Incantation as Linguistic Disruption: Magic in Postcolonial Literature

The grammar turned and attacked me.
Adrienne Rich, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

The logics of colonial domination are those of the idealized scientific mind William Blake called “Bacon & Newton & Locke”: ideologies that present themselves as rationality (Blake 54). Such logics operate in two stages: first elevating rationality as the supreme principle under which politics and social life should be governed, and then asserting that the colonial power’s actions are a priori rational. Once this project is complete, many of the power structures undergirding colonialism become taken for granted and impervious to critique. In his description of the way that new social structures become entrenched in everyday life, Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin states that the gestures that reify these structures are “mastered gradually – taking their cue from tactile reception – through habit” (Benjamin 40). Benjamin sees this process as both dangerous insofar as it allows capital to shape people in accordance with its interests and generative insofar as it gives art with mass appeal a chance to create a new world. While his analysis is limited to mass media (and specifically film), it may be instructive to look towards more niche postcolonial literature to find strategies for such generative rehabituation. M. NourbeSe Philip’s poem Zong!, a reinterpretation of the text of a court case concerning the murder of enslaved people during the Middle Passage, is one such piece of literature, as is Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, a sprawling multi-character epic about a ship destined to carry indentured servants from India to Mauritius. Both works take seriously magical and spiritual connections between characters that transcend space and time. Rather than impart habits onto the reader through distraction, this focus on magic serves to defamiliarize the habits that underwrite colonial ideology. Ghosh’s character of Baboo Nob Kissin organizes his life around a feat of necromancy. As Ma Taramony, the great love of Baboo’s life, dies, she tells him “...your body will be the vessel for my return. There will come a day when my spirit will manifest itself in you, and then the two of us, united by Krishna’s love, will achieve the most perfect union” (Ghosh 162). In his book Another Mind-Body Problem, John Harfouch connects the history of “the institution of a racial non-being, conceived as a mind-body union without reason” to Edward Said’s work on imperialism (Harfouch xiii). The idea of racial non-being that allows for the labor arrangements that make colonialism profitable is dependent on a version of Cartesian mind/body dualism under which the human being is a mind that uses reason to control a body. Already embedded in Ma Taramony’s promise to Baboo is the rejection of such a hierarchy. Her use of the word “vessel” to describe Baboo’s body might seem like a call to the idea of possession, where a foreign consciousness empties out a body in order to inhabit and control it. However, such a model of possession emphasizes the continuity of the identity of the possessing force in a way that is inadequate to explain the union with Baboo that Ma Taramony foresees. The relationship between body and mind is not straightforwardly dualistic; it is a complex and mutually constitutive bond.

The function of resurrection in Zong! engenders a similar confusion of the mind/body distinction. Such a confusion might also be called a contusion. Like the process of bruising, wherein blood spills out into the interior of the body, trauma allows the substance of the mind into parts of the body where it was not intended [sic] to go. For Philip, that foreign but ultimately aesthetically generative mind is that of Derrida’s “generations of skulls and spirits,” which Philip gives the name of Setaey Adamu Boateng and credits as a co-author (Philip & Boateng 204). However, Philip’s concern with resurrecting the voices of the dead is not just about the thoughts of the dead, but also their vocal cords and, by extension, their bodies as a whole. She uses the word “exaqua” to give a name to her task of bringing up the bodies again, of offering her flesh to the minds of the murdered Africans while simultaneously offering her mind to their flesh. Were it the case that Setaey Adamu Boateng had used Philip’s hands to commit their voice to paper, Philip would have had no reason to credit herself as an author of Zong!. Like in Sea of Poppies, then, her relationship with the spirit does not obey the simple logic of possession, but might be better understood as a creative collaboration.

Creative collaboration between the living and dead in Sea of Poppies disrupts the efforts of colonizers to use language to establish hierarchies of meaning. After seeing Baboo Nob Kissin wearing women’s clothes, Burnham provokes him, attempting to uphold a strict gender binary. Baboo Nob Kissin attempts to reassure him: “It is outward appearance only–just illusions. Underneath all is same-same” (Ghosh 209). Burnham takes this to indicate that Baboo Nob Kissin is denigrating the importance of the institution of gender rather than making manifest that which had been latent in Baboo Nob Kissin since the death of Ma Taramony. This misunderstanding leads in turn to other misunderstandings and fabrications that eventually allow Baboo Nob Kissin to express the spirit of Ma Taramony in peace. Baboo Nob Kissin’s use of language, difficult to understand as it is, thus becomes a model by which challenges to colonial order maintenance can slip under the radar. It is at precisely the moment that he begins attempting to express something magical that communication with Burnham begins to break down in a manner advantageous to him. Through understanding that a central part of the British colonial project consisted of “reject[ing] the presence of femininity in man as virtually the negation of all humanness” both at home and abroad, the reader may come to see Baboo Nob Kissin’s habits of language as not just rejecting the gender binary system insofar as it disadvantaged Ma Taramony, but also evading colonial systems of control net large (Nandy 43). 

In parallel to how Sea of Poppies presents a magical alternative to the British imposition of the gender binary, Zong! destabilizes the very idea of the gender binary as an unassailable rational force in the British psyche. In a section narrated by a white sailor and addressed to Ruth, the sailor sees “visions of l / ace for a queen / my queen / there is pus / dire visions / tempt all” (Philip & Boateng 65-66). This juxtaposition between “visions of lace” and the reality of “pus” parallels the entrance of the voice of the white slaver into the poem being relayed to Philip by the ancestors. The evocation of playing cards in the line about an “ace for a queen” shows not only how the perspective of enslaved people can be swapped out for that of the slaver, but also how the pus on the sailor’s body and his vision of lace on that of Ruth can become swapped and confused. The poem uses a strange, archaic word for breasts: “dugs” (65). That word is also used in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to describe the “wrinkled” breasts of the magically sex-changed prophet and “old man” Tiresias (Eliot 228). Along with other moments in the surrounding text that sound like Eliot (“at tea time éclairs”, “bo / ne men”), there are clear echoes of The Waste Land’s gender confusion, a confusion born of chaos and societal breakdown. In Zong!, however, this breakdown comes from delirium, from visions induced by illness and poor rations. All the dualisms upon which the Western metaphysics decried by Harfouch depend are dependent on the notion that rationality can rule one’s life supremely, that when there are lapses in rationality, rationality can reassert itself and suppress dissent. In a state of delirium, however, the subject has no sense of what is and is not rational. For this reason, the sailor succumbs to magical visions, which are anathema to the metaphysics he depends upon to justify his profession of shipping Black people to America. As those metaphysics crumble, so too does the difference between self and other, between narrator and Ruth, and between man and woman.

Similar mystical visions in Sea of Poppies challenge the efforts of colonial power structures to limit the imagination of colonized people. The very first sentence of the novel is “The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen the vessel before, not even in a dream” (Ghosh 3). The epistemic standpoint privileged by Western conceptions of rationality demands a certain level of doubt by which any piece of sense experience or intuition must be ruthlessly criticized before being integrated with the sum of all one knows about the world. What’s striking about Deeti’s alternative form of integrating perception with knowledge is that it is no less rational than the Western model. Unlike Philip’s sailor aboard the song lost in a fever dream, Deeti has full control of her mental faculties, which allows her to neatly separate visions from dreams and dreams from realities. She soberly notes that “the vision was not materially present in front of her” (8). However, the guiding framework of those mental faculties allows for faith as opposed to doubt. Destiny, rather than the senses as they exist in the physical world, is axiomatized in Deeti’s epistemic system, counterbalancing the self-contradictory empiricism of colonial ideology. 

This alternate system is not just Deeti’s system, but a fundamental component of a larger anticolonial order. In the first of the novel’s striking flash-forwards, Ghosh writes that “in time, among the legions who came to regard the Ibis as their ancestor, it was accepted that it was the river itself that had granted Deeti the vision” (10). The historical significance of the novel’s plot is never fully explained, but it is implied to be immense. Most of the characters whose perspectives are represented in the novel’s storytelling have an antagonistic relationship to the colonial powers-that-be. Many, like Deeti, are members of colonized groups; Zachary and Paulette are marginalized on the basis of race and gender. The use of the word “legions” in this vision of the future thus implies two things: that those inspired by the Ibis will form a military and that this military will not treat the British with the utmost kindness. The “legions” go on to calculate that the vision occurred “the moment the vessel made contact with the sacred waters…in the second week of March 1838” (10). The scholars of the future do significant historical and mathematical work in order to construct an accurate timeline of events. This work is eminently rational, but that is not to say that it assimilates the vision into Western epistemological norms. Those norms are inherently incompatible with knowledge gained from intuition that is neither empirical nor rational. When empirical facts and deductive reasoning are used to expand societal knowledge about a mystical vision, then, an entirely new epistemology is constructed that cannot be reduced to that of the West.

Zong!’s treatment of the Yoruban divination practice of ifá is similarly methodologically complex. An early usage of the word occurs when the narrator muses, “am sum / am / ame / if / if / if / if only ifá” (Philip and Boateng 70). The metaphysical constraints provided by the “am” statements are harsh and restrictive. The speaker is a “sum” of money that may or may not be awarded to the owners of the ship depending on the ruling of the court. The alternate Latin meaning of sum (“I am”), which could grant the line recursive meaning (the Biblical name Yahweh is associated with the powerful phrase “I am that I am”) is rendered inactive by the lack of italics. The speaker’s insistence on being “ame” communicates little more than a cruel joke: the French word for soul, âme, is rendered incomplete by the rending of the letters from the circumflex above the “a.” In Latin, ame means love, but this meaning is conspicuously absent from the glossary, where love is absent from the definitions of all the words from European languages. Language rends itself open to deny the speaker the opportunity to use it to find meaning, like a bear chewing off its leg so a hunter will not find it in a trap. The speaker then searches vainly for logic and meaning, repeating the word “if,” but is unable to find the second part of the “if-then” statement, the future. 

The word “ifá” represents a radical break from these inadequacies, as it is presented as a whole word with all of the meaning bestowed upon it by Yoruba culture. What is important about ifá is that it provides a future that is not premised on death. Roman methods of divination like auguries and haruspicy took as their source the entrails of dead animals, but ifá uses pine nuts instead. While those Roman methods of divination were abandoned by the West as part of the rationalist philosophical project discussed in this essay, they were replaced by historical disciplines with an outsized focus on war and suffering. Popular aphorisms such as “If we cannot remember the past, we will be doomed to repeat it” make clear that the future conjured by the discipline of history is one that finds its basis on the bloodiest elements of the past, a dilemma that ifá is freed from. In the context of the poem, however, ifá cannot be separated from the disgusting “bile cum pus” that characterizes the ship. Visions of the future allowed by ifá must eventually give way to an unbearable present. Ifá can thus be thought of as “if a,” a beginning to a sentence that never reaches an end. Nevertheless, imagining a better future allows for the creative collaboration between Philip and Boateng that, while unable to redeem the violence done aboard the Zong, nonetheless represents a retroactive challenge to colonial oppression and a meaningful demonstration of care towards the dead enslaved people.

The kinds of language games that lead to the elevation of ifá as a practice worth holding onto in Zong! can be found in Sea of Poppies in the various meanings given to the English word “black.” When Baboo Nob Kissin announces his plan to board the Ibis, Mr. Burnham objects “Won’t your Gentoo brethren ban you from their midst for crossing the Black Water?”, leading Baboo Nob Kissin to successfully argue, “[p]ilgrims cannot lose caste—this can also be like that. Why not?” (Ghosh 211). One of the most liberatory aspects of magic as presented in the novel is its ability to transform itself in response to material conditions and organize itself around the principle of sufficient reason. Burnham’s knowledge of Hindu custom is significant, but not intimate: he realizes that the Black Water might be a problem, but he lacks the understanding and energy necessary to challenge Baboo Nob Kissin’s redefinition of the rules of caste. It is precisely his provocation, however, that leads Baboo Nob Kissin to redefine the rules in the way he does and thus redefine his actions in the eyes of Krishna as a pilgrimage. 

Of course, this redefinition is based on the gomusta’s interpretation of “Black” as the color of Krishna “whose very name meant ‘black’ and whose darkness had been celebrated in thousands of songs, poems and names” (142). Upon perceiving Zachary as white, Baboo Nob Kissin contorts his mental image of Zachary to align with the legends of Krishna. Eventually, he discovers a crew list with “the word ‘Black’ scribbled beside Zachary’s name” (430). Ironically, he interprets the word “Black” as Zachary’s good-name, when it is actually his race or color. This misunderstanding could be read as a comedic coincidence that is simply fortunate for Baboo Nob Kissin, but it might better be theorized as an example of the way that magic can reveal and manifest into being fundamental truths outside the purview of deductive reasoning. As the negative sense of the word “Black” as in “Black Water” is rejected and nullified in Baboo Nob Kissin’s mind by the positive connotations of Krishna’s “Blackness,” the racial hierarchies associated with other parts of the British Empire start to break down. The logic of passing, whereby Zachary is required to hide his racial status in order to gain wealth and status, fades away as Baboo Nob Kissin gives Zachary the chance to form an authentic relationship based on the truth with Paulette. It is no surprise that magic negating the curse of the Black Water might have some effect in terms of the Hindu caste system, as that is the social structure in which the Black Water has meaning. The fact that this negation is able to affect other forms of racialization shows that magic has the ability to transcend its original setting, allowing it to adapt to changes brought upon by colonialism.

Attempts to change the magical energies attached to water in Zong! bear less narrative fruit but are no less urgent. One passage, again from the perspective of the white slaver and lover of Ruth, reads, “geld / the negro now / and wash the / water of all sin” (Philip and Boateng 106). One issue at stake in these lines is the rape of African women by slavers, who were sometimes thrown into the sea to hide the slavers’ shame at having copulated with a non-white woman. Miscegenation, not murder, is the sin mentioned here, and the slavers place the blame for this sin at the feet of Black women and men alike. The sexual aggressiveness of the slavers is displaced in an act of sympathetic magic onto the Black men, who must now be “gelded,” or castrated, in order to atone for the sins of the white man. However, to consider magic as solely the providence of the white man in this line would be to apply an overly reductionist lens to the formal complexity of the poem. Shortly after the voice of the slaver comes a plea: “èsù oh / èsù / save / the / us / in you” (106). Èsù is the trickster orisha and messenger god in Yoruban myth who brought the ritual of ifá to humankind, stealing it from its eponymous god (Britannica). Here, the enslaved people aboard the Zong beg Èsù (who might be compared to the figure of Setaey Adamu Boateng) to tell their stories with their voices and thus keep them alive. The earlier prayer from the slavers to “wash the water of all sin” thus becomes hijacked by the voices of the dead, recentering the crimes of murder and rape that Philip wishes so dearly to foreground in her poem. Unlike in Sea of Poppies, where magical struggle leads to a turn against oppression on the narrative level, in Zong!, the magical struggle occurs on the level of form. It helps to provide order (another concept strongly associated with Èsù) to the multiplicity of voices offered in the poem, and thus to emphasize that even if the voices of the slavers must persist, what matters is keeping alive the voices of enslaved people. The idea of washing water is paradoxical, and Philip’s poem cannot achieve it, but if Zong! can accurately record a desire to wash the water of murder and not of miscegenation, then it has achieved its goal of “exaquay.”

Ultimately, it appears that the role of magic in postcolonial literature is to reject colonial accounts of history and to create new concepts of knowledge and time oriented towards the postcolonial future rather than the colonial past. However, the way it does so is radically different from Benjamin’s account of art-creating habits in the spectator for better or for worse. The adaptive quality of magic, by which an individual can transform the rules to suit their position, makes it difficult for its depiction in postcolonial literature to be habit-forming. It encourages re-evaluation of the habits of the past without necessarily providing a clear blueprint for what everyday life will look like in the future. The future presented by magic is one of the radical possibilities that magic makes available to the reader. Of course, one danger of this view of magic is that it could succumb to an atomized individualistic account of the relations between people. However, it could also provide the basis for anticolonial and anticapitalist forms of resistance that reject the teleologies that have historically impeded such resistance. The success of Zong! and Sea of Poppies in using magic to tell stories that the English language does not want to tell indicates that the latter, more optimistic path might be more likely.