Miles P. Grier's "Inkface"

Miles P. Grier is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Inkface marks the final turn in a chapter that positions Aphra Behn's novella "Oroonoko" (1688) as a proto-feminist query. I infer that Behn wrote “Oroonoko” to discover whether the stage tragedy of Othello could be revised in print, by a self-respecting woman writer, to allow Desdemona to triumph even as she is murdered by her husband. In the preceding pages, I pursue this question by looking at the white narrator and the black African heroine as two Desdemona figures who achieve disparate victories. The white narrator survives because, unlike Desdemona, she avoids the fatal stain that results from coupling with a blackamoor. Ironically, the African queen Imoinda achieves sexual inviolability — she cannot be deflowered — because she has already been covered in black floral tattoos.

Scholars of Behn’s novella have suggested that Behn finds Imoinda a rival and has her murdered to secure victory over her Black double. Yet, on page 99, I argue that critiques of Behn's failed sympathy with Imoinda neglect that an old African woman, Onahal, is an earlier cipher for the white author.

I write:

Arguably, the elderly Onahal, who facilitates the consummation of Oroonoko and Imoinda’s sworn love in Coromantien, is a stand-in for the aged writer. Onahal, she writes “had not forgot how pleasant it was to be in Love: And though she had some Decays in her Face, she had none in her Sence and Wit; she was there agreeable still” (139). An idealized version of the authorial Behn, Onahal is a spy and mediator, a clever woman who, with well-maintained beauty and court connections, can still seduce and wield influence.

…. In her navigation of the embitterment and gendered service that accompany her status as the cast-off mistress of the Coromantien king, Onahal proves herself an African composite of Emilia and Iago. Like Desdemona’s maid, Onahal controls access to the “Bed of State” she once occupied, where the king intends to consummate a marriage he is imposing on Imoinda, in spite of her prior betrothal to Oroonoko (138). She resembles Iago in avenging her loss of status by pretending to do others’ service—operating within the letter of decrees while employing an unruly orality. Yet, where Iago famously fabricates a scene in which his bedmate Cassio confesses in his sleep to a clandestine affair with Desdemona (III.iv.413– 26), Onahal reveals to Behn’s African prince that he should “not lose a Moment in Jealousie” of a king she “kn[o]w[s]” is impotent (138). Beyond disclosing this secret truth, she ensures that Oroonoko and Imoinda have time and privacy to have a sexual union that, though consensual, cannot achieve legitimacy. For her pains, Onahal is sold into slavery but not to Surinam, it would appear, as she is never heard from again.

The chapter concludes on the next page with a sentence in which I aim to capture Behn's regrets about the result of her experiment:

As the author Behn looked at the results of her experiment—a lifelike death mask, a shattered statue, a literary commodity, and a treacherous version of herself—Onahal suggests the faint wish that it could have gone another way.

A reader assessing my book according to page 99 could be misled, as the whole book is not a reading of "Oroonoko." Still, the excerpt does exemplify my contention that attending to the messy materials of early blackface Othellos puts both Othello and its respondents in a radically different light than we have imagined. Behn, an archetypal First World feminist, turns out not to betray an African counterpart.

A person skimming page 99 would likely turn to the final fragment on 100 and catch the vague wistfulness attending Behn’s achievement of social authority. Through skillful deployment of printed characters and ink-marked Africans, Behn legitimizes herself as a woman writer in a sexist cultural field. Yet, joining the fraternity of literate white men comes at a significant cost that she acknowledges, as I believe we must, too, if we intend to rectify the real injuries that she contemplates in fiction.

Learn more about Inkface at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue