"What Time has Proved": History, Rebellion, And Revolution in Hamel the Obeah Man (Essay‪)‬

A number of early Caribbean novels written in English have been reprinted over the past several years, from Lise Winer's critical edition of E. L. Joseph's Warner Arundel, or the Adventures of a Creole (1838) to Karina Williamson's edition of the anonymously published Marly; or, a Planter's Life in Jamaica (1828) and John Gilmore's Creoleana (1842) by J. W. Orderson. (1) Much of this publishing activity arises from interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Caribbean colonialism as scholars examine discourses of slavery and abolition through the critical lenses provided by current postcolonial studies and critical theories of race. (2) Certainly a reconsideration of early Caribbean fiction has contributed to this project, particularly the recognition that these texts are Creole rather than metropolitan productions. They are, as Kenneth Ramchand describes the West Indian novel, "written by West Indians about the West Indian reality" (qtd. in Winer xi). To a large degree, construction of West Indian "reality"--that is, white West Indian reality--depicted in novels like Hamel the Obeah Man depends on a dramatic confrontation between Old and New World constructions of the Caribbean past, its present, and the future that white Creole authors meant to shape. Indeed, the intensity of these confrontations reminds us to be wary of our own historiographic practices. As David Scott argues in Conscripts of Modernity, scholars need to reexamine conceptions and representations of history that have led to "the facile normalization of the present" (2). We need, in other words, to complicate our readings of the past--as embodied in textual artifacts produced at particular socio-political moments--by going beyond simple acts of resurrection and commemoration, acts that discount the ongoing dialectic between historical moments. Such oversimplifying gestures encourage us to relegate the texts to a completed past even as we grant them limited currency by bringing them back into circulation. Thus, while we happily read novels like the anonymously written Hamel, an anti-abolitionist, pro-planter work, as proof of an unenlightened colonial past and search for evidence of imperial discursive strategies within them, we ignore the ways such readings promote essentializing distinctions between "us" and the largely monolithic historical "them" of our enquiry.