The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone

Chapter Four. Sculpting History: African American Burdens of Memory

CHAPTER FOUR Sculpting History: African American Burdens of Memory Since the 1980$, an increasing number of scholars and performance artists have been using a variety of media to make the story of the Amistad a living memory. Through pamphlets, public lectures, plastic arts, the fine arts, fiction, drama, poetry, film, and even a floating museum (a model of La Amistad at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut), the Amistad is fast becoming a greater presence in public memory.1 In his foreword to Black Mutiny, William Owens captures the reasons why the Amistad story might have meaning in today's world: No institution in America has its origins in an event of such dramatic power as the American Missionary Association and the Amistad story. This is truly one of the great contemporary myths of the American folk. The myth of the Amistad would be much easier to live with if it were not historical, if it had its origins in primordial imagination. . . . The power of this drama lies in the symbolic representation of its leading characters and in the heroic dimensions of its staging.2 Indeed, the synchrony between the Amistad narrative and the artistic expression of that narrative has always been apparent. This, in part, explains the use of what I have called the quasi-historical genre, rather than traditional academic history, to memorialize the incident. Influenced by the interdisciplinary theory and practice of cultural studies and performativity, many scholars prefer a dramatized translation of the Amistad events to a disengaged, seemingly objective delivery of their research.3 Owens, for instance , prefers a dramatic retelling to the usual scholarly documentation 72, REINVENTING THE PRESENT of history.4 The conceptual framing of the Amistad story as a performance of culture has also been considered by historian Howard Jones, who contends that the Amistad incident "contained the ingredients of a national melodrama."5 Jones concludes that "[a] novelist telling this story would be accused of taking an excursion into fantasy."6 To many nineteenth-centuryNew Englanders, the Africans' appearance in their territory was a melodrama in living color. Locals and visitors to New Haven filed around the New Haven green to gape and gawk as the Amistad captives exercised daily outside the jail, even going so far as to pay admission. The performative dimension of the situation was readily apparent. Many plays dramatizing the Amistad and its surrounding events began at this time. For example, in the fall of 1839, an Amistad production titled The Black Schooner, or the Pirate Slaver Amistad played to packed houses in the Bowery and a number of other theaters in New York.7 Like other Amistad performances of the nineteenth century, the play has not survived. It was not until the centennial celebration of the Amistad incident in 1939 that Owen Dodson wrote Amistad, the earliest surviving play.8 Considering the dramatic nature of the Amistad revolt, the celebrity status of the trials, and the jailhouse "performances" of the Africans, it is a wonder that many more plays have not survived. In recent years, however, scholars and artists, such as the African American playwright John Thorpe, have contributed to efforts to commemorate the incident in the United States. Just as Dodson did for audiences in the depression years, Thorpe has reinterpreted the Amistad revolt by developing a dramatic retelling of the story for contemporary audiences. African American Drama Perhaps the greatest dilemma facing African Americans today is not so much the struggle with double consciousness through which they have come to know themselves, but more so the moral dilemma of recognizing their collective memory. Living on the periphery of the dominant society as a marker for white identification, blacks have learned to negotiate both the advantages and disadvantages of their marginal existence through what W. E. B. DuBois has called "second sight" and "twoness" in Souls of Black Folk.9 On the one hand, double consciousness as an art of survival offers a concerted response to America's long history of oppression. SCULPTING HISTORY 73 On the other hand, the consequent collage of memory in double consciousness offers a ruptured narration of rememberings. How to stage what black artists knew of the experiences of being black in white America often called for rhetorical strategies that could access simultaneously the resolve of blacks and the sympathy or guilt of whites.10 The mimetic representation of what Samuel Hay has termed the "inner life/outer life" of...