§ The
racism of the minstrel shows, which entertained white American
audiences with the singing and dancing of black folk while
reassuring them that their potentially threatening servants
were in fact lazy, stupid, superstitious, and eternally
cheerful, was almost certainly moderated somewhat when those
shows spread to European stages in the later 19th century. For
audiences in the UK, parodic stylings of American blacks must
have been as much an exotic curiosity as a window onto a
culture's charged racial fault lines. (At least at the
beginning: minstrel material maintained its popularity in
Britain until very late in the 20th century, by which time
London had its own sizeable black minority and everybody had
plenty of reason to know better.)
Exoticism certainly seems to have figured in the stage act
which Gifford and Slote cite as a source for the Citizen's
remark. "The White-eyed Singing Kaffir" was a highly
popular music hall show performed by Londoner George ("G. H.")
Chirgwin who, like the American Eugene Ruhlmann ("Eugene Stratton"),
performed in blackface. Chirgwin's acts evidently involved a
good deal of solidarity between performer and audience, and no
particular racial animus. A talented musician, he got his
start in a family troupe that imitated the minstrel shows. His
stage makeup sported a large white diamond surrounding one eye
in a black face, which suggests a somewhat detached,
aestheticized approach to presenting a stage Negro.
Chirgwin attributed his inspiration to an outdoor performance at
which a storm blew dust into one eye: as he dabbed furiously at
the eye the audience started to laugh, because he had rubbed off
his black makeup. But his father had started out as a circus
clown, and the diamond shape that he later incorporated into his
look strongly evokes a clown's makeup. His stage delivery too
was apparently far removed from the minstrel shows' air of
archly mocking inferior people: he filled the space between
songs with the friendly, improvisatory chatter of a
working-class bloke talking to his mates. Richard Anthony
Baker's
British Music Hall: An Illustrated History
(2014) notes that Chirgwin spoke to the people in his audiences
"as though he were addressing a select circle of old chums"
(199-200). After retiring, he kept up the patter by opening a
pub.
§ In a
personal communicatin, Vincent Van Wyk notes that "white-eyed
kaffir" also appears in Columns, a 1903 Kipling poem
about "mobile columns" of "six 'undred men" that were
deployed across the South African landscape in wearying
search-and-destroy missions, hunting down Boer guerilla units
after the capture of Bloemfontein and Pretoria failed to
produce real victory. The poem follows the British troops as
they march at all hours, look for shade in the African heat,
try to decide which cart-tracks to follow, and so forth, in an
unending round of tedium and terror. One of its many vivid
details is a "white-eyed Kaffir 'oo gives the alarm."
The British army employed many thousands of black natives in
the mobile columns and in auxiliary roles, and they used the
word "kaffir" to refer to these men, whether Xhosa, Zulu, or
from other tribes. It is thought to have come from an Arabic
word, kafir, meaning an infidel, though Van Wyk
suggests a possible alternative in amakhafula, meaning
the rubbish of the North, which Zulus applied to tribes like
the Venda, Tsonga, and Ndebele that they pursued to the
borders of South Africa.
At the time of the Boer War, the word "kaffir" appeared
widely in print and meant simply "black native"—a long way off
from linguistic practice in South Africa today, when the word
has become charged with such violent hatred that uttering it
in public can earn one a well-deserved jail sentence. Still,
it had never been a neutral term, and Kipling's use suggests
how readily it could acquire overtones of contempt. His image
of white eyes opening wide in a very black face smacks more
than a little of the way black people were presented in the
minstrel shows—a point that Mary Hamer makes in her online
notes to the poem.
§ Racial
stereotypes were bandied about much more casually then than
now, and Chirgwin's case suggests that a "whiteeyed kaffir"
could serve as little more than a decorative vehicle for
musical entertainment. But given the rancor and racial animus
with which the Citizen talks about (and to) Bloom, Kipling's
poem seems a highly relevant context. Several details in Ulysses
suggest that Bloom's complexion is a bit swarthy by Irish
standards, and Bloom himself repeats the stereotype of the
"dirty jew" in Lestrygonians. By tarring him with the
brush of blackness, the Citizen insinuates that Jews are an
inferior and threatening race.
Such racial stigmatization from a defender of Irish purity
is massively ironic, given the ugly 19th century history of
British publications (and sometimes American ones as well, as
in the image displayed here) depicting the native Irish as an
apelike and vaguely Negroid people. The English depicted the
Irish as subhuman in order to justify their brutal treatment
of them, and the Citizen, rather than distinguishing himself
from these hated oppressors by holding himself to a higher
standard, operates in much the same way. He dehumanizes people
he sees as not authentically Irish—"coming over here to
Ireland filling the country with bugs"—in order to
justify his violent xenophobia.
The Citizen is blind to this irony, but Bloom certainly is
not. When accused of not being Irish ("— What is your nation if I
may ask? says the citizen"), he retorts that the people with
whom he is racially identified have been victimized just as
much as the native Irish have: "And I belong to a race too,
says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very
moment. This very instant.... Robbed, says he. Plundered.
Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right." By
his logic, Irish Catholics and Irish Jews should make common
cause as oppressed peoples, not oppose one another from
positions of narrowly defined ethnic purity. Racial
essentialism is a chimera perpetuated by powerful elites who
can make kaffirs of whites and Semites as easily as blacks.
When Kipling was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in
1907, he became the first English author to win that honor,
and the honor became linked with tales of English men imposing
their will on India and South Africa. If Joyce did intend an
allusion to "Columns," he must have done so with a wicked
awareness that he was linking his novel's arch-nationalist
with the writer most indelibly associated with British
imperial conquest. It is by no means hard to imagine him doing
this. When the Citizen starts off on a tirade vituperating the
"glorious British navy" that "bosses the earth" and "the great
empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs," Bloom
interrupts to ask, "isn't discipline the same everywhere. I
mean wouldn't it be the same here if you put force against
force?" Armed force is the same everywhere, and from
violent nationalism to rapacious imperialism is only a small
step.
