Lori’s Reviews > Salvage: Readings from the Wreck > Status Update

"If we say that a Black reader like me ought not to notice that cataclysm, ought not to notice that the text is active, but only acknowledge its assignment through the lens of refined taste, then a reader like me is, . . . 'excluded from the domain of modern reason, aesthetic judgment and the culture of taste.'"

"The range of emotion in these works is limiting, in that there can only be grief and fear and melancholy, not happiness or love or wonder (except the wonder in horror). In other words, the full range of emotions and repair that a novel might offer and is said to offer are, a priori, foreclosed to a reader like me."

"A white reader encounters the flow of time, we encounter stasis. We know the duration of slavery, and we know no other life is possible for the Black protagonist/subject, no trajectory to freedom, since the novel's bedrock of landscape, character and desire self-evidently contain us as chattel."

"A structural problem of English literary narrative . . . all we must be concerned about is the individual plight, the individual striving against 'life's' odds. This is the idyll that soothes the reader - as if the antagonism is personal and not social/structural, as if the appraisal of the state of being involves one individual instead of the mass of individuals who come under the regime."

"Just like the British books I read, the American songs dragged one's thoughts away and intimated again that our existence was one not worth conceiving."

"What Chamoiseau gets at is this: that the footprint haunting literature is a spectre of the colonized, a threat both in real and imagined terms; a spectre hanging over the whole enterprise of colonization and slavery."

" . . . it bestows, once again, the mantle of the human on the European. Yes, the text is a work of art - as we have come to define art. And yes, it is also reducible to its origins and its imaginaries, which are produced by its historical place, environment, quotidian details."

"Some contemporary readers might say, 'Well, it was the time . . .' But these readers cannot have it all ways. First, enslaved people also lived in their time - as narrators without an author. They lived in the same time as this novel's author and narrator, and any equivocation places and objectifies enslaved people as inanimate and inhuman, like a chair or an axe . . ."

"Literature has made [Crusoe] an 'everyman,' an exemplary character whose feet of survival is to be admired and duplicated. We might call this narrator unreliable now - but perhaps only some of us would. A reader like me is alert to this story and finds the narrator abhorrent. A reader like me is wondering about Xury and is broken at this point."

"The protagonist's focus assumes and carries the weight of affinity, and the reader's affinities are assumed, too. The moral weight is with the protagonists, no matter their actions. So: Crusoe buys into the trade and is captured and enslaved, which we are meant to feel is wrong, but only for him."