Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism By Grada Kilomba
In an attempt to bring voice to the psychological reality of everyday racism based on subjective accounts and biographical narratives, Kilomba’s Plantation Memories, deconstructs the normality of racism towards black bodies. The author illustrates what it is like to live in a body that has been historically constructed as the other. Here, ‘we are speaking in our own names’ she asserts, and in the name of the people ‘who have been silent too long’.
“Why do I write?
‘Cause I have to.
‘Cause my voice,
in all its dialects,
has been silent too long”
Kilomba’s introduction starts with this powerful poem by Jacob Sam-La Rose which according to the author is adequate in capturing the long history of ‘imposed silence’, interrupted histories, disrupted speeches and ‘continual loss urged by colonialism’ (p12). Chapter one, entitled, “The Mask”, explores the questions of silences and silencing through a very powerful illustration of the the facemask, an instrument which consists of a bite placed inside of the mouth of the slave, “clamped between the tongue and jaw, and fixed behind the head with two strings, one surrounding the chin and the other surrounding the nose and forehead” (p16). The primary function of the mask according to Kilomba was to impose a sense of speechlessness and fear and in that sense it has become an enduring legacy of colonial representation, “the sadistic politics of conquest and its cruel regimes of silencing the so called ‘others’” (p16).
Who can speak then? Kilomba asks, ‘what happens when we speak? And what can we speak about?’ But also, ‘who listens’, and ‘who can listen’? Kilomba then reminds us that the purpose of the facemask was not solely to prevent the slaves, or ‘the others’, from speaking but also it aimed to protect white ears and consciousness from hearing. White people’s fear of listening to the black subject, as they might reveal a truth about their lives that can impose guilt, shame and anxiety on the white consciousness, was the purpose of rendering the other silent and deriving them far from white consciousness (p21). The mask and the silences that it represents has been created to protect the white subject from hearing the ‘other’s voice and knowledge – the white subject become vulnerable. The art of not knowing; not knowing what you have to know, or what you already know. When words projected out loud, they leave to no room for us to escape. We get entrapped in the Speaker/Listener contract. However, not all who listen hear. Usually, in a dialect, those who are listened to, Kilomba argues, are those who belong or those whose language belong.
In the second chapter Kilomba explicitly delves into the question of ‘who can speak?’ This is not only an exploration but also a critique of Gayatri Spivak’s question of ‘can the subaltern speak?’ for which Spivak response is an emphatic ‘No’! For Spivak, the subaltern dwells in an impossible state of – attempting but failing to – recover her voice from the structures that renders her voice marginalized. There is no escape from these structures; therefore, it is impossible for the subaltern to speak in a way that she can be understood. Although Kilomba seems to agree with the nature of this state of impossibility, she correctly finds Spivak’s position on the silent subaltern, problematic. Kilomba argues that Spivak’s position on the absolute silence of the subaltern “deliberates deafness to the native voice where it can be heard and attributes an absolute power to the white dominant discourse” (p26). Aligning herself with Patricia Hill Collins’ position on this question, Kilomba argues that to assume that subordinate group have to always positions their speech as a confrontation to white consciousness and to always assume the whiteness as the main listening subject means marginalized groups should always “identify unconditionally with the powerful and have no valid independent interpretation of their own oppression” (p26).
Agreeing with Kilomba, I would also argue that to imagine and re-imagine ourselves through the white imagination limits our perception of ourselves and makes the black/brown Other forever a slave confined within the limits of the white gaze. In addition, it plays into the colonial project which assumed that every language and every word out of the subaltern’s mouth, is for the consumption of whiteness rather than subaltern’s own name and community and the moment white ear’s stop listening or misinterpret the speech, then the speech loses its value and becomes a tool for oppression again. Kilomba, using Hill Collins, demonstrates that these claims see the colonized as incapable of speaking in their own name and also make their speeches an unsatisfactory or inadequate and in that sense, a soundless one.
Of further importance is Kilomba’s chapter 4 in which is dedicated to her methodology, where she justifies her utilization of everyday experiences of racism by black bodies in Germany. In so doing, Kilomba attempt to illustrates “the ways in which it is possible for individuals to act as subjects in their social realities, and [..] the way in which it is possible for Black women to achieve the status of the subjects in the context of gendered racism [..] as subject embodies three levels, the political, the social, and the individual”. In describing her methodology and analytical model, Kilomba explicitly mentions that she consciously stays away from abstraction, essentialization and generalization. Although she sees the importance of theory and its abstraction and universalization of certain aspects, she nonetheless is afraid that this universalization risks taking away from the complexities of lived issues and render individual voices silent once again. In the the next few chapters she narrates the experiences of everyday racism through multiple perspectives and concludes with the last chapter on Decolonizing the self.