Zachary Reid’s Transoceanic Performance of White Gentility in Sea of Poppies

Although by 1805 about 18 % of American seamen were Black (and “mostly free”), their population declined with the downsizing of American maritime culture, in addition to the increasingly discriminatory laws against Blacks that followed the Civil War (Bolster 1997).

Scholars have also shown interest in the circulations between east Africa and Asia within the Indian Ocean, which contained its own African slave trade, though on a smaller scale (and with fewer records) than would come to dominate the West, especially after the British forbid slave trading in the nineteenth century. See Joseph E. Harris, The African Presence in India (1976), xiii. In contrast, for a history of high caste Africans in India, see African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat (2006) by Kenneth X Robbins and John McLeod.

Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (2014) and Marcus Rediker’s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2013) also help us to imagine complex transnationalisms through the rebellious attempts to seize freedom aboard the slave ships Tryal and the Amistad. See also Kane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (2010).

See Coolie Woman: An Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur (2013) for more on the nature of coolie labor on plantations. The British transported one million coolies to plantations like British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Suriname, Mauritius, and Fiji between the years of 1830 and 1880 (xx). Bahadur points out that the term “coolie” was originally an epithet that the British used toward their workers (ibid.). I use the term “coolie” not to reproduce the violence of this term, but to emulate the novel’s vocabulary

Fanon argues that “the characteristic of a culture is to be open, permeated by spontaneous, generous, fertile lines of force” (“Racism and Culture” in Toward the African Revolution, 34). Thus, we can consider that mixed races and languages on the boat—for whom the accompanying dictionary is not always accurate—reveal how Sea of Poppies portrays a culture that is singular to the interaction of various groups aboard the ship.

See W. Travis Hanes, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of one Empire and the Corruption of Another, (2002).

See for example Antoinette Burton’s “Amitav Ghosh’s World Histories from Below” (History of the Present 2.1, 71–77), and Anita Roy’s review “Charting Histories” (India International Centre Quarterly, 32.2, 198–202).

Like Black slaves, Asian coolies were targeted for their ability to work on land (in the tropics). See L.G.W. White, Ships, Coolies and Rice (1936). 15). Coolies also died in large numbers, and they are shipped to penal islands. (Clare Anderson’s Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (2012)). However, in Coolie Woman, Bahadur traces the etymology of the word “coolie,” explaining that it comes from the Tamil word “kuli” for “wages or hire” (xx). Theorists like Frank Wilderson would note that this opportunity to earn wages—even if poor ones—is one of the most fundamental differences between coolies and slaves as false participants within an economic system.

According to Fanon, “Racism is not the whole but the most visible, the most day-to-day and, not to mince matters, the crudest element of a given structure. … Racism, as we have seen, is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression of a people.” Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (1994). 33.

See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997).

From Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982). “Indeed, the single most important factor determining the condition of the freedman in the society at large will be the nature of his relationship with his former master,” 240.

That journey aspires to create a brotherhood of the boat between the ship’s subjects, perhaps Ghosh’s imagined compliment to the Middle Passage in which Africans created new forms of kinship under the pressures of their shared suffering. Simon Gikandi of Princeton University discussed the Middle Passage and subjectivity in his lecture, “Inside the Atlantic Crypt: Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement” as New York University’s (Graduate School of Arts and Science) English Department’s Goldstone Lecture of 2014 on March 5, 2014.

Fanon explains this phenomenon occurs as a result of the nuanced system of racial exploit that persists despite the oppressed (Zachary) imitating his oppressor through his “gentlemanly guise.” While “having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural forms, his language, his food habits, … the oppressed flings himself upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a drowning man” and yet “the necessity that the oppressor encounters at a given point to dissimulate the forms of exploitation does not lead to the disappearance of this exploitation.” Toward the African Revolution (1994), 39.

By the time these restrictions were revised or lifted, by the mid-century and the approaching Civil War, Northern free African Americans had less economic liscense to sail.

Martha Hodes explains that the 1890 census was the first and only to divide African Americans into four categories—Black, mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon. This census alludes to anxieties that began with the rise of abolitionism in the 1830s, when Zachary sails aboard the Ibis. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, the American empire has consistently and increasingly depended on physical markers of the “other” so that they may be excluded from privilege. (“Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History ed. Laura Ann Stoler. 2006, 242).

Ghosh also presents us with a complex portrayal of “passing.” Sea of Poppies is set in the nineteenth century, but Ghosh writes it during the twenty-first, so we must venture to believe that Ghosh has thought of earlier novels about the act of passing. Ghosh rejects the “tragic mulatto” stereotype. Rather, Zachary emerges as the hero of the Ibis, and not a depressed (or dead) victim, by the final pages of Sea of Poppies when he overcomes his racist boss, Mr. Crowle, in a tense showdown, when Ah Fatt kills Crowle with a handspike. But he is only heroic because he seems “white.”

Finally, Zachary is not the only character who passes. Paulette, who is white, fights throughout the novel for the opportunity to serve as one of the ship hands aboard the Ibis. Zachary is stunned by her determination to pass not for high rank, but to descend in rank. “It’s not only that you’re a woman—its also that you’re white. The Ibis will be failing with an all-lascar crew which means that only her officers will be “European,” as they say here,” Zachary explains (301). “Anything Jodu can do, I can do also,” Paulette argues. “It is true that he is darker, but I am not so pale that I could not be taken for an Indian” (302). In these ways, Ghosh both upholds and destabilizes stereotypical conceptions of the act of passing.

My emphasis.

While at Port Louis, it is the lascars with training in tailoring who mend Zachary’s clothes and who properly dress him. Serang Ali remains committed to helping Zachary upkeep his image. “It was as if he had acquired a claim on him, in having aided in his transformation into a sahib; no matter how much Zachary cursed and slapped his hands, he would not stop: it was as if he had become an image of gentility, equipped with all that it took to find success in the world,” 22. These lower ranks create the image of gentility from which Zachary will benefit, not unlike the ways in which the hands of these ranks later cultivate the poppy seeds from which the British Empire would benefit.

See Paul Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (Signs of Race) (2013).

Crowle dies moments later after “the half-Chinese convict,” Ah Fatt, hits him with a handspike, a moment which brings us full-circle from Zachary’s memory of the Baltimore shipyard. I struggle to interpret Baboo Non Kissin’s reaction to Zachary’s mixed race. He thinks that Zachary’s blackness reveals that he’s an incarnate of the Dark Lord. We might interpret this in a similar vein as to how the American slave master often conflated himself as a “god” to his subjects so that they believed white skin evoked the deity.

Furthermore, Ghosh explains that he is interested in how decolonial movements in Third World countries during the nineteenth century had aspired to create their own universalism—i.e., sending letters across the globe as a means of resuming cross-cultural conversation.