Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare
race.19
The slave named Peros stands apart from the other three. For one, he is the oldest and the most experienced with the life of a slave in the mid-Atlantic colonies. This is attested to by Washington’s laudatory but paternalistic evaluation that Peros “speaks much better than either, indeed has little of his Country Dialect left, and is esteemed a sensible judicious Negro.” In the present, some will feel a specter of palpable linguistic loss in Peros’s story, but Washington sees only improvement in the form of civilizing and (perhaps) humanizing achievement. In fact, his description implies that to the degree that Peros’s “Country Dialect” has dissolved, his ability to speak and comport himself properly has improved. Peros’s stable command of an anglophone language likely even encourages Washington and his overseers to view him as “sensible” and “judicious,” though that reading is more assumption than conclusion. Whether or not Peros can also communicate with Jack, Neptune, Cupid, or others in another African language remains unclear but is suggested in this ad. It is not implausible that Peros should have “little of his Country Dialect left.” Linguistic skills atrophy if they are unused. However, Washington does not speak Peros’s ancestral language or languages. His claim that Peros has lost that unnamed language is difficult to verify and perhaps better reflects Washington’s own affective investments than real linguistic facts on the ground.
Indeed, in the picture that Washington draws of Peros, the writer’s linguistic evaluations take on a note of narrative excess. In addition to the paragraph near the end of the advertisement in which he gives a general accounting of the language skills of the group as a whole, Washington’s initial description of Peros insists on including the detail that his “Speech is something slow and broken, but not in so great a Degree as to render him remarkable.” Peros, in other words, speaks with quirks that, paradoxically, a reader of the Maryland Gazette will never notice because these features do not “render him remarkable.” Washington admits that Peros’s linguistic particularities are below detection, somehow only knowable or noticeable to the ad’s author. And yet they are mentioned in this short text as though they signify something more. What could Peros’s “unremarkable” linguistic “slowness” and “brokenness” be doing in a text that is purchased, written, and designed to efficiently highlight those features that are remarkable about him as the object of a manhunt? By the author’s own admission, these details are superfluous to the task of finding and identifying the man in question. So why are they there?
Washington’s inclusion of these details about Peros’s linguistic identity signifies something about the context of eighteenth-century anglophony even if it says little of interest about Peros as a historical person and embodied linguistic subject. Emergent characterological and narrative forms (of which the fugitive ad is only a narrow example) played a role in making the linguistically unremarkable remarkable as an index of identity. These forms of writing bring nonnormative language into being in new ways. The slave hunter who catches Peros and his band of differentially skilled anglophone multilinguals is to know that the oldest, most “sensible,” and most “judicious” among them is not actually “sensible” or “judicious” at all. His language is to be judged “slow” and “broken” even if it is not experienced as such by an interlocutor. These details consolidate the more general eighteenth-century phenomenon whereby the experience of linguistic difference is mediated by metalinguistic descriptions emphasizing normativity. Wherever they are found, these descriptions enumerate qualities like body shape, mental acuity, and behavioral quirks in such a way as to conceptually align them with linguistic difference. The inclusion of these “unremarkable” linguistic details as remarkable, in other words, is a scaled-down version of a more comprehensive process. Eighteenth-century anglophone writing that is about or concerning anglophony forecloses certain ways of experiencing linguistic difference during this period. By giving readers a linguistic scrim through which all experiences of otherness must pass, eighteenth-century texts precede and undermine human interactions that may or may not feature linguistic difference. Metalinguistic commentary comes to predict and predefine character types, in other words, and linguistic difference becomes a prominent clue in the larger labyrinth of public identity as it unfurls in the eighteenth century’s transoceanic spaces. Conversely, in the absence of apparent linguistic difference, other vectors of identity are called on to project any likely linguistic differences that may exist even when on the surface they are undetectable or “unremarkable.”
As part of the passage to a more elaborate discussion of the multilingualism of the other as it appears in eighteenth-century texts, I begin with the ephemeral evocation of these four men’s voices and linguistic identities because the truth of these voices and linguistic identities is something that can be neither confirmed nor denied. Washington’s evaluation of these multilingual subjects is eternally suspended in the swollen archive of the U.S. slave economy just as it is forever inscribed in an anglophone history of representation involving what type of person is commonly believed to speak in what types of ways. We cannot hear Peros, Jack, Neptune, or Cupid speak on their own terms. Even if we could hear them, their speech would already be mediated, just as the works of liminal anglophone subjects like Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Wheatley were, at the moment of their publication, predigested through the assumptions of racist categorization, some of which were built around and buttressed by linguistic reception criteria, a point I address in the following chapter.20 Washington’s ad in the Maryland Gazette has spoken for these four men. In its even more powerful way, the mesh of embodied, ethnolinguistic identities that takes shape against the regime of eighteenth-century Standard English and its writing practices has, in its powerful way, already prefigured them too.
CHAPTER 1
The Multilingualism of the Other
Politics, Counterpolitics, Anglophony, and Beyond
Violent Bequests
The Irish language and the Irish people were proscribed together. It was penal to teach and penal to learn the energetic dialect of our country. All of you recollect when it was a crime to speak it in the hedge schools, where we received the first rudiments of knowledge; and when the square bit of timber, called the score, suspended from the neck of each new scholar, gave intimation to the master, by a notch on its angles, when the stammering urchin relapsed into his mother tongue at home.1
Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gĩkũyũ in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment—three to five strokes of the cane on the bare buttocks—or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into witchhunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community.2
Although drawn from different periods and spaces, the scenes of learning above bear witness to violent and “humiliating” episodes of linguistic coercion. The first conjures up anglicization in Ireland during the 1790s while the second recalls the stiffening of British education policy in colonial Kenya after 1952.3 Taken chronologically, these two scenes portray language as cultural and later legal authority, a trajectory whose origins we can trace back to the long eighteenth century. Indeed it was during this century, in both the British Isles and North America, that a particular species of ethnolinguistic chauvinism organized around “proper” or “standard” linguistic behavior came to dominate anglophone cultural life. It was also during this century that the ideological groundwork was laid for making Standard English pedagogy into a constituent element of imperial rule, a process that Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest (1989) chronicled nearly three decades ago.4 The eighteenth-century drive to standardization is a decisive chapter in anglophone history. It is one of the preconditions for the educational violence staged in the testimonies