Tag Archives: Middle Passage

The Atlanteans and the Middle Passage

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A detailed drawing of the inside of a slave ship, showing how close together the "cargo" was packed. --- Image by © Louie Psihoyos/Science Faction/Corbis

This essay first appeared on CiCo3. It was inspired by Nijla Mu’Min’s extraordinary film Deluge. Thanks to Amrah Salomon for feedback on the draft.
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Superheroes have celebrated origin stories. Gamma radiation gives rise to shapeshifting rage monsters. Extraterrestrial parentage provides biological powers. A magician’s curse or a nibble from a radioactive arachnid can turn one superpowered. The story of how one gets one’s powers is a defining part of superhero stories. It is, after all, the sine qua non of any superhero’s existence. But what about the universes in which the superheroes operate? Why don’t we look at their origin stories? And what can those origin stories tell us about the comics universes and popular discourse? What follows explores the origin stories of the DC and Marvel universes through their respective Atlantean populations, focusing on a missing narrative fundamental to the world in which virtually all stories in the DC and Marvel lines happen: African Slavery.

The Marvel and DC universes take place, with some exceptions, in the United States settler colony. The United States has two systemic structures without which it does not exist: African Slavery and Indian Removal (or at least it does not exist in anything remotely resembling its current form). These are the bedrocks of settler colonialism on the continent. The simultaneous destruction of the native world and construction of the anti-Black one define everything— from many colloquialisms in White American English, to property and land law, to policing, to the names of sports teams, to holidays. They comprise the preponderance of U.S. history, not to mention the country’s entire physical geography.

Can this be less true in the Marvel and DC universes? They both have Black characters, albeit relatively few and poorly drawn – often in both senses of the term. Black as an identity (or, per anti-Blackness, a site of capital accumulation and location for gratuitous violence) is tied to the legacy of settler colonialism’s African Slavery. If there was African Slavery then there was transport of enslaved peoples from Africa to colonized Turtle Island (North America). So where were the Atlanteans of the respective DC and Marvel universes during the Middle Passage? Where were Aquaman’s and Namor’s ancestors when the first rebelling or newborn enslaved Africans were tossed overboard to drown, be eaten by sharks, or drift slowly to the bottom of the Atlantic?

Exploring these ideas identifies dramatic narrative gaps in between the worlds where these stories purport to take place and the world in which they are told. That they are missing from the Marvel and DC universes exemplifies settler normativity, how the destruction of the native world and construction of the settlers’ anti-Black one is naturalized in and baselines politics and society. Settler colonialism is the organization of power that accomplishes this simultaneous destruction/construction. It is how native Turtle Island becomes the anti-Black North America for example.

It also creates a worldview for its inhabitants. In the same way that men struggle to see sexism, instead just seeing ‘normal’, settlers struggle to see settler colonialism. This settler normativity is one of our very frames of reference. It is basic to our understanding of the world. It is why when we hear about the 49ers we think about the football team or the miners of the gold rush, not the populist genocide the actual ‘fortyniners carried out, even though the depopulation of native California by far being their most enduring and impactful legacy. To question settler colonialism is to question the very world the settlers make. We don’t ask where Aquaman’s ancestors were during the Middle Passage because African Slavery is naturalized in society. It, like men not seeing sexism, is a level below the observable because it is the frame through which observations are made.

So where were Aquaman and Namor’s great-great-great grandparents when they first encountered African Slavery? What was their reaction? How would those reactions change the DC and Marvel universes? I explore some potential scenarios in the paragraphs that follow. Some of these fit inside the current DC and Marvel continuities, namely, the more horrible ones. Others disrupt the current continuities, including those that stop African Slavery in its infancy.

 
Scenario 1: Hotlantis

Those thrown overboard are rescued by Atlanteans and form an Afro-descendent Atlantean population or are assisted in returning home. This does not require significant adjustment of current continuities.

Scenario 2: Successful Anti-Slavery Intervention

The Atlanteans intervene against the slavers and prevent the Middle Passage from happening. Scenario five can work in conjunction with this. This is, in the DC universe term, an Elseworld and is irreconcilable with the current continuities. Scenarios 3 and 4 show why it is irreconcilable.

Scenario 3: Post-Intervention A

Superman’s rocket lands in Pawnee country since there is no Kansas in which to crash without African Slavery. Superman is now a Pawnee hero. This is irreconcilable with the current continuities.

Scenario 4: Post-Intervention B

Without African Slavery there is no such place as Gotham in which Thomas and Martha Wayne are shot to later be patrolled by their son Batman. They remain British aristocrats. If Bruce Wayne grows up to be a billionaire vigilante he does so in the UK. This is irreconcilable with the current continuities.

Scenario 5: No Response

The Atlanteans first encounter African Slavery through the at sea disposal of newborns or rebelling Africans and either react only to the drowned bodies and not to the act of drowning or simply go about their business. Here the Atlanteans would be concerned with whaling ships more than slave ships (though the ecological damage of African Slavery is in fact substantial!), to the degree they’re concerned with surface dwellers at all. This does not require adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 6: Unsuccessful Intervention

The Atlanteans attempt to intervene and fail and the Middle Passage continues. This is the basis for the Atlantean distance from the surface dweller world for the next four hundred years until the eras of Aquaman and Namor. This does not require significant adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 7: Complicity

Both Atlantean worlds are monarchies of one kind or another which suggests regressive politics. It is thus entirely feasible that Aquaman and Namor’s ancestors were complicit in the Middle Passage in some way. Was a tribute or toll paid to those who control the seas? Thus Atlanteans owe reparations of some kind and direct action at the Justice League headquarters is in order. This does not require significant adjustment of continuities.

Scenario 8: Opportunistic/Humanitarian Intervention

The history of humanitarian intervention is dominated by the interveners integrating a crisis or oppressive system into their own politics rather than ending the crisis or oppression. Alternately put, humanitarian intervention is with few exceptions a tool of empire. Entirely plausible in an intervention scenario is Atlanteans taking over the slave trade rather ending it. This does not require significant adjustment of current continuities.
 
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An honest account of U.S. history means dealing with the ugly truths of settler colonialism. Settler society cultural production helps avoid these ugly truths by producing myths. Not myths as in, superpowered beings in symbolic grand battles. But myths as in, the United States settler colony somehow being post-colonial. As it stands, the most implausible thing about comics is not that some beings can fly without apparent means of propulsion, but that they take place in a United States without Indian Removal and African Slavery. DC and Marvel comics are not imagining a utopia without colonialism even if they may think they are. Instead they imagine a world where colonialism doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter anymore, mountains of facts to the contrary be damned.

Comics can do better. Comics can narrate the colonial present and retcon their respective universes to where settler colonialism, including African Slavery and Indian Removal, happen and impact the universes accordingly. Elseworlds-style stories are one way of accomplishing this. For example there is the as-yet not made story Superman: Alien where the Man of Steel’s rocket is found by Mexican migrant workers on a Kansas farm. He then gets deported with his adoptive parents and grows up to be a Mexican superhero. That is at least as plausible as him being found by the white farm owners. This and the more tragic alternate visions offered above veer away from the current continuities in that they contextualize events as if they take place in the universes they purport to.

The question is one of decolonizing comics. Not as in, comics were colonized and must now be decolonized. That is silly. Nobody colonized comics books. To the contrary, comics in the United States are part of settler colonial cultural production. So in decolonizing comics we seek comics that are decolonizing acts; that are decolonizing narratives and, potentially, tools. Some indie comics and zines already explore this. Yet mainstream comics can too play a role in subverting settler normativity through dealing with the world settler colonialism made, the world in which the comics universes exist. One possible story to tell in this direction is the one that tells the story of the Atlanteans during the Middle Passage. Aquaman’s ancestors have some explaining to do.

 

The Romance of Dead Parents

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Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage is structured as, and by, a romance. The novel starts off with a description of the relationship between freed slave, thief and wastrel, Rutherford Calhoun, and the prim schoolteacher Isadora Bailey. Calhoun and Bailey are in love with each other, but he’s not willing to be tied down; she forces the issue by offering his creditor, Papa Zeringue, to pay his debts if he’ll marry her. Zeringue determines to force Calhoun to do just that, but he slides out of the ring or the noose or whatever metaphor you wish by sneaking aboard an illegal slave ship bound for Africa. Adventures and hijinks ensue…but in the end his travails and misfortunes bring him back around to Isadora, and the book ends, as romances should, with a marriage and happiness.
 

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Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s Please Remember This isn’t really structured as, or by, a romance. There is a romance in it — between coffee-shop owner Tess Lanier and historical excavator Ned Ravenal. That romance, though, doesn’t really get started until something like 2/3 of the way through the book. The bulk of the earlier part of the novel, and the main thrust of the plot, is about Tess’ relationship with her dead mother, the brilliant author Nina Lane, who killed herself several months after Tess was born. The novel meanders through it’s small as life, non-adventurous plot, letting Tess figure out that she doesn’t have to be Nina, and doesn’t have to not be Nina, before getting her to a place where she can take up the rest of her life — which, almost as an afterthought, involves Ned.
 

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Both of these books in broad terms fit into Pamela Regis’ eight essential elements in “Natural History of the Romance Novel,” but Johnson’s book is much more insistent about it — the action in the novel all derives from the development of the romance, whereas for Seidel the bulk of the novel’s structure and themes would be little changed if Tess had just recommitted herself to her coffee shop at the end, rather than finding a man immediately. Yet, “Middle Passage” is generally considered a work of literary fiction, while “Please Remember This” was marketed as a romance novel. What’s with that?

Part of the answer is right there in that last bit; Seidel is a romance novelist and marketed as such, so her book is considered a romance. Johnson writes literary fiction, so his book is literary fiction. In genre, form is less important than commercial labels.

There’s some more to it than that, though, I think. Middle Passage presents itself as literary fiction in a number of ways — most insistently in its prose. Seidel’s prose style is accomplished, precise, and frequently delightful; “It was part rock festival, part Star Trek convention, and part plain old down-home country fair without the baby pigs and homemade jam” is an imaginative and funny first line. It’s significantly less performative than Johnson’s opening, though:

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. In my case, it was a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Isadora Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison, a brief stay in the stony oubliette of the Spanish Calabozo (or a long one at the bottom of the Mississippi), or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment — especially if you knew Isadora.

It’s not coincidental here that the virtuosity here, the hyperbolic/mock-hyperbolic irony, is achieved through riffing on misogynist tropes. Isadora becomes a disaster, a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme — she’s a placid nonentity on which to embroider flights of cheerfully rhetorical antipathy. That is more or less the case throughout the novel, in which Isadora serves mostly as a plot device. We don’t see into her head, and while our protagonist/narrator Rutherford says he loves her, we get much less of a sense of his relationship with her than of his attraction/repulsion to the Bly-like Captain Falcon, or the Allmuseri tribe members who have been captured and enslaved on ship. The romance with Isidora is the impetus and the structure of the book, but Isidora herself is mostly a trope — a stand-in for the world of home from which you set sail and then return (Johnson explicitly compares her to Penelope.) Even her body becomes subordinate to the plot and Rutherford’s attitude towards her; she loses 50 pounds while he’s away at sea, physically demonstrating her transition from disaster to desirable in Rutherford’s eyes, though how she feels about the change is never either mentioned or considered. The book’s literariness, it’s (multiple, deliberate) textual links to the Odyssey, Moby Dick, Joseph Conrad, are based on repressing or displacing the romance plot that guides it in general, Isadora’s consciousness in particular.

In this regard, it seems important that Rutherford’s main internal conflict involves his feelings for his brother, and especially for his father, a slave who escaped and left his sons behind him. Rutherford has always bitterly resented being abandoned, but after a traumatic encounter with a kidnapped, delightfully Lovecraftian African God, he understands that his dad never came back to visit because he was killed by patrollers almost as soon as he tried to escape. The recognition that his father didn’t abandon his responsibilities, but was murdered out of them, allows Rutherford to accept responsibility himself (after a good deal more trauma.) Which is nice for him, but leaves another question unanswered, and almost unasked — viz., even if he barely knew his mother (she died when he was 3), why doesn’t he, or the book, seem to care about her at all?

You could ask the inverse question of Please Remember This. Tess is tied in knots about her mother, the brilliant, erratic Nina Lane — where Rutherford can’t settle down (it’s implied) because of his father’s shiftlessness, Tess is too settled as a reaction to her mother’s eccentricity. And where Rutherford doesn’t seem to care about his mother, Tess is similarly disconnected from, and uninterested in, her father. Early on, we learn that the man she thought was her dad, wasn’t; Nina had conceived Tess not with her then-boyfriend, Duke Nelson, but (maybe? possibly?) with some passing-through hipster artist dude, who Tess never even bothers to try to track down. Instead, rather than looking for fathers, Seidel multiplies mothers, focusing on Nina Lane’s relationship with her own mother, Violet, who raised Tess, and with one of Nina’s friends, Sierra, who cared for Tess for the first couple of months of her life,and wanted to keep her.

In Middle Passage, Johnson suggests that the Lovecraftian African God may control multiple worlds and multiple realities, and Rutherford imagines himself as the captain and the captain as him, the hold crammed with “white chattel” — a vision of racial poles reversed, but also of Oedipal substitution, with Falcon serving as a sinister father figure, the twisted European forebearer (Conrad? Lovecraft? Melville?) in whose stunted footsteps Johnson ironically but inevitably treads. In Please Remember This, on the other hand, narratives are composed not of alternate fathers, but of alternate mothers. Tess sees herself, or her possible selves, in the mother/daughter relationship in Nina’s last, unfinished novel; in the actual relationship between Nina and her mother, Violet; in the possible self Tess could have been if Nina’s mother had raised her:

And what would being raised by Sierra have given Tess?

She might not be as independent as she was now. She might not be as observant or as serene. She might not have been allowed to develop her own style and her own voice.

But she might have had the capacity to love Ned Ravenal as he deserved. And that would have been good.

“We might have done all right together,” Tess heard herself say to Sierra. “We might have done all right.”

The phrase, “Tess heard herself say” is a good example of Seidel’s subtlety. Tess is imagining herself as someone else, and then she speaks as someone else, as if the other she might have been is talking through her. It’s a quiet nod, too, to reader, and author, identification — we, after all, are both identified with Tess, and hearing her speak. The novel becomes a way to imagine other mothers, other lives, and to think how we might have been someone else, and done something else, and loved someone else. Though for Tess, in the end, imagining that someone else she could be allows her to love as she thought only that someone else could.

The reason that Seidel’s book is romance, then, is because it cares about dead mothers; Johnson’s is literary fiction because it cares about dead fathers. And that’s also, perhaps, why Johnson’s feels more formulaic — more wedded to both the romance narrative and, contradictorily, to the performance of genius that signals literary fiction. Supplanting the father is an old story, in which the new boss is always already the old boss and vice versa — like Isadora or Penelope, you unwind the thread each night only to rewind it the next morning, waiting for the guy to return. Mothers, though, in Seidel’s vision at least, don’t replace each other, or duplicate each other, but multiply possibilities. Different loves are different, which is how a novel which isn’t a romance can be a romance, too.