LITMIR.BIZ

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gathered in the course of research. In order to make clear which information is drawn from documented historical accounts or from family oral tradition, chapters begin with a review of the available information in the historical record and are followed by a section devoted to family oral traditions and their analysis, presenting ethnographic commentary on the style, content, and uses of these narratives.

      The text suggests the possibility that slaves and early free-black immigrants from Madagascar, as well as their descendants in Virginia and a few other places in the American South, remembered, reinvented, and imagined a particular geographic site they held in common. It is also about the pervasive sense of loss that contemporary families express about their separation from an ancestral geography that is symbolized, for them, by a specific ancestor from a specific place. I explore ethnic negotiation and identity formation among Malagasy newcomers to North America and their Afro-Malagasy, creole descendants by drawing on family narratives that are woven from memories and stories passed down by successive generations. With family ideas of a particular ancestral place came an allegiance to a particular history and to an inheritance of stories that describe a sense of difference from other families, and other stories, in the African American community.

      My intent is to provide a reflection on the process of creolization that led to African American identity by following one strand: the legacy of slaves and early free immigrants from Madagascar. Whether the legacy I mention above is direct descent or creations of assumed genealogies, it is a received notion deriving from ideas and thoughts of Madagascar. The approach here is not statistical but rather focuses on historical context and memory. It addresses the problem of family historical narratives as received testimonies of a past that has been embroidered and otherwise transformed in narratives stretching over successive generations. The meaning of narratives of Madagascar is explored, therefore, as an example of the complexity of memory work as it affects group identity.

       Identity and the Question of Authenticity

      It is a difficult, almost impossible enterprise to corroborate the genealogies suggested in the stories collected, because there are few existing records linking any Malagasy slave or early immigrant with particular African American descendants, although there are many African Americans who claim Malagasy descent, as “Negro Mary” did. There is, thus, a dialogue that continues throughout this volume between ethnographic analysis of the storytellers and their narratives, on one hand, and historical documentation, on the other. Today’s family narratives, as I see them, are not a recent response to public memory enterprises but, on the contrary, are built on remnants and reconstructions of much earlier narratives.⁷

      Family oral traditions offer a unique way of understanding how people experience history. The archives, which offer multiple sources of slave lists, do not reveal the transition that most slaves or early black immigrants experienced between their ethnic identities and their newly appointed racial identities. For example, while names are by nature meant to identify (a person, a thing), in the case of slaves they also hid, or even erased, personal identities. In North America once the slave received a name—his or her “slave name”—that person’s past identity and place of origin was effectively lost to future generations, because African and Malagasy names suggested linguistic or ethnic origin. Moreover, origin as a criterion of reference quickly went into disuse by slave owners (usually with the first country-born generation). If a document such as a diary or journal ever recorded the naming of individuals in a group of slaves from Madagascar, then the descendants of each slave might yet be traceable in plantation records. Unfortunately, no such record has yet been found, and records of this sort are notoriously rare for any slaves in North America. Moreover, slaves coming to the Americas generally could not read or write in English and rarely in Arabic⁸ and, thus, did not leave their own written records. This fact seems apparent, but the simplicity of this problem has often led to its invisibility, particularly for those outside the academy who want to understand or contribute to African American discourse on identity, such as the descendants of slaves. Nor has the existence of African American stories of Malagasy ancestors been common knowledge. It is not surprising, then, that this is the first scholarly publication to attempt to situate ancestor stories of Madagascar told by contemporary African Americans in a historical context.

      It is always difficult to find material evidence that demonstrates the accuracy of oral histories in the case of illiterate societies, and this is especially true of disempowered communities. How does one corroborate an oral tradition that has been passed down by a repressed minority? In this case, I have chosen to present such narratives chronologically so that historical evidence provides a background, even though there are few documents that directly substantiate Malagasy origins. But family oral-history narrators do seek to tell a chronologically based story, and the purpose of the story is to frame the present in relation to the past, specifically, a shared family past. This chronological feature exposes a desire for coherence and logic—an attempt to order the past, to signal what should be remembered and, hence, to give meaning to the present.

      The infamous Middle Passage was not long enough for people to forget who they were: the average time from West Africa across the Atlantic was two and a half to three months, and from the western Indian Ocean about three months more. Over generations, people did forget much about where they came from, and it must be imagined that remembrance was in many ways painful and underlined the powerlessness people felt. Yet if family oral history is any indication, then within the cultural aggregate that has been the African American community, traces of ethnic particularities from diverse sources and very specific experiences remain in perpetually new and ever-changing configurations, for example, as embodied practices, as folk tales, or family historical narratives. The Madagascar example, based on a less known minority population among North American slave imports, provides circumstantial evidence of how ethnic or national clusters from Africa and its islands responded to the imperative to integrate into existing black communities, enslaved or free, in the New World.

      My research has shown that authenticity is not a concern of the family oral narrative insomuch as families accept that they are not pure Malagasy, but do argue that they are of Malagasy descent. Their focus, which they clearly admit, is on their identities as people of a mixed heritage that includes an ancestor from Madagascar. This is an aspect of the narratives that is approached in various ways throughout the book, as we seek to understand why the “Madagascar” lineage was remembered or otherwise noted, especially in contrast to other less visible or forgotten stories, such as those on continental African descent. This book is thus not a project in search of “lost authenticity” but of offering a context for a particular kind of family oral tradition through exploring the historical record.⁹ For understanding the internal significance of the Malagasy lineage and thus the Malagasy story, I turn to ethnography and discussions in anthropology on memory and identity.¹⁰

      In contrast to archival materials, family oral traditions give a sense of the tension and displacement experienced by slave descendants. I find that the practice of the family narrative is intentional; its purpose is to transfer information. However, the family oral narrative depends principally on memory, unlike professionally written histories as we know them today. The problem of understanding the past through family oral histories lies in a gray area between memory, mnemonic behaviors, and available historical evidence.

      Recent historical research has pioneered alternative ways of looking at slaves who arrived in the New World, and this volume draws on these new theoretical perspectives and findings.¹¹ We know that when enslaved captives arrived on American shores, they did not yet see themselves as simply “black” people or Africans. We can take the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, known also as Gustavus Vassa, as an example.¹² There has been considerable debate regarding whether Equiano was indeed born in Africa and transported as a youth on a slave ship, or born in the Caribbean of Ibo parents, or born in South Carolina. Nevertheless, any reading of his history gives evidence of the importance of ethnicity to Equiano’s own story of himself. He spoke of himself as a displaced Ibo person and as an African.¹³ Paul Lovejoy, for instance, in “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa—What’s in a Name?” suggests that the methodological issues regarding the Equiano debate relate to how historians engage oral tradition and literary custom with the archival record.¹⁴ This volume addresses issues of the Equiano debate,

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