The Imagined History of White Colonialism

There is power in narratives to create, shape, and dictate culture and race relations. Over the years, many white-dominated narratives have shaped the cultures and beliefs of the colonized, placing them at the ultimate mercy of the colonizer. Colonial narratives; narratives of Empire, etc - all enforce the white hegemony and position whites in places of power, authority, and they have all the power to change and manipulate their surroundings, while blacks/slaves/natives/Indians ultimately are at their disposal/will/beck and call/mercy. Even a wonderful novel like Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Patton, is subject to this, because despite the author's clear sympathy for the plight of the blacks - throughout his novel, he continually positions them in subservient roles, giving white characters the ability to grant favors or aid, as well as take away; while black characters are continually positioned at the mercy of either benevolent or malicious whites.

For example:

South Africa: "Jim Comes to Joburg" - the "shining white city" overwhelming the poor, unsophisticated black from the countryside. Ways of Dying, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Cry the Beloved Country, The Mine Boy

India: easily subdued, eager to please their colonial masters Indians; Kim, Passage to India

African Congo: The overpowering might of the colonial 'Other' - anxiety that all things native will eventually break down a white man's barriers, and destroy them; the only way to control this 'Other' is to forcibly subdue, conquer, map space - Robinson Crusoe - or enslave them, because - even though violent and barbaric - slavery is the best way to subdue the colonial 'Other' - Heart of Darkness.

Caribbean: Imagined history of cultural exchange between white colonizers, and black colonized. Ti Marie, Cambridge

Creolization, Making the African Colonial

I. Fear of the colonial "Other", mistreatment of slaves, fear of rebellion:

The18^th century saw the Caribbean as the most brutal slavery regime in history. The mistreatment of slaves rampant; they were seen merely as machines, means to an end: Du Terte - "We feed them however we want, we push them to work like beasts, and with their consent or by force, we draw from them all the service of which they are capable until their death"(Garroway, 241).

Quite simply put, they (slaves) were seen as consumables. Sugar plantations became known as "killing machines", tasking slaves with hard, grueling work, often admittedly to maintain the "hegemony" of the white regime (242). The reforms to the Code Noir - an initiative to govern and regulate the slavery system - had become ineffective, (as shown several times in Ti Marie after Picton takes over), and there was no limit to lashes that can be given to a slave, or the extent of any form of punishment.

In 1778, slave owner Lejuene committed a heinous crime against his slaves - burning and scorching their feet, thighs, and legs in punishment for disobedience - many died, but he was not prosecuted for it. In many way, the courts of the day were afraid of punishing him and crippling the white hegemony of power, so he (Lejuene) stands in many ways as a symbol of white colonial power: "It is not fear of the law's equity that prevents the black from stabbing his master, it is the sense of absolute power we have over his person - Lejuene after the courts acquitted him of any wrongdoing.

However, it is important to note that slave brutality spawned from the very real fear of slave revolt. During this time in Caribbean history, slaves outnumbered their white masters 30 to 1. According to historian and writer of the times, C. L. R.James, Saint-Domingue exhibited the "unusual spectacle of property owners apparently careless of preserving their property; (slaves), for they had first to ensure their own safety" (242). Thus, they mistreated and rode slaves so hard not ONLY because their view of the black as only one step above a domesticated animal, but they were also very afraid that healthy, well-treated and strong blacks would be strong enough to rise against them and overthrow them. Ironically, their brutal treatment of slaves most likely did more to incite revolt more than anything else.

A very near slave revolt occurred in 1757, when a slave tried to poison water supplies and kill an entire plantation. Incidents such as this only fomented and made more tangible the fear of slave revolt. Along with this, increasing acts of slave resistance eroded white's sense of legitimacy and supremacy (245), so in an effort to secure their place, brutality escalated.II. Imagined History, Family Romance:

As stated previously, there is ultimate power in a narrative, both fictional and non-fictional; the power to make the rules, establish the "grammar" of speaking, and set the stage. For white colonialism, their narratives propagated an imagined unity with their black slaves through an imagined "social exchange", or a "fiction of reciprocity". Colonial Narratives of the French Caribbean portray slaves not as beasts of burden prone to revolt, but rather as providers of culture and diversity (246). In these narratives, slaves - in spite of their abuse - were conceived in terms that valorized their diversity and resilience (246).

In this way, Creolization - the creation of the Creole through intermarriage - became a way of representing a cohesive slave unit. Instead of dominance, repression, rape, it was a "merging of culture", which created new people. Moreau de Saint-Mery claimed his historical narratives represented colonial population in works, but he leaves out the horrors of slavery in order to present a colonial society united by culture (246). He did this through his imagined history of the plantation "family romance", which was the imagined, created relationship between slave master and slave women. These narratives put together free women of color and romanticized them, while portraying white men as poor souls who simply couldn't help themselves in the face of temptation created by black women who wanton and promiscuous, possessors of "enthralling beauty" that enslaved white men and made them senseless.

In the "family romance", the narrative creates the white plantation owner as a father figure; a virtual progenitor of the entire plantation population: white, black, creole, mixed. As white masters had dalliances with slaves and produced children of free color, mulatto, and they positioned themselves as the "father of the plantation" - literally and figuratively. These narratives even went a step further by suggesting the "white father bestowed his "heritage" upon the plantation "family" with encounters with the daughters he fathered, creating a climate of racial incest.

Whether this was calculated, incidental, or simply not cared about is unclear. Plantation owners often did not acknowledge his bastard offspring; because they didn't come from a publicly recognized union, having relations with them therefore DIDN'T count as incest. Imagined histories and constructed narratives portrayed the white master as simply staying in his own gene pool, "strengthening" the Creoles with his "whiteness".

III. The African Made Colonial

This then led to the fantasy of "the African made colonial." In every established narrative of Empire, white is always placed as a paternal, benevolent figure offering something better, offering something to the colonial natives that's "for their own good"....

Cambridge: "If treated with care, these children (slaves of color) are as loyal as any creatures under the sun......It would this appear that the welcome process of Creolization is advanced and advancing apace. This being the case, we must be bold enough to take on the responsibility that comes with ownership, and learn to care with even greater dutiful application." (72)

Heart of Darkness: "And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; (presumably by English instruction)...A few months of instruction had really done for that fine chap...He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank...he was useful because he had been instructed.." (60-61)

In the French Caribbean, sexual domination and possession was romanticized to give a sexual twist on the "fiction of reciprocity" - the white man was not only out to colonize land, produce material goods in plantation, and to benevolently rule over slaves - but to colonize pedigree, to determine race, to produce off-spring bettered by white genes, for the betterment of black slaves in general. Hence the development of the idea of "Creolization", a process which lead to a "morally and physically superior standard of blackness" (Garroway, 251) According to these narratives, "Domesticity (of the slaves) beautified the species", (251) because Creoles were part white, and are raised by whites and among whites, inferior black genes are being washed out: "the nose lengthens, the traits soften, the yellow tint of the eyes weakens, as the generations distance themselves from their primitive beginnings" (252).

This leaves us with some rather weighty questions to consider, especially in regards to colonial and post-colonial novels alike. Initially, coming to question if the pattern of incest within plantation families. Were they calculated, premeditated acts by white plantation "fathers" to actually spawn his own family, were they unconscious urges backed by the fact that Creole children weren't spawned from "sanctioned" unions, and therefore the laws of incest didn't apply, or was it simply a matter of not being aware of illegitimate children's identities? In the post-colonial Caribbean romance Ti Marie, by Virginia Belgrave, Jose's anxiety and conflict over his desire/love for Carmen comes from his fear that she was his half-sister, born of a union between his father Diego and the negress "woman of the house", Yei.Does this create Ti Marie as a colonial romance, a post-colonial narrative, or is Belgrave simply having "fun" with this confusion - especially because Diego gets very angry for Jose wishing to marry Carmen, being a people of "proud blood" (70)?

We must also think of the process of Creolization, and its divergent effects upon whites and blacks. In the novel Cambridge, white narrator and daughter of a wealthy plantation owner Emily succumbs to Creolization, propitiating the idea that the tropics and exposure to blacks ultimately wear down white people, though the opposite is also supposed to be true: that exposure to and mingling with whites is supposed to "improve" black people. Can this be seen as playing out in colonial and post-colonial narratives?

There are also the title characters Barry Vantage in Ti Marie and Ellen in Cambridge. One is ultimately "destroyed", or at least uprooted and spun around in circles by the overwhelming of the tropics - Ellen - while the other - Barry - appears to have his eyes "opened" to truths he's never considered before. How does this position both these narratives? They're both post-colonial in nature, but in terms of "imagined history", looking back on a time and projecting a narrative upon them - which one is more accurate and realistic - if that can be said at all?

Sources:

Garraway, Dorris. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean. Duke University Press 2005

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness

Phillps, Caryll. Cambridge

Belgrave, Valerie. Ti Marie+