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.
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.
