#marronage

“The characterization of freedom-striving, fugitive, enslaved Africans as being in the wrong forcefully stamped white European, and especially U.S. American, characterizations of the Haitian Revolution as a ‘white massacre.’ Writers from Haiti's first state governments were determined to overturn this narrative using documentary evidence. Recall that in Le Système colonial Vastey lamented that for years Haitians were not able to counter those who denounced their revolution as unjustified. [85] In his widely read exposé, Vastey painstakingly described how the colonists of Saint-Domingue practiced some of the cruelest tortures on enslaved people in the Atlantic World. [...] Vastey's descriptions did lead some foreign readers to wonder who would dare plead the cause of the white colonists after the crimes they had committed.”

from Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution by Marlene L. Daut

My Gender is Marronage

African traditions say that when we are born, a vague sense of who we are to become, or what we are meant to do in this world, sits in our heads, guiding us. We make choices, we lean toward certain things, we express certain personality traits, because there is an anointing on our metaphysical head pointing us to a sacred role in history or society which those things help us get toward.

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Now, in our ancestral practices, a child would be born, and the elders would observe certain habits, likes, inclinations, and responses to their environment. They knew based on sacred teachings that these traits and behaviors and impulses were indicators of what divine calling the kid might have had upon their head. So they provide the ritualized pathways for one to begin to step into this personal truth, and journey toward their higher self. Then, the devotee would live out a spiritual walk, contemplating myths woven around natural phenomena and human activity, with each ritual and meditation and magical working as a touchstone for becoming clearer on the destiny that one either chose or was given by God upon entrance to this reality.

In the Black church, when folk go off to fast, or to seek (for the Gullah) or tarry (for the Pentecostal) or mourn (for the Spiritual Baptist) and when they interpret dreams or visions or the Scriptures or everyday life moments, with a focus on trying to discern (or divine) God’s will for one’s life in particular, this is an expression of the African mystical complex. For Black trans folk in particular, however, I think our ritual is the act of flight.

I remember my first time flying. There wasn’t elders to guide me. I was often on my lonely as a little kid. My mother always thought I could handle being by myself a little more than my brother. How I remember it, I was in the living room one day, by myself, just walking, quietly, reflecting, soaking in. And the sweetest light was pouring in from the fire escape window, a golden drip from the sky. And the house is vibrating with the thronging voices of a choir that played from the radio. I was caught up that day. I started shuffling in a circle, going around and around, looking up at the ceiling, as the gospel praising was pouring into my skin like the rhythms our ancestors would stomp into the wood floor of the praise houses. And I saw a vision in those days: I saw a black expanse, vast yet endearing, deep as the dark shrouds in the sea where no human has gone but those who jumped over. And scattered all throughout this canopy of cosmic shadows, there were versicolor shards, flecks of blue and green and yellow and purple and pink and orange and red light hanging like angels around, carrying the chorus into the presence of God. This is how I conceived of the sacred.

“Oh yonder come day,

Yes I heard em say

Yonder come day

Oh I heard em say

Yonder come day

Yeah, I heard them say

Day has broken into my soul

Yonder come day

I was on my knees

Yonder come day

I was on my knees

Yonder come day

I was on my knees

Day has broken into my soul

Yonder come day…”

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These imperial cultures use religion or science to make it seem like both the coercive narrative and the systems they reinforce cannot be changed. Everything becomes fixed. It is black-and-white. The Word becomes flesh. Right is right, wrong is wrong. You are sexually immoral: you deserve slavery. This is the situation facing Black trans people.

We either internalize the curses they put on us, or we follow the destiny laid upon our inner head, which we chose, which we define. Oftentimes, the enslaved and colonized ends up doing both simultaneously, believing one thing about ourselves and believing another all at once. A double consciousness. For Black trans people in particular, it feels like dysphoria in our head. It’s like there is a veil between us and the rest of the world; we try to struggle against it to get to what we need so we can live out who we are. But the world that is forced onto us makes us feel lesser, and they alienate us and seek to control us, and will redefine how we understand ourselves so we will be too scared to act on our own interests. We end up striving against their narratives because the inner head is tryna get us to our higher, truer selves. But, the world that is imposed on us says something is wrong with us as individuals. There is nothing wrong with the system, and the world they created; it’s just we who are bugging, and our brain is warped. They blame it on “phylogeny” or “ontogeny.” They try to lay hands on us, or run tests on us, to measure and “cure” us of a distinct wavelength in our brains.

But, we are not broken. We are responding naturally to hostile conditions, by trying to nurture a new way of inhabiting the planet. It is a problem of “sociogeny.” Our brains are trying to implement an alternate set of mythically reinforced instructions than the ones pushed onto us. Those other instructions: the living legacy, the ancestral power, things that African human beings have been doing since before colonization and enslavement, things which call for a more egalitarian mode of existence, such as Black trans folk determining our own genders. Our inner head remembers and contains these alternative understandings, even if it is not that conscious to us at first.

Although the maroon’s relationship to space is typically highlighted in theorizations of marronage, the final characteristic that I want to emphasize is the maroon’s relationship to time - not only the way that the maroon challenges the totalizing time of the modern state, but also the way that the maroon is produced and referenced in narratives to negotiate struggle in the postcolonial present. [...]

[T]he maroon signifies both spatial difference and temporal difference in its antagonistic relationship with colonial power. [...]

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The phrase “temporal difference” is not meant to reproduce the Orientalizing tendencies of colonial historiography that relegates colonial others to what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the waiting room of history. Nor is it intended to collude with similar tendencies that Johannes Fabian identified in anthropology, where the ideological and epistemological biases in scholarship entailed “the affirmation of difference as distance” - a distance comprised of spatial and temporal separation alike. This spatialization of time results in a progressive view of history that divides epochs into discrete units occurring sequentially.

Instead, with the term “temporal difference” I intend to [consider] the ways that maroons positioned themselves to be deliberately disruptive to the totalizing temporality of the colonial state and the limited liberalism that inspired the French revolution, yet continued to withhold equal rights to black freed men and slaves alike. [...] The European narrative of modernity, as Chakrabarty describes for the Indian context, mandated that the “primitive” colonial subject must wait to progress through stages of civilization before integration into world history as a modern political subject; the anticolonial response (and, I would add, the maroon response) was predicated on an interruption of this historical chronology. It is with the rejection of this appeal to wait, the refusal of the “not yet” of European liberalism, and the positing of different temporal modalities, that I begin my analysis of marronage in Carpentier’s Kingdom. [...]

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Ti Noël and Michael K, despite the vast distances in space and time between Carpentier’s 1949 fictionalization of the Haitian Revolution and [...] [the] 1983 novel set during the Emergency in South Africa, share a commitment to freedom and the future through their investments in flight [...]. Both characters are marked by their ostensible passivity, but reading the texts in terms of marronage reveals their active opposition. Their respective deliberate, intentional acts are disruptive to state or colonial power, exposing the underpinnings of state mechanisms even if not directly or successfully abolishing them. [...]

According to the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on waiting, to wait can also mean to lie in wait with hostile intent or ambush, or to look forward or continue in expectation.

Both meanings are applicable to the practice of marronage deriving from the Haitian Revolution, where survival strategies included ambushing plantations and waiting for opportune moments to launch offensives [...].

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Like the act of waiting, which can be experienced as a suspension of time between past and present, marronage can also disrupt the naturalized progression of time associated with the temporal regimes of nation-states. [...] The theory and practice of marronage illuminates not only the totalizing temporality of the state, but also the varied ways resistance to it might be embodied through flight. If the philosophy of marronage is one of continual becoming and movement and “counter to the idea of fixed, determinate endings,” then marronage is opposed to the temporality of the modern state, which naturalizes its existence by professing “to give political expression” to nations that “always loom out of an immemorial past, and still more important, glide into a limitless future.”

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