I've been thinking a lot about Saidiya Hartman's concept of 'the afterlife of slavery' in Lose Your Mother, specifically in a Canadian context.
It's easy (well, you know what I mean) to think of Transatlantic chattel slavery in America - books are written recording its events and films are created depicting the middle passage, slave quarters, plantations, (in)human auctions, shackling, branding/whipping...
The hereafter of slavery, as Hartman points out in the introduction of Lose Your Mother, is seen through contemporary forms of power abuse and violence enacted upon Black bodies, which is really the same narrative told in a different way: "skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment" (Hartman 6)
In American...
We are made to not forget slavery.
We are made to not forget that its effects live on presently.
But what about Canada?
What I'm realizing is that the thing about an afterlife or afterlives is that it depends on something key:
For something to have an afterlife, it must first be acknowledged to have existed in the first place.
How do we think about the lasting effects of transatlantic slavery, of forced migration, of kidnapping, of dispossession, of severed familial/familiar ties, of trauma, of pain in Canada, if so many refuse to believe, accept and acknowledge that SLAVERY ALSO HAPPENED IN CANADA?
How do you even start that conversation? Can that conversation even take place?
How do we talk about slavery in a country that doesn't take ownership (my word choice here is intentional) for its bloodied and racist history?
How do the aftershocks of slavery manifest in a Canadian context?
How does the Black Canadian come to terms with a moment within its country's history that is so often overlooked, ignored and disputed (many people are still adamant that slavery never happened on Canadian soil)?
To go back to U.S. for a bit, the difficulty in ignoring the slavery conversation in America goes back to the still visible traces or remnants of the period throughout the country. People can visit old slave quarters and walk on land that has been identified as the location of major plantations in the south (even if today, there are houses built on it, etc). The sites where slavery happened are tagged and identified - they are made apparent. We can point a finger at the exact spot where slavery occurred.
But perhaps purposefully (or simply accidental) traces, remnants, residues of slavery in Canada are not as identifiable. Scholars like Katherine McKittrick, Charmaine Nelson, Afua Cooper, Dorothy Williams (amazing historian on Black Canadians in Montreal, so read her books y'all), and Rinaldo Walcott have written in great detail about how Canadian sites which were marked by slavery, have been occluded from vision. Spaces where the auctioning of newly arrived kidnapped Africans, have been paved over, so to speak. As Walcott writes in his book Black like Who?
So,
How do we trace our steps back to the traces of slavery?
And I guess this is the question that haunts me a bit, do we want to?
Through all of this, I've been thinking with Hartman's use of the concept of the afterlife of slavery alongside Christina Sharpe's and I'm not sure if it's complicated matters or presents them in a new light, but she asks in the intro of her book In The Wake, "... how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?" and while my thinking about the afterlife/afterlives of slavery in a Canadian context is not solely preoccupied with its history within museums or institutionalized memorials, I do think the 'unfolding' and 'ongoing' aspects she points to, helps to perhaps understand how tracing those traces are really hard.
The way she works through the concept of afterlives is to define it as something that never ended - as something in perpetual motion and in process. And if we tie ongoing to unfolding (as she does), we'll see that both words indicate a progression, a playing out or a 'to-come' (as something to-come that has already happened, as something to-come that will be different from what has already come, as something to-come that will shake what as already come, etc). If the afterlives of slavery, as Sharpe posits, are a 'to-come', what will that arrival/happening look like? Are we both living it and anticipating it at the same time? It's hard to say I guess.
But I do think that seeing the concept through both Hartman and Sharpe helps to understand that the life (and hereafter) of slavery, is clearly different in different contexts. And the manifestation of the afterlife/afterlives of slavery's 'to-come' (or better put, the to-come aftershocks of transatlantic chattel slavery) will be vastly distinct within a context that acknowledges its past (though still plays the innocence card) and a context which refuses all together to recognize its history.
It's easy (well, you know what I mean) to think of Transatlantic chattel slavery in America - books are written recording its events and films are created depicting the middle passage, slave quarters, plantations, (in)human auctions, shackling, branding/whipping...
The hereafter of slavery, as Hartman points out in the introduction of Lose Your Mother, is seen through contemporary forms of power abuse and violence enacted upon Black bodies, which is really the same narrative told in a different way: "skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment" (Hartman 6)
In American...
We are made to not forget slavery.
We are made to not forget that its effects live on presently.
But what about Canada?
What I'm realizing is that the thing about an afterlife or afterlives is that it depends on something key:
For something to have an afterlife, it must first be acknowledged to have existed in the first place.
How do we think about the lasting effects of transatlantic slavery, of forced migration, of kidnapping, of dispossession, of severed familial/familiar ties, of trauma, of pain in Canada, if so many refuse to believe, accept and acknowledge that SLAVERY ALSO HAPPENED IN CANADA?
How do you even start that conversation? Can that conversation even take place?
How do we talk about slavery in a country that doesn't take ownership (my word choice here is intentional) for its bloodied and racist history?
How do the aftershocks of slavery manifest in a Canadian context?
How does the Black Canadian come to terms with a moment within its country's history that is so often overlooked, ignored and disputed (many people are still adamant that slavery never happened on Canadian soil)?
To go back to U.S. for a bit, the difficulty in ignoring the slavery conversation in America goes back to the still visible traces or remnants of the period throughout the country. People can visit old slave quarters and walk on land that has been identified as the location of major plantations in the south (even if today, there are houses built on it, etc). The sites where slavery happened are tagged and identified - they are made apparent. We can point a finger at the exact spot where slavery occurred.
But perhaps purposefully (or simply accidental) traces, remnants, residues of slavery in Canada are not as identifiable. Scholars like Katherine McKittrick, Charmaine Nelson, Afua Cooper, Dorothy Williams (amazing historian on Black Canadians in Montreal, so read her books y'all), and Rinaldo Walcott have written in great detail about how Canadian sites which were marked by slavery, have been occluded from vision. Spaces where the auctioning of newly arrived kidnapped Africans, have been paved over, so to speak. As Walcott writes in his book Black like Who?
"Crossings to Canada represent an ambivalence for any Canadian who must simultaneously grapple with the absented presence of slavery in official national discourses and the popular narratives which argue that Canada’s only relation to slavery was as a sanctuary for escaping African-Americans - via the Underground Railroad. This dilemma is important because the crossing has been appropriated by the nation as the source of its denial of an almost five-hundred-year black presence" (Walcott 35).
So,
How do we trace our steps back to the traces of slavery?
And I guess this is the question that haunts me a bit, do we want to?
Through all of this, I've been thinking with Hartman's use of the concept of the afterlife of slavery alongside Christina Sharpe's and I'm not sure if it's complicated matters or presents them in a new light, but she asks in the intro of her book In The Wake, "... how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?" and while my thinking about the afterlife/afterlives of slavery in a Canadian context is not solely preoccupied with its history within museums or institutionalized memorials, I do think the 'unfolding' and 'ongoing' aspects she points to, helps to perhaps understand how tracing those traces are really hard.
The way she works through the concept of afterlives is to define it as something that never ended - as something in perpetual motion and in process. And if we tie ongoing to unfolding (as she does), we'll see that both words indicate a progression, a playing out or a 'to-come' (as something to-come that has already happened, as something to-come that will be different from what has already come, as something to-come that will shake what as already come, etc). If the afterlives of slavery, as Sharpe posits, are a 'to-come', what will that arrival/happening look like? Are we both living it and anticipating it at the same time? It's hard to say I guess.
But I do think that seeing the concept through both Hartman and Sharpe helps to understand that the life (and hereafter) of slavery, is clearly different in different contexts. And the manifestation of the afterlife/afterlives of slavery's 'to-come' (or better put, the to-come aftershocks of transatlantic chattel slavery) will be vastly distinct within a context that acknowledges its past (though still plays the innocence card) and a context which refuses all together to recognize its history.
I remember reading this quote (from your linked encyclopedia entry) while I was doing my PhD: “To encourage White American settlers to immigrate north, the government passed the Imperial Statute of 1790, which allowed United Empire Loyalists to bring in “negros [sic], household furniture, utensils of husbandry, or cloathing [sic]” duty-free. By law, such chattel could not be sold for one year after entering the colonies.” I should have known, but I didn’t. And when I published this quote (as well as the one above from Rinaldo Walcott) in my first book, one of the readers accused me of making it up. Kelann, what you say is so vital: if we cannot even have the conversation about how history is narrated and what is obfuscated in that narration, if we cannot talk about the history of slavery in Canada, we will never be able to face (and challenge) the afterlife of slavery.
ReplyDeleteFollowing your lead, this from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: “"It is a big leap from working class, to Ivy League schools, to being a tenured professor. And a part of that leap and apart from its specificities are the sense and awareness of precarity; the precarities of the afterlives of slavery (“ skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment”: Hartman 2007, 6); the precarities of the ongoing disaster of the ruptures of chattel slavery. They texture my reading practices, my ways of being in and of the world, my relations with and to others. Here’s Maurice Blanchot (1995, 1–2): “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. . . . When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come. The disaster is its imminence, but since the future, as we conceive of it in the order of lived time belongs to the disaster, the disaster has always already withdrawn or dissuaded it; there is no future for the disaster, just as there is no time or space for its accomplishment.” 6 Transatlantic slavery was and is the disaster. The disaster of Black subjection was and is planned; terror is disaster and “terror has a history” (Youngquist 2011, 7) and it is deeply atemporal. The history of capital is inextricable from the history of Atlantic chattel slavery." (loc 234)
Thank you so much for this Kelann. I appreciate the way you articulate the differences in context as well as how to grapple with those differences through the work of Hartman and Sharpe. You make a very important line of connection between how they express this notion of time, to make visible the history of enslavement in its afterlife as well, what's "to-come", and how that manifests not only in space and place, but in the way that knowledge is produced and disseminated - how these histories even get to be known or hidden, discussed or erased.
ReplyDelete