All of these are accounts of the negativity that slaves needed to comprehend and overcome in order to come into being as subjects.
But a question still remains to be addressed: Was the play of sorrow—and performance—in general, a way of apprehending the nothingness of slavery and negating it at the same time? And if so, how does one map out a structure for the enslaved African body in these zones of nonbeing? How does one write of the space of enslavement as both a radical form of debasement, the site of undoing identity, and as a place where new modes of being, new identities were constructed, elaborated, and represented in an altered public sphere?
It is true, of course, that the culture of modernity posited enslavement as the symbolic extremity of refinement. And as I have argued in considerable detail in previous chapters, in order for European high culture to be exalted and elevated to the place it has come to occupy since the early modern period, it needed to debase the black other and to rehearse and display this debasement as the counterpoint to refinement. But focusing on the instrumental nature of debasement alone is not enough, because if we were to reduce slaves to their functions, we would end up espousing the thesis that they were culturally rootless, total victims of a system of domination that did not or could not allow for the Africans' agency.57 Since this was not the case, the subjective identity of the enslaved must be seen to emerge as a calculated negation of economies of control, especially the symbolic ones.
The power of symbolism in the management of African slaves in the Americas has been well documented. We know, for example, that what might have appeared to be simple instruments for enforcing servitude—the whip, the chain, and the muzzle, for example—were simultaneously valued for their capacity to inflict pain and their symbolic measure. As Orlando Patterson notes in Slavery and Social Death, “symbolic instruments” were critical factors in the control of the slave's body: “In much the same way that the literal whips were fashioned from different materials, the symbolic whips of slavery were woven from many areas of culture. Masters all over the world used special rituals of enslavement upon first acquiring slaves: the symbolism of naming, of clothing, of hairstyle, of language, and of body.”58 From William Blake's illustrations for Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition to the portrait of a whipped slave named Gordon featured prominently in Harper's Magazine (July 11, 1863), punishment was most effective when it was made visible.59
These images of the mutilated or tortured black body would become popular in the public imagination, as they concealed a more surreptitious and complicated form of control, one that actually sought to destroy the spirit and preserve the body. After all, the slave's valuable asset—his or her labor—depended on the destruction of the spirit and the preservation of the body. And thus, in looking back at the forms of punishment popular in slave culture, and indeed the instruments of torture perfected by the slave-owning class, it is striking to note that control was directed not at the body as a whole but at those parts of it that might provide symbolic resistance. Muzzles, for example, were favored instruments of controlling speech while the chain restricted physical and social mobility. There are, therefore, useful lessons to be learned from a reflection of the invisible, psychological forms of control, including those that deprived the body of its capacity for pleasure and its sensuousness, which would thus lead it to disorientation in both moral and physical space.
Consider, for example, the question of physical space. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault has noted that in its ambition to produce docile bodies, “discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space.”60 He has isolated several techniques perfected in the eighteenth century by institutions of power as they sought better ways of producing docile subjects. These techniques, according to Foucault, included the confinement of bodies in enclosures of monotony, the partitioning of spaces to break up “collective dispositions,” and the assignment of individuals to spaces limited to particular functions.61 While all of those means of controlling space are discernible in the transformation of the African from a free person into a slave, Foucault's analysis of space cannot account for the extreme nature of the slave's confinement, because it presupposes a free subject. Indeed, for Foucault, the disciplining project, as he called it, did not set out to destroy the subjectivity of its victims but to produce a different kind of being—a docile subject. In this sense, disciplining would become a project of producing subjects whose docility would make them function better within the institutions of modern culture. If, for example, one were a soldier, the disciplining project did not take away that role; it just made the subject function according to “constraints, prohibitions or obligations” imposed by those in power.62 In contrast, enslavement was premised on the forced displacement of human subjects from prior functions and identities. Slavery was a form of moral and spatial disorientation.
And in order to understand the significance of this dissociation, we need to recall Charles Taylor's claim that there is an essential link between social identity and orientation: “To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.”63 If one's sense of being depends on spatial orientation, the disordering of space leads to “a radical uncertainty about oneself and about what is of value to one” and to “disorientation and uncertainty about where one stands as a person seems to spill over into a loss of grip on one's stance in physical space.”64
There are certainly many examples of how the enslavement of the African commenced with a spatial disorientation that, in turn, led to an acute crisis of identity and a sense of moral devaluation. Accounts of people involved in the slave trade as both slavers or enslaved have provided detailed accounts of the slaves' painful transition from the open to the confined space. A vivid and detailed eyewitness account of the slaves' spatial confinement and its attendant crises was provided by Alexander Falconbridge, who served as a surgeon on a slave ship. Falconbridge acutely noted the close relationship between spatial confinement and the act of bondage:
They are brought from the places where they are purchased to Bonny, &c. in canoes; at the bottom of which they lie, having their hands tied with a kind of willow twigs, and a strict watch is kept over them. Their usage in other respects, during the time of the passage, which generally lasts several days, is equally cruel. Their allowance of food is so scanty, that it is barely sufficient to support nature. They are, besides, much exposed to the violent rains which frequently fall here, being covered only with mats that afford but a slight defense; and as there is usually water at the bottom of the canoes, from their leaking, they are scarcely ever dry.65
He then went on to show how, on being brought abroad the slave ship, the bound slaves would be put in positions that distorted the form of the human body:
[T]hey are frequently stowed so close, as to admit of no other posture than lying on their sides. Neither will the height between the decks, unless directly under the grating, permit them the indulgence of an erect posture; especially where there are platforms, which is generally the case. These platforms are a kind of shelf, about eight or nine feet in breadth, extending from the side of the ship towards the centre. They are placed nearly midway between the decks, at the distance of two or three feet from each deck. Upon these the negroes are stowed in the same manner as they are on the deck underneath.66
Former slaves, too, would recall the point of confinement in the hull of the slave ship as emblematic of a frightening disorientation in moral space and a violation of the codes that had hitherto defined their identity. Here is Quobna Ottobah Cugoano's recollection of his confinement in Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of the Slave Trade:
[W]hen a vessel arrived to conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow-men. Some would not stir from the
ground, when they were lashed and beat in the most horrible manner. I have forgotten the name of this infernal fort; but we were taken in the ship that came for us, to another that was ready to sail from Cape Coast. When we were put into the ship, we saw several black merchants coming on board, but we were all drove into our holes, and not suffered to speak to any of them. In this situation we continued several days in sight of our native land; but I could find no good person to give any information of my situation to Accasa at Agimaque. And when we found ourselves at last taken away, death was more preferable than life, and a plan was concerted amongst us, that we might burn and blow up the ship, and to perish all together in the flames; but we were betrayed by one of our own countrywomen, who slept with some of the head men of the ship, for it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies; but the men were chained and pent up in holes.67
5.7 “Slaves Packed Below and On Deck.” Illustrated London News (June 20, 1857), vol. 30, p. 595. Copy in Princeton University Library.
Though located at different ends of the slavery continuum, both Falconbridge and Cugoano were testifying to a new relationship between bodies and spaces. As a rule, African slaves, considered nothing more than commodities after they had been sold at coastal markets, would commence their journey into the new world as packed bodies rather than subjects; and crammed to maximize space, these bodies would be supervised by cadres who were oblivious to kinship ties, genealogy, social status, or even the integrity of the human being. As objects of trade, rather than as social beings, the slaves would not be permitted what Falconbridge calls “the indulgence of an erect posture.”68 In this “anomalous intimacy,” slaves were not entirely commodities, but their relation to constricted spaces did not denote a phenomenological relation between selves and landscapes (fig. 5.7).69 The confinement of African slaves in these spaces quickly came to be understood as a form of disembodiment and dismemberment. This point was understood and underscored by abolitionists who used the model of the slave ship—most famously the Brookes— as evidence of the degraded physical condition of the slave. Displaying slaves in their physical confinement disturbed the modern imagination, its norms of social space, and its conscience.70 Thus in Francis Meynell's color drawings of both the above and below deck of the slave ship Albaroz, slaves were intermixed with other objects of trade and supplies such as barrels of water and sacks of food (figs. 5.8 and 5.9).
4
The constriction and redefinition of the slaves' physical and social spaces was often followed by other modes of symbolic negation, including stripping a slave's body and denying his or her natal name. Agents in the slave trade understood the significance of the symbolic undressing of the body. To take the clothes off a slave's back, the governor of the Dutch West Indian Company noted in 1705, was to reduce him to cultural tabula rasa: “we send them on Board our ships with the very first opportunity; before which their masters strip them of all they have on their Backs; so that they come Aboard stark-naked as well Women and Men.”71 For the slaves, entering the hold of a ship meant more than the removal of the clothes on their backs; it was tantamount to being stripped away of the vestiges of what they used to be, the style, or mode of self-presentation that had once marked them as members of a community. This state of being culturally undressed struck Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua as a radical gesture of alienation: “We were thrust into the hold of the vessel in a state of nudity, the males being crammed to one side, and the females on the other.”72
A complex semiotics was evident in this art of undressing, and there is no doubt that stripping a black's body was in itself a paradox of the cultural encounter between Africans and Europeans on the colonial frontier. Consider this: throughout the period of their adventures in Africa in the early modern period and especially in the era of enslavement, European travelers and agents had consistently remarked on the nakedness of the African as a sign of cultural lack, of the state of barbarism that was endemic on the continent. Jean Barbot's description of the natives of what he called “Senegal,” first published in 1688, is typical of this view of the African as a naked and uncultured self: “Men and women of the common sort for the most part go about naked, or if they cover themselves, it is only with a pagne (length of cloth) or a scrap of cloth, over the parts modesty requires them to hide. Men have merely a loincloth around the waist and some have only a little strip of leather around the loins to which they attach behind and before a strip of cloth which hides what it is not decent to name. This cloth hangs at the rear like the tail of a horse.”73 Significantly, Barbot's account of African nakedness—and the illustrations he provided to go with his narrative—were not original or even accurate. As the editors of the Hakluyt edition of his account note, the descriptions and illustrations had been copied from the accounts of prior travelers, including Pieter de Marees Olfert Dapper and perhaps Alain Manesson Mallet, and “relate not to Senegal, but to the dress of the Gold Coast.”74
5.8 Francis Meynell, “Slave deck of the Albaroz, 1845.” Album of Lt. Meynell's watercolors, National Maritime Museum, London.
5.9 Francis Meynell, “The Slave Deck of the Albaroz, Prize to the Albatross, 1845.” Album of Lt. Meynell's watercolors (circa 1860), National Maritime Museum.
What was plagiarized often, however, was what was considered central in the differentiation of Africans from other human beings; African nakedness was recycled as evidence of moral and cultural lack. Yet almost all the illustrations of the Africans in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel narratives show people dressed—or half dressed—for their environment or occasion. Even the so-called Hottentots of southern Africa, who would later be demonized in nineteenth-century colonial narratives for their nakedness, would appear in most accounts in ceremonial dress or the appropriate apparel for their environment and social world.
Why, then, did the sight of half-dressed Africans seem to have generated deep cultural anxieties among European observers and slave agents? And why did the slave agents, given their revulsion to nakedness, undertake the systematic act of undressing the African as a prelude to enslavement? A compelling response to these questions is provided by Steve Buckridge in his study of the language of dress in colonial Jamaica, where he probes the duality of undressing among the slavers and the enslaved in the negotiation of the landscape of slavery:
The Africans' clothing reflected identity and relational ties with others within the community. Being stripped, having the naked body exposed, represented for African slaves their painful reality: discontinuity and the enforced severance of cultural and kinship ties. For Europeans, this became a symbolic act of ridding their captives of their “wildness,” of humiliating and enfeebling Africans to gain control. Europeans, who had equated African nudity with backwardness, were now enforcing on Africans the very act they once condemned. This reflected Europeans' ambivalence about the black body—simultaneous fascination and abhorrence.75
For the slaves, nakedness was not in itself the source of shame or trauma; what seemed devastating was the act of enforced undressing, which became a part of an elaborate, symbolic undoing of selfhood. What about the enslavers? What did they feel when they undressed their captives? Although this point may not be apparent, dress and undressing had a deep and complex meaning in the world of the slave traders and their moral economies. The majority of the European agents on the West African coast and leading captains on slave ships were often products of the Protestant Reformation. Barbot, who had become involved in the African slave trade as an employee of the French Royal African Company, was a Huguenot, a French Calvinist. On October 1685, the Edict of Nantes, which had been passed in 1598 by Henry IV, guaranteeing French Calvinists rights of citizenship, was revoked, Protestant beliefs were condemned, and Barbot and his family fled to England. It was in his capacity as a Protestant fugitive that Barbot undertook the two voyages (1678–1679 and 1681–1682) that were the basis of his narrative.
More generally, when slave traders and c
aptains like Barbot, Hugh Crow, and John Newton invoked providence in their justifications of the slave trade, they were drawing from an established Protestant tradition. And as children of the Reformation, Protestants in the slave business must have had a keen sense of the meaning and significance of nakedness in the economy of faith and salvation. If they had read John Milton—and there is evidence many of them had—captains of slave ships would have been acquainted with the centrality of what Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have called the “material mnemonics of livery,” an essential aspect of the Renaissance account of Genesis; they would have known that to be naked was to be reduced to the skins of beasts, that to be clothed in livery was to wear what Milton called the “robe of righteousness.”76
Having associated clothing with the state of culture or civilization, European slavers understood, perhaps more than their African captors, what was at stake in the stripping of the body. They especially understood the cultural capital and symbolic value, which Jones and Stallybrass have identified in their exploration of the politics of dress in early modern culture:
The “value” of livery, though, cannot be fully calculated in monetary terms. Livery was a form of incorporation, a material mnemonic that inscribed obligations and indebtedness upon the body. As cloth exchanged hands, it bound people in networks of obligation. In most modern societies, dominated by neutral exchanges of money, the creation of bonds, of debts, and of liberties through the physical medium of clothes appears increasingly strange. We are rarely connected in any personal way to our employers by our wages, any more than we are personally connected to the supermarket through the plastic cards or the pieces of paper and metal with which we trade. In a livery society, though, things take on a life of their own. Payment is made not only in the “neutral” currency of money but also in material which is richly absorbent of symbolic meaning and in which memories and social relations are literally embodied.77
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 29