Celia E. Naylor, Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths about Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022); 274 pages; ISBN 978-0820362137 (e-book)
Celia E. Naylor, Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths about Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022); 274 pages; ISBN 978-0820362137 (e-book)
Note: I style this review to honor Celia E. Naylor’s work in the subjunctive. Long parenthetical lists of numbers point to pages where Naylor dwells in the speculative mood. My frequent deference to Naylor’s own words is guided by her insistence on naming, in almost overwhelming detail, the irrefutably possible yet unknowably precise minutiae of the daily, interpersonal, and spiritual lives lived by those enslaved on the Rose Hall Plantation in Jamaica. As a significant scholarly achievement, Naylor’s monograph unsettles the dominant, scientific models, forms, and senses by which many of us, in the Western academy at least, have learned to know. I have tried to allow my own prose to follow the twisting, turning, and returning spirit of Unsilencing Slavery’s subjunctives.
One of the central tenets of Naylor’s Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica,is that it is “impossible to re-create and reconstruct . . . the connections[,] . . . tensions[,] . . . tribulations, traumas, and joys . . . shared (or withheld)” by the enslaved community at the Rose Hall sugar plantation (33). It is impossible because “the records do not provide explicit descriptions or references to the interactions, friendships, and other relationships between enslaved people outside of their individual and collective labor routines on this sugar plantation” (18). It is also impossible because even though the Rose Hall Plantation is today a famous tourist attraction that describes itself as a museum, neither its contemporary fame nor popularity bear any relation to its history as a site of enslavement. Rather, tourists are drawn to the plantation where Panella, Kate, Celia, Peachy, Prague, Jemmy, Memmy Sen, Memmy Jun, Hercules, Jreen/Green, Cowslip, Dove, Miranda, Polly, Ruth, Lenora, Arabella, Stella, and hundreds of other African and Creole people were enslaved because of a legend popularized by the Jamaican writer Herbert G. de Lisser in his 1929 historical novel The White Witch of Rose Hall. It is said that the White Witch’s ghost still haunts the corridors of Rose Hall today.
De Lisser’s novel is written from the effectively omniscient perspective of a wealthy Englishman visiting the Rose Hall plantation wherein he meets mistress Annie Palmer amid the 1831–32 Christmas Rebellion. According to the story, Palmer was an evil White Witch who learned Voodoo from a Haitian priestess, murdered three White husbands, and cruelly treated those she enslaved and who was supposedly killed during the rebellion by her formerly enslaved ex-lover, Takoo. As Naylor critiques in chapter 4, Palmer was real but these details are all a fantasy—a fantasy propped up by a support cast of African and Afro-Jamaican characters whose primary function is to embellish the lore of their enslaver. Racialized, gendered, and classed plantocratic power dynamics are glossed over to prioritize the battle of White feminine innocence against an evil contaminating force of the Black Caribbean. That the present-day tour of this former plantation lauds a fictional narrative of a White enslaver as its organizing historical fact is telling of the aphasiac nature of colonial memory. As Naylor argues in chapter 5, such a rendering of Rose Hall’s past further disarticulates the possibility of imagining enslaved life on the plantation by concealing such life beneath a double-folded layer of colonial history. The backward reach of racial capitalism obfuscates its own archives in preference of a history that sells.
If what the Rose Hall tour sells is precisely the act of forgetting, then Unsilencing Slavery is an antithetical effort at remembering. This plays out at the structural level. Naylor opens her book by centering neither the novel nor the tour but rather the possible lives of the enslaved. A triptych written in the subjunctive, Naylor’s first three chapters ask and imagine and ask and imaginatively answer then doubt and ask again and again how to name what we cannot know, how to remember what we have never been given and yet what we have already forgot. In chapter 1 Naylor tries to “uncloak” (20) fully fleshed individual enslaved people from their fragmented and numerical rendering in the plantation’s archives. And, in chapters 2 and 3, she advances to critically imagine increasingly complex individual and interpersonal lives that were and might have been shared by those individuals—in particular women—who lived and were enslaved on the plantation.
Void of “any diaries or journals or scraps of paper left behind by Rosannah, Mary James, Sarah, or Bessy” (69) or any of the women and men enslaved at Rose Hall, Naylor argues that “we do not know” (54, 58, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 73, 90, 103, 110, 176), “we cannot be certain” (68), “we cannot deduce” (46), and “we cannot assume” (44, 68, 73) the “psychological, emotional, physical, and sexual burdens” (67), nor the “gynaecological . . . medical and herbal practices” (54), nor the “cultural backgrounds, languages, and cosmologies” (46), nor the “mourning practices or customs” (58), nor the “individual, familial, and cultural . . . processes, rituals, and ceremonies” “regarding naming” (55), nor the “cultural knowledge, practices, and customs about family, community, relationships, resistance, pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and various aspects of womanhood and motherhood” (46), nor even the “circumstances surrounding the conception and birth of any enslaved child born by an enslaved woman . . . or the specific biological father for any of these enslaved persons” (67) at Rose Hall.
In the face of simultaneous not-knowing and unknowing, Unsilencing Slavery teaches the pivotal work of dwelling in a speculatively charged space between them both. It is a lesson in listening both to and in archival silences where records of enslaved life and community and resistance and joy and grief and love and despair and death and pride and kinship and blood have been forgotten and rigorously blotted out.
The first half of Naylor’s monograph performs a lean into this opacity. Using only Jamaica’s triennial slave registers (which ran from 1817 to 1834, when slavery in Jamaica was abolished), an 1832 clothing allowance list for enslaved people at Rose Hall, and piecemeal details of certain enslaved people scattered throughout the Rose Hall Journal; Unsilencing Slavery is an effort to reimagine (7, 10) the “possible,” (19, 33, 34, 45, 54, 57, 61, 63, 67, 69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 82, 90, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105) “individual and collective lived experiences” (18) that Rose Hall’s enslaved people “perhaps” (2, 39, 45, 48, 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 90, 94, 96, 98, 100, 101, 105, 176, 177) “might have” (14, 20, 35, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 83, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 114, 115, 176, 177) lived and “possibly” (18, 48, 58, 62, 64, 67, 72, 76, 77, 78, 84, 88, 92, 96, 98, 100, 107, 110, 176, 178) “may have” (16, 19, 21, 33, 42, 44, 45, 58, 53, 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 90, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 117, 157, 189, 177) shared with each other.
Perhaps practices from West Africa and West Central Africa informed the naming of children of enslaved mothers on the plantation. “Was the reference to infants living beyond nine days . . . based on the Yoruba, Akan, and Ga practices of waiting until the eighth day before a newborn’s name was shared as part of a naming ceremony” (72)? Perhaps “Celia’s mother . . . may have been Akan.” Perhaps Quaco was so called to invoke “familial history linked to the Akan people of West Africa” (73). Perhaps Marinda/Naranda, the third child of Glister/Glossom, was named as a way of honoring her African-born grandmother (75). Perhaps “naming practices . . . were created as a way of honouring an elder by invoking the name again for a younger member of a family” (72). Perhaps there was a “relationship between Memmy Sen, Miranda, and Memmy Jun.” Perhaps “Memmy Sen and Miranda were biologically related as mother and daughter,” or perhaps “Memmy Sen . . . [became] for Miranda an ‘other mother’ who helped her to navigate life at Rose Hall” (74). And perhaps “Memmy Sen . . . mothered Miranda as an infant or young child who may have been separated from her biological mother during the process of captivity, during the Middle Passage, or after they arrived in the Caribbean” (75).
For Naylor, we need not categorize these archival subjunctives as mere speculative histories. They are history sans qualifier. Her writing memorializes, stages, insists on, imagines, honors, and insistently reremembers the history, the lives, the aliveness, and the humanity of generations of enslaved mothers, children, women, fathers, adolescents, men, and grandparents who were enslaved on the Rose Hall Plantation. To invoke Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”: Naylor’s is “not [an effort] to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified. . . . It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.”1 Beyond that, it is a pedagogical lesson-by-way-of-demonstration of what such critically fabulative and meticulously imaginative archival work must involve and what unspooling images of enslaved history can make imaginable. As Naylor herself writes, Unsilencing Slavery “holds space for those who were enslaved” (173).
One thing, then, is true: if Memmy Sen “were Miranda’s mother, then she would be the only African-born woman who became a grandmother and great-grandmother living with her kin at Rose Hall from 1817 to 1832” (53).
Alick McCallum Alick McCallum has an MA in Literature from the University of California San Diego and will shortly enter the doctoral program in English at Rutgers University.
[1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, no. 26 (June 2008): 12; doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.