Do Not Go Gently: Oroonoko, Race, and the Problem of Violence

“Caesar [Oroonoko] made an harangue to ‘em [the slaves] of the miseries and ignominies of slavery, counting up all their toils and sufferings, under such loads, burdens, and drudgeries as were fitter for beasts than men...”

“…they [the white men] all concluded that…Caesar [Oroonoko] ought to be made an example to all the Negroes, to fright ‘em from daring to threaten their betters, their lords and masters; and at this rate no man was safe from his own slaves…”

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

Three hundred and twenty-seven years after the publication of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, we are still debating race, racially-motivated violence, and the question of how much suffering any person or people can put up with until they reach a breaking point. All over the United States, in the last year, we have been seeing the breaking point reached and the social order breached. Many shake their heads in anger, frustration, or dismay, that the peaceful protests against police brutality of African Americans have turned to violence, riot, and looting. And yet, no doubt many of the same people would agree that slave revolts in the New World were justified reactions to slavery.

            I do not wish to oversimplify the case, however, or to somehow overstate Behn’s prescience

Riot fires burn in Baltimore.

or her novella’s ability to comment on our situation today, all over the US and most especially, lately, in Baltimore, in my home state of Maryland. And yet, it seems that the old adage holds true: all roads lead to Rome. I had planned to write about Oroonoko this month because I was teaching it again, after a couple years’ break. It just happens that the night I sit down to write, the riot fires are lit, and Behn’s words seem more applicable than ever: white heteropatriarchy still insists that we must make examples of rebellious black men, lest the slave owners be threatened by their own slaves.

            What struck me the most, re-reading Oroonoko;, or, The Royal Slave, this time around (my fourth time, at least, possibly my fifth) was the violence that permeates the text. From the gruesome arrow-in-eyeball that puts Oroonoko next in the line of succession, to Oroonoko’s final, brutal burning and dismemberment, Oroonoko is a violent text. The violence is not limited to any one kind of person or people—the Africans, the Europeans, and even some of the Indian groups described by Behn’s narrator all perpetrate horrific acts of violence. And the recipients of violence are not just men and women: the victims of violence include the animals of the jungle as well.

            Behn’s text served an important role in the early abolitionist cause, and in the past, I read her depictions of violence as shock tactics applied for the purposes of garnering sympathy for Oroonoko, Imoinda, and the other slaves who “toi[l] on all the tedious week till Black Friday; and then, whether they worked or not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they promiscuously, the innocent with the guilty, suffered the infamous whip, the sordid stripes, from their fellow slaves, till their blood trickled from all parts of their body.” The body is a fragile, permeable, extremely vulnerable entity in Oroonoko, subject to both physical and mental anguish. Even when Oroonoko takes matters into his own hands and kills his precious Imoinda, his body then fails him: he cannot get up and wreak his planned revenge on the whites. Instead, he languishes by her body, unable to move or leave.

            The natives of Surinam, however, are not all gentle and sweet, either. There are those who are described as taking part in brutal, gruesome self-mutilation for the purposes of displaying their grit and courage. Upon seeing these mutilated men, these “hobgoblins,” the narrator, Oroonoko and the others learn that these men have competed in the past for the glory of leading armies into battle: “they are asked what they dare do to show they are worthy to lead an army. When he who is first asked, making no reply, cuts off his nose and throws it contemptibly on the ground; and the other does something to himself that he thinks surpasses him, and perhaps deprives himself of lips and an eye; so they slash on till one gives out, and many have died in this debate.”

            Later, Oroonoko himself shows his contempt for the white men by “cut[ting] a piece of flesh

Behn's gruesome descriptions were
no exaggeration.

from his own throat, and thr[owing] it at ‘em…At that, he ripped up his own belly, and took his bowels and pulled ‘em out.” Incredibly, Oroonoko survives this self-harm, is taken back to the plantation, is healed, only to be burnt alive while simultaneously being dismembered by the evil whites of the plantation. The metaphorical resonances of this brutality—that white men would patch up self-destructive, rebellious black men just so they can kill them even more brutally at their own leisure—suggest the inequalities built into our own system of socioeconomic oppression and injustice.

            Oroonoko asks us to consider some weighty questions, including those relating to class as well as race. Do we empathize more strongly with Oroonoko because he is a “royal” slave, a beautiful, noble prince, while his jailers are former convicts, sent to the colonies for lack of a better place to put them? Similarly, do we castigate looters and rioters merely for their actions, or for the race and/or class they appear to represent?

            Beyond questions of race, though, Oroonoko seems to suggest or possibly even critique the inevitability and the brutality of violence. The only persons who do not perpetrate violence actively are the women of the text: Imoinda saves herself from the King’s rage by claiming that Oroonoko took her by violence and in the end he kills her (though she does help convince him to do it) while the narrator and the other women of the colony are routinely pushed out of the scene of action so that violence between men can take place. Is violence, then, a masculine trait? Do the women participate in the violence if they only do it passively?

            Finally, there is the question of brutality and civilization. There appears to be no difference in the level of savagery perpetrated by the different groups—African, European, South American—though there are some allusions to noble or honorable violence. The differences between honorable and dishonorable violence are elusive at best in Oroonoko. Instead, we are confronted with the long history of human brutality—the brutality that Oroonoko accuses his fellow slaves of falling into by refusing to rebel against the iniquities perpetrated against them. Oroonoko calls his fellow-slaves “insensible asses” who have “lost the divine quality of men.” The line between civilization and savagery, the rational and the irrational, and the orderly and the brutal is hazy and uncertain, subject to interpretation.

            At one point, Oroonoko manages to kill a tiger that had killed many “lambs and pigs.” Oroonoko manages to shoot the tiger in the eye, “but when the heart of this courageous animal was taken out, there were seven bullets of lead in it, and the wounds seamed up with great scars.” The tiger (a cougar or puma) is brutal, yet it kills for food; others had attempted to kill it, and it had survived. Eventually, though, it’s too much: Oroonoko’s arrow finally does her in. Is it mere irony that Oroonoko is the one to kill this vicious yet noble beast of the forest?  Or are they both to be understood as noble victims of forces larger and more powerful than any individual? Despite the narrator’s suggestion that many in the area believed the tiger to be a “devil” rather than a “mortal thing,” the tiger’s violence cannot be understood as purposefully malicious. It kills to survive.

            And perhaps that is the crux of the whole thing: when is violence justified? When it is the only means left by which to survive.

Thoughtful Grading and Secret Sin

It’s the end of the semester, and that means grading. For many of us in higher ed, this is only a continuation of the grading madness that inevitably seems to engulf the second half of the semester.

My back is aching, my wrists are tired, and my thighs are scorched from too much laptop-on-lap time, yet I have to admit I’m enjoying reading my students’ paper drafts in my American literature class.

I will be the first to voice my concern about rising class sizes
and the detriment they pose to student learning, but grading can also be a conversation.

The course is a survey, which I’ve written about before, and it’s my first time teaching an American literature course. I’ve been in my “BritLit” pigeon-hole for so long, and then suddenly I found myself discussing pilgrims and Puritans, conquistadors and Christians, revolution and social rebellion.

I found myself enjoying the course quite a bit. I still find American literature overwhelmingly earnest, moralistic, and overly didactic, but these qualities also provided excellent fodder for class discussions. The course covered the earliest texts of the Americas up to the Civil War/1865 which meant that, like many survey courses, it contained a little bit of everything.

As we wended our way to the close of the semester, I wondered how my students would approach the final paper, which charged them with choosing two texts by two different authors and discussing them together while also using outside sources. My students had struggled with the first paper of the semester, the first of two shorter response papers. There was significant improvement on the 2^nd response paper, but the final paper requires the students to analyze texts in conversation with one another and to make more complex arguments about them.

I was both pleased and surprised, however, when we discussed the thematic and stylistic connections between authors in class. Students put together texts in innovative and compelling ways—and these connections showed up in their paper drafts as well.

One student put Emily Dickinson’s poetry in conversation with Benjamin Franklin’s essay “To Those Who Would Remove to America” in order to make an argument about how these two very different authors approach the pursuit of happiness. Another student discussed Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s short story “The Two Offers” in order to make an argument about how these authors understand the self. A third student discussed the individual versus society using Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

In many ways, these would not be combinations that I would have put together at first glance. I was less surprised, for example, when students wrote about slavery in Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, or death and horror in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Just when I thought I’d read all the unusual papers, I picked up another unusual combination: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” as works that both explore characters who wish to escape reality.

It’s possible these combinations seem so unusual to me because I don’t normally study American literature, but regardless I was excited to note the different connections students made between texts. Maybe the execution wasn’t stellar, maybe they still need to flesh out the ideas or add in more quotations—these papers are still in the draft stage. Nevertheless, I already feel like I have learned a lot from reading these papers and from seeing my students’ improvement. While commenting on drafts before students turn in the final draft can be time-consuming, it does mean that paper-writing becomes a conversation between students and instructors.

When I think back, I realize that I never got as much feedback on papers in college as I give now to my students. Of course, I wish my classes were smaller so the burden of putting comments on papers wasn’t so heavy, but I can’t deny that this process leads to better communication of requirements, better student understanding of the writing process, and, ultimately, better quality papers.

Along the way, I also get to witness the transformation of ideas through writing and re-writing. I might even, sometimes, read something in a student paper that sparks my imagination, as when one of my students wrote that Bartleby perpetrates a type of “metaphysical crime” when he refuses to leave the office and just “hangs around.” The student further suggests that it is because Bartleby’s intentions are opaque that his behavior incites the social unrest.

It's hard to miss the irony of Melville's classic
short story when I sit down to grade stacks
of student papers.

This idea reminded me of our class discussions about “Bartleby” and Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”, and how the behavior of Bartleby and the minister, with his refusal to explain the veil, provoke social unrest—merely by seeming to be so different than the rest of the people who surround them. Both Bartleby and the Hawthorne’s minister challenge social expectations by being unlike others—and by having veiled intentions. Others project their own insecurities, shames, and fears onto them, hating these “different” characters because they remind them of their own inadequacies, their own “secret sins,” to use Hawthorne’s term.

I couldn’t help but connect this discussion in class to what has been happening in Ferguson, MO. Ferguson has been in my classroom conversations all semester, as I discussed the representation of African Americans on screen in my Writing 1 class; as students researched police brutality in my Writing 2 class; and as we discussed the history of slavery, abolitionism, and the fraught nature of personal narrative and the American Dream in my American literature course.

As with many controversial news stories, the events in Ferguson are subject to interpretation; each day we see the war of different perspectives on what happened there. Ferguson is our black veil, it is our Bartleby who won’t leave the office….we each project onto it our own secret sins, our own explanation of why it happened and what it means. But like the minister’s veil, which covers his face even in the grave, sending posthumous shudders through the remaining citizens, there will never be a simple explanation to the events in Ferguson.

How do we interpret the many images, headlines, news clips and
sound-bites coming out of Ferguson, related protests around the US,
or any other news story, for that matter?

And so, it’s the end of the semester, and though I’m tired in body, I feel energized in mind. It’s moments like these that I see clearly why we who research should also teach; the intellectual interactions we have with our students allow us to see things anew, to consider new angles, to question the usual juxtapositions that we rely on for interpreting the world around us—and our research.