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PORTSIDE CULTURE

EXPOSING THE VIOLENCE OF EMPIRE IN THE NOVELS IT LEFT BEHIND  
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Sophie Gee
October 8, 2024
The New York Times
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_ For her new book, “Salvage,” the Trinidadian-born writer Dionne
Brand rereads classic English novels, teasing out evidence of the
ravages of colonialism. _

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_Salvage: Readings From the Wreck_
Dionne Brand
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 9780374614843

Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist and essayist who was born in Trinidad
and moved to Canada in 1970. She seeks, across all her work, to
interrupt history. Or, as she puts it in her new book, “Salvage:
Readings From the Wreck,” describing how the fiction writer John
Keene blows “life into the collapsed world of coloniality,” she
exposes histories that have not previously come to the surface,
finding traces that were of little importance to the white writers of
England’s colonial past.

In “Salvage,” which Brand calls “an autobiography of the
autobiography of reading,” she returns to some of the 18th- and
19th-century social-realist novels — “Vanity Fair,” “Jane
Eyre,” “Robinson Crusoe” and “Mansfield Park” — that she
read as a young person, along with more recent spinoffs such as Jean
Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”_ _and J.M. Coetzee’s “Foe.”
Having been trained to read the classics as an Anglophile Commonwealth
subject, first in the West Indies and then in Canada, Brand rereads
them to recover the Black and Indigenous lives that English realism
obscured.

It’s not that Black and Indigenous bodies are simply pushed aside in
these novels; they’re kept in sight just long enough for their
presence to underscore and intensify their absence. In short, Brand
shows that learning to read English literature involved learning _not_
to notice who, or what, was missing.

The most striking instance she discovers of her past misreading occurs
when she returns to Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.” She cites the
Trinidadian historian and activist C.L.R. James, who wrote, in
Brand’s paraphrase, “that Thackeray, not Marx, made him.” James
meant by this that literature was always an “active, interested”
part of the “imperializing project,” collaborating in
colonialism’s disparaging of Blackness by relegating it to the
margins of fiction. When Brand rereads “Vanity Fair,” she notes
that Becky Sharp’s status as an aggrieved social misfit “gestured
toward Blackness in this respect of wanting what one did not have and
growing bitter without it.”

 

But Brand’s real shock comes when she encounters Miss Swartz, a
“rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts,” and, more shocking
still, “Sambo,” a Black servant. She hadn’t noticed these
characters on previous readings (I didn’t recall them either), yet
it’s Sambo who on the novel’s first page rings the bell of Miss
Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies and sets Thackeray’s plot in
motion. “How did _I_ miss Sambo?” Brand exclaims. “On the first
page! What slippage of interpretation accomplished that?”
 

 

The slippage is the slippage of literary realism. It’s the slippage
that makes people think of shipwrecks as artifacts of the West’s
adventuresome, treasure-seeking past, involving bullion and intrepid
survivors, and not as human tragedies in which lives were lost and the
families of sailors left without livelihoods. “There are many
shipwrecks now,” Brand writes, linking the enslaved and forcibly
displaced people hidden within canonical novels of the imperial age to
victims of contemporary humanitarian disasters, often involving
migrants. “The salvage there, in wrecked pirogues, is bodies, small
possessions, wallets, cellphones, T-shirts, raincoats, jackets, keys
to houses and rooms, sodden papers, only valuable to the ones who lost
their lives.”

These are the kinds of details that made up the worlds of the realist
novel, too. Brand’s key point is that the minutiae of white
characters’ daily lives serve to conceal the unseen — unsalvaged
— minutiae of the enslaved and Indigenous lives under imperial
control. She makes her case forcefully in a chapter on Jane Austen’s
“Mansfield Park.” The family in the novel derives income from a
sugar plantation in Antigua, but we learn this only from a passage
about procuring a horse for the heroine, Fanny Price, while Sir Thomas
Bertram, the plantation's owner, is away in the colony. The horse
carries a “freight” of information about the family’s
slave-owning past that “we must nonetheless ignore,” Brand argues,
“because our concern is for Fanny getting a horse.” This is how
English realism works: The particulars of white daily life distract
from, but never efface completely, the Black and Indigenous characters
lurking at the margins, as so much literary flotsam.

Equally suggestive are moments in Brand’s book when she shows us how
a passage ostensibly not about the violence of colonialism is in fact
a barely conscious acknowledgment of it. Reading Charlotte Brontë’s
“Jane Eyre,” for example, Brand stresses not only that it is a
novel of “confinement and submission” for its white female
characters, but that the wealth and luxury in the novel are
“produced by the political economy of slavery,” including in the
case of Jane Eyre herself, who attains financial independence when she
inherits an estate in Madeira, a former sugar colony.

Confinement and submission thus double as unacknowledged descriptions
of the colonial world on which the book’s English characters depend.
The episode in which Jane Eyre hears “the snarling, canine noise,
and a deep human groan” of Bertha Mason, the famous “madwoman in
the attic
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is perhaps the most important in Brontë’s narrative. Bertha’s
groan, her immeasurable suffering, has been interpreted many ways;
Brand reads it as “the noise of the plantation world, the
suppressed, the made-mad, the sequestered” that was Blackness. This
is the very essence, and paradox, of so-called novels of sympathy that
became so iconic during English colonialism: “The contentment”
that Jane Eyre “feels, and that we are to feel for her, is riven
with violence.”

Sophie Gee teaches English literature at Princeton. She is the author
of the forthcoming monograph “The Barbarous Feast: Eating and
Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World” and co-host of the podcast
“The Secret Life of Books.”

 

* colonialism
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* The English Novel
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* literary realism
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* Racism
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