Thursday 11 May 2017

The American Imperative



Colson Whitehead (2016), The Underground Railroad, London: Fleet, pp. 306


‘In America, the quirk was that people were things.’
                                                  
If you are a thing, your value depended on your possibilities. After being appraised and reappraised in the scales of other men’s visions, you knew your value and your place in the order of things. To escape the confines of this hierarchy was to escape the principles of your existence. The Underground Railroad, winner of Pulitzer Prize Fiction 2017, is a daring novel that maps the journey of escape of a slave girl as she traverses the physical terrain and foundational myths of America.

Three generations of slave women- Ajarry, Mabel and Cora- are at the heart of the story. While grandmother Ajarry was sold from Africa and died in plantation after being sold and resold many times over, her only surviving daughter Mabel attempts to escape the plantation and is not seen thereafter. Cora, Mabel’s daughter, is living as a stray, outcast among other slaves. She is part of the Hob that has seven outcast women who have insulated themselves from the insinuations of the world around them because of their reluctance to mix with others. As she is fighting for her ‘three square yards of dirt’ within the plantation where she grows her own garden, she meets Caesar, a former freeman from Virginia, who offers her passage to freedom through the ‘underground railroad’. Cora is compelled to take this offer and she sets off on a dangerous journey to go to the free states up north.

Upending metaphors
In this vicarious pathway to freedom and dignity, Cora encounters different states, each a possibility of an alternative America. In each of these steps, she encounters a terror more unprecedented than the previous. Cora understands that you do not need chains to imprison a person- the purpose of chains was accomplished in so many different ways. The seemingly harmless hospital in South Carolina is a hub of eugenics that subjugates black people through controlled sterilisation and her refuge (a nook in the attic of a white man’s house) in North Carolina is no more than a secret prison. Cora understands that ‘the world could make living prison of your safe haven.’ As she passes through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana, a miraculous combination of faith and friendship, takes her to her freedom.

What makes the novel stunning is the way metaphors and myths are turned on their heads, to live out their literal existence. Colson Whitehead sketches the details of the underground railroad by making the metaphor live its meaning, bolts and all. The railroad literally spreads like invisible vein of slave transport, an empire with its own logic, under the foundation of America. From this underbelly, it chisels away at the foundational myths of the American Declaration of Independence- the promise of equality, freedom and dignity to all its citizens. Cora hears of the Declaration recited by a slave and thinks of it as a ghost from the darkness. Later her language tutor Georgina tells her, ‘The Declaration is like a map. You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it yourself.’ When Cora ventures out, truth comes to her as a sudden engine from darkness dislocating all her beliefs, breaking her. When she works as an actor in a history museum in South Carolina, playing out a slave for the white audience, she thinks of truth as ‘a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach’. Simple theatre becomes a refuge of faith that comforts her. It is this same mistrust in truth as revealed by history that makes her reject the Bible and poetry.  Cora understands truth, freedom and equality when the lived experience of her life confronts the inherited faith of her society.

Questioning history
The American landscape is portrayed with as much brilliance as the mindscape of its people that run a ruthless machinery of order and hierarchy. The slave master and the slave catcher, the slave mother and the station agent, the grave robber and the abolitionist, are all the products of the same system. The philosophy of the slave catcher Ridgeway sums up the unstoppable racial logic, that the story portrays and disembodies, trenchantly. He believes that the true American Spirit was one ‘that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate, if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription- the American Imperative’. Ridgeway worked for this ‘American Imperative’ to ensure that property remained property. It was a notion of order, hierarchy of social arrangement and chain of value.


In the end, this is a story of one woman’s indomitable will to escape her destiny and find her way to freedom. Quite directly, it is her adventure through space and time in America where at each step a unique terror awaits. But this is also a meditation on history, our understanding of our pasts. In this light, the politics that works when black history is placed in the pages of white narratives attacks the foundational myths of the America. This story also brings out how technology moulds history, the tale of inventions and human endeavour to find a way out of difficulties, the kind of technology that is fantastic and adds meaning to life. Whitehead is claiming back something substantive here, but it is not something we are expecting. The novel is in the same vein of other defining works that took the idea of identity and turned it on its head- Julian Barnes’ England, England on the English question, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout on slavery and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question on being Jewish. An important perspective for our times!