The Other Problem of History: What Cannot Be Represented
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As Dalley states in his study of the postcolonial historical novel, “just as contests over the meaning of history forced historians to reconceptualize their discipline as a form of interpretative realism, so the contested nature of postcolonial pasts prompts novelists to frame their work vis-à-vis norms of plausibility, verifiability, and the dialogue with archives and alternative accounts” (2004: 8). While the metafictional and metahistorical assertion that “History is Storytelling” forms one axis of Yaw’s chapter, the other is the knowledge “that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home” at the end of the chapter (241). Encouraged by his future wife Esther, Yaw realizes that the political anger he is unable to transfer onto the page conflates with the anger transferred onto his mother the woman who scarred his face – and that he first has to confront the history of these scars before he can ever progress as a character and historiographer. On the one hand, this storyline represents Homegoing’s reckoning with the “fullness of slavery” that starts with acknowledging the “evil” in one’s own home, but it also indicates the notion of an alternative diasporic historiography, a history of scars that registers on the body as well as in the minds of the people implicated by it. Crucially, as these scars serve
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‎as a constant reminder, their traumatic effects do not necessarily ease or cease with time. While, at one point, Yaw reflects on how “you could not inherit a scar. Now […] [he] no longer knew if he believed this was true” (228).
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‎In this sense, the story of Yaw’s scar in Homegoing is exemplary for a particular aporia of diasporic and postcolonial counterhistories. The events over which these accounts compete with ‘truth claims’ are usually violent, traumatic incidences that pose specific problems to narrative representation. There are in fact two notions of violence that bear on these forms of historical writing. One is the actual violence of the event, as well as its rippling traumatic effect. But there is also the epistemic violence that often structures the way it is represented, or suppressed, by ‘official’ records like the colonial archive or the archive of slavery. This presents a particular problem to narrative representation. As Hartman asks: “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” (2008: 4). The archive of slavery, she notes, often amounts to scattered scraps indicating not more than “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history” (ibid. 2).
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‎In the heavily symbolic system of Homegoing, Yaw’s scars signify the violent event that mobilizes the emplotment and temporal logic of the novel. At this point in the narrative, the reader knows how these scars came to be and that they result from his mother acting out the family trauma: the curse of two family branches ripped apart by the ‘original sin’ of the slave trade. In his chapter, Yaw is both grappling with the fact that he cannot remember and thus “doesn’t know” – that there might be, in fact, no way of “knowing” but only telling – and that this crisis of representation may either result in an endless play or the dominance of a victor’s story. Similar to Hayden White’s diagnosis of historiography’s 19th-century malaise, he is aware that all these narratives are only ever approximations of the truth. The scars, as embodied knowledge of this trauma, indicate not only an alternative form of history but also serve as the constant reminder of a painful past that is difficult to voice without re-traumatizing or perpetuating violence.
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‎Yaw is not the only character physically bearing witness to the past; in several instances of the novel, scars speak their own language. Subjected to a vicious cycle of domestic violence, Effia can “recite a history of the scars on her body” (4) before the age of 11; by the time we reach Ness, the first descendant born into American chattel slavery, her scarred skin is already “like another body in and of itself” (74). Ness’s skin, the reader is told, “was no longer skin really, more like the ghost of her past made seeable, physical. She didn’t mind the reminder” (74). Yet what serves as potent reminder of unspeakable pain also seals her fate when her master suspects her of
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‎hurting his son: “Ness was sure that he could see clear as day what had happened, but it was the memory of her scars that made him doubt” (79). In this sense, scars are violent reminders that often beget even more violence. They do not only indicate traumatic pasts but are potentially traumatic in and of themselves. Similarly, encountering “the scraps of the archive,” as Hartman muses, cannot fully undo these traumas but may cause its own sense of pain (Hartman 2008: 4).
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‎The crisis of narrative representation, while haunting the status of historiography at large, is particularly evident if one understands the transatlantic slave trade and American chattel slavery as limit events that ultimately defy or at least severely challenge representation. The particular ‘unrepresentability’ pertaining to the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery is indeed a kind of truism, already informing their earliest literary incarnations. In his antislavery tract from 1787, Ottobah Cugoano provides only the scarcest description of a British slave hold, repeatedly conceding that these horrors “cannot be well described” (1825: 123), that there is indeed “no language” to describe it and that no ear, except that of “Jehovah Sabaoth,” may truly understand the “deep-sounding groans of thousands” (125). Frederick Douglass, too, speaks of his inability to “commit to paper” what he feels apropos the “terrible spectacle” of the whipping of Aunt Hester, symbolizing his “entrance to the hell of slavery” (1845: 28). And William Wells Brown, who published his slave narrative in 1847, famously asserted: “Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented” (1969: 82). Apart from the impossibility of rendering its horrific spectacles intelligible, there are other aspects to a limit event that further complicate its representation in historical and fiction writing.
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‎Simone Gigliotti defines the term “limit event,” as it is applied in scholarly writing about the Holocaust, as variably “the manifestation of the potential barbarism of modernity, as an extreme event of such uniqueness and incomparability that renders it incomprehensible to ‘those who were not there’, and of contested representational possibility in historical discourse, literary and visual culture, and in testimonial narratives” (2003: 166). The ‘limiting’ attributes of limit events are thus manifold; for one, they appear as ultimate limits of the social imaginary, and they also impose limits on language and representation. Yet this also means that the particular demands of a limit event problematize the very notion of relativity inherent in a radically constructivist view of history. What White elsewhere terms “imperatives of the real” will necessarily condition the range of possible responses (1987: 4). Precisely because it is so unintelligibly violent and so momentous, and because it can therefore never be contained or neatly periodized, the stakes in representing it aptly or even ‘truthfully’ are exceedingly high.
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‎In his work on the relation between history and trauma, Dominick LaCapra asserts the particular significance of limit events in Hayden White’s thinking. The notion of an unproblematic closure, for example, as well as other rhetoric modes of storytelling that would relativize the crimes of the Holocaust thus present the historian with the difficult task of finding a morally appropriate mode of historiography that doesn’t denounce its own “literariness.” LaCapra’s concern also lies with the notion of narrativization as fictionalization that may depart from or distort traumatic historical events by providing unproblematic closure (2001: 16). LaCapra notes: “The study of traumatic events poses especially difficult problems in representation and writing both for research and for any dialogic exchange with the past which acknowledges the claims it makes on people and relates it to the present and future” (2001: 41). The fictionalization of history writing notwithstanding, he points to what he calls an “irreducible aboutness” of historiography that, while not necessarily being reducible to the ultimate transparency of a documentary or self-sufficient research model, nevertheless distinguishes the “truth claims” of professional history writing from endlessly self-referential play (2001: 4). However, and this is significant in the context of diasporic literature, this kind of referentiality is not limited to historiography but also informs fiction writing and other works of art dealing with historical events. Rather than only thinking about the fictionalization of history – often conflated with narrativization in Hayden White’s earlier work – LaCapra is also interested in assessing the way historiography informs fiction writing. On the one hand, this approach would influence the manner in which works of art are critiqued and measured on behalf of their veracity or referentiality. LaCapra stresses “that truth claims coming from historiography […] may be employed in the discussion and critique of art in a manner that is especially pressing with respect to extreme events that still particularly concern people at present” (2001: 14). This approach, however, also entails an extended understanding of the “truthfulness” of literary methods. As LaCapra writes, one could “argue that narratives in fiction may also involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery or the Holocaust […] or by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive through restricted documentary methods” (2001: 13).
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‎The fact that the documentary methods of historiography pose certain limitations on diasporic fiction adds an important aspect to the idea of a limit event. Reading diasporic fictions as a form of counterhistory allows one to identify a more or less pronounced critique of so-called official records in many of these texts. This particular stance, the questioning of established historical narratives, may play out very differently but always signposts the notion of metahistoricity in diasporic or postcolonial fiction. The quasi-historiographical ending of Things Fall Apart is such an example, as is Yaw’s
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‎history lesson in Homegoing. Other texts introduce critical metahistoricism more formally. 82
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‎In their attempt to “truthfully” represent the limit events of slavery and colonialism, writers are confronted with limited archives marked not only by gaps and silences on behalf of the few witnesses, but also with cold and calculating historical records reproducing the very violence they seek to unsettle. Unsurprisingly, therefore, both fiction writers and historians have adopted speculative methods that self-consciously foreground these limitations. M. NourbeSe Philip’s long poem Zong!, for example, represents the erasure of enslaved subjectivities through disorienting fragmentation and literal blank spaces. Novelists like Fred D’Aguiar, David Daybdeen, or Caryl Phillips, as Abygail Ward argues, expose the “difficulty of representing slavery and the ethics involved in doing so” (2011: 7) through techniques like “contrapuntal montage” (2011: 27).
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‎Yet another formalized response to these issues is Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation. This method, coined in “Venus in Two Acts,” but already employed in Hartman’s earlier works Lose Your Mother and Scenes of Subjection, combines rigorous historical research with critical theory and fiction writing. Born from a double gesture of wishing to represent and narrate, and thus “save,” the life of the captive from yet another form of erasure, while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of this endeavor, critical fabulation is “a history written with and against the archive” (2008: 12). The story of Venus first appears in the chapter “The Dead Book” from Lose Your Mother, Hartman’s part-autobiographical, part-historiographical account of the Atlantic slave trade. Here, Hartman uses what little traces she can find about the fate of a captive girl in order to imagine her life and thus save her “from oblivion” (2007: 137). While this chapter already concedes the impossibility of reconstructing a life from a mere footnote in history (a court record stating “the supposed murder of a Negro girl”), her later essay restages what Hartman had begun in Lose Your Mother but more fully examines her own desire to make whole, reckoning with the necessity of its failure and further restraining her desire to give narrative closure.
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‎For Hartman, the violent omissions of these and other sources, as well as the paradigmatic status of the limit event they circumscribe, place certain demands on the methods of narration. This results in what Hartman describes as a “”recombinant narrative” that “loops the strands” of incommensurate accounts and “weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girl’s story and in narrating the time of slavery as our present” (2008: 12). Hartman, who coined the notion of the “afterlife of slavery,” pushes against reconciling a painful history through apt representation because the racializing legacy of said history “is yet to be undone” (2007: 6). Rather than being melancholically attached to the past, she claims, her project is invested
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‎in a utopian vision of the future by repeatedly problematizing the archive’s “founding violence” and its limiting effect on the present (2008: 10). She writes:
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‎For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of the present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence. As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing. (2008: 4)
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‎In terms of working with and against the historical archive in Hartman’s sense, as well as asserting the historiographical claim of ‘truthfulness’ in LaCapra’s understanding, Homegoing provides a range of interesting examples.
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‎Gyasi lists in her “Acknowledgements” section not only the names of family, friends, and mentors, but also a selection of scholarly publications on transatlantic slavery, such as The Door of No Return by William St. Clair and The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Rebecca Shumway. In its detailing of historical events, if only as background to the unfolding of personal stories, the novel utilizes archival sources, for example in the figures of Quey and Cudjo, the inspiration for whom most likely stems from the historical Philip Quaque, son of a wealthy Gold Coast slave trader, and his cousin William Cudjo.83 In light of these references and considering the novel’s more or less ostensive displays of historical verisimilitude, or at least aspirations to a verifiable historical narrative, could one interpret Homegoing as a claim to ‘truthfully’ represent a history of slavery and colonialism? Only, I would argue, if the entire semiotic range of a violent limit event is taken into account. As a traumatic event, which, following both Hartman and LaCapra, continues to affect the present, the notion of representing the past ‘the way it really was,’ and thus fetishizing it as a totalized object, becomes questionable at best. LaCapra notes that “the historical text becomes a substitute for the absent past only when it is construed as a totalized object that pretends to closure and is fetishized as such” (2001: 10-11). This does not mean that historical facts or accuracies do not matter, but that the extreme violence of this event, or chain of events, troubles the kind of historicist representation that aspires to transparency or totality or strives to situate historical events in an arc of linear progress.
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‎Counterhistories of slavery and colonialism cannot ‘prove’ how terrible these events were, at least not through ‘accurate’ description alone. For one,
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‎the ‘reality’ of this violence needn’t be disclosed and discovered, but is and was, if anything, hidden in plain sight. Both its ideology and effect weren’t felt in the periphery alone but conceived and documented at the heart of empire itself. That is why, already in the 18th century, Ottobah Cugoano found it “needless” to describe the “horrible scenes” of the slave trade “as the similar cases of thousands, which suffer by this infernal traffic, are well known” (1825: 124-125). A similar documentary fatigue affects today’s spectacles of anti-Black violence, the exasperated assertion that Black lives matter and, in the case of fiction, a particular mode of representing historical violence. In the case of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, for example, a contemporaneous novel often associated with Homegoing, scenes of extreme violence may cause some readers to doubt the novel’s historical accuracy. But the question of whether a particularly graphic scene of torture actually took place or not becomes irrelevant if one has only minimally familiarized oneself with the historical archive of slavery, for example, the gruesomely detailed journals of Thomas Thistlewood.84
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‎Furthermore, in its allegorized representations of historical events and periods, The Underground Railroad already questions the effects of historical realism. While the historical inaccuracies behind a neo-slave narrative like Roots could still compromise the claims of its author Alex Haley, Colson Whitehead acknowledges that he is interested in “the truth of things, not the facts” (Purcell 2017: para. 11). Thus, the novel provides a representation of slavery that centers not (merely) on historical detail. Rather, through its extended metaphor, the introduction of historical and historiographical text types, such as fugitive notes or almanacs, as well as the blending of historical and fictional events, renders historicism itself a subject matter. As Jesse McCarthy observes, Whitehead’s “novel doesn’t seek to reenact history, but rather to imagine and represent simultaneously the many hydra heads of a system designed to perpetuate the enclosure and domination of human beings” (2016: para. 26). In registering and commenting upon the violence of the archive, both Whitehead’s and Gyasi’s novels appear to reiterate Hartman’s question of why, despite our better knowledge, we still attend to those who were murdered by the “play of power” that is inseparable from the archives, why “at this late date we still want to write stories about them” (Hartman 2008: 11). If it is not ‘counter-knowledge’ in the strictly documentary sense of the term, these fictional counterhistories aim to do something more imaginative in their oppositional stance. In Homegoing, for example, history is imagined as a fold, with layers touching each other, where, as Gyasi describes it in reference to a quote attributed to Mark Twain, historical periods speak to each other “in a way that rhymes” (- Bausells 2017: para. 4). This manner of folding and echoing can produce a sense of haunting, a claustrophobic tautology that is used to an effect, particularly in
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‎relation to how the violent histories of slavery and colonialism bear upon the present.
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‎In the context of memorializing the transatlantic slave trade, an effort that unfolds, as Angela Davis notes, against the “historical tendency toward willed forgetfulness regarding slavery” (1999: 199), even some of the most pronounced anti-representational stances are tied up with a resistance, not only against cultural amnesia, but also against the legacy of those historical traces and forms of remembering that were complicit with these violent events. With regards to representing the Holocaust, Hayden White has called the most extreme response not the position of the so-called revisionists, but the assumption that no language or medium is ever able to adequately represent or explain it, least of all a historical account. Yet as Andreas Huyssen asserts, by the 1980s the public debate had generally morphed from whether to how to represent the Holocaust (2000: 65). Faced with the problem of memorializing an ever further receding historical event, debates over whether Schindler’s List, Shoah, or Maus are adequate Holocaust representations seemed pressing. However, prioritizing the appropriate form of remembering often loses sight of that aspect of Adorno’s often-quoted sentiment – that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz – which points toward the ongoing and unresolved crisis of modernity. 85
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‎The ossified historical traces – or scars – born by contemporary society still indicate the pulsating wound of absolute barbarism. It was the integral violence of racial capitalism that sanctified the decision of the slave ship Zong’s captain to throw more than 140 people over board in a bid to claim insurance money, and this rational violence also sustains the legal documentation of the event. Therefore, even the disintegration of meaning and representability espoused by Philip’s Zong! is framed by a reworking of this legal document that engenders to confront modernity with its repressed legacies, resulting in what Philip describes as a “hauntological pedagogy” (Watkins para. 10). While not all contemporary representations of slavery are as experimental as Philip’s, the wider implications of this kind of memorial culture – as a fundamental critique of modernity – is prevalent in many of today’s artistic and theoretical responses. However, even though the metahistorical critique of these contemporary counterhistories is warranted, if not crucial, this mode of representation may also produce its own kind of limitations.
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‎For example, Nehl’s study on the “second generation neo-slave narrative” in the 21st century not only focuses exclusively on the issue of slavery in diasporic novels, thus privileging the ‘Middle Passage Epistemology,’ but also reiterates the morally charged dichotomy of good and bad accounts of slavery – or proper and improper historiography for that matter – from a decidedly Afro-pessimist perspective. 86 Nehl identifies “loss, dispossession and grief as defining features of the African diaspora”
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‎and charges contemporary diasporic novels with the task of representing, or at least not misrepresenting, the “true implications and the horrors” of slavery (2016: 12). Considering the representational challenges of this limit event, this is surely an enormous demand and unsurprisingly excludes quite a number of imaginative responses. Despite being anchored in a political critique of the present, this demand may also run the risk of unwittingly aestheticizing racial slavery and converting “trauma into the occasion for sublimity” – a tendency LaCapra observes in a memorial culture’s heightened fidelity to trauma (2001: 23).87
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