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Foreword

To name a thing is a powerful act, with implications and consequences far reaching in nature, conveying for the named both meaning and purpose. Insofar as it concerns the human condition, it is a transformative event, by which the unknown travels a circuit of discovery, of intelligibility. But such a process also constitutes a beginning, at times in a literal sense, while always in a cognitive one. To name a thing is equally transactional, conveying import for both the one who names and the one who is named. To the degree that the name endures, the former achieves recognition as progenitor, a causal source in at least some sense, while the latter is given visibility. To these aspects of naming must be added its spatial quality, locating the one naming and the one named in mutual social relation. But such pursuit of nomenclature is also directional, as the name bestowed, whatever its meaning, provides a level of orientation. And direction, by its very definition—and notwithstanding its capaciousness—also has boundaries, a certain terminality, situating the one named relative to all and anyone else, delimiting the universe of possible permutations of experience.

Wendy Wilson-Fall’s incisive book Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic is about the social and cultural properties and implications of naming and demonstrates that the more specific the naming, the more powerful and consequential the act. In following the story of the Malagasy in what becomes the United States, she succeeds in continuing to dismantle, piece by piece, the formerly unassailable notion of the improbable, the implausible, and the far-fetched as it relates to the originating experiences of African Americans. And in advancing our understanding of those origins, she simultaneously underscores their heterogeneity, effectively making the point that the African American community issues from an array of geophysical points of departure.

Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic is an arresting example of how black folk collectively remember a past that extends centuries back in time, yet without benefit of written records or other forms of recorded documentation. It is a moving account of how families refuse to allow this special part of them to die, to go unrecognized, to be unnamed. It is an inquiry into insistence, reflecting a quiet, unshakable confidence of verities for which collaboration would be welcome, but in any event it is not to be confused with verification, for which there is no absolute need. The claim of Malagasy descent is a certainty, resting not in the testimony of the learned, nor reliant on the certification of the bureau, but rather very much grounded in an intergenerational transfer of information and family tradition that is self-authenticating. It is assertive in its position, unwavering in its conviction.

Deftly and masterfully employing the skills and insights of the social anthropologist, Wilson-Fall has produced an amazing account of the ways in which the traditions of families claiming such descent indeed interact with and connect to “history,” to the written record of transoceanic voyages and enslavement and postemancipatory mercantile activity on an international scale. Carefully collecting and “listening” to multiple family traditions that have as their common thread the report of an ancestor from Madagascar, Wilson-Fall has undertaken the historical work of searching for the imprint of that ancestor in the ledgers of slavers and planters and runaway slave advertisements, and she has found it. The author limits her inquiry to North America, and more specifically the American South, where she has uncovered evidence for the importation of the Malagasy, evidence that comports well with the traditions of those families for whom Madagascar has long been recognized as a place of origin. But in narrowing the aperture, the author simultaneously draws attention to the fact that captives from Madagascar were distributed throughout the Americas by the thousands.

The more precise focus of Memories of Madagascar and Slavery is eighteenth-century Virginia, where some 1,450 Malagasy captives arrived between 1719 and 1721. Though sold in small parcels of several individuals upon disembarkation, Wilson-Fall’s research indicates the majority remained geographically proximate to each other on farms and plantations along the York and Rappahannock Rivers, suggesting they would have been able to maintain degrees of social commerce, critical in that they were engulfed by African captives from elsewhere. Indeed, in the first twenty-five years of the eighteenth century, nearly thirty-eight thousand Africans are reported to have arrived in Virginia and Maryland, of which slightly over twenty-five hundred hailed from the Swahili coast, Madagascar, and possibly other Indian Ocean islands, representing a little over 6 percent of the Chesapeake’s enslaved population. If the importation record for the whole of the eighteenth century is considered, the Malagasy contingent becomes entirely subsumed, representing even less of a fraction (less than 2 percent) of the slightly more than one hundred forty-two thousand Africans brought to the Chesapeake.¹ It is truly a wonder, therefore, that any memory of the Malagasy survives at all, and that it does necessitates explanation.

Part of that explanation lies in Wilson-Fall’s skillful discussion of the period following Virginia’s 1782 Manumission Act, when a number of freed persons, which would have included descendants of the Malagasy, ventured together into such towns as Petersburg and Hopewell in search of employment, where again they would have maintained social and cultural ties. But the positing of the Malagasy in the corporate recollection was not wholly dependent on constant renewal and replenishing of such ties, as the post-1808 domestic slave trade resulted in their movement to the Lower South, relocations very much embedded in family lore. To these migrants Wilson-Fall would add captives illegally transported into American territory, with many family traditions actually periodizing the arrival of their ancestors, specifying the 1830s and 1840s, circumstances made all the more plausible by the level of detail describing locations, individuals of relevance, and other circumstances.

That most of the Malagasy were women and children raises fascinating questions about how their memory may have been enshrined or otherwise elevated to levels sufficient to facilitate their recollection by descendants as well as others (as contemporaries making no claim to Malagasy ancestry nonetheless also remarked on their having passed this way). Wilson-Fall offers informed suggestions as to how mothers may have negotiated the concept of lineage and descent with, for example, Igbo fathers for whom patriliny may have been the norm. Such insistence on the part of mothers may well explain an ongoing, fervent embrace of Malagasy ancestry, but in any event Memories of Madagascar and Slavery attends to matters of gender in ways that provide depth and texture to what can otherwise often be flat and assumptive discussions of social and cultural relations among the enslaved.

But of course, another reason why the memory of the Malagasy would have been preserved concerns the theme of exceptionality, a matter Wilson-Fall addresses unflinchingly, though with acuity and dexterity. The Malagasy were everywhere described as phenotypically distinct from (other) Africans, with hair textures and facial features that garnered attention and commentary. Wilson-Fall is careful to explain that in a context of virulent racism, in which everything about the African was denigrated and disrespected, it is understandable that individuals and families with “atypical” characteristics would experience that difference in ways that brought a bit of relief from unrelenting disparagement. It may have been the case, she suggests, that the interest in Malagasy women living in towns was such that many entered concubinage, bearing children to white males, which further suggests that an ensuing free black population would have disproportionately reflected Malagasy ancestry.

That the Malagasy and their descendants would acknowledge if not embrace differences with the similarly oppressed is hardly surprising and fits well within a trope of exceptionality that can also be observed among African Muslims in the Americans, who were often enough viewed by the slaveholding class as separate from other Africans by virtue of their distinctive physical features as well as their religion.² African Muslims did not always internalize such divergence, but in enough cases they did, viewing themselves as a distinct community and separate from other Africans—even though they were all Africans, a construct whose meaning would become increasingly apparent over centuries. In contrast the Malagasy, though in some ways not unlike African Muslims, did intermingle with Africans and their descendants, such that their progeny do not claim Malagasy ancestry to the exclusion of other lines of descent, recognizing their heritage as multiple.

The examples of African Muslims as well as the Malagasy also make the point that the trope of exceptionality was not always or simply a response to racism, though it was performed within the context of New World slavery, but that differentiation often had origins in Old World settings, from where it was transferred to the Americas along with the captives themselves, where it underwent magnification and embellishment as a component of racial discourse. As such, the Hausa-Yoruba would emerge as a leading configuration in early nineteenth-century Bahia, reflecting a dynamic that began on the soils of what would become southwestern Nigeria; while the Kromanti (“Coromantee”), who would earn a reputation as the defiant ones in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, issued out of conditions of conflict internal to what is now Ghana and Ivory Coast.

The intensification of differentiation among the enslaved and subsequently oppressed is therefore one of the more unsavory aspects of hierarchies of power organized along grids of racial and ethnic categorization, and it has had lasting effects. Even so, it is a marvel that, as Wilson-Fall reflects, individuals and families transported from one side of the world to the other would remember a specific place-name—Madagascar—without having any firm idea as to where it might be located. The embrace of Malagasy ancestry, in addition to its various social implications, therefore also speaks of a resolve, a determination to preserve human dignity—a human dignity with a face—with a name.

The record of the Malagasy held as slaves in the American South is remarkable enough, but their experience may not have been confined to processes of enslavement and manumission, as Wilson-Fall further reports that they may have also arrived in the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States as merchants and sailors, possibly as indentures. Again, this is based on family histories that maintain Malagasy ancestors were aboard American and British vessels as crew members, a development that could be related to the formation of such arrangements in South Africa, the latter possibility established through the author’s research efforts.

By focusing on a particular formation—the Malagasy—Memories of Madagascar and Slavery also makes important conceptual and methodological interventions into the study of slavery and its aftermath. As to the former, one of the book’s more striking innovations is an expansion on and elaboration of the concept of the shipmate. Heretofore understood to represent the bonding process of the Middle Passage, Wilson-Fall extends the notion to the final sale of persons in small parcels to individual families, after having experienced the transoceanic voyage with a largely homogeneous cohort. This “fourth great fracture,” as she labels this final sale, followed the initial capture in Madagascar, embarkation, and disembarkation in Virginia. The effect of reconsidering the shipmate experience and lengthening its gestation is to emphasize an increasing sense of isolation among the Malagasy, countered by an intensification of the bond between those who remained together into the fourth phase, in turn heightening the sense of their uniqueness.

With respect to methodology, the historian can learn much from the author’s approach, by which she produces, chapter by chapter, information on various aspects of the Malagasy presence as established or verified through conventional records and written testimony, followed by a discussion of the way in which the evidence maps onto those components of family tradition that relate most closely to the period and experience in question. The order of the process of relation and substantiation is revealing, inverting the customary progression of authentication by suggesting that it is the recorded evidence that is in need of oral tradition’s verification, rather than the reverse. But more important, the method reflects the seriousness with which the author treats the family traditions. Standard indices constituting historical verity are provided in collaborative fashion, but familial collective memory is given at least equal weight.

In fact, it is indeed the family traditions that formed the basis, the reason, the impetus for the search for collaborative information. It is the family tradition that is the generative source as well as the connective tissue for the whole of the project, without which we have little save disaggregated, occasional references to a runaway “Madagascar” here and there. Their memorialization by subsequent generations is convincing testimony that they did not run in vain.

The historian typically approaches resolution of a problem through consultation with an archive of some sort, which has often already been organized in a fashion in anticipation of particular lines of inquiry, if not out of an interest in actually shaping that inquiry. As such, it is an artifice as well as an instrument of power, its collections emblematic of social and economic disparities implicit in the very process that determines what is preserved and what is discarded. To be sure, the circumstances and experiences, even the voices of the disenfranchised and marginalized, can be found there, the successful recovery of which is testimony to the expertise and dedication of the researcher so committed, as well as to ever-developing techniques designed to uncover such experiences, making it possible to read against the archive, extracting from it information often thought unobtainable.

In contrast, collective memory represents those persons and places and circumstances for whom and which the archive was not intended, serving as a counterbalance and corrective to what is regarded as official and authoritative. It addresses, in its own inimical way, that which the archive refuses to honor, speaking to the silences and ellipses and vacuities in the standard account. As such, it is inherently oppositional and highly resistant to efforts at policing its content and claims. It necessarily exists in the realm of the recalcitrant; indeed, it must inhabit uninhibited, lawless spaces into which authority is forbidden entry. Rather then a “subjugated knowledge,” it is more of a parallel discourse, and as opposed to being policed by outsiders, it serves as its own sentinel over a past that would otherwise be readily denied and conveniently forgotten.

In this way, the realm of the familial recollection is critical to the pursuit of the African American experience. There remain many accounts of forebears both enslaved and free, born in Africa or the Americas or elsewhere, whose inclusion into the aggregate investigation of the past would add considerable detail and shed much needed additional light on the sojourn and travail of black folk in the Americas. However, such stories and information tend to travel only interior circuits of familial exchange. In some instances the exclusivity of the traditions may indeed be with all intentionality, but there are other traditions not so restricted, and simply have not been afforded serious attention. They have no one with whom to share their information, there is no one listening. In the United States alone, given the African American population, such circuitries must range in the thousands, if not even more.

By tapping into these circuitries and taking them seriously, Wendy Wilson-Fall has shown the way to begin accessing such accounts, offering a method by which to bring such parallel discourses into conversation with conventional means of understanding the past. As such, her work may well prove to be a major new avenue through which knowledge of the African American experience can travel. To be sure, reasons for sheltering family lore would include an unwillingness to subject what is precious to the scrutiny of a process that can be indifferent, callous, and even hostile. But there is so much to learn, and so much to gain, as Memories of Madagascar and Slavery demonstrates. Wendy Wilson-Fall has produced an exquisite rendering of a process spanning thousands of miles and hundreds of years. We do well to emulate her example.

Michael A. Gomez

November 2014

New York