Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Fezokuhle Mthonti on 'The Black Jacobins'

Fezokuhle Mthonti, March 2014

C.L.R James’s book entitled The Black Jacobins is perhaps the most comprehensive thesis on the complex political moves and motivations that led to the Haitian Revolution. Apart from providing a detailed description and/or narration of how and why the events that led to and sustained the liberation of Saint Domingue were so violent and so prolonged, I would argue that James was particularly interested in humanizing the subjects that led to this revolution within this text. In trying to engage meaningfully with this text I would like to specifically look at how James was able to carry out what perhaps may have been the secondary aim of this  book; which I believe was to humanise and subsequently give context to  some of the actors in this revolution.

I am particularly interested in two aspects of this book. The first being how the black slave entered the colonial imagination as a reified object with no intrinsic value apart from their level of productivity and how I feel James was able to derail that project by documenting and detailing the specific stories of  these individuals. It will be my assertion that stories do in fact humanise. The second idea speaks to the production of the female characters, or rather, the lack there of in this text. I will argue that these women should be given a back story; some semblance of an identity. Having listened to one of my favourite artists, Nina Simone, this past week I feel like there is something in the haunted lyrics of her 1966 classic Four Women that may reveal the lives of these untold stories.

The first idea that I would like to unpack is how the project of slavery and colonialism were conceptualised through the reification of the human subject and thus how the creation of the slave was based on the idea of property and the ‘thingification’ or the ‘objectification’ of the individual. Reification is a term commonly associated with Marxism, wherein objects are conceived of as  subjects and subjects are effectively turned into objects. As I understand it, this is quite an economistic approach in which the subjects are rendered passive or determined, whilst objects are rendered as the active and effectively more important than the actual subjects.

C.L.R James demonstrates how dangerous it is to conceive of human life in this way by recounting the tragic stories of the individuals that had been reduced to a means to an end. In the first chapter of The Black Jacobins we witness how the human spirit is lashed, bruised and cowed into passivity and docility. It is through this unrelenting violence on body and spirit that the individual who differs only in pigmentation to his master, is made into a replaceable object with limited value and utility. The colonial proverb  “The Ivory Coast is a good mother” demonstrates how little regard the slave owners had for the preservation of their slaves livelihoods. Moreover, it is through this narrative that we are able to conceive of the slave as that which is outside or contrarian to the human race. Despite their uncanny resemblance to the white man or woman, the slave was predestined and predetermined to a life that was inferior to their white counterpart.

 It is also through this logic of reification that we see the French Bourgeoisie divided in their decisions to support the Slave Trade Abolitionist Movement because of the threat to their own economic imperatives, despite their willingness to support the proletariat in the French Revolution and overthrow the Monarchy under the banner of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity! In fact the first murmurs of Slave Trade Abolition were not necessarily motivated by a moral imperative which recognised the slaves to be human and therefore right bearing citizens, but rather the call for reformation against the system came from the British Empire who wanted to secure their imperial dominance against their increasingly successful rivals in the French Colonies. Despite the contemporary self-congratulatory rhetoric that we often hear about the moralistic imperatives that drove the beginnings of the abolition movement James sarcastically points to the truth in saying that “with the tears rolling down their cheeks for the poor suffering blacks, those British bourgeois who had no West Indian interests set up a great howl for the abolition of the slave trade.”(1963:51)

Moreover, I would argue that it is the same economistic logic which had reduced the status of these slaves to unthinking brutish animals that made the white slave owners to arrogantly rubbish the claims that there were slave led revolts happening in Saint Domingo. By documenting these stories James is able to disrupt this logic and is able to show that ‘the slaves in San Domingo by their insurrection had shown revolutionary France that they had could fight and die for freedom.’ (1963:120)

My contention would be that this text is important because it interrupts this economistic master narrative by not only foregrounding the experiences of these slaves as real and human but it also introduces the slave as actional; a subject compelled to respond to  and against their oppression through their ability to imagine and fight for their freedoms through ‘smaller’ isolated instances of defiance to larger and more powerful displays of insurrection, and in so doing, assert their claim to humanity. I personally think that James’s acute attention to detail to the build, characteristics and the mannerisms of his protagonists is a rejection of the homogeneity that the slaves were often treated with and an attempt to show that these were effectively individual human beings who had been unfairly cast as prototypes of one another.

For example James not only tells the reader that Touissant L’Ouverture was strategic, courageous and disciplined but he also tells us that he was ‘small ugly and ill shaped’ (1963:92). I would argue that these intimate biographical details not only humanize L’Ouverture to the reader but also make him an identifiable in a way that had not been done for black people or black characters of the time.  We are suddenly made to see him through the text and in so doing, able to recognize him as human and not just an object. Throughout this book, one is able to see that James also describes Mackandall and a number of the other Mullattoe  and Black slave leaders.

The second idea that I would like to speak to is the treatment of women under slavery and how the variations of their blackness dictated their experience of slavery. For the most part, the women in this narrative are faceless and voiceless. They are cast as the rape victims and the  mistresses of the slave owners and they are also cast, quite indistinctly, as the   numerous concubines with which some of the heroes of this narrative (except for Touissant who remained faithful to his nameless wife) satisfied themselves  after a long and enduring struggle against slavery and oppression.  They are the spoils of war; when they are mentioned, their stories are only told as a means with which to demonstrate the brutality of the era. “The whites committed frightful atrocities against the Mullattoes. They killed a pregnant woman, cut the baby out and threw it into the flames.” (1963:103)

Even though I have recognised and celebrated the fact this C.L.R James’s text has displaced the assertion that to be enslaved and black is to be an object without agency by simply documenting the  revolution and its leaders, I would contend that this text does not extend the same courtesy to the women that were also undoubtedly present at the time. The lack of distinct female voices in this book gives the impression that they were objects that were simply acted on. Slavery, revolution and  emancipation seems as if it was thrust on these non-actors without agreement or dissent. In fact, the  only time we hear of women as having agency is when the women in France march to Versailles after the threat of a counter revolution by the Monarchy is rumoured to happen and when they  insist on the signing of the final draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by the King.

What of the half caste Mullattoe women that very likely the product of the rape of a White Master? What of the pregnant black women that were punished using the four post? (This was a kind of punishment used on slaves on the plantations ‘wherein their limbs were suspended to a hammock’ (1963:13)  What of the concubines that lived with their master? What of the females that formed ‘Maroons’ or the slaves that had escaped a hundred years before the revolution? How are we to humanize them if they do not have stories.

I would like to posit Jazz singer  Nina Simone’s  song  entitled Four Women (1966) as a response to the faceless and voiceless women that I think  should  have been a part of James’ narrative about the extraordinary resolve of the first and only successful  slave rebellion.  The song itself sounds like a dirge and perhaps that it is why it resonated with me whilst I was reading this text. That being said however, in choosing Simone’s very simplistic song, I hope to both suggest the names and identify some of the roles and characteristics that these concubines, mistresses and slaves may have had in the same way that C.L.R James is able to depict the character and the physicality of the Mulattoe generals and the black slave leaders. In so doing, I hope to at least cast them as real and recognisable (even if they do appeal to stereotypes) so that they too, can be  seen as subjects that are no longer reified by slavery and, effectively, by  the silencing effects of patriarchy.

Lyrics for Four Women by Nina Simone

My skin is Black
My arms are long
My hair is Wooly
My back is strong
Strong enough to take the pain
Inflicted again and again
What do they call me?
They call me Aunt Sarah
They call me Aunt Sarah

My Skin is Yellow
My hair is long
Between two worlds I belong
My Father was rich and white
He forced my mother late one night
What do they call me?
They call me Saffronia
They Call me Saffronia

My skin is tan
My hair is fine
My hips invite you
My mouth like wine
Whose little girl am I?
Anyone who has money to buy?
What do they call me?
They call me Sweet Thing
They call me Sweet Thing

My Skin is Brown
My manner is Tough
I’ll kill the first mother I see
My life has been rough
I’m awfully bitter these days
Because my parents were slaves
What do they call me?
My name is Peaches

Works Cited:

James, C.L.R. 1936. The Black Jacobins. London: Penguin Books

Simone, N. 1966. Four Women in the album Wild is the Wind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf9Bj1CXPH8&feature=kp Accessed on 24 February 2014.