African Diaspora JOANNE CHASSOT Re-Visioning History, Memory, & Identity Ghosts of the Ghosts of the AfricAn DiAsporA re-MAppinG the trAnsnAtionAl A Dartmouth Series in American Studies series eDitor Donald E. Pease Avalon Foundation Chair of Humanities Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute Dartmouth College The emergence of Transnational American Studies in the wake of the Cold War marks the most significant reconfiguration of American Studies since its inception. The shock waves generated by a newly globalized world order de- manded an understanding of America’s embeddedness within global and local processes rather than scholarly reaffirmations of its splendid isolation. The se- ries Re-Mapping the Transnational seeks to foster the cross-national dialogues needed to sustain the vitality of this emergent field. To advance a truly compar- ativist understanding of this scholarly endeavor, Dartmouth College Press wel- comes monographs from scholars both inside and outside the United States. For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com. Yael Ben-zvi, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories Joanne Chassot, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity Samuele F. S. Pardini, In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen Sonja Schillings, Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence Günter H. Lenz, edited by Reinhard Isensee, Klaus J. Milich, Donald E. Pease, John Carlos Rowe, A Critical History of the New American Studies, 1970–1990 Helmbrecht Breinig, Hemispheric Imaginations: North American Fictions of Latin America Jimmy Fazzino, World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature Zachary McCleod Hutchins, editor, Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act Kate A. Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific Melissa M. Adams-Campbell, New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage Joanne Chassot Ghosts of the afriCan Diaspora Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity DArtMouth colleGe press hAnover, new hAMpshire Dartmouth College Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2018 Trustees of Dartmouth College This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. All rights reserved For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com. Published with a subsidy from the Commission des publications de la Faculté des lettres de l’Université de Lausanne. Page 237 constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5126-0158-9 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5126-0160-2 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5126-0161-9 Everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts, even when one goes after the ghosts of the other. — Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Tracing the Ghost 1 1 “Voyage through death / to life upon these shores”: Representing the Middle Passage 34 2 Dusky Sallys: Re-Visioning the Silences of History 75 3 “You best remember them!”: Repossessing the Spirit of Diaspora 109 4 “A ghost-life”: Queering the Limits of Identity 152 Afterword: Learning to Live with Ghosts 195 Notes 201 Works Cited 219 Credits 237 Index 239 AcknowleDGMents A book, AccorDinG to DAviD punter, is always “only a shadow or a ghost of a book that might have been written” (6). There is — will always be — much more that I would have liked to write, and write better. But that this book exists at all is due to the help, encouragements, and sup- port of many people I wish to thank here. Some of them played a crucial part in the thinking, writing, and revising process that resulted in this book. Oth- ers played an equally important part in keeping me strong and motivated, and in taking me out of the realm of the living dead from time to time. I first and foremost wish to express my deepest gratitude and respect to Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, without whose guidance and mentorship this project would never have come to life. She was often able to see what haunted a confused and not fully articulate(d) argument, and help me bring it to light. This book is also a much more coherent and carefully thought-through piece of work thanks to Teresa Goddu and Justin Ed- wards, whose insights and questions pushed me to re-vision some impor- tant theoretical and methodological aspects of the project. I am also very grateful to the reviewers who read the manuscript for UPNE, for their time, attention, and generosity. Thanks to Richard Pult, my editor at UPNE, the publication process was incredibly fast and smooth, and I am grateful to him for making this first publication experience much easier than I had imagined. I presented parts of this work and received precious feedback at var- ious conferences and workshops, at the University of Reading, Howard University, and Southern Illinois University, at the International Gothic Association conference at the University of Heidelberg, and at the Eu- ropean Association for American Studies conference at Trinity College Dublin. I have greatly benefited from being a part of the PostCit com- munity, and I am grateful to the brilliant and inspiring scholars who compose it, with special thanks to Noémi Michel. At the University of Lausanne I particularly wish to thank Christine Le Quellec Cottier and Brigitte Maire, as well as the Formation Doctorale Interdisciplinaire, and especially Jérôme Meizoz and Alberto Roncaccia. [ xii ] Acknowledgments Isis Giraldo has played a major part in my academic life and beyond, and our intellectual, political, and human bond sustained me throughout this project. I have learned much from her strength, her passion, and her unrelenting critical engagement. Sarah Baccianti also holds a special place among the people who have inspired me. Her unwavering friendship and generosity have made aca- demia a better place to be in. I have been blessed to work with wonderful friends and colleagues in the English Department at the University of Lausanne, who supported and guided me through the dissertation and the publication process. I am particularly thankful to Valérie Cossy, Mary Flannery, Martine Hennard Dutheil, Roxane Hughes, Kirsten Stirling, Boris Vejdovsky, and Najat Zein, for the many ways in which they have helped me. I also wish to thank all the other people who made Lausanne such a great place to work at, in particular my ACIL friends, who helped take my mind off research and put it to more practical questions and active projects. My students throughout my years of teaching at UNIL have also been a regen- erative presence. Their curiosity and enthusiasm have nourished my own. My friends in “the real world,” thank you all for supporting me and bearing with me from the beginning to the end of this long project. You didn’t forget me when I became a ghost, and you brought me back to life on countless occasions. I could never have followed this path without the love and encourage- ments of my parents, Dominique and Marc Etienne, who always found ways to help that only parents can, and whose interest in my work cer- tainly made them my most careful and diligent readers. I’m also grateful to my brother Mathieu, who has taught me much about courage and perseverance in life. Beyond words is what I owe to Cédric Cramatte. His faith, patience, and love have been a source of strength through times of doubt and weariness. The very existence of this book proves he was right on many points, and these wouldn’t be acknowledgments if I didn’t admit to that. Finally, I wish to thank the Société Académique Vaudoise, the Fonda- tion van Walsem pro Universitate, and the Commission des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres (UNIL) for their generous support, which has made this project and its publication possible. Ghosts of the AfricAn DiAsporA introDuction trAcinG the Ghost I am very happy to hear that my books haunt. — Toni Morrison, interview with Nellie McKay My first encounter with a ghost was — like that of many readers of African diaspora literature — with the spiteful baby spirit at 124 Blue- stone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1870s. That ghost haunted me for years. My second ghost sighting was in the woods of Willow Springs, a Sea Island in the limbo space between Georgia and South Carolina, in the late 1990s. That apparition was far more fleeting than the house- shattering baby spirit and the fleshy ghost that named herself Beloved. In fact, were it not for that previous encounter with the ghostly, which had somehow made me more alert to such apparitions, I might not even have noticed this second ghost. While Beloved was a greedy, insatiable ghost always demanding more of everyone’s attention, the discreet presence of this other ghostly woman whose name nobody remembered made itself known only in the rustle of her long woolen dress and in whispers in the wind blowing through the trees. When, by happenstance, I landed in Jamaica in the 1950s and discov- ered the wilderness of the Cockpit Country, I had the uncanny sensation that this place too was haunted. Not only figuratively, by violence, rac- ism, classism, and the specter of neocolonialism, but also quite literally by a woman warrior from the past whose struggle against the oppressive forces of her time, slavery and colonialism, seemed anything but over and whose great power and guidance were more necessary than ever. It is that third apparition that led me to wonder about this strikingly recurring presence of ghosts in novels that were all written in the 1980s by women of the African diaspora. It is also that third ghost that made me ask myself if I was not perhaps starting to “see things.” As horror film viewers as impressionable as myself have often experienced, when we [ 2 ] introDuction have just witnessed a haunting we are likely to identify every shadow, every ripple in the air as the sign of a ghostly presence. But that is in fact, as I soon came to realize, the very nature and power of the ghost: it makes us ques- tion what we see, what we read, what we think, what we (think we) know; it makes us more attentive to what may be there even though it is not quite visible, not quite within our reach, and attentive to what really is not there, even though we thought it was, or wish it were. Deciding that whatever it was I had witnessed — a ghost, a figment of my imagination, something else altogether — was intriguing enough to deserve further inquiry, I set out on a ghost hunt through the literature of the African diaspora. ❖ At the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Beloved , when Sethe suggests to Baby Suggs that they move house to escape the rage of the baby ghost that haunts 124 Bluestone Road, the old woman replies: “What’d be the point? . . . Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (5). Returning to the scene of my first ghost sighting after a long journey through haunted lands, it strikes me that Baby Suggs’s perceptive remark aptly describes the state of African di- aspora fiction in the last thirty years. The novels of Morrison — who ad- mitted that Beloved haunts all her early works in one form or another (Naylor, “Conversation” 217) — virtually all contain ghosts or ghostlike presences. 1 If the tremendous impact Beloved had on African diaspora literature might partly explain why ghosts became attractive figures, it alone certainly cannot account for their proliferation in texts as diverse — and sometimes anterior to Beloved — as Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Wilson Harris’s The Guyana Quartet (1985) and The Ghost of Memory (2007), Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba (1986), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), Al Young’s Seduction by Light (1988), Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spir- its (1989) and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), Tina Ansa’s Baby of the Family (1989), Ugly Ways (1993), and The Hand I Fan With (1996), J. California Cooper’s Family (1991), Charlotte Watson Sherman’s One Dark Body (1993), H. Nigel Thomas’s Spirits in the Dark (1993), Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), Tananarive Due’s The Between (1995), The Good House (2003), and Joplin’s Ghost (2005), Steven Barnes’s Blood Brothers (1996), Kwadwo Agymah Kamau’s Flickering Shadows (1996), John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing (1996), Julie Dash’s Daugh- ters of the Dust (1997), 2 Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring Tracing the Ghost [ 3 ] (1998), Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998), Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1998) and Bloodlines (2000), or Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) — to name but a few. Of course, the ghosts that appear in these many texts take various forms and play diverse roles. Their presence does not always provoke the same reactions; and their intentions toward, and power over, the living differ in significant ways. Besides, ghosts are not new to the literature of the African diaspora. They made notable appearances in the fiction of such writers as Charles Chesnutt at the close of the nineteenth century. Nor is their proliferation in the late twentieth century unique to African diaspora literature. But if, as is conventionally thought, the dead always return for a reason, and if, as critics generally agree, the ghost always responds to specific historical and cultural conditions and anxieties, then there must be a way of explaining this overwhelming presence of ghosts in the fiction of the African diaspora of the last thirty-odd years. Account- ing for this presence in that specific literature at that particular time is one purpose of this book. More precisely, the questions I pose are these: What social, political, theoretical conditions and anxieties do these ghosts ad- dress? What is their cultural specificity, and to what extent do they enter into dialogue with other ghosts outside African diaspora literature? And most importantly, beyond the poetic work that they perform as meta- phors, what cultural, theoretical, and political work do these ghosts do? Besides Morrison’s Beloved , to which I do not devote a full chapter but which both initiates and haunts my examination of the other texts, Ghosts of the African Diaspora examines Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts , Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day , Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow , and a selection of prose and poetic works by Michelle Cliff. My aim in this book is threefold. At the level of each chapter, I analyze how these writers use the ghost trope in their texts, and what functions it serves in their respective literary and political projects. At a broader level, I argue that the trope does cultural, theoretical, and political work that is both specific to late twentieth-century African diaspora literature and related to broader theoretical developments of which the trope is an important critical resource. My discussion thus also aims to propose a more general theory of the ghost as trope, an endeavor that is particu- larly timely considering the fast-growing scholarly interest in ghosts and hauntings. Finally, looking at these texts through the ghost trope also enables me to propose an original reading of them, as it throws new light on aspects that have received ample critical attention and explores oth- ers that have not. Using the ghost as a guide into these texts ultimately [ 4 ] introDuction allows me to draw new connections between them and to think about the complex ways in which the interplay of history, memory, and identity positions them as products of, and contributions to, African diaspora literature and culture. At all these levels of reading and interpretation, I relate the ghost with the notion of re-vision, a term whose various mean- ings and modes of interventions I will sketch in this introduction. Situating the Ghost Ghosts have always been with us. They have been common figures in lit- erature across periods and genres, national and cultural boundaries. The proliferation of ghosts in late twentieth-century African diaspora litera- ture is therefore neither a new nor a unique phenomenon. In her discus- sion of ghost stories in ethnic women’s literature, Kathleen Brogan argues for the necessity to read what she calls “tales of cultural haunting” as “a pan-ethnic phenomenon” or a “transethnic genre” (4, 16). If her interest in ghosts was sparked by her encounter with those in African American literature, she contends that examining ghosts in this literature exclu- sively would obscure the similarities they share with those found in other ethnic literatures. Such cross-cultural examinations are certainly impor- tant, and Ghosts of the African Diaspora is largely indebted to Brogan’s and other scholars’ work on literary ghosts — as well as nonliterary ones. Yet this book also concurs with critics who view ghosts, despite or be- yond their cross-cultural and transhistorical characteristics, as “culturally specific, behaving according to particular cultural patterns of belief and serving particular cultural (and literary) purposes” (Zamora 499). The ghosts in the texts I analyze here may have much in common with those that appear in the novels by Native American, Cuban American, or Jew- ish American women writers Brogan examines, in which they also serve to explore history, memory, and identity. But if the ghost trope works in ways that can to some extent be generalized, history, memory, and identity in the context of the African diaspora are also distinctive, and they inter- sect in specific ways that must be examined more carefully and discretely. Ghosts of the African Diaspora thus responds to the equally important need for a culturally focused approach that accounts for the particular- ities of the ghost trope in a more restricted corpus, a corpus that has as yet not received sustained and detailed attention. 3 In order to articulate both the specificities of African diasporic ghosts and their similarities with other ghosts, I situate them in a double ge- nealogy. On the one hand, I trace their origins to African cultures and