The funny thing is that the night after I wrote the first draft of this poem, i had a horrible nightmare about dieing. I dreamt that the grim reaper was chasing me. Spooky enough, but then I awoke, stumbling around me room to find him in my doorway. As he caught hold of me I was able to wake up for real. This is the first time I ever had a wake-up-in-my-sleep dream. It was the scariest dream experience I had ever had. Amazingly, my dream room was exactly the same as me real room, right down to the pile of clothes that needs mending. My sleep has gotten better ever since I read a passage from Doctor Zhivago on consciousness and sleep. Apparently all I needed was to be talked into letting myself just fall asleep and not trying to talk myself into falling asleep. Here's a second draft of the poem:
Finding Sleep (A.K.A Battling Insomnia)
When my heart is broken
and you are not there,
where can I find my solace?
Left alone, I am sleepless
with restless dreams and a tiredness
that will not subside.
I think of my world
and the golden strings
wondering what will become of them next.
Three sisters, sharing one sight,
three minds with the same conclusion.
They have no sleep, for there is work to be done.
They work while I await my rest.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Insomnia
For the past week or more, I have been having a horrible case of insomnia. It has been a problem before, but has never bothered me too much since I never had things to do in the morning. Now I have to be at work by 9, and it isn't good at all to take sleeping pills at 2:30AM. (not that I want to take them at all.) I even have trouble sleeping after having taken something for it. Tonight, after having such a battle, a poem came into my head about insomnia. Here it is in a very early stage:
Finding Sleep (A.K.A Battling Insomnia)
When my heart is broken
and you are not there,
where can I find my solace?
Left alone, sleepless
with restless dreams and a tiredness
that will not subside,
I think of my world
and the golden strings, wondering
what will become of them next.
There are three sisters, sharing one sight,
Three minds with the same conclusions.
They sleep not, for there is work to be done,
Whilst I await my rest.
While dealing with insomnia, as I'm sure many people well know, the mind races. I had so many amazing and interesting things pop into my mind only tonight, that seem unrelated but are interconnected merely through the colors which they share. My mind has been too much awake, and I am going to try to fall asleep again. Good night.
Comic: “The Lockhorns” by Bill and Bunny Hoest
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Celebrities
The other day I was in the restroom at a local restaurant and when I came out a guy was waiting to go in. I gave him a quick glance; a simple acknowledgment that a person was there, but I was quick to go to my table. I thought that somehow I knew him; perhaps he was in school with me, went to the same parties, or was a regular at the store that I work at. Apparently I was looking right at Elijah Wood. It's strange how we become so familiar with the people we see on TV that we feel as though we have developed some sort of bond or relationship with them. It really was Elijah Wood, the fact was confirmed many times, and yet I never had the urge to run up to him and beg his autograph. What I found, after some contemplation, that is even more strange is how little I cared about his celebrity status and much I wanted to say "hi" like he was an old friend from years back. Maybe it's because I'm not that great a fan of his, but maybe there really isn't that much to the glamor of celebrities than that fact that he has millions of "old acquaintances".
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Subreption in Slavery as seen in the Novel Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack
" William Earle’s novel Obi or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack is an important literary text for its cultural treatment of Obi religious practices found in the British colony of Jamaica. Influenced by the Enlightened thinkers of the Eighteenth Century, and the Romantics who stemmed from their philosophies, Earle’s novel reflects the conflicts of a nation torn between ideologies. The concept of slavery was difficult for the Protestant British to digest and therefore they altered their perception of African slaves in ways that allowed them to feel comfortable with enslaving a whole race in accordance to their own theological views. The treatment of their slaves, as well as the religious practices of the slaves, by the British varied as they struggled to make peace with it. This struggle is a psychological process closely related to Kant’s discourse on the Sublime. The British fell into the trap of subreption, causing them to inaccurately portray African-slave practices in their literature as reflected in Obi.
In Kant’s discourse on the Sublime[1], the human mind can only handle certain things that are within the parameter of the Reason[2] that we have accumulated from our experiences and ideologies.
But because there is in our Imagination a strive towards infinite progress, and in our Reason a claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real Ideal in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things of sense, excites in us the feeling of a supersensible faculty. And it is not the object of sense, but the use which the Judgment naturally makes of certain objects on behalf of this latter feeling, that is absolutely great; and in comparison every other use is small. (109-110)
It is not the institution of slavery that the British of the late Eighteenth Century had a difficult time apprehending—they were very comfortable with it decades before—it is the institution of slavering as it affects the Enlightened mind that caused the alteration in slavery interpretation: “the sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our Ideas” (109). Apprehending animal-like treatment of human beings was beyond the ability of people who thought that humanity existed in all races; therefore it was natural to Romanticize the Africans and distort their religious practices in ways that legitimizes the continuation of slavery.
The early eighteenth-century saw a large change in the use of slaves. Plantation farming began to grow as an economical source for Britain during the “sugar revolution” and as a result their demand for workers increased. Originally, the desire was to employ lower class Europeans, but their death rates were too high and as an alternative African slavery was utilized.[3] With the body of slaves reaching high percentages of the work force on plantations, and the French Revolution bringing socialism into British philosophies, keeping the old view of slavery was near impossible.
Savages, having no civilized society, might be taken to be “natural men” and thus “uncorrupted men” or even “good men.” This was, perhaps, more a part of the romantic movement than of the Enlightenment in its earlier phases, bit it led Europeans to weaken their natural Xenophobia. (Curtian, page 150)
Before the Enlightenment and discourse on social change, the British did not have ad open struggle on the topic of slavery. As this struggle grew, British literature began to reflect these thoughts, and the Romanic Slave was born.
Earle’s novel Obi is a book filled with Enlightenment jargon, and consequently his imagery of slavery is Romanticized. The argument that Captain Harrop gives for enslaving Makro and Amri is that they are savages and it would be better for them to live a life of servitude under an Enlightened Empire than to live their lives in ignorance in the wild:
He soon have me to understand that I worshiped a false god…He told me the glorious sun was but a substance created by his God …He told me of the enlivening power of the sun, ‘I’ cried he ‘feel its warmth in my heart…You yourself’ applying to me, ‘feel the same influence…So the charitable man spreads his kindly rays around, revives the depressed, becomes a father to the orphan, a husband to the widow; by him are the afflicted comforted, the ignorant enlightened, and the poor relieved. Oh! Amri, a charitable man is the noblest work of God. (77)
Harrop’s speech to Amri was given before he knew that he was ever going to find a way back home and therefore has an air of his genuine personality. Though his ideas do not follow the concept of native Africans being a uncorrupted and pure people, as Curtain states was a popular theory, his believe is that the Africans are naïve and since they do not worship the correct god he therefore, as if they were orphaned children, acts as a father and educator. As a merchant in the slave trade, Captain Harrop could not afford to feel much mercy for those whom he enslaved, but Earle gives him moments of tenderness towards Amri and Makro that shows that he too is touched by the Enlightenment.
Earle’s development of the slave characters owes much to Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, written more than a century earlier during the Restoration period. Behn was writing during a period when xenophobia was very much a part of British ideologies; therefore, in order to convey her hero, Oroonoko the African slave, Behn was forced to westernize his character:
His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat; his mouth the finest shaped that could be seen, far from the great turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble and exactly formed that, bating his color, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome. (2187).
In everything except color, Oroonoko is the greatest embodiment of Western hero. To set him about other Africans, his is a prince of an African nation. With royal blood and Roman features, Behn was satisfied that her audience would be able to find some way to connect with her African hero. Earle did the same, although his audience did not require as much convincing to read a story about a slave: “His face was rather long; his eyes black and fierce; his nose was not like the generality of blacks, squat and flat, but rather aquiline, and his skin remarkably clear” (72). What makes Earle’s novel so different in the treatment of slaves from Behn’s is Enlightenment jargon the discussion of the religious practice of Obi.
Behn’s novel follows the stoic Hero through his Romeo and Juliet love story and his failed rebellion. The stoicism that Jack shares with Oroonoko is noticeable, but Jack is not stoic purely because of his inner greatness, as Oroonoko is, but because of his powerful Obi. The foreign practices are how the British view and separate themselves from the slaves. Earle’s aim is not to put Jack on the same level as the Europeans, but to see his differences as a way to understand his enslavement. Because of Earle’s desire to reconcile what he wants with what he actually exists. Subreption caused the British to falsely report encounters of Obi to each other on the plantations and consequently back in Britain to gain legal and moral support. Such practices were used in all slave -holding societies that did not use pure human degradation in order to oppress people into servitude. Orlando Patterson in his book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study:
The slaveholder camouflaged his dependence, his parasitism, by various ideological strategies. Paradoxically, he defined the slave as dependant. This is consistent with the distinctively human technique of camouflaging a relation by defining it as the opposite of what it really is…The slaveholder retaliated ideologically by stereotyping the slave as a lying, cowardly, lazy buffoon devoid of courage and manliness: the slave became, in his slave holder’s mind, the “Graeculus” of ancient Rome…the “Quashee” of eighteen-century Jamaica. (337-338)
Patterson, a pioneer in the study of slavery, calls the transition from a “free” person to a slave “Social Death”, the slave does not stop breathing, his heart does not stop beating, but who he is becomes lost in a new reality found in the slaveholder’s hands. The formula that Patterson is referring to in the previous quote is the generic style for a society transforming into a slave-holding society. When Britain reached the end of the eighteenth century they were attempting to work their way through the stereotypes, which can be found with Earle’s character Quashee.
Though not a large character, Quashee holds great significance for Earle because, when he becomes Christian, he changes his name to James Reader. Before he became Reeder, Quashee was merely another African slave of minor worth to the story. His indicated that he was a stereotype of the disgruntled slave. He was no match for Jack and Jack’s Obi, and his determination seems purely stubborn and selfish. As a Maroon, it was necessary for Quashee to capture Jack to maintain his freedom. But as a Christian, Reeder was bound by theological duty to quell the unrest that was caused by an unnatural “Black Magic”. Earle, though clearly interested in the reaction that the Obi had on the slaves, did not bring his story to a battle of religions. The Christian symbol that Reader wore around his neck was more powerful than Jack’s Obi, and Earle’s Jack instinctively knew it: “Jack started back in dismay; he was cowed; for he had prophesied that White Obi should overcome him, and he knew the charm, in Reeder’s hands, would lose none of its virtue or power.” (156) To Earle, it is almost as if he does not believe that the Obi holds any truth for Jack or any of the other slaves.
The choice not to recognize the full beliefs that the slave had in their religions was part of the alteration the British created in their perception of the slaves. Earle gives Amri and Jack British idiolects—they speech in perfect Enlightened terms and as if they were Europeans masked with black skin—while at the same time calls them unenlightened:
Oh! Thou great Creator, look down upon those unenlightened savages! see them entwined within each other’s arms, while the mingled tear of friendship, the grateful effusion of two noble hearts, deprives each of the power of speech. But these are savages and worship an imaginary god; they are black men, and slaves, unworthy of the appellation of men. (146)
It is evident in this soliloquy that Earle deeply wants to be on the side of Jack, but that his inability to allow a rational being to be a slave deters him from allowing Jack to be a full hero. In the following lines, Earle begs for some kind of reconciliation to be made by his fellow enlightened thinkers:
Ye sons of Christianity, versed in enlightened schools, that teach you to distinguish and to adore the great Creator, emulate their great example, for ye have no such heroes among you. (146)
The encounter between Jack and Mahali, to which Earle is referring, happens in the forest and during the night, both are settings for mystical and non-Christian practices to take place. By admitting to the greatness of Jack and Mahali under the guise of the dark and wild, it is almost like not admitting to anything at all.
To the British, Obi was not real, and they tried not to allow people to think of it as real. They hid by saying that the slaves “seemed” to be afraid of it. An article from the New York Times published in 1912 recalls a story from a plantation in the West Indies that the plantation owner ignored the “local superstitions and act[ed] according to the mandates of a white man’s nature.” Since the owner ignored the woman’s cries of the woman and uproar occurred among his field hands—which he refers to as “Quashees”. The solution was to get rid of the woman, which eventually allowed the owner to calm the rest of his workers. Earle treats Jack’s Obi as a tool to inspire fear into Jack’s naïve enemies, but his real power comes from what Patterson calls “zest for life and fellowship”. (337) Since most real relationships are taken away by the institute of slavery the bond between mother is child is extraordinarily strong: “The fierce love of the slave mother for her child is attested in every slaveholding society”. (337) Jack becomes enraged towards his rebellion because of the story Amri tells him of the betrayal of her and Makro by Harrop. The Obi came later in the story, as an attempt to understand the psychology of the slaves.
The encounter with Obi in the book is with Jack’s grandfather, Feruarue, who was charged with stirring up the slaves against their masters:
I was brought to their market, and sold. In my heart I secretly vowed revenge, and for that purpose, studied Obi.
I acknowledge I spirited up he slaves to rebellion; I acknowledge I struck terror to the hearts of many that refuse their aid, but how I effected this remains with me, and with me shall expire. (99)
The settlers on the plantation were unnerved by Feruarue’s statements; they determined that he was using some form of witchcraft on their slaves. But just as the Sambo Amri presents Harrop with in token of friendship and good health, the Obi charm is part of the religion practiced by the slaves in Jamaica. Obi is still believed and practiced today by descendants of slaves from the Caribbean:
One such tradition is that of obeah, a magico-religious practice representing a synthesis of African spirit worship and European Christian principles. Obeah is widely known and, at least so some degree, continues to be believed and practiced by Canadians tracing their origins to Trinidad and Jamaica. (Butler, 155)[4]
The continuation of Obi into the twenty-first century clarified Earle’s misrepresentation that Obi was not completely believed in by the slaves. Earle does not allow the African slave characters to be fully integrated in their own religious practices because he must maintain that Africans are not fully Enlightened and therefore easing his mind to the concept of slavery.
Earle’s struggle with Jack is that he wants to view him as a man under the ideologies of the Enlightenment, but cannot do so comfortably because the institution of slavery is legalized in his country, and thus he must try to find some kind of rationalization for it. Because Earle cannot smoothly rectify the slavery under the social ideals of the Enlightenment he: “finds the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (Kant, 118). In his mind, as well as other people in Britain, he creates for himself a tangible, but wavering, concept that can be worked through using his Sense and Reason. The concept is still wavering for Earle because it is the object of slavery as an institution that he is struggling with, but how the humane person can forcefully control another rational being. The struggle that is present in Obi is the same struggle that Kant says is the process of experiencing the Sublime. As Earle tries harder and harder to reconcile his opposing beliefs, he alters the reality of them creating an alter reality that he relays to his readers. The misrepresentation by the recorders of plantation history caused a great falsification in the treatment of African’s as people with their own beliefs and matured in their own ideologies.
Works Cited
Behn, Aphra. Oronooko. 1688 The Norton Anthology: English Literature eighth edition, Ed. Stephan Greenblatt. New York: W. W. W. Norton and Company, 2006.
Butler, Gary. “Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse” The Journal of American Folklore Vol 115, No. 456 (2002) pp. 154-174.
Curtain, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex Second edtion. New York: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1998.
Earle, William. Obi or the history of Three-fingered Jack. Ed L. W. Conolly. Broadview Editions, 2005.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. USA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
“Witchcraft in the West Indies” in The New York Times (1857-current file); Feb 4, 1912 ; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times.
[1] Kant, Emmanuel. The Critique on Judgement
[2] All terms used come surrounding Kant’s philosophy come from his definition, as he uses them in his writings.
[3] Curtain, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Second edtion. New York: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1998. Chapter 6.
[4] Butler, Gary. “Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse” in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol 115, No"
In Kant’s discourse on the Sublime[1], the human mind can only handle certain things that are within the parameter of the Reason[2] that we have accumulated from our experiences and ideologies.
But because there is in our Imagination a strive towards infinite progress, and in our Reason a claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real Ideal in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things of sense, excites in us the feeling of a supersensible faculty. And it is not the object of sense, but the use which the Judgment naturally makes of certain objects on behalf of this latter feeling, that is absolutely great; and in comparison every other use is small. (109-110)
It is not the institution of slavery that the British of the late Eighteenth Century had a difficult time apprehending—they were very comfortable with it decades before—it is the institution of slavering as it affects the Enlightened mind that caused the alteration in slavery interpretation: “the sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our Ideas” (109). Apprehending animal-like treatment of human beings was beyond the ability of people who thought that humanity existed in all races; therefore it was natural to Romanticize the Africans and distort their religious practices in ways that legitimizes the continuation of slavery.
The early eighteenth-century saw a large change in the use of slaves. Plantation farming began to grow as an economical source for Britain during the “sugar revolution” and as a result their demand for workers increased. Originally, the desire was to employ lower class Europeans, but their death rates were too high and as an alternative African slavery was utilized.[3] With the body of slaves reaching high percentages of the work force on plantations, and the French Revolution bringing socialism into British philosophies, keeping the old view of slavery was near impossible.
Savages, having no civilized society, might be taken to be “natural men” and thus “uncorrupted men” or even “good men.” This was, perhaps, more a part of the romantic movement than of the Enlightenment in its earlier phases, bit it led Europeans to weaken their natural Xenophobia. (Curtian, page 150)
Before the Enlightenment and discourse on social change, the British did not have ad open struggle on the topic of slavery. As this struggle grew, British literature began to reflect these thoughts, and the Romanic Slave was born.
Earle’s novel Obi is a book filled with Enlightenment jargon, and consequently his imagery of slavery is Romanticized. The argument that Captain Harrop gives for enslaving Makro and Amri is that they are savages and it would be better for them to live a life of servitude under an Enlightened Empire than to live their lives in ignorance in the wild:
He soon have me to understand that I worshiped a false god…He told me the glorious sun was but a substance created by his God …He told me of the enlivening power of the sun, ‘I’ cried he ‘feel its warmth in my heart…You yourself’ applying to me, ‘feel the same influence…So the charitable man spreads his kindly rays around, revives the depressed, becomes a father to the orphan, a husband to the widow; by him are the afflicted comforted, the ignorant enlightened, and the poor relieved. Oh! Amri, a charitable man is the noblest work of God. (77)
Harrop’s speech to Amri was given before he knew that he was ever going to find a way back home and therefore has an air of his genuine personality. Though his ideas do not follow the concept of native Africans being a uncorrupted and pure people, as Curtain states was a popular theory, his believe is that the Africans are naïve and since they do not worship the correct god he therefore, as if they were orphaned children, acts as a father and educator. As a merchant in the slave trade, Captain Harrop could not afford to feel much mercy for those whom he enslaved, but Earle gives him moments of tenderness towards Amri and Makro that shows that he too is touched by the Enlightenment.
Earle’s development of the slave characters owes much to Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, written more than a century earlier during the Restoration period. Behn was writing during a period when xenophobia was very much a part of British ideologies; therefore, in order to convey her hero, Oroonoko the African slave, Behn was forced to westernize his character:
His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat; his mouth the finest shaped that could be seen, far from the great turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble and exactly formed that, bating his color, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable, and handsome. (2187).
In everything except color, Oroonoko is the greatest embodiment of Western hero. To set him about other Africans, his is a prince of an African nation. With royal blood and Roman features, Behn was satisfied that her audience would be able to find some way to connect with her African hero. Earle did the same, although his audience did not require as much convincing to read a story about a slave: “His face was rather long; his eyes black and fierce; his nose was not like the generality of blacks, squat and flat, but rather aquiline, and his skin remarkably clear” (72). What makes Earle’s novel so different in the treatment of slaves from Behn’s is Enlightenment jargon the discussion of the religious practice of Obi.
Behn’s novel follows the stoic Hero through his Romeo and Juliet love story and his failed rebellion. The stoicism that Jack shares with Oroonoko is noticeable, but Jack is not stoic purely because of his inner greatness, as Oroonoko is, but because of his powerful Obi. The foreign practices are how the British view and separate themselves from the slaves. Earle’s aim is not to put Jack on the same level as the Europeans, but to see his differences as a way to understand his enslavement. Because of Earle’s desire to reconcile what he wants with what he actually exists. Subreption caused the British to falsely report encounters of Obi to each other on the plantations and consequently back in Britain to gain legal and moral support. Such practices were used in all slave -holding societies that did not use pure human degradation in order to oppress people into servitude. Orlando Patterson in his book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study:
The slaveholder camouflaged his dependence, his parasitism, by various ideological strategies. Paradoxically, he defined the slave as dependant. This is consistent with the distinctively human technique of camouflaging a relation by defining it as the opposite of what it really is…The slaveholder retaliated ideologically by stereotyping the slave as a lying, cowardly, lazy buffoon devoid of courage and manliness: the slave became, in his slave holder’s mind, the “Graeculus” of ancient Rome…the “Quashee” of eighteen-century Jamaica. (337-338)
Patterson, a pioneer in the study of slavery, calls the transition from a “free” person to a slave “Social Death”, the slave does not stop breathing, his heart does not stop beating, but who he is becomes lost in a new reality found in the slaveholder’s hands. The formula that Patterson is referring to in the previous quote is the generic style for a society transforming into a slave-holding society. When Britain reached the end of the eighteenth century they were attempting to work their way through the stereotypes, which can be found with Earle’s character Quashee.
Though not a large character, Quashee holds great significance for Earle because, when he becomes Christian, he changes his name to James Reader. Before he became Reeder, Quashee was merely another African slave of minor worth to the story. His indicated that he was a stereotype of the disgruntled slave. He was no match for Jack and Jack’s Obi, and his determination seems purely stubborn and selfish. As a Maroon, it was necessary for Quashee to capture Jack to maintain his freedom. But as a Christian, Reeder was bound by theological duty to quell the unrest that was caused by an unnatural “Black Magic”. Earle, though clearly interested in the reaction that the Obi had on the slaves, did not bring his story to a battle of religions. The Christian symbol that Reader wore around his neck was more powerful than Jack’s Obi, and Earle’s Jack instinctively knew it: “Jack started back in dismay; he was cowed; for he had prophesied that White Obi should overcome him, and he knew the charm, in Reeder’s hands, would lose none of its virtue or power.” (156) To Earle, it is almost as if he does not believe that the Obi holds any truth for Jack or any of the other slaves.
The choice not to recognize the full beliefs that the slave had in their religions was part of the alteration the British created in their perception of the slaves. Earle gives Amri and Jack British idiolects—they speech in perfect Enlightened terms and as if they were Europeans masked with black skin—while at the same time calls them unenlightened:
Oh! Thou great Creator, look down upon those unenlightened savages! see them entwined within each other’s arms, while the mingled tear of friendship, the grateful effusion of two noble hearts, deprives each of the power of speech. But these are savages and worship an imaginary god; they are black men, and slaves, unworthy of the appellation of men. (146)
It is evident in this soliloquy that Earle deeply wants to be on the side of Jack, but that his inability to allow a rational being to be a slave deters him from allowing Jack to be a full hero. In the following lines, Earle begs for some kind of reconciliation to be made by his fellow enlightened thinkers:
Ye sons of Christianity, versed in enlightened schools, that teach you to distinguish and to adore the great Creator, emulate their great example, for ye have no such heroes among you. (146)
The encounter between Jack and Mahali, to which Earle is referring, happens in the forest and during the night, both are settings for mystical and non-Christian practices to take place. By admitting to the greatness of Jack and Mahali under the guise of the dark and wild, it is almost like not admitting to anything at all.
To the British, Obi was not real, and they tried not to allow people to think of it as real. They hid by saying that the slaves “seemed” to be afraid of it. An article from the New York Times published in 1912 recalls a story from a plantation in the West Indies that the plantation owner ignored the “local superstitions and act[ed] according to the mandates of a white man’s nature.” Since the owner ignored the woman’s cries of the woman and uproar occurred among his field hands—which he refers to as “Quashees”. The solution was to get rid of the woman, which eventually allowed the owner to calm the rest of his workers. Earle treats Jack’s Obi as a tool to inspire fear into Jack’s naïve enemies, but his real power comes from what Patterson calls “zest for life and fellowship”. (337) Since most real relationships are taken away by the institute of slavery the bond between mother is child is extraordinarily strong: “The fierce love of the slave mother for her child is attested in every slaveholding society”. (337) Jack becomes enraged towards his rebellion because of the story Amri tells him of the betrayal of her and Makro by Harrop. The Obi came later in the story, as an attempt to understand the psychology of the slaves.
The encounter with Obi in the book is with Jack’s grandfather, Feruarue, who was charged with stirring up the slaves against their masters:
I was brought to their market, and sold. In my heart I secretly vowed revenge, and for that purpose, studied Obi.
I acknowledge I spirited up he slaves to rebellion; I acknowledge I struck terror to the hearts of many that refuse their aid, but how I effected this remains with me, and with me shall expire. (99)
The settlers on the plantation were unnerved by Feruarue’s statements; they determined that he was using some form of witchcraft on their slaves. But just as the Sambo Amri presents Harrop with in token of friendship and good health, the Obi charm is part of the religion practiced by the slaves in Jamaica. Obi is still believed and practiced today by descendants of slaves from the Caribbean:
One such tradition is that of obeah, a magico-religious practice representing a synthesis of African spirit worship and European Christian principles. Obeah is widely known and, at least so some degree, continues to be believed and practiced by Canadians tracing their origins to Trinidad and Jamaica. (Butler, 155)[4]
The continuation of Obi into the twenty-first century clarified Earle’s misrepresentation that Obi was not completely believed in by the slaves. Earle does not allow the African slave characters to be fully integrated in their own religious practices because he must maintain that Africans are not fully Enlightened and therefore easing his mind to the concept of slavery.
Earle’s struggle with Jack is that he wants to view him as a man under the ideologies of the Enlightenment, but cannot do so comfortably because the institution of slavery is legalized in his country, and thus he must try to find some kind of rationalization for it. Because Earle cannot smoothly rectify the slavery under the social ideals of the Enlightenment he: “finds the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (Kant, 118). In his mind, as well as other people in Britain, he creates for himself a tangible, but wavering, concept that can be worked through using his Sense and Reason. The concept is still wavering for Earle because it is the object of slavery as an institution that he is struggling with, but how the humane person can forcefully control another rational being. The struggle that is present in Obi is the same struggle that Kant says is the process of experiencing the Sublime. As Earle tries harder and harder to reconcile his opposing beliefs, he alters the reality of them creating an alter reality that he relays to his readers. The misrepresentation by the recorders of plantation history caused a great falsification in the treatment of African’s as people with their own beliefs and matured in their own ideologies.
Works Cited
Behn, Aphra. Oronooko. 1688 The Norton Anthology: English Literature eighth edition, Ed. Stephan Greenblatt. New York: W. W. W. Norton and Company, 2006.
Butler, Gary. “Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse” The Journal of American Folklore Vol 115, No. 456 (2002) pp. 154-174.
Curtain, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex Second edtion. New York: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1998.
Earle, William. Obi or the history of Three-fingered Jack. Ed L. W. Conolly. Broadview Editions, 2005.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. USA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
“Witchcraft in the West Indies” in The New York Times (1857-current file); Feb 4, 1912 ; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times.
[1] Kant, Emmanuel. The Critique on Judgement
[2] All terms used come surrounding Kant’s philosophy come from his definition, as he uses them in his writings.
[3] Curtain, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Second edtion. New York: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1998. Chapter 6.
[4] Butler, Gary. “Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse” in The Journal of American Folklore, Vol 115, No"
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
My Reactions or Reading Wyn Cooper's book "Postcards From the Interior"
Review: Wyn Cooper Postcards from the Interior
Wyn Cooper’s latest collection of poetry, Postcards from the Interior, is motionless and frozen like a postcard from which the title gets its name. Cooper’s poems capture singular moments of emotions or people with suggestions of contemplation. But they lack the language that creates depth and imagery. The only distinguishing feature between his prose poetry and verse poetry is the alignment of the words on the page.
His title poem “Postcards from the Interior” frames a house the speaker found while hiking. The last lines are full of consonance that cause the reader to trip while rolling over an awkward line break:
Somehow the wallpaper matches it all,
yellow-brown, dust grey, content
turning to form from floor to ceiling,
a sight to behold on this bring spring day.
Simply listing a few colors with grade-school precision does not constitute imagery that can give birth to sights in the imagination. The house still remains a pile of formless nothings that Wyn may or may not have seen. Ending the line with “content” is ambiguous as to which line it belongs to and is has a harsh repetition of “t” quickly followed by “f”s with “form”, “from” and “floor”, blending all of the words into each other with more of a disruptive sensation than a literary illusion to the idea of formation.
Cooper writes his lines as if he has never seen any of the things he writes about. His removal from the subjects is suggested by his inability to relate them in his lines. Why does he decide to pick on hunters in “Postcard Recipe form Hunting Season”? Who would cook their venison in Ketchup and not butter? In Sprite and not wine? The only uneven heat would possibly be due to campfire flames, and even they bring a glorious flavor to foods they touch.
The slow pace which the poetry moves and the lack of imagery makes his poems dull and ineffectual. It is easy to read one poem and jump to the next without noticing that you have actually completed one thought. What is noticed are the poor line breaks and out of place rhymes, not what you want your poetry remembered for. I haven’t read any other poetry by Cooper, so I don’t know if he is trying something new—attempting to capture the singularity of postcards in his writing, but if he is then he should revisit the power of still-life art. Just because there isn’t any motion doesn’t mean that art doesn’t move.
If you are interested in looking into Cooper's works, he also writes songs, please go to his website: www.wyncooper.com
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Spring
Spring is here--at least the weather is finally starting to resemble spring. Many of my posts have been writing assignments for my classes, and i have to admit that i have been having fun doing them. I greatly look forward to graduating in a few weeks, but lament over the fact that I will be out of the world of academia for a while. My only hope is that I will be able to read more books and increase my poetry writing; which has been very slow as of late. Perhaps with the warm weather the muses will dance towards the Northern Hemisphere and become one with me again. But for now, I have sapling thoughts on the character of Victor Frankenstein...this weeks forecasted rain may help them grow.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Some thoughts on Kant: Critique of Judgement
To Kant, Sense gets in the way of human understanding in so much that it tries to force people to have a relationship of familiarity with new experiences causing them to be incapable of accepting something that is genuine and/or abstract. While reading Kant’s philosophy, one must put aside their Sense, enough so that they might see the argument as a whole, for seeing only small pieces, as with the Egyptian pyramids (112), the meaning of his argument cannot easily be determined. Alternately, if we completely remove our Sense and take in the whole of The Critique without considering each section of the argument, then the details that are most artistic will also be lost. With either situation in place, the writing will fail to perform its task of inspiring mental growth.
This concept is what, according to Kant, allows people to experience the Sublime. I agree with Kant that the Sublime is not the object itself, but the subjective and psychological “state of mind produced by a certain representation with which the reflective Judgment is occupied, and not the Object” (110). Sense strongly encourages the mind to rationalize all that it sees, and can even discard the unusual for being irrational and irrelevant. The sheer awe created when the mind attempts to comprehend what it has just apprehended is what is painful because we use our Sense during the process of comprehension, creating a state of conflict within the mind.
Kant says that, since we have a difficult time processing the sensation of the Sublime, we conceal some of the truths of it (subreption) because it “finds the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its Ideas” (118) and therefore we label the Sublime as “an Object of Nature” (119). In doing this, we create for ourselves a tangible concept that can be worked through with our Sense, and neatly understood. The Sublime cannot be neatly understood because it is not the object, but the state of mind. It is the pain that the human mind undergoes when it cannot neatly understand the observed, and it stays with us and works through us, just as reading Kant’s philosophy works through our minds while we attempt to understand. When easily we understand, we loose the Sublime feeling and all that we are left with is the object, be it the mountain or a body of writing.
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