The past, Faulkner once wrote, never dies. If the pattern for "success" (i.e., "freedom") for the few works once, it will work again and again and again. Just develop more and more ways in which to repress dissent.
So the story has not ended. In his introduction to The Empire of Necessity, Grandin begins by recounting the story of the attempted slave revolt aboard the Tryal.
Aboard his whaling ship, Captain Amasa Delano is "lying awake in his cot" when a deck officer informs him that a ship is approaching, "coming around the southern head of Santa Maria," a small island in Chile. The Tryal "flew no flag." Aboard, as Delano and crew discover, are Africans speaking in many tongues: "Wolof, Mandinka, Fulani, and Spanish." Of the first 123,000 African slaves brought to the Americas between 1501 to 1575, 100,000 were Muslim, writes Grandin. Tyral's captain is Benito Cereno. So it would appear to Delano.
In actuality, Tryal is led by Africans (Babo and his some Mori) from Senegal, who captured the ship some two months earlier and is directing on a return trip to West Africa. The "free" Africans make it appear as if Cereno is the "free" man, in charge of his vessel and its human and non-human goods; but Cereno knows he is not. For the Africans, the game is up when Tryal' s captain "jumps" the narrative in which the Africans are in command. Cereno lands at Delano's feet! Delano, now alert to the deception, readies his men "to unleash a god-awful violence" against the rebels.
Repression is swift. The business of the profiteers will continue. Here is the return of "reality." The Africans once again "enslaved," and Cereno is once again "free." Benito Cereno, a novella by Herman Melville, Grandin writes, is a contemplation on the idea of freedom. As Grandin informs us, Melville reads Amasa Delano's memoir, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), but focusing on Chapter 18, the Tryal slave rebellion, he produces "one of the most haunting pieces of writing in American literature." While Melville invented the ending, Grandin writes, it is "what happens on the ship, which takes up two-thirds of the story, that led reviewers at the time to comment on its 'weird-like narrative' and to describe reading it as a 'creeping horror.'"
Business will continue under the order of a newly tweaked narrative of violence. Delano's narrative situates the black rebels at the core of his text. The rebellion of Africans is the nightmare Delano wants to impart to his readers. Never mind that for the enslaved, the nightmare is the kidnapping, enslavement, sheer violence of western imperialism's blueprint. For it is the narrative of imperialism that green lights the violence of the trade in human beings. In that sense, there is no Delano, as he depicts himself in A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, without this over-arching narrative of imperialism, i.e., violence. We should not be surprised readers when Delano's narrative presents the black rebellion as a nightmare for the "free."
Rather than argue the merits of whether or not Melville's "Benito Cereno" is or is not a racist text, I suggest that we consider, as does Grandin, what lies at the center of this fictionalized version of an actual slave revolt. Here is what happens to resistance, Melville imparts. It is demonized and crushed and demonized again in narrative form for maximum exposure and repeatability. That is Melville's text rather than Delano's. Grandin does not expand on this "creeping horror" image, its impact during slavery and Jim Crow, and its impact today. We hear snatches of the cultural narrative of violence when a white police officer says he feared for his life when he confronted a "hulk," a "demon" who was actually an unarmed young black man. We hear snatches of this cultural narrative when the black president says we will go after terrorists and, at the same time, use the word "peace," precisely "peaceful," as if the US is pursuing "peaceful" means to resolve conflicts in the world. "Creeping horror" is witnessing the way in which the American public is deceived, repeatedly by this narrative of violence that presents the "creeping horror" as something other than the creator's and manipulator's own culpability.
The idea of "free" blacks--a "creeping horror" then and now. What if blacks should resist? What if they begin running amok in the land of the free and home of the brave? How would "free" black people impinge on the freedom to profit?
Black, brown, and indigenous Americans could and do offer an alternative way of being in the world, not as commodities or consumers but as human beings, free of tyrannical mentality obsessed with making a profit. We are all enslaved by this obsession with profits because we are not "free" from resigning ourselves to images of ignorance and hate. Such images are marketable, profitable in themselves as they assist in generating more profits--more oil, coal, gold, coltan, more cheap workers to slave away for little or nothing. And who will dare to resist when the Empire has at its disposal the media and the cultural institutions that speak the language of fear and proliferate images of "protesters" as troublemakers. In the meantime, the amassing of power and the production of wealth for the few continues.
Melville was not oblivious to an understanding of how wealth in the US was generated during his lifetime. Melville's "existential digressions," writes Grandin,
...speak directly to the problem of slavery in Western society, that go straight to the heart of what the massive and systemic subordination of millions and millions of human beings over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years meant to the societies that prospered from slavery and to the slaves who suffered creating that prosperity.
Imperialism, for the capitalist, is a cultural as well as a social project. Consequently, who is "free" from the narrative of violence let alone those many industries established to facilitate the business of enslaving black Africans and their descendants?
Where there is oppression, ask why? It is not enough for the liberal class to shake its collective head and then return to business-as-usual and engulf their collective selves behind a wall of "innocence." Silence. Why is there oppression among village farmers in Africa? Why are the Native Americans here suffering from a high rate of mortality? Why are North and Sub-Saharan Arabs and blacks leaving their homes to live and work in Europe? Why are peoples from the Caribbean and Latin America willing to sacrifice their lives to reach the US borders? Why have urban police forces been militarized?
An immediate "fix" is not another non-profit organization. In fact, one more fascinating development in Greg Grandin's The Empire of Necessity focuses on the businesses and industries still with us and for which the US (and Europeans) have been able to prosper.
Grandin turns to the wisdom of Herman Melville, again. Aboard the Tryal, "the slaves are running things." Melville keeps this a secret. Delano is fooled into believing that everything is "normal": Cereno is in command of his ship. Cereno knows better.
Delano's narrative, writes Grandin, reveals a deception. As Grandin explains, Delano is not just fooled by the enslaved Africans into thinking their temporary "owner" is "free" (the rebels have killed the "buyer" of their bodies and labor) and thus in charge, but Delano believes he, too, is "free"! As Grandin argues, and rightly so, those in the business of enslavement, whether merchants or slaveholders, are linked to a contradiction. Belief in "liberty" and "democracy" is one thing, but in actuality there is no "liberty" or "democracy" to be had by anyone if the mindset of those believers are wedded to the enslavement of others. As Grandin points out throughout his narrative, Delano characterizes himself as a "free" man, "not only in a political sense, but in every other sense. Free from the past, from the passions that soaked human history in so much blood... free from slavery itself, from relations of bondage and exploitation."
However negligent to the humanity of black people, denouncing their right to be anything more than profit-making "cargo" or, as the Spaniards called their human captives, "piezas," would imply that Delano's existence as a human being depends on the enslavement of black people. What a summation of his life, any life--that it operated on the wrong side of history.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
