Others, without underplaying the differences, have pointed to similarities, several drawing on my concept of social death in addressing the parallels. In her definitive study of life in Nazi Germany, Kaplan repeatedly describes the pre-destruction period leading up to the death camps as a condition of social death for the Jews living in Germany: ‘In the 1930s Nazi Germany succeeded in enforcing social death on its Jews – excommunicating them, subjecting them to inferior status, and relegating them to a perpetual state of dishonour.’181 Daniel Goldhagen, writing about the same time, made a similar point, arguing that while German Jews were indeed totally dominated, natally alienated and dishonoured, the distinctive features of social death, the critical distinction lay in the fact that the slaveholder found value in the body of the enslaved, while the Nazi terrorist sought the elimination of Jewish bodies.182 More recently, Claudia Card has argued that my concept of social death is ‘central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or primarily cultural)’ and that it is what ‘distinguishes genocide from other mass murders’.183 Card focuses on the fact that a people’s social identity, based on their distinctive way of life, is what gives meaning to their existence, and destroying this is what most critically defines genocide: ‘Social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create an identity that gives meaning to life. Major loss of social vitality is a loss of identity and consequently a serious loss of meaning for one’s existence. Putting social death at the centre takes the focus off individual choice, individual goals, individual careers and body counts, and puts it on relationships that create community and set the context that gives meaning to choices and goals.’184 In making this philosophical move, Card was actually returning to the pioneering student of the subject, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’, and for whom ‘the destruction of cultural symbols is genocide’, as well as actions that ‘menace the existence of the social group which exists by virtue of its common culture’. It also, of course, involved ‘the criminal intent to destroy or cripple permanently a human group’.185 The fact that it does not do so completely does not make it any less genocidal, since ‘Lemkin made clear that total extermination was not necessary for genocide to occur.’186 Some Jews survived. Some Jamaicans survived.
From all this, it is clear that what happened in Jamaica between 1655 and 1838 was genocide in every sense of the term, for what we find is both ethno-cultural destruction, physical brutalization and the denial of existence to 5,741,473 souls. While both were genocide, there are three differences between the Nazi and the Jamaican holocaust. The first is temporal, the fact that the Jewish social death lasted for twelve years (1933 to 1945) while that of Jamaicans lasted for 183 years of deracination, the loss of connection with their past, of any recognized sense of any rights in or belonging to the land of their birth, to their own children and parents, to their very selves and bodies. The second, already mentioned, that the Jewish physical elimination was concentrated over a short period of four years, while that of Jamaicans lasted for 183 years in the drip, drip, drip of shortened lives and curtailed fertility, so tortured and degraded that death was vociferously celebrated as ‘a welcome relief from the calamities of life and a passport to the never-to-be-forgotten scenes of their nativity’.187 The third concerns the nature of the elimination, and is likely the most contentious: in the case of the Jews, actual living bodies were destroyed; in the case of the Jamaicans, in addition to the abbreviated lives and outright individual murders, mass executions and suicides, potential living bodies were preventively destroyed – lives that would almost certainly have happened, should by any and all human standards have eventuated, under the quite reasonable counterfactual condition. The absence of these 5,741,473 Jamaican lives is not a hypothetical. It was a deliberate curtailment. Like female gendercide, the deliberate preventive obliteration of up to 117 million females mainly through sex-selective termination of pregnancies,188 it was a crime against humanity. The comparison with gendercide is clarifying in that it emphasizes the fact that genocide need not involve deliberate killings, actual bodies, or concerted mass murder (although these frequently happened in Jamaica, especially after real and attempted plots of rebellion, as well as in gendercide with infanticide). As Warren points out: ‘not all instances of genocide involve direct or deliberate killing. Deaths or cultural disintegration deliberately or negligently brought about through starvation, disease or neglect may also be genocidal. Indeed, some acts of genocide do not involve any deaths at all, but rather consist in the wrongful denial of the right to reproduce.’ [emphasis added]189 To repeat, for 183 years, Jamaicans had their ancestral memories, and traditional cultures destroyed, their actual lives ravaged, ruthlessly exploited and severely shortened, their familial bonds shattered, their bodies casually raped with impunity and infected with life-shortening diseases, their reproductive rights denied, leading to the accumulation of 5,741,473 missing persons. One can think of few more heinous cases of a crime against humanity.
When British slavery was finally abolished in 1838, Jamaicans, as we have noted, had experienced it for 183 years. I write this introduction in 2021, exactly 183 years after the abolition. The island has never fully recovered from the uniquely violent decimation of that first half of its history. ‘One of the characteristics of traumatic memory’, Dan Stone has written, ‘is that it cannot be suppressed at will’, and societies remain scarred long after its experience.190 The Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Honourable Andrew Holness, in his 2021 Emancipation Day speech commemorating the abolition of slavery in the island, noted the facts that it has been 183 years since abolition, and the role that the last great rebellion of the enslaved, led by National Hero, the Rt Excellent Samuel Sharpe,191 played in helping to bring it about. But then he added something with which his entire nation would have somberly agreed: ‘The use of violence has followed us from our history.’192 Today, Jamaica remains one of the most violent nations on earth, as it was in the eighteenth century, with a homicide rate that places it in the top five of all nations, and a rate of femicide, the murder of women, consistently at the very top of the world’s nations.193 The dead yards of the nation’s slums194 bear ghoulish witness to the plantation dead yards of that first half of its existence.195 For Jamaica, ‘the politics of post-genocidal memories are matters of life and death’.196
That first half of our history has never been fully told. If the truth be known, it can never be fully known. Genocide, fast or slow moving, is unknowable. Unimaginable. We try as historians and sociologists to fathom and feel its horror, its sorrow, its unrelenting grief, its preternatural evil. But in its hollowing banality,197 it defies all understanding. Having reached the limits of historical and sociological understanding I tried to imagine that first half of our past in the literary sequel to The Sociology of Slavery, my novel, Die the Long Day,198 which drew on the materials I had collected for the earlier work to re-create a day of death and celebratory mourning on an 18th-century slave plantation. During the mourning for the murdered heroine (butchered by the Maroons at the request of the white overseer), an old Fanti woman, slightly crazed, wanders amidst the mourners, repeatedly wailing in a voice as dark as death, a dirge that was all she had remembered from her deracinated African past. It went like this:
Do not say anything,
O Mother, Sister,
Do not say anything.
For anything you say, will be too much,
And nothing you say, will be enough.
Orlando Patterson,
Harvard University
1 1. My warmest thanks to Professors Loïc Wacquant and Chris Muller for encouraging the publication of this new edition and for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. Thanks also to the anonymous readers of the introduction for their very useful comments.
2 2. Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History, New Beacon Books, 1992.
3 3. My last contribution to New Left Review included a
