Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness

How Black Was Pushkin? Otherness and Self-Creation

David M. Bethea How Black Was Pushkin? Otherness and Self-Creation ALEXANDER PUSHKIN is Russia’s national poet, with all that means in the larger and smaller senses. One thing this means is that the difference we identify as Russian culture, whether viewed from the outside in or from the inside out, is simply not there without Pushkin. Make Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Chekhov the central figure in that culture, its “origin without origins,” and that margin of difference looks very different, and considerably less Russian, indeed. But Pushkin also had a black great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who according to family history was the son of an Abyssinian prince as well as (but this “as well as” counts for a great deal) the ward and godson (hence the patronymic) of the most illustrious of all Russian tsars. Somewhere between these terms—between how Pushkin became the poet who best or most fully exemplified the Russians’ views of their culture as forever both/and (both “European” and something else) and how the given of his racial inheritance entered into his psychic makeup—lies our quarry. The extent of Pushkin’s “blackness” is not, as I hope to demonstrate, exclusively or even primarily a question of “blood.” In this respect, what one contemporary writer (Itabari Njeri) terms ironically the “little-dab’ll-do-you” rule would be a clear impoverishing of the Pushkin phenomenon.1 At the same time, how the poet saw himself on the surface (his “Negroid” features) certainly played a prominent role in his self-fashioning, from the adolescent “mirror phase” of “My Portrait” (1814) on. Blackness was for Pushkin both something real, given (he cared about surfaces), and something styled, something to be worked with. Yes, race counts for Pushkin, but it does not necessarily count more than other gifts/curses of “fate,” especially that of class. That his genealogy on his father’s side could be traced back some six centuries to the “old” Russian nobility (stolbovoe dvorianstvo), with numerous ancestors playing visible, often obstreperous roles in his country’s history, was a fact of immense significance and pride to him. By the same token, Gannibal himself was not just any African 122 but the son of a prince whose own name was reputed to have ties to the famous Carthaginian general.2 What Pushkin wrote about Byron near the end of his life could have been said (and considering the exclamation, was being said) with equal validity about himself: “The Byron family is one of the most ancient in the English aristocracy . . . [its] name is mentioned with honor in the English chronicles. The title of lord was bestowed on the family in 1643. It has been said that Byron held his genealogy dearer than his artistic creations . A feeling very understandable!”3 The idea here is that the Byrons (and, by implication, the Pushkins) had a history and belonged to history, a fact that no one in the present, despite scandal and obloquy, could take away from them. Thus, when the democratic journalist Faddei Bulgarin (who strictly speaking had roots in the lower-level Polish gentry/szlachta) made fun of Pushkin’s aristocratic pretensions by calling his mother (known in her youth as the “beautiful Creole”) a mulatka (mulatto woman), the jibe, however underhanded , was not racial tout court. Rather, it was racial and political (not only the Russian/Polish fault line, but the fact that Bulgarin was a spy for the tsarist police) and social (the “aristocrats” and the “democrats” vying for primacy in the new no-holds-barred literary marketplace) all at the same time. Race is such an elusive category to get at in Pushkin precisely because he rarely presents himself or his characters/poetic speakers as being defined wholly by this given (there are exceptions). But before venturing further, I would like to propose why, from within our space-time, it is so difficult for us to construct a conceptual bridge back to Pushkin in his. PUSHKIN AND BLACKNESS: HOW TO APPROACH IT We have heard it more than once, but it bears repeating: rape is a crime not only of the body, but of the mind, and not only of the mind (intellect, cognition ), but of the “soul” (the place, mythical or no, where one’s private emotions and personhood reside). Beneath the sexual violation lies another violation, more horrifically magnetized still. Rape cannot be spoken of to the victim in cool forensic terms because...