The book club is reading “The Hemingses of Monticello” in February. Our March pick will be announced on Monday.
Revolution in the French colonies, which erupted in the uprising in Saint-Domingue in 1791 that led to Haitian independence, pitted black against white in ways that were threatening to white slave-owning Americans like Jefferson, but American literature is slow to record it. Denial of the race problem largely persists in American literature until Melville, who, as Jon points out, writing in a kind of code, begins to unmask black/white master/slave power relations in the mid-nineteenth century.
French writers were not as timorous. In 1787, the possibility of native retaliation against colonialism is expressed in “Chansons madécasses,” thought to be the first French prose poem. It was written by Evariste de Forges de Parny, an aristocrat who grew up on the Isle of Bourbon (now called Réunion, east of Madagascar, and still part of the French empire) where he witnessed the effects of colonization on native populations. De Parny was educated in France, served in the French colonies in India, and returned to France to lead a literary life that earned him a seat in the Académie Française.
The second song in the three-part cycle, “Aoua,” which can be translated “Ouch,” (you can read the full translation here) begins like this:
“Aoua! Aoua! Méfiez-vous des Blancs, habitants du rivage.” (Ouch! Ouch! Beware of whites, inhabitants of the coast). It describes the colonial ventures of marauding European whites who break promises, build forts, attack and subdue indigenous peoples through slavery and religion, and are defeated by the natives, who exult (They are no more, and we live, and we live in freedom!).
Maurice Ravel set the cycle to music in 1925. Here “Aoua” is sung by Magdalena Kozena. If “Aoua” hasn’t become more of a rallying cry in black-liberation circles, it may be because it’s so difficult to sing. But I think it deserves a place on the Hemingses Playlist as we tackle Part 3, when the Hemingses and Jeffersons get back to where they once belonged.
Or do they?
Share your thoughts on the book in the open thread.