DAVIE MAY BE DAVID, BUT ZION IS BABYLON: MISCOMMUNICATION AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POWER IN V.S. REID’S NEW DAY By Gerardo J. Lamadrid
DAVIE MAY BE DAVID, BUT ZION IS BABYLON: MISCOMMUNICATION AND THE PERFORMANCE OF POWER IN V.S. REID’S NEW DAY
By Gerardo J. Lamadrid
In his introduction to V.S. Reid’s seminal historical novel New Day, Jeremy Poynting argues that Davie Campbell, an idealist mixed race Jamaican escaping Governor Edward John Eyre’s reign of terror following the Morant Bay Rebellion, “has tried [in the second part of the book] to create Zion as a replacement for the helotry of slavery, but his utopia replicates the organization of the old sugar estate, except that the whip has been replaced by the Bible” (22). Indeed, Davie’s utopia on Salt Savannah Cay, excluded from the political framework of mainland Jamaica and the jurisdiction of the British Crown, recreates the exploitative economic structure of Caribbean plantations, with Davie ruling with an iron fist, albeit clenching the Scriptures. His violence is not legal or physical, but ideological. In the microcosm of Davie’s Zion6 (a new land of promise and prosperity, treated practically as a colonial settlement), we see the machinations of doctrinal domination employed by previous Christian colonists, but “The name of one of the hills of Jerusalem, on which the city of David was built, and which became the centre of Jewish life and worship; in biblical and derived use, allusively for: The house or household of God; and hence connoting variously, the Israelites and their religious system, the Christian Church, heaven as the final home of believers, a place of worship or meeting-house.”
exacerbated in the absence of physical domination, and performed insidiously by Davie, who converts “from equality with his fellows to becoming ‘Mr. Davie’” (22) once Zion begins selling guano to American merchants. Poynting further suggests that Zion becomes a “capitalist farm” under Davie’s son, James Creary, when he turns the workers into “wage labourers” (23). While this is true (the dynamics do change towards profit-driven production and commerce), the seeds of bourgeois authority are planted by Davie, whose self-righteous religious convictions and popular appeal disguise his crooked leadership. In this paper, I will delineate and analyze the ways Davie Campbell’s fictional promised land fails in its emancipating mission by reproducing the same exploitative visions and practices he sought to replace, deteriorating into cult-like autocracy and colonial deference to foreign traders.
Reid’s narrator, Davie’s younger brother John, says in Part Two: “First time Davie had said he and me would do the overseeing, for we must see that no man idles in Zion.” He then explains how he had “never seen such labor in men,” not even with a “headman” watching them (234). Granted, given the nature of their enterprise, the Campbells had to ensure that they produced enough to feed all of the inhabitants of Zion—their initial stoicism and industry is a logical result of their struggle for survival. At the same time, Davie guarantees that the benefits reaped are to be shared (in a style reminiscent of the more modern Labor Zionist concept of the kibbutz7). Notwithstanding, Davie’s stated purpose of “what is for one is for all” becomes more ominous when one considers his authoritarian tendencies (232). “What is for one is for all” effectively refers to both commodities produced and beliefs mandated. What Davie regards as true and necessary, so must everyone else. Regardless of the positive, liberating aspects of Davie’s ideal commune, his methodology of prohibition and strictness makes him, for all intents and purposes, a cult leader.
While he does not seek worship for himself, he has no leniency for deviations from the cultural norm. The institution of ridiculous rules, such as “no flowers on Zion […] God’s earth is given to man for his food. Flowers are planted in idleness, grown for devil’s garland” (235), and his insistence on how “we ha’ come here to live our lives, to work this Zion. None o’ us are thinking of holidays. Holidays are devil-buckra’s arrangements for drunkenness and carousing. We do no’ want that; we must find our happiness in work and fastings,” demonstrate his obsession with maintaining a puritan ethic and aesthetic, and his deep-rooted, thickheaded belief that he knows what everyone wants and what is best for them (241). He does not listen to pleads from John or Lucille (Davie’s wife) – he does not recognize appeals to reason – because he has internalized a plan which he has no intention to change.
“The Sixty-fifth Psalm tells us: ‘Praise waiteth for thee, O God, in Zion and unto thee shall the vow be performed” says Davie, summarizing his ambiguous creed. If this was the foundation for his Zion, its vagueness is evident (232). The same allows Davie, frustrated by the Morant Bay debacle, and ostracized from his home, to project his own troubles unto the laws of his new land.
First of all, his refusal to allow alcohol, and even secular music, in Zion could stem from his disdain for the people he has observed drinking, the figuratively inebriated ostentation of buckras such as the “imperialist” Zaccy O’Gilvie (90), and, of course, from the fundamentalist Christian tradition (as evidenced by contemporaneous, nineteenth-century British conservatives and American revivalists) of abstinence from the bottle and preference for spirituals. Also, his repetitive fixation with “no idleness in Zion” (235) clearly recalls the Queen’s Advice which partly sparked his and the rebels’ rejection of British rule in Jamaica: “The means of support of the labouring classes depend on their labour. Her Majesty will regard with interest and satisfaction their advancement through their own merits and efforts” (57). The Crown’s disinterested attitude, exemplified by ignoring the plight of the Jamaican people (greatly worsened by a multi-year drought and the poverty of the abused land), and recommendation that they simply work harder, infuriates Davie, and clearly fuels his desire to eradicate idleness. After all, the Jamaicans of Zion could not be considered lazy if they work all-year round—unlike the British with their “white devil” holidays.
This single-minded strategy for social organization, and his close-minded lifestyle, quickly affect Davie’s personal relationships. Lucille rants to John, “with aloes: ‘He is not my husband. He is my overseer. No flowers. No singing except old hymns. No books, except the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress.” And this is after John admits, in his narration, that he is struggling with knowing her feelings, yet not being able to publicly say that “[Davie] would have us all live in his drought with him” (238). Two references stand out. An obvious one is John’s mention of drought, which seems to metaphorize the actual drought happening in Jamaica to illustrate Davie’s psychological barrenness, and his cold, dry ways. Lucille, on the other hand, gives us a reference which is intertextual. Now we see where Davie gets his ideas: he is practically positioning himself in the role of Christian, the everyman protagonist of Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian says, more than once, “I am come from the city of Destruction, and am going to Mount Zion” (28). Davie left a Jamaica forced back to Crown Colony status, after falling victim to “a reign of terror, which was to last several weeks, in the course of which hundreds of black Jamaicans were to be summarily shot or hung, many hundreds of others tortured, and over a thousand homes burnt” (Semmel 3-4). Away from this “city of Destruction,” Davie is now looking to build his own Zion.
Yet Lucille will not have his way of doing it. Irritated and sad, she continues:
Last night I suggested that he send to Jamaica for some bright prints to make dresses for the children instead of this–” she laughed without steadiness and touched her osnaburg “–this thing we all now wear. It was then he looked at the fashion books on the table and said something about ‘spoils from the camps of the unrighteous,’ speaking in that horrible Bible-quoting manner he has adopted. (Reid 239)
From this anecdote we may surmise two important ideas. One, that Davie is forcing everyone to wear osnaburg8, a thoroughly ironic “As a mass noun: a kind of coarse linen (and later cotton) cloth originally made at Osnabrück, used esp. for making rough hard-wearing clothing, or for furnishings, sacks, tents, etc. As a count noun (usually in pl., sometimes treated as sing.): a exercise of his executive control of their property and trading, for Davie had said “man was no’ built for slavery” (220), and yet now he makes his people, who are beginning to prosper, wear clothing for slaves. Also, by extension, he has established a uniform for everyone, evoking prison servitude and the loss of identity related to living in a cult.
Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, Lucille does not hide her disdain for Davie’s bible-speak. Power is always expressed ideologically through discourse. He himself may not realize it, but Davie is replicating the obfuscatory speech of the Crown, while trying to sound like the Baptist deacon Paul Bogle, whom he had admired and followed back in their village of Stoney Gut, and whom is now, in reality, considered a Jamaican national hero.
There is a clear disconnect in what Davie perceives as proper speech, a linguistic reflection of his educated, elevated epistemological tendencies, and how the people around him wish to communicate. In fact, Lucille’s next revelatory Bible reference (bible speak appears to be contagious) is precisely about language: “Johnny, your brother is building a Tower of Babel. By the time he is finished, we might not speak the same tongue!” (240). Anglican and Baptist churches in Jamaica during the 1800’s would have almost certainly used the King James version of the Bible, which tells of how all the people in the world spoke one language, and used it to erect a tower, the proverbial Tower of Babel, that could reach the heavens, until God disapproved and “did there confound the language of all the quantity of this; (also) an item or items made of such cloth, esp. (formerly) clothing given to servants or slaves.” earth” (Genesis 11.9). “Babel,” according to the OED, originated with senses that “were probably influenced early on by association with the (etymologically unrelated)” term “babble,” suggesting confusion.9 Also, because of its believed location in latter-day Babylonia, “Babel” used to be utilized interchangeably with “Babylon.”
This connection, of course, layers the semantics of our present-day reading of New Day (and could have done the same with original 1940’s and 50’s interpretations), given that “Babylon” is commonly used with negative connotations in Jamaica.
Therein lies the crux of my argument: whereas Davie is essentially attempting to be a King David, leading his people and constructing Zion on Earth, he actually uses them to construct a Babel tower that condemns them to Babylon. His egoist ambition leads to the literal destruction of the island (if we read the tempest that eventually ravages the cay and kills him as divine punishment), and to the acceptance of the truly capitalist enterprise his son initiates. Like the rest of Jamaica, Zion too becomes Crown Colony territory. Due to this, we may say that Davie would have certainly viewed the beginning of Part Two as tragic: alongside the trees that struck him down, waving below the Salt Savannah Cay sun and blown by Zion wind, the Union Jack – the flag of modern, imperial Babylon (203). In the end, then, Davie was not able to “build a place to show the buckra English that we people are no’ benighted” (239), a lamentable case of a voice of the people that no longer spoke for or to the people. And what makes the situation more sadly inevitable is that, from the beginning, this voice of the people was not listened to by the powers that be. Hear John, discussing the earlier incident of Davie’s speech for investigators after the Rebellion:
Lucille, when Bro’ Davie went before the Queen’s men at Morant Bay, he never made fun to tell them how our people did no’ have a level road to walk upon. The Queen’s Commissioners heard how our people had thrift in them, ‘cause out o’ their ninepence a day they bought land and grew crops. How only drought and poor lands made hunger ride them for these years. Believe, I believe the Commissioners did no’ believe him. (239)
This confusion, this miscommunication between colonizer and subject, birthed the miscommunication between Davie and his followers. At this junction, to address the origins of Davie’s foibles in his project, we should note what Bernard Semmel proposes regarding British opinion on the Morant Bay Rebellion: “The question discussed by the English public was that of the importance of protecting the thirteen thousand white men and women of Jamaica against savage miscreants – as well as that of keeping that island within the Empire” (5). To a Commission heavily influenced by the racist concerns of their citizens, what would Davie’s contentions matter to them? Reid’s historical narrative highlights the epic quality of Davie’s words and actions, but we must recognize that the real Queen’s Commission would have given little mind to this. Davie, the roundest character in the novel, has a dark side which represses his anger with the British, and compensates for it by repressing his people in Zion.
Semmel further dissects the English populace’s view of the Morant Bay conflict, and while doing so, reflects on others’ (namely, Octave Mannoni’s) analysis of “the psychology of the actual confrontation, in a colony, of the colonizer and the native.” Semmel says: The view of the native which the colonial possessed, Mannoni continued, was one which projected his own dimly understood conception of the “primitive” or of “Nature,” (or of his own “nature” and instincts). The result might be the view of a “Noble Savage,” which was a fairly common one, especially in the earliest days of colonization, or of the native as a murderous brute, which was to replace the earlier view. (7)
What interests me here is the ironic shift in perception and positionality we can observe in Davie by reading him with this framework. When his colonizer sees him as a “murderous brute,” he becomes the colonizer. He copies the plantation model, intensifies his submission to the white man’s religion, and begins to see his own “subjects” as “noble savages” who can live off thrift and whom he can manipulate to his liking. As Lucille infers, “these poor people have never known better – there is food in plenty – security for they and their children – they will not ask for more” (Reid 238); Davie, playing Christian and King David, takes an allegorical, adamic approach to his Zion, and his people cannot tell they are being duped.
All things considered, it is necessary to facilitate a reading of Davie Campbell which highlights his flaws, because so much of John’s narrative discourse revolves around the idea of “Davie’s seed” and how his legacy shapes the nascent Jamaican nation. Therefore, while Reid’s narrator recognizes his brother’s shortcomings, he never indicts him; John is too biased. It is our reading which must explore how Davie’s overseer persona informs the shift from feudalistic serfdom to capitalist management that his son James leads, and the paternalistic manipulation of workers which his grandson Garth eventually resorts to for creating and influencing unions among his and other Jamaican companies. John insists on Davie’s goodness and his rebellious nature, but fails to acknowledge and fully critique his patriarchal, reactionary tendencies.
Reid’s mythical fabrication of the real Jamaican nation (when read with the depth its characters’ psychologies, intertextual allusions, and historical context require) is accurate because it is inherently and subtly nuanced. Its leading near-buckra family possesses and plays with power and ambition, both rejecting and replicating the colonizer’s ways. The narrator looks past a brother’s epic failures, and makes him an epic hero, because such are partiality and prejudice. And we can point out the birthing pains of a country, and the (at times, inherited) mistakes of its people and leaders, both historically and fictionally, as portrayed masterfully in V.S Reid’s New Day, because we can find Davie sympathetic, while also understanding his ill-advised pursuance of playing King David; and, more broadly, we can appreciate the national microcosm (as island-colony) of his Zion, while figuring how this Jamaican Eden devolved into Babylon. It is paramount to acknowledge that, both in history and literature, and despite postcolonial hopes, not all is well in the West Indian front.
Acknowledgement
I wrote this paper for Professor Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s class Crossings: Literature without Borders, on the topic of “Victorian Revenants in Contemporary Caribbean Literature: Cultures in Dialogue,” cross-listed for English and Africana Studies. This work, therefore, would not have been possible without a dedicated Caribbeanist in Vassar’s faculty.
Works Cited
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. 1678. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/pilgrim%20progres s.pdf. Accessed December 9, 2017.
Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, June 2017. www.oed.com. Accessed December 9, 2017.
Poynting, Jeremy. “New Day, Epic of Jamaica.” Introduction. New Day, by Victor Stafford Reid.Peepal Tree Press, 2016, pp. 7- 46.
Reid, Victor Stafford. New Day. 1949. Peepal Tree Press, 2016.
Semmel, Bernard. “The Issue of “Race” in the British Reaction to the Morant Bay Uprising of 1865.” Caribbean Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, Oct. 1962, pp. 3-15.
The Bible. Authorized King James Version, DaVince Tools, 2004. http://www.bookbindery.ca/KJBIBLE.pdf. Accessed
December 9, 2017.
Gerardo J. Lamadrid is an English major in the Class of 2020. They love creative writing – poetry, short fiction, and drama. They write mostly in English, but also in Spanish and Spanglish. Their most recent book is the poetry collection Yéndome (2018, San Juan, Publicaciones Gaviota). They also contribute to the “Buscapié” column in the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día.