Before I get too far into the summer, I want to write a couple of posts about students responding to works I taught this past semester. Today I report on how Matt Alexander and Tori Poffenberger used Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) to sort through two of the biggest issues that Americans face—issues that have recently been making headlines.
As the president fixes a date for America’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s worth looking at what Matt, a Marine who was deployed four times to the country, learned when he applied Melville’s novella to his experience there. And as we see renewed conversations about racism in our country (thanks in part to comments by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, Clippers owner Donald Sterling, and Senator Rockefeller and to a brilliant article about reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates), it’s illuminating to see how Tori uses Benito Cereno to make sense of the race sentiments she encountered in her small Maryland town.
To quickly summarize the story, which is based on a real life incident, the gullible Captain Delano comes aboard a slave ship experiencing distress but fails to realize that there has been a slave rebellion and that Captain Benito Cereno is being manipulated to hide it. All Delano can see is a seemingly faithful slave attending his master whereas Babo is actually the rebellion’s mastermind. Only after Cereno escapes the ship by leaping into Delano’s rowboat does the American captain understand what he has actually been witnessing.
As I’ve noted in the past, Delano’s gullibility stems in part out of wishful thinking. The idea that the slaves are not just faithful Newfoundland dogs (the phrase is his), overgrown children, or docile earth mothers—that they are capable of pulling off an astounding rebellion—is a reality that he doesn’t want to face up to. After all, if slaves have this kind of intelligence and plotting skills, then the antebellum south is not a bucolic land of mint juleps on the plantation porch but a tinderbox that could go up at any moment.
Matt had his own awakening in Afghanistan. For him, Benito Cereno reminded him of how little Americans understand other cultures:
Like Captain Delano’s confusion throughout the story, I was confused about the foreign lands I traveled to in the name of American freedom. Before deploying, the Marines are trained to look at the Afghani nationals in a way to say that we’re better than them because we’re there to help their failing country get where they need to be in the world. Like Delano, I found out that this was not the truth and that the Afghani nationals never wanted or needed Americans there in the first place. While talking to our interpreter about his home country, I found out that Afghanistan is much like Vietnam in many ways. They have been fighting wars for over thousands of years, and need zero encouragement from a super power like America. Their culture and society have been built thousands of years before I ever came into existence, so what was I to say about the ways those people lived? The Marine Corps taught me to look at them like brutes, savages, monsters, and even second-rate human beings, but that wasn’t the truth at all.
In Tori’s situation, the Other were not people of a different nationality but of a different race. She uses Benito Cereno to understand those Americans who blithely state that racism is a thing of the past while secretly–and sometimes not so secretly–expressing fears of young black men. Benito Cereno, in other words, is an articulation of the outwardly sunny disposition that hides mind-bending fear. Her analysis begins with a description of her hometown:
In the small town where I grew up, I had a lot of friends who just loved the idea of the town, B____. They loved the people, loved the atmosphere, and loved the attitude. As you walk down Main Street of the “Historic Town of B____,” you see cute little family owned shops that you think would be fun to take a peek at. There are people constantly waving to each other from across the street, friendly conversations coming from the direction of the local tap house, and a few tourists exploring the history of a town that is way off any traditional map. With a contented sigh and a smile you think that this is just a perfect little Mayberry, a safe haven. A lot of the parents and kids in the town agree. Why go anywhere else when you have a perfect little life here?
…But there’s one group that, while they walk down the street with smiles on their faces, as soon as they walk by they get talked about right behind their backs. There weren’t many African Americans in my school, but when a few started to attend B____ High School, the news spread like wildfire through the medium of racist jokes. Everyone knew about them, but for some reason, there was this clear divide in every aspect between “us” and “them.” The African American kids sat amongst themselves in the cafeteria, at one table, while the rest of the kids spread out and took over the rest of the cafeteria. After school, the African American students would hang out near the gym to wait for their bus, while everyone else stood on the steps outside. Now, why would the cute, little, ideal town of B____ act so strangely towards a group of people that are citizens just like us? Why is there this split between what everyone in the town shows on the outside and what they whisper under their breath?
Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno gives us insight on this split between what people pretend is going on and what is happening in reality… Melville shows us that American whites have a duality when it comes to addressing inequalities such as the one Melville focuses in on, which is between white people and slaves. If the ship upon which the story takes place, the San Dominick, is a metaphor for the self, then the conscious desires are reflected by Captain Amasa Delano, while the unconscious fears are seen in Benito Cereno’s character… Benito Cereno’s character [represents] the underlying fears that whites had towards slaves in the 1850’s. The people in B____ and the whites that had slaves in the 1800’s are constantly living in a mixture of obliviousness and fear, part Delano, part Cereno.
Tori goes on to see the same dynamic at play wherever there is oppression or inequality. As soon as one group rises above another, it becomes afraid of that group. Suddenly the black barber who is shaving you is a potential executioner, a Babo. Suddenly the black teenager in a hoodie walking in your neighborhood or the black teenager playing loud music is a thug.
Tori concludes her essay with a plea for economic equality:
This duality isn’t just true for the inequality between whites and blacks. Cereno and Delano are a part of every person on the better end of inequality: first world countries, men, whites, the rich, and the list goes on and on. To solve the problem in B___ and throughout the world, people need to open up their minds, their hearts, and their wallets to raise the unequal to equal status with the higher of the two. The rich must open up their wallets to the poor, men must open up their minds to women, and whites must open up their hearts to blacks…Instead of creating separate human cultures that inhibit certain people, humans need to create a culture that is universal. We need to take the St. Mary’s Way of accepting people of all sizes, shapes, colors, gender, and sexuality and make it global. We need to use it to make sure culture is not subject to change and is not unstable.
Benito Cereno reveals the nightmares that arise when we fail.
Previous posts on Benito Cereno
Melville and Climate Change Denial