“To fully understand what follows…”: Contorted Narrations of Maroon Plots and Landscapes

• In Event: All-Too-Human Borders / More-Than-Human Planet (HYBRID)

Abstract

Victor Séjour’s 1835 short story “Le Mulâtre” depicts the marronage of an enslaved man named Georges and his vengeful return to the plantation. To explain the plausibility of such a plot, the storyteller introduces one key paradox of marronage, the proximity of the maroon community to the plantation. Their explanation takes the form of what I read as a “primer” of maroon geography: “To understand what follows, you should know that from Alfred’s plantation there was only one small river to cross in order to find oneself in midst of those dense forests that seem to hold the New World in their embrace.” (Pour bien comprendre ce qui va suivre, sachez que de l’habitation d’Alfred on n’avait qu’une petite rivière à traverser pour se trouver au milieu de ces forêts épaisses, qui semblent étreindre le nouveau-monde.) This rhetorical move is a shared feature of many narratives of marronage. It wrestles with two authorial problems in representing marronage: the paradox implied in the phrase “to better understand that which follows…” shorthands the author’s concerns that such plots may seem farfetched or “singular,” that readers would struggle to believe that escape could be in such proximity to the plantation, but also completely out of reach for years. Authors concerned with credibility or believability, but also officials making records who fear accountability, deploy such “formal contortions” as they attempt to represent something they don’t know first-hand, that can only be written up second-hand—that is life in a maroon community, marronage. This paper offers examples of such winding, thorny sentences that reflect the challenges of the authors and mirror, at the grammatical level, the efforts of those who went maroon. Complicated, uncomfortable, strategic twists and turns—beyond the plantation and yet close enough to survive. Such small moments in the text reflect the yoked spatial and epistemological crises triggered by every individual who went maroon. They were so close and yet so far, and what they did and knew could only be imagined. This paper takes pleasure in such evident struggles to represent marronage that highlight the relentless historical attention such flight received.

Author

• SJ Zhang, University of Chicago