Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare
stranger before”—as a conduit to biblical and classical knowledge. As Vincent Carretta notes, “The education that Phillis Wheatley received from Susanna and/or Mary Wheatley would have been very impressive for a white man of high social standing at the time.”74 He also speculates that Phillis’s transgressive educational achievements might have been partially a result of John and Susanna Wheatley’s perverse desire to experiment with the education of an African-born woman: “Phillis Wheatley’s writings demonstrate that she was granted an education that went well beyond what was needed in order to be catechized on Christianity…. The Wheatleys offered her an extraordinary opportunity to develop her talents and interests. They may have done so as a kind of social experiment to discover what effect education might have on an African.”75 As Carretta has it, this education represents an unusual contravention of racial, class, and social categories organized around educational and especially literate attainments. Whether her education was the product of a strange experiment or simply the Wheatleys’ avowedly Christian commitment to a form of literate anglophone religiosity that was spawned in the wake of the First Great Awakening, Wheatley’s natural aptitude and anglophone education enabled transformations in her subjectivity, as all linguistic education must. There is another wrinkle to recollect. The education the Wheatleys gave her was not her first. Phillis Wheatley’s natural aptitudes might have been complimented by her once and perhaps still multilingual mind. Her transatlantic transit meant that she was the kind of person forced to think about linguistic protocol, translation, and especially survival outside of and before her anglophone education. These earlier experiences would have informed the poetic projects she later undertook.
Wheatley is now widely known and taught as the first African American woman to publish an anglophone book in Britain, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). This quality of being “first” coupled with the importance of the transatlantic slave trade to eighteenth-century anglophone culture frequently means that the brief poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” one of the thirty-nine poems included in her first volume, is Wheatley’s most regularly taught and anthologized work. The assumed exemplarity of this poem derives from the fact that it speaks generally to the situation of enslaved transatlantic subjects as well as to Wheatley’s poetic disposition, which is frequently devotional, and not without irony:
‘TWAS mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.76
The first four lines of this poem can be read as a Christian redemption story but also as an educational autobiography—a different version of what Lyons and Ngũgĩ provide. Wheatley’s past here is not an idyll (“Once I redemption neither sought nor knew”) but instead a spiritual state that the poetic persona has thankfully left behind. Her anglophone education, which was embedded in her Christian education, and vice versa, is figured as the happy result of her journey from Africa to America. The success of her education even allows her to reach across racial lines, as she also did in her correspondence with famous figures like George Washington and Samson Occom. In this poem, Wheatley reminds (white) Christians that devotion means more to one’s spiritual state than race, especially when it comes to entering into a state of grace believed to be the exclusive purview of a dominant racial group: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.”
The fact that this poem evinces thankfulness for anglophone and thus Christian education is most fascinating when set against the other poems in the book. If any one poem or poetic form predominates in this volume, it is the elegy—which is fitting, as it was her elegy on the death of George Whitefield that first brought her work into the public eye in October 1770. Fourteen of the volume’s thirty-nine poems are straightforwardly elegies or funeral poems.77 Several others engage the question of death and mourning more obliquely.78 Wheatley seems instinctively drawn to the elegy in the sense of requiem, a tendency critics have read in various ways.79 One critic reads Wheatley’s use of the elegy in conjunction with the importance of elegy to the classical literature that Wheatley would have studied. In this reading, Wheatley’s translation of the form takes on a political function as an attempt to form community, “The elegy functioned as more than a funeral poem for classical writers, and it routinely expressed political positions…. Wheatley’s elegies created community by drawing local Boston together in corporate mourning for admirable or pitiable members of the community.”80 Another critic, Mary Balkun, finds in Wheatley’s elegies an attempt to explore the spiritual doctrine of the transcendent soul’s independence from the material body: “The fourteen elegies that constitute a large portion of Wheatley’s book may thus be read … as a way to insist on the essential unimportance of the body.”81 Wheatley uses the elegy, in this reading, not to mourn the body but to adulate the saved Christian soul.
Balkun’s reading of the elegy moves me toward my own reading of how exactly the elegy functions in this multilingual writer’s work. Devona Mallory writes, “In Wheatley’s case, the recently departed may not be merely references to the deceased; they may be an attempt by the African American artist to console parents who have been separated, beyond their control, from their children.”82 This useful and sensitive reading calls on the biographical details of Wheatley’s forced removal from Africa in order to suggest that she possessed a heightened sensitivity—visible in her poetry—to empathize with those who had recently lost loved ones, especially parents, who in the normal order of things are not supposed to be predeceased by their children. Wheatley, having lost her ancestral home and gained another, uses the elegy in the sense of requiem because she knows intimately that this form’s plaintive properties come close to capturing the inexorability of loss.
I would add here only that the texture of the question changes if we imagine that Wheatley might also be writing about her lost language or languages, that swirling collection of sounds and meanings she would have learned in childhood and then never heard again after her arrival in Boston harbor, 1761. Several of her elegies invite this reading. For example, the middles stanza of “On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age,” implores mourners to “hear in heav’n’s blest bow’rs your Nancy fair, / And learn to imitate her language there.”83 The titular character, who has undergone death’s passage from “dark abodes to fair etherial light” echoes Wheatley’s self-described exodus “from my Pagan land” at the hands of “mercy.” Just as Nancy has learned a new celestial language that her earth-bound relatives must attempt to divine, Wheatley too has entered a spiritual, cultural, and linguistic environment by leaving others—unnamed and perhaps only hazily remembered—behind.84
This section’s juxtaposition of Burns and Wheatley is intended as a stark first example of the polarities engendered by the eighteenth-century experience of anglophone linguistic multiplicity. Whereas Burns chooses Scots as his poetic medium, thereby defending local culture as it is attached to a particular linguistic heritage, for Wheatley this is impossible because her language is in effect lost or forgotten. In both cases, educational history is essential to the story that is told about the poet in the paratexts that surround his or her work. Just as it is necessary for John Wheatley to authorize Phillis Wheatley’s poetic achievements by overtly stressing her remarkable and precocious education into anglophony, early reviewers of Burns’s work stress his authenticity and autodidacticism even as they critique his language. Because of her race and gender, Wheatley’s anglophone education must aspire to perfection, but Burns’s education is described by his reviewers as happily incomplete. As a case in point, Tobias Smollett’s review of Poems includes these lines: “We have had occasion to examine a number of poetical productions, written by persons in the lower rank of life, and who had hardly received any education; but we do not recollect to have ever met with