KINGSTON BY STARLIGHT by CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

THE AUTHOR

            Christopher John Farley was born in 1966 in Kingston, Jamaica; He was an author

and journalist. He was a freelance music writer of the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe; He was a staff writer for USA Today, 1988-91; and a music critic of Time magazine. Christopher John Farley holds one of American journalism’s most sought-after jobs as Time magazine’s pop-music critic. Farley’s post gives him ready access to some of the biggest celebrities in the entertainment industry, and he has used that influence to pen biographies of Halle Berry and Aaliyah. Farley is also a novelist, having made his debut with a satirical novel, My Favorite War, in 1996. In 2005 his second novel, Kingston by Starlight, was published by Crown.

SUMMARY

            Anne’s early years in Ireland are relatively comfortable, she and her mother protected by her wealthy father’s reputation – until he gambles away his fortune and sets sail for North Carolina in the New World. Without resources, Bonny and her mother struggle for a now-meager existence and are finally forced to seek a place in the New World as well, hopefully locating the errant father.

For Anne, the ocean voyage was revelatory as she and her mother sailed aboard a slaver. Anne Bonny and her mother sailed their ways to her father through that slave ship for that is the only ship that they can afford. They are horrified when the ship took on the precious slave cargo, all of them forced to live (or die) in inhuman conditions. Sympathizing with the plight of the Africans, Bonny understood something of the future that awaits in America if she and her mother failed to find the father.

Her mother was killed on the ship they were travelling to go to her father who left them penniless and a series of debts. Her mother was killed when she tried to stop the men from assaulting and sexually abusing the female slaves aboard that ship. She managed to escape that ship. When she reached the shore, she went to look for her father who made a name in the business industry there. She did not have a difficult time locating her father since he was quite a personality there but when she reached her father’s house, his father denied that she was his daughter.

Abandoned and denied by her father, Anne chose to seek her fortune in the lush tropics of the colonial West Indies, where she passed herself off as a young man named Bonn. Anne Bonny decided to pass herself off as a man because “there was little work for an honest woman—as a female, I could not join a guild to learn a trade, I would be ridiculed for any job on the dock, and the pay for farm labor was little more than an insult. Shopkeepers laughed me out of their stores; ship captains threatened to whore me out if I returned again, “Anne Bonny, Kingston by Starlight, p. 50.

There was no legitimate employment in the early eighteenth century for decent women; their only choices are marriage or streetwalking. The feisty Anne refused to consider either. With a great admiration for the inherent freedom of male pursuits, she cut her hair, travelled to Barbados and begun the ribald life of a pirate aboard the William, captained by Calico Jack.

She found herself a work as a ship’s hand, sailing under the command of Calico Jack, a notorious and charismatic pirate with a bounty on his head. Calico Jack had his heart set on raiding the Madrid Galleon, the richest ship in the Caribbean, which sailed from Kingston laden with Cuban gold and Jamaican rum.

During one of William’s (the name of the pirate ship) exploits of raiding another ship, manned by just one person, they met Read, a mysterious good sword fighter who owned the ship they raided. Later on, Read became a member pirate of William. Through many adventures, Bonn, as she was now known, kept her true identity secret, revelling with her mates, dueling with Read, although both were conscious of an instant attraction to one another. Eventually, Bonn retired with Calico Jack, living in relative plenty until approached by Read and another former shipmate with tales of gold and treasure too great to ignore. One more voyage will suffice to ensure all their fortunes, a final escapade.

It was only when the three of them were captured that their darkest secrets surfaced.

Governor Woodes Rogers was so eager on capturing Calico Jack. According to Calico, he once brought the Governor’s daughter aboard with him. On a certain instance, he had to go ashore to buy them (he and his ship’s crew) food and other goods. When he came back, he found out that his men raped the governor’s daughter and he killed all the men there he suspected and admitted of doing so.

When Calico Jack was about to be executed, both Read and Calico surmised and realized that Calico would never have told them of his secret that was unrevealed until his final hour. A secret, one that Read surmised and she guess, in some way, she always knew.  “He would not have told me that he never romanced Roger’s daughter, and that the story was a front, a ruse, a lie, to cover another deeper deception. He would not have told me that he and Woodes Rogers, on some voyage long ago, shared those things that men sometimes share on sea-voyages, when one comes to kno one’s fellows in a way that one never would on land. To John, all flesh was flesh, and this episode was just one of the many; but to Rogers, it was a moment of deep ignonimity, of weakness, of sin, and it was his drive to purge himself that drove the Governor on his campaign to destroy John and all who sailed with him. But, by my faith, John would have said nothing of all this,” Anne Bonny, p. 292.

ANALYSIS

            It was stated in the book, both clearly and subliminally, how women were regarded as something inferior. The sexual division of labor was also very evident: “There was little work for an honest woman—as a female, I could not join a guild to learn a trade, I would be ridiculed for any job on the dock, and the pay for farm labor was little more than an insult. Shopkeepers laughed me out of their stores; ship captains threatened to whore me out if I returned again, “Anne Bonny, Kingston by Starlight, p. 50.

Sex is biology, and gender is social roles designed by the society. In this case, we see that it’s not only the person’s gender that defines them or what kind of job is suited for them. But it was also their sex.  It was interrelated; sex defines your gender, sex defines you, society defines your gender, society and gender define you.  We see in this book how men exclude women.

Post-structuralism focuses on these key points: the idea of a center and the idea that binary oppositions are interrelated. In post- structuralism, there is no definite center,  just the definite presence of centers. Post-structuralists developed this literary theory so as to provide the audience or readers another angle or point of view in reading or watching a film. The center is where everything comes from and to which everything refers or returns. Sometimes God, sometimes it’s the human self, the mind and sometimes the unconscious. The idea of a center privileges a center; it just focuses on a certain person or character. For example, in most of the adventure and action films, it was always the men who were the heroes or the main characters. Men in such films, especially in the Philippine cinema, are focused; women are just supporting characters—wife, whore, mother, or a display-material girlfriend. The problem with privileging is that it gives privilege to something or someone and neglects a lot of things. Deconstruction provides a new center by destroying an existing center and producing another one. Kingston by Starlight is a deconstruction of the common suspense and adventure novels wherein only the men are focused. It was as if only men have the desire for mystery and adventure.  Of all the pirates that terrorized the sea, most were male, but Kingston by Starlight is the tale of one woman who defied the odds to live as a man, joining the crew of a ship captained by the infamous Calico Jack Rackam. This was a deconstruction not just of adventure novels but of real piracy life as well.  We see here that this book provided as with new center through the persona of Anne Bonny. The narrative of this book defined another center.

Post-structuralism also stressed that binary oppositions are interrelated. That oppositions can be partly undermined, or by which they can be shown partly to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning. Let me give you an example:  In a male dominated society, man is the founding principle and woman is the excluded opposite of this; and as long as such distinction is tightly held in place, the whole system can function effectively. Woman is the opposite, the “other” of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally, man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite; defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his knowledge, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is.

In this book, men exclude women; sexual division of labor, abuse, etc.  It’s funny how men refuse to take women pirates aboard with them but they shamelessly refers the ship to a woman…as a she. Not only is man’s own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because the woman may not be quite so other after all.

“Never in my life had I actually given thought to what I was going to do with my life. It seemed every line had already been written. Either I would be married, happily or not, to a man of means or a man without, and I would bear children or else I would be barren,” Anne Bonny, p. 51. We see here that women are really marginalized. It was as if there is no world out there for women. It was like there is no world for women outside the embraces of their husbands, the confines of her home. It was like saying that a men is everything to a woman, it was as if bearing children and having husbands are the only things that can define a woman’s person—a woman as a person and a woman’s personality and very essence.

“And if I was not taken by a man in marriage, then I would live the life of a spinster…In any case, my life would be filled with farmwork and housework…and making a man happy or miserable or both. My options were not all good ones, and there were not so many of them,” Anne Bonny, p. 51.  This is very representative of the state of women during her time, early 18^th century.

“There is this strange power that fathers have over their daughters—the more they withhold heir love, the more we desire it,” Anne Bonny, p. 45. The desire for the love of a father can somehow be likened to a woman’s desire for the society’s complete acceptance of her.

During their voyage to visit her father, Anne Bonny was exposed to the slave trade.  The earliest ships used to transport human beings from Africa to enslavement in North America were converted merchantmen; later, special vessels were built, equipped with air scuttles, ports, and open gratings. The first American ship to carry enslaved Africans was the seventy-nine-foot long Desire, sailing out of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1638. The Hannibal, an English slaver of 1693, was 450 tons and mounted thirty-six guns, which it was frequently forced to use; seven hundred human beings could be forced into its hold. Many slavers rigged shelves in the middle called a “slave deck,” leaving only twenty inches of headroom, so that individuals were unable even to sit upright during the entire voyage. This was the same image portrayed in the novel. The slaves were even stated to be naked. The nudity symbolized the humiliating state they had; nude of any shame, dignity, and even identity.

According to Farley, the main characters in this novel—Bonn, Read and Calico—are eral people. Their trial, held in 1720, was one of the most infamous events in the history of the West Indies, drawing attention in newspapers from Boston to London, and inspiring plays and ballads. As a native of Jamaica, he first heard bits of this story when he was a child.

I was fascinated to find how easily lines of race, sex, and class blurred on pirate ships.  Paupers could become buccaucer kings; aristocrats sometimes tired of their pampered lives and joined the brethern of  coasts, black slaves and white slaves found freedom afloat. The cultural backgrounds of Bonny and her fellow shipmates are not entirely established in the historical record; the past Farley created for Bonny represented the tenor of the times, as well as the guidance of the voice he heard as he wrote the book. The characters in this book are extraordinary/ Extraordinary people are often deemed so because they are representative. They carry, in the story if their lives and the thrust of their actions, the spirit of their age.. Farley wrote very passionately about both slavery and piracy.  I think those “trades” ultimately shaped the culture of the Caribbean, both in the 1700s and in the present day. Slavery helped enrich Europeans and European-Americans while it simultaneously devastated the economics of African nations and native communities in the Americas. The shock waves of slavery continued to impair the economy of post-colonial governments in the West Indies long ater emancipation. Slavery also, of course, took a toll in blood and bodies. Bob Marley, the reggae poet of the Caribbean, on his very first major label release, featured the song “Slave Driver,” a track whose lyrics provided his album with its title, Catch a Fire. The legacy of slavery is a real one for Caribbean singers, poets, novelists, and others. But, in many ways, rather than weakening the culture of Jamaica, all of this had made the soul of region stronger and more resilient. It helped stir the embers of a fighting spirit. Revolutionaries and provocateurs of all sorts, from Marcus Garvey to Claude McKay to Kool Herc (one of the fathers of hip-hop) were naives of Jamaica.

The narrator in the novel, Anne Bonny, noted that though real names are rarely if everused on the William, the assumed names by which her crewmates are known are moe expressive of their various characters. She herself changes the name she uses for the captain throughout the book; at times he is “the captain,” at others Calico, Rackam, or John. I think this say about the complicated character of her relationship with Calico Jack Rackam.

Anne Bonny’s reluctance to enter into prostitution is understandable—but she doesn’t appear to regard murder as a similar breach of “virtue.” When faced with a choice essentially between prostitution and piracy, there really is something about piracy that really appeals to her. “I suppose my romance with the deep began, in large part, because I have always had more than some fair amount of fascination with the ways of men,” Anne Bonny, p. 47.

“My da had his new life. I would have mine,” p. 51 .I admire Anne Bonny for this. Though abandoned and denied by her father, she redeemed herself by dong a job of ehr own interest and by not begging for him. She also had proved to herself that she can do stuffs that man does.

From time to time, Anne Bonny seemed to interact in a very real way with her audience—in requesting and then sharing refreshment for example—but at the end of the book it is less clear that her audience is a living person. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that her audience is her unborn baby. Anne Bonny had a miscarriage months after she was released from prison. She was relating her narrative to all her dead shipmates. The dead baby is a symbol of a dead past. It was a symbol for Bonn’s missing of her life as a pirate and she knows that all this missing implies is a past that remains in its rightful place.

We can see another binary opposition. In the earlier times, people are either beheaded when they are executed or their necks are being tired under a rope. We can connect this paradigmatically to the prevalent photograph taking. If we analyze this structurally, during the execution of Calico Jack, his neck was tied with a rope. Neck or head, being the most important part of the body, was cut or used to stop one’s life.  Head was cut. However, picture taking or photograph captures the head, the most important part of the body, in contrast to what is done during the execution.

Sources:

Kingston by Starlight by Christopher John Farley

Literary Theory: An Introduction 2^nd Edition by Terry Eagleton

http://mrbraiman.home.att.net/lit.htm

http://www.curledup.com/