Hazel V. Carby - Imperial Intimacies

First published by Verso 2019

Hazel V. Carby 2019

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-509-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-511-7 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-512-4 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carby, Hazel V., author.

Title: Imperial intimacies : a tale of two islands / Hazel V. Carby.

Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019017193 | ISBN 9781788735094 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781788735117 (UK EBK) | ISBN 9781788735124 (US EBK)

Subjects: LCSH: Carby, Hazel V.Family. | Carby family. | HistoriansGreat BritainBiography. | Women historiansGreat BritainBiography. | Racially mixed womenGreat BritainBiography. | Racially mixed familiesGreat BritainHistory20th century. | BlacksGreat BritainHistory20th century. | JamaicansGreat BritainHistory20th century. | WelshMigrations. | Great BritainColoniesAmericaHistory. | Great BritainColoniesEmigration and immigrationHistory. | JamaicaEmigration and immigrationHistory. | SlaveryJamaicaHistory. | JamaicaHistoryTo 1962.

Classification: LCC DA3.C37 A3 2019 | DDC 929.20941dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017193

Typeset in Sabon LT by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Ian
Nicholas, April,
Nicole and Chloe

Identity is not only a story, a narrative which we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which change with historical circumstances. And identity shifts with the way in which we think and hear them and experience them. Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition.

Stuart Hall

Every story is, by definition, unfaithful. Reality cant be told or repeated. The only thing that can be done with reality is to invent it again.

Toms Eloy Martnez,
Santa Evita

I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in

I read it a little as a duty but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes mouths, their thoughts and designs the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Imperial Intimacies is a very British story. It is a story of the everyday ties, relations and intricate interdependencies of empire and colonialism. It does not conform to the way in which most stories of empire have been told and it questions what we think we know about our shared colonial past. I incorporate stories of my Welsh mother, my Jamaican father and their ancestors into material drawn from colonial archives and histories to show how they were shaped by the times and places in which they lived. But family stories and historical accounts sit uneasily side by side. When I assembled the various pieces I found that rather than cohere into a unified narrative their juxtaposition revealed the shards of conflict and contradiction that familial, national and imperial ideologies work to conceal. I used family memories as a guide to navigate material in the National Archives of Jamaica and the UK, but when I stumbled I had to put aside the voices of my relatives because they hindered my ability to see what they had disguised, hidden, or had no intention of passing on.

Imperial Intimacies is an account written from the perspective of someone of Jamaican Welsh ancestry who does not take for granted definitions of being British but rather is interested in how subjects become British and how people are inscribed into ideologies of empire and beliefs of whiteness that enable them to feel superior even when desperately poor. The story of imperial relations is as restless as the Atlantic surging between the islands of Britain and Jamaica as I follow currents that draw me into the mid-eighteenth century. But it is also anchored, temporarily, in the particular places in which people in my family lived and died: the urban centres of London, Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Kingston and the rural landscapes of Devon, Somerset, Lincolnshire and Portland. It is not an exceptional story about becoming British but asserts that Britishness harbours the deepest interconnections of class and race and gender: trying to find your way as the white mother of a black child; trying to survive as a black child in a colony and a black man in the metropole; being a girl regarded as an oxymoron when she claimed she was both black and British.

In the concluding pages of My Brother, Jamaica Kincaid alludes to her ideal reader, a particular person, her father-in-law and former editor of The New Yorker, recently deceased. Kincaids words form a memorial to an ideal reader, one who no longer exists. Before I read Kincaids memorial, before I realized that for Kincaid an ideal reader was someone who disagreed with and argued against what she wrote and disapproved of the style in which she wrote it, before reading My Brother, I had considered myself an ideal reader of Jamaica Kincaids work. That was because I assumed that an ideal reader would be full of admiration for a writer, that an ideal reader would be knowledgeable about and sympathetic towards the people and places a writer renders into prose. An ideal reader, I believed, would surely feel empathy for the intellectual and political contours of the worlds a writer created. I was wrong; Jamaica Kincaid is wise. I too, will attempt to disconcert, to challenge and to confront the assumptions that any reader may bring to these pages.

Is it possible to produce a reckoning of movement between and among places, spaces and peoples, the scattering that results in racialized encounters and the violent transactions that produce racialized subjects? Pitting memory, history and poetics against each other in a narrative of racial encounters is intended to undermine the binary thinking that opposes colonial centre to colonized margin, home to abroad, and metropole to periphery. Does it matter where encounters between Africans and Europeans, between those constructed as black and as white take place: in an African or English village, town, or city; if they occur in the impenetrable darkness of the dungeon of a coastal fort, or in the claustrophobic hold of a slave ship, or take place, face to face, in the glaring light reflected from the Atlantic Ocean; if they are confrontations on the shores of a Caribbean island or on the streets of a metropolitan imperial city? Perhaps it is not, in fact, only the place that is significant but also the manner of the journey and arrival, the eager walking, or manacled stumble, the panicked flight, or forced or voluntary sailing toward and away from each other.