The Problem of Otherness

How much "otherness" must a man overcome is the question explored by David Rocklin in The Night Language. Set in Victorian Europe where racism thrived without the brutal institutional measures that kept it front and center in the United States, the novel could be viewed as a cousin to the American slave narrative. Its tropes and conflicts will be familiar to readers of Frederick Douglass and other bondsmen and women who sought salvation through literacy. But that is where the similarities between Rocklin's story of a displaced Abyssinian prince and Douglass and others end, and the ingenuity of this novel begins. For Rocklin accentuates the problem of otherness, as it is represented and wrestled over through language, by investing it with personal and sexual dilemmas in a world ruled by autocrats and empire-builders. The consequences faced by Rocklin's characters make American racism of the same period seem positively simple, in comparison.

Though based on historical figures, Rocklin takes a good deal of liberty with them for his inquiry into how power is wielded through language, in the service and against humanity. He begins his story in 1868, decades after western powers have banned the international slave trade, but dark-skinned people still live under the threat of being traded like chattel, or being delivered into circumstances just as inauspicious. Rocklin's Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) is brought to Windsor Castle as Queen Victoria's ward, or perhaps as a spoil of a war: his status is as opaque as the story he has to tell, and as the system of signals, glances, and expressions he will use to communicate with the Queen and his companion, Philip Layard. Another dark-skinned youth, Layard is the assistant to a military physician who is assigned to care for Alamayou by virtue of his race; darkness understands only darkness, apparently. But unbeknownst to those surrounding the pair, Philip has already become Alamayou's secret sharer, through a glimpse the two briefly shared amid the chaos of the African battlefield. In time their relationship, while chastely depicted, will place them in mortal peril.

Slave narratives remind us how for American slaves, learning to read and write is a double-edged sword. By becoming readers and thinkers in the master's tongue, they endanger their teachers, but they also gain access to Christianity, which confirms their humanity if not their personhood under the law. Literacy also reveals the power structure that ensnares the slave while showing him the path to emancipation. This is the "grand achievement" Frederick Douglass thanks his master for in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) even though he has been forbidden from receiving further instruction. "From that moment," Douglass says, "I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom."

Literacy in English, at least in the spoken word, also frames Alamayou's route toward a kind of independence, though what that freedom will look like, considering that Alamayou did not require liberation in the first place, is not clear. While not set to labor, he is put on a kind of display in several instances, just as American slaves were at auction. Alamayou and Philip find themselves guarding the secrets of Queen Victoria's court, much as slaves might be expected to conceal the secrets of the master's house at a plantation. With a teenage girl from the Congo, who arrives through a mysterious transaction and is made a translator for Alamayou, the prince and Philip explore a courtly netherworld of private and geopolitical intrigue. "Over the next several weeks, Alamayou gave them more words," Philip observes early on in his charge's education. " . . . The more he gave them, the more freedom he and Philip were granted . . . " The plot of The Night Language, then, follows Alamayou's progression through the language, which Rocklin deftly handles.

At the same time, however, Alamayou is, if not a gregarious communicator, an expressive individual. He paints and like the Queen who is alternately fascinated and threatened...