Sansay's Secret History

When I finished reading Sansay’s Secret History, I was at first surprised by the “scant attention to the cataclysmic events of the Haitian revolution, the complex politics of race and colonial power, and the often horrific scenes of warfare that took place during the very years of the novel’s exposition” (Dillon 78). However, I appreciated the novel’s complex treatment of social and marital relations within the context of the revolutionary period, especially through the parallel between Clara’s oppressive marriage and the slave rebellion. St. Louis’s violence against Clara mirrors the violence the slaves experienced under their cruel masters. The novel not only shows the success of the slave revolution, but also Clara’s success in escaping her husband. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon points out in her article that “a surprising effect of the revolution is thus to enable white women to escape from the power of men” (92). The large scale rebellion that topples the hierarchy in St. Domingue paves the way for shifts in gender dynamics.

 

Mary’s letters to Burr reveal that life goes on during periods of warfare and revolution, thus seemingly trivial concerns will continue to be discussed and worried about in addition to bigger issues. In many ways, Mary’s attention to social experiences is a coping mechanism. She often tells Burr that the horrors she experiences “cannot be imagined” (61) or that she “cannot describe” (83) them. Her inability to fully convey the gravity of the situation in addition to a desire to distract herself must be strong motivations for her sudden jumps to describing social experiences. When describing social life, she is often able to take the focus away from herself, as well, acting as an objective observer. In focusing on other people’s issues, like her sister’s unhappy and unhealthy marriage, she can avoid talking about her own issues. Mary even acknowledges in one of her letters to Burr, “You say, that in relating public affairs, or those of Clara, I forget my own, or conceal them under this appearance of neglect” (89). While Mary comes up with excuses, Burr’s comment still resonates since the reader must have thought the same thing.

 

Dillon discusses the novel as a creole novel in which Sansay’s “account of the community of creole women that is created in the wake of the Haitian Revolution indicates that she understood herself and other white U.S. citizens to be creoles as well” (88). Dillon’s reading of Sansay’s novel is very much in line with Edward Watts’ arguments for a new way of reading texts in his “Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy” article we read last week. In this way, I think Dillon provides a useful and provocative reading of a text that shows an alternative history to the myth of American nationalism. However, Dillon’s contrast of the white creole women from St. Domingue to the French leaves out another important cultural group—the Spanish.

 

As Dillon explains, “Mary’s initial view of the creole is eventually subject to a direct reversal. Ultimately, she will contend, the apparent lack of stability and seriousness of the creole masks superior capacities for self-support that are revealed by the violent upheaval of revolution” (89). Yet, Mary exhibits ambivalence toward the Spanish creoles as well. When in St. Jago, she gives many accounts showing “the inhabitants of this island have long since reached the last degree of corruption” (126). However, this contrasts with her experience with Jacinta in Barracoa. Jacinta is a “native of the Havanna” who speaks Spanish, and despite having to move to the “deserted” region of Barracoa, “she never repines, and seeks to diffuse around her the cheerfulness by which she is animated” (108). After leaving Baraccoa, Mary writes, “a sigh for the peaceful solitude of their retreat will often heave my breast amid the mingled scenes of pleasure and vexation in which I shall be again engaged. Fortunate people!” (108). In some ways, the Spanish creoles have an idyllic lifestyle.

 

Clara’s letters to Mary also show the negative aspects of the Spanish as their filth and poverty fills her “with disgust” (143). However, Clara doesn’t blame the Spanish people, “believing that it is entirely owing to their vicious government” (144). Like the French creoles in St. Domingue, there are important political issues that complicate the Spanish characters. Both sisters’ accounts reveal that every culture has its vices and problems, but there are always examples of goodness as well.

Letting Go of My Established Principles

The article that most struck me this week was Suzanne Bost’s “Doing the Hemisphere Differently.” Bost claims, “It’s hard work for those of us educated in the US to unlearn the narratives and definitions that govern US academic studies” (235). I think part of what was so disorienting for me last week was the sense that I had to “unlearn” so much of what I was previously taught. I thought it was important to include texts by marginalized writers within the field of American studies, but I hadn’t even considered looking beyond the boundaries of the United States to Spanish literature written in Cuba, for example. I wanted to move beyond the canon, but at the same time I really liked reading the canonical works. I was having a hard time reconciling everything I love about what I’ve already learned with all of the new compelling ideas I was encountering. However, as Bost (along with the rest of the writers) argues, “we must be willing to surrender our own narrow perspectives to wider and longer views” (236). As hard as it is for me, I agree, especially because I don’t think there’s one objective truth or reality. We need multiple perspectives to have a more holistic understanding of American history. The stories that the white European settlers tell are of course different from the stories that the Native Americans tell. Yet, Bost challenged me to think about perspective in another way entirely. Multiple perspectives don’t have to be locked in time; instead, our multiple perspectives can be taken from across time. She explains that “we in the present bear the imprint of the past, but this imprinting is not linear or irreversible,” which is illustrated by Chicana/o writers creating “alternative pasts that are more useful than the real” (237). Not only did Bost get me thinking in a new way, she also showed one example of how texts by minority writers can enrich American studies—these Chicana/o writers bring something to American literature that’s entirely different from the norm.

Bost’s attention to difference rather than similarity was especially provocative. Last week’s readings got me thinking mostly about how we could link seemingly disparate texts together, seeking for connections by which we could compare them. Contact zones imply difference, but I wanted to seek hidden similarities. However, Bost highlights the importance of embracing difference (while admitting her postmodern bias). She argues, “Focusing on shared terms might never get past the dynamics of imperialism and resistance to imperialism, missing local realities and perceptions not defined by the empire” (238). In line with our class discussion last week, Bost’s argument articulates one way in which the “transnational” turn just reinforces American exceptionalism. Even if we read “outside” texts that we can compare to our US texts, we aren’t really fixing the problem. We have to be willing to seek out texts that at first glance may not seem to fit in with our US texts at all. In spite of, and perhaps because of, their differences, these types of texts will give us a fuller picture of American history. In her last paragraph, Bost asks, “What if we were to jettison familiar methods like genealogy or comparison and approach the Americas through collage or dialogue?” I’ve always loved the idea of a dialogue because it implies two equal parties bringing what they can to the table. The idea of “dialogue” is part of what made me embrace Porter’s “quadruple set of relations” last week—I saw her putting continents in dialogue with one another while keeping things organized. I’m normally big on organization and fitting things into neat little categories, but I’m going to try to let that go to see where it can take me in this class. We don’t need neatly organized continents in dialogue, we need individual texts in dialogue, or maybe in a collage as Bost suggests. We can even embrace the messy and incommensurable.

The Transnational Conundrum

After reading the numerous arguments for why and how we should expand our conception of American literature, I felt overwhelmed. Clearly it’s important to decenter the United States and include the voices of many currently marginalized writers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. However, I struggle to see how we could possibly do them all justice within American studies alone. Moya and Saldivar mention in “Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary” that “the literature that is enshrined in a canon has less to do with what is valued at the time of the making of an individual work than it does with what is valued at the time a canon is put together” (6). Values have shifted since the traditional American literary canon was put together, and it would be crazy to stick to that traditional canon with everything we now know about American history and the dialogues taking place across borders for hundreds of years. The hardest task that I envision for the future of American studies is choosing which writers to now include, and which ones to exclude. Even if scholars can theoretically keep reading more and more neglected works, American literature classes are limited in scope. My undergraduate courses in American literature struggled to fit in the important canonical works, let alone works by marginalized writers. Whenever we were assigned works by ethnic minorities, we rarely discussed how those works conflicted with or related to the canonical works.

As time goes on, it will only be more difficult to fit everything into our literature courses. Moya and Saldivar explain that we currently live in a period of “rapid economic internationalization” in which “transformation is being played out before our very eyes” (12). The transnational imaginary is inevitable. As American literature progresses throughout this century, the current literature will be in more and more of an interplay with the rest of the globe. Scholars of the future will have an even bigger task ahead of them, so we must begin the transition for them. For now, maybe the answer is changing the American literature curriculum to reflect Carolyn Porter’s “quadruple set of relations between (1) Europe and Latin America; (2) Latin America and North America; (3) North America and Europe; and (4) Africa and both Americas” (510). Dividing American literature courses into these four categories could help professors tackle the problem of showing the relationships between the different continents while still doing justice to the writers from each place.