Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Wendy Wilson-Fall

of the family narratives derive from a family history linked to the slave cohort of the eighteenth century or slaves smuggled into the United States in the nineteenth century. It also suggests that contemporary family narratives of free Malagasy immigrants likely stem from accounts of lived experiences. As with Equiano, there are no written sources to lend credibility to a claimed identity that precedes the American experience. However, I am most interested in what importance the narratives have for the people who use and recite them. I am less concerned with proving that they are “true,” because the written documentation necessary to make that claim has not been found and perhaps was never written.

      In the case of the nascent African American community of the eighteenth century, the racial concept of “black” people in America as a new, homogeneous group was being constructed at the same time that various Europeans acquiesced to new identities of being “white” and American. Later, in the early days of the republic and particularly in the mid-nineteenth century, prior national or ethnic origins were to have little public meaning for those blacks born on American soil. In response to the problems of understanding past black identities, some African American genealogical narratives are presented here as a way to explore how some people today imagine and remember their ancestry beyond being “black” or “mixed” in the United States, where laws governing racial identity have been strictly applied until very recently.

      The contradiction implicit in adjusting to a new, despised identity while holding on to an older, more dignified one applies to early immigrants of African and Malagasy descent as well as to slaves. For example, the particular ethnic or national identity of (nonwhite) sailors who “jumped ship” or otherwise opted to remain in America, and of black women who arrived as personal servants to white families (discussed in chapter 4) was rarely registered by customs or immigration offices due to the very nature of their arrival. They were most often registered simply as “black sailor” or “black servant.” In the mid-nineteenth century, most whites had very little understanding of African ethnicities and perceived African difference as tribal, savage, and primitively formed. Such identities were deemed irrelevant, if not an obstacle, to being an American. Blacks rightfully assumed that public discourse on African identities would not suit their cause for citizenship. Within the black community, insistence on difference was not highly appreciated and sometimes perceived as antisocial. Unity was the most important operational theme.

      African and Malagasy identities, first and foremost, were shaped by language, custom, and geography, and from Madagascar, as elsewhere, captives arrived with particular language and ethnic affiliations. Their first allegiances were to their lineages, their clans, and their ethnic groups. Among those who came to North America, the most numerous were the Ibo and related groups; the Wolof and other Senegambian ethnicities such as the Bambara, Mande, or Diola; and people from Central Africa, notably the kingdoms of Kongo and Ngola. People from the island of Madagascar, from Mozambique, or from the Yoruba city-states were distinct minorities in North America. Most knowledge of these affiliations did not last into the nineteenth century, yet some slaves held on to family lore that described their origins, even while they were busy becoming creoles.

      A black person who arrived in North America in the nineteenth century, whether as a captive or as a free person, had to perform two identities simultaneously: one that acquiesced to the general category of black and one that enlisted various strategies to hold on to an identity that essentially was covert. This basic tension has always been at the heart of the African American experience and is perhaps what led W. E. B. DuBois to his thesis of double consciousness.¹⁵ Narratives from descendants of early free immigrants show that Madagascar receded into a sometimes glorified past and was usually discussed only in the home and among relatives, as people quickly sought to live and possibly even prosper in the segregated black community.

      Identity is relational and depends to a great extent on how one is perceived, to what extent cultural norms are shared between self and others, and opportunities to externalize beliefs about one’s self, one’s community, and even the universe. Without the opportunity to act on personal beliefs and morals, for example, or to speak one’s language, many behaviors that were once normal become extravagance in a new setting. Since African and Malagasy societies perceived the individual as an expression of group identity, involuntary separation from one’s group in violent circumstances must have presaged an acute identity crisis and an existential conflict, as it would for any person in such events.¹⁶ In looking at the problem of culture, power and place, identities, like the contents of cultures themselves, are historically contingent. Identities are not simply affected by changing schemes of categorization, or discourses of difference, but may be actually constituted or interpolated by them,¹⁷ and thus epistemological differences (and ontological shifts) are a lived experience. The case of a self-ascribed Malagasy identity must be examined in this context.

       Oral Traditions and Family Narratives

      The practice of the narrative in the twenty-first century is as much a result of a community experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—including public acknowledgment within the African American community of a “Malagasy,” “Madagasco,” or “Madacasar” identity—as it is the result of individual proclivities, fashion, or personal design. The numbers of slaves on the ships, the dates and conditions of sale, of transfer by inheritance, and even of escape appear in planters’ correspondence, account books, and newspapers. What does not appear so clearly is the human qualities of the slaves, which have been preserved in oral traditions. Similarly, in the case of free arrivals, the circumstances of the alliances they formed or contracts they signed that brought them to America are not referred to in great detail in the narratives. The fact that this information is absent in all the narratives of free immigrants suggests a common theme.

      The narrative of the ancestor is a story intended for a lineage, even though that lineage might have been partially fictive. In the threatened black communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, siblings may have shared one mother and had different fathers or some other variation of household kinship. Repetition over generations signifies nevertheless the oral tradition’s importance to family as an important tale to be told. The centrality of the family as the source of, and often the only place to assume, a Malagasy descendant identity gives evidence of a sort of household-level or extended-family project of self-identification. This sort of family identity is layered and complex. Moreover, each narrative suggests a reading of social and symbolic space (where and when narratives are recited and by whom) in relation to continuously reassembled information that has traveled through generations, in the sense in which Pierre Bourdieu talks of symbolic social space, the variability of positionality through time, and cultural capital.¹⁸ This always contemporary performance nevertheless reconstitutes a past sense of urgency for listeners because the information is shared in order that it not be forgotten.

      Each ancestor from Madagascar serves a symbolic function as a claim to humanity that predates and survives the calamities of captivity, enslavement, and exile. In this case, the symbolic space to which I refer is not Bourdieu’s referent of class but an ethnicity claimed and possibly reified—and certainly sanctified as a special and impermeable quality that each family holds. The ancestor narrative’s dynamic quality derives from its function as more unconscious ideology than physicality, more metaphysical than biological, and is part of family cultural repertoire and its cultural capital. This function is addressed in the concluding chapter, which discusses how history is learned through reenactment and stories or lived in traumatically induced and transmitted narratives, and in the moral character of memory.

      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