3.

The Long Song of the Colonial Archive

Cultural critics and novelists offer literary historians a third

way to counter these ideologies in approaches to these archives, one

that joins together the aesthetic and historical aspects of critical analysis to facilitate richer readings
of these fragmentary and explicitly

mediated texts. Drawing on the musical concept of “counterpoint,”

in which multiple voices or sounds are layered in a way that accommodates differing melodies in the
same piece, Said defines contrapuntal reading as an interpretive paradigm, which aims to breathe

new life into old texts by reading against the grain of the text’s original intentions in order to
acknowledge the multiple voices that surrounded and exerted an impact on its creation (59):

In practical terms, “contrapuntal reading” . . . means reading a

text with an understanding of what is involved when an author

shows, for instance, that a colonial sugar plantation is seen as

important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life

in England. Moreover, like all literary texts, these are not

bounded by their formal historic beginnings and endings. . . .

The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both

processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which

can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include

what was once forcibly excluded. (66–67; my italics)

Rather than a simple inversion, such analysis acknowledges the

“‘overlapping territories’ and ‘intertwined histories’” inherent to colonial discourse (Lazarus 17). In
addition, it confirms that although

“[t]he archive [may] thus present[] itself as a physical place that

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shelters the destiny of . . . the documentary trace. . . . [In fact,] the archive is not just a physical or
spatial place, it is also a social one”

(Ricoeur 167). Said’s musical metaphor makes vivid the elaborate

sociability of the Caribbean colonial archive and facilitates a more

nuanced relationship between the present and the colonial archive.

The dynamism of this musical metaphor of the counterpoint that

enables a critical reading of the archive is similar to the dialogics of

the “Sankofa” concept that Frances Smith Foster articulates (xviii).

As she explains in reference to Haile Gerima’s eponymous film

from 1993, Sankofa requires us to “reclaim our past so we can move

forward; so we can understand why and how we came to be who we

are today” (xvii). Because of the ways past history has persistently

misread subaltern voices, the simultaneity of the forward and backward gaze of the ancient Akan
concept of Sankofa—like the dual focus required by counterpoint—is foundational for articulating

African diasporic literary historiography more effectively.

Such recuperative gestures can also easily lead into romance

and nostalgia. And so, as Hartman reminds us, we should not ignore

how the archives of slavery were intended as “a death sentence, a

tomb” in which the voices of Black enslaved women would be understood as “asterisk[s] in the
grand narrative of history” (“Venus”

2). Yet, Hartman also recognizes the inadequacy of reconsigning the

Black voice in the archive to silence. She teaches that one way to reconsider the seemingly silenced
voices of the enslaved without

resorting to fable or romance lies in “critical fabulation” (11).5 By

grounding fabulation or inferences in critical analysis, Hartman is

careful not to resort to romantic resurrection as she draws on the personal, experiential, and
archival to “narrate a certain impossibility”

(Hartman and Wilderson 183). Critical fabulation, like contrapuntal

reading, models how to actively read the silences in the archives as

the presence of stories that were, as Toni Morrison describes them,

only improperly but not completely buried.

This engagement with archival silences, voice, and power is

also a central component of fictional neo-slave narratives—such as

Gerima’s film Sankofa, Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), and

Levy’s The Long Song—each of which manifests the imbrication of

the masters’ voices with those of the enslaved across the discourses

of slavery, even while they articulate figurations of the past and the

present as a long song of varied and intimately connected voices.

And this union of past and present in the neo-slave-narrative novel

is a central vehicle, like the concept of Sankofa, for the genre’s

investments in rethinking assumptions about the archive and the

enslaved voices within. As Wendy Walters explains, because

“[m]any African diasporic novelists and poets allude to or cite archival documents . . .
foregrounding . . . elements of archival research