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!

The Grim (Humour) that Stole this Christmas

The Sellout, Paul Beatty, OneWorld, pp. 289

The grim humour that stole this Christmas for me is Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. The first novel by an American author to win the Man Booker Prize, the book is a biting satire on race relations in a country that has just seen the end of an African American Presidency.  And it is in questioning these large symbolic breakthroughs in ameliorating the everyday lives of any group that is not mainstream that the book does unabashedly. The collective resistance under the leadership of Dr Martin Luther King, the rejuvenation set out by Harlem renaissance, the historic Presidency of Barack Obama are taken as one off events and questioned on both intrinsic and relative merits on the community they sought to better and ended up leaving worse off.

‘I whispered racism in a post-racist world’, says the protagonist, who is an African American tried in the Supreme Court for owning a slave and practising racial segregation. Indeed our protagonist is a product of experimentation from childhood and bears its brunt with an equanimity that accepts reality and attempts to change it by using its own logic. He makes it through his childhood home schooled and generously experimented upon by his father a behavioural psychologist. In this process he becomes an object and this experience of total isolation from agency exists in him with fierce bouts of resistance. He loses his family, his neighbourhood disappears from the maps and minds of the administration and he is left hanging listlessly with his friends in a no man’s land. From this window incognito, he strikes back using the very instruments that made him suffer. He makes the entire society flinch by unleashing the same kind of experiments back on them.

Of this novel, I can say the journey is the message. The language with its endless puns, metaphors and slang is abrasive and uncompromising. On writing this book, Beatty remarked, ‘It was hard for me to write, it’s a hard book to read.’ There is savage wit ripping off every holy cow, blurring the sacred, eviscerating the sacrosanct, lampooning nuance leaving us with just the heart of the problem. But then, Beatty trenchantly puts it in his novel, ‘being offended is not an emotion.’ Parts of the book make us laugh, then cringe and in many significant ways reflect the times we live in.

This book was turned down eighteen times by established publishers before being accepted by a small two people publishing company in Scotland called Oneworld. It is also the publisher’s second Booker in a row after last year’s winning novel ‘A brief history of seven killings’.  As far as the Man Booker prize goes, satire barely makes it as favourite. Yet, out of the 155 books that entered the prize this year, The Sellout was the unanimous choice of the jury and is a great work of fiction comparable to the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.