"Gayl Jones and Travel No-Where"
Abstract
Gayl Jones (USA, b. 1949) writes of journeys throughout the Americas, while also, if implicitly, exploring a global African diaspora. Her epic historical novel Palmares (2021) focuses on Brazil, retelling the story of Zumbi, 17th-century Afro-Brazilian leader of a quilombo, or fortified rebel city. Palmares did finally fall to Portuguese colonial militias in 1694-5, and in her book Gayl Jones’s protagonist, Almeyda, then travels to what she hopes will be a new or second Palmares. Her journey, however, frustratingly and paradoxically seems to get her nowhere. But, as we will see, this nowhere reveals the No-Where of Palmarians’ lives, a placelessness that seems uncertain, but at the same time offers freedom, or at least imaginative space. Like legendary “flying Africans,” people who escaped enslavement by leaping into the air, Jones’s characters appear to launch themselves into an unknown, a Not-Know-Where that may take them to Africa or somewhere utterly unanticipated. We can find other versions of this ambiguous travel in Gayl Jones’s drama, The Ancestor: A Street
Play (1975; 2020), and her novel, The Birdcatcher (1986; 2022)—and even in the works of Toni Morrison, whose novels show similar concern with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation”: attempts to rethink history outside archives and beyond maps.
Keywords
Gayl Jones; Toni Morrison; Palmares; Zumbi; The Ancestor: A Street Play; The Birdcatcher; Saidiya Hartman; critical fabulation; African diaspora; Portuguese colonialism; quilombo; Candomblé; travel
References
Anderson, Robert Nelson. “The Quilombo of Palmares: A New Overview of a Maroon State in Seventeenth-Century Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 1996, pp. 545–566. JSTOR.
Atwan, Helene. “My Decades with Gayl Jones: Reflections from an Editor.” PowellsBooks.Blog, Sept. 19, 2022. Web.
Coser, Stelamaris. “African Diasporic Connections in the Americas: Toni Morrison in Brazil. Feminismo/s 40, 2020, pp. 53–78. Web.
D’Salete, Marcelo. Angola Janga: Kingdom of Runaway Slaves. Fantagraphics, 2019.
“Gayl Jones.” Academy of American Poets. Web.
Ghansah, Rachel Kaadzi. “The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison.” The New York Times Magazine, April 18, 2015. Web.
Harper, Frances E. W. “Death of Zombi, The Chief of a Negro Kingdom in South America.” Poems. Philadelphia, Merrihew and Son, 1871. Web.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Freedom and Fugitivity with Saidiya Hartman.” UCLA Lusk Institute on Equality and Democracy, June 11, 2021. Web.
---. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W. W. Norton, 2019.
---. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14. JSTOR.
Jones, Gayl. The Birdcatcher. Virago, 2022.
---. Palmares. Beacon Press, 2021.
---. The Ancestor: A Street Play. N.p., 1975, 2020.
Jones, Gayl and Michael S. Harper. “Gayl Jones: An Interview.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 18, no. 4, 1977, pp. 692–715. JSTOR.
Kent, R. K. “Palmares: An African State in Brazil.” The Journal of African History, vol. 6, no. 2, 1965, pp. 161–175. JSTOR.
Kidder, Daniel Parrish, and James C. Fletcher. Brazil and the Brazilians, Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches. Philadelphia, Childs & Peterson, 1857. Web.
Lazo, Rodrigo. “Israel Potter, Deported.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2020, pp. 146–165. Project Muse.
McDaniel, Lorna. “The Flying Africans: Extent and Strength in the Americas.” New West Indian Guide, vol. 64, no. 1–2, 1990, pp. 28–40. JSTOR.
Myers, Shaun. “Transnationally Rooted Practices of Candomblé in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.” A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 16, no. 16, 2014, pp. 110–118. Web.
Reis, João José and Flãvio dos Santos Gomes, eds. Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil. Diasporic Africa Press, Inc., 1996, 2016.
Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview with Gayl Jones.” Callaloo, no. 16, 1982, pp. 32–53. JSTOR.
Schwarcz, Lilia M. and Heloisa M. Starling. Brazil: A Biography. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2015.
Southey, Robert. History of Brazil, Part the Third. London, Longman, 1819. Web.
Tate, Claudia. “An Interview with Gayl Jones.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 13, no. 4, 1979, pp. 142–148. JSTOR.
“The World Migration Report.” International Organization for Migration, 2020. Web.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0881-882X
Wyn Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), where she teaches classes in literature of the Americas with a focus on fluid intersections of race, gender, and class, old and new media, and social, historical, and political contexts. She is author of Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) and of Herman Melville: An Introduction (2008); and co-author, with Henry Jenkins, of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom (2013). Former Associate Editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, currently Associate Director of MEL (Melville Electronic Library), and co-editor (with Christopher Ohge) of the Wiley-Blackwell A New Companion to Herman Melville (2022), she has published essays in a number of journals and collections and has also worked to develop digital pedagogy with MIT’s Digital Humanities Lab. She is a founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, which supports programming at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and maritime culture in the New England region. More recently, after an opportunity to teach in São Paulo, Brazil, she has begun new work on the relationship between US authors and Brazil, focusing on writers like Frances E. W. Harper, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. In support of these efforts, she has won an NEH grant at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA in 2024.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.
- License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
- Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
- User Rights
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
