Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic
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From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored. Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history. By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.
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Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic
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A neat line from a specific Malagasy village to the early captives who came to America or from those captives to the people who tell their story today cannot be drawn. Most details of slave ancestors’ lives before captivity have been lost, if they were ever transmitted, as discussed above. The narratives show an internal struggle and dialogue whose main forum was the slave community or the segregated black community. Though the narratives are told through the aegis of the family, it is also useful to consider the possible meanings of the aggregate of families who share this practice of storytelling to question the metanarrative, the possible overall meaning of the narratives as a collection of stories. The subject of this book is, therefore, not the biography of an individual or individuals, but rather an attempt to describe a disparate group of people with common origins and common practices. It is a sort of ethnographic biography of an experience.
Commenting on Michael Lambek’s essay on remembering as moral practice, Maurice Bloch observes that there are instances where “questions of individual memory are developed by means of a public idiom and conversely the memory burdens of individuals contribute to the reproduction of that idiom and its ability to continue to commemorate the past [in Madagascar].”19 This description could also describe others’ cultural practices, such as those whose stories are in this volume. Their family narratives seem to be about, and used by, a network of families and are in fact sustained by such networks. In fact, the stories defy biological logic. They supersede the intricate mathematics of subdivision in genetic histories. If such beliefs are not based on the force of physical proof or on the evidence of an essentialist self-view of purity, what is the logic of their persistence? Do these narratives also have some moral functions? The answer to these questions is the main theme of this book.
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