Abstract: This chapter’s case study examines NourbeSe Philip’s poetic sequence Zong!
as a study of alternative methods of recovery and archival work in the history of the
Black Atlantic. Through this chapter, I look at the way in which her poetry opens the
archival record to West African divination practices as a means of disrupting
Eurocentric archival “laws”. In the Western tradition of the archive, the Middle
Passage is often read as a site of archival loss in terms of understanding the experience
of African slaves in their transportation from Africa to the Americas. In her repositioning
of recovery work through an African historiographic worldview—her reading of the
archival record offers an ancestral past that is accessible (among human and non human
agents), transformative and transforming, and collective. It opens what has been
rendered materially silent or lost to new modes of archival knowledge and archival
agency.
1
III:
“The Africans are in the text”:
Ifa Divination Ceremony and the Disruption
of Archival Laws in NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
In the journal section of NourbeSe Philip’s poetic sequence Zong, she
questions what it means to recover the history of the 18th century slave ship where
132 Africans were thrown overboard in order to collect an insurance claim on the
“cargo”. She writes: “What did, in fact, happen on the Zong? Can we, some two
hundred years later, ever really know? These are the questions I confront”(196).
Philip’s questions signal a common confrontation: historical or archival loss
in the history of the Black Atlantic. The documents that do exist to report or identify
the details of this past—ship documents, etc. etc—are often embedded in the same
practices and systems that made mass historical erasure possible. Even when there
are narratives of transatlantic passage told through the point of view of the slave—
Equiano, etc. etc.--the language is still often encased or promoted within a culture of
Western or Eurocentric literacy practices. And yet, we know that traces of this
history are accessible, present, and rich by thinking through what travels or remains
2
from this passage. Through examinations of the African diaspora, we know that
voodoo, Santeria, and other religious rituals; music, musical instruments, and songs;
and oral or folk traditions encase historical narratives and may be thought of as
archives or thought of archivally in keeping or collecting evidence of the past
(CITE?). These examinations do, however, ask us to rethink methodology by
recognizing, on the one hand, that the archive and recovery are contextual traditions
(i.e. Western or Eurocentric constructions that view history as a system of records
and documentation), and that, on the other hand, other possibilities for
recontexualizing archival work can (and do) exist. In other words, what would it
mean to recover the history of the Black Atlantic through alternative
understandings of the archive and archival work? Specifically, what would it mean
to situate recovery in an African centric worldview? In this chapter, I want to think
through Philip’s presentation of Ifa divination ritual in her reading of one of the
most famous archival records documenting the history of slavery: the insurance
case for the slave ship Zong.
Of course, the connection between NourbeSe Philip’s poetic sequence Zong!
and the disruption of the archival text holds a strong presence in scholarly discourse
in African and African American literatures. Literary scholars Ian Baucom, Patricia
Saunders, Myriam Moise, Anita Rupprecht, Erin Fehskens, and Jenny Sharpe all turn
to Philip’s 21st century intervention with the 18th century archival record of Gregson
vs. Gilbert—a trial over insurance policy. These scholars recognize Philips’ text as
confronting the limitations of this narrative history of the massacre, insurance, and
the trial and constructing an alternative sequence of the past. For example,
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Fehskens’ article “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZOng! and
the Catalogue” examines how Philip’s text interrupts meaning in categorical
knowledge and subverts these “totalizing modes” of historical record and record
keeping. She argues that Philip’s text unhinges fixed categories of the past by
“flooding her text with polyvocality and multiple word possibilities”(410). Fehskens
article echoes other scholars’ discussion of Philip’s challenge to the historical
limitations of the archival record and the way in which her text opens this history to
other voices and visions of the past.
This chapter extends Fehskens discourse of polyvocality to suggest we read
this not just as a matter of disruption or critique of categorization, but as a move to
reorder historical truths through other systems of knowledge or knowledge making.
This isn’t just a case of radical revision or an inclusion of multiple voices, but, as I
argue, the disruption of the text can be read as a turn to African historiographic
practices that accommodate (and have accommodated) these other forms of record
keeping and knowledge production. Specifically, I look at the presence of West
African ritual in Philip’s text as offering alternative means of forming and
embodying the scholar’s work in recovery. In this ritual, the ancestral past is
accessible (among human and non human agents), transformative and
transforming, and collective. It opens what has been rendered materially silent to
new modes of archival knowledge and archival agency.
I was first drawn to the place of West African divination practices in the text
—specifically Ifa—through a question of reading or the work of reading the archive.
4
After all, there is something troubling about the reading (or un-reading) that Philip’s
text presents/performs and the way that it disrupts and speaks to our own practices
in archival work. At the end of Philip’s journal detailing her work in researching,
piecing together, and constructing the poetic text, she discusses the “code” like
presentation of her language. She describes the way in which multiple languages
enter the scene of Zong!, and that the mixture, merger, and confrontation of English,
Spanish, Latin, Yoruba, Shona, and so forth, “levels everyone to a place where there
is, at times, no distinction between languages”. She adds that this intersection
returns everyone to “a state of pre-literacy”(206), and in this way suggests a
practice of unreading or deconstructing the process of reading recovery. She calls
this act throughout the journal “un-telling”.
Her own acts of disrupting the archival text and re-evaluating the way the
language of the recorded past works on the page lead her to ask: “How do I read
work like this?” It is, a simple, and yet stunning question. How do we read the
archive? How do we read an archival document that erases the historical agency of
the African slave? How do we read Philip’s rearrangement of it? How do we read
this work that Philip describes as “chant! Shout! And ululation! […] moan! Mutter!
Howl! And Shriek! […]”(207)? How do we read this “pure utterance”? This “song”?
Even with an index for translation of terms, there is still something in this
cacophony of voices, sound, and language use that is difficult to read. In fact, many
times the reading resembles misreading. For example, I first read the title for the
last chapter sequence of the poem as “Ehora” or “e hora,” which is Portugese for
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time or Spanish for “and time…”1. In referring back to the table of contents, I realized
the chapter uses the Yoruba term Ebora, or, as Philip’s glossary indicates,
“underwater spirits”(184). The misreading here reflects Philip’s concept of the
slipperiness and plurality of language on board the Zong. And yet, even though this
is a case of situating Yoruba alongside of Spanish/Portuguese, it also highlights a
question of perspective and reading practice. Can we read this archival event in
multiple ways? Can the use of Yoruba speak not only to language, but also to
practice (specifically a historiographic practice)?
For a moment then, we might consider how even the translation of the word
“ehora” (time) to “ebora” (underwater spirits), speaks to different modes of
accessing the past. The first suggests a view of the past as part of a chronological
narrative. The second suggests a view of recovery where past and present coexist,
interact, and are in constant iteration. These perspectives can translate to different
modes of thinking through the archive and archival work—between material and
intangible. This chapter, then, takes “Ebora” as its starting point to figure different
or multiple relationships to recovery and archival work. This is not to suggest that
we believe in West African spiritual practices (or spirits, in general), but that Philip’s
text suggests that we recognize other historiographic methods and philosophies,
particularly rituals, as operating modes of historical research and valid forms of
accessing the history of the Middle Passage.
1
The slipperiness or playfulness of language here relates the introductions commentary on
Derrida’s reading and working in the language of the Helene Cixous’ archive. Specifically,
Derrida’s use of “oublire” or “forget reading” echoes in Philip’s shifting language use.
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Philip’s use of divination ritual challenges traditional boundaries or
limitations to the Western or “normative” understanding of the archive. The
presence of ritual highlights the contextual nature of the archive: its production,
collection, preservation, and the work we do there. After all, to recover the history
of the Africans on board the ship—an intention that Philip continues to emphasize
throughout the text—demands that we also think through the way in which history
or historical making was understood by those experiencing the event. In her
journal, Philip opens the question of perspective: “How did they—the Africans on
board the Zong—make meaning of what was happening to them? What meaning did
they make of it and how did they make it mean?”(194). Philip’s assertion asks us to
think through the type of work we do in the archives of slavery, and, in doing so,
troubles labels of what counts as official or authorized methods of meaning making
and knowledge production.
To examine Philip’s use of alternative methods of archival work, the chapter
begins by thinking through Philip’s challenge of archival laws. The first section,
titled, “The law it was that said we were. Or were not,” evaluates how Philip’s use of
the legal text of Gregson vs. Gilbert reflects a tradition of recovery practice where
documents (particularly legal documents) materialize historical “truth” of
knowledge in the history of the Black Atlanic. These legal documents reflect and
maintain/preserve larger institutional practices of the archive. In the case of
Gregson vs. Gilbert the same document that secures a historical narrative of the
Middle Passage also records the dehumanization of the African slave as property on
board the slave ship. The relationship between the practice of the law and the
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practice of the archive is one built on the ability and systematic effort to fix and
stabilize language. However, under these archival laws and through the legal text,
the archive restricts the voices that can be heard and the histories that can be
known or recovered. It is no wonder then that scholars such as Jacques Derrida,
Laura Stoler, and Ian Baucom all refer to the archive’s “spectral” presence. I situate
Philip’s discussion of the archive and the law within this discourse of the
spectre/hauntology.
Following the discussion of the law, I situate Philip’s text in a wider discourse
and history of recovering the Black Atlantic. In the section, “The most enthusiastic
antiquarian,” I analyze how the construction of modern African American and
African diasporic archives emerge from Western archival traditions. I evaluate the
methodologies of recovery set up by figures such as Arthur Schomburg who
promotes archival knowledge as an institutional and scientifically objective practice.
While Schomburg’s call for collecting materials documenting the history of African
Americans and African diaspora amasses a hugely important body of records, the
emphasis on archaeological evidence (i.e. material evidence) also excludes other
forms of cultural preservation. Still, in returning to Schomburg and the wider
period of the Harlem Renaissance, we can see how the question of Africa and African
methodology continue to circle around the question of recovery and scholarly
practice. Finally, in this section, I trace the continuing critique or re-evaluation of
the traditional or normative archival practices in producing the history of the Black
Atlantic and the recent call for “alternative” archives.
8
After situating Philip’s text in these discussions of archival recovery, I turn to
her use of Ifa divination as a historiographic practice that accommodates multidimensional understandings of knowledge production. I think through how ritual
performance speaks to the methods of recovery work that act as an alternative
archive situated in an African worldview or philosophy. This perspective, I argue,
allows for Philip to challenge “official” narratives of a material past by accessing and
giving agency to ancestral voice and thereby producing a more collective and
transformative method of archival work.
2. “The law it was that said we were. Or were not.”
The documents that record the history of slavery and often permit its recovery can
be the same documents that engendered the practice of the slave trade. In Zong!, Philip’s
use of the legal document Gregson vs. Gilbert questions the way in which a legal record
becomes an archival event in the experience and history of the Middle Passage. What
does it mean to work with this document? What kinds of forms (or languages) can tell or
even contain these histories let alone account for the work of constructing these histories?
In opening the 18th century legal text that records the horrific and painful history of slave
massacre and examining the kinds of histories that it produces, Philip acknowledges the
limitations and implications of working with this archival document and performing this
type of work. On the one hand, she acknowledges the importance and the necessity of
this document in registering the massacre. She writes:
The case is the tombstone, the one public marker of the murder of those Africans
on board the Zong, locating it in a specific time and place. It is a public moment,
9
a textual monument marking their murder and their existence, their small histories
that ended so tragically. (Philip 194)
Philip acknowledges that the legal record marks the passage and the events on board the
Zong! and documents the lives lost on board this ship. In order to tell this history and to
continue to preserve and articulate the public memory of the event, she recognizes the
need (and under the traditional sense of archival work, the necessity) to turn and continue
to turn to the language and the facts of the legal case to understand this history.
On the other hand, Philip also questions the use of this text. What histories are
available in this legal document? What are the limits of this material law? What limits
does the document place on our understanding or our ability to know this history? How
does this law relate to the “laws” of recovery work?
Philip confronts the conditions of knowledge making:
What did, in fact, happen on the Zong? Can we, some two hundred years later,
ever really know? Should we? These are the questions I confront. Although
presented with the ‘complete’ text of the case, the reader does not ever know it,
since the complete story does not exist. It never did. All that remains are the legal
texts and documents of those who were themselves intimately connected to, and
involved in, a system that permitted the murder of the Africans on board the
Zong. (196)
Philip’s interrogation of our historical knowledge and historical production recognizes
that the legal text that records the event and through which the history of this event
materializes is also the same record that reflects a system that allowed for the massacre of
slaves to fall into a trial about an insurance claim. Moreover, this legal case reflects a
shift towards containing uncertainties in legal practice during the 18th century—a means
10
of containing or controlling the law through an adherence to its language and precepts.
As we inherit this document, the archival text testifies to an institution maintaining its
authority through objectivity (an objectivity that collides or is part of the concept of
“modernity”). It is not a document, let’s say, that gives voice or historical agency to the
African slave.
To think through the implications of recovery work, Philip both adheres and
disrupts the contained and controlled language of the legal text and the readings offered
through its details. Her question of “what can we know?” echoes throughout the different
poetic dialogues and constructions within the text. And her answer, a form of “untelling”
interrogates archival practices and highlights the way in which historical knowledge is
produced, maintained, but also ruptured. However, before we think further through her
interrogation of the law and the practice of recovery work as part of a reading of this law,
let’s turn to the case itself and trace the history of its work as an archival document.
So, what is this case? What is the law? And, what does it produce or bring to life?
What, also, as Philip asks, does this archival document eliminate, erase, or exclude? We
often come about the details of the case of Gregson vs. Gilbert through repetition or
rehearsal of the “facts” of the case. Erin Fehskens begins her recent article on Zong! with
the statement: “You have heard this story before”(Fehskens 407). And, we have. Even if
we do not know the name of the case or are unfamiliar with the details, the story of the
18th century slave ship Zong is part of and continues to generate the public memory and
archive of the transatlantic slave route. In this sense, the rehearsal of this story also
11
testifies to a history of documentation, record, and academic scholarship. So, let’s
continue to tell the story again2:
While en route to Jamaica, the slave ship Zong ran off course mistaking
Hispaniola (now the island “shared”3 by the Dominican Republic & Haiti) for its
destination, and, as a result, the ship was delayed in its passage(Walvin, Black Ivory, 15),
(Baucom 11-14). Facing diminishing supplies, sickness, and death among the slaves and
crew, and supposedly, for want of water, the ship’s captain, Luke Collingwood, ordered a
number of the slaves to be thrown overboard (Walvin, Black Ivory, 14). He dispersed
them in sets, and, facing the final selection, many of the slaves in the final group took
their own lives and jumped into the sea (Walvin Black Ivory16; Hoare xxviii; Philip 189).
Once the ship arrived in Jamaica, the ship’s owners asked the insurers to
underwrite the value of the lost slaves—30 pounds per head (Hoare, Vol. 1, 1828, 362).
When the insurers refused to underwrite the claim, the ship’s owners William, John, and
James Gregson filed suit. While a jury initially sided with the ship’s owners and ordered
the insurance company to reimburse the claim of loss, an ensuing King’s Bench trial,
presided over by Lord Mansfield, found that because these massacres had occurred after a
rainfall, the ship’s captain did not act out of necessity of preservation of crew and
remaining slaves, but in error. Mansfield found that the insurers, in this case and within
2
Contemporary scholars turn to James Walvin’s text The Zong: A massacre, the Law, and the End of
slavery (2011) and his prior research in Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire (1992, 2001) for
information on the Zong. Philip mentions her initial reading of the Zong in Black Ivory (Philip xi). Other
influential texts in the retelling of the Zong include Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic: Finance,
Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005). Many of these texts also cite Prince Hoare, ed.
Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq. Composed from his own manuscripts and other authentic documenst in
the possession of his family and of the Africa Institution (1820, 1828). http://bit.ly/13vkQ9Z
3
As a side note, it would be fascinating work to think through archives of the Black Atlantic within
Hispaniola (contemporary Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Of particular interest would be the
comparison between the archive of slavery that might appear on one side of the island in relation to the
other.
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the debate of “necessity”, had no liability to recover the loss (Walvin, Black Ivory, 1819).
Of course, the case becomes much more than an 18th century insurance ruling on
the cargo of the ship. As the horrific details of the trial came through the public discourse
of Liverpool, England, the case became part of the history and rhetoric of the abolitionist
movement. Granville Sharp—who famously receives knowledge of the case from
Equiano4--documents and appropriates the language of the proceedings as part of a
platform to bring murder charges against the ship’s captain (then dead) as well as the
crew and to bring attention to the dehumanizing practice of the slave trade (Hoare
PAGE). In a number of records, letters, and public exchanges, Sharp seeks to document
the events on board the ship. He sees this act/this event as an inhuman practice, and that
to let the massacre against the slaves stand as only an insurance trial is to upset or
invalidate the principle of law/legal action in England. He states in a letter to the Lords
Commissioners of the Admiralty in 1782,
I thought it my duty to spare neither labour nor expense in collecting all the
information concerning this horrible transaction that I could possibly procure, for
the sake of national justice, that the blood of the murdered may not rest on the
whole kingdom, which already labours under too awful a load of guilt in
tolerating the iniquitous Slave trade, whereby, amongst other evils, this most
inhuman and diabolical deed was occasioned. (Hoare 362)
Through Sharp’s insistence and public documentation of the events of the case, the
insurance case becomes part of the legal and political history of England and the wider
legal and political memory of the end of the slave trade. Not only did the case itself
4
Explain significance.
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generate a number of documents and records—Walvin states: “The legal and political
arguments about the Zong inevitably spawned an abundance of contemporary paperwork:
legal documents, press coverage, contemporary commentaries, shipping records,
correspondences”(Walvin Chapt 1, Zong, PAGE)—but the abolitionist movement (itself
a huge propaganda machine) becomes a generative and prolific archival producer. And,
this is the story, then, that has been and can be told from the archive. After summarizing
the case in her own article, Erin Fehseken writes, “You will hear this story again and
again”(407). And, we will. The case becomes part of academic practices of rereading and
revising our construction of this trade as well as the institutions emerging around and
from it.
In the last half of the twentieth century to now, as part of the rise of the
institutional practice of studying African American and African diasporic history and the
history of what we think of now as the “Black Atlantic”5, the case continues to be an
integral archival event in the history of slavery and the experience of black people in this
advent of modern space/time. The legal case and its role in the abolitionist movement
becomes part of the discussion of academic work: the construction of departments, the
understanding of discipline, the definition of historical experience, even the concept of
the space of slavery6, and the concept of black or African/black modernity echo this event
in its discourse. The paradigms of scholarship we produce and maintain in the study of
black diaspora and the slave trade are shaped by this case.
5
The main point here is to see how this legal text becomes part of disciplinary and academic rhetoric. It is
a helpful sequence in acknowledging the way in which these archival documents continue an institutional
path/power. In the next section, I’ll return to the “Black Atlantic” and the relationship to building archives
of the Middle Passage in the next section.
6
I’m thinking here of Paul Gilroy’s examination of the Black Atlantic and the theoretical implications his
text offers in terms of department and disciplinary structures (how we conceive of the Black Atlantic
effects the way in which we perform and construct the spaces of academic work). Walcott’s assertion.
14
And yet, it is the law/legal structure of this case and the public production of the
abolitionist cause from this case that produces the archive, documents the history,
constructs our remembrance and access, and influences our practices of narrating this
event. To work with this document, then, is to receive this long history of its production
and reproduction, but it also means that we work with a document that nominates the
status of slaves as property in its original institutional context (and use). The legal text,
taken in this way, becomes an ever-widening system of history making, so much so that
the advent or the reason for its existence seems buried underneath the massive
appropriation or accommodation of its details into these different streams of inquiry.
Therefore, understanding where and why this document exists in the first place and the
function it served in its sociological/historical significance can allow us to understand
Philip’s desire to disrupt/disturb this act of history making. (need to connect here back to
Philip)
Jacques Derrida suggests in Archive Fever that in order to begin to understand the
archive we must also understand the institution or context from which the archive arises.
He writes: “A science of the archive must include the theory of this institutionalization,
that is to say, the theory both of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the
right which authorizes it”(Derrida 4)7. Derrida traces the connection between the archive
and the “state”—state laws, systems, and institutions. In the beginning of his text, he
begins with an examination of the word archive and its etymology as both
commencement and commandment. The archive is not only the place where things start
or commence, but it is also the place that maintains the “principles of the law” where
“men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place
7
Cixous’ archive is housed in the same space BNP as this case.
15
from which order is given—nomological principle”(Derrida 1). The archive houses the
documents of the law, and it is the “keepers” or guardians of this house that maintain the
authority of these records. He explains further that these documents help shape, maintain
and preserve the institution (and are shaped by the institution that preserves them).
Therefore, whoever maintains those documents also maintains a certain degree of power:
The citizens who thus held and signified political power were considered to
possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publically
recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house (private
house, family house, or employee’s house), that official documents are filed. The
archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. (Derrida 2)
Derrida further claims that in order to understand the way in which these documents
“speak the law,” “recall the law,” and “call on or impose the law” we must understand the
way in which these laws are housed (Derrida 2). In other words, we must examine the
institution that maintains, preserves, and/or accommodates these records.
In the case of Gregson vs. Gilbert the legal record reflects the authority of the late
18th century English court system and an institutional push to maintain an order of the
law through adherence to certainty: official documentation, evidence, and record keeping.
It is through this insistence on the authority of the law that the slaves can be nominated as
property/cargo in an insurance trial. In the case of the Zong, the court system protects the
interest and order of the state’s commercial trade by upholding and maintaining the
clarity of maritime law, and, in this way, procures the loss of “cargo” as a matter of
property value. In fact, to maintain the law, Judge Mansfield insists that it be kept as a
case of insurance, and not of murder (Hoare PAGE). Jeremy Krikler’s article “The Zong
and the Lord Chief Justice” examines Mansfield’s judgment as an act to give “precedence
16
to certainty over principle”(35). While the circumstances of the trial reveal the horrific
details of the slave trade, to recast these events as a trial for murder subjects the law to
disruption, which Mansfield equates to “danger”8(35). Kirkler further claims that
Mansfield’s actions against a new ruling (or new trial beyond insurance law) are an effort
not to “disturb the law”(35). Kirkler further explain Mansfield’s determination to
maintain and preserve the standards of the law, “That people should know the law was of
prime importance to him, and where he discovered the law questionable, he would rather
maintain it than, by new judgment, make it illegible or confused”(35).
Thereby, under this effort to keep the law certain and clear, the law determines
that the slave holds a property value of 30 pounds, and that the jurisdiction rests on a case
of property not on the dehumanization of slavery. Mansfield claims during the trial “This
is a case of chattels or goods. It is really so: it is the case of throwing over goods: for to
this purpose, and the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property: whether right
or wrong: we have nothing to do with it”(Hoare, Prince Memoir Sharp 357). The
regulation of the law is a debate about the terms of maritime law and the law of average9,
and, in this sense, is a trial over the concept of “necessity” (i.e. the necessity to destroy
property in order to save the “enterprise” as a whole (Kirkler 37).
In keeping the strictness of the language of the law (and its objectivity and
legibility), Mansfield rules on the relationship between necessity and the need for water.
As the case rests on the need to destroy property as a result of lack of sufficient water,
Mansfield overturns the previous ruling once evidence displays that water was available
8
The word danger comes from Kirkler’s review of the Earl of Mansfield’s archival papers in a case
appealing “against a judgment relating to libelous publication”(qtd. from Kirkler 46). In the papers,
Mansfield states “Miserable is the Condition of Individuals…Dangerous is the Condition of the State, if
there is no certain law…”(qtd. In Kirkler 35).
9
Give quick review of law of average and what the maritime law was
17
(a rain had fallen) before the last set of slaves was thrown overboard. The ruling on the
case, even its appeal rests on the question of the necessary destruction of the goods.
Moreover, if we take this justice as one of the record keepers, we see the maintenance of
the law as ordinary property law. There is something extraordinarily “ordinary” or
“mundane,” about laws practice and the categories and language that it maintained.
Laura Stoler, in Along the Archival Grain, a text that similarly examines the
maintenance of laws and empire within the archive10 discusses the way in which
“Colonial administration were prolific producers of social categories”(Stoler 2). Even if
we understand these categories as unstable or fluid, these categories (and the desire for
categorization) reflect the need for organized claims to knowledge. These colonial
authorities produced “scientific management”(Stoler 57) and determined what would
count as “reason and reasonable”(Stoler 57). These documents and the reflection of these
documents of the law (or maintenance of the law) grant access, permit histories to be
told, administer legal regulation, determine legitimacy or illegitimacy, and help follow
order, pragmatism, and authority. The justice’s insistence to the jury in Gregson vs.
Gilbert is that they follow the documentation of the law and the objectivity of the law in
denominating the slaves as goods. The ruling was not a moral narrative. Kirkler explains:
[…]the stress Mansfield laid upon the importance of the murders after the rains
served to imply that there was justification for the murders before them. So far as
he was concerned, if the owners of the slave-vessel could prove that it was
running out of water, and if that situation arose through no fault of the captain or
crew, most of the killing was permissible. (38)
Stoler similarly notes that “Archivists are the first to note that to understand an archive, one needs to
understand the institution that it served”(Stoler 25).
10
18
What is fascinating in this transaction is Mansfield’s insistence on the authority of the
law, even in the face of what he considered the “odious” institution of the slave trade
(Kirkler 39). His abidance of the legal record and the authority he places upon the clarity
and certainty of evidentiary law, speaks to the migration of this legal record as an iconic
archival document within the history of the slave trade.
Now, not everyone—even within the institution of the state or an adherence to
legal language—accepted the neutrality or objectivity of the law as a case of property or
cargo. However, even as challenges to the law arose, the method and logic of material
authority (the same kind of method and logic that Mansfield maintains) holds a key place
in the discourse and illuminates an institutional structure built on the relationship between
official truth and material documents and records. For example, as mentioned previously,
Granville Sharp challenges this case as part of the abolitionist cause and calls for a trial
for murder directly confronting the legal opinion of the justice. Even as he challenges and
intervenes in the assumptions of the trial (that it is a case of property not of murder), he
still upholds the authority of documentation11. He challenges the assigned category of the
legal case, but he does not disrupt the mode of categorization. If we examine Sharp’s
own history, we see the language and adherence to the concept of documentation as well
as to the idea that the records would maintain and continue to uphold the principles and
history of the institution (as well as influence it).
SET UP In William O. Blake’s History of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Ancient
and Modern12, the author emphasizes Sharp’s process of documentation:
11
Baucom calls this Sharp’s “book of evidence”(Baucom 33).
Full title The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade Ancient and Modern. The Forms of Slavery that
Prevailed in Ancient Nations, Particularly in Greece and Rome. The African Slave Trade and the Political
History of Slavery in the United States. Compiled from Authentic Materials By W.O. Blake (1857)
12
19
Mr. Sharp was present at the trial, and procured the attendance of a shorthand
writer to take down the facts which should come out in the course of it. These he
gave to the public afterwards. He communicated them, also, with a copy of the
trial, to the Lords of Admiralty, as the guardians of Justice upon the seas, and to
the Duke of Portland, as principal minister of the state. No notice, however, was
taken by any of these of the information which had been thus sent them. But
though nothing was done by the persons then in power, in consequences of the
murder of so many innocent individuals, yet the publication of an account of it by
Mr. Sharp, in the newspapers, made such an impression upon others that new
coadjutors rose up. (Blake 166)
The testimony above speaks to the process of documentation and publication that
allow the “facts” of the case to arise. What allows Sharp and the state to bear witness
throughout this history is tied to the material, and our reception of this history comes
from this “authenticity” of official material. There is an insistence on documentation that
aligns with literacy practices (a culture of literacy)13. Throughout Sharp’s memoir there
is an insistence on the verifiability of the manuscript. The repetition of “authentic
copy”(362), “unquestionable authority”(361), “vouchers of the facts”(363), and so forth
all speak to the insistence upon documentation and the upkeep of the principles of
English law.
At the same time that Sharp’s documentation works to challenge the Mansfield’s
ruling as well as the institution of the slave trade, it cannot give historical agency to
13
Sharp and others praised figures like Equiano during this time period (and other Africans like him) for
his literacy and his “Christian demeanour”(Walvin Chapter 10, ZOng). Africans who adhered or were
allowed to adhere to the precepts of enlightenment (literacy, judgment, principle, materiality) became
published authors. See Rebecka Fisher’s article “The Poetics of Belonging in the Age of Englightenment:
Spiritual Metaphors of Being in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative” (Early American Studies 2013).
20
anything other than documentation. Though Sharp and Mansfield may stand on different
sides of the archon—and the type of guardianship they rule on in terms of the right or
wrong of slavery—Sharp and the legal case of the Zong abide by the processes and
appeals of an institution that upholds documentation and grant adherence to authority and
authenticity as materiality. What fits in the archive of slavery, then, is the legal record.
If the historical subject is not literate or does not subscribe to material practices of the
legal record of 18th century England, it equates to an experience of archival loss under
this equation. Therefore, when Philip asks in her poem, “What did, in fact, happen on the
Zong?” she points towards the legal facts of the case. She admits: “All that remains are
the legal texts and the documents of those who were themselves intimately connected to,
and involved in, a system that permitted the murder of the Africans on board the Zong”
(196).
Throughout her poetic text, Philip recognizes her own use of the law in the
practice of recovery. To tell this history of the Zong, she, too, must turn to the legal case
that documents the details and materializes narrative truths of the events on board the
ship. After all, it is the only transcript of and, therefore, the only direct record to the event
and to the question of what happened on board the Zong (Kirkler 30). The law, in this
case, as Philips states is “certain, objective, predictable, it would cut through the
emotions like a laser to seal off vessels oozing sadness, anger, and despair”(Philip 191).
In this turn to neutrality, Philip submits to the law’s objectivity and its ability to “cut
through” emotional ambiguity/intuition. She writes:
The irony here is that the story is locked within the text of those individuals—
members of the judiciary, one of, if not the most powerful segment of English
society—who were themselves an integral part of a system that engaged in the
21
trade of humans. A system of laws, rules, and regulations that made possible the
massacre on board the Zong (199).
In fact, within this language of the law, Philip recalls her relationship to legal
practice. In an interview with Patricia Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the
Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,” Philip describes the experience of
practicing law:
[T]he training in law teaches you to squeeze all of the emotion out of the events
that comprise the case in question to get to the fact situation. And then you have,
I suppose, this wonderful thing, the law, that is supposedly so constant and so
unchanging and that at times is modulated by the principles of equity. Equity’s
purpose was supposed to soften the hard, unyielding law. (66)
In the case of Gregson vs. Gilbert, Philip can turn to this law and this reading of the law
for the “fact situation” of the transatlantic experience. It is a language, echoing
Mansfield’s own desire, to be stable, accurate, and “unchanging”. It is in its unvariability that the law rehearses supposed “equity”.
However, Philip also recognizes that the legal text is “at best, only tangentially
related to the Africans on board […]”(199). Philip acknowledges that there are other
voices and other systems at work and at play that would have been available on board the
ship….other ways of knowing. Therefore, the concept of and emphasis of “suppose,” is
important for Philip in the previous quote as well as in her poetic rendering of the legal
text. We can think of suppose as to act out of assumption without necessarily claiming
truth, or as the OED states “To assume (without reference to truth or falsehood) as a basis
of argument, or for the purpose of tracing consequences; to frame as a hypothesis; to put
as an imaginary case; to posit”(“Suppose v.”). Or, in its noun state, suppose can mean “a
22
supposition, hypothesis, conjecture; an assumption; an uncertainty, a doubt; a
consideration of ‘what if...?”(“Suppose” n.). The echo of uncertainty, the consideration
of supposition, the turn to “what if” suggests possibility, potential, and/or imagination
rather than an alignment with the “fact situation” of the legal text. Philip’s echo of
“supposedly,” challenges the “clarity” and “certainty” of the language of the law that
Mansfield desires to readily to preserve. And, it is right here within this uncertainty—of
the relationship to the law, of this relationship to recovery through the legal text—that
Philip challenges the reading of the archival document.
In an early poem from section one—the section of the text that most directly
appropriates the legal language of the case—Philip introduces “supposed” into the fixed
scene of the language of the law. Here is the poem in full:
Zong #11
Suppose the law
is
not
does
not
would
not
be
not
suppose the law not
—a crime
suppose the law a loss
23
suppose the law
suppose (Philip 20)
This particular poem frames two important concepts that highlight Philip’s interrogation
of the law and the laws that shape archival work. On the one hand, we have in this poem
the “law as loss” and, on the other hand, we have a means of approaching that law and
that loss through the idea of “suppose”. The evocation of the law, in this case, functions
as the concept that materializes and enforces a set of policies and rules through which to
judge the evidence. Philip’s conjuring of suppose also suggests uncertainty, possibility,
and assumption beyond the limitations of the law. The tension Philip sets up between the
law as regulation and standardization of practice/policy and supposition as possibility,
ambiguity, or even imagination (the what if) are all central to thinking through her vision
of recovery work in the Black Atlantic.
Philip builds uncertainty into her reading and recovery of the law in order to
confront the tenuous relationship between the legal text as archival record and the legal
text as what destroys the possibility of testimony from the Africans on board the Zong.
To stay within the limits of the archive—in this case the material document of the
case—is to work with an archival record that nominates Africans as property value—an
insurance “loss”. Philip describes what it means to stand in relationship to this legal text
as an act of history making:
Absolutely nothing (apart from one comment in the case) is about murder, though
murder it was. And that to me is what then really makes me question the law—
for us, as African people—and out relationship with it. How do you/we relate to
the law when it once said that we were things, and upheld all of these decisions
that supported that view? (Saunders 66)
24
Philip thinks through/questions this tension between the relationship of Africans to these
laws, especially when these laws in Gregson vs. Gilbert divest agency from the slaves.
More conflicting still is the fact that these laws produce the material that allows for and
authorizes the “facts” of the case. Philip’s intervention into the reading of the law and to
the practice of recovery opens the archive to other possible methods of historical
production and to other possibilities of the archive itself.
Her questioning of the law and the embrace of uncertainty leads Philip to naming
the method of her work as “hauntological”(Philip 201) She writes Zong “[…] is a work
of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make themselves
present”(Philip 201). The word “hauntological”14 resonates as a form of contradiction: to
be at once a scientific (logical) study, and on the other hand, unexplained, returning,
persistent, but even more so unresolved. This sense of returning to irresolution creates the
ghostly presence of the text and the almost intangible or uncapturable narrative of this
story. When Philip echoes that this story, this event is “haunted by generations of skulls
and spirits”(201), we can sense the continuum of historical work that remains uncertain.
Haunting, here, also speaks to the concept of inheritance and the way in which we receive
this uncertain history of the slave trade.
Philip’s use of “hauntological” directly echoes Derrida’s Specters of Marx who
uses the word “hauntological” as a means of thinking through the impressions of the past,
or, in other words, the past that returns (or has never left) to haunt the present. Derrida’s
shift to these phantasmagoric presences of history speaks to what we might think of as
the violence of an unreconciled past, or, perhaps even more so, an unreconciled past of
violence. That these un-reconciled elements of history trouble and plague archival
14
Derrida and phastasm/hauntology
25
structures echoes across Derrida and Philip’s practice of hauntology as a means of
producing and considering our production of the past. Derrida calls for scholars to “talk
with or about”(Derrida, Specters, xvii)15 and to “learn to live with ghosts”(Derrida,
Specters, xviii)16 . His discussion of our relationship to these specters (our “being with”
ghosts) is part of our understanding of “ the politics of memory, of inheritance, and of
generations”(Derrida, Specters, xviii). The question of ghosts, our confrontations with
them, are about our future with them, or, as Derrida asks: “Whither? Where will we go
tomorrow? […] where are we going with it?”(Derrida, Specters, xix). These questions
echo Philip’s recovery of the legal text and the ghosts, in this case the un-voiced Africans
within this text, that remain to haunt our relationship to archival work. Such a haunting is
nothing new to those who work with revisionist histories of the Black Atlantic or
histories in general of this institutional traffic of African bodies.
Derrida’s examination of the presence of, let’s say, non-presence or specters
continues to emerge in Archive Fever in his reading of the Freudian archive. He echoes
“the phantom continues to speak”(Archive Fever 62) and speaks about the archive
producing a “spectral response”(Archive Fever 62). He further explains that the structure
of the archive, as a site of haunting, is “neither present or absent”(Archive Fever 84) in its
spectrality.
15
http://bit.ly/19kUPyH
Also quoted in Stef Craps article “Learning to Live With Ghosts: Postcolonial Haunting and MidMourning in David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts” (2010). Callaloo 33.2.
467-475. This article evaluates the revision of the Zong incident in these two fictional pieces. Craps argues
that
“Derrida’s hautological politics of memory can help to counter the premature and obfuscatory celebration
of the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ […]”(468-469). He evaluates how Dabydeen and D’Aguiar’s narratives of
the Zong massacre allow for the spectral presence of the past to continue to exist: “Instead of clearing away
the dead, they permit this traumatic history to live on as a haunting, troubling, foreign element within the
present”(469).
16
26
Ian Baucom, perhaps most explicitly captures this spectral presence within the
history of the slave trade. Drawing on theorists Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida—
we see once again the echo of “Specter” appearing as a theoretical lens to read the Black
Atlantic history—Baucom gives a close reading to the material records of this massacre.
language of “haunting,” Baucom considers the slave trade within the larger capitalist
system of trade and commerce in the late 18th century and the way in which this
institution permits or accommodates for the massacre of slaves as property. Therefore,
when understanding or approaching this history (and its recovery/revision work), we
must see it as a space haunted by and informed by a violent and destructive trade.
Baucom writes:
For what haunts this record book, what haunts the accounting procedures and the
econometric logic of justice explicit in the Lords Commissioners’ attempt to do
justice to those who had suffered on the empire’s behalf, is not only the specter of
a modern principle of bookkeeping and a modern system of finance capital
capable of converting anything it touches into a monetary equivalent, but the
specter of something else such financial protocols made possible, something the
Admiralty would decidedly not have wished to associate with its loyal suffering,
subjects: the specter of slavery, the slave auction block, the slave trader’s ledger
book; the specter, quite precisely, of another wounded, suffering human body
incessantly attended by an equal sign and a monetary equivalent. (Baucom 7)
Baucom calls for an alignment of these two practices rather than a reading of this history
that could exclude or separate these institutions. And, of course, his mention of the leger
book reminds us that the archival materials of the slave trade also participate in and are
reflective of these systems of modernity and modern record keeping. Philip’s work
27
reflects the haunting presence of the archive in Derrida and Baucom. We see Philip
grappling with these hauntings and with the work of recovery that is surrounded by these
ghosts and these unreconciled bodies from the past.
Derrida ends his introduction to Specters of Marx with “There is then some spirit.
Spirits. And one must reckon with them”(Derrida, Specters, xx). Philip displays her
reckoning with the spirits of slavery embedded within this material narrative as a shift
outside of reading the material. Her text disrupts the document’s ability to materialize
meaning, she unhinges its ability to objectify or stabilize language around this history,
and she troubles the clarity of the legal record. In her journal, Philip calls this process a
matter of “untelling” or “not telling” the story of the Zong. This reference towards the
“un” or “not” echoes the “non-being” of Derrida’s reflection on the phantasms or specters
of history. To reach these spaces or absences of history—which in many ways are not
absences at all if seen outside the epistemological boundaries of reading archival texts—
one must undo the way we adhere to the language of the document and intervene in the
legal text which details the massacre of the slaves.
In the beginning of the second section of the poetic sequence “Dicta”, Philip calls
in the poem to “clear the law/ of/ order”(Philip 50). In many ways, this decree evokes the
poem’s desire to rupture the authority of the text and to take what may seem small, or
even insignificant (mundane), and confront or reckon with what this objective language
signifies in terms of the slave trade. We can see Philip’s appeal to “clear the law of order”
throughout the text even from the beginning of the poetic sequence. One of the initial
poems in “Os” locks itself within the term “water”—one of the main terms of the legal
text that is used to determine the verdict (i.e. was there enough water on board the Zong
to prevent the jettisoning of cargo). Here is a snapshot of Philip’s poem to see it in full:
28
The poem thinks through what constitutes the evidence of “one day’s water”. The poetry
both embeds itself in the language of the law as well as uproots its logic from the interior.
In her journal, she writes: “Our entrance to the past is through memory. And water. It is
happening always—repeating always, the repetition becoming a haunting”(203).
29
In the final sequence of poems in “Ebora,” the clarity and logic of the law becomes an
embrace of illegibility, and the desire for “transparency” of the legal language becomes
opacity. Philip describes the structure (or de-structuring) of the final set as a matter of
printer error: words collide, overlap, and run together.
As we can see above, Philip’s production of historical recovery here is both
recognizable as well as illegible. The passage is “haunted” by what we cannot
know or interpret from the language of the text. The haunting of the legal text offers
multiple channels of understanding, approaching, or accommodating knowledge
production from this document. Rather than a legal text that rests on the clarity of
determining what is or what is not human (allowed existence), Philip’s disruption of the
order of the law provides a richer, more nuanced, and expansive understanding of the
way in which archival knowledge might be produced, not just performed from material
practices.
The disruption of the archival text challenges the way in which we produce
knowledge from archives and make meaning of the event. Philip disruption of the
language of the law also illustrate how methods of recovery derive from particular
30
standpoints or positions from which to make meaning of the past and of recovery work.
She acknowledges that the reception of the legal text as the document of the event is a
material record that she must enter, but her poems demonstrate the desire to disrupt this
documents objectivity as the law. In fact, not only does she intervene by breaking though
the language and the structure of the law’s logic, but she also recognizes other ways of
meaning making that can be produced and performed if we think of recovery through
other means and through other standpoints. In this case, the question cited in the
introduction to this chapter, “How did the Africans make meaning of what was happening
to them?” prompts a revision of recovery work that might include other ways of
“reckoning” with ghosts. We might point to Philip’s invocation of divination practice as
a possibility of recovery work.
“The Most Enthusiastic Antiquarian” (Recovering the Black Atlantic)
What is archived? Where? How? What kinds of practices of recovery (and
preservation) can we challenge or call into question if we rethink the assumptions that
built these practices? How can we “speak to the dead”17? If we take Derrida’s lead, and
we are meant to acknowledge or reflect on how we “speak” to the ghosts of the past, or,
even more so, how we speak back towards the institutions which produce as well as
exclude them, then it might be helpful in our understanding of Philip’s disruption of the
act of reading the legal text to turn to the history of reading and recovering the Black
17
I echo Lewswin Laubscher here in his article “Working with the apartheid archives: or, of witness and
testimony”. He writes: “[…] it ought to matter whether one speaks to, of, or for the dead. Especially as
researcher and archon, as researcher-archon, sensitive to the dead of the past, and the phantom of the future,
what is the mode of my address?”
31
Atlantic. Understanding recovery efforts and institutional practices in the history of the
Middle Passage (and the history of slavery more broadly) can allow us to situate Philip’s
reading in a contemporary call for alternative archives and archival practices.
Another challenge to the archive of the Black Atlantic is a reflection on what it
means to work with these documents: the slave record, the legal insurance, the trade
documents. Abigail Ward questions and explores the troubling aspects of working with
(and in) these kinds of texts. She argues that not only is it difficult to work with these
records, but it can create a culture or monument of the document that solicited loss or
enforced archival loss. She states, “The reliance of authors on the narrtives of slave
captains and plantation owners may be troubling because of the possibility of turning
these documents into monuments, creating […] docu/monuments”(Ward 245).
By putting Philip’s work in conversation and as part of the history of designing
and redesigning the way we collect, preserve, read, and recover the material documents
of the archive and our relationships to those documents, we might better understand her
call for alternative ways of interpreting as well as collecting historical materials, even a
call to think beyond materiality. And, we might better understand her poem’s
intervention in the production of historiographic knowledge. Moreover, Philip’s use of
poetry to work through these alternative archival practices echoes a long line of poetic
revisions of historical work in African American and African diasporic poetry. Seeing
practice emerge and flex alongside aesthetic revision allows us to evaluate the way in
which poetry operates as a scholarly receptacle.
As with the history of the legal text in the previous section, choosing a place to
begin this discussion is not easy. Where does one begin a history of the Black Atlantic
archive? Does this even exist? One place that strikes me as a particularly defining
32
moment in archival history and, for that matter, the archival history of the
institutionalization of the materials of African and African American literatures and
cultures is Arthur Schomburg’s construction of the Schomburg Institute and the New
York Public Library. Schomburg’s 1925 essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” printed
in Survey Graphic, is one of the most famous and well known statements on what it
means to claim, produce, and preserve a historical past. Even more so, in evaluating the
placement of this essay alongside its contemporary discussions, we can see how these
dialogues evoke a certain tenor or attitude towards an“African” past/history. In these
discussions we can see Schomburg’s call for an assertive and materialist production of
history as well as a more ambiguous or hesitant relationship of materiality and
particularly of the relationship of Africa to the production of the methods of the “new
intellectual”.
While Schomburg revises historiographic practices to produce what scholar
Adalaine Holton calls a “counter-archive,” the methods through which the practice is
institutionalized excludes the means or methods through which to view/preserve an
Africa or the “African Past”. The “African past” and the methods of relationships to the
past embedded in this cultural position becomes synonymous with “ancient,”
romanticized, or nostaligic past whereas the new intellectual embraces the modernist
sense of objectivity and the “academic” (i.e. scientific) work as disciplinary structures
and institutions of knowledge making. Understanding and examining this tension
between the “new” archives of Black diasporic history, and the boundaries or exclusions
even these counter archives contained, can further our reading of Philip’s work as calling
for a more nuanced practices through which to read (or unread) these archives.
33
Moreover, these early 20th century discussions can be read into a current call for
alternative archives, a more flexible or fluid approach to new methods of thinking
through archival practices that might allow for and include eliminated histories (or erased
histories) that can not be read within the structures/methods of the Western archive.
Moreover, by examining this moment, we might see the way in which questions of
“Africa,” as historical producer enter into this construction of archival boundaries. What
is the relationship to the African past? How do we archive it? In this discourse, we can
see Philip’s own troubling of these structures and a sense of the way in which the archive
requires not only an “untelling” or non telling, but also a new telling or new translation of
the events on board the Zong and the methods which might accommodate a retrieval of
African historical agency/voice.
Schomburg’s essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past” most clearly illuminates his
work in building the archives of a transatlantic black history. The essay, published in
Survey Graphic’s March 1925 issue “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro,” provides a lens
on Schomburg’s movement to restore black history into American and World histories.
Moreover, read within the entirety of the issue, edited by Roland Hayes and Alain Locke
(which later then became the New Negro Anthology), we can see Schomburg’s promotion
of academic research, scholarship, and collection of documents of black history within
the other sociological and aesthetic conversations on the representation/relationship to the
African past. Schomburg’s essay, however, is a particular highlight of this issue in
capturing a directed and focused call to create archives.
Schomburg opens the essay with the assertion, “The American Negro must
remake his past in order to make his future”(Schomburg 670). This revision of the past is
a call to find, collect, document, and preserve the history of African and African
34
American diaspora. Although, as Adalaine Holton describes, Schomburg does not use
the term diaspora, he does see the restoration of history as a transatlantic and linked
movement between a shared sense of an African past (CITE page). Schomburg saw this
movement and the possibilities of constructing and producing these archives as a means
to confront what was perceived as historical loss, inferiority, or absence. He writes,
“History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that
the present generations must repair and offset”(Schomburg 670). This was a collective
call to unite social, academic, and aesthetic labor to build repositories/depositories of
black culture.
Adaleine Holton describes the challenges Schomburg’s work posed to the existing
practices of archival collections in her essay “Decolonizing History: Arthur Schomburg’s
Afrodiasporic Archive”(2007). Schomburg’s search and collection of primary documents,
she argues, locates a history of black contribution to the arts and sciences that would
challenge prevalent notions that people of African descent were somehow historically
inferior. Holton shows the way in which Schomburg intervenes in these supposed
absences of black cultural contributions and makes it his life work/ambition to build an
archive that would uncover and preserve this historical past. She further claims that his
work confronts nationalistic notions of the archive in that he begins to collect the material
culture of the diaspora (Pan Africanism?). Schomburg himself was of Puerto Rican and
German descent. He grew up in Puetro Rico until the age of 16 and traveled in the
Caribbean in his later life to collect these material histories. In doing so, Schomburg
confronts the particular ways in which we receive as well as access historical knowledge
and the way in which exclusive principles of archival institutions can regulate or limit the
types of histories produced.
35
Schomburg also understood, as Holton points out, that there was a relationship
“between power and the archive”(Holton 226). To confront and claim this power for the
community of African decsent, Schomburg recognizes the need to collect and document
the record of African/African American history. In seeking out these various records,
Holton argues, Schomburg creates a counter-archive that “belies the epistemological
foundations of racial science and the master narratives of Western history”(228). His
work was also a means of showing the larger force and role that those of African descent
hold in world history. His collection reflects his eagerness to compose new narratives of
historical knowledge.
At the same time that his practice of collecting allows those of African descent to
reclaim their history, the practice Schomburg emphasizes in this process of revision is
still a material one. Schomburg’s driving force to rewrite the history of African/AfricanAmerican descendents is the discovery and collection of material culture. The
archaeological metaphors throughout his essay speak to his desire to amass the records,
writings, and artifacts of Black culture. The title “digging” is most apparent in its sense
of material discovery as well as his insistence on collecting and presenting/exhibiting the
“evidence” of historical truth. Moreover, many of the archival items he speaks about and
presents in the essay are written histories (and curate a culture of literacy): tracts,
treatises, letters, sermons, polemics, and so forth (Schomburg 671) speak to his desire to
not only collect and curate new narratives for black history, but to emphasize the growth
of scientific inquiry, scholarly practice, and research on the history of Africans and
African American past from this material accumulation.
The practice of building a “well documented” past, was conceived of as work that
pushes to shift the emergence of the “negro’s past” from the “vagaries of rhetoric and
36
propaganda” to the “systematic and scientific”(PAGE). In his essay, Schomburg
discusses his desire to institutionalize a counter history as a response to historiographic
narratives that exclude or deny African American/African diaspora history as a viable or
valuable, even real, entity. He wishes to systematically prove the following: first, that the
African American is an active collaborator; second, that iconic figures within
African/African American history are not just “exceptional” figures, but demonstrate the
ambitions and participation of the race and are not “inseparable from the group”(670);
last, that the process of collecting and recording might shed light on and value the distant
origins of Africa and African history when it is, as he states, “scientifically viewed”(670).
For Schomburg, scientific objectivity (the ability to name, index, categorize
materials) was key to establishing a collection of historical substance. It was through the
construction of a “repository” of knowledge on the African/African American past in the
material sense that the “New Negro” intellectual could refute the erasure of historical
participation. Schomburg promotes an active sense of looking for the artifact, finding the
material, and piecing together a collection. He writes: “So the Negro historian digs under
the spot where his predecessor stood and argued”(670). He digs in order to say “here is
the evidence”(670). The book collector, the record keeper, alongside the historian, the
researcher, the scholar, the artist, becomes part of this cultural, cosmopolitan moment of
the “New Negro”. Within this moment, the Black Atlantic archive becomes a defined,
tangible, and material space.
In part, one of the objectives of discovering and finding the records of Negro
history was a turn to the “closed Negro Past,” specifically “African cultural
origins”(672). The recover of this history was also a negotiation of how to write an
“African” past. For Schomburg and others, the collected documents of the past
37
illuminated a new path of bringing “African” history into Western scholarship and shaped
new inquiries to knowledge and understanding of this past. Schomburg explains how the
accumulation of material record/evidence could challenge received ideas of a vacant or
absent historical contribution. He writes:
[…] a new notion of the cultural attainment and potentialities of the African
stocks has recently come about, partly through the corrective influence of the
more scientific study of African institutions and early cultural history, partly
through growing appreciation of the skill and beauty and in many cases the
historical priority of the African native crafts, and finally through the signal
recognition which first in France and Germany, but now very generally the
astonishing art of the African sculptures has received. (672)
Schomburg speaks to a period in history where the African past is treated as unknown or
undocumented. It is thought of as a primitive/savage past (i.e. anti-modern). In order to
address this view, Schomburg pushes for and rallies behind a scientific study to bring to
light these contributions to culture. However, the momentum behind brining these
objects and artifacts into dialogue is driven by Western practices and methods of what
counts as history/history making. The archive and recovery work of the Black Atlantic
takes shape as part of a material culture, in some part, meant to save African from
undocumentation/material loss.
The emphasis on materiality, however, limits the types of histories that can be
produced to a historical perspective and practice that can be recorded, read, and
physically collected into a library’s holdings. This practice is a “corrective” against the
title of unknown or undocumented, but in prioritizing and privileging this practice, other
histories, other African histories, are excluded. In this way, Schomburg’s call represents a
38
conflict within the production of the archive. On the one hand, to produce the archive of
African/African American history, he recognizes the need to find the material evidence of
the past. The archaeological practice reflects the cultural reception of what counts as
historical truth. On the other hand, and something that we might recognize now, is that
the emphasis on materiality excludes other ways of conceiving of archival memory and
method.
Something worth mentioning or exploring further is also the cultural relationship
to Africa as a place in need of documentation and the conflicting dynamics of ascribing
cultural power to historical methods. This was, after all, a time in which the “back to
Africa” movements were promoting the return to Africa on civilizing missions.
EXPLAIN BRIEFLY a couple of sentences on the history of this imperial? “civilizing”
mission…If we think of the history of what constitutes and composes the Black Atlantic
archive it seems necessary to take into account this dynamic and often conflicting
relationship to Africa.
Schomburg directly draws on and celebrates the material documentation and
exploration of Africa. He cites Paul Cuffee, Reverend Daniel Coker, Samuel Crother, and
John Russwom. All of these figures are instrumental for the production of African
history during this time period, but all of these figures and their work is embedded as
well as driven by the practice of scientific-European/Western inquiry. These are thought
of as “civilizing projects” to institutionalize the African/African American archive as a
legitimate/authoritative space. While these are extremely important measures and allow
for our own writings in this space now, they do come at the cost of excluding certain
types of work—like ceremony or ritual—to enter into scholarly practice not as object but
as method. In fact, ceremony would have been read as the event in need of literacy or in
39
need of documentation. While documentation serves the important purpose of bringing
and translating these histories and cultures into Western dialogues, we lose African
historiographic thinking and method. This is not to say that everything ancient is
somehow romantically or nostalgically good, but that a philosophy of historical work is
lost or limited in the process of constructing the modern understanding and conventions
of the Black Atlantic Archive. The experience that Philip highlights on the Africans on
board the ship could not have and isn’t a documented event nor would have
documentation in the sense of “literacy,” nor would textual /material history been the
means through which history would have been recorded. What is lost then, is the means
to read alternative perspectives on the act of recording or preserving the past that would
have been available to those African on board the ship. For example, what ceremonial or
spiritual practices would have been the means to understanding and accounting for this
experience? The discussion of the historical relationship with an African past and
philosophy was part of the discourse for the larger “New Negro” movement beyond
Schomburg. We can see this in Survey Graphic as well as the larger publication history
(Can you find in Crisis?), but we also see this relationship to the African historical past
presented in the poetry.
The poetry, however, becomes the space through which to question some of these
finely divided historical stances between material and immaterial or intangible
knowledge making. We can find a good portrait of this kind of poetic-historical inquiry in
Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage,” which continues as part of the short piece, “The Art
of Ancestors”. The poem is published alongside of the images of African art from the
Barnes Foundation (PAGE). Cullen’s poem also picks up the dialogue on the
relationship to the “African” past. The poem begins with the question “WHAT is Africa
40
to me” to which he offers a series of readings. The first, he answers “Africa? A book one
thumbs/listlessly till slumber comes”(674). In this sense, Cullen reads—and literally
reads—Africa as a distantly researched place. Between the speaker of the poem and the
idea of “origin” is the history and culture of literacy, scholarship, and the study of race. In
this distance are the unknown elements of a pre-slavery past (or an unknown world)
where “monarch claws” leap from their “scabbards” (674). He presents “Africa” as a
place of wonderment as well as fear in its “nakedness”(674). This is not a history the
speaker claims or a past that the speaker identifies as his own, but an object of study or
inquiry through the text that procures wonder in its representation of the unknown as
though it were a new frontier.
As the poem continues, the speaker continues to evoke this relationship in setting
Africa as an exotic, distant world next to the new “civilized” construct of his own identity
as a modern poet. Like Schomburg, the past is something “read” or discovered through a
material culture or culture of western literacy. Therefore, Africa becomes a “book one
thumbs” rather than a ceremony or culture one participates in. Africa, in the poem, and
through the distance that the speaker feels is “removed”. In this removal, the continent
and the inheritance of this public memory/relationship becomes romanticized (even
exotic). Africa becomes edenic/idyllic past full of songs from “wild barbaric birds,”
“juggernauts of flesh,” and a place where “young forest lovers lie” (Cullen 674).
Through these descriptions, Africa becomes Eden and a Western romance of the
romanticized unknown or the untouched/pre-civilized past. In fact, the reminder that the
speaker comes from the position of “civilization,” further illustrates the removal or
distance from the concept of origin (and in many ways denies the possibility of return).
He states “Stubborn heart and rebel head/ Have you not yet realized/ You and I are
41
civilized?”(674). In proposing this statement as a question, he introduces ambiguity into
this relationship to his African origins—an origin that through the rest of the poem
continues to enter and consume his consciousness, upsetting his modern philosophical
perspective (or inherited perspective). This continual presence of his past reflects
Derrida’s discussion of the spectral haunting and the past that continues to exert its force
on the present.
And yet, Cullen’s poem also intervenes in this separation by thinking through it as
a question. The poem critiques the speaker’s position and recognizes the tension between
the learned and westernized institution of knowledge from which he views his
relationship to his heritage and the “dark blood within”(Cullen 675). Here, the origin of
“Africa” is something embodied by the speaker within his body/identity. He states:
In an old remembered way
Rain works on me night and day.
Though three centuries removed
From the scenes my fathers loved.
My conversion came high-priced.
I belong to Jesus Christ,
Preacher of humility:
Heathen gods are naught to me—
Quaint, outlandish, heathen gods
Black men fashion out of rods,
Clay and brittle bits of stone,
In a likeness like their own. (675)
42
Unlike Schomburg’s objective embrace of scientific history and his persistent
measure to find the “evidence” of the past through the recorded documents and materials,
Cullen’s poetry acknowledges this distant (and literate) relationship to the past, but also
disrupts its easy acquisition or method of distinguishing that which was “modern” or
“civilized” from that which was “ancient” or “heathen”. In fact, the speaker of the poem
questions these categories and knowledge systems that in many ways accommodated the
institution and acceptance of the slave trade.
Like Philip’s critique of the learned knowledge and methods she has available to
read the past (those methods implicated in the silencing and condition of “loss”). Cullen’s
speaker is also aware that his access to the past—in this case, his conversion and the
boundaries, restrictions, and silencing that comes alongside of this conversion—comes at
a high price. In this tension, the speaker asks, “Do I not play a double part?”(Cullen
675). Cullen evokes the doubleness of his role as part of a Western as well as an African
heritage. If he is to be civilized (i.e. believe in the “Holy Ghost”), then he also
degenerates his “dark” African past. In fact, the speaker recognizes that if he, who he
served, were reflective of his own racial position (and therefore, too, an inheritor of this
history), then the speaker would know that he shares a “kindred” woe with the “lamb of
God”(Cullen 675). He ends by announcing, “Lord, I fashion dark gods, too”(675). For
the speaker, the consideration of his heritage leads him to rethink the way in which he
receives this god or Christian narrative/image. Similar to Philip’s disruption of archival
reading of the legal text that admonishes the slave to inhuman or property like status,
Cullen intervenes in the reception or heritage of Western narrative. He does not refuse
the narrative, but he directly challenges and revises the epistemological inheritance of
this body of knowledge.
43
At one level, the Harlem Renaissance begins a more institutional practice of the
Black Atlantic archive. The categories of new intellectual and new Negro fit with the
kind of significant momentum of documenting historical contribution. This was a
moment that championed academic and institutional knowledge and the construction of
something like Schomburg’s collection of Black history at the New York Public library.
Schomburg’s efforts ushered in significant change in the construction and practice of
Black history. However, on another level, Schomburg’s practice also built this practice
on an adherence to Western paradigms of the archive and archival work. In looking at
and “recovering” the history of the Black Atlantic, Western paradigms may not
compensate or allow access to the histories that, in many ways, these paradigms excluded
if not erased. This period set up paradigms for scholarly practice in the Black Atlantic,
and yet it also limited the types of methods that it could draw from and that would count
as scholarly work. Moreover, the fact that a poem like Cullen’s “Heritage” addresses the
tension of received knowledge highlights poetic practice as a space for thinking through
scholarly practice.
In contemporary literary histories and the histories of the Black Atlantic (areas
that continually intersect), we see a continued dissonance and troubling of the archive “as
is” or as “inherited”. If we borrow Cullen’s language, the archival “heritage” we receive
distances us from some of the historical experiences and histories that might be told,
studied, or experienced. What was lost in this heritage? The rise of contemporary
scholarship on the archive of the Black Atlantic and the history of the African/African
American archive highlights a call for alternative archives and archival practices. These
alternatives compel us to rethink not just the material culture, but the knowledge practices
through which we receive, construct, and create (and remember) these histories.
44
Glissant’s Poetics of Relations presents a useful starting point in re-theorizing this
space as a dynamic and multi-dimentional historical event. In many ways, we can align
Glissant with Philip’s project. Both are poets, and both see poetry as a platform for
thinking through scholarly practices and a critique of received institutional practices or
theories. Moreover, Glissant’s text marks a shift in the discourse of the diaspora to
consider how something like the Middle Passage constructs a consciousness (and a
historical consciousness/memory) that acts on multiple layers and levels of knowledge.
Rather than a singular perspective of the historical event, Glissant argues that the
experience of forced removal—displaced from a known culture and entry into the
passage across the Atlantic to this new “unknown” position as slave—creates a means
(and epistemology) of knowing the world that might be seen in a multi-directional or
relative way.
The “relation” he marks out in the beginning of the text emerges from the hull of
the boat in the Middle Passage. Glissant describes the forced and chaotic journey across
the Atlantic as an event marked by the unknown (5). In the beginning of his discussion,
he places us back into the hull of the ship to imagine this event and to participate in its
continual reimagining in order to illustrate the kinds of channels of knowledge arising
and colliding into each other through this experience. It is in the hull, that the slave
leaves behind what is known and confronts what is unknown that produces this first
relational memory or record of the “African” past that is known unfolding alongside the
uncertain and yet certain destination of the institution of slavery (slave trade). Glissant
imagines this journey in the image of the fibril:
The slave trade came through the cramped doorway of the slave ship leaving a
wake like that of crawling desert caravans. It might be drawn like this: )--------(
45
African countries to the East the lands of America to the West. This creature is in
the image of the fibril. (5)
In this entry or portal into this new world, institution, and geography, Glissant imagines a
confrontation of exchange and entanglement of cultures and means of knowing within the
slave trade. It is in this space of confrontation that the concept of creolization emerges
and can help us better understand and figure the presence of the “unknown,” uncertain, or
erased/lost as part of the archive of the Black Atlantic.
This creolization takes place in Glissant’s figuration of an “open boat” and the
ship that would transport slaves from Africa across the Atlantic. The open boat, literally,
in Glissant’s illustration, opens the memory of the Black Atlantic. The first opening that
takes place is an entrance into and an understanding of producing knowledge from the
“unknown” (5). The unknown is captured by three dimensions of an “abyss”—a key
metaphor or approach to understanding this historical event and the difficulty of
archiving this history as a singular dimension. The first abyss the slaves would have
experienced is the boat itself as a terrifying belly or womb through which the slave is
enclosed but also aware of the uncertainty and unknown historical sentence this boat will
impose. The second dimension is the depth of the sea. This abyss for Glissant is where
he, too, references the experience of the Zong and the jettisoning of slaves overboard to
relieve the load (6). These depths and the bodies that Glissant mark time and space in
their “punctuation of scarcely corroded balls ad chains”(6). Glissant explains that while
the ocean presents a constant flux of beginning—a vast space of continual origin—it is
also marked by the presence of these chained bodies that mark the Middle Passage. Last,
the third abyss Glissant illustrates is the unknown at the head of the bow. It is an
unfathomable passage with, and, as Glissant imagines it, boundless. It is a “nonworld”,
46
he writes, “no ancestor will haunt…”(7). In this abyss of the unknown life ahead of the
slaves, the destination is also always reflective of what has been left behind:
Paralleling this mass of water, the third metamorphosis of the abyss thus projects
a reverse image of all that had been left behind, not to be regained for generations
except—more and more threadbare—in the blue savannas of memory of
imagination.
The asceticism of crossing this way the land-sea that, unknown to you, is the
planet Earth, feeling a language vanish, the word of gods vanish, and the sealed
image of even the most everyday object, of even the most familiar animal, vanish.
The evanescent taste of what you ate. The hounded scent of ochre earth and
savannas. (7)
The experience of this historical event of the Black Atlantic is a movement through these
multiple layers of the unknown. The archive or record of this experience, then, cannot be
contained simply by a document. As Glissant says, the only documents on board would
have been the account books (5). The knowledge produced on board this boat is
knowledge and an account of these unknowns as well as the “evanescent” or traces (to
borrow from Muriel Rukeyser) of an “African” life left behind. Notice, too, that these
memories then become, and in many ways the archive becomes a place of imagination.
In a footnote marking the beginning of this discussion of the “open boat,” Glissant
marks out the architecture of this confrontation as one of the written merging with the
oral. We can think of this moment as an important moment in the archive of the Black
Atlantic as well--to think through the archive and the challenge to material culture that an
event like the Black Atlantic emits. We have the confrontation of the impulses of the
written word and oral culture. Glissant writes:
47
This is the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the
written word and the impulses of orality. The only written thing on the slave
ships was the account book listing the exchange value of the slaves. Within the
ship’s space the cry of those deported was stifled, as it would be in the realm of
the Plantations. This confrontation still reverberates to this day. (5)
If we think through this event as a confrontation, then we trouble the idea of a written
record’s ability to survey and archive this experience. For Glissant, the history of the
Middle Passage must be thought of in terms of both the written and the oral and an
awareness of this confrontation. An archive of the Black Atlantic, therefore, must in
some way have an understanding or acknowledge an understanding of the layers of this
experience beyond what the material—in this case a western culture of literacy
production—could offer/accomodate. Moreover, Glissant’s reimagining of this event and
our entrance into this history (and history making) is also about our own confrontation
with the unknown. Glissant suggests we read this as a shared sense (asks us to imagine
an open boat) and therefore continuously relational, moving, and redirecting this
experience.
In rethinking the history and memory of the Black Atlantic, Glissant’s text also
contributes the concept of “errantry,” or in French, errance. The concept of errantry
challenges the idea of rootedness (Deleuze and Guattari), and reconceptualizes identity as
restless, wandering (as well as directed, according to the translator, by some “sacred
calling”(PAGE)). The need to find and claim roots motivates the construction of nation
and culture, and from these fixed sense of identification, the construction of institutional
practices. However, “[t]he root” according to Glissant, “ is monolingual” (15). It gives
only a sense of one’s consciousness as singular. Whereas, in a more “transient” (14) and
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unsettled version, identity is the sum of relations to others (14) and is more pluralistic as
well as constantly under transition and incorporates a local sense of identity (14). He
writes, “Relation, in contrast, is spoken multilingually”(19). Errantry, moreover, in its
wanderings and restlessness accommodates the unknown or “fathomless”(21). This is a
way of interpreting intervention, disruption, trouble, and play, and always changing.
We can see echoes of Glissant’s nomadic rethinking of identity if we extend to the
concept of the archive and the capacity to disrupt rooted methods of material authority in
the Black Atlantic. This call for a phsilosophy or subjectivity of errancy is a means of
rethinking methodology by “rerouting” its fixed criteria and practices (16). If errantry
imagines an identity that is both constantly in flux (restless) as well as moving forward
(uprooted), then the totalitarianism of the archive as a space through which to recover the
authentic documents and records of the past can be reimagined as a space through which,
perhaps, multiple and shifting methods of recovery work can take place. Rather than
aligned to and authorized by Western practices, the archive can be the site of
unsettlement, where a relationship between western and African practices might collide,
exchange, and uproot.
The discussion of alternative archives carries into recent scholarship. In March
2012, the PMLA devoted a section to “The Practices of the Ethnic Archives”.
Responding to recent challenges, critiques, and conversations on the possibilities of new
(or at least different) methodologies of working with archives of non-white or non
European figures and texts, a group of scholars considered alternative literacy practices.
In part, these writers want to respond to the “various ways ethnic literatures are rendered
‘illiterate’ or unreadable”(357). While all authors engage the key figures of
contemporary archival theory (Foucault, Derrida, Spivak), each also acknowledges the
49
gaps or silences that the archive holds in the production of knowledge. In the
introduction to the section, Dana Williams and Marissa K. Lopez resituate the study of
the archive as a question of practice rather than just refigure its definition: “Should
scholars continue to recover and foreground artifacts that reveal indigenous knowledge,
or should they reconsider the archive wholesale, questioning its politics and practices,
and implement new practices and methodologies?”(357-8).
Williams and Lopez’s question calls for attention to the way in which
conventional methodologies may not adequately (or worse yet, might reinforce
imperialist notions of normativity) address a practice of recovery or preservation from the
perspective or position in which “ethnic”18 knowledge is produced. While I am uncertain
that a neat line can be drawn across what constitutes an ethnic boundary or definition (let
alone an archival practice), what their focus on this discussion raises is the call for
alternative practices. These practices confront assumptions of our creation of an archival
past and the kinds of material practices built on these assumptions that assume a
“cultivated truth”(358). Moreover, in these challenges to assumptions of practice and
methodology, the writers highlight or recognize the necessity to find practices that
illuminate the “multiethnic cacophony of voices that require reconsideration of
established knowledge and knowledge productions alike”(358). Last, echoing the
discussion of the law in section II of this chapter, the article emphasizes that we challenge
the “established law” and ask us to “imagine what new knowledges will emerge when the
ethnic archive begins speaking to itself on its own terms”(359).
18
I am not exactly sure of their use of the “ethnic” archive as a stable term. What Philip shows
us is that the there is likely a variable perspective at play rather a severe or neatly disentangled
practice of ethnic versus “western”.
50
Their work responds to the troubling practices of the archive and its traditional
methodologies to construct historical narratives of the Middle Passage. If we take
Glissant’s description and imagining of the Middle Passage as the type of “cacophony” of
perspectives and historical meaning making at work in this journey, then we can
understand how the call for alternative methodologies of recovery (and preservation) are
necessary for actually reaching and understanding these histories. Recovery work must
let these voices speak on their own terms. In addition to rethinking the limitations of
cultural or geographical perspective of archival work, attention to methodology can also
include challenges to the material.
. David Scott, in his introduction to the June 2008 issue of Small Axe, devoted to
“The Archaeologies of Black Memory” symposium and seminar that explores
“modalities of remembrance”(CITE), explores alternative archives in his work on Marcus
Garvey. He examines what it means to work with a seemingly dearth of papers on
Caribbean black history that he calls the “archaeology of Black memory”. He describes
this process of revealing the practice of memory as a practice of critical work:
I gradually came to realize that embedded in the seemingly quotidian construction
of this archive of the mass movement founded and led by Marcus Garvey—its
events and institutions and rituals and personalities and correspondence—there
was an activity of thinking and imagination that opened out vast possibilities, not
just of memory, but of counter memory: the moral idiom and semiotic registers of
remembering against the grain of the history of New World black reracination,
subjection, and exclusion. And consequently, this activity suggested to me a
relation between the idea of an archive, the modalities of memory, the problem of
a tradition and practices of criticism. (1)
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Scott’s discussion shows us the way in which the recovery of slavery’s past
confronts archival production and archival knowledge—that memory is a practice of
criticism. In this case, Scott refers to criticism as a mode of ‘re-membering,’ of sorting
through the documents, materials, and records that keep the past ‘alive’ within the present
(1). He makes the connection between the type of work (or “distinctive labor” of the
archive) and the types of practices or recovery at play19.
To work within a traditional archival collection of the Black Atlantic requires that
the scholar also confront those systems of collection, record, or historical inscription that
do not “fit” the collection or take place within different cultural systems, institutions, and
locations. Greg Carr’s contribution to the PMLA’s practice of the ethnic archives
“Translation, Recovery, and ‘Ethnic’ Archives of Africana: Inscribing Meaning beyond
Otherness” evaluates recovery of the “African past”. He examines how academic work
within the study of African studies explores other systems of “inscription” or record
keeping. He writes:
The academic discipline of Africana studies attempts, in its more ambitious
manifestations, to take up this challenge by expanding ideas of what constitutes
the range of inscription system that contain the genealogies and trace elements of
African intellectual work over both long-term and communicative human history
(Carr. ‘What Black Studies is Not’ 178). (Carr 361)
19
Shaping Scott’s conception of the archive is Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. Rather
than the archive as institution, Foucault adds that the archive might be thought of as “the law of
what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements and events”(cite). The
archive, under this vision, is the collection of what can be said from the system that determines
the kinds of languages that can be produced. If we want to rethink the practices (as Philips) has
done, then we have to also, under this equation, change the possibilities or systems of what can be
said.
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Carr suggests that scholars seeking to work or “produce” research and recover
within “African Intellectual work” need to think through the terms of the archive. This
type of work demands a more “expansive” view, one in which “definitions would
transcend both the possible and admissible knowledges represented by the term ethnic
and by the idea of ethnicity as a generative concept of otherness with its origins in
idealized approaches by Greeks and Romans to order the people they encountered and
sought to understand”(Carr 361). Carr’s attention to alternative methodologies suggests
that prior practices deliver a limited view of interpretative possibilities. He ends the
discussion by suggesting that we place these archival methodologies in play with each
other:
Archives of people of African descent must be placed in a constellation with one
another—and then within a larger context. These will be knitted together with
techniques of translation and recovery that learn from similar exercises in vertical
(time) and horizontal (space) translation, in exchange, and in discourse
undertaken by the expansive network of archives, museums, and academic
institutions, and cultural centers […] (363).
In thinking through the archives in this manner, we produce an archive that is
decentered20 from singular forms of institutional practice and literacy. In an alternative
approach that disrupts, introduces, and constellates different forms and practices of
archival methodology, we can create new historical narratives, or in Philip’s case,
historical poetics. (CONSIDERING INCLUDING HERE A READING OF
20
I am borrowing the term “decentered history” from Natalie Zemon Davis’ talk in the symposium “Doing
Decentered History”. In her talk “Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global
World” she writes that “the decentering historian does not tell the story of the past only from the vantage
point of a single part of the world or of powerful elites, but rather widens his or her scope, socially and
geographically, and introduces plural voices into the account”(190).
53
CONTEMPORARY POETICS THAT DO SIMILAR WORK TO PHILIP—Robert
Hayden, Elizabeth Alexander, Kevin Young…)
“The Africans are in the Text”
What would it mean to access the perspective of the African on board the ship as
a form of archival work? Rethinking the archive and the archival document through an
African centered view of history and historical practice allows for different kinds of
histories and meaning from those histories to be constructed. To address what has been
figured as archival “loss,” Philip’s poetic text offers possibilities for reconceiving
archival methods of literacy work. The poems in Zong! turn to other forms of archival
knowledge, specifically, the practice of Ifa divination. This ritual provides alternative
means of addressing historical representation and reconceives what the Western archival
condition figures as material/historical loss.
In referencing and extending the language of the archive to include or address
these rituals as unique archival systems, Philip’s poems challenges us to rethink the types
of readings and the kinds of readings we perform here—let alone, asks us to rethink the
archive and its wider practices. Key themes emerge in Ifa divination that allow us to
understand what kinds of methods and modes of thinking it admits: Ifa as a practice and
performance of a record of knowledge and a system of culture; Ifa as a summoning of
both hereditary or ancestral access and the divine, human/non human, and
tangible/intangible; Ifa as a production that extends across temporalities; and Ifa as a
collective, communal, or shared act of producing knowledge. These themes challenge
the idea of a “master” text or an official reading of the archive as a material event.
Moreover, this understanding of Ifa opens the possibility of recovering “loss” and
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bringing voice/agency to those figures not represented by the Western archive. In
addition, Ifa, also reflects a social force, one meant to mend or heal the counseled. In this
way, the alternative method that Philip offers through a reading of Ifa can counsel or
mediate these spaces of historical quandary. Within a more performative or ritualistic
sense of archival recovery, Philip presents a poetic reading of the past that is a living,
transformative, and ever-evolving. It reflects the convergence of Western and African
systems and accommodates the possibility of producing multiple readings of the history
of the Middle Passage. Casting Ifa within and as an intellectual or scholarly system,
Philip asks us to rethink how these histories are experienced and produced.
For the African slaves captured on the ship, the means of recording the experience
of the Zong would not have been preserved through Western literacy practices of material
record but through the rituals and collective practices of Western African tradition and
meaning making. What we do know is that ceremony and ritual play an important role in
this journey and in the record of this history. A focus on the “creolization” of the archive
has done much to call for alternative practices (as evidenced in the previous section), but
has yet to fully examine phenomena or spiritual practices as part of archival work. What
we do know, however, is that an African centric worldview of history and memory work
would qualify Ifa as a practice that records, collects, and preserves culture.
Wande Abimbola, one of the most known scholars on African ritual cultures,
specifically Ifa, discusses the collective and historical characteristics of Ifa divination
poetry. He writes, “The Yoruba regard ese Ifa as the store-house of their culture. They
believe that ese ifa contains the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors throughout
history. Ese Ifa therefore contains everything that is considered memorable in Yoruba
culture throughout the ages”(31). The idea that ritual is a means of preserving cultural
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memory is again echoed by Eugenio Matibag in his article “Ifa and Interpretation: An
Afro Caribbean Literary Practice”. Similar to Abimbola, Matibag describes Ifa as a space
of knowledge preservation. He suggests, “The Ifa itself is a vast information-retrieval
system that preserves, accesses, and processes the texts of mythological, naturalist,
medicinal, and spiritual knowledge”(153). Both Matibag and Abimbola’s description of
Ifa divination reflect the concept of the archive as a place to “store” and access cultural
information. Rather than a place of materiality, however, it is a place of performance,
language, and practice.
Before the discussion of Ifa, I want to start with the concept of ritual more broadly
as an important (if not integral) aspect of recovering the Middle Passage. I want to echo
two images of memory and memory loss Wole Soyinka describes in his recent Of Africa,
an examination of the concept and construction of Arica read through sets of historical,
colonial, and literary encounters. The two images that I want to capture are the “well of
attenuation” and the “tree of forgetfulness,” both monuments to the Middle Passage.
Both of these images and the philosophy behind their construction reflect erasures of
history but also illustrate the role ritual plays in this history. In the latter, I want to
emphasize ceremony as a means of understanding how to rethink the recovery of these
histories and to access the knowledge and language systems that would produce or
preserve an archive/record of this cultural experience.
As Soyinka, describes, if a person visits Badagry, the slave port in Nigeria, he or
she will find a memorial marking the “point of no return”(Soyinka 60). The monument is
a water pot. Soyinka explains:
It is known as the Well of Attenuation. Every slave was made to stop and drink
from it, since the water was laced with some kind of potion—or perhaps simply
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psychic potency!—that supposedly induced a state of amnesia. Their past was
completely wiped away, and the captives moved submissively into a new state of
existence—slavehood. (61)
This monument to erasure, to forgetting one’s past and cultural bearings, speaks to the
concept of historical loss and the beginning of a transatlantic dispersal of African culture.
The second image or memorial to erasure Soyinka captures is “The Tree of
Forgetfulness” (67). Similar to the sunken water pot, slaves would circle the tree in a
ritual to “forget their former existence, wipe their minds clean of the past and be
receptive to the stamp of strange places”(68). The ritual, again, marks the system of
historical erasure and movement to a new world and institution of meaning making. And
yet, what we also know, and what Soyinka addresses, is that not all was forgotten.
Culture, memory, and ritual traveled and dispersed with the slaves and ceremonial
practice continues to mark this event.
I wanted to return for a moment to these memorial sites in order to remember,
ourselves, that to recapture or recover the history of the Middle Passage, should include
an understanding of West African ritual as part of the experience of recovery/accessing
this past. And, as Philip’s text asks us to do, if we know that ritual and ceremony are an
important component in the African centered perspective of the history of slavery, then
what is to say that it could not influence the type of work and reading done in the archive.
How might a Yoruba and/or Ifa based worldview reshape and contribute to our archival
practices and the concept of reading an archival text? What kinds of alternative methods
are possible or might be integrated through ritual into our reading practices?
In Ifa as well as in Soyinka’s examples of the rituals practiced by slaves forced
embarkation to the Middle Passage performance is key here. More recently, as discussed
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previously in the introduction to this dissertation, performance has become a key area in
rethinking archival knowledge. Diane Taylor’s examination The Archive and the
Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas argues that performance offers
a more open and expansive understanding of the archive. She evaluates the way dance,
movement, and theater can embody historical experience and play a central role in
keeping and conserving the memory of a community and culture. One must recognize,
she states, that there are other sites for history preservation as well as recovery than
literate or written records. Taylor’s more inclusive vision of the archive (and
performance as repertoire) helps address Philip’s inclusion of divination in her reading of
the archival record. Taylor challenges the transmission of history as a material-centric
production. She writes:
‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters,
archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly
resistance to change. […] The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied
memory: performances, gestures, orality, dance, singing—in short, all those acts
usually thought as ephemeral, non reproducible knowledge. (19-21)
The understanding of repertoire or the more performative aspects of cultural
knowledge approach provides a way for thinking about Philip’s use of Ifa as enacting an
“intangible” or ritualistic means or archival production. Moreover, as Taylor suggests,
this type of thinking and this methodology confront existing academic disciplines and
systems of inquiry/critical systems. We can turn to these performances, such as Ifa
diviation, as a site where history is “stored,” “kept,” and “preserved”. But unlike the
Western archive which hinges on material evidence or the authority of the document as
proof of historical being, an oral tradition and performance of ritual allows or admits
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other beings or intangibles as agents within history and as shaping our view of the past in
the present.
So what is Ifa as performance, practice, and belief system? My understanding of
Ifa, I will admit, can only skim the surface of this dynamic and evolving cultural, social,
and spiritual system. Ifa divination is a West African divination practice common
amongst the Yoruba in Nigeria21. The worship of Ifa involves ceremonies, sacrifices, and
other rituals (Bascom 3). It is also a mode of practice and a system of divination. As a
philosophical practice (a mode of divination), it serves as a means of knowledge inquiry
and production. As a ceremonial practice, it is a means of confronting the invisible
world, and represents a mediation between the world of man and the world of the
divine—or orisas (Bascom 3; Murrell 35) These orisas or divine entities are accessed
through a system of “odu” or poetic verse that are part of a ceremonial practice (Bascom
3). In the Yoruba belief system or worldview, there is a multi-dimenstional present where
the physical and the spiritual are intersect. Babalows, or divination priests, help guide
and mediate individuals and culture through these practices.
Divination is also a part of everyday, community practice. Individuals and
communities turn to Ifa to seek counsel or to make sense out of a chaotic or problematic
situation. In this way, the divine is in contact with the “real” of everyday life and
problems. Therefore, Ifa provides a ritual and practice of consultation and inquiry into
unknowns. According to Murrell, “African divination is a channel of human-divine
communication and one of the primary ways of bringing order out of crisis and chaos. It
21
The Yoruba constitute the majority of the slaves shipped to the New World before the middle of the 18 th
century”(Agbali, Anthony Attah 272).
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is often the only institutional means by which most West Africans articulate their theory
of knowledge of the world and the spirits”(46 Murrell).
Ifa is an ever-evolving practice that constantly dervives new iterations of its
poetry and its language. It reflects and changes with the cultural it is part of. The ritual
itself involves the symbolic interpretation of palm nuts. The palm nuts correspond to
particular markings, which then connect to specific odu verses (or ifa divination poetry)
(Bascom 5).. These odu verses have particular themes, are quite riddle like, but serve to
give guidance on a situation. The priest selects a set that he believes most reflects and
addresses the situation or issue at hand. It is an interpretive practice (Bascom 11). There
are 16 themes or basic figures of odu and 256 derivations of these poetic verses (Bascom
3). Because of the amount of verses and the different combinations and variations that
are available, it is hard to document a precise or stable image of the ritual. Even though
Abimbola and Bascom’s work diligently transcribes many verses to text, the ritual resists
these finite records. In the explanation of his own transcription of Ifa divination, William
Bascom describes the limitations to recording this ritual (120). He admits that any
singular view of these texts or these practices would be a mistake and would diminish the
concept of Ifa as a practice and system of belief. I want to highlight this limitation in
order to show that just “documenting” Ifa is not the alternative means of archival
practice. Instead, we can recognize that ritual holds archival meaning, but also resists
documentation as part of its method. For Philip, then, Ifa presents a mode of recovery
that does not derive its authority from documentation, but from its practice.
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Philip’s use of Ifa opens alternative practices and, therefore, alternative readings
of the archive. In all but the first section of the text22, Philip introduces the language of
divination into the language of the legal record and the story of the Zong. Language such
as “oba” (king), “ifa” (ritual) “ori”(head) “omi” (water) “owo,” “osun” (deity of water)
“odu”(the ifa verses), “omo”(child), “ogun”(deity of iron), and “ile ife” all reflect Philip’s
engagement with divination verse. These are common pieces of the language and the
practice, and reference a separate, non-Western system of ordering and producing
knowledge. The presence of these images and references to Ifa also emphasize the
different agents and agencies involved in the practice—from spiritual to physical (human
and non-human agents).
Moreover, Philip’s text also strikes me as referencing the structure of the verse:
both the physical structure and the linguistic characteristics. Below is a snap shot of
Bascom’s transcription of divination verse “Ogbe Meji”. The Yoruba verse is above and
the English translation follows.
22
Although the language of Ifa does not appear in the first section, the names of the “ancestral” dead do
appear. Philip writes these names across the bottom of the page.
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(Bascom 162)
This verse narrates the story of a man who consults Ifa after a death. The man is warned
that he must make sacrifice to Ifa if he is to take a new wife. Since he did not make the
sacrifice, he becomes ill with sores, is confined to his home, and dies (163). The verse is
a commentary on the necessity of sacrifice in divination prctice. It speaks to the belief
that if one does not sacrifice under Ifa’s guidance, then there will be some consequence in
his daily life. The story highlights the interaction between the human and divine as well
as comments on Ifa as a social force instructing practice not only on one’s past, but also
the relationship of that past to one’s present condition. It is enigmatic in verse and
structure, and we see this same intonation of idea and language in Philip’s verse.
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Below is an excerpt from the beginning of Philip’s chapter “Ferrum” (or Iron).
We can see how the line structure echo the Ifa verse structure in Bascom’s
transcription23.
INSERT PICTURE
We can also see how the language and arrangement of the theme of human and
divine are at work in Philip’s text. She begins with a summoning of “ogun” or the god of
iron (127). Again, like the previous verse, there are multiple agents in this scene (human
and divine). It is their commentary that offers voice or consultation to the issue at hand.
In this case, the speaker of Philip’s poem mourns the loss of the voices of the past. She
questions what it means to seek these voices and to seek this narrative of the past from a
“tale
that can
not be/ told in this
tale”(127). Again, the question repeats the
dilemma of the archival document. How do you capture these voices of the past and give
this story historical agency, if the material document of the past is part of the system that
silenced and erased this past? The evocation of divination, however, suggests that some
crossings of this silence--some meaning and interpretation of the past--can emerge from
divination practice as a cultural and intellectual practice.
The interaction between Ifa and the archival text begins with the entrance of
Yoruba agents or figures into the poetry. The first interaction with Ifa occurs in the
section “Sal.” It begins “water parts/ the oba sobs”(59). The parting of the water
summons the opening of the record and an admittance of new methods of meaning
making. The presence of “oba”—meaning king—introduces the language of West
23
Common characteristics of the Ifa verse are repetition, word-play, personification, lexical-matching,
metaphor, parallelism, and onomatopaea (Abimbola 22). Philip’s text plays with these elements, in
particular, with repetition (thematic, structural, and alliterative) (Abimbola 23). The restatement or
repetition of part emphasizes particular themes for the reader, listener, or client thereby connecting the
language of the verse to the present performance and circumstances.
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African Yoruba. This is also a sacred term, embedded with or signifying in addition to
king, sacred hereditary or ancestry. We are delivered from the language of the law and
into a new system of accessing historical knowledge. This is not an archive that demands
material evidence, but one that summons the past and our relationship to the past through
performativity and ritual. (NOTE: Also occurs on 79,93,…)
The appearance of “Ifa” appears shortly after in the poem as a presence “falling
over/over the crew”(60). Philip’s arrangement presents a scene in which the narrative of
the crew—the narrative formed by the material records of the law—is interrupted by the
conjuring of Ifa. The presence of Ifa introduces a different or alternative practice that
allows, through its invocation of the dead or alternative landscapes or knowledge and
allow us to recognize the material and non material, tangible and intangible, “human and
nonhuman”(Amherd 5). Again, I’ll repeat what I have said before, Philip is not asking
that we believe in ghosts or ritual, but that we acknowledge that Ifa is a form of
knowledge making and therefore a repository of historical meaning. Ifa offers an ordering
of the world and an ordering of the past (and recovery of that past). What is most
fascinating then about its presence in the text is the type of practice that it admits and the
ways in which it can open what the Western archive figures and limits as opacity and
loss.
Extending from this initial call to part the water and open the archival document
and this historical past to ritual, is the repetition of and continued call of “Ifa”. It first
appears after the introduction of the “oba” (60). Extending onto the historical scene,
Philip literally embeds or releases Ifa into this mode of recovery.
Ifa
Ifa
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Ifa i
Fa
Fa
fa
fall
ing over
&
over the crew
(60)
Philip’s call to Ifa situates ritual into the scene of the crew and to the events on board the
ship. She introduces a hybrid reading, language, and means of understanding the
experience of the massacre and the history of the Zong. This is not about introducing the
“truth” in some singular form, but introducing the idea that recovery must access context
and mode of its production. Here, what would it mean to experience the Zong would
have been different for crew and African slave, and yet it also would have been
intertwined. If we repeat for a moment Foucault’s understanding of the archive as the law
of what can be said or what could be said, then here we have an inclusive reading where
the African historiographic practice might recenter or unhinge the Western archive. We
literally see the expanding dimension of the language of the law and of the history told
(and untold) on the Zong. This is not only about language hybridity, but also practice and
a means of seeing archival recovery as part of a world view, one in which ritual and
ceremonial performance would have been an important part of “recording” the
experience and meaning of circumstances of tragedy and memory through the Middle
Passage.
Moreover, Philip’s splitting of ifa into “if a” echoes structurally through the
poems (129). The emphasis on “if” opens the condition of possibility. Philip asks the
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reader to give way to an alternative construction or possibility of reading the archival
text. In addition, Philip’s also merges ifa with the phrase “If only” and signals a
continual revaluation of the past: if the event had or had not occurred, if there had been
water, if the Africans were to tell this story,if...This instance of continuity of the past
offers a means rethinking the past, and suggests, like Ifa represents, a type of knowledge
in action or progress (Peek 120). Moreover, in this presentation of possibility, Philip’s
poetry questions what is truth—a phrase that echoes William Bascom’s understanding of
Ifa paradox and its ability to produce multiple truths (William Bascom xii).
Moreover, the emergence of “if” from “Ifa” suggests a continual negotiation of
meaning between past and present. Noel Amherd recognizes this shifting and variable
process of interpretation in his examination of Ifa divination practices. He emphasizes
that Ifa ritual incorporates (in each performance) a repertoire of possible utterances.
Therefore, in this more flexible and multiple mode of interpretation, the objective is not
to adhere to a finalized version of the truth. Instead, he writes: “It does not seek to create
a hegemonic narrative but rather keeps open the potential dissonance of competing
histories and power”(Ammherd 166). He continues, “It is through Ifa’s intertextuality,
signifying towards that which is both interior and exterior to it through discursive
strategies and infinite incorporativeness, that it becomes a nexus of discourses, critique,
and authority”(Amherd 166). In Philip’s translation of the archival text, then, the
presence of Ifa opens a more flexible encounter with the conditions and possibilities of
truth making.
The presence of Ifa also signals the translation of spiritual ideas into recovery
practices. In the poems, the concept of “raising the dead,” and the echo of
“nommo”(Philip 114), or the ancestral spirits brings intangible agents into the archival
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record. The poems frequently signal to the concept of kin. For example, Philip writes,
“for ogun../for sango…I seek the skin in kin they the kin in skin we render them in to
negroes into bonesand water”(Philip 165). Through the presence of “kin,” the poem
gives body to these historical agents. The bones are lost (in a Western Archaeological
reading), but, in an African centric historiographic practice such as divination, one can
access the voices of these kin to give them voice.
In her journal, Philip speaks directly towards the poem’s appropriation of the
spiritual world. In her discussion of the difficulty of working within the legal text, Philip
pushes into the limitations of the text. She states that she is searching for something else,
another voice or another agent within, what she calls, the “tombstone” of the archival
record. In a set of notes, she writes out “The Africans are in the text” (192). It is here
that she thinks through what it means to access them. She proceeds with a discussion of
techniques. She explains the kind of violent re-ordering of the document:
I murder the text, literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating
adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions
overboard, jettisoning adverbs: I separate subject from verb, verb from object—
create semantic mayhem, until my hands bloodied, from so much killing and
cutting, reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards, and like some seer, sangoma,
or prophet who, having sacrificed an animal for signs and portents of new life, or
simply life, reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling. (194)
She continues to reference returning to the ancestral past and “lost kin”(195). She
acknowledges that the position of recovery is also an extension to the experience of
history. There remains a sort of communication with the dead and with the ancestral past.
This is a way of confronting the “non-being” of Africans (197). She writes that she
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conjures the “presence of excised Africans”(199) from a text that dictates what is and
what is not allowed in the archive.
STILL NEED Conclusion: Again, emphasizes a shift from what we know to how
we know. Amherd: “Instead, the force of Ifa and its babalawo practictioners is
that of linking, recombing, refaming, provoking, and mobilizing past experience
to understand current trajectories and their possible or even probable
consequences”(Amherd 205).
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