Two years following the London and Edinburgh publications of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, in 1833, The Emancipation Bill was passed in the British House of Lords; in 1834, a law went into effect throughout the British Caribbean that helped establish apprenticeships for ‘free’ black; and in 1838 England abolished slavery in the Caribbean completely. All of these arbitrary dates point to the undisputable fact that Prince’s narrative was more than a popular bedside reading material. It provided the Anti-slavery and Abolitionist Movement of England with the needed instrument to re-instate the visibility of slavery as a demeaning human condition, thus challenging the legal system to act upon its final demise. Namely, the triangular relationship between Prince as the narrator’s oral counterpart, Thomas Pringle, her editor and publisher, and the whole English-reading audience, in London as well as in the West Indies, is weaved in so carefully all throughout the twenty-three page long account of Mary’s life as a slave, making it this all the more painstaking to put the hems aside and look for possible loose threads. And yet there are many such threads, most of which could be fully seen and understood if one looks beyond the confines of the text, especially if one takes a closer look at the testimonies of Mary’s trial and the documents in support of the proslavery propaganda of the times.

Henceforth, I am increasingly interested in the unseen and the unspoken elements in Prince’s text, mostly because I believe that these are the elements which constitute the life of Mary Prince as an enslaved woman, a chain of events that cannot be juxtaposed to or extracted from extensive comparisons to the life of Frederick Douglass as a male slave. Before I take a look at the published criticism, which in turn, exploits further the issue of Prince’s sexual relations to her owners (and to other free white makes), as well as those with her husband, I would like to recall an important reading from my childhood. In the course of my primary school education, our readings in Macedonian literature focused, almost to a fault, on the importance of having and maintaining a national literary heritage. We were thus exposed to the sounds of Macedonian folk songs, Macedonian fables, Macedonian dances, all (in a way) narratives (some written, others mostly oral) testifying to the existence of a Macedonian culture, long before the legal constitution of the Macedonian state. Remembering these seminal works of and by my people, both from the perspective of a time and space disjunction, I recall the emphasis that all of them placed on a woman’s chastity as her highest virtue. Historically, I fully understand the importance of one such human (not simply feminine) characteristic. Since women were the most vulnerable ‘segments’ of the Macedonian nation within the Ottoman Empire, every attempt on the behalf of ‘the weaker sex’ to hold on to her Christian values (and all that implied) was applauded and consequently turned into a narrative. Most of said narratives dealt with brave, victorious women, defeating their masters and securing their freedom, by the power of their moral values, their faith in God as their guide to eternal salvation in heaven. However, the seventh grade reading list cautiously excluded the presence of several powerful female slave narratives, some related by the women themselves (later written down by an educated male friend), and some written by the survivors themselves. What all of these few texts share in common is unstated in the other ‘appropriate’ reading materials on the subject. For one, all of the women survived their enslaved status, some embracing the Islamic faith, thus using their respective relationships to their ‘husbands’ to buy off their freedom, after a number of years. Most stayed on in urban areas since they were not welcomed back by their peasant parents and family. Most were financially independent, and if not at the inception of their lives, but certainly with time, became literate. All of these remarkable qualities, otherwise characteristic of the urban 19th century Balkan male, rendered these women invisible to their peers, making them thus equally inaccessible to present readers. Nonetheless, they are inevitably alive, in the archival documents of trial records, of claims and cases that testify of these women’s existence and their struggle for social credibility.

Why the unilateral cultural memory has decided to leave them conveniently out of the master text’s narrative could be seen as a case of memory screening. To borrow from Freud’s discourse, a ‘screen memory’ is one that substitutes for another memory that is too painful or disturbing to retrieve. So, we examine ‘forgetting’ as an active process of repression, we can see why that which is forgotten or erased from a female slave narrative, or deemed illegible and immoral by the editor/publisher, corresponds to the female slave’s challenge of her master’s right of ownership. I was fortunate to come across an article by Jenny Sharpe, titled ‘Something akin to freedom: the case of Mary Prince’ (A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Spring 1996, Vol. 8), that closely examines ‘through the historical example of Mary Prince, that slave women used their relationship with free men to challenge their masters’ right of ownership.’ Sharpe immediately points out that one such reading of the female slave narrative, moreover of the female slave’s existence and her final liberation, cannot be solely based on a thorough examination of Prince’s History. Therefore, Sharpe includes in her extensive study of the paradigm, the conventional slave testimonies, as a part of the proslavery propaganda documents, as well as court case transcripts. Sharpe is also instrumental in deconstructing the abolitionists’ grasp of the slave narrative as a genre, tracing the literary conventions that they inscribed on the narratives they sponsored, especially looking into their influence on Prince’s life story. (These include: the portrayal of Mary at the beginning of her enslaved life as one of God’s offspring before the Fall, picturing her initial masters as benevolent slaveholders (her mistress), so as to make a clear distinction between inherently cruel men and women, which they were not, and the institution of slavery as a corrupting force, which it definitely was; then, as Mary’s desent into slavery (as if she were not a slave before) emerges, there is the initial description of the brutal enforcement of power and strength, through the graphically represented beating of a female slave, which establishes, in turn, the voice-agency of Mary Prince in the eyes of the reader as a reliable one; since Prince is the embodiment of the victim to be saved rescued from her slumberous agony of an enslaved and heathen existence, there is also the inevitable religious conversion as a turning point in her life, leading her to her freedom, by appealing to both the free black community and the larger white public.)

Furthermore, Sharpe discloses Prince’s sexual relationships with free men as she denounces certain critics’ practice of equating the sexual misconduct practices with her enslaved position. Consequently, Sharpe does not look at Prince and the other female slaves of the narrative as objects of pity; she’d rather use an expression that comes from another female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The expression is ‘something akin to freedom’. Sharpe uses it to ‘denote the absence of a proper name for the contradictory status of limited choice under slavery.’ Therefore, through her Freudian model of examining silences as meaning-productive, Sharpe involves a re-reading of Prince’s narrative: ‘instead of being centered on an autobiographical text like the slave narrative, a black female subjectivity cuts across seemingly incompatible documents in which Prince appears, not as a narrative ‘I’, but as ‘the woman Molly’ and ‘she (witness)’. In this respect, I understand Sharpe’s analysis as one inclusive of the contemporary autobiographical reading of the slave narrative, on the helps expand the notion of how we read ‘personal(ized) texts’, how we approach them, what we bring with us as we pass judgments, and what we see in their actors/orators/narrators to be valuable for determining their (and our own) cultural value. And I support it.

In the Preface to American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus, Jules David Prown, states that even through ‘every work of art is [perceived to be] an artifact… all artifacts are not necessarily art.’ (2000) After a careful dissection of the collection’s essays on various objects and their relationship to American culture (with a capital ‘C’), I couldn’t agree more. What Professor Prown and a handful of his current and former students have rendered a ‘usable past’, would not necessarily be classified under the category of ‘artistic’, or even ‘artFUL’. However, by choosing to examine a number of human-made (or human-modified) things, the graduate school historians have successfully investigated a ‘suggestive rather than complete’ symbiosis between American culture, from its beginnings through the present day, and the objects’ expressiveness of that same culture. Whether the product of this relationship is to be rendered in art-specific terms is up to the analyst’s test and certainly his or her respective knowledge of art.

Out of the thirteen essays collected, I found the one titled ‘Lubrications on a Lava Lamp: Technology, Counterculture, and Containment in the American Sixties’ most accessible. Since I am a child of late sixties and early seventies transatlantic hippies, proud owners of an original Lava Lite® lamp, I was more than excited about the prospects of looking closely into this ‘retro’ gadget’s historical impact. My general impressions of both the essay’s content and its author, Jennifer L. Roberts, coincide with my understanding of the so-called Prownian analysis, a methodological approach forged over time by Professor Prown as best befitting his graduate seminar on material culture. I must admit that I was quite taken by the overall layout of the collection, both structurally and thematically, as well as with the possibility of having one’s work published (in such a format) while still a grad student with long years of scholarly toil ahead. Despite the instrumental introduction to the book’s essays, provided by the second editor, Kenneth Haltman, it seems to me that ‘the theoretical underpinnings’ of the Prownian analysis, disregarding their usefulness in research tactics, have laid too burdensome of a weight on Ms Roberts’ disclosure of the Lava Lamp’s repose in our midst.

What begins as an insightful journey into the world of a sixties’ psychedelic beacon, gets somehow sidetracked into the realm of elusive speculation, layer after layer of evocative language and yet difficult to follow. Putting the schematics for the Prownian analysis aside, Ms Roberts; essay on the possible connections existing between the 1960s American mainstream culture and counterculture, on the one hand, and the lamp’s design as well as its contained meaning, on the other, divides itself in two distinct parts. In the first part of the essay, which if we were to apply the Prownian analysis would account for the description, deduction and related speculation regarding the Lava Lamp’s material being, is a simple, yet instructive way of examining the lamp’s history. I commend Ms Roberts on her mastery in transforming the lamp’s material existence into a verbatim account of it. A truly remarkable spin on the descriptive nature of the English lexicon. But all of the presented discourse’s clarity seems to end after Roberts enquires about the lamp’s position (that is, location) on the continuum between technology and counterculture. As important as this semi-rhetorical question poses to be for Ms Roberts’s interpretative analysis, she takes more than her time to come to a possible answer for it.

I am aware of Professor Prown’s cautionary words in the Preface to the volume, conceding the exploratory nature of the essays; moreover, their polished incompleteness. It is not the incompleteness of the piece that baffles me still but rather the incoherency of thought on behalf of the author that brings us to that incompleteness. Building up support for her claim that ‘although itself a piece of technology, it [the Lava Lamp] does seem to enjoy a certain autonomy from the technological form,’ Ms Roberts takes her readers on an incongruously shifting quest for the lamp’s organic and mechanical meanings. (174, brackets added) Even though most of the parts of her speculative explanation are otherwise well-written passages of researched material (her invocation of the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan and the linguist Julia Krsteva certainly point to a well-read scholarly mind), they do not amount to a fluidly coherent second part. As the lamp undulates between meanings, so does the writer undulate between too many derivations of an original idea for the Lava Lamp’s cultural interpretation. In other words, the constraints of the Prownian analysis contain the lamp’s ‘double miracle’; that is, instead of bringing it back to life, again, for us the readers, these same constraints prevent us from reading through the writer’s path in the maize of her interpretative analysis.

All things considered, the essay by Ms Roberts is a bold attempt at crossing and forcefully merging (from time to time) the lamp’s sixties appeal with that of today, through the entrapments of technology and the dominant culture’s domestication of the amorphous force of the lamp, rendering it both a containment and a sublimation of the threatening power of the sixties’ counterculture the lamp came to represent.

My mother has the most delectable face. When I was a kid, not more than five, I used to try and lick it; as if her face, her nose, mouth, eyes, ears, dimples were the tastiest treat around: an ice-cream sundae, banana flavored. It used to drive my sister insane, the licking that my mother encouraged. I’ve always been my mother’s favorite and it has driven my sister to bits. She has taken jealously on a whole new level – beyond the playfulness of a sibling rivalry and into the dawn of the grown up grudge. She doesn’t speak to me unless there is a third party present, in the room, on the phone, outdoors. She hasn’t said a word, directly, for the past decade. And I do nothing to encourage her. I play the game; have gotten quite good at it, you might even call me the master of indirect elocution.

Anyhow, we get along, as much as any one in our family gets along. She lends me money when I cannot make rent, I remember her boyfriend’s name and try and keep up a conversation with her, oops him, from time to time. My mother begs to differ – she has this idea that my sister, Lily, is the one who is being ‘abused’ in the relationship. Only women can come up with such nonsense!

The dude used to be ok, could pass for a dude, but my god, ever since they moved in together he’s been working out, even joined a neighborhood fitness program. Got into crystals, shaved his head, to be close to the natural self. Might even wake up Buddhist one day. If you ask me I think that he is afraid she’ll come to her senses one morning and leave him unattended – oh, I ought to tell you that he’s twice her age. And twice divorced. No kids tough. Smart move, who needs more of him in this cracked up world as it is? Just last week, as I was about to visit them (my mom send me over with a cheesecake), I ran into him in the driveway, and he started giving me advice about women, out of the blue – how I should treat them, the gentle flowers that they were, and that safe sex is the safest road to travel. Man, if I wanted a fatherly advice I’d ask my dad. Go to the cemetery and have one of our quiet chats. No stings attached.

Ok, so he tries, wants to be a surrogate father or something. Which makes me wonder more about his story, about his choice not to bring more kids into this world. I bet he is infertile, and now looks at ways around it, less painful. I know for sure it’s not my sister’s fault. She did give birth to me when she was sixteen, and my parents, that is grandparents, convinced her to give birth and then, well, assign them the right to raise me as one of their own. But that’s, well, the past, and have long made my peace with it.

As I was saying, my sis and I communicate via helpers. Except that last time I almost had her. She was about to break her streak. It was after one of her visits to my mom; our ‘mother’ has always had high expectations of Lily, on account that she was, is, a genius, Mensa and all, yet somehow everything Lily does runs Mom through the roof – her choice of friends, school, job, men. You can’t blame the woman – she missed out on a great part of Lily’s childhood and is trying, helplessly, to catch up.

So I hear this loud knock on the door, and there I am just about to crack one more panel (I squiggle for a low-key, out-of-the-mainstream, comics book publication called Scruf; kind of a big deal; it’s the only way I can turn my hobby into the work I am supposed to be aspiring to do as an adult), the obnoxious ramming continued to pine away at my skull. My cigarette was all about to drop on the Bristol paper I use to create my stuff, and make a big indent into the second third of a really large new thing I was working on for the past month. I yelled, ‘Hold your horses’, banged my left foot on the decrepit fireplace in the hall (an old Victorian-style dump I live in comes with the weirdest of perks), cursed to heavens and back, and opened the door, to face the ultimate trip: Lily. Just Lily, no buffer in the shape of Randy, the middle-age Deepak Choppra of our berth.

I was lost for words, for real. No stunts. I wanted to ask, whisper, scream, hey you, here, alone, what’s wrong? But I sensed that she just wanted to come in. So I motioned her in, the same way relatives usher in their deaf cousins, allowing them to partake on the ‘sacred space’ that a household pretends to hold, while at the same time, glancing towards the side, just to make sure that none of the neighbors are close by, to witness the ‘scene’. My genial ‘older sister’, the dumb-stricken invalid of the moment.

She walked in, a bit humbled, not at all her usual confidant self. She wasn’t certain where to sit or stand, or lean against (I live in a pigsty. Literally.) She just stood there, in the hallway, next to the antic fireplace, clutching her hands. I was afraid to look. She seemed so old, so out of place, so unsettling. Yet I knew if it had anything to do with family, with Mom, she would have had someone call me. She’d never have come herself, not like this.

I made the first move. I tried to at least. I was about to open my mouth when she spoke, to me, directly, after a ten-year long silence. Well, a case of silence.

She looked at me and said – Bret (I have a somewhat stinky breath; she came up with the moniker and it stuck, although my aunt Ayelet told me once unintentionally that Brett was the name of the boy who got Lily ‘in the family way’, the only boy she ever let herself love), I’ve been meaning to tell you something.

I waited. Looking at her, still amazed at the great strength talking took out of her, I wanted to interject, but she beat me to it.

I want you to know that I, well I, have missed you. All these years, I’ve missed you.

I cried like a baby out of a stroller. Tears kept pounding on my chubby checks, and this time it was someone else who did the licking.