Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Gavin Jones

"Benito Cereno" finally leads us to question whether language is a viable index by which to evaluate intellectual, cultural or racial "sophistication." The linguistic assumptions of polygenist, scientific racism are undermined by Melville's narrative of cultural relativism, which suggests that the Africans are not trapped by their discourse, but are able to assume freely the language of their controllers and use it to impose silence upon them. The tale does not leave us with the impression of an African community retreating into the privacy of its own drum-language, but of an active and adaptable community capable of breaking through the barrier of tribal division by assuming the language of colonial power. Amasa Delano is not trapped outside a secret world of cultural expression, but is blinded by an African community capable of manipulating various levels of communication (writing, masquerade, song), and capable of a competence in the Spanish tongue that flatly contradicts the type of European (or "Indo-European") linguistic absolutism that attempted to create hierarchies of language to justify its colonial and cultural aims.

1 As Sundquist's sources show, African drum-languages are based upon the accents of pronunciation within particular tribal vernaculars. As "cultural codes," they are tribal rather than pan-African in range. See Krehbiel 66.

2 The only account of the event in Delano's Narrative to suggest that Benito Cereno called out to his fellow sailors in Spanish is the opening extract "from the journal of the ship Perseverance, taken on board that ship at the time, by the officer who had care of the log book" (812). This account was obviously recorded at some distance, yet none of the sailors far closer to the event actually state that Cereno called out in Spanish.

3 See Dillard 6, 22 and 74-83. There is no space here to discuss the complex and contentious issues involved in the genesis of pidgin languages in West Africa. Melville was undoubtedly aware of various pidgin versions of European languages: for example the "Black Portuguese . . . spoken around New Bedford by descendants of a community of Black immigrants from the Cape Verde islands, who settled in the States during the nineteenth century" (Dalby 109), and the Dutch-African dialect of blacks, brought up in Dutch-speaking households of the Hudson River valley, with whom Melville was personally acquainted (see Kaplan 189 and footnote 30).

4 According to Leslie and Stuckey's article "The Death of Benito Cereno," it "may be there were more Africans than Spanish sailors on the Tryal [the actual name of the ship in Delano's Narrative] who could read and write" (301).

5 See Gossett, Stocking and Aarsleff for accounts of the relation between language and ethnology.

WORKS CITED

Aarsleff, Hans. Introduction to Wilhelm von Humboldt's On Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

Dalby, David. "Black through White: Patterns of Communication in Africa and the New World." Black-White Speech Relations. Ed. Walt Wolfram. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1971. 103-32.