The Black Savant and the Dark Princess

The Black Savant and the Dark Princess HOMI K. BHABHA The problem of a minority group in a world torn by old and new national and racial division was of enormous difficulty: it was idle for us simply to repeat the old slogans of democracy in an oligarchic world; no matter how strongly we, with all forward-looking thinkers, might envisage a birth of democracy ... amid turmoil and contradiction ' beclouded by a thousand irrelevances and bedeviled by every art ofselfishness, but nevertheless clearly in progress. My problem was-How can American Negroes join this movement and intelligently reenforce it, for their own good and the good of all men. -w. E. B. Du Bois A Pageant in Seven Decades: 1868-1938 (I938) W. E. B. Du Bois's Bollywood-style bildungsroman, DarkPrincess (I928), presents a strange juxtaposition of the race-man Matthew Towns, figure of forbearance, and his revolutionary leader and lover, Kautilya, the Dark Princess of the Tibetan Kingdom of Bwodpur, "Princess ofthe wide, wide world." The race-man struggles with beauty and death in the treacherous folds of the Veil of the color-line where "the Doer never sees the Deed and the Victim knows not the Victor"; the high-caste Hindu princess imperiously commands a patrician posse of cosmopolitan modernists with Bolshevist leanings, banded together in an anti-imperialist Council of Darker Peoples. In this odd coupling, the celebrated "two-ness" of "double-conESQ I v. 50 11ST-3RD QUARTERS I2004 137 WE. B. Du Bois, photographed Iry Cornelius M. Batty, 1918. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-16767. THE BLACK SAVANT AND THE DARK PRINCESS sciousness"-an Am.erican and a N egro-seeITlS to lose its predOITlinantly national ITlooring; and strangely beside, abseits, there opens up a forITl ofglobal thirdness, eITlbodied in the histrionic, even hysterical, diva, Kautilya, who eITlerges on the Am.erican scene with all the SturITl und Drang of the Du Boisian persona now culturally cross-dressed in silks, turbans, and sarees. This allegorical configuration of characters, countries, and COITlITlitITlents prefigures a ITlethod of representing the particulari!J ofracial antagonisITl and aITlbivalence that Du Bois was to fraITle as the rule of Hjuxtaposition" in the later elegiac encounters of Darkwater (1920): racial conflicts, striated selves, barriers between bodies and spaces-these signatures of segregation and separation also enforce an ethical proxiITlity and a political contiguity in-between social and cultural differences. The rule of juxtaposition represents what is intolerable in the Hlocal" lifeworld of racial injustice and inequality; and yet, byjuxtaposing it with Hextraterritorial" SYITlbolic and social orders-Nature's subliITlity, transnational transitions, and aesthetic transcriptions -the authority and transparency of the dOITlestic norITlS of discriITlination and despair are displaced, their ITliITletic ITleasure over-shadowed.I Here, then, is beauty and ugliness, a wide vision of world-sacrifice, a fierce gleaITl of world-hate. -VVhich is life and what is death and how shall we face so tantalizing a contradiction? Any explanation ITlust necessarily be subtle and involved. No pert and easy word of encourageITlent , no ITlerely dark despair, can lay hold of the roots of these things.... . . . There is not in the world a ITlore disgraceful denial ofhuITlan brotherhood than the "JiITl-Crow" car ofthe southern United States; but, too, just as true, there is nothing more beautiful in the universe than sunset and ITloonlight on Montego Bay in farJ arnaica. And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied. 2 139 HOMI K. BHABHA These juxtaposed scenes of a double truth-at times incommensurable ., at others, almost unbearable-cannot be transcended or rendered whole. Their contradictory mode of coexistence -be it aesthetic or ethical-requires us to acknowledge the importance of the "counterfactual" in the realm of political discourse and the desire for freedom. "And both things are true and both belong to this our world, and neither can be denied" is a statement neither of passivity nor of quietism. To make an imaginative appeal to freedoml through counterfactual choice-the freedomfrom humiliation, suffering. racism-cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Such a counterfactual rhetoric "of freedom as an effective power to achieve what one would choose...