Slave Memory Without Words in Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner

Michael A. Chaney

Callaloo, Volume 36, Number 2, Spring 2013, pp. 279-297 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0103

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Georgia State University (5 May 2014 09:54 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cal/summary/v036/36.2.chaney.html

279Callaloo 36.2 (2013) 279–297

SLAVE MEMORY WITHOUT WORDS IN KYLE BAKER’S NAT TURNER

by Michael A. Chaney

The cover of Nat Turner is a study in visual diachrony. Fusing two distinct styles of representation, it emblematizes a primary objective of the book to bridge chasms of his-tory and memory, fact and inference. The first style may be seen in the simplified, nearly cartoonish hand, which embodies the agent of slave rebellion. It is nondescript and rudely formed with bulbous fingernails and curvaceous palms that catch a reddish highlight. Apart from the highlights, flesh tones are a flat hue of brown; the upraised arm and knuckles are so simplified as to resemble a cut-out made of construction paper that has been affixed to the background where a second, altogether different, order of representation obtains. More detailed than the hand, the sword—like the moon behind it—is photorealistic and comprises a second order of representation.

Kyl

e Ba

ker ©

200

8

Cover of Nat Turner.

280

C A L L A L O O

Filigree ornamentation appears on the pommel and cross guard in tints of cerulean and grainy shadows reminiscent of photocopy impress the blade edge. Although viewers might expect the hand to possess subjective emphasis, it is rendered in a style that calls its agency into question. Despite visual echoes of the upraised fist of the Black Power movement, the cover reanimates the hand that signifies Nat Turner’s historical gravitas according to a principle of ludic distortion. In this rendering, the cartoonish is what seems most alive, while such correlates of photorealism as the material evidence of the past are left to appear coldly instrumental.

No mere interplay of contrasts, the stylistic tensions on the cover hint at a historio-graphic pedagogy underlying Nat Turner. Scott McCloud informs us that such contrasts are far from unusual as a strategy of focalization in the comics. According to McCloud, the combination of a less detailed character, with which readers can easily identify, along with a more fully realized background “allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world” (43). Similar to Baker’s cover, McCloud’s example centers on the detail of a sword brandished by a less detailed character in a Japanese comic: “the sword might now become very realistic, not only to show us the details, but to make us aware of the sword as an object, something with weight, texture, and physical complexity” (44). A reductive Orientalism concludes McCloud’s inquiry into this difference, but our investigation can neither begin nor end there. Baker’s cover image initiates a sustained strategy of objective reclassification in Nat Turner, as the more detailed images of historical evidence are relegated to panel backgrounds in ways that call attention to the text’s larger historicist project.

And just what that larger project is may be determined in its resemblance to one that Lisa Woolfork finds throughout twentieth-century diasporic literature, in which fiction becomes a vehicle for embodied acts of traumatic memory. Through this vehicle literary characters, along with authors and readers, are curatively transported to the irrecoverable past time of slavery and the Middle Passage. Unlike conventional, Eurocentric narratives of traumatic memory, according to Woolfork, works such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale eschew Freudian assumptions concerning the allusiveness of trauma and its intolerable discursiveness in order to posit a different kind of trauma, one tied to racial community. In contrast to most of Woolfork’s Sci-Fi neo-slave narratives, however, no character in Baker’s Nat Turner moves from our world to that of the Nat Turner rebellion. Such cross-time movement is reserved for the author and the text as a whole. Indeed, Baker sets himself up in the preface as one who has traveled over the chasm of silenced history, newly returned to transmit the present visual tale as an eyewitness. And the very same historical fluidity enjoyed by the author in the preface imbues his text as well. Like Butler’s Dana from Kindred, Baker’s graphic novel seems to possess the occult ability to circulate in our time and in that of American plantation slavery. The intrinsic temporal duality of the text, which imagines itself to be not just about but also to originate from the nineteenth century, intensifies the meaning of its nearly exclusive reliance on pictures. More than simply an homage to the wordless graphic novel tradition of Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, or Tom Feelings, Baker’s Nat Turner is an insurrectionary document, albeit anachronistically so. Its method of storytelling through pictures would have made it accessible even to illiterate slaves. As we shall see, Baker’s pictorial narrative thus works both to remember and to perform insurrection. In its examination of these imaged and

281

C A L L A L O O

imaginary rebellions, this essay moves from Baker’s preface to an investigation of several of the book’s panels which resist and render anew those principles of semiotic order that govern the text. Exploiting the topos of pictorial—that is to say, visionary—narration, Nat Turner produces new orders of meaning that bear witness to the traumatic disorders of memory catalyzed by the Nat Turner Rebellion, the Middle Passage, and the Diasporic dead who are shown to circumscribe these events phantasmatically within historical discourse.

Authorial Identification Transmutes a Universal Lack of Words on Turner

Even the name used to refer to the event of the Nat Turner Rebellion wields the power to claim, corral, and curtail its historical meanings. “Was it a rebellion?” historian Bryan Rommel-Ruiz asks, “A massacre? An uprising? Were the slaves just in slaying their op-pressors? Was Nat Turner a religiously inspired leader of a slave revolt, or a murderous fanatic who led others to indiscriminately kill innocent men, women, and children?” (65). Kyle Baker’s preface to Nat Turner trades on the instabilities associated with the event without necessarily locating the crux of that instability in its name. To be sure, Baker is quite clear about his admiration for Nat Turner, so that terms like “heroic” and “rebellion” dominate his preface. What continues to flicker productively for Baker is the way the event is always acknowledged but never narrated: “Who was this man who was important enough to be mentioned in all the history books, yet is never spoken about at length?” Whether rebellion or massacre, the Turner event possesses an importance that is belied by a dearth of commentary, a refusal on the part of white historians, as Baker implies, to say much about Turner at all. The silenced, abbreviated nature of the story of Turner becomes its own narration in most historical accounts, attesting to the subject’s exile from the more elaborated narratives of the national past. Interestingly, this anxiety surrounding the lack of words despite a ubiquity of presence transfers to the graphic novel’s essentially wordless structure.

Turner’s repeated yet attenuated historical presence relates to the form of Baker’s graphic novel and familiar tropes of African American culture about the triumph of literacy. In the preface Baker raises a question that Peter H. Wood takes up in his authoritative study Black Majority; namely, how could so many be controlled by so few? Or, as Baker puts it: “How does a weaker minority dominate a physically superior majority?” (7). Baker arrives at an answer—through mental manipulation and the suppression of black literacy—based on what he refers to as his “research.” Without wanting to impugn the value of Baker’s or anyone else’s historiographic curiosity, I am drawn to the emphasis placed on embodi-ment even here in the pure text of the preface, which posits whites as physically weak and blacks as “physically superior.” Clearly, the invocation of physique is part of a larger revaluation of masculinity that resonates with claims Baker makes elsewhere in the preface about finally discovering a more thoroughly conceptualized Nat Turner in “Malcom X’s autobiography” (6) or his admission that the story makes “the perfect subject for a comic book” not least because its hero possesses “superhuman abilities” (6). It would be difficult to miss overtures to the world of superhero comics in these comments, a world onto which Baker’s revisionist history of a kind of Black Incredible Hulk is visually engrafted. More

282

C A L L A L O O

than a few of the action scenes in Nat Turner confirm Baker’s acumen as an illustrator of superhero comics.1 Baker is not the artist of the classic Incredible Hulk cover shown here, but an obvious comparison exists between it and the composition of Nat Turner’s climac-tic scene, in which a rampaging slave carries out the indiscriminate violence Turner has called for (Baker 135). Of course, these allusions to superhero comics are primarily visual, expressed in terms of composition and character placement. Like Baker’s reference to the Autobiography of Malcom X, superhero comics function as an extraneous soundtrack for the silent witnessing that Nat Turner reenacts.

Comparison of the cover of The Rampaging Hulk #3, June 1977 (left), and an illustration from Nat Turner (right).

Kyl

e Ba

ker ©

200

8

Another key genre in that extraneous soundtrack is the slave narrative, and as is typi-cal of the male-authored slave narrative trope of literacy, whose acquisition precipitates subjectivity, citizenship, and, most importantly, manhood, Baker’s celebration of literacy in his preface follows a similar trajectory of muscular self-reclamation. For Baker, Turner’s violation of the prohibition against slave literacy is virtually as meaningful as the rebellion—”and the rest is history” (7). It follows that if education makes rebellion possible, then the historic ban on education for blacks must have been effective in foreclosing widespread rebellion. This simple formula serves as a psychological alibi for Baker and presumably also for readers desirous of a superheroic revision of Nat Turner. If only there had been

283

C A L L A L O O

enough literacy to go around, the fictive logic of the graphic novel suggests, there could have been many more Nats. Such a fantasy allows for the recuperation of a usable history of slavery for contemporary African Americans, one that does not exclude black mascu-linity as being inappropriate to visions of historical redress, violent resistance, or war.

In addition to this traditional reclamation of black manhood, which recalls the telos of antebellum slave narrative, the graphic novel hews closely to a historical design. Al-though dialogue scarcely exists, the text nevertheless possesses captions and text boxes of historical exposition whose font styles, like those in the headers and captions, are taken directly from Thomas Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner. Andrew J. Kunka has ably shown how these typographical and direct citations from Gray in Nat Turner open up sites of juxtapositional intertextuality, allowing readers to form “multiple interpretations of the slave leader’s controversial life” and making “Baker’s text more than just an illustrated version of Gray’s narrative, as it may look like on the surface” (171). If there is a masculine fantasy to be cashed out in re-telling the Nat Turner Rebellion, an essential element of it is to be found in this willful anachronism of the book’s pictorial form. These font styles reminiscent of wanted posters from the Old West posit a hypothetical wish for the text to circulate in the time of the story as well as in the time of its telling. In this way, Baker revises Thomas Gray’s “effort to subordinate Turner’s insurgency to religious fanaticism” (Rommel-Ruiz 64). Baker’s text amplifies Turner’s religiosity to heroic proportions: the text works not just in the manner of a hagiography but as a sacred text, itself harboring the power to transcend its historical moment and to produce insurrection.

As emphasized in Baker’s preface, Nat Turner’s story loops readers into a conceit of historical circularity. The same capability of literacy to change history ascribed to Turner in the preface re-emerges at the very end of the book. There, a slave child furtively takes the Confessions after Turner’s execution, stealing away into the shadowy night with the book clutched in his or her arms—gender being ambiguously rendered. Such an ending avoids cliché since the kind of reading implied throughout is not necessarily a textual, teachable form of phonetic language use. Like the pictorial narrative that makes reading the story a matter of automatic scene-decoding for anyone familiar with the most basic storytelling procedures, Baker’s Nat is said to acquire literacy automatically, mythically, “with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet” (86). While borrowing the language of Turner’s inculcation of literacy from Gray, Baker illuminates scenes of Turner’s childhood reading, highlighting the reader’s complicity in the historical material being read. Young Turner, for example, is shown in one panel—eyes agape and with Bible in hand—imbibing the history of Egyptian slavery as the represented forms he reads about (shackled hands, slaves bearing immense blocks, pyramids in the distance, Moses parting the Red Sea) materialize in the very space he occupies. In this way, Baker extols a principle of visual reading and pictorial storytelling as types of heroic action.

Heroic action is thus to be understood allegorically, typologically; it encompasses a regime of proper behaviors, moral and social ideals articulated through the fantastic. Baker realizes this moral transaction with his hero ideal in the preface as he equates his effort to publish this graphic novel by himself with Nat Turner’s efforts to become a “self-freed slave” (7). “In the tradition of my hero Nat Turner,” Baker tells us, “I went out and found books about being a publisher” (7). In the conclusion to his preface Baker presents the

284

C A L L A L O O

graphic novel’s commercial and aesthetic success as a challenge to readers: “That’s just one example of what free access to reading has given me. You can do it, too. Did you know there are books about how to find a diamond mine? Think about it” (7).

In its typological approach to heroic literacy, Nat Turner proposes an author who justifies his claims to authorship by first becoming an ideal reader of Turner’s self-reliant literacy. Like the image of Turner as a child imaginatively yet materially enmeshed in a mythology of liberation, Baker demonstrates how his own reading of Turner has prompted profes-sional independence. Like the child who absconds with the book into the shadows at the end of the story, we as readers are refused the passivity of the spectator. We must utilize our unprecedented access to information and knowledge to achieve, to overcome, and to do something worthy of Nat Turner’s heroic example. However, the precise nature of that responsibility to achieve, overcome, or enact something worthy is left agonizingly vague by Baker. It is mired by his concluding comments in the preface, where readers are enjoined to use books to find a “diamond mine.” If material advancement is indeed something we dream of, the comment suggests, then why not replicate the originary heroics of finding and mining diamonds somewhere implicitly far away from our pres-ent situation? Is this not the historic project of the European imperialist and slaver? To want so heartily to change his material position in the world that he plied knowledge and bold ambition to seize that which he could “find” elsewhere as his own? If the com-ment is a joke Baker requires us to take up a precarious space of identification (perhaps as all jokes do) in order to experience anything resembling amusement. Of course, the punch line could depend upon a certain quality of self-deflation with Baker poking fun of himself for bragging about his successes as an independent publisher and equating these successes, rather bombastically, to Turner’s epic insurrection. On this frequency, we laugh with Baker, imagining our own ambitions put in their shamefully corrected place in comparison to Turner’s incredible and terrifying efforts of self-liberation. Indeed, such efforts are almost impossible today, as the joke further implies, without dredging up some of that commercial interest for getting rich quick that remains as the affective residue of slavocratic imperialism upon which our commodity culture continues to rest and which opens onto a quagmire of mass violence and exploitation taking place in contemporary Africa—were we to take Baker’s epistemological bait and do some preliminary research into diamond mines. Whatever its intent, the comment calls attention to a complex of af-fective investments regarding the psychological, historical, and memorial violence that Nat Turner both enacts and redeems.

Redeeming Middle Passage Remembrance

On the very first pages of the graphic novel a quotidian African market scene abruptly gives way to invading slavers. A poetic sensibility of lyric compression governs the way Baker brings this market to life for us. In ten panels the bustle of life is presented, and in just six, Baker captures an intricate mini-drama of unrequited romance. It begins with a set of “shot- reverse shot” panels of an African male smiling admiringly followed by a comparably designed panel of a beautiful woman with a headscarf acknowledging the

285

C A L L A L O O

flirtation; a curtly pronounced rebuff follows in the next panel, which results in the slight laughter of the rebuffing woman and the raucous laughter of pointing children who have witnessed, as have we, the drama that has just transpired. The entirety of the sequence comes to life through the nuance of facial pantomime. The posture of the teasing child, his pointing gesture and open-mouthed laughter, mirrors the horrified recognition of the first market-dweller who spies the incoming slavers (Baker 13).

Kyl

e Ba

ker ©

200

8

Scenes of amusement and alarm from Nat Turner.

This illustration of terror and alarm is a signature feature of Nat Turner’s pictorial style. We shall see such scenes of terror-struck expostulation repeated throughout the book, but it is significant that it is first introduced in grim parallel to a scene of laughter. Typically considered emotional antipodes, humor is horror’s visual homologue in Nat Turner. Save for a few telling details, the expression Baker assigns to each is almost identical. Their similarity makes possible a redemptive history of slavery in which the review of disquiet-ing scenes yields opportunities for readers to express horror for them in the present. In this way the book discharges traumatic history by performing its terrors and encouraging

286

C A L L A L O O

us to do so as well. Neither fictionalized into problematic specificities (into “speaking subalterns,” to borrow from Spivak) nor wholly anonymous (thanks to the intimacy that facial expressions mediate), Baker’s figures enable history and its horrors to become the means of redemptive, reader-centered exercises of identification.

Perhaps the most poignant horror solicited in the first part of the graphic novel is that of the Middle Passage, particularly the moment when an African mother (or is it a father?) decides to surrender his or her baby to the sharks rather than to the white slavers. Few panels demonstrate Baker’s skill for facial nuance so powerfully as these, nor rely as dramatically on variations in panel size and pacing for their effect. At the beginning of the ten-page sequence (47–55), we are shown what serves as the equivalent of the nuclear African family during the Middle Passage. It is an odd imposition—these visual cues of family—onto otherwise ungendered figures. Baker’s subtle equivocation of gender affirms Hortense Spillers’s account of the thorough unmaking of Africans during the Middle Pas-sage, according to a “sameness of anonymous portrayal that adheres tenaciously across the division of gender” (73). To be sure, this sameness is rendered, but it is also partly undone by the illustration. The positioning of these two “parental” types near the infant ascribes a normative heterosexual coupling to figures who may just as easily be read as same sex strangers. Viewers are thus encouraged to decode the taller figure holding the baby as a father and the shorter figure with more angular features and larger eyes as a mother—unquestionably the same woman captured at the marketplace and, presumably, the unborn Nat Turner’s mother.

Kyl

e Ba

ker ©

200

8

Parental figures aboard the slave ship from Nat Turner.

287

C A L L A L O O

Baker arranges these panels so that we see the increasing awareness of the more femi-nine figure, as she begins to realize that the man holding the infant beside her has come to some macabre decision regarding its fate. And yet, to view her depicted concern as horror merely is to confuse Baker’s representation of Afrocentric remembrance with the kind of memory-work found in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Indeed, Baker’s approach to the historic slave ship perfectly illustrates Molefi Kete Asante’s insistence that the truly Afrocentric consciousness evinces not simply a consciousness of oppression, but of victory as well: “The victorious attitude shows the Africans on the slave ship winning. . . . no one can be your master until you play the part of the slave” (65). From an Afrocentric perspective, the fatherly hand that cradles the infant’s head in the bottom foreground of the panel above is just as loving as the one that drops the infant into the shark-infested waters a few panels later. By contrast, the white hand that catches the infant at the last minute (Baker 53) suggests a contrapuntal force to this African ethos of a dignity so strong that it would prefer death to slavery. Taken together, these scenes of infanticide comprise an elaborate juxtaposition: the panel showing a white hand clutching the infant contrasts the panel of an awaiting shark with mouth agape below it, and both contrast against the culminat-ing panel of the African parent biting that white arm in order to have it release the child into the maw of the shark below. We do not see the shark bite, nor must we. The first bite engulfs and renders ghostly the second one that goes unrepresented.

Kyl

e Ba

ker ©

200

8

White arm/black infant/white shark from Nat Turner.

288

C A L L A L O O

If, as Marc Singer argues, comics are uniquely able to hypostatize the signifiers they articulate, then Baker is clearly exacerbating the stakes of that ability here.2 The infant forever falls toward a toothy disaster; it is never fully sighted (cited) as corpse. Its persistent status as moribund raw material for hypostatizing Middle Passage remembrance culminates in its transformation from diegetic image (of action happening in the real-time narrative) to aural icon—a pictogrammic sign of speech content. That is to say, by the last page of this opening section, the scene of the baby that drifts into the mouth of the shark reappears as a speech balloon spoken by the young Nat Turner. Kunka gives a succinct reading of this moment in his analysis of Nat Turner, which mainly focuses on Baker’s intertextual dialogue with Thomas Gray and William Styron, arguing that it emphasizes “the way in which image supersedes, or in this case, replaces, text in the work’s hierarchy of meaning” (177). Kunka is certainly right in saying that this strategy of including a virtually silent series of panels that invent a backstory for Nat Turner “sets the reader up to be skeptical of Gray’s narrative” (177), but it is also interesting to note how the image of a young Nat preaching events that precede his birth would seem to confirm those claims attributed to Turner in the Confessions of his having prophetic powers: “. . . the Lord had shown me things that had happened before my birth” (qtd. in Nat Turner 57). Curiously, this panel also metaphorizes the reception context of the graphic novel. As visual hearers of the story that Baker retells, we are like the depicted listeners of Nat’s pictorial shark story. Both situ-ations center on information that the pictorial teller has no direct knowledge of, but which he relates with all the rhetorical flourishes of prophecy that his mode of address will allow.

Young Nat narrating from Nat Turner.

Kyl

e Ba

ker ©

200

8

289

C A L L A L O O

As with Turner, Baker utilizes a language of picture-history and prophecy in order to constitute a particular type of community. Not insignificantly, Baker portrays the young Turner’s audience—our readerly counterparts—with mouths agape in awe of the tale. This scene further emphasizes the value of facial expressions in mediating an affective (and thereby redemptive) relationship to the present fiction as well as to the past that it represents. The distinction between these two temporalities, as well as between Turner and Baker, unravels in the slack of fiction’s permissive contract with readers. After all, ac-cording to this scene of the young Nat narrating, everything we have seen in the graphic novel thus far becomes mystifyingly congruent with two other narratives—the visions that motivated the young Nat to undertake his rebellion in the first place and the instigating retelling of those visions to an audience of incipient revolutionaries. Ultimately, Baker’s choice of a pictorially dominant comic suggests that this history is best experienced not in academic, lexical, or verbal terms but in soteriological terms, as icons and idols; not as some past event reprised through narration, but as vision, immediate and materially present. Baker’s orientation to history as a kind of encounter ultimately recalls Walter Benjamin’s formulation: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (247).

The Scene of the Speaking Corpse

While the speech balloon of the shark about to devour the infant ends the episode, it has the effect of drawing my attention to the graphic novel’s very first imagistic speech balloon (i.e., one containing a picture as opposed to words or symbols). This other image of speech corresponds to a different but related historical “flashing up of danger”—to borrow from Benjamin. The ambiguity of this earlier image as speech works retroactively to explain the nested structure of the aural picture-story. It comes before the infant scene, just after a series of events showing the dehumanization of the African woman from the market—she has her clothing removed, her hair shorn, and her body branded. She is shown lying shackled next to another unmoving slave, its mouth open, one eye rolled back in its socket. Over the course of three action-to-action panels, we see our heroine swat away a rat that has perched over the mouth of the unmoving slave, whom we know by this time to be dead. After a few scenes of slaves being ushered above deck, we come to a full-page panel of a silhouetted figure falling toward the ocean like a limp doll (Baker 46). A picture appears in a speech balloon; the tail of the balloon points toward the falling figure. The picture is of the cadaverous face of the shackled slave that we saw earlier.

One could argue that this is Baker’s unique way of re-tailoring the speech balloon to serve as a kind of detail or exploded view. By this logic the tail is not intended to suggest that the body is speaking the image, as in the case of the later scene where a young Nat is speaking the story of the baby and the shark. The speech balloon there indicates both the content of this earlier story and his character’s first-person telling of it. That speech balloon functions as speech, but here, one could argue, we have a pictorial incrustation or an inset that only looks like speech. Perhaps for reasons of stylistic consistency the only

290

C A L L A L O O

way we can have any identifying information about the corpse is to have it enclosed in a device that only resembles a speech balloon without actually being one. But is it not our resistance to the idea of a corpse speaking that leads us to reject the similarity between the speech balloon of the young Nat narrating and this scene of the falling corpse? Is it fear that prods us to pass off the speech indicator attached to this balloon as either misnomer or mistake?

Beyond such resistance is the intrepid awareness of a deliberate similarity. In both instances a speech balloon bears an image repeated from an earlier scene with a tail that designates who is speaking. Before even getting to the later more conventional panel of the young Nat narrating an image (which the entirety of this book also sets out to do), I want to see this scene as an intentional (mis)reading of a body being tossed overboard, as a slip of the illustrator’s pen that yields a dead body speaking its own death. Given the context, the surreal is not only permitted but demanded. After all, this is the moment where the process of memory as memorialization is most in doubt, where the narrative wavers between this rhetorical pause for the trauma that surrounds the many bodies lost

Full-page panel of falling corpse with speech balloon from Nat Turner.

Kyl

e Ba

ker ©

200

8

291

C A L L A L O O

during the Middle Passage and the narrative urgency to get to that other silenced, under-verbalized history of the Turner Rebellion.

The complexity of signification produced by this epitaphic image deserves careful analysis. It is proleptic of that later scene of euthanasic infanticide that introduces a histori-cal trajectory alternative to the slaveship’s course, veering from the Americas as a liminal destiny to chart a course toward the ocean as a finite grave. By virtue of this prolepsis, the ocean becomes another kind of mouth, a maw within which the dead word is deposited. The ocean in this panel is not so functionally different from the shark’s mouth in the panel shown later. Eerily, these two kinds of mouths (or wounds) find an echo in the corpse’s open mouth in the inset speech balloon. Words as corpses, graves as mouths—the upshot of this allegorically compound image addresses more than just the tragic moribundity of the Middle Passage through the oddity of its pictorial aurality; it self-reflexively com-ments on this particular medium’s way of doing so as a wordless graphic narrative. Thus, the scene of the speaking corpse anticipates more than just the scene of the baby and the shark. By analogy it serves as the causal origin for the Turner Rebellion.

What makes the image odd in the first place is its divergence from the conventions of the speech balloon. Instead of words, we get pictures; instead of a speaker, a dead body. The image is so surprising in its non-conformity with comics protocol that we may easily imagine even the cursory reader arrested to dwell upon this page, weighing the funerary silence of the representation against its irreverent incorporation of speech. We must, finally, dismiss any urge to explain away the tail of the speech balloon as exclusively designative, accepting it as a sign that forges an unlikely relationship between speech and death. Thierry Groensteen calls this presumed “relationship between the speaker and the enunciation that is uttered” in balloons “one of the fecund schemes that organizes the reading of com-ics” (75). Utterance and speaker materialize at the site of the balloon for Groensteen who claims that, “No balloons exist that do not refer, and cannot be attributed, to a known or supposed speaker” (75). A “reciprocal adjustment” takes place between the drawn image of a speaker in a comic and his or her speech in a balloon which leads to what Groensteen calls an “informed gaze, one that is not turned toward seeking a presence, but toward a more detailed perception of the constituent parts and the attributes of the character. . . . if the character interprets the text, it is not less true that the text, in return, interprets the character” (76). Setting aside the idiosyncrasies of Baker’s example, Groensteen’s model proposes a hierarchical sequence for understanding the utterance-speaker dyad. Whereas we first come to recognize the presence of a speaker by virtue of a speech balloon, the content of that balloon may lead to the informed gaze that motivates our interpretive viewing and reviewing of the illustrated speaker so that the text, as Groensteen puts it, “interprets the character” for us.

The “informed gaze” that ensues defies the spatial anonymity of the oceanic grave, relocating the space of this corpse’s demise as occurring in the ship’s hold and likewise dispelling the anonymity of the corpse’s shadowy status. Anonymity of place and person is interrupted. The falling body that arrests our gaze by uttering pictorial speech is in the process of being interred. We are therefore directed to remember this body, to identify it despite its anonymity as a twisted mass falling headlong toward the ocean. The speech balloon enacts an anchorage usually reserved for words in the image-textual partnership of comics. Unlike the usual speech balloon, which signifies spatial non-specificity, this one

292

C A L L A L O O

works to undo anonymities of character and space.3 In this scene the symbol is amplified and re-symbolized to serve the project of Middle Passage memorialization more generally, to obviate the representation of the slave body as so much erased and forgotten evidence.

Formalistically, the pictorial speech of the remembered dead enmeshes personifica-tion and invocation, prosopopoeia and apostrophe. For Paul de Man literary figures that give voice to that which normally has no voice or to that which is dead have the effect of making readers aware of their own mortality: “it is the figure of prosopopoeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon)” (75–76). But the voice of the corpse pictured here speaks an image of itself as already dead and so departs subtly from the context that preoccupies de Man. In this case, therefore, I must agree with Lorna Clymer’s criticism of de Man that, “by linking prosopopoeia to a conferring of face upon the dead, de Man confuses prosopopoeia, not only with apostrophe, but also with eidolopoeia, in which the dead speak” (353). Like Clymer, I am less interested in what such an odd scene of apos-trophe seems to say or bespeak than in what it demands of us to say or do on its behalf:

Far from being struck dumbly inert after being halted by an epitaphic address, the traveler’s arrest is followed by vocalization; in voicing the text, the reader activates the prosopopoeia that confers a mask or persona upon the dead. The epitaph necessitates a dramatic en-counter between the reader and the text, between the living and the dead, a more essential exchange than the one presumed in de Man’s mere “possibility” of reply. (Clymer 354)

As part of our reply, we are encouraged to acknowledge the impossible position of address that this image of a corpse assumes when speaking through a speech balloon. It is not merely, in other words, an image of a dead character made suddenly to speak (although on some level it must be this as well). Rather, it is more powerfully the deathly circular logic of Baker’s images made to speak, as they do throughout the book, as images speaking their referents, which are images as well. If the tautology implicit in this acknowledgment disrupts our reliance upon logos, the discursive void that results yet bears the possibility of forging new relationships with history, memory, and performance.

Conclusion: Seeing History and Performing the Dead

Given this graphic novel’s preoccupation with infanticide, the scene of the speaking corpse that triggers the first instance of an infant’s death helps us to understand the ethical complexities that Baker and his materials wrestle with throughout. Even though Baker’s professed allegiance to a heroic view of Turner’s Rebellion is made clear in the preface, the exact meaning of that event in the story is organized around a few scenes dramatizing the murder of innocent children. A primary example is that of the infant and the shark, but two others bear mention: one involves another use of inset images as rhetorical de-

293

C A L L A L O O

vices of causal exposition; the other is easily the most memorable and perhaps also the most ambivalent image of the graphic novel. It is the panel showing Will—the Incredible Hulk muscle to Turner’s prophetic leadership—axing the head off of a young white boy (Baker 135). The image that uses insets shows Turner deciding whether or not to return to a mansion to dispatch a sleeping infant, the lone survivor of a recent raid. The circu-lar insets depict scenes familiar to readers of slave narratives: children wrenched from anguished mothers at the auction block. They function therefore as embedded warrants for the decision Turner finally makes when he orders Will and another man to return to the mansion to finish off the sleeping white child. The picture of Turner’s agonized face, plumbing the depths of collective memory for guidance, offers an interesting commentary on ethics, since the two insets containing the ethical warrants exist in the same panel as the agonized face that must make the decision. The visual therefore amounts to a wordless language of historical revision, expiating what may be unfathomably reprehensible and making Turner an intelligible cipher of retributive justice in the process. But this wordless picture language is not always so explanatory, as the performative scene of the speaking corpse demonstrates.

The recondite image of the slave ship corpse, whose speech refuses anonymity, partici-pates in a discourse Daphne Brooks refers to as Afro-alienation. Despite being “encoded with the traumas of self-fragmentation resulting from centuries of captivity and subjuga-tion,” such performances of Afro-alienation, according to Brooks, yet have the capacity “to turn the horrific historical memory of moving through oceanic space while ‘suspended in time’ not only into a kind of ‘second sight,’ as Du Bois would have termed it, but also into a critical form of dissonantly enlightened performance” (5). The dissonance in Baker’s image comes through in the strange correspondence of corpse and speech balloon. The pictorial simultaneity that the comics form allows and Baker’s choice of nearly exclusive pictorial units of narrative information both respond to and replay diasporic trauma. Throughout Nat Turner, Baker establishes a clear chain of historical causation, turning “the horrific historical memory” of the Middle Passage into a kind of tableau, a magi-cal telos through which the later historical memory of the Nat Turner Rebellion may be understood. The narrative thus defies that condition of historical trauma that Baker and the rest of us may be working against; namely, the disconnection and meaninglessness of traumatic events as they exist in an unnarrated state, where the relation of one event to another is impossible to comprehend.

The causal chain established is difficult to miss, particularly since Baker frequently draws attention to the images not simply as sequence—where one image follows another different image—but as repetition and simultaneity, in which an image we have seen be-fore is included again within the space of a new image. We might itemize Baker’s chain of causation in the following way: 1) from the dead body below deck; 2) to that same corpse being thrown overboard; 3) to the witnessing African parent and the throwing of the baby overboard; 4) to young Nat recalling all of it; 5) to the Rebellion and its grim tallying of one infanticide against another. Entirely pictorial, Baker’s re-imagined history instantiates a chain of causation so linear that it begins to hearken back to the very anxieties of uncollected history that it seems intended to dispel. What is therefore spoken by the corpse, beyond specificities of location, is the very meaning of sequence as a system of relation. The odd panel with its strange speech balloon represents vocalization as animation and vice versa.

294

C A L L A L O O

It is a self-reflexive monument, an epitaph spoken by the dead wishing to be remembered upon the brink of a greater negation than death—having less to do with historical erasure than with dispersion—as reflected in Baker’s prefatory complaint about the universally mentioned but never elaborated Turner Rebellion of history books.

That the dead slave speaks an earlier death unseen below the ship’s hold is not quite so uncanny when put in a larger context of African American cultural discourses. How else but as a corpse can this figure give voice to that nagging question about the relation between historical oppression or social death and contemporary black peoples? What better figure than that of a speaking corpse to reference the way Africans in America may seem visibly defined by a legacy of deathliness, if only to white onlookers? Sharon Holland poses the question well: “What if some subjects never achieve, in the eyes of others, the status of the ‘living’? What if these subjects merely haunt the periphery of the encounter-ing person’s vision, remaining, like the past and the ancestors who inhabit it, at one with the dead—seldom recognized and, because of the circum-Atlantic traffic in human cargo or because of removal, often unnamed?” (Holland 15). If the speaking corpse refuses total anonymity by speaking its earlier death scene, then this same subtle naming of that which could have gone unnamed, as Holland would have it, may be said to underwrite the graphic novel, in which, as Baker attests in the preface, the objective is to expand upon a history that has been kept systematically terse, deliberately misnamed. Baker manipulates the pictorial to name the dead, to give voice to the corpses of the traumatic past, and to impose consoling narratives of causation onto disconnected history without reinvesting in myths of objective truth or historical linearity.

From another angle, this process of naming the dead also works on a pictorial level as the radical translation of time into space, as figures defined primarily by temporality or history come to be plotted along spatial relationships. The sequence of the speaking corpse, for example, invokes a pivotal antinomy of the African’s introduction to American systems of subjection in the enforced binary architecture of the slave ship—its tightly packed hold below, where the African undergoes a degendering, dehumanizing transmutation into cargo, and its deck above, where Africans of various tribal affiliations, languages, and religions are reassembled as a homogenized mass, becoming American, in other words, and often forced to dance. Commenting on Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, who cogently reinterprets this slave hold/deck-dancing paradigm, Henry Louis Gates and the other editors of Black Imagination and the Middle Passage say of his interpretation that, “[t]he beginning of African American culture is not to be sought in the image of tight-packing . . . but rather in the few moments and marginally expanded space on the deck (under the watchful eye of the crew), where the African captives replicated their physical contortions in dance” (Diedrich, et. al. 7). It is not surprising that Gates and company go on to link this liminal performance above deck to Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “space in-between, rejecting the stringent opposition between above and below, between civilized and savage, that informs the discourses of slavery’s defenders and its opponents” (Diedrich, et. al.7). Thus, in addition to making the dead speak and replacing expected words with images, Baker’s corpse blurs the slave ship’s spatial apportionment of cargo and chattel, where slaves are subjected below deck to the figural death of becoming objects of mass transport, and above deck to another figural death of becoming subject to the will of a master class, forced to move on command.

295

C A L L A L O O

Baker methodically shows how the corpse accrues symbolic meaning for other slaves, as it must for the reader, informing the gravest decisions made about the life and death of the slave child, which comes to stand for a negated African American future. Such “information” is also shown to disrupt the divide separating the two deaths of the hold and the deck, bridging both iconic locations of subjection and demise at a juncture of memorialization, which irresolvably undermines not merely the stability of language but also the historiographic sanctity of Baker’s narrative. We must recall that by the end of this opening section of the graphic novel, all of these scenes are shown to be narrated by the young Nat Turner. While we may be encouraged to read these scenes as a fictional re-telling of Turner’s ancestry, underwritten, as it is to be expected, by realism’s contract of verisimilitude, we soon realize that what we have been reading all along is really more of an oral tale, a prophesy of the very same type that invested Turner with authority among his fellow freedom-seekers.

Two closely related forms of dissidence intertwine here, relating this revelation of the tale as one told by the young Nat to the scene of the speaking corpse. Though one is a subset of the other, there is in both a formal infraction that confuses speech and image, voice and sight, in order to produce a catachresis emblematic of the ruptures of the Middle Passage. Although both trade on rebellion thematically, they continue to assume a fairly intact, positivist notion of a past, however traumatic, that can be transmitted to readers in the present. But while Baker goes to great lengths to re-calibrate the anonymity of his enslaved figures, he does not entirely dispel the anonymity of slavery’s historical corpses, thrown overboard during passage, for this figure is not named, per se; but a sort of naming in death, or being named according to a particular position as death, occurs neverthe-less. In this particular naming ritual, the text accords a known presence to an otherwise unknown figure that comes to embody slavery’s terrifying yet palpable absences, its negations and substitutions of names. Thus Baker shows how the imagined community of Middle Passage remembrance, the audience that his comic models and constitutes, “thrives on anonymity in death,” as Sharon Holland says of Benedict Anderson’s theory of national emergence, in which the nation mythically conceives of its immortality “by transforming fatality into continuity” (Holland 22; Anderson 11). If we were to expand the idea of a nation to include the black American community (a community within a community often figured as having close ties to the dead already, according to Holland) or, more specifically, to the ideal reading-viewing community constituted by Baker’s text, then we might note the ways in which this community of Middle Passage remembrance reconfigures the fatality of history into a self-evident fiction—a series of events related by strict rules of narrative causation which turn out to be, much like Baker’s text in general, a story told by the historical figure whose story the present work purports to tell. Fatality, in other words, both real and imagined, becomes the raw material of being, of drive and of memory. It sustains the continuity of community, which is figured throughout this text as the process of story-telling itself.

The result is the constitution of a readership of remembrance, which like all aesthetic communities, “is a community structured by disconnection” (Rancière 59). That is to say, the book convenes its readers as actors who must engage in the very practices that imagine such a community; in the process, the book also substitutes for the impossibility or lack of such a community in actuality. Baker’s Nat Turner thus becomes a moving and picturesque

296

C A L L A L O O

example of the historical inversions inherent to Rancière’s aesthetic community. Rather than being simply “a monument that stands as a mediation or a substitute for a people to come” (Rancière 59), Baker’s reader-viewers must become the auditors of an absent community of the ancestral dead, whose pictorial monologues cry out for our affective responses in the present.

NOTES

1. And here I am thinking of Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s 2004 graphic novel Truth: Red, White, and Black, which re-tells the origin of the character of Captain America in light of the history of the military experiments conducted on African Americans. For a superb analysis of the meaning of Baker’s black Captain America and the melancholia that his form of patriotism suggests, see Rebecca Wanzo’s “Wearing Hero Face,” in which Wanzo argues that “Truth describes an African American patriotic identity founded on an investment in democratic principles promised by the state and mourning at the impossibility of having full access to the rights guaranteed by the state or the mythology of the American Dream” (341). Likewise, Jennifer Ryan’s essay, “Truth Made Visible,” examines Baker’s illustration style in his representation of the black Captain America, making connections to the so-cial realist tradition and pointing up the dialectical relationships that Truth posits between Jewish American and African American forms of national identity.

2. According to Marc Singer, comics are remarkably “effective at embodying the real through hypostasis, the somatization of abstract concepts and desires into human figures” (275).

3. Noting that its content may be comprised of either words or pictures, art historian David Carrier locates the comics balloon beyond the “word/image binary opposition,” as being “neither entirely within the picture space nor outside it” (29). When we think of balloons as verbal enclaves into visual space, however, we risk oversimplifying the hybrid semantic nature of the comics, which mixes pictures and words by design. If comics balloons are seen as special within this already hybrid system, it is because of the way they function as spatio-temporal enclaves within the narrative. As Carrier bluntly puts it, “they have no position in space” (30).

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991.

Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. Chicago: African American Images, 2003. Baker, Kyle. Nat Turner. New York: Abrams, 2008.Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry

Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64.Brooks, Daphne. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom 1850–1910. Durham: Duke

UP, 2006.Carrier, David. The Aesthetics of Comics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000. Clymer, Lorna. “Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper, and

Wordsworth.” ELH 62.2 (1995): 347–86.De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” 1979. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia

UP, 1984. 67–81. Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. “The Middle Passage between History and

Fiction: Introductory Remarks.” Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Ed. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 5–19.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007.Holland, Sharon Patricia. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.Khordoc, Catherine. “The Comic Book’s Soundtrack: Visual Sound Effects in Asterix.” The Language of Comics:

Word and Image. Ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2007. 156–73.Kunka, Andrew J. “Intertextuality and the Historical Graphic Narrative: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and the

Styron Controversy.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 168–93.McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

297

C A L L A L O O

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2009.Rommel-Ruiz, Bryan. “Vindictive Ferocity: Virginia’s Response to the Nat Turner Rebellion.” Enemies of

Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terrorism. Ed. Isaac Land. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 63–80.

Ryan, Jennifer. “Truth Made Visible: Crises of Cultural Expression in Truth: Red, White, and Black.” College Literature 38.3 (2011): 66–96.

Singer, Marc. “Embodiments of the Real: The Counterlinguistic Turn in the Comic-Book Novel.” Critique 49.3 (2008): 273–89.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65–81.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary

Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271–313.Wanzo, Rebecca. “Wearing Hero-Face: Black Citizens and Melancholic Patriotism in Truth: Red, White, and

Black.” Journal of Popular Culture 42.2 (2009): 339–62.Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New

York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974.Woolfork, Lisa. Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009.