Racism and Radicalism in Jamaican Gothic: Cynric R. Williams's Hamel, The Obeah Man

I.

By the late 1820s, the first wave of Gothic narratives seemed to have all but exhausted the spectacular horrors supposedly found in the ruins of medieval Europe; yet many writers continued to use Gothic tropes and rhetoric in fictions that more directly addressed pressing contemporary anxieties. One such novel is the anonymously published Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), set in early 1820s colonial Jamaica, a scene torn by severe racial and political conflict.¹

The institution of slavery was still in existence, though increasingly under attack, both from local revolts organized by the enslaved and from the antislavery movement in England. Representatives of the latter had long labored to make the British public aware of the inhumanity of slavery and the cruelties practiced in the British slave colonies, a campaign that resulted in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. In the 1820s, they were taking the struggle further by agitating in Parliament for total emancipation. Fearing that emancipation was not to be stopped, and already facing declining profits from the sugar trade, the white plantocracy in Jamaica seems in turn to have been overcome by a sense of doom, even though many planters continued to speak up for what they felt to be their rights against the perceived interference of the imperial government. By employing a Gothic script to mediate the fears generated in the white planter class by this situation, the writer of Hamel inscribes his narrative in a body of texts that critics have lately come to identify as "colonial Gothic."² Briefly put, texts understood as colonial Gothic center on the destabilizing forces at work in the colonial encounter: its dehumanizing effects on the colonized and the way the normalization of colonial structures desired by the colonizers is always already haunted by unspeakable horrors buried at the heart of the colonial project. Whether pertaining primarily to national, racial, or sexual oppression, the specter of these repressed horrors tends to return in the narratives of colonial Gothic as representations of deeply felt cultural anxieties or brutal eruptions of violence.

Though long neglected by the literary canon, Hamel has recently been reclaimed as a central text in the colonial literature of the anglophone Caribbean. Like other Jamaican fictions produced at the same time, it was written from a viewpoint sympathetic to the plight of the white planters, and is thus, as Edward Kamau Brathwaite puts it, "deeply race conscious and colour prejudiced."³ Yet Brathwaite nonetheless sees the novel as "important and unique," for it "has as its central character, a black man," an African slave, represented neither as a Tom nor a noble savage but as a moral and cultural being, drawn "in some depth" and "with a sense of art."⁴ For largely the same reasons, Barbara Lalla sees Hamel as "a landmark in the development of characterization in the Jamaican setting."⁵ The "main depositories" of African culture in pre-emancipation Jamaica would have been the "obeah men," Brathwaite suggests, and it is this circumstance that Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert focuses on when she briefly refers to Hamel in a survey of Caribbean Gothic.⁶ Through "its exploration of the mysteries of Obeah," Paravisini-Gebert observes, Hamel "typifies how some of the least understood cultural elements of colonial societies since the 1820s are appropriated into the Gothic, where they are used to reconfigure the standard tropes of the genre."⁷

Yet, in Hamel this reconfiguration of Gothic tropes is far more complex than what emerges from the comparatively few lines devoted to the novel by Paravisini-Gebert, and it is my aim here to examine this complexity. By discussing Hamel in relation to the already established tradition of British Gothic, I will show how the novel exploits the tradition to a new end as it engages with the anxieties rampant in colonial Jamaica at this crucial moment in Britain's consolidation of its Empire. My discussion takes its starting point in Robert Miles's work on "the ideological meaning of 'Gothic'" in the 1790s; however, as I will demonstrate, the notion of the "radical," consistently...