intensification of differentiation among the enslaved and subsequently oppressed is therefore one of the more unsavory aspects of hierarchies of power organized along grids of racial and ethnic categorization, and it has had lasting effects. Even so, it is a marvel that, as Wilson-Fall reflects, individuals and families transported from one side of the world to the other would remember a specific place-name—Madagascar—without having any firm idea as to where it might be located. The embrace of Malagasy ancestry, in addition to its various social implications, therefore also speaks of a resolve, a determination to preserve human dignity—a human dignity with a face—with a name.
The record of the Malagasy held as slaves in the American South is remarkable enough, but their experience may not have been confined to processes of enslavement and manumission, as Wilson-Fall further reports that they may have also arrived in the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States as merchants and sailors, possibly as indentures. Again, this is based on family histories that maintain Malagasy ancestors were aboard American and British vessels as crew members, a development that could be related to the formation of such arrangements in South Africa, the latter possibility established through the author’s research efforts.
By focusing on a particular formation—the Malagasy—Memories of Madagascar and Slavery also makes important conceptual and methodological interventions into the study of slavery and its aftermath. As to the former, one of the book’s more striking innovations is an expansion on and elaboration of the concept of the shipmate. Heretofore understood to represent the bonding process of the Middle Passage, Wilson-Fall extends the notion to the final sale of persons in small parcels to individual families, after having experienced the transoceanic voyage with a largely homogeneous cohort. This “fourth great fracture,” as she labels this final sale, followed the initial capture in Madagascar, embarkation, and disembarkation in Virginia. The effect of reconsidering the shipmate experience and lengthening its gestation is to emphasize an increasing sense of isolation among the Malagasy, countered by an intensification of the bond between those who remained together into the fourth phase, in turn heightening the sense of their uniqueness.
With respect to methodology, the historian can learn much from the author’s approach, by which she produces, chapter by chapter, information on various aspects of the Malagasy presence as established or verified through conventional records and written testimony, followed by a discussion of the way in which the evidence maps onto those components of family tradition that relate most closely to the period and experience in question. The order of the process of relation and substantiation is revealing, inverting the customary progression of authentication by suggesting that it is the recorded evidence that is in need of oral tradition’s verification, rather than the reverse. But more important, the method reflects the seriousness with which the author treats the family traditions. Standard indices constituting historical verity are provided in collaborative fashion, but familial collective memory is given at least equal weight.
In fact, it is indeed the family traditions that formed the basis, the reason, the impetus for the search for collaborative information. It is the family tradition that is the generative source as well as the connective tissue for the whole of the project, without which we have little save disaggregated, occasional references to a runaway “Madagascar” here and there. Their memorialization by subsequent generations is convincing testimony that they did not run in vain.
The historian typically approaches resolution of a problem through consultation with an archive of some sort, which has often already been organized in a fashion in anticipation of particular lines of inquiry, if not out of an interest in actually shaping that inquiry. As such, it is an artifice as well as an instrument of power, its collections emblematic of social and economic disparities implicit in the very process that determines what is preserved and what is discarded. To be sure, the circumstances and experiences, even the voices of the disenfranchised and marginalized, can be found there, the successful recovery of which is testimony to the expertise and dedication of the researcher so committed, as well as to ever-developing techniques designed to uncover such experiences, making it possible to read against the archive, extracting from it information often thought unobtainable.
In contrast, collective memory represents those persons and places and circumstances for whom and which the archive was not intended, serving as a counterbalance and corrective to what is regarded as official and authoritative. It addresses, in its own inimical way, that which the archive refuses to honor, speaking to the silences and ellipses and vacuities in the standard account. As such, it is inherently oppositional and highly resistant to efforts at policing its content and claims. It necessarily exists in the realm of the recalcitrant; indeed, it must inhabit uninhibited, lawless spaces into which authority is forbidden entry. Rather then a “subjugated knowledge,” it is more of a parallel discourse, and as opposed to being policed by outsiders, it serves as its own sentinel over a past that would otherwise be readily denied and conveniently forgotten.
In this way, the realm of the familial recollection is critical to the pursuit of the African American experience. There remain many accounts of forebears both enslaved and free, born in Africa or the Americas or elsewhere, whose inclusion into the aggregate investigation of the past would add considerable detail and shed much needed additional light on the sojourn and travail of black folk in the Americas. However, such stories and information tend to travel only interior circuits of familial exchange. In some instances the exclusivity of the traditions may indeed be with all intentionality, but there are other traditions not so restricted, and simply have not been afforded serious attention. They have no one with whom to share their information, there is no one listening. In the United States alone, given the African American population, such circuitries must range in the thousands, if not even more.
By tapping into these circuitries and taking them seriously, Wendy Wilson-Fall has shown the way to begin accessing such accounts, offering a method by which to bring such parallel discourses into conversation with conventional means of understanding the past. As such, her work may well prove to be a major new avenue through which knowledge of the African American experience can travel. To be sure, reasons for sheltering family lore would include an unwillingness to subject what is precious to the scrutiny of a process that can be indifferent, callous, and even hostile. But there is so much to learn, and so much to gain, as Memories of Madagascar and Slavery demonstrates. Wendy Wilson-Fall has produced an exquisite rendering of a process spanning thousands of miles and hundreds of years. We do well to emulate her example.
Michael A. Gomez
November 2014
New York
Acknowledgments
An endeavor such as this volume cannot be achieved without the support, goodwill, and shared knowledge that characterizes a vibrant community of scholars. I would like to begin, therefore, by acknowledging my gratitude toward the scholars of Indian Ocean studies and African diaspora studies who helped me on the journey of this book’s realization. The hospitality that these scholars offered me, via suggestions for sources, reading drafts, and countless discussions, reflects the warmth and enthusiasm typical of the scholarly milieu of African studies in our era.
This book would not have been possible without the generous correspondence and suggestions of Dr. Lorena Walsh and others of the Williamsburg Colonial Foundation. In addition to the critical input from Dr. Walsh, I received a fellowship from the Williamsburg Colonial Foundation that allowed me uninterrupted time to do research at the Rockefeller Library and the libraries of the College of William and Mary.
Professor and scholar Sulayman Nyang was perhaps the first to discuss the project with me and to join Sheila Thomas and myself on an early field trip to rural Maryland. Thanks to Professor Nyang, and to Professor Robert Edgar of Howard University for his observations on Cape Town and his facilitation of contact between Malagasy researchers and the Gregory clan. My gratitude is also expressed
