 2002): 23-24.
263 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, and Melvin Richter. The Political Theory of Montesquieu. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Moretti, Franco. The Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Morgan, Alison. Dante and the Medieval Other World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Moshiri, Farnoosh. At the Wall of the Almighty: A Novel. New York: Interlink Books, 2000.
——. The Bathhouse: A Novel. 1 Beacon Press ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
NAACP, An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of the Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. New York: NAACP, 1947.
Naito, Jonathan Tadashi. “Cruel and Unusual Light: Electricity and Effacement in Stephen Crane’s The Monster. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory. Vol. 62, No. 1, (Spring 2006): pp. 35-63.
Newman, Barbara. God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
Nkosi, Lewis. Underground People. 1st ed. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2002.
Nye, Joseph S. The Power Game : A Washington Novel. 1st ed. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.
Oates, Joyce Carol, ed. “Introduction.” The Best American Essays of the Century. Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001.
Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997.
Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto: A Novel. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
264 Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Patterson, Richard North. Eclipse. New York: Henry Holt, 2009.
Patterson, William. We Charge Genocide: the Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People. New York: International Publishers, 1951.
Piasecki, Jerry, and Felicity O. Yost. Marie, in the Shadow of the Lion: A Humanitarian Novel. New York: United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2000.
Pierce, Julian R. Speak Rwanda. New York: Picador USA, 1999.
Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Plato, G. R. F. Ferrari, and Tom Griffith. The Republic. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Platz, Jonathon. Work of Idle Hands. Winnipeg: Great Plains Publications, 2002.
Plimpton, George. “The Art of Fiction No. 156: William Styron.” The Paris Review, 150, (Spring 1999).
Popkin, Richard. “Condorcet, Abolitionist.” In “Condorcet Studies.” 35-48.
Prose, Francine. A Changed Man: A Novel. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Evanstown, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992.
Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Vol. 1997. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.
——. “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality.” In The Politics of Human Rights. 67-83.
Rowe, Constance. “The Present-Day Relevance of Condorcet.” In “Condorcet Studies.” 15-34.
265 Ruderman, Judith. William Styron. New York: Ungar, 1987.
Savić, Obrad, and The Belgrade Circle. The Politics of Human Rights. New York: Verso, 1999.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schandeler, Jean-Pierre. Les Interprétations De Condorcet: Symboles Et Concepts, 1794- 1894. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000.
Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Shelby, Tommie. We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
Shklar, Judith. Legalism: law, morals, and political trials. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Sikkink, Kathryn and Jackie Smith. “Infrastructures for Change: Transnational Organizations.” Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks and Norms, Eds. Sanjeev Khagram, James Riker and Kathryn Sikkink. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 1953-93.
Silone, Ignazio, and Eric Mosbacher. Bread and Wine. New York: Signet Classics, 2005; 1986.
Siotis, Jean. “Understanding the United Nations: A Textbook and A Novel.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Dec., 1969) 521-525.
Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, Inc.: the World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.
Slaughter, Joseph. and Sophia A. McLennen, eds. “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms; or, The Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights,” Comparative Literary Studies. 46.1 (2009): 1-19.
Slovo, Gillian. Red Dust. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
Smirnoff, Marc. “Faulkner as Racist.” Oxford American Winter (2005): 130-32.
Smith, Adam, Robert L. Heilbroner, and Laurence J. Malone. The Essential Adam Smith. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
Stacy, Helen. Human Rights for the 21st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture.
266 Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Stanton, Katherine. Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Steele, Shelby. “The Age of White Guilt and the Disappearance of the Black Individual,” Harper’s Magazine November 2002: 33-42.
Steiner, Zara. “On Writing International History: Chaps, Maps and Much More.” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 73, No. 3, Globalization and International Relations (July, 1997), 531-546.
Stone, Sarah. The True Sources of the Nile. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, et al. The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007.
Stuart, David E. Angel of Vilcabamba. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967.
——. “The Enduring Metaphors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” Newsweek, 11 Jan. 1993.
——. Inheritance of Night: Early Drafts of Lie Down in Darkness. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
——. Lie Down in Darkness. 1 Vintage international ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992; 1951.
——. The Long March. New York: Random House, 1960; 1968. ——. Set this House on Fire. New York: Random House, 1960.
——. Sophie’s Choice. 1 Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992; 1979.
——. This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1982.
——. A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1993.
Thomas, and A. M. Fairweather. Nature and Grace; Selections from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. The Library of Christian Classics; V. 11. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954.
Thornton, Lawrence. Imagining Argentina. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
——. Tales from the Blue Archives. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
267
Traylor, Eleanor. “I Hear Music in the Air: James Baldwin’s Just above my Head.” in Quincy Troupe (ed.), James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1989.
Unger, Douglas. Voices from Silence. 1st ed. New York: A Wyatt Book for St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
United Nations. A More Secure World: Our shared responsibility. New York: United Nations, 2004.
Voltaire, and David Wootton. Candide and Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 2000.
Von Eschen, Penny. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, (1937- 1957. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990; 1946.
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N., Lynn Avery Hunt, and Marilyn Blatt Young. Human Rights and Revolutions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley, Calif.,: University of California Press, 1957.
West, Cornel. Keeping Faith. New York: Routledge, 1993.
West, James L. W. William Styron: A Descriptive Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977.
West, James L. W. William Styron, a Life. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1998.
Williams, David. Condorcet and Modernity. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Wynne, Marcus. Brothers in Arms. New York: Forge, 2004.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two. Eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. New York: Continuum, 2006.
268
269