All posts by Lynda Berg

Religion

The Spiritual as Complex Space for Historical Engagement

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It is apparent from this blog thread that concerns about the way history accumulates[1] and continues to vivify the present are of great importance to the study and engagement of the Black Atlantic. The past is not something left behind in some progressive march of history, nor is it a nostalgia that obscures the present with uncritical adoration of a past age. Navigating between these two streams seems to be the difficult, and perhaps even dangerous, work of those interested in the Black Atlantic. There seems to be in pop-history a narration of the Black Atlantic as a progressive march from the low point of enslavement towards this liberated present that has somehow left behind the problems of the past. In this way, engagement of the spiritual in the Black Atlantic can provide a significant voice that interrupts certain dominant narratives, and draws together the past and present in a movement more reminiscent of a dance than an upward march. This is not a dance just for the sake of dancing either, but it allows for the continued protest to the violence and destruction of enslavement, and an interruption of the continuing grammar of racial and class divides so embedded in the experience of the Black Atlantic.

The challenge with approaching the spiritual in this way is how to do so without reducing it to merely a tool of the historian. It is necessary to move into a more concrete situation to avoid such an abstraction. Thus it may be helpful to draw upon the Haitian musical group Boukman Eksperyans. “Drawing upon traditional vodou rhythms, compas, rock, and R & B to create the Haitian Musical movement dubbed mizik rasin (root music)”[2] the band has maintained its bold message of hope and survival throughout the political turmoil of the 1980-90’s and continuing in the post-earthquake challenges of Haiti. Boukman Eksperyans has “let their music be shaped by vodou”[3] both in content and style. The spiritual—which is not to be read as non-political or disembodied—enables this group to engage the complexity of Haiti’s past and present, which is bound with their own experiences. As their bio states, “For all its celebratory color on stage, the Boukman Eksperyans’ message is serious and spiritual. The band’s songs have long served as rallying cries against all manner of ills imposed upon the Haitian people.”[4]

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     The band’s name in and of itself is a clear message, connecting to the slave revolt of 1791, which sparked the revolution, to their experience today. Boukman was considered to be the one who presided over the religious ceremony of Bwa Kyimon (Bois Caiman) that began the revolt, and he continued as a leader of the revolt; though he was killed early on.[5]

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The Band’s choice of the name Boukman Eksperyans has been interpreted as the continuation of the work of Boukman as they use their spiritually laden music to “spark real change in Haiti.” For the band, this work has included encouraging uprisings against the Baby Doc Duvalier regime at great risk to themselves, and encouraging protests in 1991 with the lyrics of their song ‘my heart will not bleed [skip]’[6] (ke m’ pa sote).

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBN2z0mgALk

 

The music of Boukman Eksperyans embodies the complex space of the spiritual that animates the survival, hope and resistance of the Haitian people, which is the story of the history of Haiti. Groups such as Boukman Eksperyans, with their explicit invocation of the past as revivified in the present provide a space to engage the accumulating history of the Black Atlantic. Furthermore, their seamless connection of the spiritual and the political enables the listener/participant to avoid a potential false dichotomy. Significantly, this work is constructive, bringing together fragments of the history of Haiti, and the Black Atlantic more broadly, to engage in the possibilities of life that emerges.

 

[1] For this I believe our blog is indebted to: Ian Baucom. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

[5] Laurent Dubois. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004, pp101-104.

History, Slave Trade

Shackles for Sale

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By Lynda Berg

An Ebay ad boasts “RARE Handmade Vintage 1800’s Slave Handcuffs Manacles Shackles” with a sub-description under the category “item condition: Used” that extols “Shackles are in excellent condition with a working lock and key.”[1] The crassness of this boast, in combination with the next line denoting the price of $550, should disturb anyone who reflects upon their use in the production of humans as commodities. Is there not a sinister irony extant in these items, which were once commodities for the production of human commodities, and now returned to the market as a commodity in their own right, not for their use, but because of their use.

RARE Handmade Vintage 1800’s Slave Shackles

In thinking through what this re-commodification means, I am drawn to reconsider first the production of “the slave” by which these tools first functioned. In doing so, I find the article by Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” illuminating for this task. Spillers emphasizes the significance of the power to name in the process of controlling and commodifying a “body.” Spillers lays open the architecture behind names by relating them to the procedures of capture employed in the theft of African bodies beginning in the 15th century with the conquests of the Portuguese[2] and continuing in the Atlantic slave trade. “The captivating party does not only earn the right to dispose of the captive body as it sees fit, but gains, consequently, the right to name….”[3] This naming is part of the work of the “master” to deny past social and cultural meaning already present in the lives of these African peoples, including the denial of their identity and gender. It was a process of stripping bodies down for the purpose of creating new bodies, conformed to the body politic of colonial sovereignty, and thus malleable to the domination of the master to which they would eventually be delivered.

In this space, particularly on the slave ship, captives are first ungendered: made interchangeable with all other captive bodies on board. As Spillers notes when assessing the cargo stat sheets from slave ships, “under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into account as quantities.”[4] That is, as those uprooted from land and kin, “shackled” in the hull of a ship, crossing an unknown sea, persons are made into units of indistinct exchange, assuming no past, no identity, only mute exchange value.

What does it mean, that centuries later these vary shackles, these tools of stripping down, are themselves placed on another sort of sea (the internet) stripped of their narrative, and sold for an exchange value to the highest bidder? In what ways does this process actually re-inscribe the vary capture they once helped produce? The situation seems to demand a response to the (re)commodification of these shackles, and a response that escapes this capture, rather than living into it.

Again, Spillers may be helpful in imaging a possible horizon. For, when describing the stripping down of African bodies, she notes that in this moment flesh is laid bare. For Spillers this flesh is a double site: the site of negation and of potential. The flesh then is that which is anterior to the body, anterior to the subject position, it is the “zero degree of social conceptualization.”[5] While the process of commodification will always try to force upon this flesh a new state of capture (a new body known as “the slave”), the “negative,” the “criminal,” the very existence of flesh will reveal that these titles are never totalizing, and in fact there is always something that escapes capture (the flesh). Of course, Spillers is speaking of the flesh, not of inanimate objects such as shackles. But I wonder in what way the responses to these fetishized shackles can attempt to be a response of escape rather than capture? I have no complete answer, though others have suggested the idea of a collaborative purchase to place them in a space (perhaps a museum) that does not allow these objects to be disconnected from their narrative.[6] I don’t know if this is the right answer, but perhaps it is a way through, a way of resisting the break with narrative that the reduction to exchange value purports to do. Regardless, in moving forward, we must ask what pressures does the response of the flesh put upon the way these items are being stripped and sold that could reveal new potential?