Suffering and Social Death: Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe as Neo-Slave Narrative

Though narratives of slavery and its aftermath have been read through theories of trauma since the 1990s, questions have continued to be raised regarding the applicability of such theories, especially those developed out of psychoanalytic and therapeutic responses to the Shoah, to other histories.¹ The emphasis laid by trauma theory on the singular event, and on individual suffering and individual responses, can make its project problematical for slave narratives, whose portrayals of immediate and ongoing suffering were deployed to bring about specific political changes, as well as for contemporary neo-slave narratives, which continue to address what Laura Brown, following Maria Root’s terminology, calls “insidious trauma,” those forms of trauma that are not singular past events but ongoing, everyday forms of violence that are socially normalized (and that thus may implicate the reader or listener as well).² Concerns have therefore focused on what Stef Craps and Gert Buelens call “the individualizing, psychologizing, and ultimately depoliticizing tendencies characteristic of Western models of trauma treatment,” as well as on the “disempowering effect of Western psychoanalytically informed approaches on members of subaltern groups,” who can be placed in the position of analysand in relation to the “knowledgeable expert” represented by the reader or listener.³

Part of the “revising and broadening [of] hegemonic definitions of trauma” that Craps and Buelens advocate, then, would be attention to historically specific constructions of suffering, the uses to which they have been put, and the challenges and contestations with which they have met. Keeping these concerns in view helps to illuminate how The Polished Hoe, a prizewinning 2002 novel by Barbadian Canadian writer Austin Clarke, foregrounds not simply suffering as such but just these constructions and contestations of suffering, doing so by means of what Bernard Bell first called the “neo-slave narrative,” if Bell’s original definition is expanded to include any text that, in Valerie Smith’s words, “illustrates the centrality of the history and the memory of slavery” to black identity and cultural production in the Americas. Keeping in mind too Ashraf Rushdy’s point that such narratives speak not only to their historical precursors but above all to contemporary concerns, the neo-slave narrative is one cultural form that might be read as participating in this “decolonizing” of trauma studies, moving beyond its perceived Eurocentrism and foregrounding the power relationships in question.⁴

Clarke’s text, centering on the night-long testimony of Mary-Mathilda, who has just killed the manager of the sugar plantation on which she was born, makes use of an associative structure that moves backward and forward from the narrative present of 1951, to the West Indian labor riots of the 1930s, to the late nineteenth century, to slavery days, constructing what Rushdy would call a “palimpsest narrative” that suggests similar logics of racialized exploitation and violence in every period and alludes to a number of familiar narratives along the way, including the narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel, and, most dramatically, the confessions of Nat Turner.⁵ This last allusion speaks to two particularly important features of Clarke’s text, namely that it is not the supplication of a sufferer but the “Statement” of a murderer and that it is not only shaped by a speaker’s relationship with an interlocutor but explicitly stages that relationship, and in the process challenges both the authority of the printed text over the oral witness and the conventional gendering of suffering and violence. Indeed, the precursor narrative that, without being named, most clearly haunts the novel is the story of Harriet Jacobs, which helped to make the sexual degradation of enslaved women central to condemnation of the institution of slavery. Though just such sexual degradation at the hands of the manager Bellfeels might seem to be the center of Mary-Mathilda’s life story, however, and the cause of her violent act, she has in fact revolted not against a violation of her body or any notion of sexual purity but rather against the final loss of her place in...