Lennon, Brian. "Their own middle passage." Review of The Pagoda by Patricia Powell. The Boston Book Review 5.9 (November 1998): 39.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

How do you start over when you have lost everything, and how do you resist the desire for revenge, which only perpetuates loss? These are the questions posed by Patricia Powell's third novel, an history from below examining the life of an ethnic Chinese shopkeeper in late nineteenth-century Jamaica, whose people "had been meeting hell, at the hands of the Negro people and the few Europeans that controlled the country, ever since they arrived."

By turns baroque and reticent, The Pagoda is in some ways more ambitious than A Small Gathering of Bones (1994), Powell's brief and poignant tale of the arrival of AIDS in Jamaica, and it replaces the former's assertively dialogic representations of patois with a neutrally voiced third-person narrator more overtly supposing historic objectivity. Lowe, its gradually more ambiguously gendered protagonist, begins the novel by sitting down to write a long-dreaded adumbrating letter to his daughter: "I am not your father like you think." We learn that Lowe arrived in Jamaica in a ship full of "stolen" Chinese, kidnapped and sold to sugar plantation owners in the human trade that replaced African slavery after emancipation ruined the estates. We learn that he has had a long-standing and difficult marriage to a "Miss Sylvie," that he habitually wears an adhesive mustache, an [text missing]

Powell has a knack for wrenching arresting details from broad-brushed scenes: "She broke down in laughter, showing the brown roots of her molars." And she is adept at bounding a character's perspective with routes leading into and out of that perspective, which wisely limits the laws of identification. The Pagoda's ethical dilemmas are thus deeply perspectivist, and not at all relativist. Here, Powell animates the mind of a social type, so to speak, defined by survival of the epistemo-ontologically subordinated form of slavery that was coolie labor:

Plus was their Chinese history any different? ... was it any different from that of the Negroes, who had arrived there in a similar fashion, kidnapped and sold and bundled off and beaten up and dead in hordes on ships. Was it any different from that of the Indians coming now, standing on those very same auction blocks, trying their best to blot out the memories of their own middle passage?

Arguably, from a Euro-American "enlightened" modernity defined by historic trauma as a form of self-constituting negative grandeur, in African slavery and the Jewish Holocaust, this returns us to the global field offering rival modern atrocities from Armenia to Nanking to Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia---directed by rival modernities equal in ambition, if not perhaps always in accomplishment, to the scale of European iniquity. All too often, such apparent relativism provokes, from victims no less than less than fully reconstucted perpetrators, a stoical denunciation tout court of the "cults" of victimhood. But it is only weakness to lament the vast scale and diversity of human suffering at humanity's own hands? Certainly, as The Pagoda teaches us, it is difficult to fix blame, finally and easily, on one conveniently single social agent of systematic sociopathic violence:

It was as if the bitterness they carried could only be directed at the crimps, those Chinese who had sold them per head like rats to barracoon agents, owners of receiving vessels. It was as if that betrayal was greater than any humiliation they had suffered while chained up in those barracoons and beaten daily until their wills were broken, greater than the punishments doled out by the captains of foreign ships during the crossing, where many of the ships fell apart in the ocean---only one third of them ever survived the passage---their bones scattered, sunken in beds in the middle of the Atlantic. They never talked about the man markets that greeted them on the island once they arrived, how they were made to stand naked so the throng of planters could prod their open jaws and hanging testicles before buying them, how planters chopped off their glossy imperial queues and emblazoned, in bold red letters on their skins, the initials of plantations. It seemed as if nothing could be as bad as that, as bad as bei[text missing]

The central conceit of The Pagoda is embodied in Lowe's dream of a school for Jamaican Chinese, as an institutional emblem of something like reconciliation. It is to the hypothetical existence of such fictional lives and their "solutions" that we extend our sympathies, in consuming literature in and as something more (or less) than consumed by reification; "real" lives are, sadly, long since alienated, by death itself, from any possible world of a novel. Which is not to say we shouldn't go on trying to imagine them; on the contrary, it seems our responsibility to do so. The Pagoda is an absolutely exemplary effort.

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