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Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass and the Limits of the Black Atlantic Jacob Crane I

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Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass and the Limits of the Black Atlantic Jacob Crane I Postcolonial Text, Vol 6, No 4 (2011) Beyond the Cape: Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass and the Limits of the Black Atlantic Jacob Crane Tufts University The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream….Her village was so far inland that the sea seemed as distant as the netherworld: it was the chasm of darkness where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala-Pani, ‘the Black Water.’ —Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. — “The Sea is History,” Derek Walcott I. The first epigraph above is the opening paragraph of Indian-Bengali author Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 novel Sea of Poppies, the first book in a projected trilogy set on the trade routes of the Indian Ocean on the eve of the Opium Wars. The ship of Deeti’s vision is later revealed to be the Ibis, a former “blackbirder” or slave ship that arrived at that moment in Calcutta from Baltimore. Its intention is to take on indentured laborers and transport them to plantations on Mauritius as a replacement for the slave labor recently abolished by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Ghosh’s novel revolves around the trials of Deeti, who escapes from her native village after the death of her opium-addicted husband and enlists aboard the Ibis as a “coolie” laborer. Through Deeti’s narrative of survival as an indentured laborer, Ghosh attempts to recreate through the genre of historical fiction the lost personal accounts of the first wave of South Asian coolie labor after the formal end of British slavery. In doing so, he attempts to fill a conspicuous void in the modern history of labor migration and displacement. In contrast to the Atlantic tradition, which boasts a number of writers like Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, so few first-hand accounts from the nineteenth century written by South Asian laborers survive that Isabel Hofmeyr claims that the Indian Ocean is the “home to failed diaspora [and migrants] who move but do not embark on projects of cultural memory and constructing homelands” (18). This article will look at how Ghosh attempts to recover the Indian diaspora from this alleged failure by forging narrative and theoretical continuities with the texts of African-American slavery, specifically through the figure of Frederick Douglass, and the legacy of the Atlantic Middle Passage that constitute the black Atlantic memory of the novel. Perhaps not coincidentally, the slave ship of Deeti’s mystical vision, which sets in motion Ghosh’s epic of the Indian Ocean diaspora, is the exact image that Paul Gilroy selects as the primary chronotope for his study of the African diaspora, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. To focus on the transatlantic nature of black cultural forms, Gilroy professes a vision remarkably similar to Deeti’s: I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean as a central organizing symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The image of the ship [represents] a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion…. Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for the redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activities, as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts. (4) Although it may not be entirely necessary to rehearse the details of Gilroy’s text, it is worth noting the way in which his transatlantic model has influenced the discourse of African diaspora since its publication. Gilroy’s stated aim in the Black Atlantic is to “break the dogmatic focus on discrete national dynamics” and to “reevaluate the significance of the modern nation state as political, economic, and cultural unit” that has privileged “racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourses” (1, 6-7). His solution to the language of monolithic, exclusionary ethnocentricity is to adopt an intercultural perspective that “take[s] the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis in… discussions of the modern world” through an engagement with the transatlantic exchanges between the vernacular cultures of African-American, Caribbean and European musicians and writers (15). Within this alternate or “counter” construction of modernity, the territorializing logic of the nation-state is turned inside- out by a hybrid, oceanic culture fueled by the endless cross-fertilization of Atlantic trade routes. As the vehicles of diaspora and as polyphonic “microsystems of linguistic and political hybridity,” the ships within Gilroy’s model are invested with both the traumatic and the liberatory schemes of transatlantic exchange that constitute, according to his argument, a counterculture of modernity contesting racialized modes of oppression (Gilroy 13). Since the publication of The Black Atlantic in 1993, Gilroy’s oceanic paradigm has been greatly expanded by a number of theorists, perhaps most notably by Joseph Roach in his study Cities of the Dead: Circum- Atlantic Performance (1996). Expanding upon Gilroy’s transatlantic methodology, Roach proposes a shift to the conceptualization of a circum- Atlantic world that “insists on the centrality of the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of 2 Postcolonial Text Vol 6 No 4 (2011) the culture of modernity” (4). It is within this world defined by the traumatic history of the triangular trade that processes of “surrogation” produce the “three-sided relationship of memory, performance and substitution” resistant to the amnesia of the (state) archive (2). Through performance and text, Roach traces the mnemonic reserves that constitute “counter-memories”—performances that dramatize “the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (26). Most salient for this article is Roach’s theory of surrogation and the repetition and revision of living memory retained in images and words that establish the oceanic space as the stage for countless intersecting “performance genealogies” (26). Throughout this essay I will refer to the way in which Ghosh reads and revises traditionally Atlantic texts—the mnemonic materials of an oceanic interculture—as acts of performance and extends these genealogies beyond the black Atlantic. By beginning his narrative with the arrival of the Ibis, Ghosh locates his novel within a burgeoning transnational Atlanticist discourse, much of it rooted in the vanguard texts of Gilroy and Roach. As a part of the much heralded “transnational turn” in literary studies, this discourse takes the sea as “fundamentally a space of dispersion, conjunction, distribution, contingency, heterogeneity, and of intersecting and stratified lines and images—in short, a field of strategic possibilities in which the Oceanic order holds all together in a common but highly fluid space” (Boelhower 92-3). As evidenced by the PMLA’s May 2010 special forum, “Oceanic Studies,” in the wake of black Atlantic studies, scholarship focused on maritime modernity is gaining both scholarly momentum and institutional support. With the shift from the national to the transnational as the ordering principle of this model’s critical apparatus, the deterritorialized theories and texts of diaspora and their emphasis on hybridity have become central to alternative oceanic canon formation. It may be inevitable, however, that the rise and consolidation of any new paradigm will occasion new boundaries and new acts of enclosure. The oceanic, counter to the nation-space, “leaves no traces, and has no place names, towns or dwelling places; it cannot be possessed” (Boelhower 92). Yet, despite the expansiveness of this paradigm, surprisingly few practitioners have ventured to extend these narratives beyond the charted boundaries of a traditionally Atlantic and Western space. Critics over the last decade have noted that the formulations of Gilroy, Roach and others have tended to locate themselves within and between the cities of Europe and North America, privileging a North Atlantic discourse.1 In practice, the increasing institutional momentum of transatlantic and circumatlantic studies of diaspora have often served to reinforce the disciplinary de- linking of East and West, literally at the water’s edge. Jed Esty asks of William Boelhower’s concept of a new Atlanticism: “If an oceanic logic is displacing a territorial logic as part of the ‘archeological turn in the humanities,’ is that project any longer anchored in a recognizable geography (or hydrography) that warrants the name Atlantic?” (107). 3 Postcolonial Text Vol 6 No 4 (2011) As I will argue, Ghosh’s historical novel contests the boundaries of the black Atlantic through a comparative project that produces new forms of hybridity and new theorizations of diaspora formation in the Kala-Pani, the Black Water. It must be acknowledged, however, that any study that attempts to link subcontinent literature with the black Atlantic faces the constellation of issues surrounding the potential conflict between the oceanic model and what has traditionally been the focus of postcolonial studies. While both disciplinary paradigms attempt to produce a counter- discourse to the dominant formation of western modernity, certainly these two discourses offer conflicting accounts and emphases in regard to national territory and the nation-state. William Boelhower, a critic on the forefront of the New Atlanticist paradigm, articulates this distinction: “[while] postcolonial scholars … [turn] their history inside out and often fix on reading the new nation-building process in their native countries in terms of allegoresis, Atlanticists must necessarily enlarge the contact zones and embrace a greater range of complexity (both linguistic and cultural) beyond the structures of the nation-state” (86).
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