Yes, that gets at a lot of the pain of it. One thing I've neglected to mention is this: I've learned, during my time writing, that where there is pain there is juice. And where this juice, there's deep truth, a chance for growth, and ultimately kick-ass writing.You wrote: "It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful."
This reminded me of the following quote from Trainspotting, spoken by Obiwan Kenobi, I mean, Ewen MacGregor, (who plays, and is, a Scot)
"Some people hate the English, I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even find a decent culture to be colonized by. We are ruled by effete arseholes."
Jay's quote gets at something else I wanted, but forgot, to mention--the initial twang of cheapness that takes you over, once you fully begin to grapple with being amongst the conquered. Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage" is one of the best meditations on slavery that I've ever read. The most poignant part, for me, is when uses the voice of a slave-trading sailor to mock the small-minded African chieftains:
Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,
Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;
have watched the artful mongos baiting traps
of war wherein the victor and the vanquished
Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.
Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.
And there was one--King Anthracite we named him--
fetish face beneath French parasols
of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth
whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:
He'd honor us with drum and feast and conjo
and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
red calico and German-silver trinkets
Would have the drums talk war and send
his warriors to burn the sleeping villages
and kill the sick and old and lead the young
in coffles to our factories.
I didn't want to bold any of this, less I ruin the beauty--but the part that always gets me is the image of "nigger Kings" who traded slaves for "tin crowns that shown with paste, red calico and German-silver trinkets."
It's like, "Damn, that's what I'm worth. Broken crowns, fabric, toys and parasols. Not even gold. It's like they gave us away for nothing."
I need to clarify that I am writing about how it feels, not how it is. It's the subjective emotions, perhaps native only to me, of coming into consciousness. It's about Neo waving off the blue pill, and reveling in the red.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
You're just on fire today. Great stuff.
May I ask, does it really feel like they sold you? I mean, personally? I ask because I'm not sure I have a connection to my ancestry which is anywhere near as visceral, and I ought to remember, in future conversations I may have about slavery, that there may be a dynamic like this going on.
You had me until Neo. Now I don't know how I feel.
Reminds me of the natives selling Manhattan for what was it $20? Some glass beads?
It was actually 60 (I think) guilders, which has a value of something around one or two thousand dollars. Still, the Dutch got a pretty good deal on that one. Whatever happened to the Netherlands?They used to be so good with money and colonization. And art, too. Now? Nothing.
If you believe Kevin Phillips, we're likely to be the Netherlands in the not too distant future. American Theocracy is a fascinating book on a number of levels.
I wish! On the whole Americans could learn a lot from the Dutch when it comes to attitude and lifestyle. They are thriftier and more reserved than most Americans.
"we're likely to be the Netherlands"
Insh'allah! Ive never seen a more orderly city than Amsterdam.
Let's just hope we don't start eating like them, worst food ever. The British reputation for bad food is so ill deserved compared to the Dutch. That's the great irony they never tell you about partying in the NL.
Britain, mostly. Dutch power was based on their control of shipping lanes to Asia. When the English navy became dominant around the end of the 17th and the early part of the 18th centuries, Dutch sea power was broken and their Empire fell apart rather quickly. By the same token, the Dutch still did rather well as middle-men instead of directly controlling production.
Also, they kept getting invaded by the French and Spanish. When you have to break all of your dikes to keep invaders out, it'll really put a damper on things.
Yeah, I was joking. I don't like to miss an opportunity to mock the Dutch.
The natives thought they were selling hunting and fishing rights, which they didn't even believe in. An imperfect parallel.
You have to google some terms used in the poem to learn their original meanings. For example, "paste" of old means "rhinestone" of today. So a tin crown that shown with paste is not broken/repaired, but decorated with simulated gems. Also, "German-silver" means imitation silver, so a German-silver trinket wouldn't necessarily mean a toy.
Thanks for both these posts. Also, (somewhat) incidentally, thanks for the pointer to Hayden. He did better, I think, at adapting Eliot's style than even Robert Lowell -- which means better than anybody.
The quote you posted is from the movie. The book version is better: it's not as glib, more emotional, and even more pungent:
"Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots."
This reminds me of the song "I'm A Good Ol Rebel"
O, I'm a good old Rebel,
Now that's just what I am,
For this Yankee Nation
I do not give a damn
I'm glad I fit again' her
I only wish we'd won,
I ain't asked any pardon
For anything I've done.
I hates the Yankee nation
And everything they do,
I hates the Declaration
Of Independence too;
I hates the glorious Union --
'Tis dripping with our blood --
I hates their striped banner,
I fit it all I could.
I rode with Robert E. Lee
For three years, near about,
Got wounded in four places
And I starved at Point Lookout;
I cotch the rheumatism
A campin' in the snow,
But I killed a chance of Yankees,
And I'd like to kill some mo'.
Three hundred thousand Yankees
Is stiff in Southern dust;
We got three hundred thousand
Before they conquered us;
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot,
I wish they was three million
Instead of what we got.
I can't take up my musket
And fight 'em now no more,
But I ain't gonna love 'em,
Now that is sarten sure;
And I don't want no pardon
For what I was and am,
I won't be reconstructed
And I do not give a damn.
T, I appreciate your trying to be clear about the objective/subjective aspects of your own developing relationship to this often heartbreaking history, but it's this coming to consciousness that keeps this work that you are doing with/for us from merely being the kind of antiquarian fantasy gaming narcissim that one hears from grumpy old men on cspan, the facts about the past are just trivia if they aren't what Foucault called the history of the present, which is academize for finding/making a perspective/genealogy that moves people to take responsibility for their lives, including holding guilty parties accountable, and their communities and to see that things could have and can be different than they have "always" been, one of the important reactions to the civil war was John Dewey's development of the first real American philosophy of democracy, and how we have a lot of work to do to achieve it, and he like you came to recognize the need for demythologizing (see A Common Faith) and new ways of being in community and socializing/educating our youth that value personal experience and objective experimental practices including the sciences and arts, an update on his work by a C.West protege is In a Shade of Blue by Eddie Glaude, thanks for this enlivening conversation it makes a difference
dmf, there is some good stuff there in your reply, but do you have any idea how hard it is to read? You wrote all that in one goddamn sentence, for a start.
Following up on Calexico, identity (or identities) is always a complex, overlapping thing. As folks pointed out in the other thread, it's kinda weird for southern whites, especially gov't reps, to feel that "we" lost the war, when obviously "we" won it.
On the flip side, while I understand and appreciate the feelings, it's also a little weird for TNC to have personal feelings of "we lost" when reading Jared Diamond based on where some of his ancestors were a couple of hundred years ago, when his current circumstances as US citizen place him pretty strongly on the "we won" side of the cultural equation.
TNC's larger point here is one that I really can't quite get my head around; what analogies can we draw between the feelings of failure and victimization that southern whites have vs. the similar feelings that many African Americans may feel based on long-ago history? (My own opinion is that they are very similar on a personal level, but play out very differently on a sociological group level).
TNC killing it as usual. Robert Hayden is one of the greatest and most underrated poets of the 20th century. So, so good. Here's one of my favorite Hayden poems:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171824
once again, a reminder of why the matrix was an important movie. It can be used in the discussion of just about anything. Practically bursting with ideas, that movie is. Even as a beloved a classic as it is, I still feel like it never got its due. But I still say it's pretty amazing that movie about a virtual reality can be used to describe some one's emotions in facing a particularly unfortunate part of history such as the American slave trade.
That feeling, of having been traded for nothing, for a trinket or a sack of rice, is fascinating.
The language that some transnational adoptees have used to describe what it felt like to learn that it's what literally happened to them personally, is 'feeling worthless'.
I've given this a lot of thought because I'm raising a child who was, best we can tell, transferred in just this fashion. So there are two ideas that flow from that, for me:
Is this what it feels like, in our emotionally-developed culture imbued with a language of entitlement, to be colonized?
and, How is this a heritable condition like skin color or hair texture?
I wonder these things, not to be an obtuse jackass, but genuinely they seem to be questions worth understanding if you wish to understand race.
No other blogger ever brings me so often to the brink of tears. It's painful and wonderful at the same time.
As a separate comment, I don't think there's any people that can claim not to have been conquered, debauched and sold cheap. It's just that eventually we all come back and make something else. Eventually the Anglo Saxons conquered by the Normans become the English bestriding the globe. Likewise the African Slaves became modern Americans, richer and more powerful by far than the descendants of the west African Kings that abducted and sold them, able to elect a skinny black man with a Muslim name. The wounds are deeper and more recent than all but a few post-Enlightenment reverses, but if one takes the grand view (19th century American slavery being much more totalizing and dehumanizing than essentially any other form of the peculiar institution) the African American's emergence from eclipse has actually been faster and more determined than about any that didn't involve the sacking of the 'conquering' people. In the face of terrorism, a 9 to 1 population ratio and only tepid support from a majority that mostly wanted to pretend nothing had happened, Black people have achieved a position of prominence in the culture and politics of the most powerful nation in the world that outstrips all but the Jews on a per-capita basis. African Americans are still not were they by rights should be in a nation the building of which they've had such a critical part, but in terms of progressively supplanting defeats with victories they've definitely set the example for the rest of the world.
Even when one takes away the myths, there's still so much that is so amazing, once you really look at it.
There's Coates feeling "It's like, "Damn, that's what I'm worth. Broken crowns, fabric, toys and parasols. Not even gold. It's like they gave us away for nothing.""
There's me scrolling down to Linoleum Bonaparte's long quote and being reminded of the complete and utter garbage my forbears tried to pass off as grievances--and of all the TNC readers who just got reminded too.
Life's been like that since I was about 12. I've got no fairy godmother, and I'm not the long-lost heir to the throne of England. I'm from the intersection of the Trail of Tears and "won't be reconstructed/do not give a damn." And Nato's gracious offer above not withstanding, I can't even get up the strength to dig around 300 years back for a claim that my sorry people were "conquered, debauched and sold cheap." My people did the debauching.
Except...
I woke up a few weeks ago an NPR clip of Robert Gibbs saying "In their discussions, they talked about the theory of constitutional interpretation, generally, including her views on unenumerated rights in the Constitution and the theory of settled law.”
Barack Obama of Columbia/Harvard and Sonia Sotomayor of Princeton/Yale have been sitting in the office of FDR and LBJ sorting out “unenumerated rights,” the crown jewel of our darling ancient Jefferson-debating-Madison-about-Montesquieu Bill of Rights.
After the whole long ghastly story of slavery and Jim Crow and the Alamo and the Spanish-American War dreams of empire that got Puerto Rico half-in and half-out, I wake up one morning and find they’re in the Oval being us.
Closing in on 50, I'm the child of parents who helped make that possible and the mother of children who helped make it happen. It's better than being Hermione Grainger, raised by muggles and then discovering I'm part of a world of wizarding.
We are who we thought we were.
TNC stop making me cry at work!
Thank you for the reference. I thought that I understood the meaning, but it's good to see someone say it. This is one of my favorite places to be a fly on the wall.
This comment was totally meant as a reply to Henry Bayer @ 3:55pm. My apologies for operator error. :)
Well, color me flushed.
Readiing your post about the quote made me realize that while some of us, namely me, do not have the national or ethnic history to deal with, we do have a similar kind of feeling that comes up. Who hasn't thought, "Why is THAT wanker the manager of this McDonalds, while I'm just the toilet scrubber? And if I take his shit and shine it up nice and pretty, what does that make me?"