Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jon Smith is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Alabama.

Deborah Cohn is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction.

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""Look Away! "is an important collection that expands the vocabularies and national symbol systems that scholars can deploy to think comparatively about the Americas. It is especially useful in breaking the binary between North and South that has so restricted southern literary and historical studies."--Patricia Yaeger, author of "Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing"

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Look Away!

Duke University Press

Chapter One

By the way of the sea You've got to learn to remember what the clouds cannot forget.... How are you going to forget what the clouds still remember? Relentless memory to remember what the clouds cannot forget by the way of the sea! -NICOLAS GUILLEN, "Elegia"

GEORGE B. HANDLEY

A New World Poetics of Oblivion

The historical patterns that characterize the U.S. South also connect it to a larger region of the Americas. These patterns, most notably European colonization, Amerindian genocide and displacement, and African slavery, have served to create a region of perplexing but compelling commonality among Caribbean nations, the Caribbean coasts of Central and South America and Brazil, and the U.S. South (which in this broader context, of course, would then be a "north"), an area known as Plantation America. These historical parallels, however, should not become justification for assuming that one can find facile homogeneity in the Americas; social, racial, and cultural similarities in the New World cannot be ignored any more than they can be definitively identified. Without careful comparative consideration of both what emerges and what may have been lost in the at times brutal and violent interaction of cultures in the New World, the leap from the local to the hemispheric will effectively result in an elision of important regional differences. To do so would be to imagine that the commonalities that bring New World cultures together were never subject to original violence or historical trauma; it is to ignore and perpetuate the untraceable facts of New World oblivion.

Defining the contours of our American parallels is challenging not only because the contemporary cultures of the Americas are so divergent but also because the historical events that they presumably share, although central to the formation of New World communities, often defy our capacity to recuperate them as representable, sayable stories. A complete understanding of events such as the murder and displacement of millions of Amerindians or the Middle Passage of African slavery and its subsequent legacies of untold suffering for millions of Africans and their descendents is often beyond representation because the lived realities were either initially understated or erased in historical documentation in an attempt to conceal accountability. And, of course, dead victims cannot speak; those who did survive had little or no access to written expression, and their testimonies often held feeble legal force. This is to say nothing of the daunting task of simply finding adequate forms of representation with which to sum up such atrocities.

Sympathetic discourses that have tried to recover a more accurate sense of the nature of this violence and its lasting effects have done so most often as rhetorical witnesses of a past no longer accessible. Such discourses, however, often omit careful consideration of the dizzying authorial challenge of giving representative force to such cataclysms. Very little of New World literature and its critical reception has succeeded in awakening from a fundamental numbness toward these primal hemispheric scenes. New World writers who do overcome this numbness paradoxically do so by beginning with a recognition not of the realities of the events per se but of the existence of a saturated, collective amnesia about them. In these cases, readers are typically taken through two levels in the suspension of disbelief, first on the level of historical experience ("Could this really have happened?") and then again in working through the trauma of what they have been asked to imagine as real ("What difference does it make that it did happen?"). This double suspension of disbelief does not create further numbness precisely because it points with greater honesty and humility to the enormity of the challenge of representation that New World history presents. It also acknowledges that the evidence that remains of historical parallels in the New World is, due to the violent and traumatic nature of its history, fragmented, partial, and while undeniable, ultimately unknowable.

Because New World history has blocked historiographic access to much of its evidence, historical reconstruction would benefit from a poetics that acknowledges that whatever the contours of a total history might look like, the past can only be known in its remnant parts. It is perhaps ironic that despite the important lead of comparative historical studies on slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, literature and imagination are perhaps even more necessary. While historiography has emerged with valuable (if always tentative) New World death statistics, a poetics that recognizes oblivion-that is, not what is remembered but what is forgotten and therefore unsayable-overs a potentially more ethical way to give representative shape to these elusive historical patterns that link the U.S. South to other regions of slavery. While history yearns for the knowable story of the hemisphere, a contextualization of the American South within the literary imagination of greater Plantation America allows one to assess a broader range of representational choices about similar places and histories and thereby to at least begin to appreciate what is forgotten in the forging of imagined communities. As Jean-Francois Lyotard has written, literature that effectively responds to historical loss "does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it" (47). For that reason, literature, if it is worthy of the task of addressing the problem of oblivion, refuses monumentalization or the seduction of a permanent recuperation of the past, because it mourns what it cannot say every time it tries to say it. Literature serves as further oblivion, then, but only in the sense that it overs pardon or amnesty, as the word oblivion also implies, to the past's refusal to enter completely into representation. The question of forgiveness of the perpetrators is laid aside since that implies using the logic of historical causation that would still privilege and monumentalize the crimes; only the past's elusiveness is forgiven. I do not pretend that this poetics of oblivion is unique to our hemisphere and not highly relevant to, say, Old World problems of historical memory. However, precisely because of the particular hemispheric reach of the events that shook modern American cultures at their foundations, it seems imperative that one recognize that oblivion has played an integral role in the formation of the national cultures of the Americas. On the basis of examining partial and local fragments, one can only begin to outline the extent of what has been erased from New World memory. This, in turn, presents an ethical obligation to learn to read cross-culturally throughout those regions affected by the historical patterns of Plantation America and to commemorate that which was lost in their mutually shared histories. Only by transgressing the borders of nationalism and regionalism (and thereby situating the literature of the U.S. South in a field of New World literature, for example) can a poetics of oblivion realize its capacity to participate in a perpetually...