EDWARD BLYDEN
Deborah Shapple Spillmana
University of Oregon
While addressing the Royal African Society, founded in honor of Mary
Henrietta Kingsley, Edward Wilmot Blyden reflected on one of his more
memorable experiences in Victorian England:
During a visit to Blackpool many years ago, I went with some
hospitable friends to the Winter Garden where there were several wild
animals on exhibition. I noticed that a nurse having two children with
her, could not keep her eyes from the spot where I stood, looking at
first with a sort of suspicious, if not terrified curiosity. After a
while she heard me speak to one of the gentlemen who were with me.
Apparently surprised and reassured by this evidence of a genuine
humanity, she called to the children who were interested in examining
a leopard, "Look, look, there is a black man and he speaks
English." (Blyden, "West" 363)
Blyden, a West Indian-born citizen of Liberia and resident of Sierra
Leone, assures his audience that such scenes were not unique for the
African abroad, even at the turn of the twentieth century; seen as "an
unapproachable mystery," an African traveler like himself was "at once
'spotted' as a peculiar being – sui generis" who, as if by nature,
"produce[d] the peculiar feelings of the foreigner at the first sight
of him" (Blyden, "West" 362, 363). Keenly aware of how non-Europeans
were displayed at metropolitan zoos, fairs, and exhibitions throughout
the nineteenth century, Blyden puns on the leopard's spots in order to
highlight his experience of being marked as an object of curiosity.
Indeed, the nurse's anxious wavering between curiosity and terror
dissipates not because Blyden ceases to appear marked, or "spotted,"
but because the taxonomic crisis he arouses by not standing on the
other side of the fence has been temporarily contained: she distances
the threat of Blyden's difference as "a black man" while evading the
equally threatening possibility of recognizing his sameness as one who
"speaks English." The nurse, to borrow the words of Homi Bhabha in
describing the fetishism of such colonial "scenes of
subjectification" (Bhabha 81), constructs the man before her as "at
once an 'other' and yet entirely knowable and visible" in a way that
attempts to "fix" Blyden's identity and the Victorian categories his
appearance unsettles (Bhabha 70–71), while making the relation between
differences and their appended significance appear natural (Bhabha
67). If, by expressing himself in his characteristically impeccable
English in order to vindicate his "genuine humanity" (Blyden, "West"
363), Blyden appears to be "putting on the white world" at the expense
of his autonomy (Fanon 36), he simultaneously wages battle in this
world at the level of signification in ways that anticipate the work
of the later African nationalist and West Indian emigrant, Frantz
Fanon. An extensive reader and ordained minister who recognized the
politics of exegesis as well as semiosis, Blyden implicitly asks his
audience, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his
spots?" (Jeremiah 13, 23). Posing a rhetorical question that argues
rather than asks, that brandishes the very texts often used against
him, Blyden subtly deploys this passage typically associated with the
intransience of human character in order to defy attempts at
determining him entirely from without. Serving as a kind of object
lesson demonstrating the need for less objectifying knowledge about
Africans and their cultures, Blyden's anecdote challenged his
contemporaries to further the lessons he and Mary Kingsley offered
through their writing.
http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1060150311000015
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