Erin Mackie
In the novel Voyage in the Dark, Jean Rhys’ West Indian protagonist Anna Morgan reflects on the hallucinogenic distance between her Dominican home and the England to which she has been transplanted: “Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together” (8, my emphasis). This lack of fit registers the failure of syncretism between England and the Caribbean in an enjambed structure of competing realities. The disorienting shifts between the reality and unreality of England and the West Indies , between the thing itself and the dream fantasy of something, is registered as a condition of colonial consciousness that also affects the characters in Rhys’ later novel Wide Sargasso Sea. There these competing realities repeat in debate between Antoinette and her husband: “‘Is it true,’” Antoinette asks, “‘that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so”; he answers, “‘that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream’” (80). The difference between England and the West Indies , between the English and the Creole, frequently figures as an epistemological and metaphysical rupture across which each side is unrecognizable by and unreal to the other. In colonial consciousness this perplexing difference may be redoubled, as is the case with Anna Morgan and Antoinette Cosway, as the subject regards herself alternately in the frames of England and the West Indies; thus the Creole experiences a self-alienation that leaves her always only partially, potentially real. For the white Creole, as we see so emphatically in Wide Sargasso Sea, the frame that might identify the “West Indian” is itself fractured along black/colored/white, slave/servant/master, African Creole and Anglo-Creole lines.
Looking at its representation in three texts—the anonymous 1720 The Jamaica Lady, or, The Life of Bavia, Herbert de Lisser’s 1929 The White Witch of Rosehall, and Jean Rhys’ 1965 Wide Sargasso Sea—in this essay I examine how the perilous distance, this “wide Sargasso Sea,” between England and her West Indian colonies appears in the gap between the words “Jamaican” and “lady” that makes an oxymoron out of the term “Jamaican lady” and a bitter irony of the epithet “White Witch” in de Lisser’s title. That this gap, from the early eighteenth well into the twentieth century, so frequently provides a space for the contemplation of the colonial condition speaks to the way that fears about colonial degeneracy and the production of fraudulent value typically merge with misogynist fears of feminine capriciousness and sexual/reproductive illegitimacy. [1] Specifically, my interest here is how this gap between “Jamaican” and “lady,” this rupture across which England and the West Indies confront and often annihilate one another, comes to be filled with occult content–witchcraft, obeah, voodoo–in attempts to control, traverse, and exorcise the highly charged differences that create it. In Rhys’ mid-twentieth-century rewriting of Bronte’s Bertha Mason as Antoinette, in de Lisser’s early twentieth-century sensationalist depiction of the infamous Annie Palmer, the (ethnically) white witch of Rosehall killed in the 1831 pre-emancipation uprisings, and in the early eighteenth-century burlesque anti-colonial narrative The Jamaica Lady, or, The Life of Bavia, the white West Indian woman’s distance from the socially legitimating status of “lady” is filled and confirmed by her proximity to the occult. [2] Charges of witchcraft, whether of the European or African Caribbean variety, are brought against these women in efforts to explain and counteract their charms.
While all three women, Antoinette, Annie Palmer, and Bavia, are subject to specifically colonial and male policing in efforts both to expose and nullify their allegedly magical powers, the relationship of each character to these powers varies in ways that reveal historical differences in the relations among England and the West Indies, the African Caribbean and the Anglo-Caribbean. For, and this is registered most strongly in Wide Sargasso Sea, the divisive relationship between England and the West Indies is triangulated through Africa. What makes the (white) Jamaican alien to the English almost always is represented in some relation to African Caribbean ethnicity and culture. So the British Bavia is described with African features; Annie Palmer the white witch of Rosehall practices voodoo and obeah; Antoinette Cosway also uses obeah, hers provided by the black Christophine. Historically, as African culture is more and more heavily creolized in the West Indies the nature of this relation becomes increasingly explicit and direct. [3] Indeed, Antoinette’s failure to place herself involves her estrangement from both English and African Caribbean culture. As Christophine says to Rochester , “She [Antoinette] is not beke like you, but she is beke, and not like us either” (155). Yet in all three narratives, Wide Sargasso Sea, The White Witch of Rosehall, and The Jamaica Lady, the violent ruptures of colonialism—between England and the West Indies, between master and slave, between the African Creole and the “beke”—are so darkly fraught with oppression and mystification that they conjure forth specifically tropical and feminine charms of “black” magic which both compete with and provide alibis for white colonial domination. Figuring difference through occult practice, these texts show how, as Abdul R. JanMohamed observes, colonial discourse transforms “racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference” (80). Such transformations work both ways, racial difference as obeah and voodoo becomes metaphysical and moral; equally, the metaphysically and morally “black” practices of voodoo and obeah are fixed as racial difference. So in Wide Sargasso Sea, Christophine warns Antoinette that obeah does not work for beke, for white people (112). It is immutably a black thing. In The White Witch of Rosehall, Annie Palmer’s bookkeepers speculate on her origins and the provenance of her occult practices, both of which they trace to Haiti : “’I hear’” says Burbridge, “’there is a lot of mixture of blood in Haiti ; and she may have some. That might account for her witcheries’” (127).
Cultural ethnographers and historians have recognized the ways in which African Creole practices such as voodoo and obeah respond, often though not always in preservative and redemptive ways, to the pressures of colonial and neo-colonial oppression. [4] In the texts under discussion here, we can see the ways in which these practices are enlisted on behalf of English, white, and, in de Lisser’s case anti-nationalist, interests; although Wide Sargasso Sea differs from the two earlier texts in its critical, postcolonial, representation of how these interests operate and oppress. The Jamaica Lady, fuelled by anti-colonialist panic and misogynist commonplace, embodies its fears in Bavia, the monstrous female conjuress, and in Holmesia, the quadroon Creole, both of whom are safely ejected from England by the end of the narrative. De Lisser’s Annie Palmer, her whiteness compromised by her mastery of voodoo, also functions as a scapegoat, in this case for all the excesses, crimes, and sins of pre-emancipation white domination. While Annie Palmer’s involvement in voodoo seems to make her more “black” and savage, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette uses (ethnically) “black” magic in a misguided attempt to become more white, more English. Putting a postcolonial twist on colonialist discourse of obeah/voodoo, Rhys’ narrative draws a parallel between African-Caribbean obeah and forms of occult transformation and possession practiced by the white English husband. This juxtaposition both comments critically on colonial domination and affirms the operation of both (ethnically) “black” and (ethnically) “white” magic. So Antoinette rebukes her husband when he tries to rename her, “’Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too’” (157). In relation to the history of witchcraft belief and persecution these texts show how just as such belief was being relegated to the realms of folklore and children’s tales in Britain both belief and legal persecution were renewed in the West Indies where they focussed on African Caribbean practices. [5] Despite their historical and ideological differences, all three texts vividly lay out the failures of England ’s West Indian colonial enterprise and in all three these failures are articulated, in part, through female black magic, which in West Indian colonial discourse becomes inseparable from black female magic.
Insofar as the early modern Protestant imagination was “as apt to see witchcraft in misfortune, as Providence in good tidings,” the 1720 Jamaica Lady can be read as an antithesis to Robinson Crusoe where Providence authorizes a vision of colonial success as peculiar as the spectacle of colonial failure told through the adventures of the diabolical and monstrous Bavia (Bostridge 110). Defoe’s text uses the Caribbean as a site for its romantic dreams of a reconciliation of capitalism, Christianity, and colonization; The Jamaican Lady brings the Caribbean home as a nightmare vision of the effective evacuation of all categories of value, secular and spiritual. Where Defoe’s text performs, or seeks to perform, the all-but-impossible suture of economic and moral value, of God’s plots and man’s experience, of autonomous individual and social subject, of subjection and free will, within the final term of a miraculous Providence that authorizes the profit that accrues to Crusoe from the colonies, The Jamaican Lady sceptically and satirically refuses such mediation and insists, ultimately through the charge of Bavia’s witchcraft, that the production of value in the West Indies is at once diabolical and fraudulent, an empty, accursed promise.
All too ready, via transportation and indenture, to throw her social “garbage” into West Indian backwaters, England, in the eighteenth, as in the twentieth century, was less sure of what to do when her colonial chickens came home to roost, as they are doing in The Jamaican Lady. In his similarly anti-colonial tract, Trip to Jamaica (1700) Edward Ward describes Jamaican women: they “are such who have been Scandalous in England to the utmost degree, either Transported by the State, or led by their Vicious Inclinations; where they may be Wicked without Shame, and Whore on without Punishment.” (16). Exacting their satiric “punishment” with virulent attacks on these Jamaican women, both A Trip to Jamaica and The Jamaica Lady are narrations of a trans-Atlantic passage and so echo the pattern of the Middle Passage trope so prevalent in African-diasporic postcolonial representations of relations between the old and new worlds. [6] But whereas the African-diasporic Middle Passage articulates a process of historical and spiritual redemption, in these early English (anti-)colonial texts the trans-Atlantic crossing and recrossing becomes a trajectory only of loss, deterioration, and contamination. They articulate the passage in a desperate attempt to maintain the distance and police the boundaries between the old and new worlds, not, as in the African diasporic trope in order to bring these worlds together in a revised trajectory where each becomes the dialogic fulfilment of the other. Ward’s Trip to Jamaica recounts a descent into a feverish hell colonized by rogues and whores; the trip out of Jamaica in The Jamaican Lady follows the progress of this demonic populace from that hell back into England . The Jamaican Lady, then, is an early specimen of anti-immigration propaganda. Probably written by William Pittis, a friend of Ward’s, and certainly revealing a reactionary anti-colonialist perspective close to Ward’s own, The Jamaican Lady, like A Trip to Jamaica, stands as a satiric counter to visions of the West Indies as Edenic sites of limitless resources and profit, of pure potential for the realization of commercial imperialism’s highest hopes.
Centering its repudiation of the West Indian project on the adventures of the conjuress and con-artist Bavia, The Jamaican Lady follows the gendered commonplaces of eighteenth-century discourses of value, especially those concerned with the reproduction of value, which frequently take form in fantastic female figures with uncanny, capricious, and sometimes demonic powers. So Defoe’s and Addison’s marvellously mercurial Lady Credit and so Swift’s lady investors swept along in the deluge of the South Sea project: “Undone at Play, the Femal Troops/Come here their Losses to retrieve/Ride o’er the Waves in spacious Hoops/Like Lapland Witches in a Sieve” (89-92). In a figure that combines the stereotypical desperate West Indian adventurer with the witch, Swift creates an emblem of falsely inflated value (the hoops as bubbles on the South Seas) that indicts these investors as both victims and perpetrators of fraud. Again and again, from the late seventeenth well into the twentieth century, the figure of the bewitching and beguiling female stands at the center of critiques of the very potential of the West Indies to produce any reliable value, financial or sociocultural. Such female figures become emblems and scapegoats of England’s failure to retrieve her losses in the West Indies and so of the futility and peril of the efforts to forge circuits of exchange between England and the Caribbean .
The perils of traversing this distance between England and Jamaica is thematically rendered in The Jamaica Lady, which chronicles the sexual and social disruptions that take place on a ship travelling from Jamaica back to England with the recall of the navy immediately following the negotiation of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. While the narrative takes place, then, at a time when English commitment to and complicity with slave trade and plantation economies was intensifying, it was published somewhat later, in 1720, at the height of speculation in the South Sea scheme. [7] So, as Melissa Downes points out, this novel registers its apprehensions about the circuits of exchange between England and her colonies specifically in the context of the South Sea Company boom (32). As an anti-colonial text, The Jamaica Lady, catalogues fears centering on fraud and colonial corruption that are activated both by the post-1714 intensification of British activity in the South Seas and, in 1720, by the spectacular soar of investment in the South Sea company. Both sets of fears involve problems of return, returns from investment in the South Seas Company and the return from the South Seas of a populace contaminated by residence there. This contamination, typically, is figured as sexual and female. As Pharmaceuticus, the ship’s surgeon, remarks of his wife’s compromised virtue: “It’s true, he had caught her tripping at Jamaica, but . . . [that place] so changes the constitution of its inhabitants that if a woman land there chaste as a vestal, she becomes in forty-eight hours a perfect Messalina” (110).
Presenting the Jamaican lady as monstrous misfit, both The Jamaica Lady and Ward’s Trip to Jamaica attempt to foreclose any attempt to “fit together” England and the West Indies . The colonial woman is pilloried on the charges of meretriciousness, demonic depravity, and monstrosity that England needs to purge from an accounting of its colonial enterprise. With all the conventionality of colonial discourse, The Jamaica Lady reads as a kind of transcript of the bad dream of England’s guilty and paranoid colonial conscience. These fears take shape in the deep divide that separates what is Jamaican from what is a “lady,” a discrepancy which here, as in the other texts, is figured in terms of witchcraft and conjuration, and which marks not only Bavia, but also the Creole quadroon concubine, Holmesia, Bavia’s shipmate. The articulation of these fears as witchcraft provides a defense against them since the charge of witchcraft provides a legitimate provocation for persecution either against witchcraft per se, or against malicious fraud. For at this time in England witchcraft, as historian Ian Bostridge puts it, was an “amphibian denizen of the secular and sacred jurisdiction” (101). After the repeal in 1736 of all witchcraft statutes, witchcraft in England was still actionable as a species of fraud (Bostridge 3; Sanders 190). Reflecting the ambiguity of belief that this repeal legally resolves sixteen years after the publication of The Jamaica Lady, Bavia’s conjuring is variously condemned as a confidence game and as actual witchcraft. But, as I discuss below, the narrative offers something of its own resolution by locating Bavia as con artist in England and Bavia as conjuress in Jamaica and so expelling from English shores both the more potent danger of witchcraft and the backwardness of superstition.
In ways that define both terms in fixed opposition, the text splits “Jamaican” from “lady” in the two deeply conflicting accounts given of Bavia’s background: one narrative styles her as the English lady, the virtuous heroine of a tragic romance, the other as the fallen Scots-English woman gone Jamaican, a vicious con-artist and conjuress. Before Bavia actually appears on board the ship, a man she sends to secure her passage relates the first, favorable and fantastic, account of her life and character. This tale is pure romance and she a charming young noblewoman, beautiful, wealthy, and perfidiously betrayed by a false husband. Sold into (white) slavery to a Turkish harem, she is rescued from this fate by a bribe, her virtue, and the kindness of strangers. Told at length with much flourish of heroic and pathetic detail, the tale is met only with skepticism by the captain who, suspecting fraud, “really imagined she had been no better than a domestic servant . . . and was inquisitive to know how he should be paid for her passage” (101). Still, for all his skepticism , Captain Fustian is ill prepared for the appearance Bavia makes immediately after her story has been told. The romantic sketch of the damsel in distress that precedes Bavia jars dramatically with the picture of the crippled “piece of deformity” that limps onto the deck, “one of her legs . . . much shorter than the other.” She astounds the captain with her “dead wainscot complexion,” “large pobble walleyes, bottle-nose, very wide mouth with great blubber-lips,” and her broad yellow teeth (102). The gap between the idealized lady of romance and the female “piece of deformity” from Jamaica could hardly be established more dramatically. Translating Bavia’s frightful appearance into a frightening talisman, Captain Fustian thinks Bavia “the picture of ill luck” and, although not a religious man, he confirms her malevolent power by “blessing himself” against its force. Although actually an English woman born to a Scottish father and an English mother, Bavia’s vicious nature is written on her body with signs that render her ethnically suspect in distinctly West Indian terms: her “dead wainscot” complexion recalls the stereotypes of febrile and meager white Creoles, while her “great blubber-lips” suggest an African type. [8] And like the Africans enslaved in Jamaica , Bavia is characterized as a sub-human primate; her name, Low German “bavian,” means baboon or ape. The features that announce Bavia’s diabolic nature are composed into a “picture of ill luck” drawn specifically from West Indian types and redolent, in their juxtaposition, of its monstrous hybridity.
After a series of intrigues that articulate Bavia’s malevolence and deformity in social and moral terms, the second “true” biography is given, one that establishes the opposition between “ Jamaica ” and “lady” around the charge that Bavia is a witch, a conjuress. Giving the lie to the earlier romantic biography of Bavia as the unfortunate Jamaica lady, this narrative styles her as a sexually insatiable con artist, procuress, and sorceress (122-135). Told by a second mate, it follows on the heels of the determination by the ship’s surgeon that Bavia is a witch and its relation then is given as evidence to confirm the captain, and the reader, in the surgeon’s opinion.
Going down to his cabin after a habitual dram of rum, Captain Fustian “cast a malicious look towards Bavia” who “sat fronting the gangway” (121, 120). Thus distracted he misses his footing and tumbles down the ladder (121). The ship’s surgeon is summoned and he tells the captain that “it was looking on that ill-favoured carrion was the cause” of his accident and that “he [the surgeon] really believed she was a witch,” so suggesting that Bavia had caused the captain’s fall by hexing him (121). Yet it is Captain Fustian who gives Bavia the evil eye – “it was his looking on [her] that was the cause [of his injury].” The surgeon’s reading, then, projects the captain’s malice onto Bavia and, charging it with supernatural forces, redirects it from her as maleficium. In support of his charge, the surgeon summons the second mate who delivers up the rogue’s tale that is the (second) story of Bavia’s life. After hearing this, Captain Fustian “really believed . . .that she was a sorceress” (135).
From here on, the antagonism between the captain and Bavia is organized as a witch-hunt. Understanding Bavia’s sorcery in the age-old terms of maritime folklore where witches are feared as conjurers of storms, the captain has her confined since “he had heard that when witches were imprisoned, they lost their diabolical power” (137). [9] But then when a storm blows up immediately afterward, the captain becomes convinced that Bavia, balking at her confinement, summoned the storm and so he releases her. The storm blows over and the ship arrives safely. In England Bavia gets up to her old tricks again and is transported to Ireland , and so Bavia as England’s worst nightmare completes her phantasmagoric colonial course. [10]
Bavia is not, strictly speaking, Jamaican, but once she has been in Jamaica that character is fixed in oxymoronic negation of her status as an English lady. Yet as an embodiment of the stereotypical unruly, depraved female adventuress who goes to Jamaica where she might dodge creditors and the law and pursue her nefarious career with little impediment, Bavia quite amply qualifies for the ironic title “Jamaica Lady.” Further, as we have seen in the physician’s apology for his own wife caught “tripping,” the moral miasma of Jamaican anti-society takes no more than forty-eight hours to infect and transform its inhabitants. Certainly Bavia, who arrives at Jamaica utterly fallen, is soon acclimatized.
Most importantly, her criminal depravity flourishes most vividly in Jamaica where it is represented as witchcraft and conjuration, unlike in England where it is simply fraud. It is not only that Bavia is by innate ill-nature and criminal history “Jamaican” and so not a “lady,” but also that in Jamaica this failure of feminine virtue is infused with the tropical charms of black magic. The discourse of witchcraft in this text is liminal, positioned at a juncture between witchcraft understood in European terms and, as it is coming to be understood in West Indian colonial discourse, in African Caribbean terms as obeah and voodoo. Bavia’s career in Jamaica hints at an overlap between these two, somewhat entangled, discourses of witchcraft: what she does in Jamaica can be understood, as it is expressed in the text, as the work of a European conjuress; yet it resonates with and at points mirrors the activities of the African-Caribbean obeah woman. That is, the more typically European focus on the witch’s performance of the devil’s Sabbath is completely absent in accounts of Bavia’s career; rather her supernatural powers, like those African Caribbean practictioners of obeah such as Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea, are used to predict and influence personal, often romantic, matters. [11] While in England Bavia makes a career out of defrauding couples through sham matchmaking deals, in Jamaica she works through “geomancy” and, in typical West Indian fashion builds up a profitable business for her “charms and incantations” (129, 132-33). Although geomancy is a thoroughly Western European practice of divination through scattering pebbles or stones, it has an analogue in the Yoruba divination scheme known as Ifa which uses palm nuts or cowrie shells. Likewise there are both European and African forms of “charms and incantations.” Finally, however, what is most West Indian about Bavia’s conjuring is that it occurs only in Jamaica .
Bavia shares the title “Jamaican Lady” with another character, Holmesia, who as a quadroon born and raised in Jamaica might seem to have even stronger claim on it. Not only is she actually a Creole, but, as a whore and adventuress, Holmesia is just as little a lady as Bavia. In a pattern that chiastically mirrors that of Bavia’s career, charges against Holmesia as conjuress do not emerge until she leaves Jamaica and lands on English soil. Along with her slave Quomina, Holmesia tries to find her way from Deal to London , and so asks a peddler for the road. She addresses him in patois: “‘You Baccaraman, which is dey way to grandee town?’‘ (142). Not understanding her nor even recognizing her appearance or speech as West Indian, the peddler assumes she is a gypsy fortune teller. Significantly, the English peddler not only fails to recognize Holmesia’s ethnicity, but also at the same time fails to recognize his own as a “Baccaraman” or white man (beke). For indeed in England “whiteness” is an exotic ethnic category imported from the West Indies ; appropriately, it is announced in a foreign “Negroish” tongue. Here the distance between Jamaica and England is registered at once in ethnic and linguistic terms and the epistemological gap of this distance is filled by the peddler with suspicions of necromancy and fraud.
This scene witnesses the, often class-based, variations in witchcraft belief available in the early eighteenth century. While the peddler at first ignores the quadroon Holmesia, thinking her a mere gypsy, he becomes genuinely frightened with the appearance of the very black African Quomina (142). Her attendance by Quomina confirms the peddler’s estimation of Holmesia’s black arts: “he thought certainly the gypsy [Holmesia] had sent the Devil [Quomina] for him” (142). [12] He cries out for help and is answered by “two countrymen” passing by. These men do not seem to be under any apprehension about actual witchcraft, but take Holmesia and Quomina off to be tried for vagrancy and fraud: “We know you are a pack of counterfeits and stroll about only to cheat the country under pretence of telling fortunes” (143). The quadroon Creole and her maid are opportunely rescued by Holmesia’s lover Galenicus who happens by and clears up the whole misunderstanding with a rational explanation and a full payment of her ransom (143). In this brief incident, Holmesia, as is the case with Bavia in the larger narrative, is understood alternately as a fraud and a witch, depending on the beliefs held by the accuser, and, apparently, depending on the site of the activity. The situation patently registers the misapprehension of the peddler in a kind of reverse encounter scenario. So, in a way that, again, reverses the pattern of association between Bavia , Jamaica , and witchcraft, what is most un-English about Holmesia’s witchcraft is that it cannot be sustained in England. It is foreign to an over determined degree: it is attached to West Indian, to African, and to gypsy bodies; further while witchcraft belief it is briefly entertained by the underclass peddler it is immediately dismissed twice over, first by the two men who charge Holmesia with fraud and second by Galenicus who explains the Creole’s actual circumstance.
In the eighteenth-century witchcraft belief may be fading in England, yet the (never completely) secular aspect of its jurisdiction is still abundantly available for mobilization against stigmatized groups–gypsies, other foreign or disruptive women, and so on. Moreover, such belief is revitalized in the West Indies as African-Caribbean occult practices come to the awareness of colonialists against whom, it is rightly feared, they may be directed. In the next two examples of infamously unladylike Jamaicans, the failure of conventional English femininity that is at once a consistent feature of colonial (anti)socialization and a constant object of colonial castigation, is charged with the forces of magic that is black, both culturally and morally.
Herbert de Lisser’s 1929 sensationalist historical novel, The White Witch of Rosehall, relates from an anti-nationalist perspective the story of Annie Palmer, legendary plantation owner, sadist, and witch. According to the legend as recounted, to some extent fabricated, and substantially solidified by de Lisser’s novel, Annie Palmer was born of Irish parents and raised in Haiti as the protégé of a highly ranked voodoo priestess. [13] A Jamaican Lady of Irish extraction brought up in post-revolution Haiti, Annie Palmer embodies connections between a type of bad (colonial) whiteness first formulated as “Irish” and then exported to England’s West Indian colonies where it combines with stereotypically African-Caribbean traits to produce the Creole type (Allen 22; Mackie 264). The connection of Palmer’s occult genealogy to a specifically Haitian source reinforces the association to which the novel is devoted between illegitimate female power and African Caribbean culture. In voodoo, as one of the Rosehall bookkeepers comments, “the priestesses of Haiti are quite as powerful, in every way as influential, as their male colleagues. Given a woman of that description thrown into contact with Annie Palmer . . . and anything might happen” (129). What does happen confirms the blackness of Palmer’s diabolical career. She acquires the Rosehall and Palmyra plantations through one husband and marries two others all of whom die under more than dubious circumstances. Armed with the power of her erotic allure and her witchcraft, Palmer pursues a career of illicit gain, voodoo, seduction, and murder that is checked only when she is herself murdered in the 1831 uprising.
Just as Bavia’s narrative occupies two moments, that of the 1714 Peace of Utrecht and of the 1720 South Sea Scheme, and so conjures forth in order to dispel a set of fears connected to each, so de Lisser’s narrative of Annie Palmer has a doubled timeframe, that of 1831 Jamaica, poised for emancipation and social upheaval when the story takes place and that of early twentieth-century Jamaica divided along pro- and anti-nationalist lines when de Lissser writes and publishes it. The novel, then, simultaneously addresses the historical problem of plantation society and the more immediate issue of Jamaican independence and does so in ways that locate the corruption and failure of the plantation, not in English imperialism, but in an illegitimate exercise of power by the Irish-Haitian-Jamaican, and female Palmer. Thus, the text exculpates British colonialism from historical guilt in a way that supports de Lisser’s own anti-nationalist Anglophilic position.
Quite simply, then, the novel is premised on a vision of colonial corruption that identifies and disowns that corruption as foreign (Irish, Haitian, female) to the very English colonial powers culpable for it. “The White Witch of Rosehall,” comments Paravisini-Gebert,” is a tale of colonial decline whose moral arguments centre on the contrast between Jamaica as a place which by its very nature incites corruption and sin, and England as the repository of strong and lasting moral values” (“White Witch,” 28). [14] Standing in a long line of white Creole females renowned for their imperious sadism, Annie Palmer’s sexual indulgence and practice of voodoo colour the evils of the plantation system as both a feminine and a black thing. [15]
So, in this text, as conventionally in colonial discourse, Jamaica ’s “nature” is feminine and England ’s masculine. So the sole gentleman in the text is the young, virtuous Englishman George Rutherford who goes to Rosehall as a bookkeeper to gain firsthand experience of the workings of a sugar plantation in order better to manage his inherited Barbados estate. The narrative opens with Rutherford’s arrival at Rosehall and proceeds with its gothic tale of his seduction by Palmer, her conjuration of demons, her vicious voodoo fixing of the free colored girl Millicent, also in love with Rutherford, and, finally, Palmer’s death at the hands of a group of outraged blacks led by Millicent’s grandfather, Takoo, himself an African obeah man, “chief and leader of the people of St. James” (243). A red-blooded Englishman, well educated and wealthy, Rutherford ’s erotic enchantment with Annie Palmer is soon soured by his repulsion at her cruelty the effects of which, then, he spends the rest of the novel attempting in vain to counteract. After Millicent’s tragic death and the purging execution of the white witch Annie Palmer, Rutherford , exhausted by the horror he has witnessed, sails for England, vowing never again to return to the West Indies. So evolves another absentee landlord. Fortunately for his protagonist and tellingly for his readers, de Lisser does not allow Rutherford to make the same near-fatal mistake that Bronte’s Rochester did, of carrying the taint of the tropics back with him with a West Indian wife. Colonial corruption and failure is purely West Indian and emphatically feminine and black; the (white male) English colonialist neither can tolerate nor be held responsible for it.
The characters in de Lisser’s novel respond in a variety of ways to Palmer’s voodoo: some rationalize it as a kind of vicious psychological manipulation; others understand it more literally as magic pure and simple. De Lisser’s overall representation of voodoo/obeah in his novel operates much as it does in the English Romantic texts that Alan Richardson discusses where the representation of obeah invokes in order to exorcise anxieties about power and so “functions rather like the practice of Obeah itself” (173). [16] These anxieties become political and national for they emerge from an awareness of the central role that creolized African practices such as voodoo and obeah took in slave uprisings, especially in the Haitian revolution. However, as “primitive superstition” obeah and voodoo are invoked to discount and dismiss the rational political content of black agents and activism: “It is not Toussaint but the Obeah-man who is made to embody British colonial anxiety in the critical decade of 1797-1807” (Richardson 178). Yet in de Lisser’s case, it is not Takoo the obeah man who is made to embody Creole colonial anxiety about the horrific legacy of the plantation system but Annie Palmer the voodoo woman. For, writing in early twentieth-century Jamaica , de Lisser’s immediate concerns are not, as they were for writers in the Romantic period, with slave rebellion and emancipation (though these concerns figure in the content of his narrative), but with the historical legacy and validity of British colonialism in the West Indies .
As a corrupt and lascivious female who amasses wealth through murderous and occult means, Palmer’s social and economic power is censured and ultimately destroyed. Likewise, pitted against Takoo’s obeah, Palmer’s occult powers are discountenanced and overcome. This Jamaican lady must be subdued by masculine force and so removed both from the white realm of imperial power and from the black realm of occult power. De Lisser’s novel suggests that in the past Palmer, with her African voodoo, and Takoo, with his African obeah, have been allies; however, in the events it narrates, Palmer and Takoo are represented as competitors, her female black magic pitted against his male black magic. As one of Palmer’s slaves ruminates, “he was afraid of this woman, who was hand in glove with Takoo, with Takoo who was dreaded by every man and woman on Palmyra and Rosehall. As dreaded as Mrs. Palmer, and even more in a peculiar sort of way . . . . though she was dangerous she was less so, to them, than the gaunt negro [Takoo] of whom even some white men stood in awe” (140). At the same time Takoo’s superior power is affirmed, his practice of obeah is distinguished morally from Palmer’s. She uses her occult powers to intimidate and finally kill Millicent, her sexual rival and Takoo’s granddaughter, whereas Takoo uses his to try to save his beloved Millie. Although he fails to save his granddaughter, Takoo resists Palmer’s charms and strangles her in her bed. Yet, even as he commits murder, the novel affirms his sense of moral justice. Having killed Palmer while his co-conspirators hold back Rutherford and the other white bookkeeper, Takoo turns to them, “’We could kill both of you Squire, if we want . . . But both of you are kind. We may have to fight you tomorrow, but for Millie’s sake you can go tonight’” (246). And so the rebellion of 1831 commences with the murder of the white witch and the African’s pardon of the white men, the Englishmen. This pardon works both ways. Identifying Palmer as author of the horrors of the plantation, Takoo excuses the Englishmen, and, targeting feminine black arts before all else, de Lisser apologizes for the violence of the African rebel and sorcerer.
This gesture of removing the evils of colonialism far afield from all things English, one that characterizes colonial discourse from the seventeenth century on, continues, then, in de Lisser’s novel in ways that are deeply and bitterly ironic. The irony of Palmer’s epithet “white witch” depends on this distance between England and the West Indies, between the lady and the Jamaican, between what is white and good and what is black and diabolical; for it invokes our understanding that rather than a white witch (as in Glinda the good witch of the South), Palmer, despite her whiteness, has become culturally and morally “black” by practising “all the old African sorcery” available in the West Indies (128). De Lisser’s white witch of Rosehall embodies the cruelty, exploitation, and corruption against which African Caribbean culture fought for its life in ways that trace the source of these evils right back to that culture itself. Annie Palmer’s savage propensity for cruelty and her uncanny mastery of the techniques, psychological and corporeal, for inflicting it are called voodoo, and so assigned not to the English plantation system but to the newly independent African nation, Haiti. In a perversely twisted fashion, the novel reflects, in ways that ascribe blame rather than affirm liberation, the role that black magic, voodoo, played in the downfall of white colonial rule in Haiti by making Annie Palmer, white witch, Irish mambo, the scapegoat for the cruelty and corruption that brought the downfall of white colonial rule in Jamaica.
The inscription of the divide between England and the West Indies as two competing biographical narratives that we have seen in The Jamaica Lady occurs as well in Wide Sargasso Sea’s revision of the Bertha Mason tale told in Jane Eyre. Though there Rhys turns the tale in order to reverse the charges, tallied across the centuries, against the Jamaican lady. Richardson notes how Rhys juxtaposes “the standard Eurocentric approaches to Obeah . . . against the narrator’s refusal to depict it at all” and so “effectively subverts the colonialist construction of Obeah” (189). Other critics, such as Sandra Drake and Elaine Savory take Rhys’ use of obeah further in their interpretations. Rather than, as Richardson does, understanding the narrative treatment of obeah, along with its attendant constellation of African Caribbean occult practices, as a refusal of depiction, Drake finds the African Caribbean logic of zombification at work in the overall structure of the novel. On a more implicit level, Savory argues that for Rhys writing as conjuration works in personally protective and transformative ways analogous to obeah. The role of African Caribbean culture, embodied in the text most fully in the character of Christophine, has been an object of weighty critical attention (see Spivak and Parry). While my abbreviated and selective analysis here follows readings that affirm the positive presence of African Caribbean practices in Wide Sargasso Sea, and while I am deeply impressed by and sympathetic to interpretations, such as Drake’s, that argue for the liberatory potential of this culture in that text, I think that Rhys is concerned as well to emphasize the limits of its powers to salvage the wreck of West Indian colonialism. Finally, my engagement with this amply studied text operates mostly as coda to the foregoing analyses of colonialist witchcraft discourse in those earlier depictions of Jamaica ladies; for, with Richardson, I believe that the obeah work Rhys does here is properly postcolonial and so aimed at the colonialist talk about obeah that, indeed, functions quite like obeah in order to render colonialism invulnerable to opposition.
From early on in Wide Sargasso Sea the presence of obeah marks the hostility aimed at Antoinette’s family by both black and the white communities in Jamaica . Token of their status as proprietors—only white trash, white “cockroaches,” ever walk anywhere—their horse is poisoned. Annette blames the servant Godfrey for not preventing the blacks who did this: “’He knew what they were going to do’” (18). [17] White society launches its attack against the Cosways not as obeah/poisoning but as talk about obeah. When Annette makes her advantageous marriage gossiping neighbours surmise that it is only through the black arts of Christophine’s obeah that she, an impoverished Creole, has attracted her respectable and wealthy English husband, Mr. Mason (30). This charge of obeah is levied to produce a distinction between these soi disant “Jamaican ladies” and the Martiniquen Annette whom they, jealous of her beauty—“’because she pretty like pretty self’—and of her post-emancipation financial security, never accept (17, 30). The gap of status and cultural identity between Mr. Mason and Annette Cosway, the Englishman and the West Indian, so this charge asserts, could only be traversed by black magic, by charms the illegitimacy of which, then, is advanced to annul the match such tricks would fix and to discount any claim Mrs. Mason might make to the title “lady.” Such charges participate at once in both secular and supernatural epistemologies; they speak of fraud and deceit as much as they speak of enchantment. Likewise, Antoinette’s husband sees his marriage as a fraud imposed on him through deceitful negotiations that obscured the family history of madness and disgrace.
Antoinette understands the antagonism between the West Indian and English as a competition between two contending forms of occult transformation, the West Indian as obeah and the English as talk about Obeah which seeks to counter its charms with more-than-rhetorical forces of its own. Just as the neighbours attribute her mother’s marriage and rise in fortunes to obeah, so Antoinette attributes the changed spirit of Coulibri to “their talk”: “Their talk about Christophine and obeah changed it” (31). Here, we see that Antoinette is aware that “the representation of Obeah.” can act just like obeah itself. For Antoinette, a Creole raised by the black obeah woman Christophine, obeah is a primary term in a discourse of the world partially shaped within an African Caribbean cultural matrix. She, then, sometimes uses the terms in ways, operating outside of the limits of European reality, that comment critically on the colonial discourse through which this reality has been extended around the West Indies. [18] So when her husband tries to rename her “Bertha,” Antoinette protests: “‘Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too’” (147). With its highly charged claim on her identity, this curse of becoming “Bertha” would rhetorically transform a Jamaican Creole, a “white cockroach,” into an English lady just as Holmesia’s “Baccararaman” recasts the English peddler as a white man. And just as the term for “white man” is foreign in England, so the spell that would change Antoinette into a lady can only be enunciated in terms of an alien identity.
Yet, Antoinette charges her husband with this sort of sorcery only after she has herself used obeah to try to win back his affections. In doing this, she seems to take a hint from the suspicions the neighbours had murmured against her own mother and uses Christophine’s potion in her attempt to close the gap between her self and her husband, the English gentleman. By charming him into full erotic connection, she attempts to traverse the distance between her Jamaican identity and the role of his wife, his English lady. She, then, uses Christophine’s black magic to make herself more white, more English, and more of a lady; by doing so, she abandons herself to the spells of patriarchy and colonialism (Drake 105). Ironically, and in ways that confirm both the failure of syncretism and the novel’s critique of colonialism, both Antoinette and her husband use obeah toward the same end, to make her “into someone else.” The failure of any successful negotiation between the West Indian and the English, the Anglo-Creole and the African Creole, is affirmed in the series of gestures across cultural-ethnic lines that lead up to and proceed from the “obeah night” Antoinette spends with her husband. The critique of colonialism becomes apparent as each gesture stumbles across the fault lines that structure the terrain of colonial social relations. It is against Christophine’s admonition that obeah is not for white people that Antoinette persists in getting the potion and so she commits a cultural trespass. This error immediately redoubles as Antoinette uses the potion in her attempt to situate herself wholly within an English identity; so forsaking her West Indian self she renders that self more vulnerable to English colonial misapprehension as Bertha Mason the mad, monstrous West Indian. Disgusted and vengeful, her husband sleeps with a black servant at once asserting his immunity to Antoinette’s fraudulent and toxic charms and confirming his captivation within the easy web of adulterated and venal sexual mores stereotypically characteristic of the tropics.
Antoinette’s obeah, then, evokes her husband’s hatred and she stumbles into an abysmal dissociation represented simultaneously as madness, and as Drake suggests, zombification (Drake 106-112). This dissociation figures, within the ground of Antoinette’s psyche, the colonial ruptures that prevent Jamaican and lady, West Indian and English from ever “fitting together.” Violently rejecting her tropical charms, Antoinette’s husband challenges her obeah with his own brand: “No more damned magic,” he declares, and proceeds, vampire like, to drain her life away: “I did it too. I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty. She was only a ghost . . . Blank lovely eyes. Mad eyes. A mad girl” (170). Just as the animosity of Captain Fustian’s gaze renders Bavia a witch and brings on a completely different narrative of her life, so here the husband’s hatred makes Antoinette into the mad girl and generates the different story of her life we read in Jane Eyre. Rochester ’s confinement of Antoinette as Bertha finds its justification in her “madness” which, within the obeah centred epistemology that the narrative shares with Antoinette, is itself the product of the hoodoo work of white colonialism: “that’s obeah too.”
Pulling Antoinette fully under the sway of his legal and medical definition of pathology, her husband in a sense conquers and owns her, but the powers of this seemingly rational discourse are compromised by his recognition that the limits of that discourse mark the very source of both his attraction and his hatred. This recognition registers his vulnerability to Antoinette’s tropical charms and so engenders his reaction against them. His associations with the islands and their people lock together in a single term of disillusionment the qualities of magic and fraud, the enchantment that attracts him and deception that repulses him: “I was tired of these people. I disliked their laughter and their tears, their flattery and envy, conceit and deceit. And I hated the place. . . . I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. . . . Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness” (172). His antagonism is generated by a frustration with a world he cannot know whose magic ”secret” produces an exotic loveliness which is mystified in a way that enhances both its beauty and suspicions of its illusive and deceptive nature. Antoinette’s tropical charm, here, is registered as an intimacy of hatred and beauty and is finally dissolved in his verdict on Antoinette that exorcizes the magic, the hate, and the beauty: “a drunken lying lunatic—gone her mother’s way” (164). But in its place all he is left with is “madness” here the name for how the Englishman controls what he does not understand, once he has emptied it of all the promise that might tempt him.
Although witchcraft operates in Wide Sargasso Sea, as it does in The Jamaica Lady and The White Witch of Rosehall, to configure a set of ontological and epistemological gaps that obstruct the reconciliation between the West Indies and England, between being a Jamaican and being a lady, Drake suggests that such occult powers in Rhys’ novel finally register a conjunction rather than a rupture. This coming together is registered not on the personal level between Antoinette and her husband, nor on a cultural level, between England and Jamaica, but on cultural level between Anglo- and African Creole and on a textual level between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre. For Rhys returns Antoinette as Bertha, the madwoman in the attic, to Bronte’s text, and to the narrative that culminates in the mutual destruction of madwoman and her prison, Thornfield Hall. While within the terms of Bronte’s novel and Antoinette’s husband, this self-immolation is the act of a madwoman that retrospectively confirms the justice of her confinement even as it rids the narrative of the obstacle of her presence, within the voodoo epistemology that Drake claims for Rhys’ text this act stands as affirmation of Antoinette’s release from zombihood into the realm of autonomous being: “The zombi, awakened, takes revenge in flame. But in burning Antoinette-zombi, she also frees Antoinette for her real life–her reverse trip back across the wide Sargasso Sea– ‘the slow road to Guinea, Death will take you there.’” (108-109). Drake thus reads Wide Sargasso Sea within the trope of redemptive return so prevalent in African diasporic “Middle Passage” texts. Figuring the death and disposal of Bertha as the awakening and return of Antoinette, Drake emphasizes the victory over death this reading would award Antoinette and the metaphysical triumph it would grant African Caribbean belief systems.
Rhys and, more radically her critic Drake, use African Caribbean beliefs in ways that witness, as religious studies scholar James Perkinson puts it, how “witchcraft . . . can be ‘good to think with’ as a mode of communicative action, signifying with a kind of ‘boomerang effect’ in the intercultural space of rupture between the West and the rest” (606). Following Charles Long, scholar of African American religions, Perkinson sees colonialism as a “cosmic” upheaval for the colonized: “Unlike for the West, for the rest, the experience was irreducibly ‘religious’ . . . . It required dealing with contingency and terror on a cosmic scale. The result was the Native American “Ghost Dance,” African millenarian prophetism, Caribbean vodun, Jamaican Rastafariansim, the black church in the United States, and the cargo cult in the South Pacific” (604). Perkinson reads the figures of African-based metaphysical systems against the colonialist, racist discourse that would dismiss them as mere primitive “superstition.” Hence, the “witchcraft” tropes of African belief systems understand slavery and colonialism in ways that accord well with Marxian critiques of consumption and exploitation. Figuring European domination as cannibalism, these tropes register the ways in which “European power, in effect, ‘ate’ African substance in the slave trade.” They are available in both European and African discourses as ways to talk about the world historical devastation effected by colonialism and the slave trade: “Whatever the discourse, the fact of the effect is clear. A ‘witchery’ of heretofore unimaginable potency ravaged African and aboriginal cultures” (612). The notion of the zombi is imported to the plantation where it is creolized and used to account for the unprecedented conditions Africans confronted there: “Where indigenous practice of witchcraft is understood to involve the consumption of ‘dead’ flesh, the slavery of early modernity (1) opens a new ‘after-death’ prospect: the zombi state, the living cannibalization of commercial capital, flesh not so much as food for thought as gold for trade” (623).
The rupture that tore African from Africa, master from slave, black Creole from white Creole, West Indian from Englishman, produces a metaphysical gap that, from its inception, is chock full of powers of the blackest sort. Like Richardson , Perkinson notes how “the very charge of ‘witchcraft practice’ can itself be understood as a form of witchcraft” (606). And so, as we have seen in the three texts examined here, African and European, colonized and colonizer, slave and master, the West Indian and the English, confront each other across the metaphysical rupture of colonialism that they seek to understand and control through obeah and talk about obeah.
[1] See Melissa Downes who examines this nexus of femininity, value, and bad magic in relation to The Jamaica Lady.
[2] In the context of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this “anti-colonialist” position was usually taken by conservative, even reactionary critics who opposed the Whig-led expansionist program of mercantile imperialism.
[3] See Erin Mackie : “In earlier seventeenth-century descriptions, stereotypes of the white West Indian drew not so much on analogies with the black population, as on existent types of ‘bad whiteness’ formulated by the English to vilify the Irish, the French, and members of their own criminal and under-classes. Later, as the labor force shifted away from the white, mostly Scottish and Irish, population of bonded servants and transported felons to slaves, and as the white Creole population advanced their own interests and legitimacy, the threats that the tropics presented to British cultural identity were more explicitly traced to the influence of the African-Caribbean inhabitants” (255).
[4] See, for example, Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions and Sacred Possessions. For a classic study of African religious culture in the New World, see Roger Bastide.
[5] For the history of English witchcraft belief in this period, see Ian Bostridge and Roy Porter. While there is a whole industry built around the witch trials in Salem , much less attention has been given by historians to other, more African inflected, forms of witch belief in the colonies. Noting the presence of African derived forms of occult practice in the colonies and the paucity of discussion about these, Wolfgang Behringer observes that this “chapter of colonial witchcraft has not yet been written” (146).
[6] This trope occurs frequently in contemporary African diasporic writing and structures a wide variety of African diasporic cultural forms, such as dance. For an overview of the historical and cultural origins of this trope and a variety of discussions of its operations, see Maria Diedrich et al, Black Imagination and the Middle Passage.
[7] The terms of the Peace of Utrecht which ended the War of the Spanish Succession granted England the Asiento, the monopoly on the slave trade to the Spanish American colonies. More generally, England’s success consolidated her Atlantic/Caribbean domination.
[8] For the features and genealogy of white Creole stereotype, see Mackie.
[9] See Sally Booth: “One of the most universally accepted notions concerned the power of witches to raise storms and control the natural elements at sea” (54).
[10] See Carol Barash: “Bavia is thus the archetypal English colonial subject . . . The story of Bavia’s Irish origins [sic] and her return to Ireland at the novel’s end reinforce the extent to which her story figuratively reconstitutes the historical origins of English slave culture, and her punishment the desire to root out the sexual and linguistic ambiguities of colonization by forcibly returning her to her place of cultural origin and marking her as indisputably female” (418). Although Barash’s reference to Bavia’s “Irish” origins is based on a misreading, Bavia is half Scottish not half Irish, her point about the colonial circuit of Bavia’s career is illuminating
[11] Properly speaking, the typically more personal, more exclusively “magical” practices of obeah differ from voodoo that names an elaborate religious system of beliefs and practices. However, like voodoo, obeah could be and was used in aid of political and social cohesion and liberation. Identified with an autonomous African derived belief system and set of practices frequently employed to inoculate the individual against harm and, conversely, to harm one’s enemies, obeah is part of the culture of slave resistance. Obeah, then, has both a personal and a public face. Elaine Savory makes this distinction: “The person working Obeah is in the world of magic when using the powers privately. If an Obeah practitioner works in public—for example, in a cult such as Jamaican Cumina—then Obeah usually becomes part of a religious ritual” (218). But Obeah, per se, is not in itself a religious cult as is Cumina and as are vodou, santeria, and candomble.
[12] The peddler’s response to Quomina echoes that of Captain Fustian who reprimands a sentinel on board whom he believes had sex with Quomina: “Don’t make a cuckold of the Devil, you dog” (111). Downes observes: “An African slave, the object of trade that lies at the heart of the South Sea Bubble and a domestic economy based on empire, is also at the heart of images of absolute fetish and absolute transgressive sexuality” (39).
[13] Although Palmer is elsewhere associated with the practice of black magic, usually obeah, this Haitian connection is de Lisser’s own invention. For other accounts of Annie Palmer see Clinton Black and Joseph Shore. For an analytic unraveling of the various accounts of Annie Palmer’s life see Laura Lomas.
[14] As Paravisini-Gebert notes, Palmer “became, by virtue of her being female and thus not naturally entitled to a commanding position, emblematic of the debasing domination of the plantation system” (“White Witch,” 26).
[15] The cruelty of Creole women to their slaves is stereotypical by the time of The Jamaica Lady where Quomina is routinely beat by Holmesia and Captain Fustian comments: “a Negro had better live in Hell than with a Jamaica termagant” (112). See Barbara Bush.
[16] James Perkinson analyzes extensively and compellingly the operation of “talk about witchcraft” in European colonialist discourse and so provides a broad historical and theoretical ground for Richardson ’s observation that talk about obeah functions very like obeah itself.
[17] African Caribbean practices such as obeah and voodoo preserved and developed esoteric herbal and medicinal knowledge that could be used in poisoning, as they are here with Annette’s horse and as they were widely employed against the master class in plantation society.
[18] This is not to say that Antoinette uniformly speaks from some kind of stable and “pure” African Caribbean cultural position. Her inability to find a place in the worlds that have shaped her is a major theme of the text. So she certainly does, as Richardson claims, sometimes respond to obeah and to other elements of African Caribbean culture in colonialist, racist ways (Richardson 189). Her appropriation of obeah against Christophine’s warnings is an instance of Antoinette’s misapprehension of that culture.
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