Abeng

“It was as if the island was host to some ripe sweet plague. Because of the visitation, peppermint and chocolate sales had dropped off.”

This quote sets the stage for the narrative. The description of mango season as a plague suggests that it is not an entirely positive event. This description also establishes an indirect connection between Jamaican society and the concept of sickness.

“It seemed that English people must sing softer—or not at all—and that the climate of that place—damp and dreary—surpassed the clear light and deep warmth of Jamaica. They had always thought their island climate a gift; the harpsichord told them different. The schoolteacher advised the congregation to tone down their singing, to consider the nuances of harmony and quiet—but this didn’t work.”

This quote is a metaphor that reveals some of the control mechanisms used by the British in their project of colonizing Jamaica. The local population learns subjective opinions as facts and the colonizers expect them to fit in with these ideas despite the fact that the island context is fundamentally different from the English one. The description of the Jamaican climate as inferior because it is not like the British one, for example, applies to the supposition of other aspects of life in the novel as well: social structure, customs, skin color, etc.

“The hymns at John Knox seemed to suggest a historical and almost equal relationship with the idea of God—that this God would support the travel of the Word to faraway ‘climes’ and distant ‘heathen’ by almost any means necessary—'marching as to war.’ The hymns sung by the people in the Tabernacle suggested something else. The necessity of deliverance. A belief in their eventual redemption. In the balm of Gilead.”

This quote outlines the fundamental difference in worship between the white and affluent Jamaicans and the Black and poor segment of the population. The people who attend John Knox are representatives of the European ruling class. For them, Christianity becomes an excuse and a weapon for colonization and a means of controlling others. For those who are subject to British rule, religion is a source of solace, promising a reward in the afterlife for their suffering in the current one. There is a danger in such a worldview, as it makes it easy to give up any effort to improve their life and to become passive victims of injustice.

“The men who were in the Tabernacle were being sorely tempted. As were their brothers outside and there was little that Brother Emmanuel could do to alleviate the temptation. To relieve them. The space the temptation entered could not be filled by hymn-singing or sermons, no matter how terrifying. The space had been carved so long ago, carried so long within, it was a historic fact.”

The inefficiency of religion to address social problems appears through the hopeless poverty of the Black Jamaicans. It is impossible to resist temptation as drinking and betting are the few means Black men have of finding forgetfulness from their dreary lives. Additionally, the social problems on the island are long-standing, so prayer is not enough to change these people’s way of life because that is how their parents and grandparents have also lived.

“‘Like one of the family’ was a reality they lived with—taking Christmas with their employers and saving Boxing Day for their own. ‘Like one of the family’ meant staying in a small room with one light and a table and a bed—listening to the sound system which piped in Radio Jamaica. They waited for tea-time and prepared lap trays dressed with starched and ironed linen cloths.”

This quote speaks to the hypocrisy of the wealthy class. Black servants live on the premises, so they are supposed to be part of the family, but they are still in a subservient, dependent position, which is clearly not how a family member would be treated. The phrase “like one of the family” serves to hide the inherent inequality in the master-servant relationship. “Like” is not the same as actually being. 

“In school they were told that their ancestors had been pagan. That there had been slaves in Africa, where Black people had put each other in chains. They were given the impression that the whites who brought them here from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast were only copying a West African custom as though the whites had not named the Slave Coast themselves.”

The British government and administration purposefully misinterpret historic facts and withhold information from their Black subjects in order to minimize their own terrible acts and to control their ex-slaves more easily.

“The congregation did not know that African slaves in Africa had been primarily household servants. They were not seasoned. They were not worked in canfields. The system of labor was not industrialized. There was in fact no comparison between the two states of servitude: that practiced by the tribal societies of West Africa and that organized by the Royal African Company of London, chartered by the Crown.”

Slavery as practiced by modern Europeans is a new and extreme form of this practice, which did not exist in Africa. The claims of white people that they simply copied an African custom as a way to excuse and rationalize the slave trade are a grave misrepresentation of historical facts. Withholding this information from the former slaves in Jamaica is one more control mechanism that helps to place the blame for their exploitation on the victims. 

“Their name came from cimarrón: unruly, runaway. A word first given to cattle which had taken to the hills. Beyond its exact meaning, the word connoted fierce, wild, unbroken.”

By referring to runaway slaves by the same word used to denote cattle, plantation owners could further dehumanize them and not feel remorse at torturing and killing them in horrible ways. However, like the word “abeng,” Maroon acquires a second meaning, which is almost the opposite of the first. This process of re-defining words is representative of the history of Jamaica—nothing is black-and-white, everything has multiple nuances, sometimes contradictory, so trying to tell a straightforward history of the island would be like mentioning one definition of a word without including its other meanings.

“The people in the Tabernacle did not know that their ancestors had been paid to inform on one another: given their freedom for becoming the blackshots of the white man. The blackshot troops were the most skilled at searching out and destroying the rebels—but they also had a high desertion rate and had been known to turn against their white commanders in battle.”

One control mechanism of the white people in Jamaica was turning Black people against each other. By promising freedom to certain slaves in return for capturing or killing rebels, the plantation owners used them as tools against the Maroons. This allowed the white people to better control their Black slaves.

“They did not know about the Kingdom of the Ashanti or the Kingdom of Dahomey, where most of their ancestors had come from. They did not imagine that Black Africans had commanded thousands of warriors. Built universities. Created systems of law. Devised language. Wrote history. Poetry. Were traders. Artists. Diplomats.”

This quote highlights the fact that African history is just as long and complex as the European one. This means that there were African states, which were culturally as advanced as England or France, for example. These historical facts contradict the prevalent, at the time, view that Black people are somehow inhuman or inferior to the white ones. By withholding such information from their former slaves, British administrators and educators can control them more easily.

“His first name was James, and his middle name, Arthur; in the family and among the friends he kept from school he was called ‘Boy,’ sometimes ‘Boy-Boy,’ a common enough nickname among a certain class of Jamaicans, an imitation of England, like so many aspects of their lives.”

This quote suggests that Clare’s father is immature—he still uses his childhood nickname, which is itself a reference to childhood. Additionally, Boy’s behavior, like that of his white peers, is an imitation—something that is similar to the original, but usually deemed worse. The quote suggests that white Jamaicans want to be equal to their counterparts in Britain, but in their efforts to mindlessly fit in, they have become inferior.

“They took their coffee and tea, their sugar and rum, from trays held by others, as their cotton was milled by others, and their lands were kept by others. The fabric of their society, their civilization, their culture, was an intricate weave, at the heart of which was enforced labor of one kind or another.”

This quote reveals that Western culture, which is supposed to be superior, is based on the labor and suffering of others, whether poor white people or Black slaves. Therefore, slavery as an institution is simply an extreme form of existing inequality, rather than an exception in European history. 

“If the conversation turned to the knotty hair of a first cousin, it would be switched to the Savage ancestor who had been the first person to publicly praise Paradise Lost. If the too-dark skin of a newborn baby was in question, it would be countered with the life of the Savage who had ‘done his duty’ onboard the H.M.S. Victory with Nelson at Trafalgar.”

The Savages, representing white culture on the island, are consciously blind to their mixed family heritage. The idea of whiteness is so important to them that they willfully ignore the facts that contradict their self-image. They valorize one half of their history that is connected to Britain and suppress the other half that is connected to slavery and Black culture.

“She thought about Pip now because the great house reminded her of Miss Havisham’s room. Dingy and mindful of the past. Both the source of her and not the source of her. The house carried over to her a sense of great disappointment—maybe of great sadness. It was a dry and dusty place—not a place of her dreams.”

The narrator references Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations (1861) in which a woman abandoned by her fiancée at the alter preserves the wedding banquet untouched for many years. This image represents the destructive effects of holding onto an unhappy past, which is similar to what the white people in Jamaica are attempting to do by trying to hold on to the colonial past of the island. The dream of wealth, based on slavery, has deteriorated like Paradise Plantation. Clare is removed from that stage of history, unlike her father who tries to hold on to the past by telling her about what the house looked like before it was sold.

“Later, he would look back on what he had done and assess that he was a man of passion who had been pushed to his limit. His passion had been misled into violence. He was not to blame. These people were slaves and would not know how to behave in freedom. They would have been miserable. He was a justice: he had been trained to assess the alternatives available to human beings, and their actions within the limits of these alternatives. These people were not equipped to cope with the responsibilities of freedom. These people were Africans.”

This paragraph reveals that Clare’s great grandfather’s title of justice is a parody. In fact, his last name is much more appropriate to describe his behavior. The justice, an exemplary white man, is more savage in his behavior than any of his supposedly inferior slaves. The perception of his superiority allows him to delude himself that he is protecting his slaves from suffering by killing them. In such a way, he is able to absolve himself.

“The smoke from the bodies and the dust form the noes made a change in the atmosphere—in the air that people breathed and the water they drank. Did no one notice the stead change in their environment—that people were disappearing and returning as smoke and dust? Their lungs—their good Christian lungs—must have been filling with the smoke from burning Jewish bodies. Just as the clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki entered the bodies of women and emerged as milk from their breasts.”

This quote connects the killing of Jews during the Holocaust to the death of millions of civilians in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People in Europe deny knowing what was happening, even though so much death must have impacted the physical environment. Similarly, the atomic bombs have left a lasting physical effect, which is not limited to Japan. In other words, such atrocities cannot remain isolated and affect everyone.

“The suffering of the Jews was similar, one teacher went on to say, to the primitive religiosity of Africans, which had brought Black people to slavery, she explained, but did not explain how she had reached this conclusion. That is, both types of people were flawed in irreversible ways. And though the teacher could have stopped at this, she went on to stress again the duty of white Christians as the ‘ordained’ protectors of other peoples.”

The teacher’s ideas about Jews, Africans, and Christians reveal the fundamentally flawed view of others inherent in European cultures. She attempts to exonerate British colonialism by placing the blame for their suffering on the victims of Western countries. In the Christian worldview, as understood by the teacher, slavery is, in fact, the fault of Africans because of their inferiority. The idea of white people as protectors brought up in this passage echoes the justice’s self-rationalization after his murder of his slaves. The concept of protector can easily become synonymous with grate-keeper, which is what Europeans end up being in regard to other groups.

“To reckon with her father’s culpability would also mean reckoning with her mother’s silences—and to see how silence can become complicity. She felt that from time to time even now, but she didn’t know it except as a danger specific to herself and she thought of it as part of a marriage. Something expected of a woman married to a man.”

Racial oppression, as in the case of the Jews, is related to other types of oppression, such as that of women by their husbands. This idea is problematic because wives are supposed to take their cue from their husbands, so they are not supposed to voice their disagreement. In the case when their men are wrong, however, as in the case of Boy’s opinion of Black people, remaining silent becomes equivalent to being complicit.

“[S]he would have probably concluded that they had done something which made their fates just. For that is what she had been taught. She was a colonized child, and she lived within certain parameters—which clouded her judgment.”

In this quote, the narrator explains why Clare is unable to see and comprehend the suffering surrounding her on the island but is preoccupied with the Holocaust. She can sympathize with Anne Frank and the Jews, but she cannot extrapolate that a similar case of injustice and oppression is happening in front of her. Being a colonized person means adopting, usually unconsciously, a foreign way of thinking, which privileges certain groups. Clare has internalized the colonial mentality and is unable to see Jamaica in an objective way. 

“Clare had learned that just as Jews were expected to suffer in a Christian world, so were dark people expected to suffer in a white one.”

In this quote, the narrator draws a parallel between various oppressed groups. The reasons might be different, but the main idea is the same—anyone who is different must be inferior and consequently can be mistreated.

“Imagined inhabitants will have few—if any—individual characteristics. They will have bizarre features by which they are joined to one another, but none which are specific to themselves. Their primary feature is their difference from white and Christian Europeans. It is that heart of darkness which has imagined them less than human.”

This passage references Joseph Conrad’s most famous novel, Heart of Darkness (1899), about a British man’s journey into Belgian Congo. It reverses the meaning of Conrad’s phrase to denote that the real darkness is to be found not among people living in Africa, but in the minds of white people for whom anyone who is different is reduced to the category of sub-human, allowing Europeans to commit atrocities without feeling guilt or remorse.

“She was learning to live with narrow-mindedness. Learning not to wince when the white lady rolled down the Packard window and slid her stick through to slap Minnie Bogle across the shoulder blades.”

This quote reveals what it really means for a person of color, such as Clare, to pass as white. Kitty tells Clare that she needs to learn proper behavior from Miss Beatrice and that, in order to succeed in the world outside of Jamaica, she needs to be able to live with “narrow-minded” people. In reality, this entails silence and complicity, the two things that earlier in the book became associated with the Holocaust.

“They are all gone now—the ones who did these things—gone to their reward. But the afterbirth is lodged in the woman's body and will not be expelled. All the waste of birth. Foul-smelling and past its use.”

In this quote Miss Winifred tells Clare about some of the terrible things done by white people. She equates slavery to an afterbirth that is inside a living body, meaning that the aftermath of colonization is still present and poisoning those around it even if the original actors have long died.