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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Hunting stories will usually glorify the hunters, since it is the hunters who write the stories. In this book, Dénètem Touam Bona takes up the perspective of the hunted, using the concept of marronage to highlight the lives and creativity of colonized and subjugated peoples. In a format that blends travel diary, anthropological inquiry, and philosophical and literary reflection, he narrates the hidden history of fugues – those of the runaway slave, the deserting soldier, the clandestine migrant, and all those who challenged norms and forms of control. In the space of the fugue, in the folds and retreats of dense and muggy woods, runaway countercultures appeared and spread out, cultures whose organization and values were diametrically opposed to those of colonial societies.
Marronage, the art of disappearance, has never been a more timely topic: thwarting surveillance, profiling, and tracking by the police and by corporations; disappearing from databases; extending the forest’s shadow by the click of a key. In our cyberconnected world, where control of individuals in real time is increasingly becoming the norm, we need to reinvent marronage and recognize the maroon as a universal figure of resistance.
Beyond its critical dimension, this book calls for a cosmo-poetics of refuge and aims at rehabilitating the power of dreams and poetry to ward off the confinement of minds and bodies.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
Introduction – Seloua Luste Boulbina
1. Return of the Maroni (Forest Secession)
Variations on marronage, slavery, and the memory of resistance movements
On the verge of a line of flight: a tale of experience
“The
nègre
is not. No more than the white man.”
Notes
2. The Art of the Fugue: From Fugitive Slaves to Refugees
Notes
3. Manhunt: Spectral Analysis of Slavery
Notes
4. “Heroic Land”: Spectrography of the “Border”
Notes
5. Mayotte, the Impossibility of an Island
Republican postcoloniality
“Give in to the temptation of Mayotte…”
Mayotte Channel Gateway
Under the DOM
Tropical micro-fascism
Unease in the lagoon
Swahilization: the archipelagic power of coastlines
Notes
6. Cosmo-Poetics of the Refuge
Afro-diasporic subversion and anarchism
Vodou cosmopolitics
Rhythm of unchained fury
Dissidences and distortions of space–time
Ethics of subtraction
Notes
7. Lianas Dreaming
Spectral prelude
Conspiring
“Humans are biological risks”
The collapse of the dream
“The boat is sinking”
The experience of the cybernetic desert
Cybercapital, a mutant power
Control addict
Restoring the powers of the dream and poetry
Chimerical visions
To draw a blank
Tearing the liana from Tarzan’s hands
To be done with the Virgin
The right to opacity
Art of the arabesque and camouflage
Power(s) of the vine
Stretching the string of a battle bow
The fabrication of defenseless lands
The cursed share of plants
Prophetic visions and liberation movements
The spider’s dance
Notes
Works Cited
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 1.
Fugitive
. Painting by Maya Mihindou. © Maya Mihindou, 2022.
Chapter 6
Figure 2. ‘Caligula’, 2019, a ‘voodoo’ and futuristic interpre...
Chapter 7
Figure 3.
Breath
. Painting by Gaël Maski. © Gaël Maski, 2020.
Figure 4.
Effondrement du rêve
(
The Dream’s Collapse
). Paintin...
Figure 5. Preview footage from “Spectrographies: Contes de l’île é...
Figure 6a and 6b.
The Tears of Bananaman
. Installation by Jean-François Boclé...
Figure 7. Dance scene from the choreographic creation
Démayé
, 2021. C...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Diego Falconí Trávez,
From Ashes to Text
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Karima Lazali,
Colonial Trauma
Premesh Lalu,
Undoing Apartheid
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
The Politics of Time
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
To Write the Africa World
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe,
The Scent of the Father
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Dénètem Touam Bona,
Fugitive, Where Are You Running?
Fugitive, Where Are You Running?
Dénètem Touam Bona
Translated by Laura Hengehold
polity
Copyright Page
“Retour du Maroni,” “L’art de la fugue,” and “Chasse à l’homme” were originally published in French in the volume Fugitif, où cours-tu?, copyright © Presses universitaires de France/Humensis, 2016
“‘Heroic Land,’” “Cosmo-Poetics of the Refuge,” “Mayotte, the Impossibility of an Island,” and “Lianas Dreaming” © Dénètem Touam Bona, 2023
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Excerpt from Hawad’s “Détournement d’horizon,” Furigraphie. Poésies, 1985–2015. Éditions Gallimard. Reproduced by kind permission of Hawad.
Excerpt from “Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State” by Jean Comaroff & John L. Comaroff, Journal of Southern African Studies, copyright © The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5184-2 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5185-9 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939967
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Epigraph
Art is the strength to make reality say what it would not have been able to say by itself or, at least, what it might too easily have left unsaid. … I argue that there should be another centre of the world, that there should be other reasons for naming things, other ways of breathing… because to be a poet nowadays is to want to ensure, with all one’s strength, with all one’s body and with all one’s soul, that, in the face of guns, in the face of money (which in its turn becomes a gun), and above all in the face of received wisdom (upon which we poets have the authority to piss), no aspect of human reality is swept into the silence of history.
Sony Labou Tansi, “Foreword,” in The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez, trans. Clive Wake. Oxford: Heinemann, 1995.
IntroductionSeloua Luste Boulbina
Rather than defending claims, the texts contained in Fugitive, Where Are You Running? propose perspectives. With a poetic hand steeped in practice, Dénètem Touam Bona follows a line of flight to the horizon that lends depth to the field of experience. Experience needs vanishing points to orient the gaze in a certain direction and to escape the order of a certain world. Where power consists in imposing immobility, movement is life preserving: “the cimarrón is a runaway slave” (p. 1). The fugitive runs, turning his back on the unjust fate reserved for him alone.
The converging lines of marronage and lyannaj are articulated on each other. Neither exists without the other. In fact, the maroon does not (re)discover the freedom that he originally lost in deportation and then, again, in servile work: he searches for an exit. He strives to escape a condition that oppresses and injures him. In doing so, he turns the forest, the world of lianas, into the space of his own emancipation. The author’s pseudonym or alias, Dénètem Kilombo, was not chosen at random. What place, in fact, corresponds to the exit? And what action? Weaving bonds means sharing fertile moments of powerlessness. To accomplish this, one must sometimes just leave, narrowly escape, which already suggests the uncertain outline of a roundabout path and the sinuosities of a lengthy journey.
It takes intersections, the meeting of solitudes, to open one’s eyes to what is possible and enjoy it rather than record the unhappy impossibilities of an infernal present. A whole logic of the ruse, indeed several, may develop, enabling one to ferret out, explore, and discover ways to exist together besides confinement – and thereby to advance. A form of resistance through feints and displacements, marronage involves extracting oneself from whatever enslaves by unbinding oneself, by hiding from the disciplinary eye that freezes and exploits, by transforming the body machine into a body subject in the act of secession, by burrowing through and into the forest’s darkness, forming autonomous societies, inventing ways of being and styles of acting.
The limited margins of maneuver leave no room for rest. Dissemination weakens, but at the same time reinforces. The fugitive “fugues” more than he flees: “The rebel nègres do not flee, they fugue. Masters of subterfuge, they evade pursuit, beat around the bush, vanish into a cloud of tricks: false paths, lures, stratagems, ruses of every kind. As they escape, the runaway warriors persist in their being only by disappearing; and from their disappearance they forge a weapon with many sharp edges. In their perpetual movement of retreat and attack, they are accompanied and sustained by women and children, elders and spirits who participate in their battles; a whole moving diaspora from whence unexpected forms of life spring up” (p. 40). The author’s love for the fugue extends to its musical sense of polyphony, the lyannaj of matching contrapuntal melodies.
Dénètem Touam Bona stresses the extent to which precarity can contribute to freedom when stability is, by contrast, mortifying, at least in extreme cases. This is how a whole mode of pirate existence came to spread historically in the Americas while the shadow of servitude stretched throughout “civilized” lands. There the tree served as shelter and resource; for the art of sculpted wood developed in the tembe. In this art, indiscipline becomes a creative ferment that evades all qualification, and therefore all denigration: it promotes decarceration. This homage to the fugitive appeared in French in 2016. In 2021 the author published a supplement to his panegyric: Sagesses des lianes (Fécamp: Post-éditions, 2021). What is the wisdom at stake here?
Between these two books, Dénètem Touam Bona went maroon. After working in the backcountry of Guiana and on the artificially insular Mayotte, the island separated politically from the Comoros archipelago, he left “education” behind, together with the “national” frame, and became deterritorialized. Passing through Réunion along the way, he trusted the compass of intuition and worked up an exhibition titled The Wisdom of Lianas in Vassivières, an international center for landscape art in the heart of the French countryside, where he has a freeform residency. He set himself the task of looking at things from the other side: not only the side of those who seek and find refuge in the forest but also the side of what the vegetal itself teaches and offers to the human animal whom it welcomes. There the liana becomes the paradigm of a baroque practical wisdom in which the sinuous takes the place of the rectilinear. Means and ends become distant and recede from sight. They disappear into the shadows of calculation. The lyannaj, like the lésoté, is an inspiration to continue living, to exist together, to pursue one’s path, if not one’s goal. Both are responses to the question of how to work together. The lyannaj is a technique for binding sugarcanes together; the lésoté is a practice, accompanied by chants and drumming, for clearing the meager land that fugitives wrested from the forest in order to live far from masters or people who see themselves in that light.
The lésoté is analogous to the Haitian konbit, which is said to be the soul of the small peasantry of the first “black republic.” This marronage on a grand scale and of great scope led the landowners, who were “positive” in the sense of “positive law,” to flee – not to fugue – from the land and the people of Saint Domingue. It was by lending a hand, each in turn, in setting aside one’s own interest that the communal agricultural practices appeared without which sometimes the land cannot be worked at all. Lyannaj is a term that, likewise, belongs to Creole languages. It became well known in Guadeloupe in 2009, thanks to the the slogan Lyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (“Solidaristic Movement against the Profiteering System”). Lyannaj has a front side and a back side. On the back, fouté lyann means to put someone in a difficult position, to prevent them from doing something, to turn the screw. On the front, nou an lyannaj means to be together in struggle, to encircle the adversary, to bind oneself to others. Dénètem Touam Bona’s trek through the French overseas territories and his familiarity with matters of encirclement have led him to explore the theme of what it is that augments our power to act from within, above all when it faces repression from the outside. The liana entwines without destroying. A climbing and supple plant, it adheres to the trunk around which it wraps, lifting itself and undertaking a fugue toward the light.
From this living being and its remarkable growth, this clandestine passenger of the forest, the author draws a life lesson. Often equipped with specialized organs (drilling tendrils, roots with suckers, hooks, etc.), a liana can sink, drop, then ascend once more. These perturbations leave phantom traces, stems unfurling in the void, deformed, which form a spectrography of twists and bends; and these are nowhere more intense than in the tropical zone. Cosmo-poetics, an act of rediscovery from without and from within, has nothing in common with geopolitics. It leads to the encounter with a cosmos that vanished into what Europe called “nature,” in which “natural intelligences” were no longer recognized as such, or at least not sufficiently. Such a rediscovery entails distancing oneself, radically and for all time, from the flying carpet pasted over the tropics that characterizes the movements of Tarzan, the supposed “lord of the jungle.”
For Dénètem Touam Bona, this is a way of showing, or rather indicating, how spirituality dwells in these nomad lines of flight that the lianas and lyannaj trace in their wisdom. Here, too, he chooses not to be down to earth, not to be “grounded” or ground down, but to grasp, in each twist, each turn, each crossroads of existence, whatever leads to a gain in lightness and allows the universe of the dream to be pierced; he chooses a narrow escape. Defying subservience, this second work pursues reflection along the vanishing line while converging with the body of a subject. Going beyond Deleuze, it holds that there is nothing more active than a “flight,” that one can make a system “leak” or “run away” just as one can puncture a hose. This is no simple task: it is to conceive, at once, of a way of walking and a way of dancing, a style for the body, and thus for the soul as well, assuming and assuring a form for the humanity pushed out into the margins, if not altogether denied, in political spaces of abandonment. A “cosmo-poetics of the refuge” takes its widest meaning from this task.
1Return of the Maroni (Forest Secession)
West Indians are frightened and ashamed of the past. They know about Christophe and L’Ouverture in Haiti and the Maroons in Jamaica; but they believe that elsewhere slavery was a settled condition, passively accepted through more than two centuries. It is not widely known that in the eighteenth century slave revolts in the Caribbean were as frequent and violent as hurricanes, and that many were defeated only by the treachery of “faithful” slaves.1
It took almost a century of guerrilla warfare against the soldiers of the slave system for the N’djuka and Saramaka, groups of deported Africans, to definitively wrest their freedom from the plantation owners of Surinam, formerly Dutch Guiana. In fact, faced with the threat of a general conflagration in the colony in 1760, the Dutch were forced to sign peace treaties with the nègres marrons (“black maroons”) who were fugitive slaves. These official accords confirmed the autonomy of the N’djuka and Saramaka territories – vast expanses of the Amazonian forest crisscrossed with rivers and creeks, interrupted by marshes and savannahs, and pierced deep by invisible bogs. Several years later, toward 1770, another group of nègres marrons, the rebels of the Cottica, launched a new war of liberation that was more radical than its predecessors: their leader, Boni, had decided not simply to seize independence but also to chase the “white master” from Surinam altogether. This time William of Orange, Stathouder of the United Provinces,2 put a significant army on the ground that carried the day thanks to its numerical superiority and weaponry and forced the Boni to retreat to the French banks of the Maroni, Sparouine, and Lawa rivers.
In 1772, a revolt more terrible than any before broke out on the shores of the Cottica. Its leader was a mulatto named Boni, born in the woods to a runaway slave mother. The colonial militias proved insufficient and the prince of Orange was asked for a corps of regular troops to fight back against the insurrection … [Colonel Fourgaud] stuck to his goal, requiring his troops to manoeuver in all weather and in all seasons, across creeks, bogs, savannahs, and wetlands. He paid the cries and protests of the officers and soldiers no heed, but neither did he give the enemy any chance for rest or mercy. The capture of the village of Gado-Saby, where Boni himself was found, dealt the final blow to the insurrection; but the winners paid dearly for their victory. Of 2,000 men sent from Holland, barely 100 returned to their country, sick and exhausted from the consequences of this disastrous affair … Wounded, pushed beyond the limits of endurance, chased successively from his torched villages, Boni led his soldiers’ retreat; he crossed the Tapanoni and took refuge in the upper Maroni with the debris of his scattered nation.”3
Ever since that moment, the destiny of the Boni – who took their name from their heroic ancestor – has been intimately linked to that of French Guiana, where other groups of marrons (“maroons”) came to join them over the course of time. Today the Boni, the Paramaka, the N’djuka, and the Saramaka represent more than 20 percent of the Guianese population. However, very few works recounting their existence and their history exist in France. This is hardly surprising, given that the majority of books dealing with slavery present marronage as a secondary phenomenon, a simple systemic reaction. The myth of the docile slave remains difficult to uproot… Because this misrecognition of marronage struck me as a new injustice to the deported Africans and their descendants, I decided to spend some time in French Guiana, on the Maroni river, in the hope of learning from the “revolted Negroes” themselves a little more about their hidden history.4
Variations on marronage, slavery, and the memory of resistance movements
My stay in Guiana began in Montreuil, on the grounds of the Parole Errante,5 one spring evening when friends asked me to review the proofs of an interview that they had just completed with Daniel Maximin. In this interview, responding to questions from high-school students [lycéens], the Guadeloupean writer explained the different forms of resistance to slavery known throughout the Americas: sabotage, “suicide,” poisonings, acts of arson, and revolts – as well as all the cultural practices, more or less secret, through which the slaves reinvented their humanity.6 When he got to marronage – the general phenomenon of enslaved persons’ escape – he described its two major forms: small marronage and great marronage. The first designated limited flights of several hours or several days: slaves went missing to meet with a friend or family member on another plantation, to escape punishment, or to get a tyrannical overseer removed (in the slaveholding system, strikes took the form of a temporary collective flight). The second designated definitive escapes, whether individual or collective, that the slaves undertook by melting into the anonymity of towns or into the impenetrable tangles of nearby forests, hills, and tropical marshes. Sometimes, Maximin explained, this great marronage gave birth to veritable societies of fugitive slaves, maroon communities capable of introducing cracks into the colonial order itself. As Louis Sala-Molins emphasized, “it was by ‘marooning’ that the Blacks shook the bases of colonial society in the most efficient way and that they became aware of their capacity for systematic opposition and revolt.”7 One might add that continual raids by bands of neg mawon against plantations, roads, and isolated villages caused the colonies to tremble in perpetual insecurity, prefiguring the future liberation movements of colonized peoples (for example in Haiti, Vietnam, or Algeria) as well as their guerilla tactics of immersion in the landscape. Let us recall, with Frantz Fanon, that “decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder.”8
Certainly, I had already heard talk about nègres marrons, but had never pictured them to myself as anything but poor vagabonds forced to be brigands, living from one day to the next, and haunted by the threat of “Negro hunters.”9 Never had I suspected that, in certain places and at certain times, they were able to form significant and lasting communities. My first research into this subject touched on the origin and the meaning of their name. In truth, marron has nothing to do with color;10 rather this noun comes from the Spanish cimarrón, a term from the Taïno (one of the peoples “discovered” and immediately subjected to “genocide”…).11 The word was first used on the island of Hispaniola – the future Saint Domingue – to refer to domestic animals imported from Spain (such as pigs, cattle, or cats) who escaped, and in consequence returned to a wild state. Just as runaway bulls were called toros cimarrónes, so too the habit arose of calling blacks who escaped into the woods negros cimarrónes. It seemed quite natural to displace the meaning of animal stock onto human stock… Around 1540, the use of the noun marron spread throughout the slaveholding colonies of the Americas. In the eyes of planters, a black person who escaped slavery could only be an ungrateful and lazy animal, indeed one badly trained. Before it was revalorized by the writers and artists of the Caribbean (above all, after the abolition of slavery in 1848), the word mawon became synonymous in Creole with “vagabond,” “delinquent,” or “bandit.” This reduction of meaning contributed to the redaction of Creole memory.
It is symptomatic that little by little the colonists and their authorities (assisted by the Church) were able to impose on their population the image of the nègre marron as an ordinary bandit or assassin, concerned only with avoiding work, to the point where he was made interchangeable in popular representation with the villainous bogeyman used to frighten children. … Even more telling is the observation that [in the Antilles] the nègre marron eventually became exactly what he was said to be, and that at a certain moment he began actually behaving like an ordinary bandit … an observation teaching us primarily that a community which is deprived of its “natural” popular heroes and which disowns them under the alienating pressure of colonial action has disowned itself.12
The use of the term cimarrón is revealing in more than one respect. First, it expresses the fact that all slavery, whether that of ancient civilizations, Viking conquerors, or Muslim sultans, happens through domestication – a process of training, and therefore an animalization of human beings. Slavery has always obeyed animalistic models: “From the very beginning there must have been two distinct types of slave: the single slave, linked to his master as a dog is, and numbers of slaves together, like cattle in a field.”13 But with “modern” slavery this definition of roles began to follow a chromatic logic. Usually only the “lightest” colored slaves – particularly the unrecognized offspring and relatives of the master, his bastards – were admitted “inside,” in the master’s intimate sphere, and could therefore take pride in having gained his confidence. In the initial division between “house Negro” (domesticated, modeled on the image of the master) and “field Negro” (miserable, but always ready to escape), Malcolm X saw one of the keys needed to understand the divisions and the alienation that plagued African–Americans. Malcolm X’s claims should not be taken as gospel, to be sure; they were spoken in a polemical context and their main purpose was to disqualify the “integrationist” path represented at the time by Martin Luther King.
The house Negroes – they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good because they ate his food… Whenever the master said “we,” [they] said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro. … If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick! He identified himself with his master, more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this? That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call them today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here… The field Negro was beaten from morning to night; he lived in a shack, in a hut; he wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master… If someone came to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say, “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.” You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro.”14
Because the “house Negroes” were not subject to the same conditions of exploitation as the “field Negroes,” they might often be considered privileged, if not outright traitors. But, as The Infamous Rosalie makes clear, the historical reality is much more complex: this extremely nuanced novel by Evelyne Trouillot reminds us that, because of their proximity to their masters, domestic slaves were also the first to endure humiliation. This is how the cocotte – the mistress’s favorite slave, responsible for helping her with her toilette – came to live in a permanent affective swamp, being caught between the plantation owner’s lasciviousness and his wife’s jealousy. But this “companion” also knew her masters’ intimate secrets, therefore their weak points, and from this fact she drew a certain power to influence or indeed to harm them… In the coordination of flights and uprisings, domestic slaves often played an essential role: as information gatherers, as organizers of networks, and as agents of communication between plantations and groups of marrons.
However, it is also true that, in colonies like Saint Domingue, the “people of color” – emancipated slaves and their descendants – constituted a major political and social force (in 1789 there were 30,000 whites and an equal number of people of color to about 500,000 slaves). Now, the majority of these free men of color were “mulattos,” who sometimes possessed plantation wealth and hundreds of slaves of their own. Moreover, the colonial administration preferred to recruit from among these mulattos when staffing the Maréchaussée – a police force that specialized in verifying the identity of slaves and tracking runaways in order to discourage any possible alliance between mulattos and nègres: dividing to conquer all the better… The mulatto is a profoundly ambiguous colonial figure, indeed the traitor par excellence. To be “mixed” means being condemned to betray at least one of one’s parents, either the one from the masters’ side or the one from among those enslaved. And there is always this lingering odor of bastardy that attaches to your skin, because in a segregationist society being mixed means that you can be only the accursed fruit of rape or of an illicit love.
Thus, in order to defend the color line, that is, the line of demarcation between whites and blacks, plantation society established a correspondence between the chromatic scale and the social scale. This was done in such a way that access to valorized duties and status (domestic servant, artisan, or cook), access to a semblance of education, and even the possibility of emancipation depended on the degree to which one’s skin was white, in other words on the “purity” of one’s skin. In the eyes of the newly emergent colonial medicine, the norm of healthy humanity was effectively incarnated in the white male, with respect to whom the woman and the indigenous person (whether black or Native American) could only be unhealthy, impure, pathogenic bodies.15 Because of the disturbance that it introduces into the social–racial order of the slave system, métissage – being of mixed race – represented a kind of pollution, a formidable political and biological peril that must be contained at all costs.16 This is what led the colonies to elaborate new kinds of taxonomies, subtle ways of calculating “the mixture of whites with nègres.”17 Thus Moreau de Saint-Méry conceived of each individual as the product of 128 parts of “blood.” A mulatto, for example, would have sixty-four “white” parts and sixty-four “black” parts. On the strength of this axiom, people of color could be classified into thirteen categories: quadroon, mamelouc, griffe (“blend”), and so on. Ubuesque as this mathematics of colors might seem today, it nevertheless offered an efficient technology for identifying and sorting people, since it allowed free persons of color to be kept in a subaltern position through the simple application of a norm. Starting in the 1760s, therefore, thousands of people previously considered white were reclassified by the colonial administration of Saint Domingue as mulattos or as quadroons, which automatically denied them access to official positions, inheritances, education, professions, and even to certain types of clothing. This reflected an obsession with any possible confusion between the “mixed-blood” and the white.
As for the “white,” still a unified body, it could have only one name. By contrast with blackness, which shifts as often as a lie, whiteness is as unchanging as the truth. In the end, the color line is diffracted into a vast range of nuanced “black skins”: “cashew,” “caramel,” “raw sugar,” “prune,” peach,” “purple,” “chocolate,” “syrup,” “pistachio,” “ripe banana,” and so on. This inventory of Prévert’s – a sample of the designations employed in Saint Domingue – would be almost mouth-watering if it did not point to a sordid “zoo logic” of evaluating the humanity of human beings by their “lightness.” Whiteness is a sign of chosenness, blackness of malediction. To be of mixed race is a movement of ascension toward the light when one is attached to someone more light-skinned than oneself, a descent into the shadows when one is attached to someone more dark-skinned. In this respect, Malcolm X’s proposals have lost nothing of their sting: one has only to register the popularity, among Africans and their descendants, of “lightening creams” that, although toxic, continue to be viewed as purifying.
We declare slaves to be possessions [meubles] and to enter the community property as such, not to be mortgaged, and to be divided equally among co-inheritors.18
In his pathbreaking analysis in De l’esclavage au salariat (1998), Yann Moulier Boutang shows that the prime mover in the history of capitalism is the freezing in place of a constantly fugitive labor force: the ceaselessly renewed effort to capture the landless peasant, the nomad bohemian, the runaway apprentice, the deserting soldier, the escaped slave, the incorrigible vagabond, everyone who resisted the imposition of discipline. Flight – and, more generally, resistance – is therefore primary in relation to power. Moreover, “one of the primary objects of discipline” (of disciplinary power, exercised in European factories as much as on Creole plantations) “is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique.”19 Racism is nothing but the chemical agent that fixes the labor capacity of certain human beings when it fixes their color – not only on the surface but also at the greatest depth of their sense of self – as the ultimate truth to which they must submit. Color is fixation, both a shackle and an obsession. As I have already said, all enslavement proceeds from an animalization of human beings. But the reduction of humans to the color of their skin, which is to say their hide, is the properly colonial form of this animalization. Far more than a mere word, nègre is the paradigmatic weapon of the chief reducer, the colonist. To every enslaved person tempted by flight, the black codes issue this warning: “you can run, but I will always find you again, no matter where you are… because you wear the mark of the slave, the mark of the beast, the mark of your damnation: a skin as black as your soul, if you even have one… You, my precious, my treasure, my adored ‘possession.’”
Run, nigger, run; de patter-roller catch you
Run, nigger, run, it’s almost day …
Dat nigger run, Dat nigger flew, Dat nigger lost his Sunday shoe.
Dis nigger run, he run his best…20
The cimarrón is a runaway slave, tearing off a servile skin to take on the striated shadow of foliage in his or her mad sprint. His or her liberation comes about from a process of going wild, from an act of immersion in the forest, the sylve (from the Latin noun silva “forest,” which is at the root of our word “savage”) – an act that makes him into a forest creature, a “leaf-being.”21 The Businenge – a generic name for the maroons of Guiana – are nothing but “men of the forest,” as the etymology of this name indicates. In fact busi nenge comes from an alteration in the English phrase “bush Negroes.” But in Busitongo, which is the maroon language, nenge means “person,” not “slave” (nègre). This detour of meaning, which creatively subverts the colonist’s language, constitutes a retort to the fixation of a defamatory identity in the soul and body of the enslaved person. In choosing to call themselves “Nenge,” the Boni threw the stigma, the insult, right back at the ones who spit on them: from this shameful color, el negro, they wove the flag of their liberation and their reconquered humanity.
Anacaona, who rose up against the Conquistadors before anyone else in the Americas… The Golden Flower [which is what “Anacaona” means] began by chanting the poem of the enslaved miners who worked at the bottom of the gold-digging canyons, and proclaimed the despair of families in the repartimientos,22 the whip of the commanders snapping over the laughter of running water, the epidemics brought by the knights … the collective suicides after long nights of prayer, finally the interminable baying of the Spanish priests calling the Indians to be converted to the enslavers’ god, with their crosses, their hoods and the incense of prayer hovering over the systematic extermination of an entire people… We are all the sons of the Golden Flower.”23
For anyone who knows how to hear it, the cry of the Taïno still resonates in the word cimarrón. The Taïno were the first to be reduced to slavery, and were therefore the first cimarrónes of the Americas. The exiled Africans will borrow the same lines of flight as their Amerindian predecessors; and the marronage of each group will be mutually nourished by the others. It was precisely in order to celebrate the memory of these first acts of resistance to colonization that the “black Jacobins” of Saint Domingue called their new nation by one of the original names of the island: Haiti. The first African slaves were introduced to Hispaniola in 1499. As early as 1503, the island’s governor, Ovando, complained that blacks were having a pernicious influence on the Taïno: “He opposed as much as he could the sending of Negroes to the Indies, having observed that the earliest of those who came to the Spanish isle ran off among the natives to whom they taught everything bad, of which they were capable and which made them much more difficult to control.”24 In Martinique, one can still pause for reflection at the “gravestone of the Caribbean,” a rock from which the last “native” fighters threw themselves, preferring communion in death to the putrefaction of their life as slaves. The Spanish colonists used the expressions indios cimarrónes and indios salvajes interchangeably, to designate native communities who refused to submit to the Spanish Crown. In the eyes of the sovereign, insubordination always means savagery or barbarism. As everyone knows, laziness is the mother of all vices and work is health; Arbeit macht frei… The lazy and lustful nature of the native must therefore be subjected to the moralizing action of labor. These big children – who live only for enjoyment – must submit to the emancipatory yoke of Reason. In short, they must be made into men. Thus slavery refers to a “civilizing mission,” however cruel …
A traveler at the end of the eighteenth century made these observations:
[The colonists] still much prefer the creole nègre to the nègre from Africa. In fact, one can hardly count the obstacles that must be surmounted before the latter can be useful. Foreign for a long time in the New World, ignorant of the customary language and the kind of work expected of him, always immersed in longing for his country… On the other hand, what the creole nègre sees when his eyes open for the first time is nothing but what he will see for his whole life. Nourished in slavery, his spirit like his body is insensibly molded by small trials and has plenty of time to get used to the crudest work.25
The most difficult to govern was the “bossal” [bossale], the slave newly arrived from Africa, still “savage,” which is to say untamed. This was the category of enslaved persons in which one could find the greatest number of men and women ready to brave the bottomless forests, the swampy deltas, and the filigree of craters in order to re-create their humanity, new brotherhoods, and new lines of ancestry in the space achieved by escape. Bossale comes from the Spanish bozal and designates a type of bit, bridle, or muzzle. Moreover, among the kinds of shackles imposed on unruly slaves – runaways, saboteurs, dissemblers, those who dared taste the sugar cane, those who defied the “commander” with their speech or fists – there existed “muzzles”: iron masks fixed on the head with rivets that allowed their victims to do nothing but see and breathe. To bridle an enslaved person does not stop his or her movement but governs it, submits it to a disciplinary rule and to the sovereign’s power, so that nothing remains of it but useful force, exploitable energy, an abstraction fashioned entirely from resistance to its human material. Because the black person’s usefulness is proportional to his or her docility and in order for that servitude to seem natural, the slave must be shaped from the most tender years of childhood onward: custom becomes nature through habituation. This is why the colonist preferred the nègre créole “possession” cast in the mold of enslavement. For the planter,26 this “serf-man has lost the memory of his first being” – freedom:
Custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude. Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.27
Slavery does not exclude an aspect of voluntary servitude, because it cannot be reduced to a relation of violence (direct action on bodies: force, bending, breaking, destruction). There is always some room for play, however tiny, in the condition of the enslaved person. If not, how could the outbreak of resistance movements be explained? To enclose the enslaved person – or, in general, the colonized – in the status of a victim is to deny her all capacity for action. Believing that it honors her memory, it perpetuates her dehumanization. As Foucault stresses, “slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains (in this case it is a question of the physical relation of constraint), but only when he has some possible mobility, even a chance of escape.”28 From the moment he is no longer chained, the enslaved person can modify the strategic situation. It takes very little to topple the relations of force in that situation, which explains the permanent state of tension, paranoia, and fear among the masters and also sheds light on the extreme violence with which the enslaved person’s least infraction was repressed. On the slaving ships, the critical moment always occurs when the black cargo is uncaged. This is because on the ship’s deck, where they are allowed to wash themselves and shake out their limbs, the exiles rediscover a small margin of movement. So much so that it takes no more than a second of distraction for a mutiny to explode or for the slaves to fling themselves overboard.
So that afternoon this young Hausa woman began to dance with her man. … The whites were laughing. Afraid yet fascinated, they were inventing thousands of fantasies. Then the drumming of our hands and feet stopped cold. In the same spirit the man and the woman sprung forward and threw themselves into the sea.29
If a lesson can then be drawn from all these histories of nègres marrons, it is truly one of hope, and not a requiem or a victimology. A situation of domination, whatever it might be, always contains possibilities for resistance, action, creation. For marronage cannot be reduced to a simple refusal of “civilization,” a simple reaction against the slavery system, a simple rejection of Babylon (the image embodying every system of predation and exploitation for the Rastafarian movement); marronage is above all an inventive rejoinder that includes attitudes, corporeal techniques, an entire system of in-corporated knowledge. The body is the first theater of operation, the first position to free, the first right to re-establish. The indocile body of the enslaved person – the first complete proletarian – may not be visible as a spectacle and remains imperceptible most of the time, making use of ruses, tactics, and strategies that range from the concerted slowdown of work or negligence to the damage, or even deliberate sabotage, of machines or of production. Thus the stereotype of the “lazy black” reveals one of the thousand forms of micro-resistance against exploitation available to the colonized – a complete art of evasion already implicit in marronage.
Fleeing into the woods makes the maroon into an outlaw, someone who violates the conditions of his own exile and thereby belongs among the social criminals described by Hobsbawm (including figures like Robin Hood or Zapata): “escaped serfs, ruined freemen, runaways from state or seignorial factories, from jail, seminary, army, or navy… formed or joined brigand bands.”30 Like the Waldgänger, the Scandinavian exile of the Middle Ages, the maroon takes back his freedom using the forests. In the Germanic law of the high Middle Ages, the banned individual is defined as a creature excluded from humanity, as a “‘wolf-man’ (wargus, werwolf, the Latin garulphus, from which the French loup garou, ‘werewolf,’ is derived).”31 Thus identified with a dangerous and bloody beast, he may be killed by whoever encounters him. In colonial society, the black rebel also shares this limit condition of the wild man but, by contrast with the medieval exile, he chooses and claims his banishment. The renegade effects a secession, withdrawing from a society that is not one, since it constantly denies the humanity of most of those who compose it. Marronage is a paradoxical process: to escape from the master’s power over animals – from the condition of human livestock – presupposes the willingness to enter into a becoming-animal, to proliferate in the form of mobs, hordes, multitudes that are as rebellious as they are imperceptible – to go from being prey to becoming a predator…
[Colonel Fourgeoud] promised them life, liberty, victuals, drink, and all they wanted. They replied, with a loud laugh, that they wanted nothing from him; characterized him as a half-starved Frenchman, who had run away from his own country; and assured him that if he would venture to pay them a visit, he should return unhurt, and not with an empty belly. They told us, that we were to be pitied more than they; that we were white slaves, hired to be shot at and starved for fourpence a day; that they scorned to expend much more of their powder upon such scarecrows; but should the planters or overseers dare to enter the woods, not a soul of them should ever return, any more than the perfidious rangers, some of whom might depend upon being massacred that day, or the next; and concluded by declaring that Bonny should soon be the governor of the colony.32
There is something carnivalesque about this proposal, which reverses positions and dissolves negative presuppositions by employing an acid language in which irony and contempt are wedded. In the maroon arsenal of “voluntary insubordination,”33 laughter doubtless represents the most diabolical weapon: it brings down the exalted, blackens the white, and throws the seriousness of the dominant order into disarray, along with its supporting dogmas. The revolted Negroes hold up a mirror to their hunters: “you track us like wild beasts, but you do not see that you yourselves are slaves, barefoot, collapsing from hunger!” Here the Boni fighters allude to a concrete political and social reality: the great majority of white soldiers were either pressed into service or forced to enlist – forced through misery, debts, or crimes they had committed.34 Thus, when these rebels offer hospitality to solders of the expeditionary force sent against them, this is not merely a ruse or an irony. They know quite well who the true enemies are: the great proprietors, the merchants, and the “India companies”; in short, those who hold the land and capital – and not their guard dogs (except for the “black rangers” who were considered traitors).
Having been informed that … a village of negroes had been discovered by the rangers some time before, [Mr. Lepper] determined with his small party, which was only a detachment from the Patamaca post, to sally through the woods and attack them. But the rebels being apprized of his intentions by their spies, which they constantly employ, immediately marched out to receive him; in his way they laid themselves in ambush, near the borders of a deep marsh… No sooner had the unfortunate men got into the swamp and up to their armpits, than their black enemies rushed out from under cover, and shot them dead at their leisure in the water, while they were unable to return the fire more than once, their situation preventing them from reloading their musquets. Their gallant commander, being imprudently distinguished by a gold-laced hat, was shot through the head in the first onset. The few that scrambled out of the marsh upon the banks were immediately put to death in the most barbarous manner.35
Notes
1
V. S. Naipaul,
The Middle Passage
, p. 183.
2
This was the political and military title of the governor in the Republic of the United Provinces, inherited within the House of Orange-Nassau.
3
Frédéric Bouyer,
La Guyane française
, pp. 297–298, 300.
4
Expression used by those who hunted them down: see John Gabriel Stedman,
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition
.
5
Arts center dedicated to the work of Armand Gatti. I take the opportunity to thank Joachim Gatti and Pierre-Vincent Cresceri.
6
I’m thinking here of Creole languages and cuisines, martial arts such as capoeira or
damnyé
, work songs (which gave birth to the blues), Afro-Christian religions (Santeria, Vodou, Candomblé, etc.), and the creative forms of resistance that shaped in large part the cultures of the Americas, including that of their former masters.
7
Louis Sala-Molins,
Le Code Noir
, p. 169.
8
Frantz Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth
, p. 2.
9
[TN: The French
nègre
does not have an exact English correlate. Often translated simply as “black,” the term is, however, less neutral than “noir,” having insulting connotations that can be turned back defiantly on the European and former slaveholding cultures, in which it meant “slave” and served as a term of racial abuse. Its meaning, like that of similar terms in English, may shift depending on evolving political tensions in the Francophone world where it is used and on the speaker’s social position or attitude toward racism. I have left it in French in order to indicate that the author is using it polemically, in a historical context that is in many respects analogous (but not identical) to that of the former English-speaking colonies of North America and the Caribbean.]
10
[TN: The French adjective
marron
means “brown.”]
11
I can already hear scandalized reactions such as: “but this was not genocide, since there was no intention to exterminate them! They did not do it on purpose…” Let us pray that no extraterrestrial nation has the idea of “discovering” us…
12
Édouard Glissant,
Le discours antillais
, pp. 180–181.
13
Elias Canetti,
Crowds and Power
, p. 384.
14
Malcolm X, “Message to the Grass Roots,” pp. 10–11.
15
See Elsa Dorlin’s pathbreaking book
La Matrice de la race
.
16
The anthropologist Mary Douglas shows that phobias related to dirt, impurity, and mixture play the role of a system that symbolically protects social order. See her
Purity and Danger
.
17
Moreau de Saint-Méry,
Description topographique…
, pp. 71–88.
18
Article 44 of the Code Noir promulgated in March 1685 by Louis XIV; see
Le Code Noir ou Edit du roy
. A properly colonial codification of social relations, racism is the nauseating fruit of the “black codes” of the slavery system; “juridical” codes which rationalized the unjustifiable.
19
Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish
, p. 218.
20
Excerpt from “Run, nigger, run,” an African–American folk song of the 1850s (Louisiana version). For documentation, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run,_Nigger,_Run
.
21
A wild figure in the medieval West that symbolizes the return of fecundating forces in springtime.
22
Involuntary settlement of “native” populations on a given territory in order to impose forced labor upon them.
23
Jacques Stéphen Alexis,
Romancero aux étoiles
, pp. 156, 170, 177.
24
Père Charlevoix, as cited in Jean Fouchard,
The Haitian Maroons
, p. 300.
25
Girod-Chantrans (1786), quoted by Gérard Barthélémy, “Le Rôle des Bossales dans l’émergence d’une culture de marronage en Haïti,” p. 841.
26
The figures of the Creole
nègre
and bossal
nègre
were initially colonial representations. Let us not forget that what often kept the Creole slave from definitively escaping was the more or less consistent kinship network that he or she was trying to preserve. To run away might mean abandoning very young children or parents who needed assistance and leaving them to the mercy of the master.
27
La Boétie,
Anti-Dictator
, p. 26.
28
Michel Foucault, “The subject and power,” p. 342, translation modified.
29
Èvelyne Trouillot,
The Infamous Rosalie
, pp. 26–27.
30
Eric Hobsbawm,
Bandits
, p. 33.
31
Agamben,
Homo Sacer
, p. 105.
32
Stedman,
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition
, pp. 282–283.
33
Michel Foucault, “What is critique?” p. 32.
34
The “press-gang” system: from the seventeenth century to the start of the nineteenth, the British Royal Navy and other European navies forcibly recruited any unemployed individuals in the ports. In general the recruiters resorted to trickery: they got their prey drunk and then kidnapped them.
35
Stedman,
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition
, p. 66.
36
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet,
Dialogues
, p. 136.
37
Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth
, pp. 10 and 51.
38
See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of violence.”
39
It was on São Tomé, an island off equatorial Africa, that the Portuguese experimented for the first time with the slave labor plantation, toward the end of the fifteenth century. But in 1595 the fugitive slave Amador unleashed a general insurrection that resulted in the permanent destruction of the enslaving system on that island, although Amador himself died in action.
40
Jean Hurault, “Histoire des noirs réfugiés Boni de la Guyane française,” pp. 77–78.
41
Lännec Hurbon,
L’Insurrection des esclaves de Saint-Domingue
, p. 31.
42
Stedman,
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition
, p. 48.
43
“Many Politics,” in Deleuze and Parnet,
Dialogues
, p. 135.
44
Fouchard,
The Haitian Maroons
, p. 272.
45
Jean Hurault,
Africains de Guyane
, pp. 20 and 22. See also pp. 92–93 in this volume.
46
Pierre Clastres,
Society against the State
.
47
“The Africans arrive stripped of everything, of every possibility, and even of their language. For the hold of the slave ship is the place and the time where the African languages disappear” (Édouard Glissant,
Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity
, p. 6).
48
“Creolization is the putting into contact of several cultures or at least several elements of distinct cultures, in a particular place in the world, resulting in something new, completely unpredictable in relation to the sum or the simple synthesis of these elements” (Édouard Glissant,
Treatise on the Whole-World
, p. 22).
49
Maryse Condé,
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
, p. 3.
50
The treaties signed with the Dutch stipulated that the Maroons would cease their attacks against the plantations in exchange for an annual tribute (of weapons, tools, and various goods), but also that they would return any newly arrived fugitive slaves to their masters. The N’djuka, allies of the Dutch, killed the military leader Boni and kept his community under their supervision for many years.
51
Richard Price, “Preface to the 1996 edition,” in his
Maroon Societies
, p. xiv.
52
Victor Schoelcher was the principal architect of the decree that abolished slavery in 1848.
53
I.e. the army created by Toussaint Louverture to counter the military task force Napoleon sent in 1802 to re-establish slavery.
54
Dénètem Touam Bona, “‘Écrire’ Haïti…,” n.p.
55
The case of French school textbooks is exemplary. Thus the history supplement on “Antilles – Guyane” for the use of more advanced high school [
collège
] students (a supplement edited by Hatier in 2001) devotes a long unit to abolition movements, but makes only a brief allusion to the phenomenon of marronage, via a citation of Voltaire’s
Candide
. Likewise, one learns that the victory of black revolutionaries over the Napoleonic armies in Saint Domingue was connected above all with yellow fever…
56
Michelle Perrot, “Faire exister les acteurs de l’ombre,” n.p.
57
I wrote this text in 2003, at a time when I was still learning about the history of slavery and knew nothing about the remarkable works by black feminist authors; these were not published in France until 2008, when Elsa Dorlin compiled and edited a groundbreaking anthology on this theme; see Dorlin,
Black Feminism
.
58
For the heterogeneous set of proverbs and maxims, songs, proclamations, prayers, and tales connected to the time of the “founding ancestors,” see Richard Price,
First-Time
.
59
Nathan Wachtel,
The Vision of the Vanquished
, p. 213.
60
Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
, p. 206; translation modified. See p. 37 and n. 68 further down.
61
This was before the imposition, in 1969, of the communal system with the policies of development and “integration” that it presupposes: social assistance, medicalization, administrative control, compulsory schooling…
62
Naipaul,
The Middle Passage
, pp. 182–183 (the chapter title is “Surinam”).
63
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
, p. 327.
64
Maurile de St.-Michel,
Voyages des îles Camercanes
, 1652, as quoted in Sala-Molins,
Le Code Noir
, p. 22; see also pp. 199 and 200 in this volume.
65
Télérama
interview with the Martinican writer Raphaël Confiant, August 4, 1993, p. 7.
66
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
, pp. 29–30.
67
Biringanine Ndagano,
Nègre tricolore
, pp. 136–137.
68
Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks
, p. 206. See p. 31 and n. 60 in this chapter.
69
“‘The one-drop rule,’ which defines as black a person with as little as a single drop of ‘black blood.’… It still is, according to a United States Supreme Court decision as late as 1986, which refused to review a lower court’s ruling that a Louisiana woman whose great-great-great-great-grandmother had been the mistress of a French planter was black” (Lawrence Wright, “One drop of blood,” p. 48).
70
“It is therefore demonstrated that the color of all rays when reunited is white. Black, consequently, will be the body which does not reflect any rays” (Isaac Newton, as quoted by Maurice Déribéré,
La Couleur
, p. 24; re-translated here back into English).
71
Richard Wright,
Black Boy
, pp. 48–49.
