Black Women's Writing Revisited

11      Two crucial related questions pertaining to content and form result from this; the first is: "How does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?" (Venus 3), and the second, paramount for Hartman, as well as many other black writers, male and female:

What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speech and song? What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives as counter-history, and aspiration that isn't a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and depicting the grammar of violence? […] Do the possibilities outweigh the dangers of looking (again)? (2008, 4)

The dangers of looking and of thus creating a panoptikum of what Hortense Spillers early on called a "pornotroping" (206) of the enslaveds' history weigh in on Hartman's text heavily; the only strategy available to deal with that ambiguous challenge is a constant level of self-reflection, puncturing Hartman's text almost to excess because:

Scandal and excess inundate the archive: the raw numbers of the mortality account, the strategic evasion and indirection of the captain's log, the florid and sentimental letters dispatched from slave ports by homesick merchants, the incantatory stories of shocking (ibid.) violence penned by abolitionists, the fascinated eyewitness reports of mercenary soldiers eager to divulge 'what decency forbids (them) to disclose,' and the rituals of torture, the beatings, hangings and amputations enshrined as law. The libidinal investment in violence is everywhere apparent in the documents, statements and institutions that decide our knowledge of the past. What has been said and what can be said about Venus take for granted the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire and violence. (2008, 5)

12      With its excessive, repetitive questioning gestures towards images of the dead, Hartman' text performs a wake for the nameless millions lost in the middle Passage; with Foucault, Mother speaks of the "precarious domicile of words that allowed the enslaved to be murdered" (2007/8, 250) against which another artifice of words is left as the only however fragile and intangible re-compensation. Working with the archival material which slave trade historiography has of late unearthed in great quantities, she reconstructs the scenes of torture, abuse and annihilation filling the ledgers of slave trading, as well as abolitionist records, as mere numbers, as ciphers of obstinacy, loss or safe cargo. Aggressively, her text strains against the process of historiography's familiarization which has rendered the corpses for a second killing. Her purpose is - to the contrary - to de-familiarize enslavement in its detail for her readership; thus she critically reworks the phrasing by other scholars whose very words, in her eyes, recapitulate - despite all best intentions - the litany of regular normalcy: "Outrages of that nature were so common on board the slave ships that they were looked upon with as much indifference as any trifling occurrence; their frequency had rendered them familiar" (2007/8, 143). Hers becomes a meticulous effort to make readers understand the extent to which the annals available to historiography amount to a comprehensive book of the dead, to a pornography of suffering which "flummoxed the London public" (145) during the heydays of the abolitionist campaigns, became sanitized in slave trade historiography, and regain their ability to haunt contemporary readers only if connected to an ethically self-reflective, and deconstructive reassembly of detail. Past the contemporary international debates for monetary reparation (167-169) Hartman goes straight for a white audience which has deluded itself for the longest time about the pertinence of slavery to white Euro-America, claiming, as James Baldwin and others have also noted with rage, that they, as the "authors of devastation" could be "innocent" (169). Her text's pertinence lies in an awareness of how early, and in how constitutive ways, the modern world we inhabit was grounded in the purposeful creation of human thingness, of human property outside the realm of human subjectivity.

13      Vis-a-vis the "dead book," as Hartman reiterates, there is not one single autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage. (3) Accordingly, the challenge to represent the absented human clamor which haunted Morrison's Beloved implicitly, Hartman makes explicit. In one self reflective turn after another, she agonizes about the impossibility of narrative which the counter-history she aims for requires being written, but which actually can never have a solid foundation in a human voice, may only be - as I argued in White Amnesia - Black Memory (Broeck) delivered in the paradoxical mode of invented testimony. In Lose Your Mother, she describes her discourse - something akin to the gesturing towards story, but overlaid by a persistent arresting self-questioning of that very narrative - as "critical fabulation" (2008; 9, 10, 11). Her witnessing, as she sees it, has always already failed by necessity, so that, in a strange and perturbing way, she knowingly reproduces excess, in order to keep herself to and produce in her readers, the "acuity of regard" (Scarry, in Hartman 2008, 4). She keeps re-articulating her project in impressive ways which will need readerly patience to be digested in full:

The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence. This violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power. The archive yields no exhaustive account of the girl's life, but catalogues the statements that licensed her death. All the rest is a kind of fiction: sprightly maiden, sulky bitch, Venus, girl. The economy of theft and the power over life, which defined the slave trade, fabricated commodities and corpses. But cargo, inert masses, and things don't lend themselves to representation, at least not easily? […] Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional temporality of "what could have been," according to Lisa Lowe, "symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods." (2008, 11)

Her terms of address thus oscillate from mourning to meditation, to reflection, and to radical revision: "The dream is to liberate them from the obscene depictions that first introduced them to us, It is too easy to hate a man like Thistlewood; what is more difficult is to acknowledge as our inheritance the brutal Latin phrases spilling onto the pages of his journals" (2008, 6).

14      Thistlewood, the British slaveholder who wrote an extensive and self-indulgent account of his practice as an early modern owner of human beings on his plantation in Jamaica, here stands in for the masterful regime of New World slavery in its inseparable connection to early modern investments in white western civilization, to wit, Hartman's oxymoronic conjunction of obscenity and Latin, via the tie-in of "brutal". As a cautionary tale, Thistlewood's recollection - though easily despicable - amounts to quite a challenge for a white community of readers. Because Thistlewood, if read epistemologically, not ethnographically, or 'historically,'' calls white readers into a profound dis-identification with humanities' trajectories rooted in modern Enlightenment's premises. Thistlewood's freedom to transgress against human beings turns out to be quite commensurate with modern notions of the sovereign subject - even though abolitionism duly used his writing as the kind of propagandistic pornography Hartman also dissects. As Hartman argues, the slave barracoon must be looked at not just as a holding cell, but more importantly, as a modern episteme which controlled as well the practices of history, and collective white memory, creating a "second order of violence" which reached far into abolition. (2007/8, 5) Faced with the regime of this episteme, Hartman's, Spillers' and Morrison's work, among others, urges Gender Studies to move away from benevolently thinking about race, as in "add race" to postmodern thinking about the modern self, for the formation of which the gendering of subjects - male and female- was essential. Instead, we need to discuss the modern gendered subject as situated in a nexus of property versus sovereignlessness, to take Hartman and Best's term, (as the sine qua non of black human beings), of blackness as abjection outside all the defining categories of modernity. Thus, Hartman's question becomes: How does the recognition of the creation of sovereignlessness "better enable us to chart the relation between pasts and presents, to think about the relation between capitalism and slavery and the dilemmas of the present" (2006, 12)? That is to say, for me the founding difference of early modern Euro-American societies was subject versus abject, of sovereign self versus sovereignlessness, of thinged property versus the subject; gender as modern category, comes to figure within that economy, that epistemology, as precisely a category to negotiate, for white European and US women, towards a status of sovereignty, subjectivity and property rights.

15      The point I want to make is not that African societies did not organize themselves around different cultural social and economic interpellations for men and women, neither that in new world slavery, and colonial societies female beings were not subjected to particular politics and practices - most importantly - rape, and the theft of motherhood. However, as Spillers has argued, and as Hartman's texts illuminate, enslaved African-origin female beings never qualified as women (because of their non-humanness, it followed logically) in the Euro-American modern world, and therefore were not interpellated to partake in the ongoing social construction and contestation of gender. The point I do want to make is that gender - a category that would have enabled a black female claim on social negotiations did not apply to 'things', to what was constructed as and treated as human flesh. Moreover, that very category gender emerged in western transatlantic rhetoric precisely in the context of creating a space for white women, who refused to be treated like slaves, like things. Modern gender, with early modern feminism, constituted itself discursively precisely in the shift from 18th century female abolitionist Christian empathy with the enslaved to the paradigmatic separation of women from slaves, a process that repeated itself in the late 19th century American negotiations of, and between, abolitionism and suffrage. The fact that black women have - in their long history in the western transatlantic world - consistently fought for an access to the category gender to be able to occupy a space of articulation at all, most famously, of course, in 19th century Sojourner Truth's angrily subversive exclamation "Am I not a woman and a sister?", does not alter the structural complicity of gender as a category with the formation of the sovereign modern white self. That is to say to have, or to be of female gender which could claim and deserved certain kinds of rights, and treatment, staked the claim of white 18th century women to full human subjectivity, as opposed to thingness. The infamous and very persistent use of the analogy of women and slaves (Broeck) provided a springboard for white women to begin theorizing a catalogue of their own demands for an acknowledgement of modern, free subjectivity as antagonistic to enslavement; as a discursive construct, then, modern gender served the differentiation of human from property. White Feminism and gender theory have thus played active roles in the constitution of modern societies as we know them that need far more reflection in shaping and negotiating the expectations of how to do gender properly, even in its critical modes - roles that were claimed rather rarely in conjunction with, or based on an acknowledgment of black people's agency. To me, the corruption inherent in this history demands a bracketing of the category gender, a coupling of it to that history to lose its innocence. Making this kind of connection will also support Gender Studies to go beyond the epistemologically restrictive gender-race analogy which fired white female abolitionism - an ideological position that is untenable for gender studies in a de-colonial moment.