‘The Trembling Hand’ Provocatively Calls Out the Romantic Poets for Perpetuating Racist Tropes

‘The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive’By Mathelinda NabugodiKnopf, 432 pagesMathelinda Nabugodi is at an exhibition that features Wordsworth’s manuscript and his breakfast crockery set. “Seeing a tea cup,” she recalls, “I was immediately struck by the thought of the poet’s thin lips pursed against its rim and how drinking from it today would be akin to kissing Wordsworth across time.”I had a similar experience handling Amy Lowell’s cigar in a Brown University archive and imagined putting in my mouth — an act of ingestion — which is what biographers do with their subjects.Ms. Nabugodi is fascinated with Wordsworth and also disgusted by his racism, his casual friendly relationships with slaveholders, and his ridicule of Queen Marie-Louise of Haiti for her aristocratic pretensions. This is not a case of presentism, of judging the past by today’s standards. As Ms. Nabugodi points out, Wordsworth was out of alignment with his abolitionist friends.All of the major Romantics — Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats — come in for considerable criticism of their unthinking perpetuations of racist tropes, but that is because Ms. Nabugodi is viewing them also in terms of her own imprisonment in the figurative language and attitudes that she expressed in wanting to look white, to have her natural kinked hair flow in extensions that swung around her shoulders.One infuriating moment occurs when Ms. Nabugodi applies for an academic position and a white interviewer touches her hair, a humiliating encounter that is not an uncommon experience for black people, many of whom, she points out, have written about such intrusions. She brings her own visceral experience to a re-reading of Romantic poetry.“The Trembling Hand” shows how the Romantics very conception of beauty cannot be separated from equating whiteness with perfection. They contributed to an idea of classical beauty that obliterated, for example, the original appearance of Greco-Roman statuary: “When they were excavated, many statues still retained residual traces of their original colouration. Rather than use these traces to reconstruct what ancient statues might have looked like, lovers of antique art had them blasted away. They would not let empirical evidence threaten the white supremacist aesthetic that regarded colour as tacky and barbarian and identified elegance with whiteness. The first time someone attempted to reconstruct and display Greek sculpture with their original colours, it causes a furor, and the exhibition was closed.”Please pay attention to the word “gaudy” in this book. Wordsworth uses it in a poem to describe an encounter with a black woman, and the word is not complimentary. It works against what might appear to be a sympathetic portrayal. The Romantics, especially Keats, Ms. Nabugodi’s argues, fetishize poetic power in physical descriptions that exclude any conception of black beauty: “A lock of thy bright hair,” is an example of how “Keats gushes” about the “creative power emanating from his [Milton’s] brain.”Taken alone such lines may not seem to have anything to do with a white/black dichotomy, but, as Ms. Nabugodi might say, you have to see the full context of where such language comes from and how it contributes to a world in which Romantics hardly ever gave much thought to how their words might be part of an economy that relied on the profits from slavery and that, in many instances, supported their own careers as poets.Byron is a special case because of his club foot that made him conspicuous in ways that Ms. Nabugodi likens to the way being black has been treated as a disability. Byron’s own relationship with a black servant comes in for provocative commentary by Edward Trelawny, his friend, “an inveterate liar,” Ms. Nabugodi admits: “In our voyage from Italy, Byron persuaded me to let him have my black servant, as in the East, it is a mark of dignity to have a negro in your establishment. He likewise coveted a green embroidered military jacket of mine; which, as it was too small for me, I gave him; so I added considerably to his dignity.”Trelawny, true or not, leads me back to thinking about what is gaudy, and what it is about the black and Romantic nexus that so bedevils and fascinates Ms. Nabugodi.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography” and “Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography.”

‘The Trembling Hand’ Provocatively Calls Out the Romantic Poets for Perpetuating Racist Tropes

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