Impossible Witnesses

Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony

Dwight McBride

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814764169
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

Even the most cursory review of black literary production during the nineteenth century indicates that its primary concerns were the issues of slavery, racial subjugation, abolitionist politics and liberation. How did the writers of these narratives "bear witness" to the experiences they describe? At a time when a hegemonic discourse on these subjects already existed, what did it mean to "tell the truth" about slavery?

Impossible Witnesses explores these questions through a study of fiction, poetry, essays, and slave narratives from the abolitionist era. Linking the racialized discourses of slavery and Romanticism, it boldly calls for a reconfiguration of U.S. and British Romanticism that places slavery at its center.

Impossible Witnesses addresses some of the major literary figures and representations of slavery in light of discourses on natural rights and law, offers an account of Foucauldian discourse analysis as it applies to the problem of "bearing witness," and analyzes specific narratives such as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," and "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano."

A work of great depth and originality, Impossible Witnesses renders traditional interpretations of Romanticism impossible and places Dwight A. McBride at the forefront of studies in race and literature.

1. INTRODUCTION

Bearing Witness: Memory, Theatricality, the Body, and Slave Testimony

The chief concern of this book is mapping the rhetorical markers that constitute the terrain of abolitionist discourse. Recasting the abolition debate in terms of a discourse usefully places central significance on the issues of language, rhetorical strategy, audience, and the status and/or production of the “truth” about slavery. This recasting also broadens our considerations of abolitionist discourse to include not just anti-slavery writing but the various discursive forces that gave rise to and made possible, even necessary, such writing. This, in turn, provides a fertile ground on which further and ultimately more probing work in this area is possible. Additionally, this shift in focus has the effect of deepening our understanding of the transatlantic and cosmopolitan quality of abolitionist discourse, thereby complicating much of reigning historiographical wisdom, which historicizes abolitionism in narrow and often nationally delineated contexts.

The primary site of contestation for slavery debates in the nineteenth century was African humanity. Theories such as Hegel’s description of Africa in The Philosophy of History as the “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit” or “merely isolated sensual existence” and the popular climatological theories disseminated throughout the eighteenth century, along with the obsession of nineteenth-century anthropologists (fueled by the theory of evolution) with the measurement of race differences,¹ are examples of racial thinking that circulated widely in an effort to prove that Africans were fundamentally inferior to Europeans and were, therefore, especially fitted for slavery. Such ideas also served as moral justification for much of the treatment of Africans under slavery. From the content and rhetoric of the debates waged between the anti-slavery agitators and the pro-slavers, one can see that the major debates were not only over the nature of slavery as an institution but also over the nature of the slave. Indeed, these debates reveal much about the moral stakes involved for the slave master as well. It was Montesquieu who said, with irony: “It is impossible for us to assume that these people [Africans] are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians” (250).

A preliminary understanding of the issues involved in the debates over slavery, then, provides a point of departure from which to explain the discourses that animate, as well as the context that both enables and limits, the testimony of slave narrators. Such an understanding further uncovers the complex relationship between the slave witness and those who would receive his or her testimony. The “reader” is not only constructed by the witness, but the imagined reader becomes completely discursive for the witness. The reader represents the fray of discourses, so to speak, into which the witness must enter to be heard at all. This, as we shall see, has far-reaching implications for slave testimony.²

My selection of the variety of texts discussed in this introduction and throughout this book has much to do with the variety of genres that anti-slavery argument itself assumed. The range included literary texts, political pamphlets, speeches, essays, newspaper articles, historical and scholarly treatises on both the institution and the morality of slavery, and, of course, slave narratives. This broad-ranging approach to understanding abolitionism, rather than assuming a hierarchy among these forms, is concerned with the production of meaning that is possible when one considers the interplay of these forms taken together in the terrain that is abolitionist discourse. Rather than observing generic and disciplinary boundaries, my approach requires a break with such observances in order to think more clearly about the narrative and rhetorical strategies and the figurative and philosophical language that create the discursive regularities of abolitionist discourse.

I employ the metaphor of a “discursive terrain” to describe what is created by abolitionist discourse or the abolitionist debates. For the moment, I examine this metaphor of the discursive terrain in order to understand the situation of discourse into which the slave narrator enters when he or she takes pen in hand. If there is a discursive terrain created by abolitionist discourse, what exactly is the function of that terrain? What does that terrain do to the slave narrator? What does it mean to the slave narrator? If the situation of the discursive terrain is that there is a language about slavery that preexists the slave’s telling of his or her own experience of slavery, or an entire dialogue or series of debates that preexist the telling of the slave narrator’s particular experience, how does one negotiate the terms of slavery in order to be able to tell one’s own story? The importance of this idea is that the discursive terrain does not simply function to create a kind of overdetermined way of telling an experience; it creates the very codes through which those who would be readers of the slave narrative understand the experience of slavery. If language enable articulations, language also enables us to read, to decipher, and to interpret those articulations. As a result, it becomes very important for the slave narrator to be able to speak the codes, to speak the language that preexists the telling of his or her story. Hence the story has to conform to certain codes, certain specifications that are overdetermined by the very discursive terrain into which the slave narrator is entering or inserting him or herself. The variety of examples to follow suggests the extent to which the concerns of abolitionism, almost from the very beginning of its institutionalization (marked by the organizations in Britain, France, and the United States that first appeared in the late eighteenth century to address the problem of slavery), were transatlantic and transgeneric. Considered in this light, a far more cosmopolitan context for abolitionism emerges than that for which reigning scholarship seems to allow.

Related to this situation of the slave narrator with regard to the discursive terrain is Michel Foucault’s discussion of the position of the madman in “The Discourse on Language.”³ The slave is also in the position of Foucault’s madman with regard to how the madman’s language is read and deciphered:

We have only to think of the systems by which we decipher this speech; we have only to think of the network of institutions established to permit doctors and psychoanalysts to listen to the mad and, at the same time, enabling the mad to come and speak, or, in desperation, to withhold their meager words; we have only to bear all this in mind to suspect that the old division [between raison and folie] is just as active as ever, even if it is proceeding along different lines and, via new institutions, producing rather different effects. (217)

This relates to the staging of slavery at the auction block and the use of corporal punishment.⁴ This is also not unlike the staging of abolitionism, the carting out of black bodies onto the stage to bear witness to their authentic experiences of slavery. It was, after all, common for the slave narrators to deliver their testimonies orally on the abolitionist “lecture circuit” before the accounts were committed to paper and published as narratives. This black body that testified on stage was somehow more truthful than the word of white abolitionists, who were mere witnesses one step removed, as they were not themselves slaves. Even eyewitness accounts on the part of white abolitionists did not make them authentic in this regard—not authentic in the way abolitionists wanted, needed, and desired to have “real” black bodies on stage telling their “real,” “authentic” stories.⁵

But let us return to the issue of the overdeterminacy of the slave’s testimony. We see that slave testimonies are being framed all the time by the context of their presentation. It is the theater of abolitionism that enables the moment of articulation, the moment of bearing witness. Yet, even as the discursive terrain enables these articulations, it also restricts them. Again, as Foucault says, “we only have to think of the network of institutions established to permit doctors and psychoanalysts to listen to the mad and, at the same time, enabling the mad to come and speak” (217). Abolitionists or potential abolitionists who would hear these testimonies also had to be competent to read abolitionist discourse and had to understand something of the development and dissemination of that discourse in order to be able to hear the slave or the ex-slave. Even more radically, the discourse is what allowed the slave to come and speak in the first place. But to speak of what? It allowed for speech on one’s very experience as a slave. That is, it produced the occasion for bearing witness, but to an experience that had already been theorized and prophesied. In this way, the slave serves as a kind of fulfillment of the prophecy of abolitionist discourse. The slave is the “real” body, the “real” evidence, the “real” fulfillment of what has been told before. Before the slave ever speaks, we know the slave; we know what his or her experience is, and we know how to read that experience. Although we do not ourselves have that experience, we nevertheless know it and recognize it by its language. This is because the language that the slave has to speak in, finally, is the language that will have political efficacy. And the language that will have the greatest degree of efficacy is the language of slavery that the reader already recognizes—the very discourse that creates the situation for the slave to be able to speak to us at all. I mean this both in the theatrical sense of speaking publicly⁶ and in the written sense of the slave narratives that we still have today (in terms of the rhetorical performativity of those narratives). In this way, the slave’s narrative also bears witness to the accuracy of the reports and testimony of white abolitionists.

In addressing the issue of truth or authenticity in testimony, Foucault offers the following comments:

Finally, I believe that this will to knowledge, thus reliant upon institutional support and distribution, tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse—I am speaking of our own society. I am thinking of the way Western literature has, for centuries, sought to base itself in nature, in the plausible, upon sincerity and science—in short, upon true discourse. (219)

This is instructive when one thinks of the Romantic project of treating or thematizing the common man, the oppressed, and the lowly all as extensions of “Nature.” For the Romantics, there was not a more definitive sign of the “authentic” or real than that of Nature. In the context of the idea of theatricality, the slave represents a state of nature. We will have occasion to observe this idea at work in chapter 2, in William Lloyd Garrison’s statement about the naturalness of the African’s language that David Walker’s appeal trades on. The slave is the material—the real, raw material—of abolitionist discourse. The slave is the referent, the point, the very body around which abolitionist discourse coheres and quite literally “makes sense.” As is the case with the producers of any narrative, slave witnesses had to understand clearly the terms of the discursive terrain to which they addressed themselves. Once they did, they had to determine how best to mold, bend, and shape their narrative testimony within those terms to achieve their political aims. The narrative challenge, then, was to relate one’s story in terms that would “make sense” for one’s readership (which I understand here less as a group of “real people” than as a complex of discursive concerns).

But what is there to say about this “sense” that abolitionist discourse makes? What underlies and makes possible this sense? What Nietzsche named the “will to power,” Foucault, usefully for our purposes, rearticulates in “The Discourse on Language” as the “will to truth”:

True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognizing the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it. (219)

The question is: What is being masked about the will to truth of abolitionist discourse? If anything is being masked, it is the overdeterminacy that I have been discussing. What is also being masked in that overdeterminacy is the fact that in using the very terms of the institution of slavery to talk about these human beings as “slaves,” “Africans,” and later “Negroes,” one supports and buttresses the idea that the slave, if not subhuman, is certainly not of the same class of people as free Europeans. It suggests that even abolitionists could more than sustain such a contradiction. I examine this further in my discussion of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in chapter 5 (though I would scarcely call Jefferson an abolitionist) and of Ralph Waldo Emerson in chapter 2. Both were men who were, in one form or another, opposed to the idea of slavery but who nevertheless harbored a belief in the inferiority of the African. This position was not uncommon in the nineteenth century even among some abolitionists, nor was it viewed as the contradiction we might experience it as today.

Of course, one of the main arguments of the pro-slavery advocates for the justification of slavery was that Africans were not of the same variety of humanity as Europeans and were, therefore, fit for slavery. Even Hegel, in The Philosophy of History, contends that Africans are better off in slavery, where they have the chance to improve themselves by association with their European masters, than in their atemporal, nonprogressive existence in Africa—the place without change or history for Hegel (98–99). This explains why abolitionists were constantly responding to this claim in their writings by showing examples of the humanity of the African. What is interesting in this light is that, in this political and philosophical debate, one of the seemingly unavoidable occurrences that persists is the equating of humanity with white-ness—a point I return to in my treatment of William Blake and Margaret Fuller in chapter 2. The deployment of the rhetoric of whiteness reminds us of the currency of the rhetorical possibility of shedding epidermal layers. It returns us to a kind of phenomenal question of the body: the black body as the referent, the signifier, the site of contestation, precisely because of how it is used in the racist practices of pro-slavery advocacy and rearticulated in abolitionist texts.

Even as I employ the trope of a discursive terrain, along with its companion metaphor of theater, to get at the problems of witnessing, I also deploy a third trope of “mapping” to talk about what these slave witnesses have to do to the discursive terrain of abolitionism and to the memory of their experiences in order to bear witness and to tell the “truth” about slavery. It is useful to include mapping in this cluster of tropes because it helps us see the conscious nature of our constructions. In this way, we also see the purposefulness of these tropes. When we say, “I am mapping this out,” it is because we want to know how to get someplace, how to talk about the structure or morphology that enables whole ideas, whole discourses. We look out on the world that is unformed and want to impose order and form upon it. That is a very godlike desire. This is not to suggest that other cultures do not do this or that pre–European contact cultures did not have “maps.” Everyone has landmarks or lieux de memoire that tell what is significant in a given terrain: for example, there is the river where my mother was baptized; that is the place where an elder passed on to the next world; there is the house in which I was born. This is interesting in relation to the slave narrative as well, because often the narratives are told through these kinds of landmarks. James Olney, in his often-cited essay “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” discusses how memory functions in slave narratives by offering that “memory creates the significance of events in discovering the pattern into which those events fall. And such a pattern, in the kind of autobiography where memory rules, will be a teleological one bringing us, in and through narration, as it were by an inevitable process, to the end of all past moments which is the present” (149). Olney reminds us of the importance of maintaining an awareness of the constructed nature of memory. That very constructedness is among the chief constituents of slave narrative testimony that we want to bear in mind in our examination of the narratives in the chapters to follow.

Mary Prince, for example, maps out the landscape of her memory of slavery in her narrative. She does this through witnessing moments from memory. Even Prince’s description of when she arrived at the home of her new master, Captain I——, is telling in this way:

It was night when I reached my new home. The house was large, and built at the bottom of a very high hill; but I could not see much of it at night. I saw too much of it afterwards. The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners. (54)

This description is compelling for several reasons, not the least of which is that it has traces of the Gothic, with its attention to the large house and the dark, desolate landscape it occupies. At other moments, Prince speaks of someone being beaten there and the salt being poured into his wounds. It is as if these events of torture themselves become metaphorical landmarks that map the terrain of Prince’s memory of slavery—not unlike the fact that even the house is not allowed to remain only a literal house. It too, in the landscape of Prince’s memory, becomes metaphor, indeed, is anthropomorphized: “The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners.” Rhetorically, the literal material of the house is the “best thing in it.” It is what the house, like the specific events of torture that are described by Prince in the narrative, represents that is central in the landscape of slave memory.⁷ These metaphorical mappings are finally very meaningful in slave testimony as well.

This issue of remembering testimony is also interesting in terms of the idea of the collective body. That is, while this is literally “the history of Mary Prince,” Prince’s narrative, like any number of other slave testimonials, implies the impossibility of telling an individual tale. The slave body is b...