A lock of hair, a baby rattle — and a history of slavery

Boston Globe

6 days ago

It's fitting she begins with Samuel Coleridge's signature, located in a Cambridge library ledger, a seemingly innocuous record left by an author Nabugodi admired. In it, she locates the 'contemporary abolitionist poetry' he probably sourced for his prize-winning, anti-slavery-themed Greek ode, which, it turns out, was milk-fed on pro-slavery's watch. Coleridge, she notes, was a 'Rustat Scholar,' a prestigious award funded by the estate of Thomas Rustat — one of the founding members of the Royal African Company, the most prolific slave-trading organization in history. Nabugodi connects this funding to even more complicated systems of erasures.
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At the Bristol library, she realizes how ledgers reinforce human hierarchies. 'The same record keeping techniques that help us sort and arrange books in a library also enable the reduction of human lives into nameless entries,' she writes, 'and paved the way for transforming humans into commodities.' These ledgers were more than neutral bookkeeping. 'The ledger is a powerful technology of dehumanization,' and a form of
agnotology
— a term for the deliberate production and maintenance of ignorance.
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If this all feels abstract or victimless (lists, libraries, literary allowances) Nabugodi traces the pedigree of Coleridge's work to the finale of his descent: 'how [he] went from being an idealistic abolitionist to becoming a white supremacist.' Her critique contains discomfort, for Romantic literature has long been her field of expertise and joy. 'This is what I do not want to talk about,' she writes. But she does, and thankfully so. 'Much as I was appalled by discovering their views [Wordsworth, Coleridge] I was even more dismayed by the absence of any critical discussion of their statements, even though they had been in print and easily accessible for decades.'
Romanticism was lit by ideas like equality and electricity, she writes, but those advancements came with an asterisk — progress wasn't for everyone: 'Europeans of the Romantic period considered themselves to be superior to people with darker skin.' Even abolitionists 'tended to regard Africans as inferior' and felt it was 'their duty to take pity on the poor savages.' Coleridge not only shared these views — he diagrammed them, placing Black Africans at the bottom of a racial hierarchy and 'crystallized' them in a lecture where he argued: ''Human Species consists of ONE
historic Race
and of
several others
.''
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Nabugodi also studied the stepladder of influences in Mary Shelley's work, finding them saturated with the racist pseudoscience Coleridge (whom she knew since childhood) later espoused. Shelley's personal physician, William Lawrence, was also deeply interested in comparative anatomy — 'the science that sought to define species, races, and varieties of man through comparison … skin tone, hair type, skull measurements' — eugenics, in other words. Shelley likely owned Lawrence's 'Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology' or knew of it, and she certainly borrowed from his lectures for '
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Her encounter with the Shelley 'relics,' as they were called, a word in lockstep with Nabugodi's suspicion that archives expose a racialized sense of exclusion, is the can opener of the book. As she holds Shelley's bracelet — mourning jewelry made from the author's hair: 'It takes me a while to realize that one reason why I do not expect to find any carefully preserved Black hair is because I myself do not value my Afro.' She recalls how, as a teen, her white schoolmates mocked loose Afro curls on the floor. 'Yuck, it's pubes.' When a white friend stuck some of Nabugodi's hair on a Barbie doll, 'It looked horrendous. … The other kids could see it. Yet [my friend] was beaming … seemingly unaware that, like a childish Frankenstein, she had created a monster.' These memories lead Nabugodi to explore racist Romantic-era taxonomies. If Black hair ever entered the archive, she writes, 'it is more likely to be a scientific specimen than a family heirloom.'
Despite the scholarly weight of the book, as a writer Nabugodi is warm and witty, her prose both intimate and animated. To unite scholarship with storytelling, the political with the personal, and the funny with the grim, is something that really should be required for tenure because it shows how nimble her intellect is. There's another kind of archive she alludes to — our neural archives, which activate when we learn something new. If some people are excluded from the archives, do we accept their absence because they are not part of the networks our brains remember or design? Nabugodi has written a masterpiece about how history is made, maintained, and remembered, while also including what history forgot — with trembling hands, she admits — and with power and ferocity.
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THE TREMBLING HAND: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive
By Mathelinda Nabugodi
Knopf, 432 pages, $32
Kerri Arsenault is the author of '
' and director and founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio (TESS).