Results

The neo-slave narrative, as defined by literary critic Ashraf Rushdy, is a genre of work that grew out of the awareness and turmoil of the 1960s Black Power movement. As a genre, the neo-slave narrative “assumed the form…and the first-person voice of antebellum slave narratives,” while attempting to position itself in the burgeoning debate between mainstream and minority opinion on history and cultural critique of the era.  While the 60s saw an explosion in critique based around deconstruction of dominant genres, like the novel or the tragedy ¹, the neo-slave narrative differentiated itself from other genres by using the slavery discourse to highlight the social injustice of slavery and to comment on the conditions and expectations in 60s black culture.

In the heady days of high postmodernism following Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard, neo-slave narratives increasingly turned to intertexuality–the conversation that happens between texts–not only to position their works relative to the history of antebellum slave narratives, but as a form of social protest that appropriated the cultural discourse on race. Specifically, they appropriated the narratives of racism that permeated the United States: Jim Crow and segregation. “Writing in the voice of manumitted or fugitive slaves,” Rusdy argues the neo-slave narratives of Sherley Anne Williams, Ishmael Reed, and Charles Johnson allowed the authors to position themselves on the edges of the 60s protest against cultural power structures. These characters, heroic in their ability to resist and overcome the slave-owning power structures of the South, take so-called outsider perspectives on the politics of slavery that white authors, such as William Styron of the popular slave narrative Confessions of Nat Turner, had avoided. The neo-slave narrative was at all times reflective of, and obsessed with, the physical freedom of its freed narrators.

Forty years after the neo-slave narratives have ascended to a place of pride as canonical texts in African-American literature, Thylias Moss’ seventh collection of poetry, Slave Moth, writes around the postmodern neo-slave narrative tradition. Slave Moth stands apart from its forerunners through its distinctive use of the long narrative poem form and strong central female voice to comment upon the conventions of the neo-slave narratives themselves. Rather than privilege the grotesqueries of the carnivalesque, the spectacle of the commodified body, and the liminal threshold between freedom and slavery, Moss includes these distinctively postmodern elements in her poem as if to normalize the “outsider” posture that the postmodernism has clung to since the 60s. Perhaps most significantly, Moss replaces the yearning for physical freedom with an extended mediation on mental freedom and the interconnectedness of the slave/master relationship.

To best understand Slave Moth, I must first talk about how the reader encounters the poem. As a work that is highly concerned with how shape and form influence the text, the poem’s fourteen year-old narrator, Varl, draws our attention to the way she produces this narrative for us. Varl is a slave on Peter Perry’s farm at the outset of the book, and she composes the series of poems that make up Slave Moth by sewing her words into cloth panels that she wears under her dress as she grows into a young woman.  The details of Varl’s life are revealed to us in layers, unspooling from Varl’s mind as they would occur to a stream-of-consciousness narrator. Varl takes her birth name from Master Perry’s horse who dies on the day of Varl’s birth; rather than be given the name of Free as her mother, Mamalee, wishes, Perry writes down the name Varl in his register. Varl and Mamalee live on the Perry farm in the town of Perrysburg (so named after the dominant plantation in the area); Varl’s two older brothers (we only learn after much circumlocution) are dead-killed for the unconscionable act of “buying” each other at a slave auction-and her father Captain (also called Odysseus) is either dead or alive at sea. Mamalee is an educated slave; her previous owner, Esmenda Jenkins Dube, arranged for Mamalee to receive a college education.

Living within the boundaries of the Perry household in a cabin that was built to house the slaves, Varl situates herself within the physical and emotional constraints of slavery, attempting to reclaim her freedom through her writing.  Her ability to read and write makes her a “rare thing” of interest to her Master, Peter Perry, a consummate collector obsessed with the “deformity” and “delicacy” of his assembled household of slaves, Sully the Dwarf and Albino Pearl (who are treated more like circus curios than slaves at times) and of his insect plates in his Great Book of Insectean Marvels.  Perry’s desire to influence Varl’s development causes him to introduce her to the luna moth-the actias luna that “writes itself a new existence” with its cocoon.  The process of composing the poem through “stitch-writing” in cloth pages becomes sewn into the fabric of the story.  Varl records the “meaning of what happens,” inching herself towards greater understanding through the repetition of events and phrases, by moonlight and starlight while sitting on the Jimbo Wood tree stump that her father Captain (also called Odysseus) felled under the cover of night to build the martial bed of Peter Perry and Ralls Janet, his wife. In form, if not content, Varl writes herself as the third player in this marriage, casting herself against Peter Perry or Ralls Janet as the narrative develops.  This clever evasion of authority through her writing makes Varl into the rarest of Perry’s collection of slaves in a slowly-increasing property that constantly must hire out workers to put on shows of Southern slaveholding opulence for guests.  Through Varl’s eyes, the performance of slavery is elegantly contrasted with the performance of mastery through the display of the hired-out slaves, a kind of self-mythologizing that Peter Perry uses to maintain, and re-manufacture for every new guest, the expectations of the Southern slave-holding culture.

As Varl matures into this thickening cocoon of words, her layers of words becomes their own intertext of the bodies and lives that the master/slave bond between Peter Perry and his household has authored. In this intertextual world that is seemingly authored by the cultural capital of slavery, Varl wonders if her awareness of her own womanhood has become “deformed” by Perry’s attentions  (Moss 73).  The question of “deformity” can never adequately be addressed by Varl, however, as the subjectivity that we know as “Varl” owes its shape to Perry; to be deformed is to have another possible shape, a previous shape, or a shape that could serve as the exemplar of what a Varl should be.  Yet no such models for a second-generation educated slave exist in the slaveholding South.  Varl’s perfunctory, possessively mute crush on Dob “(he will be mine)”, a wordless man who works the cotton fields as “the king of strength” in Varl’s mind seems to exist only in defiant opposition to her equal fascination with Peter Perry’s love for her (pp. 10, 36).  While she does not outright support this reading of her desire (as Varl, ever the postmodernist, is always conscious of the reading of herself), Varl’s proclivity to cast herself in a series of binary oppositions to her Masters-Peter Perry, Janet Ralls, and their daughter, Lusa-as well as  her social network-her mother, Mamalee, and Jessper, a young female slave who suffers sexual and physical abuse at the neighboring Staley farm-allows the reader to apprehend Varl’s shortfalls in self-awareness.  When she asserts that she writes “as if I love [Perry] / but I do not”, the reader sees through Varl’s rhetoric of “love” into the language of possession and ownership that bleeds into ideas of romance.  Yet as washed as Slave Moth is in postmodern theory of constructed and equivocal meanings, mute Dob never quite rises above a “not speaking” canvas onto which Varl projects her desire, onto which Varl’s marries desire and violence (”touching me and thinking about a gun / …Thinking about a gun / because he’s touching me”) that is inherent in her relationship with Peter Perry.

Whereas the dominant narrative about education and slavery of the neo-slave narrative equates education with the phenomenon of “unique… identity,” having a “sense of worth as a human being,” and freedom, Slave Moth ultimately does not portray education as the necessary or sufficient path to freedom (Rushdy 76).  The route to literacy, as imagined by slaveowner Esmenda Jenkins Dube, was to convert “stupidity into reason”; however, this literacy was to help further the goals of slaveowning — she wished to write out her orders to her her literacy-enabled “uppity household” (Moss 19-20).   Emphasizing the elitist attitude that reading and writing gives households, Esmenda nevertheless postulates that the slaves can now discover for themselves “how / dangerous it would be traveling so far / with nothing” (19).  Education to Esmenda, unlike the oft-ascribed Frederick Douglass quote that is taken as a rallying cry, “once you learn to read you will be forever free,” is “nothing” — less even than what the actual “traveling so far” to freedom entails.  Education in this sense is not a simple, neutral act of learning an alphabet and phonetic sounds; it is an inscription of the master narrative of enslavement onto the mind, an indoctrination into powerlessness that the dominant culture projects onto slaves.  Mamalee’s college education did nothing to alleviate her enslavement: after harassment from the townspeople drove Esmenda from her farm, Mamalee passed into Peter Perry’s household.  Rather than forge a bill of travel to escape to the North, Mamalee buys into the Fredrick Douglass narrative of “freedom” and runs a secret school for slaves.

Yet Varl, herself a slave (even though she was born to an educated slave with all of the attendant benefits of a second-generation education), notes that “the whole thing [Mamalee] lives for would be ruined/ if she wasn’t in slavery” — speaking as much about her narrative strand with Perry as she is about her mother’s (60).  Contrary to the assumption of the neo-slave narrative tradition, Moss consciously highlights that Mamalee’s “unique identity” and “sense of self” is not created through education so much as it is authored by slavery, and sustained by her context as educator within the slave economy of the South.  The subversion of the dominant neo-slave narratives of education and freedom in Slave Moth allows Moss to shade the context in which personalities and purpose are formed in slavery. In the equivocal relationships between slavery, education and Mamalee’s personal sense of purpose, defiantly opposed yet encompassed by the system in which she was born, Moss achieves a nuance in characterization that both stands outside of Varl’s voice and reflects upon Varl’s own oppositional/complicit role in her own enslavement.

Rather than cast reading and writing into the role of savior, Moss uses Varl’s voice to complicate the ways in which the individual’s literacy uses reading and writing to gain authorship of their personal worlds.²  Varl’s “needle writing” equivocally creates a space for freedom of personal expression by making a space to be “luna underneath/ the visible Varl” by concealing the dialogue she has with herself next to her body to “change her heart” (7).  Underneath the name of “Varl,” given to her by Peter Perry as the name of his dead horse, she has begun to author a new meaning, a new text that invests “the visible Varl” with layers of meaning others cannot comprehend-the constellation of the private imagination that the Romantics were so keen to ascribe to unique creation.  Yet Moss does not let this private space-the thoughts that create the very narrative we read-authorize itself as a wholly positive thing; this layering of meaning insulates Varl from the outside world, unable to “feel enough of [Dob's] hand on my waist/ through the thickness of my cocoon” when she finally realizes her desire for him (127).  The layering of pages over her body leaves Varl in danger of becoming nothing more than text herself.  While Varl rejects the thought “I’m just a page in the master’s book;/ free in my thoughts, but attached to the binding” — it is not until she is forcibly stripped of the cloth pages and made to wear one of Lusa’s small dresses without the words over her heart that Varl acknowledges that her writing overwrites history to change “what can happen/ because a changed Varl has options” (16, 149).

Slave Moth does not provide any overt resolution in material terms that one would expect in a neo-slave narrative.  Varl does not run away, or kill Peter Perry as the resistance narrative would have her do to exorcize the violence inherent in the master/slave bond. Neither does she find freedom and love as expressed in the terms of conventional romance. Instead, in a resolution worthy of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Varl’s act of writing finally succeeds in inscribing her bondage-name Varl to mean Free through a maturation of her own literacy. The tension between Varl as a person and Varl as text that has been sewn into Slave Moth (for text can be inserted, rearranged, bound into the “master’s book”) culminates in an act of creation that signifies her growth into adulthood.  Whereas other reviewers such as Milton Welch have focused on the romantic coupling with Dob as the fulfillment of the romance trope, or through a gentle elision not treating the ending at all, the resolution of Slave Moth occurs within the form of the poem itself — the final poem of the collection, “A Day in Varlton” is Varl’s fully-realized potential as a poet and as a young woman.

Though Moss thwarts the reader’s ambition to witness a satisfying conclusion for Varl’s life through the provision of details relating to her escape with Dob, this final poem presents a powerful statement of freedom by framing the blooming of Varl’s interior world as an act of overwriting of the townspeople of Perrysburg.  Peter Perry, infatuated with Varl’s act of defiance in the climax of the poem by refusing to show him the cloth pages of her narrative, flexes his privilege as the dominant economic stake of the region and renames the town Perrysburg “Varlton” in honor of Varl.  The narrative of master/slave becomes fully unstable; Peter Perry’s desire for Varl can no longer be separated from Varl’s interior agency within the text of her own narrative. Transforming the location of her enslavement into “Varlton,” Varl with the help of Mamalee transforms the humiliation of being forced by Ralls Janet to wear one of Lusa’s dresses (too tight to fit her cloth pages underneath) into empowerment.  Varlton is the freedom that she sought in her cloth pages, written now onto the world — “with or without a map I know how/ to find Varlton” (151).

The resolution is not so much written as the subversion of the power structure that the neo-slave narrative would require, though we glimpse some resistance-Sully the Dwarf and Albino Pearl halt their work on the Perry farm; it is in the craft of the final poem that we witness Varl’s full maturation.  Whereas the poetic form of Varl’s earlier poems involve enjambed, breathless lines, stanzas of length or brevity according only to Varl’s artistic sense, “A Day in Varlton” is controlled: end-stopped lines, terse stanzas of three or four lines interspersed with single or double line stanzas for punctuation of longer thoughts with the touch of an imagist poet like William Carlos Williams, or a minimalist poet like James McMichael. The poetic distance is palpable in observation-oriented lines — the detached “activity in the cocoons” forming the first line of the poem, rather than the direct, “unmediated” dialogue we have experienced in the rest of Slave Moth (150).  In the final lines of the poem, the final expression of the maturation of form, Varl demolishes the paradigm of master/slave that has dominated her self-image by extending herself “beyond/ the boundaries of Varlton” to find a relationship of equals with Dob: “I’ll follow Dob sometimes/ and sometimes he’ll follow me” (152).  Varl no longer requires, nor craves the dialogue of her luna moth pages; she can exercise her art and her freedom as a pupated poet.

It is in this final poem that the poetic voice of Varl takes on such wings created through a distance from her material — a distance that allows us as readers to see the full sweep of her gaze from the highly reflexive problems of her past to a vista “beyond Varlton” — that the breathless first-person narration of Slave Moth is ultimately revealed as merely a stage in a young poet’s growth. This brilliantly-written but problematic addition to the neo-slave narrative tradition smashes open gendered readings of slavery and authorship, never quite falling prey to the weaknesses inherent in such an intensely-focused first-person voice as Varl’s, yet as a postmodern artifact never quite finding its wings except in the total transformation and control of form.

References

Moss, Thylias. Slave Moth. New York: Persea Books, 2004.

Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.