"Building Bridges Back to the past": An Interview with Fred D'Aguiar

Author(s): Maria Frías and Fred D'Aguiar

Source: Callaloo, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 418-425
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3300567
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 "BUILDING BRIDGES BACK TO THE PAST"
An Interview with Fred D'Aguiar

by Maria Frias

This interview was conducted after Fred D'Aguiar traveled to Ghana (West
had been invited by the British Council to lecture at Ghana University-wh
on a research project on women's slave narratives-and to participate at the
Writer and the Slave Trade," held at Cape Coast University (26-30 Novem
a visit to Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle-which hurt too much-we c
about D'Aguiar's The Longest Memory (1994), and Feeding the Gho
powerful and poetical works in which the author both revisits, and rewrit
on a monstrous and barbaric episode: African-American slavery.

FRIAS: You are widely known as a poet, but you have recently
fiction-very poetical fiction, I should say-and you have chosen to
subaltern and the underprivileged: black slave men, and black slav
Could you possibly elaborate a bit on your choice?

D'AGUIAR: I've been interested in history, specifically black history

book of poems, Mama Dot, about my grandmother in Guyana who
descent. My interest in ancestry beyond those who are alive is really my
in the gaps of an eradicated past and to understand history throu
through people and their experiences rather than by a rehearsal of
A society is best understood by a study of its treatment of the poor
it. The seeds for regeneration in society frequently come from the b
least empowered people as a result of their agitation, hunger and i
travels upwards, whereas the decay in that society, a society's dec
signs of death, works its way from the top to the bottom. Histor
examples of this, the era of slavery in particular. There is an even m
to this too. My experience as a black person in a white-majority sys
me towards an interest in race since my skin carried this high ne
whose history I was keen to find out about.

FRIAS: As with Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose and Toni Morriso
your intention to re-write, to provocatively re-visit the traditional
narratives? I am thinking about the language and the themes. I am t
Prince, Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, etc.

Callaloo 25.2 (2002) 418-425

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 CALLALOO

D'AGUIAR: Part of my answer is furnished by E

Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Mary asks: "W
already got?" and the protagonist answers, "Miss Jan
the record of history in books sharply contrasts with t
Jane as it does for old Whitechapel in The Longest Mem
and slave narrative adds to my understanding of bla
history. And every previous text opens new seams
Stories beget stories. The more stories there are th
Remember we are talking about slavery, a 400-year
are enough? These previous texts gave me permission

FRIAS: In the traditional slave narratives we have m

writing stood (using Henry Louis Gates' words) "as
ity" (in Race and Writing). In The Longest Memory
worships words and the power of the written word
you picture him-he does not need any kind of certificat
you, again, consciously challenging derogatory ster

D'AGUIAR: Literacy among slaves is illegal on the p

fore, its ascription to a slave is an emblem of empow
say. For the young slave, Chapel, in The Longest Memor
Literacy is one of a cluster of things forbidden t
servitude and dependence. Every move by Chapel to
transgression. His black body is corralled by the in
extent that every little independent act or thought
black body is so over-circumscribed that the merest
read as an assertion of its humanity. Chapel's chara
emblems or tropes. He amounts to much more. The
character rather than his character determined by th
slave are easy to de-bunk. What's difficult is how to
and reconcile that personality with the belittling in
survive a life of slavery if you have a shred of digni
a capacity to love? It must have hurt to simply wake up
with such a consciousness. Yet it is the basis for hum

FRIAS: African-American critic Hazel Carby stat

American women writers use words as "cultural art
just to reflect or mirror society but they attempt to ch
The Longest Memory or Feeding the Ghosts, did you ha
like attitude in mind? Were you consciously trying
century audience?

D'AGUIAR: Hazel Carby is right about the reformin

slavery. For me, the German 18th-century philosoph
says it all, that fiction about history should be the act o

419

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 CALLALOO

not by holding a mirror but by stepping through t

Without ever leaving the plantation, old Whitechap
the middle passage). By remaining on the plantation
(personal and collective), as painful as it is, he records, i
a new history. When you write slavery, you don't se
thrust upon you, as it were, by the subject: you don'
a double narrative: the narrative of my experience force
history, to literally harvest a storyline from the prodig
to sustain me in the racist present.

FRIAS: Because the potential reading audience of th

century were white, Victorian, traditional, and relig
shocked, the discourse on sexuality is almost non-e
However, in The Longest Memory you introduce a m
mistress/black slave-and write a story about feelin
tifully expressed, too. In view of the traditional disc
that you were trying to push the boundaries of erot
approach it, it seems to me a rather provocative the

D'AGUIAR: Sex between blacks and whites has alway

been viewed by both sides with suspicion and uneas
attempts at a dilution of racial purity and as sowin
miscegenation. I suspect all that frothing at the mouth
a verbal participation in a forbidden act. The spectat
lexicon to do with the proscribed thing as a vicario
Erotic love is, next to speech, a glorious yardstick for m
mean fucking, I mean love-making. The language of
its most eloquent when engaged in a love-act. I w
individual depends for its well-being on the person's
intensely, during the affirmation of the body which
body is black and the other white ought to be irrel
difficult enough without adding skin color. And yet
based. Therefore erotic love, at its most ordinary be
four for god's sake!), becomes a problem when c
problem for the two people concerned-they're too
around them.

FRIAS: Continuing with the writing of the body-the sexual body. Even though t
love story is openly sexual, there is a scene in which the black male body is lying back
to back with the white female body. Naked and all, they do not embrace. Is tha
metaphor on the impossibility of their erotic love/their love story? Are you talk
only about slavery times?

D'AGUIAR: That back to back scene is Chapel and Lydia's last, half-hearted effo
(more a technicality at that late stage than a real act of obedience) to obey her father's

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 CALLALOO

dictate that the two lovers should not see each other. De
between them that the back-to-back scene is less a restriction and more an emblem of

foreplay. Back-to-back, they are trying to be obedient to their times, but they are
close and naked, so locked in the intensity of their feeling for each other that they are
destined to disobey convention. When we see them lying naked like that we see failure
of societal constraints and the promotion of love and lust. For me their bodies in suc
awful proximity is a taboo full of wonderful purchase in terms of storytelling this time
and the time of slavery. There is a narrative framework there that is a gift to the write
who cares about history as understood through the body; about burying thought
about history in physical detail; about sensuality as a mode of historical discourse

FRIAS: Neo-slave narratives are frequently self-conscious angry responses to histor

cal cruelties and indignities. Is that so with The Longest Memory?

D'AGUIAR: I hope The Longest Memory in its use of the polyphonic narrative bring
into play multiple viewpoints about slavery. The wish is that the story is its own
argument. All the usual hurts bequeathed to us by a skewered history can be
addressed in the story but only through the usual fictional devices, such as plot,
character, theme, tone, dialogue, events, diction. There isn't room to rant and rave, not
if the writer is obedient to the characters and their stories. Anyway no good fiction is
ever born from a need for revenge.

FRIAS: Talking now about Feeding the Ghosts, I personally think it is a breathtakin
story on the slave trade and the Middle Passage. Beautifully written. Again, highl
sensual/sexual. And you go to historical sources (the Zong, and abolitionist Granvill
Sharp). In different interviews and essays Morrison, Gayl Jones, or Sherley Anne
Williams highlight their emotional reactions to historical facts. Could you tell us
where you learned about the Zong, and how you decided to re-write that traumatic
historical event? (In Morrison's case she refers to Margaret Grabble's story, and how
Morrison got caught by a picture of this runaway slave woman on a newspaper. She
could not forget either the look in that woman's eyes or her dignity.)

D'AGUIAR: I read from The Longest Memory at a library in Liverpool back in 1994 an
came across the story then at the Liverpool Maritime Museum slave gallery. The stor
of 132 slaves dumped overboard for the insurance is shocking enough without th
additional horror of learning that 10 others voluntarily jumped overboard and on
person who had been thrown over the side managed to climb back on board the shi
The court hearings never tried anyone for the crime. The insurers contested the clai
of the investors by arguing against the necessity of the disposal. This is the languag
of stock and trade not traffic in people. I thought it likely that the person who climbed
back on board was very healthy and for my purposes, female. Mintah is her name, and
she writes the Middle Passage for me and she scripts old age as a woman in the earl
19th-century Caribbean. As a male writer the challenge for me is to write as far awa
as possible from my gender bias. Mintah takes me out of my skin, my sex, into he
likely experience. I should say I read Linda Brent, Phyllis Wheatley, Sojourner Trut

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 CALLALOO

and others to get a feel for the time, tone and place
always been interested in the in-betweeness of a sla
slaves who have left home and are bound for a stran
think about what they have left and where they are
for them. They are in a ship. They have to read the cur
their memory, their will to remember, their will to
bondage.

FRIAS: It is a fact that contemporary slave narratives written by women writers favor
female protagonists. In Feeding the Ghosts, and following this tradition, it is a slave
woman's act of resistance, Mintah's, which starts it all. Why Mintah? What does
Mintah represent for you?

D'AGUIAR: Mintah is a natural progression from my earlier writing about women.

In my first book about my grandmother, Mama Dot (Chatto & Windus, 1985) and then
in my second novel, Dear Future (Chatto & Windus, 1996) about 1960s and 1970s
Guyana, [the story is] replete with women: grandmothers, aunts, mothers. Women
raised me. It is what I know. I owe it to myself, the female aspect of myself that yearns
for articulation in my fiction. The Longest Memory is principally about fathers and sons:
how to be a good father if you are a slave, for example. Therefore it made sense to
surrender the story to a woman. In addition, I was interested in the question "if the
black man is silenced in history, what is the nature of the censure of the black
women?" I also wanted to reconcile my experience growing up in the household of my
incredibly robust grandmother (as children we fell asleep before her and when we
woke she was already up and about the house so we thought she never slept!) with the
adversity of a slave past.

FRIAS: As with The Longest Memory, in Feeding the Ghosts we find an interracial love
story. Could you elaborate a bit on this obsession?

D'AGUIAR: Inter-racial love is just love in technicolour! An emblem of multiplicity,

a plural trope, a potpourri of possibilities, a body's quest for otherness, a symbol of
transgression, love's repair of inter-racial conflict and despair, eroticism's attempt to
shape the future, love's exegesis of history's hurt. Love! Love! Love!

FRIAS: In contrast with traditional slave narratives in which we hear an "I" voice who

is witness (eye) to the terror of slavery, in your texts both in The Longest Memory and
in Feeding the Ghosts, we read and hear multiple voices. Could you elaborate on th
polyphonic discourse we systematically find in your narratives?

D'AGUIAR: The more testimonies we have about the past the better informed we ar
A single consciousness which tries to order a linear narrative about the complex pa
is too exclusive and exclusionary. Ambiguity and contradiction are aspects of any
return to the past so it is better to have it written in as a guarantee between characters

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 CALLALOO

in the text, rather than in a single authorial voice,

number of readings inherent in any return; more "stuf
I picked up from the theatre. When you write plays,
thing leading to another so that one thing is another
is women as a result, rather than any simplistic linea
as characters add to and subtract from what others have said. Room for a reader to feel
and talk back to the text is created as a result.

FRIAS: As for the ending-and bearing in mind that traditional slave narratives we
a successful physical journey from south to north, and a celebratory spiritual journ
from slavery to freedom-traditional slave narratives' discourse present a someho
happy ending (I know this might be arguable, though). In both texts, The Longes
Memory and Feeding the Ghosts, the stories are told, and re-written by survivors of th
horror of slavery-physically, mentally, and emotionally bruised, but alive-becau
many died trying to be free. Why those heartbreaking endings? Why do you seem
deny some room for healing?

D'AGUIAR: I hope that a sad ending does not amount to a denial of room for healin
On the contrary, emotional space is created for thought beyond the life of the te
How many stories are lost because the people perished without leaving so much a
their names behind? At every stage of the slave triangle how many sad endings ar
buried in shallow graves, sea burials, in the stones of Elmina Castle and Cape Coa
Castle dungeons, in the worn wood of slave hulls packed with bodies, on plantation
across the Caribbean, South America and the United States? How many sad endin
compared to my paltry two? Healing is there in those sad feelings. The reader feels for
those who died like dogs when the lives of the lost are re-invoked with as much
humanity as my pen can muster.

FRIAS: How would you evaluate the readers' response, and the academic response
to your narratives of slavery?

D'AGUIAR: I'm not sure it is for me to say how I evaluate the readers' and critic
responses. I write to be read. I wish my books to be read and written about. I want
to be done with feeling and intelligence. Beyond that it is out of my hands.

FRIAS: Apart from being a writer who writes about slavery, you teach American
literature. How would you lead your students from traditional slave narratives t
fictional narratives on slavery? What is it that you would like them to learn from slave
novels?

D'AGUIAR: Each generation needs to nuance slavery according to its own percep-
tions and needs. Slavery will face revisions and other visions as a result of hi
generational need. Fiction is one such take on slavery, a present-day assessment in
terms of the best means available to us, namely story-telling, a re-enactment. Slave

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 CALLALOO

narratives complement this process of testimony an

poem about slavery written today is in conversation
or poem from the slave-past. The dialogue belongs to
being continually added to as more and newer reade
Slave novels fill in the details lost to history. Throug
is able to become immersed in a subject and experien
is no longer about defeat and blame but a source of
past and the present. Fiction is about healing too, a

FRIAS: In your essay "One Ending Out" you go back t

narratives, and you choose to be the protagonist of t
crystal clear to me that you can now assert your human
you found love [because "love persisted. She persist
slavery personally dehumanized you? Where were/ar
the auction block, and ultimately, castration? Who h
you? Who has humiliated you? Who called you nigge
has castrated you? I want to know who did all of th

D'AGUIAR: My black ancestry and Caribbean experie

slavery. My skin has drawn a lot of static from whi
teenage years growing up in London and since my ar
Stories from the past about the auction block are au
behalf of those who suffered these things. Racism is no
examples of it every day in the media. People die eve
deplore these things. I feel them. I write about rac
superior to another strange and unacceptable.

FRIAS: I must confess I do have problems with your

lar theory (141). You-writers-have an infinite numb
saying that any reader-no matter ideology, etc.-mi
sympathetic? Both with The Longest Memory and with
felt that the writer was allowing me/the reader som
is why they are so powerful. That is why they are so
with the writer/with the narrator of the story, you ne
sensitive and, above all, a very sensual human being.
the picture of the average reader? I doubt it.

D'AGUIAR: I have never met an "average reader." I

when I open a book.

FRIAS: As you put it, "the descendants of slaves are

research on slavery would not heal their souls. Are
slave novels might have a therapeutic effect on the
much-and for too long-abused lives? Are you also s
would not heal at all?

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 CALLALOO

D'AGUIAR: Historical amnesia is a disease. Fiction is

poetry. Auden said in his famous elegy for Yeats that "
but he's dead wrong. Poetry, in this case the arts,
changed by art, they are sensitized by it, their sleep
art. Art can be pleasing but it also makes you think a
and emotional force.

FRIAS: You also suggest that writing or "articulating a black experience ... is not th
sole preserve of black artists" (142). It is true that Toni Morrison highlighted in an
interview that, for her, the best contemporary novel on the south, racial segregatio
and discrimination was The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All, written by Gurganu
white and male. You somehow seem also to reject the idea of black writers monopo
lizing what you call "the black experience." Could you mention any relevant work
written by a writer of a different race, for example?

D'AGUIAR: The greatest to my mind is Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beeche
Stowe. From the pen of one of several white patrons from Harlem Renaissance day
there is Nigger Heaven (1926) by Carl Van Vechten. Two other more recent books, again
novels, are Marina Warner's Indigo and Judith Gleason's Agotime.

FRIAS: You seem to be very optimistic about the future of slave novels, ironicall
because the present situation is not precisely rosy. Are, therefore, slave nove
modernized versions of the novel of protest of the 1930s and 1940s? I am thinking
Richard Wright.

D'AGUIAR: Could be so. Certainly there will be many more to read in the future. N
doubt slavery is a site for orchestrations of radicalism.

FRIAS: Since you only wrote one ending out of the many possible endings of the la
novel about slavery, are we going to hear other possible endings? Are there still oth
stories about slavery that you are burning to put into words?

D'AGUIAR: Yes, yes.

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