Analyze My Demise:Slavery’s Enduring Legacy of Bodily NegationMichael BrewsterENG 640 Dr. Leffel12 May 2015

[Pre-Hook] Pressure Drop

Everything black, I don’t want black (They want us to bow)I want everything black, I ain’t need black (Down to our knees)Some white, some black. I ain’t mean black (And pray to their God)I want everything black (That we don’t believe) — Kendrick Lamar, “The Blacker the Berry” (2015)

I say a pressure drop, oh pressureOh yeah pressure drop a drop on you — Toots & the Maytals, “Pressure Drop” (1968)

“Six in the morn’, fire in the street,” Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker The Berry,”

opens, placing his song at a particular moment in history— August 14, 2014 in Ferguson,

Missouri1, where people rioted over the non-conviction of a white police officer in the

shooting of Michael Brown, a black man. The rest of the song compresses four centuries of

enslavement, disenfranchisement, religious faith, and the ironies of late capitalism into

five-and-a-half minutes of critique— the critique of white racists and black thugs alike, but

most of all, the self-critique of a black man in 21st Century America.

The lyrical imagery of “The Blacker the Berry” relies heavily upon the historical and

cultural effects of slavery and oppression of African-Americans, a topic as current as

today’s news and older than our Republic. Even as I borrow the structure of that song, I

will examine more closely another of Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics, “Never Catch Me” for the

You’re Dead! album by Flying Lotus, where Lamar invites us to “analyze my demise.” In

order to do this, we go to the beginning, where the stories of American slavery are first

recorded by white Europeans writing about black lives. Historical and literary narratives of

the 17th and 18th Century are filled with examples of this, but I am choosing to focus

particularly on English literature2 set in the West Indies, investigating examples of black

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proprioceptive resistance leading to bodily negation. Next, I compare those writings with

black slave narratives of the same time to differentiate between the white and black

perspectives. Staying in the West Indies, I will examine how religion, resistance, and music

joined with the Jamaican oral tradition of gangster legends and cult of celebrity in a

unique cultural petri dish to create the precursors of today’s hip hop. Following one

Jamaican to Bronx, New York, I will show how 300 years of slavery and colonialism

infused American hip-hop of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries with the themes of

proprioceptive resistance and bodily negation as evidenced in the lyrics of Kendrick

Lamar.

[Hook] Old Pirates Rob I

You hate me don’t you? You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture You’re fucking evil — Kendrick Lamar, “The Blacker the Berry” It is his body that is his answer, his body intact and fought for, the absolute of his organism in its simplest terms, this structure evolved by nature, repeated in each act of birth, the animal: man; the house he is, this house that moves, breathes, acts, this house where his life is, where he dwells against the enemy, against the beast. — Charles Olson, “The Resistance” (1953)

The concept of bodily resistance has long been associated with the ability of a body

to persevere through physical rigors or to fend off disease. Resistance itself, in the OED

sense of “opposing or withstanding someone or something” reaches back to the 14th

Century, in reference to resisting against a sheriff as the representative of the law. In an

1860 United States District Court case, U.S. Attorney H.S. Fitch ironically uses “bodily

resistance” to describe an escaped slave’s unwillingness, as he is detained in jail under the

Fugitive Slave Act, to crawl through a basement window and participate in an abolitionist’s

rescue attempt3.

If we reserve the term “bodily resistance” to refer, giving respect to the humanity of

the resistor, to actual historical resistance, then the fictive actions of slaves resisting their

captors and oppressors found within stories, plays, and poems should have a name, for

which I propose proprioceptive resistance4. In 1960, LeRoi Jones, who later adopted the

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Muslim name Amiri Baraka, published in his literary journal Yugen a prose poem called

“Proprioception” by the avant-garde American poet Charles Olson. Olson “presumably…

first came across the word ‘proprioceptive’ in the introduction to [the 1948 Norbert

Weiner book] Cybernetics (p. 7)” (Maud 82). Today, proprioception is at home in the field

of robotics, where it relates to self-monitoring, and in prosthetic design, where artificial

proprioception is an avenue of exploration for myoelectric control. Cutting-edge

technologists are mining the exact same territory Olson investigated in his literary a half-

century ago. His “definition” is:

Proprioception: the data of depth sensibility/the 'body' of us as object which spontaneously or of its own order produces experience of, 'depth' Viz SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES (Collected 181).

In the Olsonian conception, a body is intact, a house for a man’s life, where he dwells; his

proprioception affords him a depth of order, sensibility through his own movement. The

sense of the self in space has existed for the poet, as much as this concept can be captured

and contained in words, perhaps as long as there has been poetry, even if proprioception

itself is based on a 20th Century scientific understanding of neurosensory activity. Olson

here has connected the latent self-awareness of the poet to tacit knowledge as described

by Michael Polyani: “we can know more than we can tell” (4).

For Olson, the only answer to death and attendant bodily fragmentation is bodily

resistance. The body, this house, is all man has when he can be “reduced to so much fat

for soap, superphosphate for soil, fillings and shoes for sale. [H]e has... one answer, one

point of resistance only to such fragmentation” (Collected 174). Man must, using his sense

of himself in his surroundings, act to fight against enemies, the “beast” of death.

Within a fictive narrative, when a slave achieves proprioception, the awareness of

oneself that leads to resistance against oppression, then the author is creating a character

whose actions most completely resemble those of a free-willed person. There is something

of a paradox here, as the boundaries of slavery, imposed in the narrative as in society, do

not contain any provision for a slave’s free will; simultaneously, the mimetic boundary of

fiction is readily apparent to the writer and reader, even if there is a willingness to suspend

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disbelief. This paradox produces an interesting space for exploration, a kind of limbo— on

the one hand, the slaves must necessarily be captured for punishment, execution, or killed

outright; on the other, fiction is not bound by the fact that an autobiographical narrative

must end at death. What is remarkable is that white writers push into this space when

illustrating the deaths of their black slave characters, and in doing so, create a temporary

limbic5 state for them that leads to an ultimate act which I call bodily negation.

In researching the phenomenon of bodily negation, my understanding and

refinement of the idea has been influenced by two conceptual bookends: John Locke’s

discussion of slavery in Two Treatises on Government from 1690 and Samuel Coleridge’s

1817 revision of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which he gives the explicit name

“Life-In-Death” to his character of the spectral woman on the ghost ship. Jonathan Lamb

applies Locke’s philosophy of the self to slave narratives and finds that “since the slave

owns not even the actions of his or her own body… he or she is in a state defined as

suspended death” (158). Locke himself does not explicitly use that term, but does provide

a justification for subjugational slavery:

If someone performs an act that deserves death, he has by his own fault forfeited his own life; the person to whom he has forfeited it may (when he has him in his power) delay taking it and instead make use of the offending man for his own purposes (2.23).

This delay, or suspension, of death provides later critics like Lamb and Abdul

Janmohamed6 a tool by which they examine slave narratives and the works of more recent

black writers like Richard Wright. Indeed, Janmohamed has proposed that the characters

in Wright are “death-bound-subjects,” which he defines as a “subject, who is formed, from

infancy on, by the immanent and ubiquitous threat of death” (2). He traces this

phenomenon back to the slave narratives of Equiano and Douglass, where I see bodily

negation as a fictive dispossession strategy ranging back further in literary history to Aphra

Behn. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner has avoided Death, but exists in a limbic state no

better. For the rest of the poem, the Mariner is doomed to wander, telling his sad tale.

Conceptually, this character might be said to have been imbued with some aspects of

Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson’s “social death” (5), and in this way it may be

extrapolated that Life-In-Death is related to the limbo of Locke’s suspended death.

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However, a more insidious reading is possible. In 1795 Coleridge gave a Lecture On the

Slave Trade, published in a revised form in 1796. Helen Thomas points out that Coleridge’s

Lecture

presented a shift in focus away from the plight of the African victims and highlighted instead the fate of those English victims who, ‘unwary or in greater distress’, had been tricked into serving aboard a slave-trading vessel (92).

This conscious relocation, Thomas argues, “strategically avoided a discussion of the slaves

themselves” (95). I suggest that part of this avoidance stems from the same “unwary”

impulse from which bodily negation arises, that writing about the horrors of slavery

induces distress in the rational mind. Marcus Wood’s examination of detailed slave torture

scenes in 17th and 18th Century literature and the recurrence of similar images in later

pornography provokes his observation that his

subject demands more than discomfort; perhaps it demands the maintenance of a perpetual state of shock, the shock of knowing that you will never know what you want to say about slavery, or what the right way of saying it might be. (22)

I suggest that bodily negation is a narrative strategy employed by abolitionist and

ameliorist British writers who, feeling a similar state of shock at the conditions of slavery,

want to provide some sort of relief for their characters in the mode of a dignified escape.

Because it is the characters who act in resistance and rebellion, British writers can avoid

social and legal repercussions by arousing the sympathies of their readers toward these

lone figures who make the ultimate sacrifice in order to avoid dehumanization.

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[Verse 1] Sitting In Limbo: White Writing Black I’m guardin’ my feelings, I know that you feel it You sabotage my community, makin’ a killin’ You made me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga — Kendrick Lamar, “The Blacker the Berry”

Détournement is the antithesis of quotation, of a theoretical authority invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now a fragment torn away from its context, from its own movement, and ultimately from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the precise option that it constituted within that framework. Détournement, by contrast, is the fluid language of anti­ideology. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

As much as literary critics would like to imbue literary characters with “agency”

within fictive environments, the truth is that the characters act according to the writer’s

pen. Treating these personae separately from the narrative from which they emanate is in

itself a kind of détournement, even if it might offer insightful analytical avenues. Narrative

decontextualization can all too easily elide the truth that the author creates the fictive

milieu, no matter how realistic that (re)creation may seem. In the case of British writers

writing fictional narratives centered on black African characters, one must examine more

closely the motives of the authors in writing black resistance. Framed within the

restrictions of the author’s knowledge and ability, proprioceptive resistance can be read as

heroic or horrifying, noble or defiant. Because it is a white author writing a black

character, though, it can never be real. Instead, the author recognizes the point of no

return, of ultimatum in the power struggle between enslaving and dehumanizing on the

part of the Europeans, and fictively reacts to these abominable historic truths.

If the black body became the symbol of the African (or any non-European), then in

antithesis, the Englishman became white. Historically, the European body was possessed,

legally and spiritually, by a succession of others: children were possessed by their fathers

and placed into various academic, occupational, or marital contexts without choice;

women were possessed first as children by their fathers and then as wives by their

husbands; men were possessed feudally by their lords and spiritually by their churches. For

centuries, Europeans had been institutional possessions and not individuals. It was not

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inherent in English culture that bodily possession be tied to a single type, but over time,

several of these factors evolved so that “free white men” came into its own as a class7. In

this way, the central dichotomy of the emerging notion of “race” had been established.

The evolution of the concept of blackness, evinced in black bodies, comes into

direct opposition to the liberty of whiteness in British literary works. One of the earliest

representations of black Africans in British literature can be found in Aphra Behn’s 1688

novella Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave, A True History. Even at this early stage in

colonialism, Behn’s text is rife with conundrums and complications that reveal the same

complexities of whiteness and blackness our culture struggles with today. By accident or

design, Behn’s story incorporates a justification8 for the existence of slavery— that

Coramantiens engage in the slave trade themselves. This kind of subjugational slavery has

a long tradition in Western culture; Christian Englishmen would be well-versed in the

Egyptian and Babylonian captivity narratives of the Old Testament, stories of conquest and

attendant spoils. But the African slave trade does not arise from English conquest of

continental Africa. Instead, England legalized a system of slave trading thereby entrenching

the systematic dehumanization of Africans. The convoluted influences and shifting

contexts of Oroonoko make it difficult to simply suss out Behn’s feelings toward slavery

and blackness, but the vector of the narrative does give us a direction for exploration.

The narrative fuses various genres together in telling the story of Oroonoko, a royal

Coramantien, captured into slavery through subterfuge, who becomes a slave named

Caesar in Surinam. Upon learning of his wife9 Clemene’s pregnancy, Caesar feels an

urgent need to reverse his captivity: “[t]his new accident made him more impatient of

liberty… for all the breed is theirs to whom the parents belong” (41). The feeling Behn

describes in Caesar has been called “natal alienation” by Patterson, a condition where

being born into slavery divorces a child from his ancestry, community, and culture, thereby

enforcing “social death” (5). Even though Behn writes this book mere decades after the

legal institution of the English slave trade, the consequence of this legal bodily status fuels

its tragic climax. Caesar decides to foment unrest, advocating a combination of escape

and honorable armed action to secure and maintain liberty for himself and fellow

Africans. He seeks to dispossess the English of their Africans’ bodies, knowing instinctively

that only through physical divestiture can they achieve true liberty. Slowly, he sways other

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slaves to join, overcoming the objection of Tuscan who says that if they were just men,

they would follow, but “we are husbands, and parents too, and have things more dear to

us than life; our wives and children” (53). This supremely ironic rhetoric, while making a

kind of sense to the speaker, reveals a completely delusional misreading of the situation.

Caesar counters by espousing honor, integrity, and dignity, and wins the support of the

Africans. Behn comes closest to criticizing slavery here, giving Caesar the impetus and

justification for discordant action, but in couching Oroonoko’s identity with a classical

Roman name and invoking Hannibal as an exemplar for “African” action, she glosses over

this new kind of slavery and instead relies on her readers’ understandings of traditional

subjugations to play on their sense of sympathy. Caesar’s characterization is not so much

as a slave seeking an unlikely emancipation as he is a rebel warrior acting honorably—

rousing his people toward the promised land. It should be no surprise that Caesar’s

rebellion is fairly quickly disassembled, his strategy of dispossession and repossession, of

nullifying English possession of the Africans’ bodies and reacquiring it for themselves, fails.

When he survives his punishment and is given sanctuary by his master Trefry, he takes

advantage of that latitude and embarks upon his most radical attempt yet to win back

power over himself, Imoinda, and their unborn child10.

Throughout Behn’s problematic narrative, Caesar and Clemene/Imoinda have

enjoyed a paradoxically substantial amount of independence and self-agency. Despite

Caesar’s oratory against the evils of slavery, Behn provides little actual textual illustration

of shackles or beatings. Upon his recovery, then, despite his previous rebellion, Caesar is

able to persuade “Trefry to trust him into the air, believing a walk would do him good.”

Caesar promptly takes Imoinda into a wood where he confesses his plan: that he will first

kill her, then his enemies, and then himself. “He found the heroic wife faster pleading for

death than he was to propose it… and, on her knees, besought him not to leave her a prey

to his enemies” (60). At this point, the plan for these final killings seems to fulfill Caesar’s

need for repossession, as self-sacrifice is an ultimate act of agency and would signal his

complete control over himself (and, of course, Imoinda and their child). But, as we have

seen, in this text, freedom is not won through repossession. Caesar implements a radical

strategy of bodily negation, slicing Imoinda’s throat and beheading her. Now, the original

plan to die fighting against his enemies breaks down, but in its place comes a strategy

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through which Caesar can ensure that no English person would ever possess him again.

After many days, searchers find Caesar at the site of his wife’s now decapitated and

decaying body. No longer Imoinda, Caesar has effectively negated her from existence. The

English, when no man will approach him, once again thwart Caesar’s desire for revenge.

In his full rage and power, he begins literally negating his own body and strength through

self-butchery. He cuts off flesh from his throat and, when still no Englishman approaches

to fight him, disembowels himself. Incredulously, this act does not lead to his death, and

the English again repossess Caesar11.

Fittingly, the English seem to understand that only a complete destruction of

Oroonoko’s body will negate his will, but Behn’s narrative hand is not finished with our

royal slave. Sussing out the fact that by being tied to the post to “die like a dog,” (64) he

will not be responsible for his own bodily negation, Caesar issues his last defying taunt to

the Englishmen. If they shall not whip him, he will stand, unbound, and accept his own

death. And so, standing calmly smoking pipe tobacco, Caesar allows an executioner to

dismember his body piece by piece and burn it in the fire12. Perhaps Aphra Behn hopes to

invoke the image of an unjust assassination— like Julius Caesar or Charles I— with this

prolonged knifing scene, or perhaps she purposefully seeking to be this graphically

inhumane to drive out any hint of ignobility in her subject, thereby eliciting maximum

sympathy in her readers. Either way, Oroonoko clearly chooses bodily negation rather than

allowing the English possession of his death. It is critical, from a story labeled “A True

History,” that Behn’s accounts have the air of verifiability because it is of utmost

importance that she attribute all agency directly to Caesar. On one hand this exonerates

Behn from the appearance of sympathizing with slave “revoltings” while simultaneously

allowing the reader to appreciate the human dignity of Oroonoko. Behn demands and

enforces narrative authenticity throughout the story and because of this, we can be sure

that the images of bodily negation in the story are intentional and actual, not just narrative

artifice and melodramatic hyperbole.

Oroonoko provides the first model of bodily negation and British authors continued

to mine this motif for their literature. Based on a May 1773 newspaper article about a

slave who shot himself in the head rather than be sent back to an American plantation,

Thomas Day and John Bicknell wrote “The Dying Negro.” Brycchan Carey calls the poem

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“the earliest direct literary attack on slavery and the slave trade” (“Biography”). The 1775

edition adds an essay dedicated to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which the authors note that

the slave trade “annually reduc[es] millions to a state of misery still more dreadful than

death itself” (“Dedication” v).

Carey describes the poem as “a suicide note” (Biography) interwoven with a

condemnation of the slave trade. I suggest that rather than illustrating one man’s suicide13,

the poem’s first person narrator, the “I,” simultaneously represents both the personal

pronoun and any black man contemplating bodily negation. It opens with the speaker’s

intention:

ARM'D with thy sad last gift—the pow'r to die,Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy;Thy dreadful mercy points at length the shore,Where all is peace, and men are slaves no more;—This weapon, ev'n in chains, the brave can wield (1.1-5).

The speaker is in possession of a gun, which, even in chains, gives him the gift of bodily

negation. He addresses his owner directly: “And thou…/ Forbade me Nature's common

rights to claim,/ ...farewel!—for not beyond the grave/ Extends thy pow'r, nor is my dust

thy slave” (6.15-20). This imagery extending past physical death is what separates the

speaker’s act of bodily negation from suicide. His dust, the remains of his proprioceptive

resistance, cannot be reenslaved, repossessed in any way because they are fragmented and

dispersed: “Fate's blackest clouds were gather'd o'er my head;/ And, bursting now, they

mix me with the dead” (13.7-8). Though his physical body, reduced to dust14 and mixed

with all the other dead, is gone, he envisions a life-after-death:

For all the wrongs which innocent I share,For all I've suffer'd, and for all I dare;O lead me to that spot, that sacred shore,Where souls are free, and men oppress no more! (24.13-16).

This final image is novel— Day and Bicknell have created a hybrid text by intermingling

the fictive discourse of proprioceptive resistance and bodily negation with an image of the

afterlife more at home in a slave narrative written by a christened African15. Rather than

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hinge its anti-slavery argument on gruesome torture scenes, “The Dying Negro” is almost

sanitized, cleansed of unsavory images in order to invoke sympathy and not outrage.

Most British authors, though, choose not to commingle images of bodily negation

with Christian imagery, probably because the taboo against suicide is so strong. Still, if one

were tempted to compare the images of slave deaths in fiction to martyrdom, then

“Slavery, A Poem” by Hannah More strongly counters this ill-considered inclination. Her

exemplar of a tortured slave is hopeless:

   For him, when fate his tortur'd frame destroys,What hope of present fame, or future joys?For this, have heroes shorten'd nature's date;For that, have martyrs gladly met their fate;But him, forlorn, no hero's pride sustains,No martyr's blissful visions sooth his pains;Sullen, he mingles with his kindred dust (13.177-83).

Though wronged, the slave is not “enjoying” the bliss of martyrdom. Indeed, in death, he

is wretched:

O thou sad spirit, whose preposterous yokeThe great deliver Death, at length, has broke!Releas'd from misery, and escap'd from care,Go meet that mercy man deny'd thee here (14.189-92)

In More’s polemic, the method of the slave’s death (through proprioceptive resistance or

outright murder) does not matter as much as the death causes the slave to continue to

suffer in the limbo of the non-Christian afterlife, though in the next section More appears

to offer the sad spirit some solace in true Christian redemption: “Where ignorance will be

found the surest plea” (15.209).

More’s poetics involve inspiration from what she takes to be a factual source. She

relates in a footnote to Section 6 the story of one “Qua-shi,” a slave who was to be

punished by his young master, with whom he was raised, for a small infraction. Drawing

upon James Ramsey’s 1784 text An Essay On the Treatment and Conversion of African

Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, More notes: “It is a point of honour among negroes of

a high spirit to die rather than to suffer their glossy skin to bear the mark of the whip.”

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Qua-shi hides, but is eventually discovered by his master and they tussle. Qua-shi gains

the upper hand and pulls a sharp knife, but rather than kill his master, “he drew the knife

with all his strength across his own throat, and fell down dead, without a groan, on his

master's body” (6.note). Nicole Aljoe calls the veracity of Ramsey’s account into question:

Although, according to Ramsey, Quashi is an actual historical figure whose story Ramsey heard directly from a friend of Quashi’s master (248), the narrative was also intended to represent other West Indian slaves whose stories may have been similar (30).

In reading Ramsey directly, one notices the caveat that “[t]he only liberty I have taken with

it, has been to give words to the sentiment that inspired it” (248). More’s version of these

words: “Master, I have been bred up with you from a child; I have loved you as myself: in

return, you have condemned me to a punishment of which I must ever have borne the

marks: thus only can I avoid them” (6.note) succinctly condense Ramsey’s invented

monologue. Because Aljoe sees this as a fictional narrative, the “historical” Quashi’s

resistance is proprioceptive and culminates in bodily negation with a unique motive. Both

Ramsey and More take Quashi as a symbol for what a good African can become— loyal,

conscientious, and capable of moral thought and action. Neither More nor Ramsey can be

rightly labeled abolitionist— both are concerned with contextualizing slaves in a true

Christian society rather than emancipation— and so their ameliorative fictions serve this

cause.

My examination of proprioceptive resistance and attendant bodily negation ends

with a pair of texts set in the Jamaica of the late 17th Century. Published less than a

decade before the end of the British slave trade in 1807, the plots of both “The Grateful

Negro” (1802) by Maria Edgeworth and the epistolary novel Obi or The History of Three-

Fingered Jack (1800) by William Earle, Jr. involve the practice of obi or obeah, a kind of

hybrid African/West Indian witchcraft. This innovation foregrounds the battlefield of

religions— the pagan obeah against Christianity and anticipates the soon-to-be-

widespread christianization of West Indian slaves 16.

Rather than lead a slave character through proprioceptive resistance to bodily

negation, Edgeworth sprinkles in some elements of Christianity, subverts several of the

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typical “slave rebellion” tropes, and replaces bodily negation with an obeah-based

invincibility. Her short “tale” borrows from Aphra Behn a plot revolving around married

slaves and from contemporary author Bryan Edwards the historical outline of Jamaican

slave rebellion. In her story Mr. Jefferies is a man who allows his overseer Durant to treat

slaves “with the greatest severity” (49). This contrasts with Mr. Edwards, who “treated his

slaves with all possible humanity and kindness” (49). Jefferies has a pair of betrothed

slaves, Caesar and Clara, who are to be sold (undoubtedly separately) to satisfy debts.

Caesar begs Edwards to purchase them, recalling More’s Quashi with his promise that

“Caesar will serve you faithfully” (51). Edwards becomes their hero when he buys the pair

and gives them their own plot of land to work. “Tears which no torture could have

exorted” (53) flow from Caesar’s newly-grateful eyes. At this point, Edgeworth introduces

the complication that slaves are planning an island-wide slave uprising, along the lines of

Tacky’s Rebellion of 1760, “to extripate every white man, woman, and child” (53). All the

slaves of the island know of this plan except those owned by Mr. Edwards, who are not

trusted because of their attachment to their kind master. Based on his change in

circumstances, Caesar seeks an audience with his friend Hector, leader of this slave

conspiracy, in order to secure safety for his master. The strong bond of friendship between

Caesar and Hector was formed in their youth back in Africa. “[B]oth Koromantyns… they

had... been accustomed to command” (54).

However, there is an important distinction that Edgeworth draws between the two

slaves— Hector wants revenge on all slaveowners, Caesar, though, “would devote

[sacrifice] himself, for the defence of a friend, and he now considered a white man as his

friend” (54). Caesar goes to Hector in the night, where they argue, neither being able to

dissuade the other. Caesar ends by “declaring he would sooner forfeit his life than rebel

against such a master” (55). Martyrdom is preferable to rebellion; and though Caesar is not

Christian, Edgeworth’s ameliorative text in suggesting this allows for the possibility that

Christianity may offer slaves an avenue for accepting their fates. Hector, resolute, remains

silent while Caesar is conflicted between love for Hector and gratitude to Edwards.

Edgeworth is setting the most serious of stakes here for these old friends. In Caesar,

“[g]ratitude at last prevailed: he repeated his declaration, that he would rather die than

continue in a conspiracy against his benefactor” (55). Hector refuses to “except him from

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the general doom,” (55) and berates him: “Yes, Caesar, deliver me over to the tormentors: I

can endure more than they can inflict. I shall expire without a sigh, without a groan” (55).

Hector has reached the point where his resistance will proceed all the way to bodily

negation. Before this argument goes any further, Durant, awakened, comes to investigate

the noise and Caesar barely escapes. But Hector needs to insure Caesar’s silence, and

seeks help. Obeah enters the plot in the form of Esther, “the chief instigator of this

intended rebellion” (57). Hector and Esther conspire to force Caesar to join the

insurrection, and place a spell on Clara. When Caesar learns of the cause of Clara’s

problem, he redoubles his resolve: “My hands shall never be imbrued17 in the blood of my

benefactor” (58). Again, Edgeworth is infusing Christian imagery into Caesar, a slave, with

the image of blood-stained hands.

Not having pressured Caesar to reconsider thus far, Esther ramps up the pressure on

Clara. Esther administers a potion rendering Clara “apparently a corpse” (61). Additionally,

Esther prepares her rebels with a promise of invincibility. Hector and his party are

“[a]rmed with weapons which I shall steep in poison for their enemies. Themselves I will

render invulnerable” (62). Knowing as we do the similarities between this story and

Behn’s, we should expect Caesar to resist now even more, and he does. Confronting

Esther, he proclaims “I wish for death… Clara is dead” (62). However, when Esther offers

the chance to restore her, Caesar accedes. Under the pretense of fetching his knife, he

warns his master Mr. Edwards, who gathers a force to surround Esther’s hut, which they

accomplish. Caesar wins pardon for Hector, but the need for revenge overpowers Hector

as he stabs Ceasar18, who cries “I die content… Bury me with Clara!” (63). But Clara is not

dead, she recovers from the drug Esther administered and so too will Caesar’s death be

false. Rather than suffering Oroonoko’s fate, Edgeworth offers this Caesar, his wife, and his

master, redemption19.

Maria Edgeworth’s story innovatives, being the first work that we have seen to

infuse Christian concepts into a slave’s perspective for an ameliorative purpose. Edgeworth

twists proprioceptive resistance in several ways so that Caesar would rather die than betray

Mr. Edward, and would rather die than live without Clara. Because Clara’s own death is

illusory, this second instance of resistance never reaches a crisis point. The revenge of

Hector, who chooses to attempt to murder his former friend rather than his purported

Brewster 14

enemy Mr. Edwards, would seem to martyr Caesar, but this turns out to be another illusory

death. Edgeworth conveniently avoids a tricky political and theological sticking point by

not having Caesar die in this attack.

In Obi or The History of Three-Fingered Jack, William Earle Jr. seems to have

included every form of proprioceptive resistance and bodily negation previously discussed

as he fictionalizes the true story of Jack Mansong’s 1780 rebellion. Rather than rehash

these kinds of examples, I will focus on the end of the story where Earle focuses on

Christianity in opposition to obeah. Obi begins with Amri and Makro, parents of the titular

Jack, being tricked into slavery by Captain Harrop, who they have saved from drowning

after a shipwreck. On the passage to Jamaica, Makro begins his resistance with a hunger

strike and eventually endures multiple tortures, including hundreds of lashes. “[T]he flesh

was pulverized on his back… [t]hey applied salt to his wounds,” which revived him (92).

He does grap Harrop’s pistol and shoot him, but does not kill him. Amri, pregnant with

Jack, takes Makro’s call for revenge and raises her son for this purpose.

Halfway through the book, Stanford relates the capture and torture of an Obi-Man.

Earle draws heavily upon the House of Commons Sessional Papers, 1789’s investigation of

obeah (included in the Earle volume as Appendix A) and expands the small account

contained therein20 about the capture of an Obeah-man who played part in a slave revolt.

Earle gives his Obi-Man a name, Feruarue, and an ethnicity, Feloop, both humanizing

devices. Indeed, he takes the opportunity to build upon his sources and wrench the

maximum drama from the scene. Feruarue, as it turns out, is Amri’s father, and she

witnesses her father’s even-more-prolonged torture and death, but this time the statement

of revenge is not directed to her (and Jack), but to Feruare’s English captors: “What shall ye

expect from a son of Africa? Revenge. You drag us from our homes, make slaves of us, and

gall us with your whips. What does the African think of? Revenge” (99). He is burned alive

and Amri, grief-stricken, jumps into the fire “to die with my father, but I was denied my

eager wish, and snatched from the death I sought” (100). At this point in the story, Amri,

like Thetis dipping Achilles into the River Styx, entreats Jack to seek out the “hut of the

Obiah-practitioner, Bashra” (104) who will imbue him with invincibility. So protected,

Jack’s mission is to unify the slaves in an uprising, to “link them to one firm and resolute

body” (105). This image stands in opposition to bodily negation, it incorporates the slaves

Brewster 15

through mass resistance. We have seen this strategy fail before in Behn and Edgeworth,

and when Jack attacks Captain Harrop in revenge, the slaves fall out before armed troops,

leaving Jack to be captured. But prior to his execution, Jack escapes, gathering up a band

of marauders who strike terror into the colonial enterprise, forcing the governor to offer a

bounty21.

Jack’s obeah has thus far allowed him to elude his pursuers, but Quashee, on the

promise of liberty, raises an expedition to capture Jack. By luck, Quashee lives near Amri’s

hovel and hears Jack there. He is able to follow Jack to Mount Lebanus and raises a party

of eight to attack. Ever watchful, Jack awaits the party and starts shooting, leaving only

Quashee and another man. Thus begins the first showdown we have seen involving two

slaves fighting each other for their freedom. Quashee shoots Jack in the shoulder and slices

off two of his fingers with a sabre, but Jack kills the other man and rather than face death,

Quashee flees, but he knows Jack is not invincible (125).

The Government of Jamaica raises the bounty and offers to purchase the freedom of

any slave who will take or kill Jack. Additionally, “if any one of his accomplices will kill

the said Three-fingered Jack, and bring in his head and hand wanting the two fingers, such

accomplice will be entitled to his free pardon” (155). Again, Quashee desires to capture

Jack and secure his freedom or die trying, but this time he changes tack— “Quashee first

got himself christened, and changed his name to James Reeder” (156). Quashee and two

others approach Jack’s lair and find him seated before a great fire. Jack says he is going to

kill them. “But Reeder told him that his Obi had no power over him, for that he was

christened, and no longer Quashee, but James Reeder.” Quashee has realized that in order

for the obeah to work, he must believe in it, and in becoming a Christian, it has been

rendered powerless. Jack is dismayed and cowed “for he had prophesied that White Obi

would overcome him” (156). In the ensuing fight, Jack is defeated, as Stanford says “basely

murdered by the hirelings of the Government” (157).

As we saw in “The Grateful Negro,” in Obi, obeah purports to grant invulnerability

to weapons, making revolting slaves invincible; another way of rendering the slave body

unpossessable by whites. Perhaps this circumstance of invincibility is supposed to operate

as a transitory state, a kind of limbo through which the slave body must pass to render its

former possession powerless. In this way, then, obeah invincibility performs the same

Brewster 16

function as bodily negation, but in a more Afrocentric form. Though it is a narrative

innovation, this invincibility is ultimately futile. A counterintuitive and subtle colonialist

agenda can be read22 into its narrative use, especially in Obi, where coupled with the

conversion of Quashee to Christianity, because the British agenda is ultimately victorious.

[Verse 2] We’ve Got to Fulfill da Book: Blacks WritingChurch me with your fake prophesizing that I’mma be just another slave in my headInstitutionalized manipulation and liesReciprocation of freedom only live in your eyes — Kendrick Lamar “The Blacker the Berry”

Today we employ the generic term “slave narrative” to try to encapsulate all forms

of writings from Africans captured into slavery, from blacks born into slavery, and from

freed black slaves. This information about slavery and the experiences of slaves lives only

exists today because someone wrote it down— as Bryccan Carey notes “slaves and former

slaves began both to represent their own lives and to call attention to the evils of slavery in

the language of their enslavers” (403). Even though some of the earliest accounts are

technically biographical, as they have been recorded by various whites and subsequently

published, the implications of Carey’s assertion cannot be understated. If the slave trade

and New World colonialism worked hand-in-hand to eradicate any trace of African

identity, then we may describe this literary effort as a victorious expropriation23. Sara Salih,

editor of The History of Mary Prince, notes that “Gronniosaw… Equiano and Prince are

engaged in precisely such an exercise of [expropriation], and their texts articulate the

sufferings of what would otherwise have been a forgotten generation” (xii).

In her study of shorter, fragmentary narratives, Aljoe uses an apt metaphor when she

writes: “The portraits ranged from brief sketches to longer narratives of several pages and

aimed to provide evidence of slave life in the West Indies by connecting and attributing

the slave voice to an implied, yet corporeal, slave body” (29). She writes this to illuminate

the variety of slave narratives that exist outside the well-known “big” published book-

length works. In my research, I have read accounts short and long, investigating

Brewster 17

experiences that demonstrate bodily resistance to slavery in order to differentiate the kinds

of writing done by real, historical individuals from the fictive accounts examined in the

previous section. Though I did decide to separate proprioceptive, fictive, resistance from

historical bodily resistance, the vital distinction comes not in how resistance in these

narratives originates, but how it emanates. The naked truth is that no dead slave can

communicate the thoughts and feelings that precede the decision to accomplish bodily

negation, and any writer who does include an autobiographical account of the feeling I

am better off dead than a slave is one who has stepped past that nearly-ultimate state and

lived to write. Because this true paradox cannot be resolved in a slave narrative, I humbly

offer that the absence of first-person evidence of bodily negation as a dispossession

strategy in historical slavery does not refute its existence as valid thought and behavior

therein. Each and every slave who resisted and died is a testament to the certitude of this

action. I have also further decided to limit the number of slave narratives because my real

aim in this research is to highlight the fictive uses of resistance rather than the historical.

The several representative narratives I use here illuminate the fictive examples discussed

above, and abut the bridge I am building between white fictive writing of the 17th and

18th Centuries with black fictive writing of the 20th and 21st.

The narrative of Briton Hammon, printed in Boston in 1760, may well be the first

slave narrative written by an African24 (like many early slave narratives, some critical

questions surround this). He is onboard a ship returning from Jamaica when it hits a reef

and starts to sink. The situation is complicated by the appearance of natives in canoes: “we

saw the whole Number of Indians, advancing forward and loading their Guns… upon

which I immediately jump'd overboard, chusing rather to be drowned, than to be kill'd by

those barbarous and inhuman Savages” (6). Thus we have the first example recorded in

English of a black slave attesting to the choice of deaths. If bodily negation in the fictive

mode is a choice of the slave to dispossess himself of slavery than to submit voluntarily to

death, then in nonfiction it might be characterized as the impulse that causes the thought I

am better off dead by my own reckoning.

The narrative of James Albert, who was born in Africa as Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

about 1710, is interesting on several levels. In his discussion of desiring literacy (though

this narrative, like many, is dictated) and converting to Christianity, this 1770 publication

Brewster 18

established itself as the model for Olaudah Equiano and others to follow. However, Albert

does not report horrors of his captivity. Transported to the Gold Coast, he is accused of

being a royal spy and ordered to be executed, but is spared that and sold into slavery

instead. He becomes the property of a Dutch minister and is emancipated upon that man’s

death. In 1763, he sails for England, where “he [is] baptized by a Baptist minister and...

marrie[s] a white woman named Betty. The couple face[s] employment difficulties and

racial discrimination and struggle[s] to support themselves and their children” (Summary).

His is an early example of christianization, and though he is free, in facing discrimination

and poverty, he and his family experience identical impediments as many biracial families

do today.

Mary Prince’s History is the last slave narrative I will examine, and though it

records several instances of bodily resistance and death-as-escape, her text brings to the

forefront the question of authorial authenticity to which I have alluded above. Prince

dictated her story to a woman named Sally Strickland and the 33-page account was

published in 1831 together “with a sixteen-page editorial supplement, a validating

appendix and the account of another West Indian slave” (xiii). Salih describes blacks

publishing slave narratives in English as

a radical gesture, and these texts undermine the authority of colonial discourse and the validity of its (hitherto uncontested) theories by affirming both the authorship and the authentic humanity of the black subject who was still struggling for recognition from a white establishment which persisted in regarding ‘negroes’ as bestial. (xvi)

In the mere telling25 of her life story, Prince’s writing is proof of an enduring humanity as it

accords her mind and soul an afterlife in the corpus of literature. Mary Prince’s

experiences also illuminate the little-known instance of slave labor in the salt industry.

While much abolitionist literature focused on the “blood sugar” aspect of the West Indian

plantations, Michele Speitz finds in Prince a more insidious and corrosive metaphor:

Ultimately, Prince molds her many references to the salt industry of Turks Island into a compelling trope, grafting her figurations of a body and mind transformed by labor onto narratives of a British body politic and its ideological claims that purport to be working for freedom. (§11)

Brewster 19

As one would expect in an abolitionist text, Prince specifies any numbers of horrors

suffered by the slaves. Before I examine Prince herself, I will discuss the examples she

gives of two fellow slaves, Hetty and Old Daniel. Prince is close with Hetty, who “was

very kind to me, and I used to call her my Aunt; but she led a most miserable life” (15). In

a scene that would not be out of place in Marcus Wood’s book, the pregnant Hetty is

stripped naked and flogged for a minor misdeed. Her child is stillborn, and once Hetty

recovers bodily, she is again repeatedly flogged by her master and his wife. When she

finally dies of dropsy “all the slaves said that death was a good thing for poor Hetty.”

Prince misses Hetty, and she finds the manner of her death so horrifying “I could not bear

to think about it; yet it was always present to my mind” (16). One can only imagine Hetty,

clinging to life, trying to resist death; and Prince, witness to dozens of bodily horrors,

mentally fighting alongside her. While the other slaves are grateful for her death-as-escape,

Prince is left to cope with this trauma and ponder her own end.

Old Daniel was lame and could not keep up physically with the other slaves, so his

master would have him beaten raw with a rod of rough briar, and then throw salt into the

raw wounds. “This poor man’s wounds were never healed, and I have often seen them full

of maggots.” Here Price explicitly imparts her thoughts: “in his wretched case we saw,

each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old” (23). These traumatic experiences

as a whole shape the kinds of autobiographical writings we have from the survivors. XXX

need more

Prince does give a personal example of the desire for death-as-escape. She

accidentally breaks an earthenware jar and is subjected to a prolonged flogging almost to

the point of death. “Oh I thought the end of all things near at hand; and as I was so sore

with the flogging, that I scarcely cared whether I lived or died.” She crawls away and

collapses under some steps, where she “lay there till the morning, careless of what might

happen, for life was very weak in me, and I wished more than ever to die” (17).

“To be free is very sweet,” (31) Prince says once to her owner Mrs. Wood when she

wishes to purchase her freedom, and because the Woods move to England, taking Prince,

she eventually wins freedom. At the close of her narrative, she reiterates “All slaves want to

be free— to be free is very sweet” (38), but as Speitz points out “although she is nominally

‘free’ in England, at least a decade after her salting days, she has not healed bodily or

Brewster 20

psychologically” (§19). It is Mary Prince, not James Albert or Oluadah Equiano, whose life

story is transformative. Speitz points me to this truth:

Like Daniel’s story, hers does not end in death or any substantive freedom, but in suffering, both of them possessing transformed bodies abandoned to a narratological limbo or an eternal hell, where their mutilated external forms perpetually display a tormented subject within. (§19)

But where Speitz sees26 Mary Prince and Daniel sitting in limbo, I see their stories as

crucial linchpins connecting 15th Century Africa to 21st Century America by way of the

West Indies.

[Verse 3] How Long Shall Dey Kill Our Prophets?I said they treat me like a slave, cah’ me blackWoi, we feel a whole heap of pain, cah’ we blackAnd man a say they put me inna chains, cah’ we black — Assassin “The Blacker the Berry [Hook]”

Cause the wickedCarried us away in captivityRequiring of us a songHow can we sing King Alpha's song in a strange land? — The Melodians “Rivers of Babylon” (1970)

John Donne, in his Sermon of 5th November, 1622, the anniversary of the

Gunpowder Treason, calls the Book of Lamentations a “prophetical history and a historical

prophecy” (205). Babylon existed as an enslaver of the Israelites in history and Babylon is

a prophecy of future enslavement, as typified in Psalms 137: “By the rivers of Babylon,

there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion” (137:1). Elizabethan

scholar Hannibal Hamlin notes, though all the Psalms were cycled through monthly in the

Anglican church, “none was more read, translated, paraphrased, widely quoted, and

alluded to than Psalm 137” (225).

From English poets and gentleman, whose society created the Atlantic Slave Trade,

the Rastafarian resistance movement in Jamaica appropriated27 this Psalm several centuries

later. Horace Campbell notes that “Rastas had used the words of the Psalms to depict their

Brewster 21

condition and in the minds of poor people, Babylon became the symbol of

oppression” (101). Rastafarians expropriated English religious symbols and language alike.

The dialect “Rasta-talk” grew and came to infuse Jamaican patios, the language of the

people, with its particular vocabulary and syntax. Louise Bennett28 established patois as a

literary language with numerous poems starting in the 1940s and this hybrid would come

to prove particularly robust, especially after Jamaica’s Independence in 1962.

Jamaican radio in the 1960s played white American pop music, leaving native

groups and their working class audiences marginalized. New “institutions, called Sound

Systems, where the music of Jamaica and of black America could be played without

restraint” (127) sprang up in the streets and yards of Kingston. These sound systems created

a demand for indigenous groups which reggae artists like Toots and the Maytals, The

Wailers, and Burning Spear, with their overtly political Rastafarian messages, filled. At this

time, the emcees of these sound systems would talk over the instrumental parts of records,

“toasting” in homage to the radio deejays. Soon, producers like King Tubby would record

instrumental “dubs” of hit singles to create more time for the best toasters to talk (and sell

more records). Eventually, King Tubby would partner with the toaster U-Roy to create

records of this new dub29 style.

As one would expect from a homegrown artform, reggae music spoke in patois. An

instrument of appropriation, expropriation, and détournement, reggae music thrived as the

voice of the whole Jamaican underclass, not just the more insular Rastafarians. Reggae

would achieve worldwide presence partially with the release of the Jimmy Cliff-starring

movie The Harder They Come (1972) and more completely with its Cliff-led reggae

soundtrack. This fictionalized story of Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin who escaped from prison

and went on a crime spree, shooting and killing police and civilians alike over six weeks

in September and October 1948, coupled with Jamaican fascination with the gangster

rebel, as exemplified by the ongoing popularity of Three-Fingered Jack, became an instant

sensation.

A week after the historical Martin was shot dead, Louise Bennett published the

poem “Dead Man” about which Rachel Mosley-Wood says “both denounces and pays

tribute to Rhygin” (81). Written in Jamaican patois, the poem posits a scenario in which

Rhygin’s ghost continues to terrify after death, manifesting a transfixing dispropriation:

Brewster 22

Koo de fus picture him pose fa, Look at the first picture he posed for Gun dem ready, blazin lead! Guns ready, blazing lead Koo de las picture him pose fa, Look at the last picture he posed for Eena dead house, lidung dead! In the morgue, lying down dead

But ah wonder wat hood happen But I wonder what would happen To de picture-man, Miss Sue, to the photographer, [my friend] Ef wen him dah teck de picture if, when he’s about to take the picture, Rhygin duppy did seh ‘boo’! Rhygin’s ghost said “boo!”30

Though this is not the first literary example of a treacherous ghost, a duppy is a

particular kind of malevolent spirit with its roots in obeah and West Africa31, and in this

literary context, Rhygin’s imagined duppy desires to continue the freedom of his spree and

to wreak revenge upon those who have wronged him. This particularly Afro-Caribbean

manifestation inhabits reggae to the extent that Bob Marley’s first big hit was titled “Duppy

Conqueror.”

In another way, Rhygin’s duppy inhabits The Harder They Come, the movie Mosley-

Wood calls “most responsible for Rhygin’s continued regeneration,” proving “Rhygin’s

metaphorical evasion of death.” In the movie, Ivan poses for pictures, but pushes self-

mythologizing a step further by recording songs. Ivan’s songs32 are interwoven with “Rivers

of Babylon,” “Pressure Drop,” and other contemporary reggae hits, giving him a huge

admiring audience in the streets of Kingston. Mosely-Wood rightly sees the regenerative

nature of this film connecting Rhygin to Three-Fingered Jack in the “larger ongoing

narrative of resistance that has sprung from Jamaica’s history of slavery and

colonialism” (82). I suggest that reggae music and its associated culture, with its sound

systems and dub experimentation, tie Jamaican slave resistance and its subsequent cultural

effects on West Indian history and literature directly to contemporary American hip-hop

and its thematic concerns.

Brewster 23

[Musical Outro] Never Ever Catch MeI’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015When I finish this if you listenin’ then sure you will agreeThis plot is bigger than me, it’s generational hatredIt’s genocism, it’s grimy, little justificationI’m African-American, I’m African — Kendrick Lamar “The Blacker the Berry”

Today, we can trace the literary genesis of African dehumanization to English

literature of the Restoration in general and perhaps to Behn’s novella in particular. While it

is important to examine slavery in historical and literary contexts, contemporary American

culture is still riddled with the racist aftermath of slavery. Historically, the literary black

voices of an Equiano or a Frederick Douglass contextualized slavery in America,

supporting the broader abolitionist movement, and today, a new generation of African-

American voices continue to ground their experiences within the cultural discourse. While

chattel slavery is no longer the focus for black resistance, hip-hop artists draw heavily on

images of slavery33 and bodily resistance in their songs, reappropriating this tradition to

examine contemporary American society.

Today’s rap or hip-hop music can trace its origins to 1970s Bronx, with its large

West Indian immigrant population. Clive Campbell, who became DJ Kool Herc, was born

in Jamaica in 1955 and moved to the Bronx in 1967, is the man credited with inventing

and naming hip-hop. In the 1990 essay “Signifying Rappers,” David Foster Wallace and

Mark Costello write:

’Hip-hop’ is an older synonym, coined by Rap pioneer, Kool Herc, to describe the heavily danceable Jamaican scatting he introduced between records at the huge South Bronx block parties he and other new-Scene celebrities, like Jazzy Five and former Black Spades leader, Afrika Bambaataa, could turn into late-70s frenzies of Breakdance (both music and dance a self- conscious reaction against the glittered unreality of downtown Disco. (Note 1)

Brewster 24

Herc himself describes playing records at these parties:

...the whole chemistry of that came from Jamaica ... I was born in Jamaica and I was listening to American music in Jamaica ... When I came over here I just put it in the American style and a perspective for them to dance to it. In Jamaica all you needed was a drum and bass. So what I did here was go right to the 'yoke'. I cut off all anticipation and played the beats. I'd find out where the break in the record was at and prolong it and people would love it. So I was giving them their own taste and beat percussion-wise. (“Kool D.J. Herc”)

Drawing on Jamaican sound systems, reggae, dub, and toasting, Kool Herc and his

contemporaries, in yet another détournement, created American hip hop.

Almost immediately, hip-hop artists began decrying the experiences of black

Americans in their raps, and one voice in particular seems to “own” today’s authoritative

position, commanding the largest audiences based on sales and plays. Kendrick Lamar has

risen from Compton, California to the top of the charts on the basis of his rapping skills

and authentic lyrics. Over the last four years, Lamar has become the preeminent voice for

the Black American experience; as the writer Greg Tate puts it, speaking of the new album

To Pimp a Butterfly, “this is Lamar's moment to remake rap in his own blood-sick image. If

we're talking insurgent content and currency, Lamar straight up owns rap relevancy.”

Several of Lamar’s lyrics directly embody images directly related to my thesis.

In a 2014 collaboration on the Flying Lotus album You’re Dead!, Lamar contributes

the lyrics to “Never Catch Me.” In this rap, he poignantly connects the viewpoint of a

contemporary young black man directly to the slave experiences as exemplified in

Oronooko. Unlike Oronooko, though, Lamar has not yet reached the point of conceding

the fight. First, he acknowledges the duality of inner and outer “darkness” and its

connection to life and death: “I can see the darkness in me and it’s amazing/ Life and

death is no mystery and I want to taste it34.” He continues, narratively winding images of

Brewster 25

his mind’s fear, afterlife, and states of absence, into a tight, tense thread with lines like:

The big thought of fallin’ off disappeared to my fate They say that Heaven’s real Analyze my demise I say I'm super anxious Recognize I deprive this fear and then embrace it

and

Lookin' down on my soul now, tell me I'm in control now Tell me I can live long and I can live wrong and I can live right And I can sing song and I can unite the youth that I love Youth that I like, look at my life and tell me I fight.

Like Oroonoko, Lamar understands that the state of darkness, blackness, is one of

bodily dispossession, and that the thinking man can only recognize this state and

formulate a strategy to resist. Oroonoko is able to force the dispossession of his body by

the English and achieve release through negation, and Lamar’s lyric comes to a similar

resolution:

I got mind control when I'm here, you gon' hate me when I'm gone Ain't no blood pumpin' no fear, I got hope inside of my bones This that life beyond your own life, this ain't physical for mankind This that out-of-body experience, no coincidence you been died Bitch, you're dead!

The track is crowned with a hauntingly sung chorus, reinforcing the notion that the

speaker cannot be possessed: “Say you will never ever catch me, no, no, no.” If Kendrick

Lamar isn’t directly channeling the spirit of Oronooko, Mary Prince, Jack Mansong, and

Rhygin, he is certainly writing and rapping with a communal, centuries-in-the-making

voice of the African-American experience. For each of these literary and historical

personae, the dominant expression of their life forces was to escape possession, to escape

from physical and mental slavery, to escape from poverty and racial discrimination, to

escape a life forced upon them by oppressive cultures and societies.

Lamar deconstructs in “The Blacker the Berry” and “Never Catch Me” his own

blackness, the “darkness in me” which exists independent of his skin color and

simultaneously because of it. Perhaps spurred by the Socratic philosophy that “the

Brewster 26

unexamined life is not worth living” this self-examination leads him to call this darkness

“quite amazing.” While Lamar adopts a fictive personae in his raps when he needs to, that

personae is “Kendrick Lamar,” the twenty-something black man from Compton. When he

raps “analyze my demise,” it is both an invitation to the listener and a personal procedure.

Lamar’s “I,” like those found in literary and historical narratives, is at once the personal

pronoun and every black person in America, all of whom must still resist, still fight for

basic human rights and the dignity to live a free life.

From 17th Century Africa, to the America of the 21st Century, strategies of

proprioceptive resistance and bodily negation by enslaved and oppressed black personae,

mirroring historical resistances, persist. Spreading through British prose and poetry to the

oral tradition of Jamaica and ultimately into popular music, the voices of oppressed

peoples continue to record and celebrate instances of resistance and spur a wider

audience to action. In the literature of slavery, for the Black Man in particular, the only

possible emancipation seems to come through bodily negation. Kendrick Lamar’s attempt

at reversing this, at salvation is to call attention to this black bodily negation and reinforce

the visceral living of life in order to reverse “that out-of-body experience.”

Brewster 27

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Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself." James Albert

Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Walter Shirley, 1725-1786. Web. 12 May 2015.

Aljoe, Nicole N. Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies,

1709-1838. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text, Historical Backgrounds, Criticism. Ed.

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Briton, Hammon. "A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings." Briton Hammon A Narrative

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Campbell, Horace. Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney. Trenton:

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Cassidy, Frederic G., and R. B. Page. Dictionary of Jamaican English. 2nd ed. Cambridge:

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Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican

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1 See Daniel Hill writing in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis) <http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/rftmusic/2015/02/kendrick_lamars_the_blacker_the_berry_addresses_criticism_to_his_ferguson_remarks.php>

2 Specifically that of white English writers of fiction and poetry who write about the West Indies slave trade

3 See pg. 19 <http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/llst:@field(DOCID+@lit(s185910200))#0090017

4 What originally spurred my connection of Olson’s proprioception to slave resistance was a reference in “Blood Sugar,” where Timothy Morton quotes Paul Gilroy talking about “[a] sense of the body’s place in the natural world” (88). Investigating Gilroy directly, one finds a thorough discussion of the place of the body as a “central locus of resistances and desires” in social movements, including the women’s movement, the gay movement, and the peace movement. Gilroy is specifically addressing how the black body is being represented in black culture, the transformation of “blackness” from a “natural” (albeit false) understanding of race to a historical one. Though his essay touches broadly upon some of the same themes I address here, his thesis addresses contemporary black social movements in Britain.

5 No accident the relation of this state and the modern physiological limbic system which controls basic needs and desires

6 Janmohamed posits, based on Patterson, Hegel, and Heidegger, a series of deathlike states starting with Patterson’s social-death and ending with actual-death. In between the two is symbolic-death, which he finds in the writings of Richard Wright. Janmohamed defines this symbolic-death as “constituted by the death of the slave’s subject-position as a socially dead being and his rebirth in a different subject-position… the most graphic example of symbolic-death in African-American slave narratives is Frederick Douglass’s ‘resurrection’ after he defeats the slave breaker Covey” (17). This symbolic-death is very close to what I am writing about, but I believe that the truest representation of bodily negation resides in the fiction of white writers.

7 In other words, the legal issues of slavery caused a refinement of the class system in place to explicitly denote certain kinds of whites as “free”

8 It should be noted that the publication of Behn’s Oroonoko slightly predates Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, so that her rationale of slavery is independent of his, though they both draw from the same cultural milieu.

9 At home in Coramantien, Oroonoko had engaged in an illicit affair with Imoinda. She is supposedly executed, but actually sold into slavery in Surinam, where she is known as Clemene. In the realization of the romantic trope, he finds and marries her.

10 Pages 57-9

11 Pages 62-3

12 Disturbingly, Caesar’s dismembered body is actually further mutilated: “They cut Caesar into quarters and sent them to several of the chief plantations” (64) as signs of warning. Shannon Miller finds that the language Behn uses in Oroonoko’s execution closely aligns to the trial of the traitor Algernon Sidney reported in The Arraignment of Algernon Sidney, Esquire (London, 1684). Historically, this practice is not unique, and can be found in Judges 19:29 (wherein the concubine of the Levite, during the time before Israel had a king, having been gang-raped, is cut into 12 parts and distributed to the lawless tribes of Israel as a warning), but this quartering exceeds Oroonoko’s bodily negation as it relates to my thesis.

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13 Helen Thomas writes “Whilst suicide constituted a cardinal sin in Christian theology... death by drowning or hanging was considered by many slaves preferable to slavery, as they connected such acts with a belief in a possible return to their homeland, even after death” (170). I am purposely separating the notion of suicide, the freewill-based taking of one’s own life, from the concept of bodily negation, which is a fictive action found only in the works of white writers. I will discuss this further in the second part of this essay.

14 The notion of the body disintegrating into dust is clearly Biblical in origin. The King James Version has Adam formed by God “of the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7), and in the Book of Job, the story of a man’s deliberate tribulations at the hands of God: “All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust” (34:15). The Anglican Book of Common Prayer uses the phrase “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” in its burial service.

15 Carey reproduces the original newspaper article which states “Tuesday, a black servant… ran away from his master and got christened, with the intent to marry his fellow servant, a white woman…” (http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/day.htm)

16 It has been interesting to research slave resistance and Christianity in Jamaica, and to clarify several ideas about slavery and Christianity there. According to Abigail Bakan, “It was maintained that slaves could not be genuinely Christian. In 1727, the Lord Bishop of London published an epistle calling upon English colonists to teach their slaves the Christian faith. The practice, however, differed greatly from the preaching... After the American Revolution several hundred United Empire Loyalists, accompanied by their slaves [some of whom were black Baptist slave preachers], emigrated to Jamaica from the United States” (51). Bakan here points out a philosophical difference between slaveowners on the mainland, who allowed their slaves to become christianized, and those in the West Indies who had resisted conversion. Edgeworth’s touches of Christian behavior were historically appropriate, and Earle’s depiction of a conversion specifically is as well.

17 “Imbrue” is a rare word, and in this context seems overtly biblical. Indeed, John Wesley’s commentary on Deuteronomy 17:7 uses the word: “First upon him - God thus ordered it, for the caution of witnesses, that, if they had thro' malice or wrath accused him falsely, they might now be afraid to imbrue their hands in innocent blood; and for the security and satisfaction of the people in the execution of this punishment.” The original verse, in the 1611 KJV, is “The hands of the witnesses shall be first vpon him, to put him to death, and afterward the hands of all the people: so thou shalt put the euil away from among you.” It may be that Edgeworth is not explicitly referencing Wesley with this particular word, but the thematic connection is strong.

18 Yet another allusion to Julius Caesar/Charles I?

19 Contrast with Robert Southey’s “Poems On the Slave Trade” in which the revenging slave is hanged http://genius.com/Robert-southey-poems-on-the-slave-trade-annotated/

20 “At the Place of Execution, [the Obeah-man] bid defiance to the Executioner, telling him that it was not in the Power of White People to kill him; and the Negro Spectators were astonished when they saw him expire” (Appendix A, 177)

21 Pages 108-14

22 Alan Richardson notes “[I]t was largely through denying a coherent ideology or political aspirations to black insurgents, representing them instead as ‘savages,’ stirred up by African sorcerers and European demagogues and giving vent to uncontrollable, barbaric fury, that English fears of black empowerment could most readily be vented if not entirely allayed” (12).

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23 Sophia Lehmann contextualizes this expropriation, pairing the Jewish and African diasporas. “Cynthia Ozick refers to English as "The New Yiddish," because the Holocaust eradicated Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews, in as irreparable a way as slavery eradicated African languages for people brought to the Caribbean” (111).

24 “Hammon's Narrative is viewed by scholars the earliest slave narrative, but editorial interference, Hammon's legal status, and earlier memoirs of slave life written by white authors complicate this claim. While almost all slave narratives exhibit some signs of editorial intervention, the format and content of Hammon's Narrative correspond so closely to Thomas Brown's 1760 captivity narrative that scholar John Sekora suggests readers must examine both texts to distinguish between the "distinctive flavor of Briton Hammon's story" and those features attributable to a "common house [editorial] style" (pp. 149, 151). This strong editorial influence notwithstanding, the Narrative purports to have been written by Hammon, a fact that would make it the first slave narrative authored by an African American. Even if it can be assumed that Hammon wrote all of the Narrative, however, its status as a slave narrative remains problematic, if only because Hammon never defines his relationship to "My good Master" Winslow explicitly” (Summary)

25 Salih notes it is absent “biblical and literary allusions that ‘elevate’ the text and [would] prove the writer’s human intelligence” (xvi-xvii)

26 To be completely fair, in §21 Speitz writes “[Prince] is cannibalized by salt she exists as a human commodity, a slave, and harvests a commodity, salt, that devours her flesh. This economy of cannibalism and corporeal alteration entails an existential transformation.” This statement absolutely contributes to and infuses my concept of bodily negation. Connecting cannibalism here echoes the libels against the Caribs, Arawaks and tribes on the mainland that extend from 1492 all the way to the Sullivan Campaign of 1779, ordered by General Washington against the Iroquois of the Finger Lakes region (and which, I believe, run parallel to my ideas on bodily resistance and negation). Speitz’s focus on labor, commodity, and here specifically co-commodity, is only tangentially related to my thesis. However, her emphasis on “corporeal alteration” and “existential transformation” are exactly where my thesis lies.

27 See Campbell (101)— Rasta leader Prince Emmanuel’s Groundation

28 see http://louisebennett.com/biography/

29 While taken from reggae recording sessions, dub reggae on record continued to be experimental and primarily instrumental. This variation spawned several genres: the 12” remix popularized in 1980s New Wave as well as 1990s Jungle and Drums ‘n Bass, evolving over time into the now cliché Dubstep.

30 Bennett’s poem is printed in full in Cooper Noises In the Blood, standardizing some of the words. I have used the version of the last verse given in Mosley-Wood to restore the patois. The translation is mine.

31 In the OED, earliest citation is Long, 1774; see also Dictionary of Jamaican English for much broader connections

32 One of the songs on the soundtrack, “Sitting in Limbo,” includes the verse:

Sitting here in limboWaiting for the dice to rollYeah, now, sitting here in limboGot some time to search my soulWell, they're putting up a resistanceBut I know that my faith will lead me on

Though it may be coincidence, the dice recall Coleridge’s Life-In-Death character. Limbo being linked to resistance and faith shows how interwoven these themes continued to be in the 20th Century.

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33 See “Hip Hop and the New Slavery” <http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/article_100633.shtml>. This article in The Final Call, a Nation of Islam publication, focuses on rappers fusing the themes of capitalism— oppressive record deals and the privatization of prisons— with historical images of slavery, like Lamar does in “The Blacker the Berry.” I would argue though that Lamar’s sense of historical proprioception, like that of Chuck D or KRS-One, affords his narratives greater critical weight.

34 all lyrics in this paper are from genius.com