The Black Holocaust and the Poetics of the Slave Sublime

5 Volknation: The Black Holocaust and the Poetics of the Slave Sublime 5.1 Neo-slave Narratives, Memory Work and Affirmation of Negative Heritage As Richard Dyer has aptly remarked, while “[h]istory is a discipline of enquiry into the past; heritage is an attitude towards the legacy of the past” (“Nice Young Men” 44). Accordingly, where historians seek to generate knowledge and understanding about the national past, writers of historical novels are freer to interpret it in line with current political and ideological needs. But even though “heritage is not history” (Hewison, The Heritage Industry 10), both historians and writers are, in some measure, driven by a “heritage impulse,” which, in the words of Higson, is thus about seizing hold of the selected aspects of the past and presenting them in a way that tallies with current sensibilities and needs – it is in Lowenthal’s term, a declaration of faith in a particular way of seeing the past. Therefore, it is important to recognize that heritage is often invented or revised as it is conserved – hence the insistence on agency on the part of those who mobilize the past as heritage. (English Heritage 50) I would like to suggest, in this chapter that like historians, BWR writers were social actors re-imagining the past with a view to creating in their heritage/historical narratives what Brett has called “popular” history (The Construction of Heritage 4), or what Ditchfield has called “applied” history (“Foreword” ix). I will argue here that some BWR historical and maternal romances aimed to reconstruct through the matrilineal line “the specific origin of the people (or their race) (Volknation)” (Yuval-Davis, Gender Nation 21), and to cull from the depths of this reinvented communal past cultural values that could form the core for “exclusionary/homogenous visions of the ‘nation’” (ibid.). Historical romances of the BWR, bordering on history and oral tra- ditions, were a particular kind of heritage practice that showed how creative writing can “transform present day reality” through the “effort to remember and reclaim the past, [and its] legacies of pain, suffering and triumph” (hooks, Yearning 147). Paule Marshall called this process “establishing the cultural base” and argued that for BWR writers the “task is two-fold: on one hand to make use of the rich body of folk and historical material that is there: and on the other to interpret that past in heroic terms, in recognition of the fact that our history … is one of the greatest triumphs of the human spirit in modern times” (“Shaping the World” 108, 107). Thus, the reclamation of African American folk tradition by BWR writers in the 1980s went hand in hand with their reconstruction of the history of African Ameri- can slavery that had previously been repressed by the dominant white culture and neglected by black nationalist men. Despite attempts in the 1960s and 70s to assuage Neo-slave Narratives, Memory Work and Affirmation of Negative Heritage 147 what Edouard Glissant called “the hammering nature of the past” (Caribbean Dis- course 144) by drawing a line between the harrowing past and a more promising future, it became clear in the following decade that this black “nonhistory” (ibid. 64), to quote Glissant out of context, was nonetheless “obsessively present” in the coll- ective consciousness of African Americans (ibid. 63). BWR fiction of the 1980s bore out Glissant’s assertion that for many black writers in the New World, it became “the duty of the writer …. to explore this obsession, to show its relevance to the immediate present” (ibid. 63-4). Thus, the exploration of the slave past became a hallmark of womanist historical writing in the 1980s. This decade saw the publication of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1987), which has since become a paragon of the historically revisionist black feminist novel. Other extraordinarily diverse examples of neo-slave narratives also enjoyed immense critical and popular success, including Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose (1986), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), and Jewelle Gomez’s Gilda Stories (1991).66 Together these narratives constituted what Alice Walker called “the song of the people” that “holds them together” and gives them “a soul” (Meridian 372-3). Admittedly, male authors also wrote novels in this genre. Alex Haley’s Roots, which was published serially in the Reader’s Digest in 1974 and as a book in 1976,67 and Ishmael Reed’s parody, Flight to Canada (1976), are considered to be progeni- tors of the genre. Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, and David Bradley’s The Chanesyville Incident were as popular as female neo-slave narratives. The notable difference between female and male neo-slave narratives was that novels by the writers of the BWR foregrounded matrilineal descent and the black female past. In these narratives, black nonhistory was re-inscribed through images of strong and resilient female characters who mothered. In the words of Elizabeth Beaulieu, the reinvention of the slave narrative by black women writers in the late 20th century constitute[d] a rebirth of perhaps the proudest tradition in African American literature, a “rebirth” responsible for elevating the slave mother from “threefold” servitude… from virtual obscurity to a heroic status uniquely her own. (Black Women Writers 15) These black feminist narratives repositioned slave women as heroes who “passed on to their nominally free female descendants a legacy of hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, a legacy of tenacity, resistance and insistence on sexual equality” (Angela Davies, Women, Race and Class 29). 66 I use Ashraf H. A. Rushdy’s term “neo-slave narrative” for this subgenre of historical fiction that he defines as including “contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative” (Neo-slave Narratives 1). 67 The novel sold more than 1 million copies in 1977 alone, and the TV series was watched by appro- ximately 130 million viewers (Beaulieu, Black Women Writers 144) 148 Volknation: The Black Holocaust and the Poetics of the Slave Sublime Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), the first neo-slave narrative and also the text which many critics regard as marking the beginning of the BWR, is credited with creating the paradigm in which the maternal voice is represented as the source of historical memory. Jubilee was the first novel to “[imagine] … an enslaved female as a speaking subject” (Beaulieu, Black Women Writers 139) and to treat slavery in an epic form in an effort to build on the maternal sources of black oral culture. It tells the true story of Walker’s great-grandmother, which was passed on to her by her grandmother; a story that Walker had struggled to write for most of her life, as she herself admitted in How I Wrote “Jubilee.” This essay details Walker’s efforts to authenticate her grandmother’s oral story with extensive historical research. The novel itself, however, gives prece- dence to the oral tale. As the threads of memory are interwoven with historical facts, it becomes clear that in this narrative orality is linked to women’s histories and perspec- tives, and that these oppose the historical status quo by providing a decolonized and distinctively feminine version of the past. In other words, Jubilee’s orality established historicism through a non-institutional and quintessentially female voice. Jubilee is a good example of a novel that re-mythicized the figure of the black slave mother and reasserted the value of matriliny. It provided a gateway to the black female history that was lost under slavery, featuring a cruel mistress, daily abuses, the breaking up of families, slave auctions, public beatings and hangings, the bruta- lity of overseers, and the continually deferred dreams of freedom. First and foremost, however, Jubilee tells the story of a quintessential national mother, Vyry, a black female survivor of slavery, an exemplary Christian and a skillful midwife, who uses her faith and wisdom to bring reconciliation to divided black and white communities. Jubilee, which was written during the Civil Rights period, presents a politically correct black female subject, who is affirmative and optimistic, and whose pregnancy, at the end of the novel, was an expression of faith in the value of family and the future. The novel juxtaposes a son of the nation, Rendal, who is an avowed black nationalist clinging to his hatred of all things white, with the wise and compassionate Vyry, who argues for the need to forgive and integrate. The juxtaposition of these two characters reflected the debate between the divergent agendas of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements at that time, but it also categorically positioned women as national foremothers and leaders. Vyry “passes on the baton of justice” to her daughter Minna, who, readers are given to understand, is to inherit the maternal legacy. That is why, according of Spillers, Vyry’s story “is a story of the foremothers, a celebration of their stunning faith and intractable powers of endurance … it is an interrogation into the African American character in its poignant national destiny and through its female line of descent” (“A Hateful Passion” 305). Such effusive statements are well-justified, as Walker portrays Vyry as a larger-than-life, saintly and heroic ancestress: She was touched with almost spiritual fire and permeated with spiritual wholeness that had been forged in the crucible of suffering. She is …. a living sign and mark of all the best that any human could hope to become. In her obvious capacity for … redemptive and forgiving love, she Neo-slave Narratives, Memory Work and Affirmation of Negative Heritage 149 was alive and standing on the highest peaks of her time and human personality.

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