Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by John C. Shields

Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. 280 pp. $34.95.

Alluding to Ignatius Sancho's identification of Phillis Wheatley as a "Genius in bondage" in their title and to Paul Gilroy's pathbreaking The Black Atlantic, Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould give us in their Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic an important treatment of many not particularly well-known writers of the African Atlantic, such as Briton Hammon, Ottobah Cugoano, Jupiter Hammon, John Marrant, and Benjamin Banneker. But the better known are much in evidence as well, those like Phillis Wheatley, Sancho, Olaudah Equino, and Mary Prince. It is a pleasure to have a collection of essays about all these pioneering authors.

I was especially pleased to see Briton Hammon and Benjamin Banneker receive concentrated attention. Robert Desrochers, Jr.'s "'Surprising Deliverance': Slavery and Freedom, Language and Identity in the Narrative of Briton Hammon, 'A Negro Man,'" asks a number of provocative questions about this elusive subject; Desrochers provides in his notes an excellent bibliography for further study of very early African American autobiography. Bill Andrews' "Benjamin Banneker's Revision of Thomas Jefferson: Conscience vs. Science in the Early American Antislavery Debate" provides the best analysis of Banneker's brilliant, if controversial, reaction to Jefferson's unfortunate remarks regarding blacks in Notes on the State of Virginia. Andrews's trenchant assessment is worth quoting: "The tonal tensions in the black man's opening paragraph--instanced in oxymoronic formulations such as 'allowable freedom'--surface repeatedly in Banneker's ostensibly deferential mode of address, making his letter among the most rhetorically provocative short texts in early African American literature."

Frank Shuffelton, in "On Her Own Footing: Phillis Wheatley in Freedom," is correct to insist that Wheatley did not, after publication of her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, write in a particularly subversive mode. For example, Shuffelton finds her 1774 and 1775 exchange with a Lieutenant Rochfort of the royal navy "less subversive" than skillful in its awareness of audience. Shuffelton overlooks, however, the salient fact that, by the time of this exchange, Wheatley had been moving in Boston as a free black for more than a year; also, she had already seen her famous letter to Samson Occum of February 1, 1774, reprinted in a dozen or so colonial newspapers.

The difficulty that Shuffelton, along with several other writers about Wheatley, has fallen into is that, following her manumission, Wheatley indeed had much less need to exercise a subversive mode. This same difficulty is exacerbated by the general lack of recognition that this complex poet experienced during three very different periods of development in her career as a poet. From 1765 or so, when she was first discovering her poetic gifts, until the composition of "On Recollection" in late 1771, she underwent what we may justifiably call an apprenticeship. "On Recollection" marks a noticeable turn inward, one characterized by much less dependence on white folks' Christianity. This former dependence Wheatley replaces by an intensely dynamic search for liberation within the realm of literary aesthetics. This period--her mature, confident exploration of what can only be termed her personal liberation poetics--demonstrates not merely that she had mastered the poetic idiom of her day, but that she extends and even reshapes that idiom into an aesthetic theory which serves her own, most personal determination to be free, even if only temporarily within her own creation. When this aesthetic turn inward, resulting in such poems as that named on memory, "On Imagination," "To Maecenas," "Thoughts in the Works of Providence," "Goliath of Gath" (older than 1772 but reworked for the 1773 Poems), "Niobe in Distress...," and "To S. M.," leads to her actual freedom (the book was the principal factor leading to her manumission), her third and final poetic phase begins, that of her public, no longer subversive position, this last period embracing her quest for freedom beyond the personal, focusing on her black brothers and sisters in bondage.

When we understand Wheatley's poetic career as falling first into an apprenticeship, then into a distinctively internal aesthetic quest for personal freedom, the first period of her maturity, and finally into a second period of maturity--a public phase no less demanding of her considerable talents but no longer requiring the subversive mode--we as readers of this sophisticated artist become enabled to read her work with more surefootedness. Such a serious approach to this deserving poet should prevent us from making such trivializing judgments as Shuffelton's that "it matters little that Wheatley may in fact have had few, if any, precise memories of her life in Africa"; as her endurance of the horrid middle passage (central to "On Recollection") occurred in close conjunction with those disclaimed African memories, can we bring ourselves also to discount her wretched journey aboard the Phillis? I think not, for to do so is to rob this poet of what appear to me to constitute the primary motives of her agency.