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ABSTRACT
This article interrogates transhistorical layers of colonial violence, and resistance to it, linked to the island of Navassa, located off the southwestern coast of Haiti. Long the subject of territorial disputes, the island and its literary entanglements point to the interconnectedness of resistance to colonialism by subalterns in the circum-Caribbean. To illustrate this, I analyze, among other texts, a sixteenth-century Spanish colonial account of a canoe journey, a nineteenth-century benevolent society pamphlet written in defense of revolting miners of guano (fertilizer made of avian excrement), a North Carolina mayor’s twentieth-century local history project, and a twenty-first-century narrative by ham radio hobbyists of an expedition to the island. Ultimately, I identify thematic continuities and argue that Navassa Island and its entanglements signify as synecdoche for the (anti)colonial hemisphere, an observation which has repercussions for how we understand the semiotic charge of individual islands and their respective historiographies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my deeply felt gratitude to: George Rutherford and Eulis Willis for their generosity of time and goodwill, as well as their kind assistance to my field research in West Virginia and North Carolina, respectively; Steven Knowlton for uncovering a hard-to-find OGF newsletter from 1906; Rachel Price and Christina Lee for reviewing and commenting on prior versions of this article; Jean Lesly Rene for a helpful conversation about Colón’s account, and Navassa in general; and Andy Alfonso and Rodney Lebrón Rivera for indispensable discussions of Glissantian theory. I would also like to thank my anonymous reviewers, whose comments greatly improved this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 119.
2 Wiener, Oral History, 3.
3 Ibid., 8.
4 Sued-Badillo, “From Tainos to Africans,” 100. Sued-Badillo uses Haiti-Quisqueya as a compound toponym that combines the two most often-cited Indigenous place-names for the island that the Spanish would later call La Española (Hispaniola).
5 Ibid., 8.
6 “Zile Lanavaz.”
7 Bronfman, Isles of Noise, 5.
8 Moreno, Crossing Waters, 3.
9 Goffe, “‘Guano in Their Destiny’,” 29.
10 James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 128.
11 Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire, 54.
12 Following precedent in English-language scholarship on Spanish colonial history, I refer to Cristopher Columbus with the anglicized form of his name, given his notoriety, and I refer to his son as Hernando Colón.
13 León Guerrero, “Los pasajeros,” 24.
14 Colón, Cuarto viaje colombino, 102. All translations from original Spanish documents are mine unless otherwise noted.
15 Covarrubias, Tesoro, 588.
16 Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” 576.
17 Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures, xiii.
18 This is inspired by Jamaica Kincaid’s 1998 essay on neocolonialism and tourism in Antigua, A Small Place.
19 Columbus, “El cuarto viaje,” 197.
20 Colón, Cuarto viaje colombino, 100–103.
21 Caillet-Bois, “Un olvidado erasmista,” 61.
22 Columbus, “El cuarto viaje,” 197–204.
23 Méndez, “Relación,” 437–442; Columbus, “El cuarto viaje,” 204. We can understand that the canoe voyage took place sometime in the second half of 1503, since the letter Columbus sent with Méndez was dated 7 July 1503. Méndez’s account also mentions that after arriving to Hispaniola, he spent seven months at Jaragua before traveling on to the capital, Santo Domingo, from where he was able to send Columbus a ship in June of 1504, which puts Méndez’s arrival at western Hispaniola sometime in late 1503. See Méndez, “Relación,” 442, 443n1.
24 Sued-Badillo, “From Tainos to Africans,” 99.
25 Méndez, “Relación,” 438–439.
26 Ibid., 439.
27 Ibid., 441.
28 Sued-Badillo, “From Tainos to Africans,” 104.
29 Ibid., 107.
30 The Royal Spanish Academy defines “nava” as: “Tierra sin árboles y llana, a veces pantanosa, situada generalmente entre montañas” (“Flat and treeless land, sometimes swampy, generally situated between mountains”). The suffix “-aza” or “-azo” in Spanish functions as an augmentative. “Nava.”
31 Colón, Cuarto viaje colombino, 101.
32 Ibid.
33 Goffe, “‘Guano in Their Destiny’,” 28.
34 Ibid., 29.
35 Cadava, “The Guano of History,” 120; Goffe, “‘Guano in Their Destiny’,” 33.
36 Cohen, Birth of a New Physics, 235.
37 Quoted in Moreno, Crossing Waters, 90.
38 Colón, Cuarto viaje colombino, 102.
39 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21.
40 Armstrong, White for Danger, 182.
41 James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 116.
42 Ibid.
43 United States Congress, An Act to Authorize Protection, 119.
44 James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 119, 126.
45 Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire, 54.
46 Cadava, “The Guano of History,” 117.
47 Ibid., 119; James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 119.
48 Quoted in Cadava, “The Guano of History,” 106.
49 Ibid., 121.
50 Quoted in James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 116.
51 Vallejo, The Complete Poetry, 166.
52 Rosa, “Capitalismo e ilegibilidad,” 85.
53 Salt, The Unfinished Revolution, 140.
54 Putnam, “An Important New Guide for Shipping,” 42.
55 State of North Carolina, “Navassa Guano Company Charter.”
56 Willis, Navassa, vii.
57 Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, “Where to Go.”
58 Willis, Navassa, 85.
59 Lerner, Sacrifice Zones, 2.
60 United States Environmental Protection Agency, “National Priorities List.”
61 Simmons, “Projects to Move Forward.”
62 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 4.
63 “Navassa Rioters at Baltimore,” 5.
64 Gordon, “A Brief History of the G.U.O. of Galilean Fishermen,” 1.
65 “Cambridge Notes,” 4.
66 “Galilean Fishermen,” 2.
67 Gordon, “A Brief History of the G.U.O. of Galilean Fishermen,” 2.
68 City of Baltimore, “Baltimore Addresses”; Sanborn Fire Insurance, “Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Baltimore,” 2. A comparison of these maps, the former from 2017 and the latter from 1890, suggest that was once South Liberty Street has been mostly or entirely replaced by the block that now hosts the CFG Bank (until recently, Royal Farms) Arena, bounded now by Howard to the west, Lombard to the south, Hopkins to the east, and Baltimore to the north.
69 “A Prominent Colored Man’s Death,” 6.
70 “A Grand Colored Funeral,” 6.
71 Ibid.
72 Quoted in Moreno, Crossing Waters, 90.
73 Washington, The Story of the Negro, 155.
74 Skocpol et al., What a Mighty Power, 50.
75 Interview with the author.
76 Skocpol et al., What a Mighty Power, 49.
77 Ibid., 47–48.
78 Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, Constitution, 1.
79 Ibid., 18.
80 “Women in Rotary,” paragraph 1; “History,” paragraph 4.
81 Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree, 128.
82 Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, Constitution, 55.
83 This is shown in his signature under the prefacing note to The Navassa Island Riot, Illustrated.
84 Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, The Navassa Island Riot, 3.
85 James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 129.
86 Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, The Navassa Island Riot, 6–7.
87 Ibid.
88 “Navassa Rioters to Hang,” 3.
89 “Not Under the Flag,” 8.
90 “Navassa Rioters to Hang,” 3; Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire,” 779.
91 Patterson writes:
If the slave no longer belonged to a community, if he had no social existence outside of his master, then what was he? The initial response in almost all slaveholding societies was to define the slave as a socially dead person. Slavery and Social Death, 38
92 James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 130.
93 Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, The Navassa Island Riot, 18.
94 Ibid., 25.
95 Ibid., 23.
96 James, “‘Buried in Guano’,” 168.
97 Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen, The Navassa Island Riot, 5.
98 Huggins, “Story of Alex Huggins, Ex-Slave,” 451.
99 Gaussoin’s text contains no pagination, but the illustration “Plate IV” is easily locatable within the short pamphlet.
100 Hartman writes: “This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” Lose Your Mother, 6.
101 “Dead and Dying,” 7.
102 Ibid.
103 Leibing writes: “there are some forms of suffering which reveal the interconnectedness of place, the (aging) body, identity, and power, and may be understood as heterotopic illness.” “Heterotopia and Illness,” 232.
104 “Dead and Dying,” 7.
105 Ibid.
106 Colón, Cuarto viaje colombino, 101.
107 James, The Black Jacobins, 86–88, 370.
108 Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror, 16.
109 United States Department of the Interior, “Departmental Manual,” section 1.2 N.
110 Stancil, History of Navassa Island, 4. This correspondence is dated 14 February 1984, but the report is dated 21 April 1967. According to the letter and the report’s byline, the report was sent by Scheina but was composed by Stancil. I accessed this report in the personal archives of Mayor Eulis Willis in Navassa, North Carolina.
111 Floherty, Sentries, 88.
112 Ibid., 90.
113 Price, “Between an Angel’s Cry and a Murmur,” 357–358.
114 Here, I use the Haitian Kreyòl spelling (“zonbi”).
115 Hurbon, “The Figure of the Zombie,” 7. Film critic Roderick Heath notes that the film “hovers stylistically in a grey zone between silent and sound cinema,” and that the director, Halperin,
betrays unique awareness of how sound cinema could operate in the [horror] genre here, allowing the unnerving creak and grind of the [sugar mill] machinery and the unnatural silence of the zombies to forge the uncanny atmosphere as well as draw out the fascinating thematic undercurrents of what we’re seeing. “White Zombie (1932),” paragraphs 3, 6
116 Legnani, The Business of Conquest, 5. Legnani tells us that from 1513, conquistadors were obligated to read a standardized declaration, called the Requerimiento (the Requirement), upon taking possession of a territory.
117 Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 5.
118 Stancil, History of Navassa Island, 4.
119 Day, “Haiti-United States (Navassa Island),” 439.
120 Gaillard, La République exterminatrice, deuxième partie, 388.
121 Ibid., 389.
122 Wiener, Oral History, 27.
123 Gricius, “Pulling Back the Curtain,” 210.
124 Allphin, “The Long Road to Navassa,” 88M.
125 Ibid.
126 Murray, “Portia Simpson Miller.”
127 Smith, “Capture Land,” 199.
128 Allphin, “The Long Road to Navassa,” 88M.
129 Ibid., 88J, 88L.
130 Ibid., 88M–88N.
131 Miller et al., “The State of Coral Reef Ecosystems of Navassa Island,” 138, 148.
132 Ibid., 137.
133 Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” 100.
134 Neyra, Cry of the Senses, 4.
135 Richardson, The Caribbean, 21.
136 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 3.
137 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 67.
138 Ibid., 69.
139 “‘Good-bye, My Lover, Good-bye,’” 6.
140 Waite, College Songs, 54.
141 Benítez-Rojo writes:
within the sociocultural fluidity that the Caribbean archipelago presents, within its historiographic turbulence and its ethnological and linguistic clamor, within its generalized instability of vertigo and hurricane, one can sense the features of an island that ‘repeats’ itself, unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and lands of the earth. The Repeating Island, 3
142 See note 8 above.
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Ashford King
Ashford King is a PhD student at Princeton University in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. His dissertation project examines cultural practices relating to land and labor in Louisiana, Cuba, and the Canary Islands in the long nineteenth century, with special attention to cultures of subsistence on the margins of the plantation system and beyond. Born and raised in Kentucky, he now resides in New Jersey.