Content area
Full Text
I then made up my mind that salt and potatoes in Canada, were better than pound-cake and chickens in a state of suspense and anxiety in the United States.
- Reverend Alexander Hemsley, Fugitive slave from St. Catherine's, Upper Canada
They thought that I might yet get to Canada, and be free, and suggested a plan by which I might accomplish it; and one way was, to learn to read and write, so that I might write my self a pass ticket, to go just where I pleased, when I was taken out of the prison; and they taught me secretly all that they could while in the prison.
-Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures (1849)
One Shall Pass: Reconfiguring Conceptions of Passing and the Color Line
"This is not a story to pass on" (275). Thus concludes Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved, a statement that proves to be something of a double écriture, an utterance with a shadow, or we might justifiably say, a ghost. It suggests the ineffability of the slave's experience and the innate difficulties of assessing the psychic toll on the subject by means of a straightforward, referential language. The imperatives of pausing, reflecting, and grappling with the manacles of traumatic memory remain constant preoccupations. At the core of the sentence lies the issue of narrative representation ("story"/histoire/history) and its attendant, ambiguous verb of reception, "pass on." To "pass on" foreshadows the transmission of these events to a latent audience, one who may alternatively "pass" on (that is, ignore, forget, repudiate, or distort) such a vital historical and literary inheritance. By logical sequence, what should be passed on to posterity instead passes away; it is a ritual of memory foreclosed, an offering refused, and a duty shunned. The recurrence of the ghost, an archetypal figure of incompletion, implies that a self-perpetuating covenant between the living and the dead has been left in limbo. Thus, to "pass on" signifies movement at the same time that it signifies stasis, and gestures to a leave-taking that refuses, with a perverse but apocalyptic momentum, ever to arrive completely.
What relevance does this contradictory episteme of passingpassing on, passing by, passing through, passing over, passing away-have in a discussion of the interplay between African...