Roundtable by Joellen Delucia
Enlightenment in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.11
Cite: Delucia, Joellen. 2021. “Enlightenment in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 35-38.
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During one of the earliest conversations in our reading group, we spent time considering the title of Jeffers’s collection, The Age of Phillis. For our group primarily comprising teachers and scholars of eighteenth-century British and American literature, the title instantly evoked the names of classes we had both taken and later taught: “The Age of Reason,” “The Age of Enlightenment,” “The Augustan Age,” and “The Age of Johnson.” Of course, these standard frameworks were designed to mark a range of different shifts in the history of aesthetics and the history of ideas. “The Age of Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason” often traces a movement from a theistic worldview toward what David Hume famously called “the science of man”; “The Augustan Age” tracks a revival of ancient Greece and Rome as aesthetic models for an increasingly commercial and democratic eighteenth century; and “The Age of Johnson,” using Samuel Johnson as a model, charts the rise of the professional author. The Age of Phillis disrupts these standard narratives and invites scholars and teachers to rethink how the study of the eighteenth century is structured. What does the eighteenth century look like when we center the experience of Phillis Wheatley Peters instead of Enlightenment philosophy, neoclassical poetics, or Samuel Johnson? What happens if instead of teaching Wheatley Peters as the conclusion of a unit on, say, Enlightenment rights discourse that begins with Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft, we instead start with her?

When we encountered a group of poems in the middle of the collection organized under the heading “Book: Enlightenment,” we began to sketch out some rough answers. This section itself is exemplary of how Jeffers’s collection as a whole invites teachers and students to remix and rethink not just the Wheatley Peters archive but the archive of Enlightenment. Indebted, as she acknowledges in her notes to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Trial of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and her Encounters with the Founding Fathers,¹ Jeffers begins with two epigraphs, the first from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and the second from Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764-65): 1) “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic], but it could not produce a poet” ; 2) “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling”.² Beginning with Jefferson and Kant’s racist assessments of the aesthetic capacities of both Wheatley Peters and Africans, Jeffers explores in this section how the systemic racism built into Enlightenment philosophy diminished Wheatley Peters’s art. This set of poems on Enlightenment also raises new questions about the “paradox of Enlightenment,” making an important contribution to twenty-first-century conversations about the tensions within Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment aesthetics exemplified in works such as Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Cutlure of Taste (2011), Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire (2003), Karen O’Brien’s Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009), and J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion (1999–2015).³ 

The six poems within “Book: Enlightenment” contrast the brutal abstractions encouraged by Enlightenment systems with the lived experiences of Anton Wilhelm Amo and Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, in addition to Wheatley Peters. The first poem in the collection is written in the voice of Amo, the German-African philosopher, who taught at the Universities of Halle and Jena (places still associated with Kant and German idealism) but later in life returned to West Africa. In the poem, Jeffers speculates that Amo’s return was, at least in part, because his “colleagues” refused to confront the philosophical import of the physical world, which the Amo of Jeffers’s poem describes as “a query of material and skin” (61). Amo’s poem is followed by “Illustration: Petrus Camper’s Measurement of the Skull of a Negro Male.” This poem is written in the voice of Camper and inspired by, as Jeffers notes, Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “The Venus Hottentot,” which puts the voice of George Cuvier, the doctor who dissected and then cast the body of Saartjie Baartmann, in dialogue with Baartmann’s own voice, which is absent from the archive. Like Cuvier’s treatment of Baartmann, Camper’s callous probing and classification of a Black man’s skull, “illustrates” (to borrow from the poem’s title) the unfeeling nature of scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment. Jeffers turns Kant’s assessment of Africans in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime on its head and makes the reader doubt the humanity and capacity for feeling of the European philosophers and scientists responsible for creating the taxonomies and classification systems that structure Enlightenment thought. 

Written in the voice of Kant, the next poem entitled “The Beautiful and the Sublime” sets the philosopher’s famously inflexible routine alongside the rigid racial hierarchies that emerged from Enlightenment science and philosophy:

first the keen whites

                        [I rise]

then the mean yellows

                        [I bathe and dress]

then the savage reds

                        [I break my fast]

then the trifling blacks

                        [I take my sweet walk]

the lowly apes at the last

[lonely contemplation]

first the keen whites

                        [I rise]

When contrasted with his desire to generate universal systems, such as the aesthetic hierarchy he sets forth in the treatise Jeffers quotes in the epigraph, Kant’s existence in Könisberg registers as dangerously particular and insular. His solitary routine and limited lived experience contrasts sharply with the deleterious and universal racial classification systems developed by Kant in his work on aesthetics and, perhaps most famously, Carl Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1735). Jeffers’s critique of Kant drives home the irrationality inherent in systems created by provincial white European thinkers to structure “objective” or abstract understandings of a global world. Jeffers returns readers to Kant’s work on aesthetics, reminding us that his aesthetic theory not only gendered the beautiful and sublime but also, like Montesquieu and David Hume before him, used national characters that he knew very little, if anything, about to determine the capacity of individuals to feel and create. His work sorts out those European nations who are drawn to the sublime (German, English, Spanish) from those who prefer the beautiful (French, Italian) and then uses these assumptions to assess the capacities of people in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. For example, in the same passage of Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime that Jeffers cites in her epigraph, Kant refers to Hume’s assertion that “among the hundreds of thousands of Africans who have been transported elsewhere . . . not a single one has ever been found who has accomplished something great in art or science,” and concludes that race and geography determine one’s “capacities of mind.”⁴ Ultimately, Kant’s conclusion emerges as a “ridiculous” and “trifling” racist assessment issued by someone who knew very little about the world outside Könisberg.⁵   

The next two poems shift to Enlightenment law and Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her uncle William Murray, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, who famously ruled in both the Somerset and Zong cases. The unnamed speaker in the first poem, “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and Her White Cousin, The Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench,” reacts to the 1779 portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, asking readers to “forget [h]istory. She’s a teenager” (60). The speaker appeals to readers and asks them to see the joy and beauty that has captivated viewers of this portrait outside the oppressive structures of Enlightenment, pleading with readers to “Let her be. / Please.” (67). The subsequent poem, “Three Cases Decided By William Murray,” ” places Lord Mansfield, Dido Belle Elizabeth Lindsay’s uncle, in history and in Enlightenment, juxtaposing three cases: the real Somerset and Zong cases for which he wrote decisions and an imagined interior conflict between the private and public Lord Mansfield. The three contrasting voices in the poem (plaintiff, defendant, and judge) reveal the self-interest and emotions that are often channeled through abstract notions of justice. The first section is written in the voice of the Somerset defendant Charles Stewart, a Scottish merchant who purchased James Somerset in Virginia and then transported him to England. Somerset escaped, claiming his freedom on British soil; then Stewart captured and imprisoned Somerset, claiming him as property purchased in Virginia. The speaker in the next section is the plaintiff in the Zong case, Gregson, one of the Liverpool enslavers who sued to be recompensed by the group’s insurance company for the Africans they had thrown overboard during their forced migration. Historians and other scholars have long wondered how Lord Mansfield’s recorded affection for his niece may or may not have impacted his ruling in these cases. Instead of answering this question, Jeffers in the final section of this poem depicts the contradictions Mansfield must have lived with, giving us the fictional trial of “The Public Lord Mansfield v. The Private William Murray, 1787.” Acting as both the defendant and plaintiff, Mansfield leaves behind debates about common and positive law, appealing to natural law: “Dido has become my child. / . . . . Let me protect / my kindred if you will cover / your own. / Natural law will stay: / morality and bones” (70). Mansfield’s refusal to reconcile his public and private selves and his appeal to natural law points to inconsistencies within the Enlightenment legal system, the failure of abstract Enlightenment ideas and principles, and the system’s inability to account for material reality and lived experience.

Jeffers returns to Thomas Jefferson in the final poem of “Book: Enlightenment.” In “Found Poem: Racism,” Jeffers rearranges Jefferson’s racist account of the differences signified by white and black skin color in his Notes on the State of Virginia. She breaks a group of lines at “beauty,” “difference,” and “colour” emphasizing the connection between racist Enlightenment aesthetic hierarchies and his assessments of Phillis Wheatley Peters and her work. Jeffers’s rearrangement of Jefferson’s essay into verse also transforms his essay from an Enlightenment treatise into an aesthetic object to be assessed by readers as he assessed and then dismissed Wheatley Peters and her poetry. Instead of an object of beauty or feeling, Jefferson’s essay emerges as a testament to his failure to feel as well as his inability to apprehend beauty and acknowledge Wheatley Peter’s contributions to the poetry and thought of his era. As a group, the poems in “Book: Enlightenment” testify to the way in which we still live with the consequences of the Enlightenment’s systemization of law, nature, and aesthetics. By using these poems in our classrooms and in our scholarship, we can make sure our interlocutors better understand the history of these enduring Enlightenment frameworks as not just generators of rights and equality but also as part of the architecture of systemic racism. I hope that reading Jeffers will inspire teachers and scholars to retire the familiar frameworks that have structured study of the eighteenth century and embrace a new “Age of Phillis.”

ENDNOTES

[1] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Civitas Books, 2003).

[2] Honorée, Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020), 59. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

[3] Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015).

[4] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, eds. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58-59.

[5] Ibid, 58.

Roundtable by David Mazella
The Age of Phillis and Collage —The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.10
Cite: Mazella, David. 2021. “The Age of Phillis and Collage —The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 32-34.
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As I told our group at one of the first meetings, I was approaching Jeffers’s poems as someone who had taught Wheatley Peters to undergraduates, but without much success. Wheatley Peters seemed to cause (I seemed to cause) a mix of discomfort and strained, dutiful attention in my “diverse” classes featuring mostly white authors. Students sometimes expressed frustration, too, at the disconnect between the tragedies, losses, and displacements summarized in the biographies and the formal constructions and tone of the poetry. My attempts to provide context also fell flat. The parallels to Pope and the bare biographical summaries did not help. Introducing responses to her from poets like Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement made things even less comfortable, because I had not made any connections between those poets, their situations, and their poetics in our class.

Reading, teaching, then reflecting on and discussing Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis has helped me understand how much I was shortchanging Wheatley Peters’s poetry, and it gave me a better grasp of Jeffers’s own poetics: the first step was trying to understand the earlier poet’s biography, as partial and fragmented as it is, in its fullest social implications. Jeffers’s research and commentaries reconstructed the earlier poet’s life and experiences as an active member of Boston’s Black community, free and enslaved; as a person who lost one family, lived with another, and then attempted to create her own family with the husband whose name she chose to assume; and as a kind of public curiosity but also correspondent with both public figures (e.g., George Washington and Samson Occom) and members of her own local and religious networks. Seeing her operating within and between these networks made an enormous difference in the way the earlier poems could be read and then interwoven with Jeffers’s own poetic reconstruction of her life and work. This interweaving is how the “critical fabulation” theorized by Hartman begins to supply the missing connections of Wheatley Peters’s fragmentary documentary record. Jeffers takes Wheatley Peters’s life seriously enough to imagine the child’s existence prior to her abduction and the fully grown woman who survived enslavement and found attachment and perhaps even romantic love amidst a precarious freedom. Biography does not solve all interpretive problems, but the problem of regarding her perpetually as a dependent young girl certainly limits our view of her entire poetic career.

Reading Jeffers’s poems reminded me of how some poets and poems really blossom under our attention when isolated and placed in anthologies, and others are ill served. The Age of Phillis really demonstrates how inadequate those anthology-based readings have been for a subtle, understated poet like Wheatley Peters. 

Instead of the flat, compartmentalized narration of a life and context, and a dutiful chronological march through the most familiar poems, in The Age of Phillis, we plunge in media res into an invocation of the “Mother/Muse,” who is conjured up in her “Prologue” via an epigraph from Langston Hughes: “This is a song of the genius child / Sing it softly, for the song is wild” (2).¹ Then, we are transported to a scene of an African mother and daughter in a poem whose title, “An Issue of Mercy #1” hangs on the most notorious line of Wheatley Peters’s best known and least comforting religious poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”: “‘Twas mercy that brought me from my Pagan land.”² 

Jeffers’s point of entry, in her opening poem “An Issue of Mercy #1,” gives us a newly imagined view of that “Pagan land,” as seen through the eyes of the child rather than the young poet:

Mercy, girl,

What the mother might have said, pointing

at the sun rising, what makes life possible.

Then, dripped the bowl of water,

Reverent, into oblivious earth.

Was this prayer for her?

Respect for the dead or disappeared?

An act to please a genius child? (3).

In a scene that hinges on the hardest, least intelligible word in an eighteenth-century poem that confidently asserts a “fortunate fall,” mercy in Jeffers’s “Issue” becomes the exclamation of an exasperated African mother, whose rituals and ceremonies are registered but only partially understood by the young girl. Nonetheless, this young girl, “a genius child,” will soon enough be regarded as “dead or disappeared.” Was the mother’s prayer for her? The young girl will never find out.

Mercy, what the child called Phillis

Would claim after that sea journey.

Journey.

Let’s call it that.

Let’s lie to each other. (3)

Jeffers’s narratorial voice takes command here and makes mercy the term that the earlier poet “would claim after that sea journey” (my emphasis). Jeffers’s stress on the poet’s “claim” upon our moral judgment transforms our understanding of the term “mercy” in Wheatley Peters’s poem, so that it sheds its appearance of servility or compliance. Instead, Jeffers helps us view Wheatley Peters’s assertion that “mercy” had brought her to America is an act of mature reflection of the older toward the younger self. It is an act of self-forgiveness, from someone old enough to understand how she has been stolen from and lied to. To produce this alternative reading of mercy, however, Jeffers suggests how profoundly the earlier poet’s story had been truncated from its first moments of circulation and publication.

Jeffers’s poetics goes beyond quotation and rises to the level of collage, which I think of as an antianthology. Elements of Wheatley Peters’s history, her conflicting strands of biography, the key words and phrases of her poems and letters can be detached from a sometimes lying historical context and muddled historical record and remade and reconfigured to show something of the epic journey of “a genius child” who grew up to sing her own soft but wild song.

ENDNOTES

[1] Jeffers’s “Prologue” takes its epigraph from Hughes’s poem, “Genius Child,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (Knopf, 1994), 198.

[2] Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” in Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 13.

Roundtable by Jenny Factor and Sam Plasencia
The Age of Phillis in Forms, Found and Free—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.9
Cite: Factor, Jenny and Plasencia, Sam. 2021. “The Age of Phillis in Forms, Found and Free—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 27-31.
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In The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers takes on a work of Black poetic lineage, engaging in a process of matriarchal reclamation that makes scholarship sing. Jeffers’s more traditional prosodic engagement deftly echoes the literary ages in which the book occurs: the masterly and capacious eighteenth-century couplets (and centos) of a Pope or Dryden and the globally prescient pantoums and villanelles that evoke an oral tradition. Yet in addition to the couplets, villanelles, pantoums, and centos of the volume, Jeffers tells a story of embodiment through a more experimental use of form that must be held alongside the fixed forms as one of the most important genealogical engagements of the volume. 

Poetic form—when used as part of a more complicated and nuanced aesthetic project—is not about skillful shapes and received forms alone, but it is rather about a conversation between poetic embodiment and content. In the case of Jeffers’s Phillis, the use of form, at its very essence, works through some of the same struggles that pervade any historical reading of Wheatley Peters herself—namely, how to build a robust story and vibrant sense of an author’s original living body in spite of history’s persistent lacunae about her life and the relationship between her life and her art.¹ Here, the imagined body is the space the form and content are truly co-constitutive. Rhythms and shapes of breath, joy, politics, and oppression infuse the line lengths and shapes of these more experimental poems. 

For example, the poem “mothering #1” is written in twenty-three lines that fluctuate between two and five syllables, mimicking the erratic and shallow inhalations of the titular Gambian mother who is out of breath from the exertion of birthing. In the following section, “The Transatlantic Progress of Sugar in the Eighteenth Century” is written in three eight-line stanzas that each start with one word or character and from there unfurl, with each subsequent line extending slightly further than the previous one. The complete poem takes up one page and takes the form of three ninety-degree triangles. These triangles may be an allusion to the triangle trade wherein Black men and women were kidnapped from Africa and transported to the Americas where their labor produced raw goods that were then shipped to England to be manufactured, which were then dispersed back across the Atlantic and down to Africa to be traded for more Black men and women. The unfurling shape of the stanzas also evokes a paracord whip that sits coiled on its user’s hip until it is used, at which point it extends outwards. That a poem about the massively successful sugar trade takes the form of an unfurling whip reminds readers of the violence that propelled eighteenth-century economies. 

Some of the experimental poems in the volume repeat titles, such as “An Issue of Mercy #1,” “An Issue of Mercy #2,” and “An Issue of Mercy #3,” or “mothering #1,” and “Mothering #2.” The use of repeated titles gives the impression of these poems serving as drafts or variants of one another—an issue powerfully connected to the scholarly afterlife of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s own poetry in which one can never be certain when handling variants that may have appeared alternatively in letters, periodicals, and broadsides, of which version Wheatley Peters most approved, or even whether Wheatley Peters herself was given final authorial say over the more enduring book form of her own work.¹ The poems that hearken to the theme of mercy also serve as a kind of kaleidoscopic thesaurus, echoing directly one of the most controversial lines in Wheatley Peters’s most anthologized poem (“Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”).  With each new use of mercy, Jeffers complicates and ironically deploys this challenging word. 

In the two “mothering” variants, Jeffers signals the entanglement of race, violence, and archival recordkeeping by capitalizing the m in the second mothering poem, which is about Susannah Wheatley, but not in the first, which is about Wheatley Peters’s mother. The transatlantic system of enslavement and its extant paper trail are both reasons why we know of the particular being Susannah Wheatley and why we do not know of the African woman who birthed the girl who was later renamed Phillis Wheatley. The distinction in capitalization also disrupts the historicist inclination to overvaluate those for whom we have names: Jeffers gives Wheatley Peters’s mother pride of place in The Age of Phillis. For example, Wheatley Peters’s mother is the imaginative subject of the prologue, “Prologue: Mother/Muse,” where she is titularly aligned with—and positioned as—a muse. She is a central figure throughout the first major section, “Book: Before,” and is reflected back on in other poems throughout the collection. Indeed, mothering is a significant through line in Jeffers’s work. In these ways, the now unknowable woman for whom we have no proper noun reverberates through the text.  

Jeffers also invents and then repeats forms, as with the twenty-five “Lost Letter[s],” the three “Fragment[s],” and four “Found Poem[s].” The “Lost Letter[s]” make key contributions to Jeffers’s engagement with what is unknown in Phillis’s lived experience. These letters are generally invented verse epistles that Jeffers imagines may have once existed—such as a lifelong correspondence between Wheatley Peters and Obour Tanner, based on the existence of extant letters indicating that they shared a friendship and perhaps a church, and a letter between Susannah Wheatley and Samuel Occom, based on a surviving reply from Occom to Wheatley that implies her opinion about Phillis’s manumission. The “Fragment[s]” often contain direct quotations from Wheatley Peters collected works. Like the recent erasure poems of Robin Coste Lewis, these “fragments” make the existing texts sound out in new ways that honor the absence written into them. The “Found Poems” usually tie eighteenth-century historic events together with contemporary twenty-first-century social history, tearing into legal documents and journalism to do so.

In our reading group, we noticed that Jeffers’s found poems usually concluded one of the volume’s ten sections. For example, the first section of The Age of Phillis, “Book: Before,” ends with “Found Poem: Detention #1,” which is a versification of Warren Binford’s interview for the New Yorker about the border camps in Texas.² More specifically, it is a poetic rendition of the interviewer’s inquiry into how many children were imprisoned by othe facility and Binford’s answer, which detailed the overcrowding, filth, and sadness of the “warehouse” (17). Ending “Book: Before” with this found poem is a poignant critical choice. Most of this book takes place in West Africa: it imagines what it might have meant for a Gambian mother and father to have a baby girl, describes prayer rituals, and narrates the little girl as a toddler—walking to the village with Yaay (the Wolof word for “mother”) while eating mango. Put differently, the first half of this book (six pages) imagines a time before the conquest and enslavement that tore this Gambian family apart. The poem on the seventh page is titled “Fracture,” and it narrates the present-tense event of existential rupture: “the men arrive” (13). The second half of “Book: Before” (six pages) is divided between three one-page poems (the father’s “moan,” the mother’s “entreaty,” and the child’s middle passage) and then ends with the three-page found poem on the contemporary detention of children. 

Jeffers’s decision to follow the African child’s middle passage with a found poem on immigration detention offers a transnational, transhistorical, and intersectional analysis of power. First, the juxtaposition draws attention to how white supremacist governments forced migration from one continent for their financial profit and also stall migration from other continents for profit. Secondly, it demonstrates that the apparatuses of enslavement in the United States persist despite the fact that de jure enslavement was abolished. Third, Jeffers’s poetic assembly transhistoricizes racialized violence in order to demonstrate how technologies of power originally practiced on enslaved Africans are now being practiced on Latinx communities. In these ways, Jeffers presents contemporary immigrant detention camps—a booming for-profit, spin-off industry of mass incarceration—as a reiteration of the racialized technologies and relations of power that organized the economies and politics of enslavement. She echoes this alignment of racial violence by concluding the second section, “Book: Passage,” with “Found Poem: Detention #2,” which versifies a Washington Post report by Michael Brice-Saddler on a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died while in the custody of the US Border Patrol. Jeffers thus compounds multiple registers of repetition—thematic, titular, formal, and conceptual—in order to demonstrate how enslavement is the blueprint for our current state-sanctioned forms of detention and death. As Christina Sharpe might describe it, such repetitions and reverberations are what it means to live in the wake of slavery, a “disaster” that is “deeply atemporal…always present.”³ 

One of Jeffers’s most fascinating forms challenges readers to become conscious of both the privileging practices and the social ecologies of their own acts of reading. These two three-column contrapuntal poems were likely modeled after the multicolumn, multidirectional syncopated sonnets of Tyehimba Jess, who popularized the form in his recent collections Olio (2016) and Leadbelly (2005).⁴ Jess’s two books also use archival materials to make poetry of the lives of African American artists in history. Two of these multicolumn poems are found in The Age of Phillis. The first, “The Mistress Attempts to Instruct Her Slave in the Writing of a Poem,” is organized into three columns. The left and right columns each contain an extra line at the top comprised of just a name: “Phillis” initiates the left column and “Susannah” begins the right column. In between them is a column wherein each line is italicized, in brackets, and ranges between two and five syllables. This poem’s structure invites readers to play with the order of reading. You can read by prioritizing each column: read from top to bottom and left to right, or reverse that order and start at the bottom. Alternatively, you can prioritize lines: from left to right and top to bottom or in reverse. You could even read from right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top. The complexity of these multiple arrangements and how they shape the poem’s meaning is intensified by the note that prefaces the poem: “This verse to the End is the Work of Another Hand. / –Addition by Phillis Wheatley at the bottom of ‘Niobe in Distress’” (53). This preface calls into question the center column of italicized and bracketed phrases: are these—as in the lost letters—internal thoughts? If so, whose? Susannah’s? Or are these the distressed thoughts of the “Niobe”?

The second contrapuntal poem, “chorus of the Mother-Griotte,” is even more complex. It’s found in the section entitled “Muses: Convening,” in which Jeffers, following the titular allusion to the Greek sister goddesses, assembles seven women’s voices, including the Yoruban water deity Yemoja and Ona Judge, a Black woman enslaved by Martha Washington. “Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” is the second poem in the section, preceded by Yemoja and succeeded by an enslaved mother named Isabell. “Griotte” refers to the “Griots,” a highly respected traveling group of oral historians in West Africa—storytellers, singers, poets, and musicians who reposit and performatively share history. As with the Griots, this poem tells a history that comprises many histories: of a girl “who was sold,” stood “naked in the corner,” and marched through the “door of no return” (92). As with the first contrapuntal poem, Jeffers makes use of three columns; however, in this poem, the text is further divided into five three-line segments. Each grouping is preceded by a short phrase, centered above the middle column: “amnesiac wood,” “sailing knot to knot,” “jealous sharks,” “on the battlefield,” and “in God’s name.” For example, the first grouping is as follows:

                                                amnesiac wood

nostrils of girls                        who was bought                      uncle’s hand

guts on the air                         who was old                            defeated man

history’s charnel                     I say                                        trader’s silver

While each grouping might still hold the possibility of a multidirectional reading experience, Jeffers controls her reader’s movement through the use of short poetic lines that anticipate—or perhaps introduce or frame—each three-line grouping. These framing lines force the reader to move from top to bottom and make readers contend with each grouping before moving on to the next. 

“Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” is another beautiful example of how Jeffers intertwines structure and content: this poem’s arrangement bespeaks a certain kind of historical movement that is both punctuated and indefinable. Jeffers represents the passing of time and experience as demarcated by violence: the knots that tie African wrists during transport, the sharks who follow slave ships, the battlefield that brought death but not Black liberation (in 1775 and 1862). What is so brilliant about the poem is that in the final analysis, the passing of time and poetic segments is itself an illusion. What we actually get is a history of repeated antiblack violence. Calvin Warren calls this temporality “Black Time”: “a time without duration; it is a horizon of time that eludes objectification, foreclosing idioms such as ‘getting over,’ ‘getting through,’ or ‘getting beneath.’”⁶  Black time is marked by a “horizon of violence” that “fractures the vectors of temporality” into “an infinite array of absurdities, paradoxes, and contradictions.”⁷ (59). In “The Mistress Attempts to Instruct Her Slave in the Writing of a Poem,” if Jeffers invites the reader to engage in the intricacies of reading an incomplete history with our own insights and perspectives, Jeffers’s “Chorus of the Mother-Griotte” draws the line. At last, in controlling the direction of our reading, Jeffers reminds us that some facts do not leave room for apologist interpretation. Jeffers’s contrapuntal poem embodies this temporality and performs its fracture through the line-breaking, punctuating articulations of violence. This history of fracture, expressed in fragments and visual splinters, is shattering. There is perhaps no better word to describe the intellectual, psychic, and emotional experience of reading the many formal experimentations of Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis.

And yet, what is most surprising is how the sheer formal inventiveness connects with archival virtuosity to also impart a sense of possibility and freedom verging on joy. In the final coda to The Age of Phillis, Jeffers connects her own book’s project to that moment when, as a child, she was first introduced to Phillis Wheatley. She writes:

To my teachers, the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley was the first of the firsts, a beacon for black children . . . . Neither of my parents liked (or respected) her poetry much, but that wasn’t the point. The point was loyalty to the race, to African American men and women.  

This “loyalty to the race” and to undoing the injustice of forgetting a potent African American foremother seems to drive Jeffers toward a project steeped in formal virtuosity, both fertile and lively. Alongside structural and formal echoes from Tyehimba Jess and Robin Coste Lewis, Jeffers engages in a powerful citational praxis, seeding her poems with lines shared from a century and a quarter of African American and Afro-Caribbean poets and their poetries: Elizabeth Alexander, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, A. Van Jordan, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, M. NourbeSe Philip, Natasha Tretheway, and Afaa Michael Weaver—all of whom are explicitly credited in the volume’s extensive endnotes. Claiming Wheatley Peters as root to a powerful family tree, Jeffers’s formal engagement breathes possibility and intellect, vulnerability and strength, linguistic tour de force and Enlightenment racial consciousness into the lacunae that remain in Wheatley Peters’s own story. As a result, The Age of Phillis brings Wheatley Peters’s life and poetry into connection with the African American poetries of the present day. In this sense, it is Jeffers herself who is serving as griotte across three centuries, and we are the ones to whom Wheatley Peters is revealed and her legacy healed. 

ENDNOTES

[1] For more on Wheatley Peters’ subject position and her art, cf., Tara Bynum, “Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures: Reading Good Feeling in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems and Letters,” Commonplace: the journal of early American Life, accessed March 13, 2021, http://commonplace.online/article/phillis-wheatleys-pleasures/.

[2] Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 48-50, 80-85, 213.

[3] Isaac Chotiner, “Inside a Texas Building Where the Government is Holding Immigrant Children,” New Yorker (June 22, 2019).

[4] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 5.

[5] Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly ( Seattle: Wave Books, 2005) and Olio (Seattle: Wave Books, 2016).

[6] Calvin Warren, “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness” The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, R. J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen, 55–68 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 56.

[7] Warren, “Black Time,” 59.

Roundtable by Sam Plasencia
The Black Radical Tradition in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.8
Cite: Plasencia, Sam. 2021. “The Black Radical Tradition in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 22-26.
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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (2020) is the culmination of nearly fifteen years of research on the eighteenth-century enslaved poetess Phillis Wheatley, who was manumitted in 1773 and married John Peters, a Boston grocer, five years later. In “Looking for Miss Phillis,” the essay that concludes this collection of ninety-nine individually titled poems, Jeffers explains that she wrote this book because she got tired of waiting for someone to write a biography of Wheatley that discussed her “free lineage,” including the family, customs, and cosmologies that informed her life before enslavement.¹ All existing biographies, including Vincent Carretta’s carefully researched Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2011), begin their treatment of Wheatley “at the Boston Harbor in 1761, with her disembarking a slave ship” (174). And what of her marriage to John Peters? Jeffers asks why literary historians “have entrusted the story of Phillis Wheatley and John Peters to a white woman [Margaretta Matilda Odell] who may have made assumptions about Wheatley’s husband, assumptions that might not just be wrong, but also the product of racial stereotypes” (173). What if Wheatley wasn’t a “sycophant” (180)? What if John Peters wasn’t a “hustler” who abused and then abandoned Wheatley (180)? The extant archives do not support these depictions of Wheatley or Peters, and the only evidence of Odell’s authorial claim to being a “collateral descendant” of the white Wheatleys is her claim itself. 

We literary historians have thus put a tremendous amount of trust in Odell’s authority—and yet there are ample reasons to question it. Besides the obviously racist ways in which Odell interprets a Black man who aspires for more than day laboring and her oxymoronic romanticizing of Phillis’s privilege while enslaved by John and Susannah Wheatley, Jeffers’s painstaking investigation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print records suggest that Odell may not have even written the biography. Advertisements for Odell’s book, printed by the publisher George W. Light in a periodical he was also responsible for publishing, listed the Memoir without attributing it to an author. What’s more, these advertisements appeared alongside advertisements for another Wheatley biography—Memoir of Phillis Wheatley—accredited to B. B. Thatcher, a Boston lawyer who published two books on Native Americans and creative work in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Repeated advertisements for the two memoirs continued to omit Odell’s name. Some forty-plus years later, an anonymous footnote to volume 7 of Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1877) announces Odell as the author of the memoir, represents Thatcher as having edited it, and denies the existence of a second biography. Jeffers assembles a catalog of questions and possibilities in response to this confusing archival record—indisputably demonstrating that more research is needed and that, in the meantime, “the responsible, professional course of action would be to cease using Odell as a primary source for Wheatley Peters’s life” (180). 

In The Age of Phillis, Jeffers does just that. The result is a portrait of a daughter loved by her parents, traumatized by the transatlantic slave trade, ensnared in—and aware of—the complex affective relationships bred by enslavement, committed to a lifelong friendship with another enslaved woman, excited by the swirling discourses of liberty, enamored by John Peters, and above all, consistently determined in love and life. One of Jeffers’s enduring legacies will be her insistence that we stop referring to this African poetess by her enslaver’s name and instead call her Phillis Wheatley Peters, the name of her choosing. 

In, through, and around the retelling of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s life, Jeffers weaves the stories, people, and philosophies of the late eighteenth century. The resulting collection portrays an intercontinental age, stitched together by the trades in Black bodies and racialized discourses (scientific, political, and religious). By positioning Wheatley Peters at the center of this epoch, Jeffers draws seemingly disparate worlds and spheres into the same orbit: Gambia and Boston, Yemoja and Christianity, the illustration of the British slave ship Brookes and letters from the Indigenous Christian missionary Samson Occum, Ona Judge (enslaved by Martha Washington) and the “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay,” African prayers and the eighteenth-century sugar trade, the door of no return and descriptions of ravenous wolves in the tower of London, and Jeffersonian race science and the Kantian sublime. In these ways The Age of Phillis assembles the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches of the Black diaspora as African-descended persons mingled with eighteenth-century art, philosophy, trade, tourism, families, and more.

What follows are some insights that emerged from a group of scholars engaging in a semester-long slow read of Jeffers’s work. We were inspired by an online teach-in on “Race, Whiteness, and Pedagogy in the Long 18th Century” held in August 2020 and by the Society of Early Americanists’ (SEA’s) announcement of a Common Reading Initiative on The Age of Phillis, organized by Tara Bynum, Patrick Erben, Brigitte Fielder, Michelle Bachelor Robinson, and Cassander L. Smith. At every stage of our reading, we were enthralled and challenged by this poignant work, and in lieu of a more traditional book review, we share with you here some of our observations on method, structure, and content.

Critical Fabulation

 We were struck by Jeffers’s method, her beautiful weaving of historical fact and speculation, which reflects the kind of creative and scholarly blending that Saidiya Hartman has termed “critical fabulation.” For Hartman, this form of narrativizing enables the researcher of enslaved persons to “tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.”² In Jeffers’s work, critical fabulation takes a plethora of forms. One particularly striking and recurring form is the lost letter. The Age of Phillis contains twenty-five “lost letters”—imagined correspondences based on extant letters between Phillis Wheatley Peters and Susannah Wheatley, Samson Occom, Obour Tanner, and John Peters. In these poetic renditions of interpersonal exchanges, Jeffers typographically represents the epistle’s text in standard type and intersperses the writer’s thoughts in italics. In these italics, we hear Susannah Wheatley vitriolically insult Samson Occom as a “drunk painted creature” (55), Nathaniel Wheatley dismiss his mother’s desire to manumit Wheatley Peters in light of the money that “white men would pay to hear and touch” her (113), Wheatley Peters articulate the pain of missing her family (57) and admit that she does “know” her African name but lies and says she doesn’t (77). In these affective vignettes, readers encounter the performative niceties of a traditionally private form (letters) punctuated by uncouth, or unsafe, truths (thoughts). The melding destabilizes the presumption that letters express true thoughts and thus reminds us of “what cannot be known,” even when archival records survive.³ These lost letters are thus both speculative ventures into the mind of eighteenth-century figures and critical disruptions of historicist presumptions about knowability.  

At other times, Jeffers’s critical fabulation is more cautious, as in the poem “Phillis Wheatley Peruses Volumes of the Classics Belonging to Her Neighbor the Reverend Mather Byles.” From the outset, the narrative voice conjectures through conditional statements: “I hope that the days Phillis walked / across the street or around the corner / to explore the reverend’s library, / she was escorted by Mary or Susannah” (47). Other lines describe how the “reverend might” have quizzed her (47), and they again express “hope” that if Wheatley Peters was left alone with the reverend, “there was no danger” and he “was a gentleman” (48). In such poems the unnamed speaker assumes the position of questioning researcher, grappling with what’s left of the historical record to understand archival omissions. At times, this grappling comes in the form of conditional verbs. At other times, it comes through questions that may never be answered, such as when the speaker of “Fathering #2” asks: “Or was it the husband who purchased / the little girl? I’ve thought on this for many / years: how might a wife, a respectable, / white lady, go down to the docks / and complete a fleshy transaction?” (43). In these poems, Jeffers makes use of conditionals to imagine behaviors, events, and even spaces—like in the poem “Desk of Mary Wheatley, Where She Might Have Taught the Child (Re)named Phillis to Read.” This method enables Jeffers to move seamlessly between the scales of personal and political, letter and epic journeys, all while undermining these distinctions both formally and thematically.

The work Jeffers does here with and through critical fabulation is reminiscent of Hartman’s most recent work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls and Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2020), which was published less than two months before Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis. Though Hartman writes in prose and Jeffers in verse, both thinkers make powerful use of speculation to represent Black women whose intimate histories have been lost, expunged, or were never recorded. Informed by rigorous archival research, these texts hover between historicism and creative writing, disrupting the disciplinary boundaries that began coagulating in the late eighteenth century and that have since aided and abetted the institutionalized erasure of Black lives and voices. 

Black Joy

As someone who routinely teaches early African American literature to undergraduates, I am perpetually frustrated by how easy it is for students to talk about Black death when they are, as I have learned, virtually silent on matters related to Black life. Questions about Black pleasure, survival tactics, mutual aid, and family seem to fall on deaf ears while there is always a queue waiting to speak on the travesty of enslavement and the breaking of families. Put differently, students can see and recognize how Black persons in the long eighteenth century were socially dead whether they were enslaved or free: powerless, generally dishonored, and alienated from  birth.⁴ But they cannot, to borrow Jared Sexton’s formulation, see the social life of social death or the ways through which peoples of the Black diaspora have made a way out of no way.⁵ 

What makes Jeffers’s text so powerful is that she deploys critical fabulation to portray the social life of social death. Take for example the speculative “Free Negro Courtship #1” and “Free Negro Courtship #2,” in which the first-person speaker tells us how they imagine the courtship between Phillis Wheatley and John Peters unfolding. Nestled into the “Book: Love,” amidst lost letters in which Susannah Wheatley urges Wheatley Peters “never to marry or bear / children” these poems offer the excitement of budding love (121). “I like to dream,” begins the narrator in the first of the two poems, “that Phillis and John stepped / in a time that didn’t pay mind / to the sounds of Boston” (125). In the imaginative space of the poem and the literal page on which it is printed, Black sociality, desire, and pleasure are given precedence: the lovers’ discourse is represented as a “sanctuary,” John Peters’s is “impatient . . . to touch the kinks beneath her cap,” “a sister” may have been “sought out” to intercede on his behalf and pass along a letter, and this same sister may have given “John a sign that Phillis / was allowing him to court her” (125). Although the specter of enslavement looms in the background, such as when John Peters “wished in vain for gold to give her, / the bride price to press his suit, / as he might have across the water,” the focal point is Black love and courtship (125). The focus on social death is again refused in “Free Negro Courtship #2,” when the narrator states, “I’m unafraid of watered memories, / but this is a poem in which tragedy / can’t be invoked” (127). The reader is then taken to “the side alley off Queen Street” where, for “the first time, a careful kiss / between two sets of black lips” took place (127). In this space “Phillis and John” stood, “breathing together” (125). These are moments of stolen life, which Fred Moten has recently described as acts that fugitivity cut through the fabric of anti-blackness.⁶ These poems remind us that Wheatley Peters laughed, loved, desired, and felt pleasure, excitement, and hope—before, during, and after enslavement. 

Jeffers thus intertwines representations of trauma with the social life of social death. We’re invited to bear witness to Wheatley Peters’s baptism and her friendship with Obour Tanner (whom she addresses as “Sister of My Nation”). We learn about the muses who may have inspired her and undoubtedly inspired Jeffers. We watch her walk the streets of London and visit “that place of curiosity / in the Tower” of London (107). In “Book: Liberty,” we read of her marriage to John Peters and their physical enjoyment of each other. In “Catalogue: Revolution,” we read “Fragment #3: First Draft of an Extant Letter” from Wheatley Peters to George Washington, in which her italicized and crossed-out thoughts express her inalienable freedom and censure him for vacillating between tyrant and gentleman “depending on his moods or his money” (139). And we bear witness to love letters between Phillis and John, who was imprisoned for debt—he didn’t abandon her. In poetically rendering the fullness of Wheatley Peters’s life, especially with John Peters, Jeffers challenges, simultaneously, the homogeneously tragic renditions of enslaved women and the Odellian tale of a privileged servant destroyed by a bad marriage. 

Jeffers also focalizes Black merriment, love, and companionship in ways that extend beyond Wheatley Peters. For example, she writes a poem on the “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and Her White Cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield,” wherein “the lowest are taller” and Dido is “full of girlhood” (66–67). In another poem, “Illustration: A Mungo Macaroni / A Black Englishman of Sartorial Splendor,” Jeffers celebrates a man who, within the white archival record, remains only as satire: “I confess,” he says, “I am vainglorious. / I snatch after life / as I please, bespoke / or nothing else— / thrills loosed / from silver collars” (109). “Silver collars” refers to the decorative, dog-like collars wealthy English women and men forced their enslaved persons to wear. This man, loosening pleasure from the aesthetic technologies of antiblackness, paradigmatically exemplifies Moten’s notion of “stolen life.” Though no extant letters from Obour Tanner to Wheatley Peters exist, Jeffers imagines them back into being and with them the comfort only one enslaved woman could offer another. “My Dearest Sister,” Tanner writes, “Spell me how you wish, for you have saved me. / Before your letter, no one gave a care for my name” (78). Tanner tells of the day she met Wheatley Peters, on the pier, as “naked, shivering brethren” were marched off ships. Triggered, she “dropped [her] basket of dinner fish” but found comfort in Wheatley Peters, whose “breath / calmed and we stood with no explanation” (78). In another letter, Tanner reminisces of “the gold my mother wore / around her neck and in her ears” (153). This friendship is a refuge, a space of safety, comfort, and shared history. And while much of that shared history is traumatic, the act of sharing it is relieving, a space of social life carved through the fabric of social death. 

The Age of Phillis is a body of work born of the Black Radical Tradition and is thus itself a testament to and manifestation of Black life. The text is rife with intertextual references to a long tradition of Black artists and activists. At one register are all the Black writers of Wheatley Peters’s age whose lives, unrecorded thoughts, and printed words are woven across the book: Phillis Wheatley Peters, Obour Tanner, Anton Wilhelm Amo, Lemuel Haynes, Belinda Sutton (who petitioned the courts for old age pension), Felix (an unidentified Black man who petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for freedom), Crispus Attucks (a Black and Indigenous man killed during the Boston Massacre), Salem Poor (who fought in the Revolutionary War), and Harry Washington (a fugitive from enslavement who escaped to Novia Scotia). Then there are all the Black artists cited by way of epigraphs: Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Margaret Walker, and Marcus Rediker. There are also intertextual homages made to Black artists whose work thematically and structurally marks The Age of Phillis: Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Robert Coste Lewis, and Tyehimba Jess, to name just a few. To these literary, political, theological, and philosophical thinkers could be added the names of countless others whose existences inflect the text—stretching it backwards to precolonial Africa and forward to today. I’ve just scratched the surface of what this book has to offer scholars and instructors. But in all the ways I have described, and so many more I have yet to learn, The Age of Phillis is a love letter to African traditions, diasporic histories, and Blackness. 

ENDNOTES

[1] Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. The Age of Phillis. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2020), 186.  All subsequent citations will be notes parenthetically.

[2] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, 26, Vol. 12, No. 2, (June 2008): 1-14, 11.

[3] Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 4

[4] Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

[5] Jared, Sexon, “The Social Life of Social Death,” Tensions Journal 5 (Fall/Winter 2011): 1–47.

[6] Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

Roundtable by Jessica Valenzuela
Voices of the Past, Present, and Future: How Eighteenth-Century Black Writers Reshape Twenty-First-Century Academia —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.7
Cite: Valenzuela, Jessica. 2021. “Voices of the Past, Present, and Future: How Eighteenth-Century Black Writers Reshape Twenty-First-Century Academia —Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 20-21.
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To study US history, one must reopen wounds from the past trauma that has seeped down from generation to generation, inflicting pain on individuals of the Black community. The same discrimination remains an ugly scar that is ever present in today’s social climate. This cycle of hatred has evolved over time, rooted in the transatlantic slave trade. Studying the writings of Black authors—such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano—is necessary to reshape academic discourse. These writings serve as important foundations for progressive acts toward racial justice. In an attempt to incorporate more Black voices into class curricula, members of academia have an important role in deciding who will be included on course reading lists and research activities. If students and teachers want to shape an inclusive space, they must hold conversations and discuss not only the root causes of racial discrimination but also how it has affected the current social climate in the United States. It is important to consider Black voices of the eighteenth century because students should be made aware of why the past is connected to racial discrimination in the present and why these issues perpetuate themselves. Wheatley, Equiano, and Cugoano each contribute to this dialogue. These writers were able to defend themselves, often writing with tropes like the “noble Negro” and using scriptural passages as a means of disproving the slander spewed by white egotistical male theorists like Immanuel Kant and David Hume.¹

Wheatley uses religious rhetoric to make her writing palatable for an eighteenth-century audience in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Wheatley’s last couplet is a word of caution: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d and join th’angelic train,”² reminding believers who hold prejudice against Black individuals that they are seen as equals to white people in God’s eyes. This subtle jab works well with Wheatley’s argument because she uses Christian rhetoric familiar to her readers as a source of agency; she exposes racial discrimination and situates herself within more human terms. Since I believe that discourses on the civil justice of the Black community should remain a part of academic discussion as a means of addressing racial injustices, Wheatley’s written contribution serves as a vital source of support and a touchstone for educators and readers.

Following Wheatley, Equiano and Cugoano were not afraid to use the “noble Negro” trope or their audience’s expectations about religion and identity to their advantage. These writers utilized Christian scripture as a means of disproving proslavery advocates by repositioning God’s message for racial equality in their narratives. In Equiano’s Narrative, he states, “Might not an African ask you, ‘learned you this from your God . . . do unto all men as you would men should do unto you,’” a passage from Matthew 7:12 that he directs toward the perpetrators of the slave trade.^[3] Equiano uses the word of God and is given agency by calling out Christian slave traders on their inhumane acts toward enslaved individuals and by exposing the blatant hypocrisy taking place. Similarly, Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments is a personal account of his life in which he relies on the Christian doctrine to support his narrative. Cugoano states that it is “the incumbent duty of all men of enlightened understanding, and of every man that has any claim or affinity to the name of Christian, that the base treatment which the African Slaves undergo, ought to be abolished; and it is moreover evident, that the whole, or any part of that iniquitous traffic of slavery, can no where, or in any degree, be admitted, but among those who must eventually resign their own claim to any degree of sensibility and humanity.”^[4] Based on his reasoning, persons engaging in the slave enterprise cannot claim to be humane, nor, through Cugoano’s linking this argument to Christianity, can they claim to be Christians. Similar to Wheatley, Cugoano and Equiano use religious rhetoric to co-opt the language of slavery and instead use it for abolitionism and personal liberation.

Given the brave choices made by these writers, it is our job as academics to give back agency to the eighteenth-century voices that have been drowned out by white supremacy. Our job is to break that mold and address the voices that have been marginalized and disregarded for centuries. I believe that through honest conversations about American history, students are able to understand how the past has shaped the current social climate and racial injustices.

ENDNOTES

[1] Ayanna Jackson-Fowler, “Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano: Legacy of the Noble Negro,” in Transatlantic Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Kamille Stone Stanton and Julie A. Chappell (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 51–64. This article gives an overview of the term, using Wylie Sypher’s apt phrasing: it is “the African who united the traits of the white man, so that he might not be repulsive . . . and the traits of the Negro, so that he might arouse pity.” For more from Sypher, see Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942).

[2] Phillis Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).

[3] Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 190.

[4] Ottobah Cugoano, “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery: And Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, by Ottobah Cugoano, A Native of Africa,” in Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 129–58, 130.

Roundtable by Jasmine Nevarez
An Imagined Reality—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.6
Cite: Nevarez, Jasmine. 2021. “An Imagined Reality—Talking Back to the Enlightenment: Practicing Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 18-19.
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Growing up in a predominately Caucasian school district made me exceedingly aware of my differences from my peers, teachers, and school materials. As a young student, I was encouraged to accept the history that was handed to me. The history that often left me, a Mexican American woman, out of the narrative. What is striking about movements like the 1619 Project is that they work within the realm of lost stories to reconceptualize and reclaim a history that has been pushed to the side. The 1619 Project brings awareness to the Eurocentricity of US history because it provides a space for Black activists, writers, and innovators to rewrite the history themselves. Black writers such as Eve L. Ewing create imagined realities that fill in the Black voices and narratives that have been lost throughout colonial history. Ewing’s poem, “1773,” presents a lost dialogue between past and present as it restores Black history.¹

Ewing’s poem calls on the voice of Phillis Wheatley. Wheatley was one of the first African American females to be published, but only after her work was approved and her character was defended by a group of white men. In the opening paratext to Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, John Wheatley, who purchased her from slave traders, certifies her ability to write the included poems. On the following page, sixteen white men in Massachusetts write that they “assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl” as a way of combatting the disbelief that Wheatley could write poetry.² Because Wheatley was a Black woman, she would not have been published without this group of white men vouching for her intelligence and her humanity. Ewing’s response begins by locating the reader at a nameless grave that transforms into the resting site of Wheatley: “Pretend I wrote this at your grave / Pretend the grave is marked / Pretend we know where it is.”³ The speaker paints an imagined reality as they question Wheatley from beyond the grave and receive answers not from Wheatley directly but from the racist Enlightenment rhetoric that surrounded her during her time. Ewing’s poem progresses through a one-sided conversation between the speaker and speechless—a conversation that symbolizes the forced silence of the Black past (Wheatley) and the restorative narrative of the Black present (Ewing).

Ewing’s poem points out the gaps within American history that silence Black voices and inserts a discourse between them that answers American complicity against Black people. She writes:

Pretend I was there with you, Phillis, when you asked in a letter to no one:
How many iambs to be a real human girl?
Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart?
If I know of Ovid may I keep my children?⁴

These questions offer a perspective where Ewing unveils the truth behind these disparities: white lives have always been held with more importance than Black lives. For no matter whether Wheatley was intelligent, whether she assimilated to Eurocentric culture, or whether a group of white men “supported” her, she would never be valued like a white man is valued. Ewing brings these inequities to the surface and creates a dialogue of truth between the silent past and the exposing present.

Ewing’s piece works to restore a Black narrative by creating a dialogue between the speaker and Wheatley that encapsulates the miseries of Black history and retells it from a modern point of view. It is the narrative of the unheard that has been stolen from slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, civil rights, and now Black Lives Matter. In a way, Ewing’s poem talks back to history and reclaims the truth behind it. Ewing and the 1619 Project invite the world to a reimagined truth to witness the Black experience of the past through the Black experience of the present.

ENDNOTES

[1] Eve L. Ewing, “1773,” The New York Times, August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/african-american-poets.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur.

[2] Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773).

[3] Ewing, “1773.”

[4] Ewing, “1773.”