AML
4503: American Romanticism
Spring 2001
Prof. Bruce Harvey
Chapter
Five
Outgrowing the Boundaries
of North America: Martin R. Delany,
Africa, and the Question of African-American Agency
"We
love our country, dearly love her, but she don't love us--she despises us, and
bids us begone, driving us from her embraces; but we shall not go where she
desires us; but when we do go, whatever love we have for her, we shall love the
country none the less that receives us as her adopted children."
--Martin
R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored
People of the United States
"Africa and her past and future glory became entwined around every fibre of
his being; and to the work of replacing her
among
the powers of the earth, and exalting her scattered descendants on this
continent, he has devoted himself wholly."
--Frank
A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany
"Whatever we determine shall be, will be."
--Martin R. Delany, Blake;
or the Huts of America
In the era's geographical literature, Africa was the foreign realm accorded the
least agency, the least purchase on world affairs.
Not all U.S. subjects, however, agreed with the pedagogues' contempt for
the land and its people. Delany, in
his late monograph, Principia of Ethnology (1879), offered an
antithetical take on the continent: "[S]o far from [being] stupefying and
depressing, as popularly taught in our schoolbooks [the African] climate and
inhalations of the aroma and odors with which the atmosphere is impregnated, are
exciting causes, favorable to intellectual development."
What, Delany implies, did not minister to his "development" was
the racist milieu of the U.S. itself. Nonetheless,
in the long arc of his life he never completely disaffiliated himself from the
U.S. nor fully bonded with his ancestral homeland. His story is one of continual negotiation, of attempting to
gauge--both for the black community and for himself--conflicting loyalties to
the U.S. proper and a land elsewhere, where African-Americans might be granted
the dignities of self-sovereignty, the foundational ethos of the Republic that,
for his entire career, he at once felt estranged from and loved. . . .
. . . . Delany's main texts, as I have previously shown, fused his yearning for a separate, strong black nation-state with a less public-minded ambition to garner prestige. The more he became preoccupied with directing black enclaves the more those enclaves became mystified. One of the most revelatory scenes exhibiting his fascination with hermetic power, however, pertains to his desire to insert himself--his own black body--within the hallowed corridors of the white nation-state. In February of 1865, he traveled to Washington to petition President Lincoln to sponsor greater black participation in the war effort. His early biographer, Frances E. Rollin Whipper, recreates a dialogue between Delany and Henry Highland Garnet upon what the former had hoped to achieve: "He remarked to the reverend gentleman that 'the mansion of every government has outer and inner doors, the outer defended by guards; the security of the inner is usually a secret, except to the inmates of the council-chamber. Across this inner lies a ponderous beam, of the finest quality, highly polished, designed only for the finest cabinet-work; it can neither be stepped over nor passed around, and none can enter except this is moved away; and he that enters is the only one to remove it at the time, which is the required passport for his admission. I can pass the outer door, through the guards, and I am persuaded that I can move this polished beam of cabinet-work, and I will do it.'"
Once again, an interior sanctum of power draws Delany.
That he should pursue access to such political spaces is by itself not
remarkable. Striking, however, is
the lingering, almost fetishizing manner in which he sees himself passing into
the inward chamber, at once a sacrosanct space representing the very core of the
democratical state and the privileged site, the "mansion," of
executive authority. The motives of
the egalitarianist and political egoist are, quite simply, inseparable.
Delany's rendering of inward and outward, hermetic and national, geopolitical spaces did not end after the Civil War. One of his most interesting, albeit most neglected, texts is the 1879 monograph Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, with an Archaeological Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization, from Years of Careful Examination and Enquiry. I have cited in full the ponderous title to suggest the full range of its contents. But we should not let the volume's pretentiousness keep us from seeing its dual strategy of redeeming blackness on both micro and macro levels. Principia undertakes a refutation of the then still current theories of "Nott, Gliddon, and others"(9), the mid-century polygenesists who had advocated the idea of absolutely distinct races and claimed that ancient Egypt was white-ruled. In Blake, Delany slyly made Lady Alcora's nightmares the habitat of blackness. Here, he investigates white physiology. He proffers what he takes to be an astonishing fact of epidermal chemistry: the "color . . . of the negro . . . is no more nor less than concentrated rouge," and this pigment "gives also in turn, the most delicate rosy tint to the ruddy cheeks and ruby lips of the lily white skin of the proudest and most beautiful white lady of the Caucasian race" (32). Delany obviously intends to provoke and challenge anxieties, on the part of his white audience, about racial admixture or contamination. Yet the real purpose this passage or the ones in Blake about a black invasion of white bodies or spaces has little to do with their shock value of racial threat. Delany was, to be sure, proud of his blackness, but ultimately he was more concerned about the politics of race than its supposed biology.
If Principia seeks to lend African-American blackness innate dignity on the micro or epidermal level, it seeks to do so as well on the macro level of state iconography. Delany in this last text also creates, to recall Foucault's term, an heterotopic archive. The bulk of the volume promotes a resolutely Afrocentric version of world history. He maintains that the rulers of Egypt were black rather than white, and that African wisdom has been genealogically transmitted through the ages: the "literature of the Israelites, both in the science of letters and government, also religion, was derived from the Africans" (55). Yet the text does not just look back nostalgically. Principia seeks to reclaim the glory of ancient Egypt and Ethiopa to invigorate his contemporary African-American community. Roman invaders, he laments, destroyed "emblems, paintings, statuary and designs, as well as other evidences of greatness of the African race" (74). Fortunately, though, a hermetic tradition has secured the forefathers' lore, expressed in the mythological iconography of the "Garden of the Hesperides" (Figure 13), which he refers to as an "allegorical disguisement of the wisdom of the Ethiopians and Egyptians, a philosophical depository of the mental and material possessions of those countries, presented in one view to themselves, while concealed from others" (79). The source of the Garden of the Hesperides symbolism is unknown; Delany may have fabricated it himself, although he insists that the arcane imagery derives from "most intimate intercourse with the native Africans of the highest intelligence in the interior" (72).
This African iconography of state, transported by Delany to the U.S. to
inculcate his own community with racial-national pride, may well manifest what
Timothy Brennan calls a national longing for form or, in a less positive
fashion, what Terry Eagleton refers to as the "'subjunctive mood' . . . of
premature utopianism." That
such national forms require inventing should not, however, discredit their
merit. Principia's
iconographical mysticism precisely encapsulates Delany's desire, at once noble
and arrogant, to yoke his inspiring intelligence (his "head," as we
have seen) to variously conceived African-American nationalities.
Delany's sense of selfhood, his pride in himself and his own sovereignty,
never faltered; yet at the same time he sought all his life for the endowment of
full citizenship. We can choose to
emphasize when surveying his career, in for instance the hagiographic portrait
in The Weekly Anglo-African, what may be called his autonomous intensity;
or, we can reflect upon his equally profound need to conjoin selfhood to the
dignities of statehood.