Unknowing the world

Some comments inspired by chapter one of Mignolo's The Idea of Latin America, first mentioned here.

UPDATE: Now, a bit more readable (I hope).

A "T-in-O" map from a 1472 edition of the Etymologies of St. Isidore (7th cen., Seville), oriented to East. The "O" is the "mare oceanum" (more familiar to us as the phrase "Ocean Sea," which, recall, Columbus would be designated as Admiral of. The crossbar of the "T" is formed by the Don, the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Nile. Older versions of this map would have located Jerusalem in the center of the map. The "T"'s vertical is the Mediterranean. Underneath "Asia," "Africa" and "Europe" are written, respectively, "Shem," "Ham" and "Japeth," the sons of Noah, consigned to those spaces by Augustine in his City of God. Image found here.

A map created by Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi from the 12th century. The map is oriented to South; Mecca is at its center. What we now call Africa dominates the upper half; "Europe" is in the lower-right; "Asia" is in the lower left. Image found here.

Maps are fascinating texts. We have become so accustomed to accepting their renderings of the earth's surface as truthful, if not Truth, that we forget that their makers determine their "narratives," which is to say, everything from their form (such as the various projection methods for depicting the planet's curved surface on a 2-dimensional surface) to their contents. When looking at maps, who among us has not felt some surprise at one time or another by what has been included in or excluded from one and wondered why that information is or is not there? Map-making is far from a value-neutral activity, therefore--or, as these ancient maps indicate, a culture-neutral one. The fact that modern maps are far more accurate in their renderings of the outlines of landmasses does not mean they have become any less value- or culture-neutral. That we here in the West rarely wonder about our maps' objectivity means only one thing: The West's way of framing the world, of thinking about it conceptually (which is what a map represents), won out over all those other culturally-specific ways.

Or, to put it another way:

"But don't African people know they live in Africa, and Asian people in Asia?"

Well--now they do."

More below the fold.

Mignolo's task is that of swimming against 1500 years or so of culture to get his reader to see the cultural construct beneath our accustomed way of picturing the world. The T-in-O map above is his starting point. According to Mignolo, thinking about the world's landmasses in terms of continents was peculiar to Europeans; other peoples thought in terms of regions distinct from each other, both topographically and culturally. Moreover, Europeans saw the world much more overtly through the lens of the Bible--in the case of the T-in-O map, through the story of Noah's three sons and where each went to live. Shem's line settled in Asia; Jesus, a descendant of Shem, was born there (or, as Augustine puts it in City of God, was first revealed there). Japheth ("enlargement") and his descendants lived in what came to be called Europe--as Augustine notes, the home of Christ's church. Ham, though, "was included neither in the first fruits of Israel nor in the full harvest of the Gentiles. He could only stand for the hot breed of heretics" (Augustine, in Mignolo 28).

It is no blasphemy, nor is it politically-correct, to say that to read the world and its peoples through such a reductive lens as this was, to put it very charitably, problematic. Most of us would agree with that statement. It was because of this frame, after all, that for most of the 16th century there were actual debates regarding just how human were the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere were: they didn't fit this paradigm--Noah had three sons, yet these are clearly a fourth people. Mignolo's larger point, despite his at times hectoring tone, thus becomes clear: it is to recognize that thinking of the history of the past 500 years--in particular, re his book, the history of the Americas--not only has determined how the West thinks of that history but also how we in the Americas think of it: as having originated in/emanated from Europe. That is a legitimate narrative, to be sure, but it's not the only one or, for that matter, the one that most truly relates the Americas' full history, the one that begins prior to and is its own history--not a negation or rebuttal of European history's version of American history. That we now recognize the absurdity, not to say the offensiveness, of those debates regarding the Indians' humanity is a sign that that paradigm is no longer so in force; but what are 100 years in comparison to the 1400 before then?

By contrast, the Islamic map is quite literally Islamo-centric--its center is Mecca, after all, no more strange a thing to do for a Muslim mapmaker than for a Christian mapmaker to center his map on Jerusalem. But the Islamic has no names for the continents it depicts, much less some implicit categorizing of the peoples therein--even though Noah and his sons appear in the Qu'ran as well.

So, which map is truer? If your impulse is to say that it no longer matters, Mignolo would say that that is precisely his point in this chapter: that once upon a time, competing maps, competing ways of describing the world, did exist, and the fact that the Western depiction of space won out has not been necessarily all to the good. Except for Westerners, of course. The modern world's eventual acquiescence to that depiction is not like acknowledging that the earth orbits the sun; it's a genuflecting before the West's economic and cultural power.

So, on the one hand, we have become so accustomed to thinking of the history of this hemisphere in Eurocentric terms that it becomes hard for us to conceive of that history in some other manner. On the other, those familiar grand historical narratives--even the ones indigenous to a place--can also obscure other, just-as-valuable narratives. That second point reminded me of Edward P. Jones' masterful first novel, The Known World, which I posted about here. Though set in the antebellum world of northern Virginia, a place and a time we think we know, we realize fairly quickly that the story Jones is going to tell us--one based on fact--is one that we may never have heard before: in part, it's the story of a black man whose parents had worked to buy his freedom and who then buys slaves to work his land and who sees nothing wrong with doing that. What is the frame of that world, after all, but the preeminence of the Peculiar Institution? Everything, from law to social relations, exists to affirm and maintain that frame. So where, then, is the inconsistency if a newly-freed slave chooses to participate in the affirming and maintaining of that frame? The power of Jones's novel is in not telling us but showing us slavery's warping of human relationships in a way that the old, familiar, no-less-true narratives can never quite do on their own.

In a similar way, Mignolo has to make his reader see the Eurocentricity of the history of the Americas before he can begin to show what alternate histories of this part of the world would look like. The familiar has to be made to look strange before we can see and come to accept the familiarity of the strange.

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The Known World: A review

This, the 2004 winner of the Pulitzer and a finalist for the National Book Award, is a magnificent novel by any standard. As a first novel, it's truly astonishing, especially given its subject matter and the way it approaches that subject matter. For various reasons, it took me a long time to finish The Known World. In retrospect, though, I'm glad it did. This is a novel meant not so much to be read as to be lingered over, pondered.

Based on the lives of actual people in antebellum Manchester County, Virginia, the novel begins with the death of Henry Townsend, a respected slaveholder, and is overtly concerned with subsequent events on his plantation in the days and weeks after he dies. What makes this of more than passing interest is that Townsend is a free black whose own parents, we learn later on, had worked to buy him from his owner after they themselves had worked to earn their freedom. How does such a thing happen? Henry is as puzzled by his parents' reaction when they learn that he owns slaves as his parents are baffled by what they've learned about their son. And we, in turn, are baffled that Henry is puzzled. A free black, own slaves? This should not be . . . yet it is so.

You might expect a novel on such a topic to be rather wild-eyed or at least reach for the occasional scene of Faulknerian or Morrisonian high drama, but you would be disappointed. Horrific, brutal, dehumanizing things happen in this novel to be sure, but The Known World is the calmest novel about race and slavery that I have ever read. Having read more than my share of such novels for my dissertation, I know something whereof I speak. That in and of itself isn't a point in its favor, yet its quiet, controlled tone, working as it does against our expectations, doesn't weary the reader but, instead, keeps the reader reading in expectation of the usual fireworks.

So, rather than engage in appropriate but expected outrage, The Known World takes a different tack, somewhat as Uncle Tom's Cabin does: each novel shows how distorted, how perverted human behavior turns in a slave-holding culture. Stowe's novel shows how slave-holding infects and corrupts the behavior of even the most benign of slaveholders; Jones' novel shows how, in a world where slaveholders have power and status, it becomes perfectly acceptable, if not the norm, for free blacks to participate in that world. In the imaginative economy of this world, Henry Townsend's owning slaves is as much an acceptable--and achievable--possibility as his parents' working to free themselves and him is. Perversely, in fact, it is via owning slaves that Henry has gained the (grudging, at times puzzled) respect of the white community, constructed as it is around the single principle of protecting "property" and the interests of those who own it. The commodification of human beings is the a priori assumption giving shape to Henry's parents' decisions as well as to Henry's.

Perhaps even more impressively, the novel's narrative style, though its main thread has a forward motion to it, frequently though briefly flashes backward and forward in time. The flash-forwards, in fact, are somewhat reminiscent of the visual style of the 1999 film Run Lola, Run. Some of those flash-forwards, in fact, serve to link our world with that one, chiefly via references to various historians' examining census records from Manchester County: about the most dispassionate sort of text I can conceive of. Yet they link us to this unimaginable-yet-true world.

I want to quote and comment on a few passages now to give you a sense of this writer's quiet, controlled style and subtle, complex vision.

The first passage, coming not quite at the novel's middle, reveals the origins of the phrase "The Known World." Skiffington, the sheriff for the county, is in reluctant conversation with a slave-trader named Broussard, presently being held on suspicion of the murder of his partner:

[Broussard] pointed to the left wall where Skiffington had hung a map, a browned and yellowed woodcut of some eight feet by six feet. The map had been created by a German, Hans Waldseemuller, who lived in France three centuries before, according to a legend in the bottom right-hand corner. "I live where they make that beautiful map. I know who make them, Monsieur Sheriff, and I can get you better, bigger map. I can do it to show how I appreciate."

"That one will do fine," Skiffington said. A Russian who claimed to be a descendant of Waldseemuller had passed through the town and Skiffington had bought the map from him. He wanted it as a present for [his wife] Winifred but she thought it too hideous to be in her house. Heading the legend were the words "The Known World." Skiffington suspected the Russian, a man with a white beard down to his stomach, was a Jew but he could not tell a Jew from any other white man.

"I get you better," Broussard said. I get you better map, and more map of today. Map of today, how the world out together today, not yesterday, not long ago." The Russian had told Skiffington that it was the first time the word America had ever been put on a map. The land of North America on the map was smaller than it was in actuality, and where Florida should have been, there was nothing. South America seemed the right size, but it alone of the two continents was called "America." North America went nameless.

"I'm happy with what I got," Skiffington said. The map had come from the Russian in twelve parts, each weighing about three pounds, and Skiffington had had a hard time putting it together. He did it while Winifred and Minerva [their black servant] were away at Clara's, and when Winifred returned and told him she did not want it in her house, he had to dismantle it and reassemble it again in the jail.

"You see, Monsieur Sheriff," Broussard said. "I get you better. I get you more better map." (174-175)

The strong suggestion here is that Skiffington wants to keep the map more because of the trouble he had gone through, not just in assembling it, twice, but with Winifred as well, than because he actually likes it. The map, three centuries old, its depictions of landforms hopelessly inaccurate, becomes a metonymy of the novel's world, itself to be replaced in the not-too distant future.

The second passage may be the grandest moment in the entire novel, not just for what it expresses but, given the times and culture, the way in which the speaker has no choice but to say it. Like reading an especially-challenging Dickinson poem, its difficult expression is part of the point of that being expressed.

A man named Barnum, a patroller (civilians deputized to ride the roads at night, looking for slaves), has just confessed to Skiffington that Augustus Townsend, Henry's father and a free man, had been kidnapped and taken south to be sold. Barnum is distraught that he had not been brave enough to have confessed this before, for the reason he will try to make clear to Skiffington:

"Now I don't want you to take me tellin you all this as my becomin a nigger kisser or somethin like that. It ain't that. You know me, John. But they sold that Augustus and they sold his mule." It was twilight and the stars were quite evident in the sky. The moon, still low, was behind Skiffington and only Barnum could see it.

"I know you, Barnum."

"But he was a free and clear man, and the law said so. Augustus never hurt me, never said bad to me. What Harvey done was wrong. But tellin you don't put me on the nigger side. I'm still on the white man side, John. I'm still standin with the white. God help me if you believe somethin else about me." He shifted in the saddle once more. The moon was just above the horizon now, a large, dusty orange point, but barnum did not raise his head high enough to see it. "It's just that there should be a way for a body to say what is without somebody sayin he standin on the nigger side. A body should be able to stand under some . . . some kinda light and declare what he knows without retribution. There should be some kinda lantern, john, that we can stand under and say, 'I know what I know and what i know is God's truth,' and then come from under the light and nobody make any big commotion bout what he said. He could say it and just get on about his business, and nobody would say, 'He be stickin up for the nigger, he be stickin up for them indians.' The lantern of truth wouldn't low then to say that. There should be that kinda light, John. I regret what happened to Augustus."

"Yes, Barnum, I know." The merchant came out of the store and tipped his hat to Skiffington and Skiffington nodded and the merchant went home.

"A man could stand under that light and talk the truth. You could hold the lantern with the light right from where you standin, John. Hold it so I could stand under it. And when nobody was talkin, was tellin the truth bout what they know, you could keep the lantern in the jail, John. Keep it safe in the jail, John." Barnum closed his eyes, took off his hat, opened his eyes and studied the brim. "But don't keep the lantern too near the bars, John, cause you don't want the criminals touchin it and what not. You should write the president, you should write the delegate, and have em pass a law to have that lantern in every jail in the United States of America. I would back that law. God knows I would. I really would, John."

"I would, too, Barnum," Skiffington said. (303-304)

It's difficult to convey not just how powerful this scene is but how skillful it is. Barnum, like Huckleberry Finn, is a basically decent person whose thought is shaped by the world he lives in, a world in which race trumps all. He cannot imagine a color-blind world, hence his palpable anxiety that Skiffington understand him and continue to see him not as a man but as a white man. Huck's fear is similar, though he chooses to embrace his world's rejection: "All right, then--I'll go to hell!" What Twain had to remember for Huck and what Jones has to remember for Barnum is not to turn their respective characters into Freedom Riders. Twain succeeded so well that Huckleberry Finn continues to run afoul of people more content to count N-words than actually read it. Jones succeeds equally, I would say, as he turns Barnum's fear and anguish into something very close to poetry.

Read this novel. Jones is a master writer writing novels and stories about race with a subtlety that I haven't seen since Beloved. Especially in these times, we need writers of this ability and complexity who don't browbeat or proselytize but who make their readers think and want to tell others about what they have to say. Jones is indeed that kind of writer, and The Known World is that kind of novel.

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