The strength of smells stroke me in this week's readings. Here are few excerpts:
From Lose Your Mother
p.53
I looked straight ahead and kept my eyes fixed on the rocky outcrops and dunes, avoiding what I suspected were quizzical and irritated glances. I pretended not to notice the stench and quickened my pace. The closer I got to the sea, the worse the smell, which reeked of things dead and rotten. Many of the streets of Accra were lined with open sewers, and poor neighborhoods were often without toilet facilities, but this was more intense than usual. I knew there was no plumbing in these dwellings, but was there an outhouse nearby? Had the community latrine overflowed? When I reached the dunes I noticed a little swamp that had been created by sewage pipes emptying onto the beach. A group of children were playing near the fetid pool, and one boy created ripples on its surface with his small arc of urine. The black water allowed no reflection of their hovering faces.
p.72-73
Kinishi wo wu shua, kumo e nan wu ebin gba: The eye that sees gold will see excrement too. So it is said in the heartland of slavery where people knew firsthand the scent of the slave hold. Karl Marx didn’t put it any better when he described the genesis of capital, which came into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” He didn’t mention excrement, but he should have. Mounds of waste were also the testament of pillage and exchange. The reek of trading forts and slave ships identified the presence of merchant capital and human commodities on the West African coast, as the foul odor of toilet beaches and open sewers marked the end of “the beauty of the first days, ” or the shortfall of independence. The smell hung in a black cloud over Accra. When I breathed deeply I swore I could discern the sulfurous odor of things dead and decaying. Utopia could not be separated from this rottenness. For the dream of a black country was born in slave pens and barracoons and holding cells. When the path home disappeared, when misfortune wore a white face, when dark skin guaranteed perpetual servitude, the prison house of race was born.
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p.80
The boats resembled wooden houses with wings because of their great flying sails. Canoes carried small lots
of slaves from the shore to the ships. Hundreds of captives were
packed between the decks. The stink of sweat and waste and
disease thickened as the cargo was completed. The reek of slavers
could be detected five miles off the coast.
The townspeople would have grown accustomed to the stench.
Watching the canoes ferry the slaves offshore, some might have
wondered why none who boarded those ships were ever seen
again, and the curious might have speculated about what
happened to them in the countries across the water. No doubt
there were those who preferred not to think about them at all.
From Beloved
p. 57
Up and down the lumberyard fence old roses were dying. The sawyer who had planted them twelve years ago to give his workplace a friendly feel--something to take the sin out of slicing trees for a living--was amazed by their abundance; how rapidly they crawled all over the stake-and-post fence that separated the lumberyard from the open field next to it where homeless men slept, children ran and, once a year, carnival people pitched tents. The closer the roses got to 29 death, the louder their scent, and everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of the rotten roses. It made them a little dizzy and very thirsty but did nothing to extinguish the eagerness of the coloredpeople filing down the road. Some walked on the grassy shoulders, others dodged the wagons creaking down the road's dusty center. All, like Paul D, were in high spirits, which the smell of dying roses (that Paul D called to everybody's attention) could not dampen
p. 162-163
The scent of their disapproval lay heavy in the air. Baby Suggs woke to it and wondered what it was as she boiled hominy for her grandchildren. Later, as she stood in the garden, chopping at the tight soil over the roots of the pepper plants, she smelled it again.
(...)
Resting on the handle of the hoe, she concentrated. She was accustomed to the knowledge that nobody prayed for her- -but this free floating repulsion was new. It wasn't whitefolks--that much she could tell--so it must be colored ones. And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess. Baby closed her eyes. Perhaps they were right. Suddenly, behind the disapproving odor, way way back behind it, she smelled another thing. Dark and coming. Something she couldn't get at because the other odor hid it.
thank you for a compelling point of entry across both books. I would be interested in discussing the relation between smell and the movement of the writing - there seems to me to be a composition across the two that brings more forcefully the horror of slavery - and of the body contained/uncontainable to the forefront. Do we hear through the rhythm of smell? And is smell that excess, that rhythm out of cadence, that allows the horror to be heard? And is the horror not also precisely that which exceeds, that escapes the bounds of propriety, that leaks beyond the edges of the docile, complacent body?
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