Reading the “Uncle Tom” Character in Fred D’Aguiar‘s The Longest Memory

This paper intends to examine the ways in which Fred D’Aguiar portrays Whitechapel, the slave protagonist of his 1994 novel The Longest Memory. I wish to argue that Whitechapel can be seen to represent an archetypal figure in the literature written about slavery and race relations but also that specific aspects of his composition belie the social and political concerns of D’Aguiar’s immediate era. I will look at how the fictional exemplar of the accommodationist slave, Uncle Tom himself, has been redeployed from Stowe’s 1852 novel into various twentieth-century diasporic writings. From the conspicuous absence of a viable position from which to collaborate with Jim Crow oppression in Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) to the despair and nihilism expressed in the ’Tom’ poems in Edward Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage (1967), I argue that the Uncle Tom character has proved invaluable to writers wishing to explore the spirit of contemporary racial politics. I suggest that D’Aguiar’s Whitechapel fails in his attempts to forget the brutality of the slave system and thus accentuates the author’s insistence on the continual remembering of the slave past yet his ambiguous relation to the mechanisms of oppression highlight D’Aguiar’s reluctance to oversimplify the complexities of history for contemporary political utility.