‎ “The Gnarled Fingers of Fate”: Curse Temporalities and the Question of Agency

In 1913, W.E.B. Du Bois commissioned the artist Meta Fuller to produce a sculpture in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The sculpture, today located on Harriet Tubman Square in Boston, carries the title Emancipation and is inscribed with the following sentence: “Humanity weeping over her suddenly freed children, who, beneath the gnarled fingers of Fate, step forth into the world, unafraid.” Fuller elaborated on the idea behind her sculpture:
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‎I presented the race by a male and female figure standing under a tree, the branches of which are the fingers of Fate grasping at them to draw them back into the fateful clutches of hatred […]. The Negro has been emancipated from slavery but not from the curse of race hatred and prejudice. (qtd. in Rubinstein 1990: 202)
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‎Reading the stories of sharecropper H or Harlem heroin addict Sonny, familiar in their typicality, readers are confronted simultaneously with what was and what shall be, each event foretold and anticipated by the course of history. While the techniques of flashbacks and foreshadowing aren’t particularly noteworthy for a historical novel per se, it is important to read the novel in the context of African and diasporic notions of temporality, particularly those affected by today’s bleak political assessment. The historicism employed by Homegoing depicts Black lives as ruinously doomed by “the curse of race hatred and prejudice,” their destinies unfolding under the shadow cast by this fate. Moreover, diasporic narratives have always indicated alternative temporalities – out of necessity. Writing about the rise of what he calls the “recent historical novel,” Manshel notes how this current genre “suggests that recent history is a period defined by insistent states of emergency. World-historical catastrophe punctuates both narrative time and historical time: a particularly useful function in an age of forever wars and ‘slow death’ threats like climate change” (2017: para. 12). As a transatlantic history of slavery and colonialism, Homegoing is necessarily positioned within a temporality in which the catastrophe has always already happened, investing in characters long since subjected to various forms of slow death. Therefore, the notion of history as curse or fate often translates into a somewhat post-apocalyptic temporality that is not exclusive to diasporic New
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‎World narratives, but as the following passage will briefly address, is also an important feature of the African novel.
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‎We can find this post-apocalyptic temporality in the tragic ending of Things Fall Apart, framing not only Okonkwo’s death but also The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger as mere footnotes in capital H history (Achebe 1958: 183). It also appears in the so-called petro-magic-fiction of contemporary Nigeria, portraying the insidious effect of what Rob Nixon has called “slow other vioviolence” – meaning “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (2011: 2).97 Another striking example would be Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu, a contemporary Ugandan novel with an interestingly bifurcated publication history and an ever growing, enthusiastic readership. 98 Similar to Homegoing, the novel follows several generations of one family and employs curse temporality as a historiographic device.
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‎Kintu is often singled out for providing a rich historical panorama of Uganda that bypasses the history of colonialism. As the “great Ugandan novel” it is often praised, Kintu stretches far back into the history of the Buganda kingdom and connects it, by way of a family curse resulting from a father accidentally murdering his foster son, to contemporary post-Idi-Amin-Uganda. Yet even though the colonial period is skipped, the temporality of colonialism cannot be undone. This is apparent in the epigraph taken from the writings of colonial explorer John Hanning Speke (1827-1864). Speke professes “accurately to describe naked Africa” in a passage reminiscent of Achebe’s District Commissioner, but not only non-fictional, but ultimately more mythical than the Commissioner’s official prose (Speke 1863: xiii).99 This epigraph is followed by the novel’s prologue, set in 2004 and detailing the brutal, and coincidental, public execution of Kamu Kintu, who is mistaken for a thief and kicked to death by an angry mob. The scene, eerily reminiscent of the one detailed in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief, sets the stage for the novel’s epic, multigenerational sprawl. The murder, it suggests, is just another instance of the curse haunting every descendant of the mythical ancestor Kintu Kidda. At the end of the prologue, as market vendors discuss the significance of Kamu’s murder, linking it to other violent incidents and peddling both “fate” and “the curse” as explanations, one woman adds another dimension (Kintu 7). Regardless of a family line being cursed, she concludes, “that is what happens to a race that fails to raise its value on the market” (ibid.). The notion of reification and commodification inherent in this comment reiterates the actual horror unfolding in Kamu Kintu’s execution, who, in becoming a thief, ceases to be human:
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‎The word thief started to bounce from here to there, first as a question than as a fact. It repeated itself over and over like an echo calling. The
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‎crowd grew […]. Angry men just arriving asked, “Is it a thief?”, because Kintu had ceased to be human.
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‎The word thief summed up the common enemy. Why there was no supper the previous night; why their children were not on their way to school. Thief was the president who arrived two and a half decades ago waving “democracy” at them […]. Thief was God poised with a can of aerosol Africancide, his fingers pressing hard on the button. (4-5)
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‎The always-precarious distinction between the human and the non-human is a core theme of the novel, not only because kintu is also the Bantu word for ‘thing,’ but also because Makumbi is certainly aware of how, as Mbembe describes it, “discourse on Africa is almost always deployed in the framework (or on the fringes) of a meta-text about the animal – to be exact, about the beast” (2001: 1). Reading the prologue in conversation with the epigraph conveys this distinction also in terms of temporality. What the angry crowd in contemporary Kampala feels robbed of is a functioning future, the notion of freedom and agency that appears to be awarded to full humanity. All they can hope for, as racialized and unchanging objects, is to raise their global market value. At the same time, the market woman’s deadpan commentary implies that today’s squalor provides the retrospective rationalization of yesterday’s curse, as “that is what happens.” The novel’s epigraph by Speke suggests a similar sense of predetermination through the biblical hermeneutics of figura and fulfillment. Referencing the myth of Ham and naturalizing a state of enslavement for Africans, Speke asserts that “for as they were then, so they appear to be now – a striking existing proof of the Holy Scriptures” (Speke 1863: xiii).
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‎Utilizing Speke’s travelogue and the Hamitic myth as an ironic intertext, Kintu’s pre- and post-colonial history of Uganda nevertheless problematizes the lasting effects of these kinds of quasi-theological, ‘scientific’ writings. As Patrick Wolfe notes in relation to the secularization of the theological discourse during the Enlightenment period, the naturalized discourse of race functioned as a key component to this process. Wolfe writes that, whereas “the Rousseauan vision of improvability through education recast the Christian possibility of grace (in the case of Jews, of conversion), race could also endow debasement with the fixity of a curse” (2015: 9). The problem, then, is not so much that Africa and Africans have been written out of History, but that they have also been produced and enveloped by it in a manner that nullifies agency: Blackness as curse or fate. The logic of figuration as racialization imposes not only a scripted past, present, and future, but it does so, most importantly, by inscribing this fate on the body.
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‎As Wolfe observes, besides functioning as a stratifying element that installs hierarchy by (de)valuing difference, race is a classificatory concept
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‎that links material and immaterial spheres, rendering it “not a negotiable condition but a destiny, one whose principal outward sign is the body” (2015: 7). As metahistorical device in Afro-diasporic fictions, curse temporalities are thus slightly distinct from haunting and spectrality because they open up questions of relationally, futurity, and agency. Who inherits the curse? What is the difference between a curse and the course of history? And can it be undone? For Benjamin’s historical materialist, turning toward the past holds the most promise for exploding the linear time of progress a progress that continues the subjugation of the marginalized and that holds past, present, and future hostage. In that sense, Benjamin inverts the teleology of messianism, which thrives on the notion of future redemption. Rather than abandoning the concept entirely, however, he proposes a messianism without the singular savior provided by the course of history, where instead each moment, when viewed through the lens of an historical constellation, may reveal its “weak messianic power” (Benjamin 2003: 390).
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‎As one literary critic observes, Gyasi expertly utilizes the novel’s particular temporal structure to summon “the fantasy of retreat into love and family, and then to show how history will, inevitably, trample that dream” (Miller 2016: para. 10). And indeed, repeatedly, Black life is represented apart from loss, dispossession, and grief – particularly in the chapters set on the Gold Coast. Yet ultimately, these moments are enveloped by the deterministic force of race in/as history. In spite of this ambiguity, however, Homegoing’s affective bedrock engenders a sense of potential redemption that does not function as mere gimmick or narrative device, made sweeter by its deferral, but represents a weak messianic possibility. Because, as Gyasi has noted in an interview, “a great way” to think of the novel’s chapters is to understand them as “love stories,” the romance of redemption is indeed built into these individual snap shots in time, rather than an all-encompassing, grand historical arc (Owens 2016: para. 82).
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‎Within Homegoing’s temporal framework, the promise of redemption is not plotted as progressive history but becomes a question of personal agency and introspection lying dormant within each historical moment. At the same time, the generally tragic plotting of its historicism questions a certain “pat liberal notion of human rights” which, according to Walter Johnson, underlies most scholarship on slavery and that tends to emphasize “‘independent will and volition’ against the possibility of ‘dehumanization'” (2018: para. 8). It is therefore insufficient to read the novel as either “fulfillment” or “effect,” as Julien outlines it in “The Extroverted African Novel”: “If the African novel is construed as a site of fulfillment, it is linked to human agency and self-fashioning. If it is an effect, it is part of a necessary trajectory, merely a product of historical forces beyond writers’ control” (2007: 668). Homegoing indeed employs and critiques
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‎simultaneously, by straining at the limits of both metahistoricist perspectives.
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‎One example of this is the way in which the novel constantly evokes and revokes universalized notions of agency and historical change. In “What is a Historical System,” a lecture given to an audience of biologists, Hayden White describes a people’s historical past as a fiction that is ultimately more malleable than genetics yet is often interpreted in a similarly deterministic sense. For White, the difference between biological and historical systems lies in the latter’s “choosing capacities” (2010: 132). He states that “historical systems differ from biological systems by their capacity to act as if they could choose their own ancestors” (ibid.). Most importantly, this act will determine the future behavior of a group, allowing for something of a historic opening with every generation that either chooses or does not choose to accept the transpired fiction of origin. The novel’s chapter on James, for example, allows for such an opening to occur. James is already the product of complex cultural entanglements on the Gold Coast. Named after his grandfather James, the Governor of Cape Coast Castle, he is the son of Asante princess Nana Yaa Yeboah and Quey, the only child of Effia the Beauty, the cursed Fante girl who was married to the Governor. Born 1807, the year the slave trade was officially abolished, James nevertheless grows up as heir to the illegal, yet unceasing business of the trade. However, the signs point toward a power shift on the Gold Coast that – as James has come to realize – will replace the physical shackles of slavery with the new “invisible ones that wrapped around the mind” (93).
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‎James is unable to fully fathom the role provided to him by his social position and ancestral history until the structures he takes for granted are questioned by Akosua, leading to his very own sense of crisis. Due to the episodic structure of the novel, the chapter on James provides only a short glimpse into a particular historical period, the Gold Coast on the brink of large-scale colonization, which threatens to engulf his personal story. As Europe enters into industrialization, James’s cards will be drawn by the markets’ invisible hand. His thoughts anticipate the shift from mercantilism and its trading post system to the new set of global relations determined by industrial economies. This new system, as Wolfe notes in Traces of History, will soon have “dispensed with the Native middleman and introduced the logic of production into the heart of Native societies, requiring either their removal or their transformation” (2015: 8).
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‎This interplay between historical structure and individual agency arising from personal crisis is precisely the node that White identifies as the breeding ground for new historical systems. White asserts that in the same way in which sociocultural systems do not “die,” but are “simply abandoned,” new sociocultural systems are in fact “constituted by living men [sic] who have decided to structure their orientation in new ways” (2010:
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‎131). When James first meets Akosua at the funeral of his grandfather, the Asantehene, their encounter is determined by their vastly different social positions. As part of the royal family, James is seated in “a single-file line of people beg[inning] at James’s grandfather’s first wife and [going] all the way into the middle town square” (Homegoing 96). Even though James has never lived in Asanteland and barely knew his maternal grandfather, power and lineage set him apart from the villagers, who are excepted to condole with the royal family by shaking each and every person’s hand. The girl Akosua, once she reaches James, politely refuses to “shake the hand of a slaver” (96). Knowing about the Asante’s role in the slave trade, James is astonished by her answer: “If the girl could not shake his hand, then surely she could never touch her own” (96) Intrigued, he later sets out to find her, allowing her to elaborate: “It is how we are all taught to think. But I do not want to think this way. When my brothers and the other people were taken, my village mourned them as we redoubled our military efforts. And what does that say? We avenge lost lives by taking more? It doesn’t make sense to me” (98). James is deeply impressed with Akosua and her conviction to break the mold and become her “own nation” (98). He decides to become a small-scale farmer with Akosua, sacrificing the privilege of “family name and power,” a privilege built in large parts on his father’s and grandfather’s work in the slave trade. War, the other great historical mechanism, presents him with a chance to opt out of the future provided for him. It is the “roving eye” of Mampanyin the “witch doctor” that sees James in Efutu, where the “never-ending Asante-British-War” (105-106) will be waged and where James will stage his own death in order to emerge on the same social footing as Akosua: “She had nothing, and she came from nothing” (99).
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‎Notably, Hayden White’s consistently male agent of change is made female in James’s chapter. Not only Akosua, but also Mampanyin and his grandmother Effia, bearer of the original curse, encourage him to try “to make a new way” (107). Effia places hope in learning to be a different person, one that invents “new ways” and does not merely continue “with the old,” yet she describes this as a mere possibility (ibid.). The further course of the novel continues to challenge this possibility, as the story of James and Akosua, while allowing them a humble degree of personal happiness, fails to break the tragic and violent “cycle” of the curse that is said to haunt the family “for as long as the line continued” (3). The ideology of race runs contrary to other ideological shifts, which White or Lukács would describe as the result of a crisis leading to a break with a theretofore-naturalized order. In its mediating of what Mbembe calls that “opaque and murky domain of power” that operates on human/non-human distinctions and plunges “human beings into a never-ending process of brutalization,” the ideology of race does not dramatize or merely exacerbate, but actually overdetermine this family drama (2001: 14). While acts of betrayal, violence, and separation
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‎brought on by the ethnic conflicts of the Gold Coast create the necessary conditions for the curse, it is the different yet entangled roles in the institution of slavery that connect the bloodlines of the two half-sisters begotten by Maame – who can easily be interpreted as another figure for Mama Africa. The fact that this shared family history of slavery and colonialism has transmuted from simple acts of wrongdoing into a many-headed system fatefully shapes the destinies of all of Maame’s children. At the same time, the fact that the imagined community of Homegoing is a community brought together by fate also creates the conditions for unity and the possibility for redemption.