Zadie Smith: "The Fraud"

Zadie Smith: The Fraud

Genteel British society in the 19th century is at the center of a wide variety of fiction. Many famous authors at the time documented the ways of the British aristocracy and upper middle class, and many authors have continued to be fascinated by this era. It has featured in many TV treatments as well as novels. Rarely have these authors fully faced the source of the wealth and privilege of their subjects: many of them made their money as "planters" — and thus as slave owners — in the Caribbean island sugar and rum trade. 

Enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, harvesting sugar cane (source)

Sugar cultivation, sugar refineries, and rum distilleries all functioned because they depended on the insanely brutal system of slave labor. The native populations of the islands had been driven to extinction by the early settlers through disease and slavery. By the 1800s, the enslaved workers were all African Black people and mixed-race African-British people. The system was utterly inhumane, and most writers who documented the white beneficiaries of the system didn't choose to mention the fundamental horrors of the system or to acknowledge the abolitionist movement that opposed slavery. The slave trade — that is, bringing enslaved Africans to the British colonies, officially ended in 1807. Continued enslavement of human workers was abolished in the 1830s when the British government generously repaid the slave owners for the loss of their human property, and their wealth was preserved. The slaves were never compensated for their losses. The British upper class beneficiaries quickly forgot the brutality of slavery, as well as the rebellion that preceded emancipation. Here’s a link about the rebellion that preceded emancipation.

Slaves working at a Caribbean rum distillery, 1800s. (From a rum advertisement: source)

In her recent novel, The Fraud (published last September) author Zadie Smith portrays a family of genteel white English folks very much like the ones in so many earlier novels. The details of the plot are based both on historic characters, particularly on a successful novelist of the time, now totally forgotten. and also on historic events, particularly a court case about a fraud that fascinated the public in the 1870s, as well as looking back on the lives of the characters from the 1830s onward. Themes in The Fraud include the relationships of literary figures of the time, as well as many political and social issues: it’s a complex novel with a complex central character, Eliza Touchet, through whose eyes we see political, social, and personal relationships. In the rest of this review, I'm concentrating only on the topics of race and slavery as the author presented them, but there is much more.

Smith uses the many events and characters with great success to illuminate these issues, including the attitudes of white people towards black people and towards the institution of slavery, for example, white women including Eliza who belong to abolitionist organizations. Smith explores the way that the black residents of England, who were often former slaves from the Caribbean plantations, reacted to a profoundly racist society, and how they formed their own way to see themselves. It’s subtle and detailed.

As the plot about the trial continues to unfold, there's a kind of a pause for a sequence of chapters about the life and family of Andrew Bogle, a former slave who played a big role in the notorious court case. Bogle’s father was forcibly brought as a slave from Africa, and his biography includes his experiences of slavery on Jamaican plantations and sugar mills. Bogle himself begins life as a slave and then as a freed man in England and Australia. 

Bogle’s story begins thus:

“‘My life has had many parts,’ said Bogle. ‘It is difficult to say how many lives I have lived, or where my story truly begins. One thing I know for certain: my story is not what it should be. I should have been a great man. I come from great men, on my father’s side. But I hardly remember my father and can only speak of what Myra told me. Myra was my mother, and much of what I know of my father’s life she gave to me. Poor woman, that she should have nothing else to give me but that!” (p. 239)

Bogle's father was born as an elite member of a tribe in Africa. As a boy, he was kidnapped and taken to Jamaica on a slave ship. Through the events of his father's life, Smith illustrates the way that all the enslaved African workers on the plantation were subjected to hardship, cruelty, and inhumanity. Bogle's story reveals the hardships of laboring on a plantation in the overwhelming heat of Jamaican summer, whether assigned to work in the offices, in the fields, or in the sugar refineries and distilleries. Eventually, he moved to England with his master and later, as a free man, went to Australia as a settler. Finally, he returned to England where he became a witness at the notorious trial that is central to the novel. 

Bogle is very aware of his place in English society as a black man, a son of an African tribal elite, an ex-slave, a witness in a highly popular trial, and as a relatively literate and politically aware person. Here are his thoughts as he reads about the 1831 slave uprising in the newspapers — at that time he was in London working for his former owner, Mr Doughty:

“Every evening, in the newspapers, the tale of this negro uprising expanded, and Mr Doughty expressed some variation on his relief to no longer be in any way involved with the ‘cursed sugar trade’. Bogle snuck the newspaper back to his quarters after dark and read the long columns by the light of a single candle, trying to understand if only the north coast was burning and who exactly was being executed in the town squares for refusing to work. But of all the negroes in Jamaica there was only one with a name, as far as The Times was concerned – Sam Sharpe – and after a while he understood that he was only upsetting himself. What he wanted to know no English paper would ever tell him.” (p. 308)

The rewards to the planters of using slave labor for growing sugar, refining it, and making rum are all very clearly described, but there’s little in the novel about the British side of this trade; for example, about the consumption of sugar and rum in England at the time. When the genteel people in the novel drink an alcoholic beverage, it would be an after-dinner glass of port, not rum! Though the content of their meals is sometimes described, the role of sugar isn’t much mentioned — in their world, sugar is mentioned only when the abolitionists ask housewives to boycott this product of slave labor. Sugared tea (I know from other sources) was the mainstay of the lower classes, but not relevant to the novel’s literary and social elite. I think this is an interesting choice on the part of the author.

The Guardian reviewer last August thus summarized the novel:

“Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were ‘two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined,’ joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s ‘secret word’: slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges.” (source)

Review © 2024 mae sander