Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Letter on file at the Archives Nationales, Fonds Guizot. A copy of this letter is also available in the Anti-Slavery Papers of the Rhodes House Library, Oxford. Qtd. in Schmidt 2000, 147; emphases and spelling as in the original. 2. For a copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen on August 26, 1789, see Hunt 1996, 77. 3. In fact, a humanitarian revolt took place in the Caribbean immediately after the French Revolution, at the turn of the eighteenth century. This led to a successful slave revolt in Haiti, as well as to the abolition of slavery on other islands such as Guadeloupe. Nevertheless, the colonial order was quickly restored by European military interventions such as the Napoléonic invasions of 1802, and slavery was reinstated everywhere. Haiti, however, became independent on December 31, 1803, and was immediately turned into a negative example for those colonies that harbored similar intentions. Haiti was subsequently excluded from commerce and political contact by the “international” community, and sunk into a state of poverty and disarray that lasts until today. For more on the humanitarian revolt, see Schmidt 2000, Brathwaite 1971, and Hunt 1996. 4. In his book The Making of New World Slavery, Robin Blackburn explains the paradoxical nature at stake in the dehumanization of the slave: “In practice, slaves were conceived as inferior species, and treated as beasts of burden to be driven and inventoried like cattle. Yet, like all racist ideologies, this one was riddled with bad faith. The slaves were useful to the planters precisely because they were men and women capable of understanding and executing complex orders, and of intricate co-operative techniques. The most disturbing thing about the slaves from the slaveholder’s point of view was not cultural difference but the basic similarity between himself and his property” (1997, 12). 5. In demanding the “immediate” abolition of slavery, both Schœlcher and Clarkson stand apart from British abolitionists, who favored its progressive suppression . See Schmidt 1994, 63. 6. “Dans l’échelle des êtres, le nègre appartient au genre homme” (Schœlcher 1842, 139). All translations of the French original are mine; original text is quoted in footnotes with its original spelling. 7. “Il est tout simple qu’il n’ait que le cerveau de ses actes; ce qui serait prodigieux c’est que son action morale étant comprimée par de longs siècles d’esclavages ou de sauvageries, son cerveau pareil à celui de l’homme civilisé” (146). 8. “L’égalité des squelettes est absolue” (142). 9. “Il n’y a de noir chez le noir que son épiderme” (141). 10. “Le noir est homme. L’analyse anatomique de son être comparée à celle des autres hommes ne présente aucune dissemblance essentielle. Ce sont des nuances dans une unité” (149–50). 11. “Même comme abolitioniste, nous ne tenons pas du tout à blanchir le noir, nous n’avons pas besoin de cela pour exiger sa délivrance” (149–50). 12. “Tout ce que l’on dit des Africains, les auteurs espagnols de la découverte l’on dit des Indiens” (148). 13. It is important to note, however, that Schœlcher never argued against French colonialism. See Schmidt 1994. 14. According to Tzvetan Todorov, Christopher Columbus appears as a medieval figure, more interested in the Crusades than in a new world (1982, 22). See also Margarita Zamora 1993, 33–35. According to some authors, during the conquest, the conquerors’ imagination, being caught between the medieval and the Renaissance periods, expected to find monstrous peoples in the new continent—such as amazons, cannibals, pygmies, and the like. What they found instead was a rather “normal”-looking population, whose slightly darker skin, “the color of the Canary Islanders, neither black nor white,” failed to constitute enough difference in a moment when the discourse on race had not fully taken shape (Boorstin 1983, 626–35). Interestingly, however, it was the natives’ nakedness that affected Columbus’s perception most dramatically. In fact, as Peter Hulme has shown, Columbus assumed that the lack of clothing pointed to a cultural void that Europe would comfortably fill. It was the difference of customs and costumes that made evident the ensuing division of those involved in the encounter in two distinctive groups: the conquerors and the conquered, the chroniclers and the discovered, the explorers and the observed (Hulme 1994, 157–97). 15. For the importance of naming as equivalent to a “taking into possession ,” see...