Ato Sekyi-Otu enjoins us in Left Universalism to honor ‘the inheritance our living ancestors willed to us by fashioning an insurgent and redemptory enterprise’ enabled symbolically by ‘native particulars and human commonalities’ (2019, p. 37).^[1] Responding to the haunting presence of the slave plantation and the shadow that it continues to cast over the twenty-first century world, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black is one such literary intervention.^[2] Despite its very small size, the island of Barbados was central to the foundation of the slave-plantation complex in the Caribbean and North America. Problematizing the form and content of the slave narrative genre, Washington Black lifts the slave-plantation presence out of its geographical and historical otherness—Barbados, the Caribbean islands, the South—and reinserts it into the surge of the modern Atlantic—the USA and Canada, England and Holland, Morocco and Dahomey (Benin). Set initially in Barbados, though with ever present echoes of West Africa, the novel lays bare the brutality of slavery as experienced by the young narrator, George Washington Black. Tracing the narrator’s intellectual development as artist, zoologist, engineer and thinker, the novel follows the narrator’s flight to Norfolk, Virginia, and on to the Canadian Arctic, tracing his subsequent life as a free man in Nova Scotia, and finally his journey across the Atlantic to London, Amsterdam and eventually Marrakesh, North Africa, the ancestral continent. This journey around the Atlantic, inverting the logic of the Atlantic trade and the crimes against humanity that sustained that trade, brings the novel into a black Atlantic frame of reference, whereby what might have been represented as a peculiarly Barbadian experience is transfigured in its breadth and depth into what Gilroy identifies as an Atlantic ‘counterculture of modernity’, one ‘that defiantly reconstructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy’ (Gilroy 1993, pp. 37-38).

‘None but ourselves can free the mind’

The Nova Scotia connection in Washington Black invites a small diversion, which, following Glissant, can nourish reversion, ‘a return to the point of entanglement from which we were forcefully turned away’ (1989, p. 26). Washington Black arrives in Shelburne a free man and subsequently moves on to the Bedford Basin in the Halifax area, where he finds himself in the company of persons of African descent living in Nova Scotia. The date is 1834, the same year that the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect in British colonies. There was a black population in Canada from earliest settlement times, including enslaved persons under the French and English, black loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, and other black refugees and immigrants over the centuries. Lawrence Hill’s masterpiece, The Book of Negroes, is one very significant retelling of a part of this history from a black Nova Scotian perspective, and there are echoes of that novel in Washington Black. It is not surprising, therefore, that none other than Marcus Garvey on his visits to Canada would choose to travel not only to black communities in Ontario but also to those on Canada’s East Coast, in cities and towns such as Halifax, Sydney and Glace Bay.

A branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association was established in Glace Bay in 1918 by Barbadian Albert Francis and another in Sydney’s Whitney Pier in 1919. Many members of the black community in Sydney were immigrants from Barbados who had come to work in the Dominion steel plant. Forced to take the most dangerous jobs, they lived in the worst area of town, near the coke ovens. Garvey’s visit to Sydney in 1937 is notable because the speech he made in Menelik Hall in Whitney Pier on October 31 was the basis of one of the most famous anthems to come out of Jamaica, Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’. ‘We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery’, Garvey stated, ‘because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind’ (Tattrie 2017; MacDougall 2000). A little over a hundred years earlier, a fictive George Washington Black living in Nova Scotia had already assumed Garvey’s challenge of emancipation, and like Marley, had done so in the fullness of his humanity, eschewing the narrowly defined ‘redemptory racial mission’ that Sekyi-Otu, following Fanon, so poignantly critiques (2019, p. 9).

Edugyan’s novel (2018) is not wedded to literary realism as it moves around the Caribbean, a white man and his black apprentice floating along on a prototype of a hot-air balloon until it crash-lands on a trading ship that then takes them to North America. Nor is the author hesitant to place a formerly enslaved man in the Arctic, where a wayward naturalist exploits the services of Inuit workers to pursue his own ends. And unlike the fighting maroons of Jamaica whom the British transported first to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone, Washington Black remains, in the first instance, attached to his benevolent liberator, Christopher Wilde, known familiarly as Titch, who first offers to buy his freedom, then steals away with him to save him from a tortuous death; and though, like the maroons, Washington Black does for a time end up in Nova Scotia, his journey back to Africa is through Europe, driven not to find Africa of the past, but to fully actualize his freedom as a black man from the white liberator that haunted his very being. Having been presented in Virginia with the option to join the underground railroad to Canada, on one hand, or head to the Arctic with Titch, on the other, he had chosen to stay with Titch. Had he not merely become, in his own words, ‘a twisted black Englishman’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 225), a concern that would occupy black intellectuals from Garvey to Marley, from Césaire through Fanon to thinkers today.

Essentially then, Washington Black risks becoming the assimilated Antillean of Black Skin, White Masks, the ‘slave who was allowed to assume the master’s attitude’, and his benefactor the ‘master who allowed his slaves to eat at his table’ (Fanon 2008, p. 194). Washington Black’s journey around the Atlantic, a journey in the lived experience of racism in the Americas, is also an inner journey of self-discovery, one that deepens when he is left to die in the tundra. Abandoned by Titch, he experiences the ‘anguish of liberty’ that Fanon associates with Kierkegaard (2008, p. 196), thereby engaging his will to be actional as he works toward what Sekyi-Otu calls, with a Marxist inflection, the ‘ideal of personal autonomy . . . as a principle of responsible agency beyond possessive egoism’ (2019, p. 2).

Enlightenment’s underside

Titch is presented in the novel as a benevolent, enlightened master, abolitionist and scientific inventor, as opposed to his brother, Erasmus, who runs a Barbadian plantation, ironically named Faith, and overseas the humiliation, torture and death of the enslaved persons that are the source of the family’s wealth. Drawing on Fanon among others, Sylvia Wynter observes that the sixteenth century humanist emphasis on natural law, reason, and freedom can be associated with the rise of a mercantile bourgeoisie for whom man was defined in its own image, as ‘man-in-general’. Indigenous peoples and peoples of African descent were determined to be lacking in reason, and encomienda and plantation internment thereby justified (Wynter 1984, pp. 34-35). It is presumably no coincidence that the brutal slave master at Faith plantation is named Erasmus. By the end of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers had taken humanism to a new level, the focus on human progress through reason and science, nation and empire, emerging in words of Sekyi-Otu, glossing Fanon, as ‘humanity without a human face’, as ‘the full and unrestrained violence of the modern Western project’ (Sekyi-Otu, 1996, p. 239). Even as European nations began the process of relinquishing the persons they had enslaved, persons whom they had deemed lesser than human, racialized exclusion and imperial domination besieged the lives of those deemed ‘other’ by the nation. Titch, the good master of Faith plantation, the abolitionist, manifests aspects of this later stage in the history of European humanism, however benevolent he may struggle to be.

It is Titch, the putative scientist, who designs the Cloud-cutter, the hot air balloon that will provide the means of escape from Barbados following the death by suicide of a visiting white relative, whose demise would mistakenly be attributed to Washington Black. Scientific projects need capital and labour: the Barbadian plantation is the source of the capital; its enslaved, the labour to build the Cloud-cutter, Washington Black drawing the illustrations and providing much of actual labour himself. Likewise, financial support for Titch’s father, a naturalist working in the Arctic, comes from the Barbadian slave plantation. Indeed, the principal source of support for Granbourne, the family estate outside London, and for several other English estates, is enslaved labour on Faith plantation. If Washington Black represents exploited, racialized labour, however, his experience is also that of alienated labour self-consciously liberating itself: ‘I wanted to create a world with my hands’ he reflects, a repeating theme in the novel (Edugyan 2018, pp. 45, 385).

Washington Black’s childhood caregiver on Faith plantation is Big Kit, also known by her European and African names as Catherine and Nawi, respectively. Big Kit’s experience of the brutality and torture of the plantation leaves her with only one real option, to return to her birthplace in Dahomey, where ‘the dead were reborn . . . to walk free again’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 8). However, while other enslaved persons take their own lives in desperation, she perseveres in Barbados for Washington Black’s sake. Enslaved and apparently parentless, Washington Black is like her a wounded person, his face permanently disfigured when a model of the Cloud-cutter explodes and nearly kills him. In their work on slavery and disability, Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie Newton observe that ‘disfigurement and impairment were routine results of enslavement in the British Caribbean’ (2016, p. 385). Enslaved bodies, already deemed monstrous and marked as different, suffered bodily injury, whether from severe punishments, labour accidents, disease or malnutrition. Furthermore, the sick or disabled who were incapable of keeping up with the demands for labour placed on them were often punished more brutally than their able-bodied counterparts.

Big Kit and Washington Black are both exemplars of the ‘pained body’ of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, a body in search of redress and freedom. Redress, Hartman argues, ‘is an exercise of agency directed toward the release of the pained body, the reconstitution of violated natality, and the remembrance of breach. … Redressive action encompasses … the transfiguration of the broken and ravenous body into a site of pleasure, a vessel of communication, and a bridge between the living and the dead’ (1997, p. 77). Washington Black finds redress in his artistic ability and scientific drive. Doubly marked, the wound on his face a metaphor for the pained body, he gravitates to art and science and finds in them the sublime, healing power that helps to repair the breach to his humanity. He is forced to leave Big Kit behind in Barbados, abandoning her to suffer at the hands of the master. But she had not abandoned him, and in him lay her redress. Although she had wanted to transport Washington Black to her Dahomean homeland, thereby providing him with a vision of an alternate world of freedom, she had also provided him with the nail with which he could defend himself from sexual and physical abuse in the world in which he had found himself.

As a pained body narrating his own story, Washington Black exemplifies the ‘wounded storyteller’ as healer, Arthur Frank’s ‘moral witness, reenchanting a disenchanted world’ (2013, p. 185). Against the postmodernists who relinquish all claims to the human because of the fraught history of state sanctioned terror that has accompanied modernity, Sekyi-Otu argues in the strongest terms that the ethical imperative of the human cannot be forsaken. The abolitionist may struggle for the slave’s freedom in the name of humanity, but it is the enslaved who experiences the violation of the idea of the human in his or her body and works to reclaim that body, standing witness to trauma and the possibilities and conditions of healing. Universalism, argues Sekyi-Otu, ‘is intracultural in provenance and transcultural in meaning, native in idiom yet always already posing the generic question of the human, impelled by a homemade transcendental requirement of practical reason, audible voice of the indigenous ‘Kantian’ that, pace Judith Butler’s demurral, does indeed reside in every culture’ (2019, p. 16). Throughout the novel, Washington Black’s abilities and actions dispute the colonial rationality of domination, thereby subverting the racialized logic of difference. Expressing his humanity through the narration of his own experience, he recuperates critical humanism’s universal relevance.

Marine encounters

After arriving in Nova Scotia from the Arctic, facing the depredations enacted on racialized black workers, his artistic and scientific interests languishing, Washington Black encounters the miracle of jellyfish in the ocean at night, reflecting light in ‘tight explosions of green and yellow, as if comets were being detonated’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 232). In this redemptive moment, the beauty of the experience takes him back to his art, and while painting along the seashore of the Bedford Basin he encounters Tanna, the artistic daughter of zoologist G.M. Goff and a woman from the Solomon Islands. Washington Black and Tanna have much in common, his own ‘wrecked visage’ to her a ‘known thing,’ he states. ‘She seemed to see beneath it something of her own suffering and recovery—the acceptance of a life-changing wound, the will to go on’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 244).

Utilizing his skills as an artist capable of scientific attention to detail, skills developed initially working on the Cloud-cutter, Washington Black finds himself employed by Goff to dive for specimens and illustrate his book on sea life, this despite Goff’s concerns about his daughter’s new lover. Diving took Washington Black into himself, he would later reflect, releasing him from the shadows of the past that haunted him, until there was, ‘finally, mercifully, nothing’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 272). This moment of absolute freedom, out of the world yet still in it, is also a moment of encounter, as the majesty of nature appears once more in a ‘wondrous and brilliantly vivid’ female octopus. Its ‘gaze seemed to churn up out of its soft mantle and burn through me,’ he states, ‘seeing, I suppose, the sad rigidity of a boy, the uselessness of his hard, inflexible bones’. The octopus opened up in him ‘a bright, radiating hope’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 273).

The thought of the octopus killed and crated as a specimen sent ‘a twist of nausea’ through Washington Black (Edugyan 2018, p. 273). Science as mastery of nature, enlightenment as knowledge that dominates the other, meets art as representation of the subjectivity of the other, and as one that has been dominated by another, treated as though he were an animal, Washington Black finds himself taken in by the subjectivity of the octopus and her invocative return of the gaze. Rather than see the octopus as a specimen to be killed and preserved for scientific scrutiny, he envisions building a sea menagerie, an idea that he takes to Tanna and Goff, and that would eventually be transmitted to the Zoological Society in London. Washington Black would move with his employer to London, design the aquarium, and travel with Tanna to Amsterdam and Morocco for specimens. The zoologist would get the credit, for which scientist would listen to a young, unschooled, former enslaved black person from the colonies?

The building of zoos and aquaria in various metropolitan centres accompanied European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. The first public aquarium in England opened in 1853 in Regent’s Park Zoo, newly established under the auspices of the London Zoological Society. The Fish House, as it was called, contained both freshwater and saltwater creatures that reportedly amazed their viewers (Brunner 2005, pp. 99-100). At the time there was a black zookeeper, Thomas Burrows, described as ‘a native of Barbados’, who travelled around the British Isles with Mrs. Edmonds’ Menagerie feeding gingerbread to elephants at shows (Cowie 2014, pp. 211-212). Kurt Koeningsberger (2007) draws a homology between the nineteenth century English novel and the menagerie, arguing that both were totalizing projects whereby English culture models empire as ‘the preeminent expression of the English spirit’ (x). ‘The menagerie, as its derivation from the Middle French term for the administration of a home or farm suggests, is a site of management and of ordering the otherwise unruly economy of the imperial household (including alien bodies, practices, and stories), and the novel’s forms of narration across the nineteenth century also became modes of managing imperial attitudes and energies’ (Koeningsberger 2007, p. 21). As such, menageries and novels including them served to unify the nation and gave meaning to imperial expansion by making an Orientalist appeal to the wild, the exotic, that which was considered different and could be contained and controlled by the nation.

Written in the postcolonial moment about the enduring colonial experience, the perspective in Washington Black is not that of an Englishman, but of one of his colonial subjects. Despite his entrapment in the imperial enterprise that the menagerie represents, Washington Black’s viewpoint is radically different from that of the imperial gaze. For him, the sea menagerie represents the encounter with nature underwater that brought life and possibility to his pained body, and his relationship with life underwater subverts the very idea of the imperial menagerie. Having been treated as an animal himself, having been depicted as non-human, he asserts his own humanity as artist, scientist, marine engineer, and does so in a way that reclaims human reciprocity with nature. The shark infested Atlantic that Big Kit had experienced in a brutal crossing, where the weak were thrown overboard in acts of violence and the strong jumped overboard in claim of redress, ‘leaping the deck rail into waters sharp with the fins of sharks’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 345), as Washington Black tearfully relates, was subverted in the idea of the Ocean House as a place of life, beauty, meaning and hope.

The notion of the zoo has changed today, and as the idea of enclosing living beings in a cage or tank has become more problematic, the function of zoos and their modes of representing animal life have been radically transformed (Koeningsberger 2007, 212-213). But what if the Ocean House is read as a metaphor for the transfiguration of the radical evil that accompanied a form of modernity that is as destructive of the human as it has been of nature? As both a liberating enactment of redress by the pained body and an ethical claim to responsibility for caring for the environment?

Enacting liberation

Literature, like art, has the capacity to transform lived reality into possibility. Sekyi-Otu writes that the best of African literature ‘enacts its liberation not indeed from history but from a reductive historicism, not from local particulars but from radical particularism’. There is not necessarily a contradiction between ‘invoking historical particulars and attending to human universals’ (2019 pp. 239-240). The particulars in Washington Black span the broad Atlantic, and more than local detail, it is Washington Black’s journey as he responds to changing historical contexts that mark the narrative’s particularity. Yet it is in this very particularity that the universal is invoked.

Washington Black remains marked by the colour of his skin, the scar of his Barbadian past. Before the idea of the Ocean House can even get to London, the lived reality of post-emancipation Nova Scotia intervenes to thwart his plans. As the recent ‘Report on Lord Dalhousie’s History on Slavery and Race’ (Cooper et al. 2019) reminds us, mid nineteenth century Nova Scotia, like other parts of Canada, remained a racialized society, where persons of African descent had access only to the lowest paying jobs, sub-standard housing, and poor agricultural land. Preyed on by various sectors in white society, individuals could be kidnapped by unscrupulous agents for American and other slaveholders claiming rights to property that had supposedly escaped. Washington Black had indeed escaped from Barbados, and planter Erasmus had engaged a slave catcher named Willard to find and return him. Willard was unsuccessful, emancipation brought an end to slavery in the British Empire and, in any case, Erasmus had died. However, literature intervenes to bring together the humiliated slave catcher and his former prey in Nova Scotia, Willard citing Aristotle’s notion of natural slavery in the encounter. After Willard starts bludgeoning Washington Black in a dark alley, there follows a fierce struggle. Big Kit had given the child Washington Black a nail to protect himself; lesson learned, Washington Black stabs Willard in the eye and staggers away, wounded, but no longer haunted by this ghost from the past.

Hartman argues that even though redressive action as resistance to the process of racialized dehumanization may be limited by ‘the inability to transform social relations’, it signals ‘an articulation of loss and a longing for remedy and reparation . . . an event of epic and revolutionary proportions—the abolition of slavery, the destruction of a racist social order, and the actualization of equality’ (Hartman, 1997, pp. 76-77). The Haitian Revolution was such an epic event, but other revolts of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean were brutally suppressed, including the 1816 Easter Rebellion in Barbados, and the Easter Rebellion with its resonances of Haiti were very much on the minds of the masters of Faith plantation in Washington Black (see Edugyan 2018, p. 24). In the act of confronting the violence of Willard, an act of self-defence, Washington Black asserts his freedom and reclaims his humanity in an equally epic way.

Edugyan’s novel can be read in relation to a long line of Caribbean writers and thinkers whose works feature the master-slave struggle, including Et les chiens se taisaient by Negritude founder Aimé Césaire and The Polished Hoe by fellow Giller winner, Barbadian Canadian Austin Clarke. If CLR James’ study of the Haitian Revolution in The Black Jacobins stands out as the masterpiece depicting this struggle in the Caribbean intellectual tradition, Fanon’s gloss on Césaire’s Rebel, ‘I struck, the blood spurted’, a reference that Fanon appeals to in both Black Skin, White Masks (2008, p. 175) and The Wretched of the Earth (2004, p. 46) are among its most significant interpretations. The fight ‘for the birth of a human world . . . a world of reciprocal recognitions’ (2008, p. 193), writes Fanon in his reworking of Hegel, involves an ‘inner revolution’: once the Rebel discovers ‘the white man in himself, he kills him’ (2008, p. 175). And this too was Garvey’s message in Sydney Nova Scotia in 1938. This is not to say that emancipatory action is just a matter of psychology or symbols. Garvey, James, Césaire, Fanon, all understood the necessary interplay of the personal and social, of literature and action, of inner revolution and outer transformation, even if their political locations and immediate goals were radically different. Drawing on the Caribbean black radical tradition, Aaron Kamugisha argues that an ‘epistemological uprising . . . must occur to effect human freedom beyond colonialism’ (2019, p. 23). Written from outside the Caribbean yet speaking to the place of the Caribbean in the wider Atlantic, Edugyan’s novel performs what Kamugisha calls, following Wynter, an act of ‘cultural self-determination, a hemispheric phenomenon, which demands a metamorphosis of consciousness, culture and being’ (2019, p. 22).

Specters of the Atlantic

In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History, Ian Baucom takes as his entry point into an analysis of the haunting legacy of Atlantic slavery the massacre on the slave-ship Zong, when 132 enslaved persons were deliberately thrown overboard and murdered, supposedly for lack of enough drinking water, their so-called Liverpool owners subsequently making an insurance claim for what they saw as a loss on their investment. Caribbean and African American writers have resuscitated the ghost of slavery past to better address the present, Walcott’s Omeros sharing with Morrison’s Beloved,

not only the literary figure of the ghost but the counter-Enlightenment philosophy of history that specter emblematizes . . . a type of contemporaneity, a complex, enigmatic, Atlantic ‘now’ . . . a now that accumulates within itself the moment of loss, the long after-history of loss, and the moment of confrontation with loss (Baucom 2005, pp. 324-25).

Similarly, M. NourbeSe Philip in Zong! and Fred D’Aguiar in Feeding the Ghosts bear witness to the past by feeding the dead, by relating the past and relating to the past ‘in a labour of resuscitation’ (Baucom 2005, p. 332). Edugyan likewise resuscitates the ghosts of the Atlantic past, bearing witness to that past by having the young narrator relate his experience, and in doing so she problematizes and complexifies the idea of the ghost.

Washington Black is haunted by his plantation past: by the absence in his childhood of father and mother, by a master who would beat him violently, sending a slave catcher to try to find him following his escape, by another master who would help him escape, free him, and yet abandon him in the Arctic. If slave hunter Willard, agent of the slave master, is the ‘ghost’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 296) from the past who can effectively be confronted and disposed of, who ceases to haunt Washington Black, other ‘ghosts’ of the past are addressed differently in the novel. Titch, his putative liberator and father substitute, had abandoned the thirteen-year-old boy in the Arctic, leaving him at risk of death to pursue life for himself, free from his former master. However, it was his own freedom from the past that Titch was pursuing. ‘You are like a ghost’, Titch yells at Washington Black, shouting at him not to follow him into the ‘obliterating whiteness’ of the Artic blizzard (Edugyan 2018, p. 216). ‘I felt,’ writes Washington Black, ‘that Titch was trying to liberate himself from me’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 215).

Having survived the Arctic trauma and the trauma of whiteness, more generally, and hearing many years later that Titch was still alive, Washington Black searches for him, seeking an explanation, acknowledgement, the last stage of his own personal resuscitation from Titch’s haunting presence, for Titch, too, had become ‘an apparition . . .a ghost’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 308). And in the Moroccan desert he finds him, still attempting to build a flying balloon, a new servant boy in tow. Stuck in the very past that continued to haunt him, Titch’s wounds ‘had arrested him in boyhood’, records Washington Black (Edugyan 2018, p. 416), leaving him to attempt endlessly to live up to the tragic ideal of the scientist that was his own absent father, the death by suicide in Barbados of cousin Philip invoking the guilt of childhood violence, a reflection of the violence of the slave plantation. ‘We had the taste of it, we simply could not stop’, Titch tells Washington Black when the latter finally tracks him down: ‘The violence was in us’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 413).

Washington Black’s feelings towards Titch remain ambivalent to the very end, Titch’s confession reinscribing his own non-existence to Titch: ‘I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men’. Yet even as he is damning Titch—and the abolitionist cause, more generally—Washington Black also realizes the limits of his words, indeed, his own indebtedness to one who, despite all, had retained power over him: ‘Even as I spoke these words, I could hear what a false picture they painted, and also how they were painfully true’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 405). And there in the Moroccan desert he comes to his fullest commitment to the Ocean House and to himself. No longer someone under the direction of others, he is his own person, a producer of new worlds, including the Ocean House: ‘I knew then . . . that I would return to London and fight to undo the expunging of my name, that I would devote myself wholly to the project and seek some credit for it’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 410).

Washington Black bears witness to another quite different presence from his plantation past, a redemptive guiding spirit in the person of Big Kit, his plantation caregiver. Memories of Big Kit resurface periodically in the novel, such as when he is diving for specimens and feels the ‘touch’ of her skin (Edugyan 2018, p. 272). As he heads into the Moroccan desert in search of Titch and again when he finds him, he asks how far it is to Dahomey (Edugyan 2018, pp. 388, 409). This was Big Kit’s homeland, marking Africa as ancestral continent. Ever since escaping Barbados and leaving Big Kit to the terror of the plantation, her presence had remained with him, both as a haunting marker of the dehumanizing impact of plantation slavery and as a sign of a liberating spirit guiding him into a future free of oppression. She was the one who provided him with the image of Africa as a place beyond enslavement; and she was the one who provided the protective nail, instrument of self-defence and struggle.

Echoing Benjamin and Derrida, Ranjana Khanna argues that the national archive is a place of forgetting, ‘of not needing to remember, remembering to forget’. Yet, ‘through reading its silences and its hauntings’ the blind spots of nations can be revealed (Khanna, 2003, p. 271). Washington Black enters the archive of the Abolitionist Society in London in search of his own past on Faith plantation in Barbados and he finds there the plantation records donated by Titch. Big Kit, Catherine MacCauley, he discovers, was not just his caregiver, she was his biological mother, and though she hid from him his parentage as a form of protection, she nevertheless gave him the possibility of a future through the depth of her love, hope and faith in him: ‘She loved me with a viciousness that kept me from ever feeling complacent, with the reminder that nothing was permanent, that we would one day be lost to each other’ (Edugyan 2018, p. 344). Seeing her name along with his in the archive unleashes a torrent of melancholic thoughts: her journey to the coast of Africa, the slave forts, the Atlantic crossing, the sun and canes, the suffering, torture and rape.

Edugyan’s novel is a fictional counterarchive, to borrow Baucom’s term for his project of uncovering from the haunting silences of the Zong massacre, a ‘singular history’ that is at the same time ‘a reassembled history of the modern’ (2005, p. 4). If Washington Black makes meaning of the silences in his own life-story, Edugyan brings the silenced narratives of the human damaged in the Atlantic world to the forefront for her readers’ critical attention, and she does so from both a Canadian and a wider Atlantic perspective. Gilroy argues that the resurgence of right-wing ideology and racialized, even manic violence in Europe and the Americas is a manifestation of the ‘broken narcissism’ and ‘paralyzing guilt’ associated with the contemporary failure of the modern nation state to address adequately the history and brutality of empire embedded in its national identity (Gilroy, 2005, pp. 99-102). While Big Kit is a ghostly reminder of that brutality and its haunting presence, she is also a caring and life-giving ancestral spirit guide, expressive of resilience and struggle against such brutality and its contemporary manifestations. In the remembrance of her Washington Black finds the strength to work towards building a new future for himself and the world.

Big Kit is not the only woman who plays a central role in Washington Black’s life. As a young man sketching on the shores of the Bedford Basin he encounters Tanna, who, like him, knows the marine world as a diver and an artist. Tanna introduces Washington Black to her father, the zoologist, and becomes Washington Black’s trusted advisor, healer and lover: she mends his wounds after the fight with Willard and motivates him to move forward with his vision of the sea menagerie; she accompanies him to the London archives and joins his journey in pursuit of Titch and reconciliation with the past. Washington Black encounters the sublime beauty of the female octopus shortly after meeting Tanna, while he is in the employ of her father Goff. The octopus is Tanna’s favourite sea creature, octopodes ‘the gods of the sea’, she states (Edugyan 2018, p. 307). There is a direct link between the hope that the octopus engenders in him, the building of the Ocean House inspired by the octopus, and his new life with Tanna. Underwater, mere minutes before his encounter with the octopus, the shadows of the past and their accretions in the present fall away and Washington Black experiences a merciful nothingness. When the octopus appears in front of him, it is as though a deep spiritual energy has come into being, containing the sublime beauty of nature, the guiding ancestral force that was Big Kit, and the love that would bind him to Tanna.

For Washington Black, the ocean is a space of healing, where the multiple wounds and lingering traumas of the Middle Passage and the plantation can be released. It is as though the spirits of those massacred on the Zong and other slave ships have been transformed underwater, their remembrance becoming the basis for the possibility of building a new, caring world exemplified in the relationship between Washington Black, Tanna and the Ocean House. Guided by an ancestral presence embodied in Big Kit and her love for her son, an ancestral principle of love, hope and healing, of life and struggle, Washington Black finds in the depths of the ocean the strength to work towards overcoming the ever repeating echo of the ghosts of traumas past.

 Literary invocations

From Barbados to Virginia, from the Arctic to Nova Scotia, from London to Amsterdam and Morocco, Washington Black, descendant of Dahomey, transited the Atlantic, witness to the history of slavery and freedom, colonialism and modernity, the African presence in the modern state. The world of Washington Black remained a colonial world, the British empire competing mercilessly for resources, labour and markets. Canada no longer had slaves, but racialized segregation and exploitation of black and other persons of colour continued, as did an enforced reservation system that deprived Indigenous people of their most basic human rights, not to mention land. The United States was free of British rule, but people of African descent continued to be enslaved in the first instance, and to suffer the ignominy of racial law, in the second. Meanwhile, revolutionary Haiti and Latin America were already ushering in a new postcolonial world, facing the tribulations of the postcolony, both beacon of possibility and warning of false starts to the independence movements of the next century.

Inheritors of a regime of colonial violence, American colonists founded their new republic in a violent struggle against their British overlords, all the while maintaining the racially based violence of the colonial order. President-to-be George Washington spent two months in Barbados in 1751, two decades prior to the American War of Independence, and the house in which he lived is on show for tourists today. If the master can make a sardonic joke of the slave by naming him George Washington Black, the novelist can offer an ironic subversion of the master discourse: from founding white national hero, war president and slave holder to former enslaved turned artist, scientist, architect and engineer, black historical actor and narrator of his own story, marks a revolutionary leap in a struggle that continues today.^[3]

There is work to be done, offers Sekyi-Otu, and African literature as exemplified in works such as Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, invoke such labour: ‘Rather than engendering genial postmodernist agnosticism, the story of immemorial rift and scattered meaning here triggers proverbs of ‘work’, an invitation to the unending labor of founding meaning’ (2019, p. 271). That labour consists of remembrance, reciprocity and return, Sekyi-Otu continues, ‘an enterprise of collective self-origination made necessary by reopening primordial questions of human existence and association, remembrance of things not yet conceived and done with respect to those primordial questions and possibilities’ (2019, p. 272). In similar fashion, Washington Black inserts itself into the history of the Americas, Europe and Africa as an invocation of a new foundation, a renewed anti-racist, postcolonial challenge for us today. And in the strangely incomplete reconciliation between former benevolent master and former enslaved who was allowed to eat at his master’s table, whiteness and blackness, signatures of the colonial plantation and imperial adventure of the modern Atlantic, unfold themselves in the ‘continued journeying’ which Sekyi-Otu, following Armah, presents as both necessity and possibility, as the hope for a new way of human relationality (2019, p. 274).

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