Marronage and its Aporias

Introduction

During the second half of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of the nominal independence of most of the colonized nations of the Caribbean, creative writers, historians, and scholars expressed longing for a figure who could bring unity and cohesion to the region and people that had been rendered history-less. For many, this figure was the maroon. In her study of the depictions of the maroons in West Indian literature throughout the twentieth century, Cynthia James argues that the archetypal, hypermasculine, and heroic maroon acted as “the putative bearer of the Jungian collective unconscious,”¹ allowing the Caribbean to understand its nominal sovereignty and freedom through the lens of the maroon’s anti-slavery, anti-colonial resistance. In what she defines as the maroon narrative genre, James says that maroons are portrayed as venerated heroes, warriors, and ancestral figures, the formerly enslaved outsmarting and outlasting the enemy, creating and protecting their own communities in the outskirts of the plantation and the colony. James considers that the maroon narrative is concerned with “writing against the background of a record of estrangement,” countering natal alienation and the imposed lack of origins and history with a desire to build a home and a history “out of traces of previous cultural knowledge.”² As a character, the maroon is affected by a hunger for the past but is in constant motion towards the future. It is precisely this negotiation between lost origins and a commitment to survival that originally solidified the maroon’s cultural metamorphosis in the New World and thus made him the perfect embodiment for the newly independent nation-states of the Caribbean.³

Making a similar argument, Charles Carnegie suggests that the maroons are viewed as a distinctive root of the national tree, nourishing a now nominally independent Caribbean into the future.⁴ Carnegie argues that the nostalgic portrayal of the maroon as a tragic hero—which is particularly predominant among the male Caribbean creative writers of the twentieth century such as Édouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire—has been coopted by the nation-state and repurposed as proto-nationalists and freedom fighters. Their leaders—like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nanny of the Maroons, and Julien Fédon—“have become subjects for state rehabilitation, often as actual monuments set apart in sacralized state gardens.”⁵ As a result of his museumization as literal monument, literary character, and analytical lens, the maroon is turned into the absent presence of Caribbean history. This absent presence has rendered the maroon vulnerable to creative writers and academics, who contribute to the process wherein marronage is turned into an open receptacle of competing desires, investments, interests, and narratives about resistance,⁶ fugitivity,⁷ sovereignty,⁸ and Black masculinity.⁹

Structuring this absent presence are the very mountains, forests, and mangroves of the Caribbean that have long served as generative sites of narration for creative writers and academics alike. In particular, the geographies of marronage facilitate the maroon’s ability to avoid capture. Paradoxically, however, his hiddenness renders him vulnerable to academic and literary capture. Due to this (necessary) invisibility, the maroon generates a series of myths and interpretive opportunities. Projected meaning is layered upon him by scholars, creative writers, and historians who find in this absent presence a potential to bridge the gap between the trauma of slavery and the unfulfilled promises of emancipation and independence.¹⁰ Characterized by its fugitivity, by the literal and metaphorical absence of the maroons—that is, the maroon needs to always be absent to avoid capture and is charged with narrative capacity because of their very absence¹¹—the maroon is positioned as freed (yet obfuscated), and so also positioned in distinction to the enslaved.

As Carnegie indicates, the maroons index racial purity because they become the signifier for “a noble, original, uncontaminated, defiant, New World blackness” that can somehow exist outside of the history of slavery.¹² Elsewhere, Rachel Mordecai describes a “prelapsarian Blackness” in her analysis of the cultural production of and about the 1970s in Jamaica. Mordecai suggests that the desires and anxieties caused by the political situation of the recently-independent Jamaican nation-state generated a break between a modern, creole multiracial Blackness and the aforementioned prelapsarian Blackness: “From this perspective, the enslavement of Africans and their descendants is the original sin of Caribbean history (a notion which problematically elides the near-genocide of aboriginal Caribbean people), yet it is possible—indeed, necessary [for these writers]—to imagine an originary black Caribbean identity before, beyond, or somehow untouched by slavery’s taint.”¹³ Hence, the repurposing of marronage as freedom creates not only an absolute break between slavery and marronage but also the creation of a form of Blackness that is unable to escape slavery’s determination and a different Blackness somehow untouched by slavery’s horrors. Carnegie and Mordecai thus put into relief that the hypermasculine, heroic, yet invisible maroon is always produced against and with the hypervisible figure of the suffering slave. Through this opposition, a break between enslavement and marronage-as-freedom is established, such that, to paraphrase Taija McDougall, these portrayals of marronage feed on the enslaved’s corpse “but neglect the wake” to demonstrate that Blackness, having been given access to the realm of being through the performance of grand marronage, is characterized by its fugitivity “only to reject the captivity and suffering that is bound to the Black body.”¹⁴

It is this last quality of marronage as mobilized by scholars, politicians, and creative writers from the Caribbean that I wish to interrogate more in my treatment of the maroon as a category of critique. That is, that in order for the maroon to generate a history of Blackness that can serve as a counternarrative to the West’s white supremacist project, marronage is portrayed not only as the endless escape from slavery towards freedom but as a complete, permanent ontological separation from the condition of enslavement. To put it differently, I contend that the positioning of the mythical, hypermasculine maroon as the sublimation of Black resistance in the Caribbean depends on the absolute break between the slave and the maroon, which erases the flight from enslavement to conditional freedom that marronage was originally meant to signal. I also argue that the maroon is constructed as necessarily male and hypermasculine, thus ensuring the portrayal of Black women in the Caribbean at large as mothers, lovers, or healers without agency, subjectivity, and power.

On Heroes and Mothers

In the male-dominated Afro-Caribbean literary order of the twentieth century, the maroon occupies a privileged space as he—for the maroon is traditionally imagined as a man—is able to generate genealogies of resistance, a cohesive and coherent origin story for the Caribbean nation-state, and the construction of a Caribbean Blackness untainted by the dishonor, alienation, and violence of slavery. In his critique of the masculinist thrust contained within Aimé Césaire’s Negritude and the literary project of the créolité movement, A. James Arnold suggests that the emancipatory potential of the suffering male hero—also known as the Rebel—of Césaire’s Negritude lies in his ability to transcend the representations of feminine weakness that the colonial imagination had imposed on the Caribbean¹⁵ Assigned narrative and emancipatory potential, the character of the Black male hero—even if the way he is presented and embodied shifts across genres and authors—becomes central to the poetico-political projects that comprises the twentieth-century Caribbean literary order. The heroic Black male protagonist, as opposed to the feminized, emasculated enslaved, is able to produce a counternarrative to the Western imperial symbolic order and lead his people to the completion of the project of emancipation.

Drawing from Sylvia Wynter, Arnold claims that the Black male hero is tasked with occupying the space of the super-male, someone even more masculine than Western Man.¹⁶ This Black super-male is supposed to stand in opposition to what Arnold calls “the erotics of colonialism,” a model based on “aggressive heterosexual desire” that determines, and thus limits, the systems of representation available to Black male writers in the Caribbean.¹⁷ However, the Black super-male produces his own erotics, replacing the feminized version of Black masculinity manufactured by the colonial imagination with a super-male that, paradoxically, cannot break out of the same emasculating colonial logic: faced with the endless threat of emasculation and feminization, the super-male needs to constantly reassert his own masculinity, furthering the marginalization of women and calcifying the feminized status of the enslaved.

This apparent inability or unwillingness to conceive Caribbean freedom and sovereignty outside the confines of the heteropatriarchal order and the Western erotics of colonialism is also evident in Édouard Glissant’s own theorization of marronage’s narrative potential. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant had lamented the fact that Martinique and the Caribbean at large had failed to turn the maroon into their tutelary hero. This missed opportunity had robbed the Caribbean of a true heroic figure of the past who would have been tasked with the creation of the region’s history.¹⁸ Arnold reads Glissant’s nostalgia for the hero-that-could-have-been as evidence of Glissant’s own inability to find a way out of the emasculating colonial logic: “The heroic Maroon, as the archetypal figure of a masculinist West Indian literary imagination is, therefore, a logical necessity.”¹⁹ What can be inferred from Arnold’s assessment is that Glissant’s longing for the figure of the maroon is not necessarily a consequence of Glissant’s search for a heroic male figure but for a narrative figure, yet in what is clearly a central aporia of the academic and literary capture of the fungible maroon, we see how narrative capacity—which I understand as the ability to not only generate stories but to also produce history—is exclusively a capacity of the heroic Black man. This move has two consequences, which I aim to explore throughout the rest of this essay; on the one hand, it portrays the figure of the heroic Black man more generally, and the maroon more specifically, as someone filled with capacity (to narrate, to resist, to generate meaning) and on the other hand equates this capacity with manhood and masculinity and with freedom and sovereignty.

The reliance on hypermasculine archetypes led to the removal of all female subjectivity and intimacy from what the literary canon of a newly independent Caribbean. This rendered women writers from the region and the Diaspora voiceless and always already assumed to be silent in the literature produced in their own region. Even as scholars like Carolyn Cooper have tried to recover the figure of the female maroon from its historical obscurity, this recovery has only managed to reify the masculinist thrust behind the maroon narrative and the construction of Black Caribbean women as always already determined by their role as caretaker. In her exploration of the figure of the maroon in Jamaican literature and historiography, Cooper defines the female maroon as “roots woman . . . the forerunner of all the nurturing mother figures of Jamaican balm-yard folklore.”²⁰ These are women tasked with mothering their communities by sharing their knowledge of herbal medicine and the arts of “the arcane, obeah and myal.”²¹ Although Cooper’s observations are meant to offer a reparative and expansive reading of maroon culture, wherein she argues that women played a significant role as keepers of knowledge and demonstrated that the meaning of marronage could be extended in order to encompass forms of resistance beyond the fight and flight matrix, it is clear that attempts to fight back against misrepresentation are seemingly unable to move beyond the gendered construction of marronage.

It is true that one could turn to historical and ethnographic studies of maroon communities to argue that the gendered conception of marronage stems from the fact that some maroon communities were, in fact, organized according to heteropatriarchal hierarchies.²² However, I contend that this gendered division, which is indeed critical to the academic and literary consumption of marronage as both narrative terrain and analytical lens, occurs because the capacity to resist, to be, to narrate is exclusively assigned to the male maroon. The visibility of the woman maroon and of Caribbean women more generally is then antithetical to the maroon narrative genre despite the acknowledgement of their presence. This is not to say, of course, that the acknowledgement of a presence—or a present absence—does not hold potential. In fact, feminist scholars and writers producing work from and about the Caribbean have rightfully pointed out the gendered aspect of these asymmetrical histories of resistance, where the acts of revolt and sabotage conducted by enslaved and maroon women, often in their roles as midwives, lovers, and mothers, are anonymized by archival violence.

Consider, for instance, Haitian fiction writer Évelyne Trouillot, who said that her decision to write the novel The Infamous Rosalie was motivated by a desire to correct the heavily gendered and exclusionary official history of the Haitian Revolution—which left out the contributions of enslaved and self-emancipated women—without resorting to the romanticization of female maroons and revolutionary heroes.²³ We could also analyze Maryse Condé’s groundbreaking, provocative novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, which critiques the Black male hero from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and rejects the very figure of the hero in West Indian literature. As Condé told Françoise Pfaff in an interview, there are no heroes in this world, only “people who tried to do things, though sometimes they did not succeed. Most of the time they were a mixture of strength and weakness. I don’t know any heroes.”²⁴ Condé’s rejection of the hero in her work does not necessarily provide a way out of the aporias generated by the academic and literary treatment of the maroons, but I do suggest we understand it as part of a larger tradition of Afro-Caribbean women writers and intellectuals who have called for the complete re-evaluation of the forms and modes of expression available to Black women. Whenever the romance of marronage and fugitivity are invoked, then, we would be wise to remember the violence that these concepts and practices are also able to inflict. In their desire to break away from the centrality of the heroic maroon, Afro-Caribbean women writers have demonstrated that marronage exists in the viscosity of the ruse of emancipation and the heteropatriarchal imagination of the Western project. In trying to counterbalance the erotics of colonialism mentioned by Arnold, the academic and literary construction of the maroon required the marginalization of Black women from the history of maroon resistance.

The Ruse of Capacity for the Maroon and the Enslaved

While A. James Arnold’s analysis of the erotics of colonialism eventually led him to posit an antithetical relationship between the heroic maroon and the marginalized Caribbean woman, Arnold’s model is also generative in thinking about the desire to separate marronage from the history of slavery along the lines of capacity. Capacity, in this case, does not only signal the assumed difference in capacity between the enslaved and the maroons, but also its gendered construction in the maroon narrative genre, as well as the scholarship around maroons. As I hope has become clear, the traits of the maroon based on his depictions in certain strands of maroon historiography, academic discourse, and creative work produced by Caribbean men emphasize the character’s masculinity. Let us briefly see what this break between marronage and slavery looks like and the role that capacity plays in the theorization of this split.

In her discussion of the historiography and archival practices of the maroons in Jamaica, Jenny Sharpe argues that the heavy presence of the maroons on the island made it difficult for British colonial officers and enslavers to establish a clear distinction between so-called rebellious and “loyal” slaves. For the British, Sharpe says, the maroons embodied the incipient rebelliousness of all enslaved people, who were always “at risk” of going maroon.²⁵ Jamaican maroon identity, however, is “rooted in the knowledge that, unlike other Jamaicans, they fought for their freedom and thus never were slaves.”²⁶ Consider, also, such accounts of maroon life like Carey Robinson’s chapter in E. Kofi Agorsah’s Maroon Heritage, which seemingly require the creation of the previously mentioned distinctions among the enslaved Africans taken to the Caribbean based on their character and spirit. Although Robinson acknowledges the immense trauma that the enslaved experienced in their forced transplantation from Africa to the Americas, he assigns value—that of who could eventually become a maroon—to the ability of an enslaved person to “rid themselves of the condition that had been imposed on them” and never accept their enslaved status.²⁷ Those who fled the plantation, Robinson argues, “had to have a special quality of heart, mind and will.”²⁸ In using character and will as markers of difference between the enslaved and the maroons, Robinson hints at a distinction between both categories along the lines of ontology and capacity. In other words, the enslaved’s captivity and the maroon’s conditional freedom become ontologized because the capacity to attain freedom has already been predetermined by the “special quality of heart, mind, and will” of the maroon and the incapacity of the enslaved.²⁹ Whereas the maroons never accepted their enslaved status, they who remain enslaved seem, by this same flawed logic, to supposedly offer a degree of resignation or acceptance of said status.

Robinson’s arguments help illustrate Carnegie’s and Mordecai’s aforementioned critiques: by making character and spirit as foundational to the idea of marronage as freedom and sovereignty are, Robinson is selecting specific elements of a Blackness supposedly untainted by the horrors of slavery to craft his own imagined narrative of marronage. It is difficult to understand exactly how Robinson establishes his dichotomy even if we assume that emphasizing the courage of the maroons is a central component of this type of narrative. It is even harder to discern when the break between slavery and marronage starts for Robinson, which poses a series of important questions: Can someone be born with a natural inclination towards freedom while someone else, due to a lack of spirit, character, or will, might be more inclined towards resignation, thus predetermining who might run towards freedom and who will stay in the plantation? If the desire for freedom is something someone needs to be born with, wouldn’t that start a process by which the same antiblack imperial logic that naturalized the equation of Blackness with “slaveness” is reinscribed on the flesh of specific Black people? Finally, when does one become free and how is freedom defined—not just in Robinson’s formulation but in the academic and literary renditions of the maroons more generally? These questions become all the more complicated if we consider the oscillation between figuring marronage as freedom and marronage as movement towards freedom that permeates so much of the writing and theorizing on the maroons.

These questions point to the many inconsistencies and aporias that characterize our modern understanding of marronage and the figure of the maroon, but what is most significant about arguments like Robinson’s is the violence they require in their insistence on finding a form of Blackness that can be extricated from the history of slavery. The use of capacity as a lens through which to theorize the split between slavery and marronage illuminates the violence performed on both the enslaved and the maroons, in their treatment as literary and academic objects of study, as well as the many limitations to such an approach. If, as Sara-Maria Sorentino indicates by way of Aristotle, the enslaved represents pure incapacity “only insofar as their only capacity is to be a tool for others,”³⁰ then the transition from enslavement to the condition of marronage is as much about the act of fleeing the plantation as it is about the demonstration of the capacity—a special quality of heart, mind, and will as Robinson puts it—to do so. What is at stake here at the same time is that the maroon, through literary and academic capture, is also made a tool for others. If we follow Sorentino’s lead and establish that the incapacity of the enslaved resides in their fungibility, we see how the academic and literary treatment of marronage contradicts exactly what it seeks to accomplish: the fungibility of the enslaved is shared by the maroon, who is unable to access capacity on his own terms and is instead charged with the capacity to be a (creative and academic) tool for others. Sorentino continues, saying that “the slave’s only capacity is to be a slave, to mark the difference between nothing and virtue; once no longer a slave, they are something else (usually a worker, sometimes a human) and it is through this something else that their capacities can be exercised.”³¹ If I had earlier suggested that the maroon needs to remain in the in medias res of fight and flight for his transformation into the hero of the Caribbean to work, we can now see that the in medias res is the space of Sorentino’s “something else”: an empty space waiting to be filled with capacity, meaning, somethingness over beingness.

The maroon’s construction as the super-male, the Rebel, the tutelary hero of the Caribbean, and the antithesis of the enslaved ultimately fails to rescue the maroon, the Black masculinity, and ancestral Blackness he is tasked with rescuing from the horrors of slavery. Whereas it sought to offer closure to the unfinished project of Caribbean emancipation and independence as well as to correct the violence and feminization imposed by the imperial imagination, what the academic and literary depiction of the figure of the maroon ultimately accomplishes is to illuminate, yet again, the ongoingness of the afterlives of slavery and the ruse of Caribbean sovereignty in an age of ever-rising fascism, Western interventionism, and Caribbean nations that continue struggling for self-determination. Similarly, it highlights what generations of Caribbean feminist writers and scholars have denounced for decades: that the heteropatriarchal order that thought itself at the helm of the post-independence Caribbean sustained itself through the marginalization of Caribbean women from the historical record, the region’s genealogies of resistance, and the intellectual and creative life of their societies.

Ultimately, the meanings, metaphors, and investments that the catachrestic figure of the maroon accumulates in its transformation into the embodiment of Black resistance might allow us to understand yet another aspect of the fungibility of Blackness and the masculinist thrust at the center of the nation-state itself. The aporias that this essay has highlighted seem difficult to solve under our current terms of engagement not only with marronage but with the history of slavery more broadly. Scholars at the intersections of Caribbean studies, Black studies, gender studies, political theory, and the environmental humanities, continue to push the boundaries of what marronage can do and what questions it might satisfy. However, perhaps more time should be devoted to (re-)evaluating what our continued desire to extend the meaning and purpose of marronage tells us about our own scholarly inclinations. More importantly, as Walcott reminds us, understanding the forms of violence that marronage itself produces is the task that will ultimately allow us to notice the multiple forms of unfreedom in the face of the ruses of emancipation and independence for the Caribbean and the Black Diaspora.³²