Qu'est-ce qu'un homme révolté? Un homme qui dit non. Mais s'il refuse, il ne renonce pas: c'est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement. Un esclave, qui a reçu des ordres toute sa vie, juge soudain inacceptable un nouveau commandement. Quel est le contenu de ce "non"? -Albert Camus, L'homme révolté These, of course, are the opening lines of L'homme révolté, Albert Camus's 1951 essay on the meaning of the act of rebellion. 1 Like the earlier, perhaps more famous essay Le mythe de Sisyphe, published in 1942, L'homme révolté is above all concerned with the affirmation of value in the face of absurdity-the temptation to act against the routinized silence of the world.Written, it is true, in different personal and historical circumstances, both texts share, nevertheless, the attempt to map a kind of moral phenomenology of human existence by thinking life (individual and social, respectively) at its limits-in one instance, suicide, in the other, murder.At the figurative center of L'homme révolté is the image of the slave in the existential moment of rebellion. Camus describes a borderline beyond which the slave is not prepared to go, a moral-psychological limit beyond which she or he is unwilling to endure the existing wrong.Up to this point, Camus says, though the state of affairs is manifestly unjust, the slave has 1 The epigraph is taken from Albert Camus, L'homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 25. I would render the English as follows: "What is a rebel? A man who says no. But if he refuses he does not give up; he is also a man who says yes, from his very first impulse. A slave who has received orders all his life suddenly judges some new command unacceptable. What is the content of this 'no'?" For a slightly different translation, see Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 13.40 • March 2013 • David Scott | 97remained "abandoned to the despair" of acceptance. 2 Then, somehow, the moment arrives when all at once the slave refuses to suffer any longer in abject silence. With newfound voice, she or he says no-rebels. That no, however, is not merely a nihilistic act of pure negation.It is also, simultaneously, a vindicating act of affirmation, an implicit declaration that there is something worthwhile in her or him that will no longer stand being ignored, violated. In rebellion, the slave also says yes.The event of rebellion, then, is a profound moment of self-awareness, an event of dramatic self-recognition in which, as Camus puts it, there is "la perception, soudain éclatante, qu'il y a dans l'homme quelque chose à quoi l'homme peut s'identifier, fût-ce pour un temps" ("the sudden, dazzling perception that there is in Man something with which man can identify, be it for a moment"). 3 In short, the rebel slave abandons the particularity that ties her or him to the imposed-slave-status and identifies with the universality of humanity. For Camus it is the moment when "interest" gives way to "right." This is why, in his view, the act of rebellion has always to be all or nothing-because what has been denied by enslavement, namely, respect, cannot be repaired piecemeal, but only in its immediate totality. This feature of universality is also why in rebellion what the slave affirms is not a narrow individual self-interest but a value held in common with others, even with the perpetrators of the injustice of slavery. 4 It has always been of decisive importance to Orlando Patterson that it this figure of the slave that so animates Camus's meditation on revolt (indeed, it is partly this that has made Albert Camus such a generative philosophic presence in his work). For one way of describing Patterson's entire oeuvre, over more than four decades now, in both fiction and nonfiction alike, is as a social-historical and moral-phenomenological exploration of the meaning of the act of refusal. In many ways, Patterson is, like Camus, principally a social moralist, that is to say, a critic whose social investigations are meant to have a normatively improving horizon.And for Patterson, too, the central animating figure in his moral sociology of the black Americas is that of the slave: concretely, the New World-but paradigmatically the Jamaican-slave.Orlando Patterson, one might almost say, is haunted by the revenant figure of the Jamaican creole slave. Born into the abjection of generations of perpetual enslavement (and so without the African slave's firsthand experience of freedom), and governed by the singular institutionalized powers of anomie and systemic violence of the slave plantation (and so without the African slave's prior context of social value), it is with the creole slave that revolt emerges as an historical as well as a moral-phenomenological problem. As Patterson writes in his first monograph, The Sociology of Slavery, while most slave revolts in Jamaica were organized 2 Camus, L'homme révolté, 26. "Jusque-là, il se taisait au moins, abandonné à ce désespoir où une condition, même si on la juge injuste, est acceptée." 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 28. "C'est pour toutes les existences en même temps que l'esclave se dresse, lorsqu'il juge que, par tel ordre, quelque chose en lui est nié qui ne lui appartient pas seulement, mais qui est un lieu commun où tous les hommes, même celui qui l'insulte et l'opprime, ont une communauté prête"; "It is for the sake of everyone that the slave rises up, when he decides that, by this command, something in him has been denied that does not belong to him only, but which is a common ground where all men, even the man who insults and oppresses him, have a ready community" (translation mine).
A Mother's Project
David Scott: To begin with, Orlando, where in Jamaica were you born, and when?Orlando Patterson: I was born in Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland, on 5 June 1940. My parents were actually living in a little town outside of Sav-la-Mar called Grange Hill. My father was the detective there, and my mother-eventually she became a seamstress, but I don't think she was working at the time.DS: So you were born in Sav and you lived in Grange Hill?OP: Not for very long; eventually I think we moved into Sav. So I was there when I was an infant but I have no recollection of it.
DS:
Where did you grow up?OP: My parents split up when I was about two years old (after a long separation they came back together). So the dawn of consciousness for me would have been Kingston. My mom and her sister both left the fathers of their children and went to live-all three sisters-in Kingston.