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Black
History Month: Rebel with a cause
My
hero, the great Russian writer Alexander Sergevitch
Pushkin, defied the limitations of his origins - Mike
Phillips
The image of Alexander Sergevitch
Pushkin, the great Russian writer, is shot through with
contradiction. Born
an aristocrat, he became a rebel and an exile. Perpetually
taunted about having the features of a monkey, he ended
his life as a revered icon of Russian and European culture.
His place in the history of the black diaspora is ambiguous,
but he referred frequently to his African blood and his "negro" temperament;
and even a casual study of his work and letters reveals
the extent to which his African background was part of
his personal trajectory.
When I first encountered Pushkin
I knew vaguely about his African ancestry, but I was
not at the time interested
in much outside of his poetry, because I was, more or
less, taken up with my own struggle to work out what made
his work unique and special in European literature. Apart
from anything else I couldn't see him as anything but
a Russian. "Blackness", in my mind, was something
to do being a colonial and part of the imperialist legacy.
By the time I visited Russia, more
than a dozen years ago, my grip on black identity had
changed, but I still
hadn't "got" Pushkin. Driving across Europe,
though, and arriving in Moscow on my first visit to Russia,
it hit me that I hadn't seen another black person since
Berlin. I felt a kind of panic, which intensified that
night when I was followed down the embankment by a group
of men in cars. I couldn't understand everything they
were shouting, but it certainly wasn't "Welcome,
dear foreign guest."
I went to see Pushkin's statue in the square named after
him next morning, and standing in front of it I felt,
somehow, a sort of comradeship, as if I was greeting a
friend. Reflecting on the isolation I was feeling it struck
me how extraordinary he must have been to sustain, throughout
his life and in that icy landscape, the fierceness of
his challenge to an all-powerful authority.
How brave he must have been to flourish his pride in
himself and his family. How full of passion he must have
been to maintain the defiance with which he confronted
insult and provocation. How brilliant he must have been
to reinvent Russian poetry, and to represent identity
in an idiom which made him the champion of an immense
slice of the world's population. In that moment I thought
of him as a hero, and in the ensuing years I have begun
to read and understand the various meanings of his work
for my own life and times.
Say the words "black hero" and you automatically
think of a figure who played a prominent part in confronting
slavery, colonialism or racism. This confrontation, over
and over again, has also been used to reinforce a definition
of black identity as occupying the space where "whiteness" leaves
off.
What is interesting about Pushkin is the fact that his
life and work remains a towering achievement in European
culture, while his legacy continues to defy incorporation
into the ideology of race.
The great grandson of Abrahim, a sub-Saharan African,
Pushkin's own mother disliked his swarthy appearance and
flat nose. He established a reputation as a poet, a brilliant
man of letters, and a dangerous rebel, with a streak of
wildness.
By the time Pushkin was killed, in a duel, he had established
enduring fame as the Russian genius who could be talked
about in the same breath as Shakespeare and Byron. Grief
at the news of his death was unprecedented and the secret
police saw it as so threatening that every effort was
made to play down public mourning. In a repressive century,
the poet was viewed for decades as a threat to public
order and a source of dangerous ideas.
His heroism, and his importance as a black historical
figure, consists of the fact that he refused the limitations
of his origins. Instead, he took the world in which he
found himself and changed it forever.
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