complicity
I'm stressed over whether to post this, because it grants a lot of air to a perspective that doesn't deserve to be platformed. Have I walked directly into a trap? I hate responding point-by-point as if an argument were being made in good faith—especially when I can't even tell. Moreover, the piece to which I'm responding has plausible deniability on its side; I prefer to say what I mean.
More disturbing to me, however, is this seeming participation in the wider project of revisionism by some soft-handed career academic. A good friend of mine (also an academic) agrees the whole thing feels like a primer, a tutorial, publicly demonstrating how to align with fascism-at-large without setting off any alarms or otherwise offending polite society. Showing others 'how it's done' at a time when "history is being rewritten wholesale," my good friend says, "is not just being complicit in the wider fascist project, it's selling shovels in a gold rush."
But my friend also suggests I get "one a year"—one opportunity to stretch my legs and respond to something truly terrible—so here goes.
P.S. It wasn't a full day before someone had responded on social media, letting me know that Barbary sailors raided the coast all the way up to Iceland. It was very... weird. My condolences go out to 1600s Iceland.
P.P.S. The recurring suggestion seems to be, if the British Empire hadn't taken over the whole world, someone else was going to do it. (The above example is specifically implying that pirate terrorism was somehow stopped in its tracks by imperialism.) It's this "it was either him or me!" argument that arouses in me an intense skepticism. Armchair historians are justifying violence using speculation—hypotheticals lightly seasoned with exceptional historical facts—about outsiders' potential capacity for violence and brutality. In other words, it's a type of revisionism claiming self-defense, when we all know Han shot first.
I'm reading this disturbing piece from the London Review of Books, "No Illusions: the Syntax of Slavery," about the transatlantic slave trade operating out of Liverpool. It is deeply unpleasant to read because the author appears to be shifting blame onto West Africa: a variation, seemingly, on the persistent claim that some individuals enthusiastically participated in their own enslavement.
I keep feeling the blood rushing to my face. Then I pause and try to refocus on what the author might be trying to say, which is not altogether what his actual sentences seem to say. I keep glancing over at the sidebar, looking at links to author John Kerrigan's other pieces. One of them is titled "Getting the Ick: Consent in Shakespeare." That is the article I'd rather be reading.
My visceral aversion to reading this piece—my own current ick—has a lot to do with having grown up in the Texas public school system in the 1990s, where world history took a backseat to U.S. history, and to Texas history in particular. (Texas is pretty big on isolationism.) The textbooks given to elementary students back then would've made Howard Zinn scream for mercy: I very distinctly remember our fourth-grade social studies book's claim that "some slaves were treated very well." Even in the '90s in remote, podunk Texas, it felt insane that our textbooks were incapable of taking a hard stance on human slavery.
In keeping with this theme, our local high school had a once-annual "slave day" for upperclassmen. You'd be right to assume that this lighthearted themed event rapidly deteriorated, over the course of a single 7-hour schoolday, into the Stanford prison experiment every time. It's all fun and games until one disempowered dweeb, power-drunk and giddy to hold the reins to someone else's life for once, overzealously tortures another student.
A few months ago or more I sat down and tried to search the Internet with a complicated term—something like "psychology narcissism commodification human exploitation." I shouldn't've been shocked that every search result was about either contemporary human trafficking or the history of slavery and human bondage. Only then did it dawn on me that the ugliness of transactional interpersonal relationships—that is, treating people like human capital, commodities, resources to strip-mine—has its cultural roots in slavery, colonization, expanding territory, domination, spurious claims to 'divine right'.
So I am reading this difficult piece and contemplating canceling my LRB subscription that, as it is, I barely use, and frankly can't afford anymore anyway. Kerrigan spends the first 70% of the piece insisting that West Africa was juuust as slavey as anyone else:
Many people​ want to believe that slavery was imposed on West Africa by European colonialism, but historians describe a situation that is more complex and compatible with what we know of Liverpool's involvement.
I'm not sure that it's so complex, actually! I'm also curious about the use of the word "imposed" here.
But I also have a lot of intellectual insecurity, an inferiority complex driven by having attended public school in Texas. I went off to university underequipped and easily cowed, knowing the majority of students around me had an actual working knowledge of European history. I don't, and I don't know anything about Liverpool, much less its particular, localized role during British abolition. The Beatles are from Liverpool, right? That's what I know about it; the history of Liverpudlian economics is well beyond my grasp. John Kerrigan, meanwhile, is a Cambridge professor.
Here, though, is where Kerrigan really reminds me of a good ol'-fashioned Texan textbook:
Slavery was widespread in West Africa before European traders arrived, partly because traditional restrictions on land ownership meant that acquiring slaves was an obvious way to accumulate capital and prestige. Some slaves were integrated into households or put to work in conditions no worse than those of serfs in Europe. They could acquire property and free themselves.
No worse than serfs! European ones! How nice. Leaving aside Kerrigan's disastrous equivocating, I actually wondered, throughout the course of the piece, if it's the author's background in Shakespeare that enables him to be so darn fascinated by the concept of human beings struggling to free themselves from financial debt—and, of course, of being owned by other humans in the meantime. It's got big "pound of flesh" implications. (Shylock, a scary foreign businessman, had his own ways of clearing a debt. Not like us civilized white Christians, who ruin lives in sophisticated ways, using courts of law and lots of metaphors.)
But I get what Kerrigan is saying. He's saying that serfdom was mainstream in England and in West Africa—every last one of us guilty of predatory lending—and slavery only became a monstrous, horrible entity once these empires' powers combined, forging an Evil Captain Planet type of industry.
...as David Eltis reminds us in his deeply researched new book [Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades], slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice,
This is wedged in the center of a paragraph, the lede to a different sentence. I guess it's a throwaway because it's supposed to be wry—"duh, no one wanted to be a slave"—but Kerrigan is also admitting people 'chose' it for themselves insofar as the alternative was a gnarly death. That's a real Sophie's Choice, which is to say, it isn't a choice at all.
Of course Kerrigan knows slaves didn't consent to their plight. He just wants us to know, repetitively, that other countries and continents had, and have, kings and debts and wars and commerce, too.
At this point, what's most compelling to me is that Kerrigan's piece never uses the word "coercive," nor its etymological relatives, even once. He does, however, use "impose" four times—almost suggesting that "imposing one's will" is a matter of impropriety, of overstaying one's welcome, as if a pesky houseguest. "Impose" suggests social pressure, an invitation that is difficult, but not impossible, to refuse. "Impose" puts polite, clinical distance between itself and a much more violent word.
However, here is where Kerrigan's choice of words really sent me to the moon and back. I think I'd actually rather literally die than ever use the word "insipid" in this context:
In addition to his other talents, [abolitionist and philanthropist William] Roscoe was a poet, and his brief epic, The Wrongs of Africa (1787-88), is a pioneering piece of anti-slavery literature. He describes a 'stately vessel' moored off the coast of Benin -- a favoured destination of Liverpool merchants -- on which two Africans are tricked into slavery when one tries to sell the other. There is kidnapping, too, of the sort that Olaudah Equiano said, in his Interesting Narrative (1789), had swept him into enslavement: 'In the lone path,' Roscoe writes, 'the sable ruffian lurk'd/Watchful to seize and sell for useless toys,/His weaker fellow.' With Liverpool slavers eager to tell him that Africans were willing participants in the trade and would barter men and women for 'shells, and beads, and rings', Roscoe could not succumb to the insipidity of imagining that all Africans were victims. What he stresses, rather, is the way Europeans provoke 'unnatural war' to produce captives ready for enslavement and incite raids on villages so that 'trembling' and 'weeping' people can be 'chain'd in long array' and taken to the coast to be sold.
Whether or not deliberately, Kerrigan is sockpuppeting the extremely long-dead Roscoe. William Roscoe was not blaming the victim. On the contrary: he was describing the horrors inherent to, and the mechanisms of, large-scale coercive control.
He was talking about driving people to war against themselves—social engineering, the ol' divide-and-conquer—with "unnatural," manufactured "provocations." Roscoe is talking about generating inorganic conflict. The modern-day equivalent would be, oh, various moral panics, probably combined with artificially-aided economic crises. Helping to stoke and subsidize wars in other countries, that type of thing.
I think a lot about how the traits we associate with narcissism, psychopathy, or other antisocial patterns of behavior—salient among these, the unapologetic willingness to exploit a peer—might also emerge under conditions of artificial scarcity. What we think of as narcissism or ego is, often, the naked, unchecked drive for survival. Add an accessible strawman for the populace to mob, and the empire now has everything it needs to do a conquering. The "useless toys" for which a people betrayed one another is really just a poetic way of saying 'fighting over scraps'. It's every man for himself, and I gotta have my limited-edition Starbucks cup.
I have no interest, at present, in listening to Allison Mack's podcast about her participation in the NXIVM cult (but it's been in the news, as she has once again pointed to a Smallville coworker for "getting her involved"). My disinclination is mostly down to my intolerance of podcasts, but also, I have a pretty good idea by now of what Mack will talk about: people who aren't on the lowest rung of a pyramid-shaped corporate ladder are thrust into the crazy-making simultaneous roles of both victim and perpetrator. When trapped in any pyramid scheme, people in middle-management end up turning on, and violating and abusing, their own kinsman. Roscoe apparently understood this. Inexplicably, Kerrigan does not—or even if he does, he's otherwise engaged in slavery apologetics. To him, being manipulable means you share blame with your oppressor.
The notion that other people, at extremely high risk of unwillingly becoming slaves themselves, attempted to insulate themselves from forceful kidnapping and exploitation by amassing gold and jewels and wealth, while going "take this guy instead!," isn't exactly the gotcha Kerrigan thinks it is. Pointing at other people and going "look, those guys were greedy too; they were abusing others, too! They have wars and debts and kings, too!" does not absolve the prevailing, dominating culture of its sins.
And to that point, I'm not too sure that cravenly doing whatever you can to stay alive would be considered an equal sin in the eyes of God. The "shells, and beads, and rings" that Kerrigan characterizes as meaningless trinkets were (obviously) the outward flourishes of a man attempting to assert his value as a human being. As a good friend privately wrote to me way back in July, "Appearance is one way to signal/claim status. And caring about status is not a bad thing; having no status is very dangerous."
Here's an especially baffling passage about the "run-up to abolition" and, more specifically, about Liverpool's leadership:
The rights and wrongs of this debate were complicated by philanthropy. As Williams noted, with a historian's eye for inconvenient truths, the slave traders of Liverpool were 'among the leading humanitarians of their age'. Bryan Blundell was a supporter of a school for poor children which is still open today, while Thomas Leyland, as mayor, 'was a terror to evil doers'. Leyland also became a partner in a bank jointly run by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe [...]. Lawyer, art collector, botanist and public benefactor, Roscoe was elected MP for the city, after the usual round of bribery, in 1806, just in time to make himself unpopular by voting for abolition. His banking enterprise with Leyland shows how interwoven members of the elite were, whichever side they took in the slavery argument.
I take no issue with a "school for poor children"; depending on how you feel about public school, you might even say I attended one. What makes this passage so baffling are the words "complicated" and "inconvenient."
What is Kerrigan really saying? The billionaire class—and the politicians who need them—is its own in-group, no matter the net good individual philanthropists might do, nor the policies they might publicly espouse. That ideological stuff is completely arbitrary; the key word in the passage is "bribery." What we see as a public figure's 'virtue' and uprightness is often just a transaction in disguise.
And then it's straight back to this:
Because slaves were a measure of wealth, the taking of captives in battle, or the extortion of them as the price for not attacking, was a routine war aim, and selling them on to Europeans a lucrative spin-off.
Kerrigan goes on to describe who sold whom and when. It's all connective tissue between "war is good for business," private equity, and the prison industrial complex. As capitalists, we all have this in common; got it.
I want to pause to stress just how strongly I understand Kerrigan's mixture of pride and grief for his two grandpas, who worked the Liverpool docks. This is not the focus of his piece; rather, it's a quick reveal that comes up after 3,550 other words.
Listen, I grew up with the story that gangsters, led by Pretty Boy Floyd, forced my adoptive dad's dad, an immigrant and farmer, to brew beer during American Prohibition. Imagine my horror when, just last year, I learned that many immigrants were in financial debt, and compliance with the mob meant they got to keep their farmland! This rocked my reality. You mean, my adoptive dad's family weren't perfect victims? The relationship between American immigrants and the Mafia was... somehow symbiotic? The family benefited in some way?
It took some time before I could fully appreciate that, no, yeah, that was still coercion. That's a corrupt system bleeding a man from all sides.
Kerrigan immediately continues,
He [Williams] shows that the liberal ideology that informed the secular wing of abolitionism [in Britain after 1807] led not just to a belief in the economic superiority of free labour over slave labour (since the former incentivised workers) but
As a cynic, I strongly suspect Kerrigan's interpretation is exactly backward: as it had in the U.S., abolitionism caught on when people realized it was just better business. This tends to be the case. What is morally righteous, what is just, tends often to be, by sheer coincidence, the economically sustainable choice. (There's reams of literature in the field of social psychology suggesting that volunteers, across many fields, turn in better work—less resentfully, more joyfully—than paid employees from whom identical labor is extracted. And while it's ethically questionable to not compensate volunteer workers accordingly, it's true that a lack of obligation, of indebtedness, results in 'better' labor freely given.)
Kerrigan will make this same point shortly ("Suicidal leaps, driven by despair or defiance, were commonplace. Since such actions endangered the profitability of the trade, sailors were alert to them"). If the merchandise is dying, how sustainable is this market?
In order to convince any megacorporation to 'do the right thing', you cannot appeal to a conscience it does not have. Instead, you show up with facts and figures proving the long-term financial benefits of morally upright behavior. Megacorporations, inherently sociopathic, will be inclined to embrace the philanthropic 'good guy' optics of better decisionmaking. Demoralizingly, the same is probably true of politics and public policy.
[Liverpool poet Levi] Tafari's focus on cultural theft was a sign of changing times. After the riots, people looked for the legacy of slavery in institutions and the arts. African gold and silver, clearly valuable, was displayed in museums, but why not homespun textiles or portraits by black artists?
Kerrigan might overly rely on the word "imposed," whereas Tafari—who has no illusions—uses the word "raped." Also, this is a great passage, not least because I happen to personally be a great lover of the textile arts. Rather, the passage demonstrates, in an economy of words, that "cultural appropriation" and "cultural erasure" are the same process. It's the theft of the value, the inheritance, while concealing who is the original, rightful owner. If you can erase a cultural identity—or, better yet, if you can successfully convince a culture to erase itself—you've conquered the territory.
There is also a universal truth here about the contemporary devaluation of creative labor. I think, even at my most prolific over a decade ago, my writing earned me about us$550 a year. This downward economic trend has since infected other industries, turning any creative skill or trade into, effectively, a hobby. (You can hear more about this in any Uber or Lyft vehicle in Los Angeles, which by and large are piloted by disenfranchised professionals.) That means you can regularly write—you can platform yourself!—only if you're among the vanishingly few who can afford to. I woke up this morning thinking about how every public school district in Texas has one guy who wants to defund the arts and humanities in favor of STEM or, more often, in favor of the football team, and now it feels like that one guy's whims have managed to somehow author consensus reality.
Here is a subsequent passage by Kerrigan, underscoring the historical significance of artist Karen McLean's textile art installation "Stitching Souls: Threads of Silence":
[...] there was a trade in slave-grown cotton between Liverpool and the American South before and during the civil war and quilting is a creative, sociable practice in African American tradition. 'A lot of care has been taken,' she said, 'and the suturing, the stitching, it's ... a reparative act.' The name of the Zong before it was seized from Dutch slavers as a war prize off the coast of West Africa was Zorg, which means 'care' -- not only as in 'being careful, taking pains' but as 'tribulation, fear'. When the name Zorg was painted over or mistranscribed, the conflicting senses of the word were obscured but not expunged.
A good friend who is a priest once told me that the only "bloodless" Catholic takeover occurred in Ireland; the heathen population was quick to embrace the invading culture because its beliefs were easily syncretized. That is, again, the exception. Much more often, syncretism is an elaborate system meant to protectively conceal cultural beliefs from those who mean to eradicate them. I think about this a lot: about how conflicting meanings, or beliefs, are indeed "obscured but not expunged." It's yet another example of how entire peoples are disinherited, disenfranchised, but the original ownership or authorship, or underlying meaning or idea or belief, is always still there, a ghost, hidden beneath so many layers of paint.
From here, I started skimming Kerrigan's article—not because I don't want to read about art from the diaspora, but because I dread reading Kerrigan's ivory-tower analysis of it. A lot of what follows, I now believe, is intended as a distraction. Regarding the poetical work Zong! and, eventually, its author M. NourbeSe Philip,
Though not in the documentary record, these names are not invented; they are real names given to the drowned, which is a different matter. [...] This is consistent with Zong! itself being attributed on its title page not to Marlene Philip (the name under which the author first published), or to M. NourbeSe Philip, the name she adopted, or even to the lower-case m. nourbeSe philip, the name she assumes in the new edition, the better to renounce her ego. Instead, Zong! is credited to an imputed ancestor with West African names in capitals: 'As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng'.
This section turns my stomach. We all know—we all know, and there is no excuse to play otherwise—that slaves lost their names. "The better to renounce her ego"?
What Kerrigan seems to feel contempt toward, here, is the way the Black diaspora has made an art of 'invented history', since the written and oral histories were deliberately erased long ago. Philip can't log onto ancestry dot com, glance over her family tree, and get the 'canonical' name of an ancestor, as Kerrigan well knows. He also knows that we, as the still-dominant and prevailing culture, are the keepers and authors and authorities of canonical history—a role he understandably cherishes as a Cambridge professor, but also seems to relish, which is a very bad look.
Philip's work is intended to give human voice to historical fact, but it is also art, a creative act of liberation:
Breaking up the signifier is routine in Language poetry, but the splitting of words in Zong! has a different aetiology and edge. Early in the creative process, presumably while drafting 'Os', philip wrote in her journal that grammar is 'a violent and necessary ordering'. She found a painful analogy between making slaves work together and 'having words work together', shackled by grammar: she was interested 'in them not working together -- resisting that order and desire or impulse to meaning'. If Zong! was to refuse what Katherine McKittrick calls, in her foreword to the new edition, 'the maximisation of profits by extracting humanity from black people', there had to be a breaking up of English, which was to enslaved Africans, as philip knows, 'a language of commands, orders, punishments'. She decided to ravage it, 'as if I am getting my revenge on "this/fuck-mother motherfuckin language" of the coloniser'. Saidiya Hartman writes in her introduction that 'Zong! mutilates language and murders the imposed tongue. It revels in the tumult of words and perpetrates a joyous destruction.'
Right, and this is a very considered, scrupulous rejection of prescriptivism. Grammar, syntax, that's an order of operations; it's procedure. 'Good' grammar, formal and pressed and buttoned up, is pious and even militant.
To be sure, in pullquotes and in description, Kerrigan provides a meticulous, almost loving re-rendering of Philip's work, explicating the structure of the book, its movements, its lines and their weights. But then,
[J]ust as striking, given philip's hostility, is Wale's use of English. Why does he not call Sade his queen in one of the African languages that flit and morph through 'Ferrum'? philip has said she was devastated when she read the abolitionist Granville Sharp asking how many of the Africans on the Zong 'would have even understood the language being spoken to them, when they were being told to jump overboard'. Mutual incomprehensibility was a feature of the North Atlantic trade [...].
I can answer this: because Philip is writing in English, for her British audience. (Also, because it's in rudimentary, painstaking fragments, as if in anguish?)
Yes, the enslaved passengers of the ship Zong, were—excepting one man—unable to communicate with their captors, unable to guess at the instructions being issued to them. I think we all daydream that if we could just explain correctly, if we could make ourselves known and understood, authority would lend us grace when it really counted. I think that's the fantasy.
But grace is not one of Kerrigan's virtues here. Instead, he wants us to remember that "incomprehensibility" was mutual. Instead, he is wondering why Philip didn't write a particular passage—a deeply resonant moment of love and loss—in another language. The style is inconsistent. He is wondering why someone, in her continued attempt to voice the Voiceless, would seek to be understood now, at this emotional climax. It's a very strange issue to raise at a very strange time. It feels a bit like a commitment to misunderstanding. This isn't the first instance Kerrigan has indicted the poet for not being a perfect documentarian—of an unpreserved oral history, the evidence of which exists only here and there in little scraps—but it's definitely the weirdest.
Most bewildering, I think, is this choice of the word "hostility." I imagine Kerrigan really meant confrontational. Philip's use of concrete poetry, of spaces and gaps arranged into triangles, is a statement about the senselessness and chaos of violence as much as it is a celebration of the written word—the instrument, on paper, of Philip's freedom and healing from generational grief. To judge Philip as "hostile" suggests that there is an active threat facing the poet. Which direction is the hostility really facing, I wonder?
When it comes to African agency in the trade, Zong! inclines to denial.
Yeah, okay, here we go.
I have been intending, for a couple months now, to write about what I've been calling "pathological storytelling": that is, when someone seizes control of a narrative and redirects it, with the goal of benefiting their particular institution or corporation's aims. And I really regret having not discussed it before now, because I would've loved to talk about it using a far less fraught example.
On the one hand, I can see the vague outline of benevolence in Kerrigan's impulse here. By giving historical West Africa a more equitable share in accountability for transatlantic slave trade, Kerrigan and his cohorts may imagine they are ceding more narrative agency to her descendants. That would be fine. We are always telling ourselves stories. Interpersonally, being precious about a generational victimhood narrative might keep us trapped in certain self-perpetuating cycles; on a grander scale, pathological victim narratives can be used as justification for committing atrocities, up to and including the genocide still being perpetrated against Palestine.
Yet there is something incredibly nefarious about pointing to mutual injuries, redirecting blame, and insisting on this agency/accountability narrative two hundred years later, while still soaking in the aftereffects of the crimes. If Kerrigan had only said "the problem is explicitly the kings, the MPs, the businessmen, who all went in on it together, and anyone who wanted to survive was dragged in by capitalist force," I'd be more forgiving of his calls for historical nuance. But this isn't nuance or complexity; it is a firehosing, granularity dressed up in academic historicity, squarely directed at a readership all too eager to have its own inherited shame alleviated.
By getting the victim to agree to their own role—their agreement, their consent, their complicity—in being victimized by a much, much larger system, you are now, firmly, operating as the voice of that system. I get it; we all yearn for job security.
Yet the obas who did nicely out of the slave trade had no illusions about it.
That's the last line, the punchline of the entire piece. It's the most florid "but what about Black-on-Black crime" I've ever read.
One does not pressure the collective victim to 'share responsibility' for an evil transaction solely to dodge personal accountability; it is done so that the larger system of coercive control, its mechanisms many years in the making, can continue to whir on unchallenged. This is, pure and simple, deflection marketing. It's an advertising campaign designed to redirect and shift high-stakes responsibility onto individuals with little-to-zero say in the matter.
There is nothing new here. It's nothing but a catalogue of names and dates, with a weird detour toward revoking the artist's poetic license, all in service of assuring us that Black people killed Black people, too.
If you told me that this entire piece were a fiction, a sort of performance art—"POV: a professor at an esteemed British university, finding himself at a tenuous moment in time when institutions are desperately clinging to their own accounts of history and literary canon, is now, on behalf of his forefathers, throwing spaghetti at the wall attempting to discredit and undermine a book of poetry from 2008"—I would say, "wow, that's a very misguided idea of satire, but a daring attempt nevertheless."
Is that what this is? A masterclass in twisting a narrative? Brilliant if so. I attended public school in Texas, so I'm still getting a feel for what 'art' is.