“Orphan threads”: Figures of auto-history in Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies

The “orphan threads” of Imperial Intimacies

The following two short passages from the text’s preface succinctly outline the impetus and methodology for Carby’s book. Crucially, in providing an account of why her text must take on an unorthodox form, Carby also introduces the problematics of orphancy as a part of her autotheoretical project, thereby linking this trope to her generic innovations:

I used family memories as a guide to navigate material in the National Archives of Jamaica and the UK, but when I stumbled I had to put aside the voices of my relatives because they hindered my ability to see what they had disguised, or had no intention of passing on. (Carby, 2019: 2)

The architecture of this [text’s] tale has the tensile strength of a spider’s web spun across the Atlantic […] the radial fibres that hold rural England and rural Jamaica in tension link the Atlantic port cities of Bristol and Kingston. Orphan threads have been left broken because I do not know how to make them connect. Though I am unable to make these repairs the web weathers and holds. (Carby, 2019: 3-4; emphasis added)

In this expository section, Carby illustrates how her text is not only wary not only of the constraints of state archives but also of the pitfalls of familial accounts. And so, in identifying and moving against these two structures of historical transmission (and therefore mechanisms that legitimate belonging), Carby elects at certain junctures to “put aside” the words of her family because of the confusions they produce. This ferrying back and forth produces a complex “architecture” for Carby’s work that is international in scope (Carby, 2019: 4). Further, Carby borrows the image of the “spider’s web” to convey the strength and shape of her auto-historical tale’s “architecture”. Notably, the “radial fibres” of this world-wide web are lines that illustrate the routes and circuits of colonization, slavery, and migration. Their trajectories, which branch out and break, may also replicate the lines of a family tree. This last suggestion is made plausible based on the appearance of the phrase “orphan threads”, which, in its sudden deployment, reminds the reader of the text’s uneasy relation to the accounts of Carby’s relatives. Indeed, it is my intention in this section to explore the significance of this curious phrase “orphan threads” to the fullest; this may risk over-emphasizing the associative and figurative dimension of Carby’s writing of an expansive and often traumatizing history of empire, but I believe a close reading of this short phrase yields significant insight into a host of connected thematic concerns and references within Imperial Intimacies, from Carby’s engagement with modernist aesthetics, to her location within Black feminist studies, to the essentialism of belonging that both postcolonial criticism and critical adoption studies scrutinize.

These “orphan threads” stick out in several ways. I want to suggest that the unease in this slight expression (what is an “orphan thread”?) should be understood as the text, as an instance of auto-history and postcolonial autotheory, registering the restrictions of generic thought and form as they pertain to describing a life in and after empire. Of course, the “orphan threads” evince the limits of Carby’s historiography in Imperial Intimacies and the ethical question of their treatment. As Marisa Fuentes notes of the text’s preface in general, “the incoherence and uneasiness […] stems from the limits of historical methods that impose analytical distance on our subjects and restrict speculation to that for which we have some archival evidence” (2021: 169). More specifically, the phraseme “orphan threads” intimates that not all is connected in the web-like structure of Carby’s tale (even if, as threads, they are nevertheless a part of the tale’s constitution). Furthermore, the passive phrasing of “Orphan threads have been left broken” reiterates the difficulty of positioning the author’s agency when writing history, especially when experimenting with creative or literary techniques. Confusion starts to creep in here, for what is Carby’s relation to the “architecture” of her auto-historical “tale”? That is to say, does one construct, or discover, or recover an account of the past that also contains your life? Is Carby architect, discoverer, excavator, or restorer? Her role in this passage moves between these professions, enacting a tendency which Saroukhani identifies throughout the text as Carby’s “persistent evasion of the self, whether through textual acts of displacement, dislocation or disavowal” (2021: 33). Or, as Anne Anlin Cheng puts it, also remarking on the text as a whole, “there is no simple ‘I’ here, which is the point” (2020: np).

But while Fuentes, Saroukhani, and Cheng have each provided productive readings of and responses to Imperial Intimacies, there still remains a need to further attend to the rich poetics of Carby’s writing and the profound implications its tensions produce. The compound expression “orphan threads” has a stiff, strange quality to it in the context of this section of the text. It is a curious and even awkward yoking of two metaphors that seem to fit uneasily. To be sure, this is not a fault in Carby’s writing style so much as an illustration of how the complexity of her thought is pushing the precision of current language to its limits. In this case the awkwardness of the “orphan threads” points back to the symbolic function of the family, or the “ideology of familialism”, as a structure that marks the boundary of sense or coherence (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982: 31). In Carby’s phrasing, “threads” that do not fit the sense of her historical tale are, by association, orphans (which is to say, not of the family or the instantiation of a disrupted line). The orphan threads are the loose ends that aren’t tied up by conventional (read: liberal, white, British, colonialist) logics of the family or history. They represent the interrupted lineages and inheritances within the imperialist order. Furthermore, Carby will at times identify with these awkward tangents at the expense of accounts from her family. She earlier proclaims a need to “put aside” her own family voices in order to conduct her auto-historical research (2019: 2).

From this analysis, it is possible to see how Carby’s use of the phrase resonates with critical adoption studies in a productive way, for Carby’s themes and approach — of putting aside national institutions and family stories and lingering on “orphan threads” — mirror the anti-bioessentialism forwarded by this field, especially in its studies of transracial and transcultural adoption. As Mark C. Jerng notes, a critical study of transracial adoption “highlights the fractured relations among racialization, citizenship, and kinship obscured by […] dominant histories and explores the terms of personhood constructed within the parent-child bond” (2010: 131). These “fractured relations” are similarly underlined by the loose threads of Carby’s web, just as, as I have argued, her invention of the phrase “orphan threads” indexes a problem of insufficient expression which Margaret Homans similarly underscores in the experience of adoption. For example, Homans writes that, in certain circumstances, adoption “has the potential not only to destabilize invidious binaries […] but also put into practice ‘another configuration of primary attachment’ for which there is not yet a common or popular language” (2015: 13).

This other kind of socially underdeveloped configuration that Homans points to has been richly explored in John McLeod’s Life-Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (2015) under the name “adoptive being” (2015: 23). McLeod’s conception of adoptive being raises two points pertinent to the discussion of “orphan threads”. First, one should note the startling similarity between the shape of adoptive being — or the articulation of “alternative ontologies of the self” — and the structure of Carby’s autotheoretical tale (McLeod, 2015: 23). McLeod writes that adoptive being — in contrast to the “oxymoronic” notion of “birth culture” which “assumes the cultural provenance of one’s birth constitutes an ever-present authentic origin of personhood” (2015: 8) — should be thought “in terms of multifarious strands, as a firm yet fraying knot that takes its place in turn, as non-originary origin” (2015: 26; emphasis in original). This “firm yet fraying knot” finds deep echoes in Carby’s description of her auto-history’s structure, which similarly tries to picture the entanglements between personal, familial, national, and racial anchors of identity without resorting to simple origin stories (as implied by Carby’s aversion throughout Imperial Intimacies to answering the recurrent, racially-charged question “Where are you from?” (Carby, 2019: 7; emphasis in original)). ¹ This comparison does not merely rely on matching associations between the rhetorical flourishes of McLeod’s or Carby’s writing — Life-Lines insists that “the possibilities of adoptive being are often most effectively realized via formal inventiveness and figurative innovation” (2015: 32). Rather, both McLeod and Carby are attempting to make incipient and/or suppressed models of social being legible from within a linguistic and imagistic framework of empire and racial capitalism that would otherwise insist on discrete individual liberal subjects, what Saroukhani called “the narcissistic logic of imperial domination” (2021: 33). Thus, for both postcolonial autotheory and texts theorizing adoptive being, the material critique of modern belonging is enhanced by a critical experimentation with aesthetic forms and figures.

Second, McLeod cautions against seeing adoptive being as “endlessly portable or the key to all methodologies, not least because of the danger of disconnecting adoption from its material particulars and contextual domains” (2015: 232). McLeod is especially wary of:

[T]he freighting of adoptive units in symbolic terms with little sustained engagement with the painful histories and experiences which underscore their materialization. Such thinking is in danger of freighting adoptees in particular with an iconic potentiality which can metaphorize them at the expense of their experiential reality in situ. (2015: 32)

This concern for the particularity and context of orphancy is reflected in sections of Imperial Intimacies that precisely detail the circumstances of unparented individuals, sections which will be examined later in this article. However, McLeod’s note of caution is complicated by Imperial Intimacies through the fact that Carby is concerned with recovering accounts of the historical “freighting” of persons that are only partially retrievable at best. Again, to do justice to such violence requires an aesthetic experimentation that strays from familiar forms of historiography. In stating from the outset that “orphan threads have been left broken”, for example, Carby is not simply admitting to a historian’s failure to “repair” these threads to the joints of a global web. Rather, she is foregrounding her fresh attempts to run athwart the liberal logics of repair and recognition that undergird the ideological structures of both family and history. In this given system, some things do not fit, and there is value in recognizing this truth. The text’s broken threads, which will be discussed in the section after next, are offered as attempts to “hol[d]” the fragments of the past in view without trying to force them into relation. What Carby tries to centre in this synthetic phrasing is her historiographical attempt to concede past moments as “broken” without allowing them to disappear altogether, and, in doing so, make that very brokenness available to the contemporary’s imagination of the past. It is a gesture that recognizes the presence of specific violences and injustices that are often sheared from neat liberal narratives — an act that is in tune with McLeod’s concern for preserving particular experiences — while also emphasizing the difficulty of using the historical record.

When placed within the traditional and inherited liberal logics of inheritance, Carby’s insistence on incompletion, confusion, and fragmentation may seem pointless or nonsensical. But Carby’s modernist-inflected practice of arranging a fragmentary auto-history is implied as an alternative form of historiography and, simultaneously, a form of care from within the heaviness of a massive historical system of violence and disarticulation. Indeed, care is foregrounded in this moment through the evocation of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) in the final line of the second passage quoted at the top of this section: “the web weathers and holds”. Carby’s sentence subtly refers to the titles of In the Wake’s final two chapters, “The Hold” and “The Weather”. This referential nod intimates that her auto-history will take up certain concerns and motifs of Black feminist studies, including what Sharpe has termed “wake work”, a practice of “care” that poses “a problem for thinking and of and for Black non/being in the world” (2016: 5).

Paying close attention to “orphan threads” thus foregrounds Carby’s contention that an ethical and careful revision of historical content first requires a critical appraisal of history-writing’s aesthetic forms and structures, as well as the colonial ideologies this representational dimension of history has often supported. In re-appropriating history’s forms for her ulterior ends, Carby is carving out a position that will make a difference, showing an allegiance to Black feminist thought and tentative affinities with adoptive being as articulated in critical adoption studies.

Highlighting paternalism: The orphan figure in postcolonial contexts

Before proceeding further with an analysis of Imperial Intimacies, it is worth outlining the broader significance of the orphan as a trope within the context of postcolonial literature and contemporary Britain. “Again and again”, John Thieme writes, “[postcolonial] con-texts generate re-readings of [colonial] pre-texts […] as postcolonial orphans and bastards, literal and metaphorical, join Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai in claiming multiple genealogies” (2001: 170). In the tradition of postcolonial literature, these orphans possess a special ability to rework the European colonial history of paternalism and infantilism. The preponderance of unparented children and adopted infants in postcolonial fields responds to a history of paternalistic ideology by Europe’s colonizing states, whereby empire nations would at times position themselves as benefactors, custodians, or patrons, adopting the so-called primitive society under its wing. In the context of colonial India, for example, Uday Singh Mehta identifies a mode of “civilizational infantilism” within nineteenth-century British liberal thought, where a “practice of ruling an empire, like that of parenting” was fostered (1999: 70, 199). Such a practice, like the prolonged work of raising a maturing child, “can be conceived only as a longitudinal process and not as a succession of lateral encounters” (1999: 199). In other words, the adopted (colonized) child of empire may — over some unspecified and continually deferred amount of time — develop to become like the civilized (colonial) society, who stands in, in one moment, as the motherland and, in another, as fatherly protector. However, as Manfred Liebel explains, this paternalistic positioning is clearly compensatory. The “naturalization as a parent–child relationship” between colonizer and colonized, Liebel notes, is an attempt by the European society to quell “the moral conflict that results from colonial conquest and occupation” (2021: 37).

But this describes the perspective of the colonizer. Anticolonial and postcolonial literature, in articulating the colonial–childhood bond through the problematics of orphanhood and adoption (rather than resorting to the biological “parent–child” dynamic), resists the essentialist belonging afforded by biological inheritance, instead insisting, as Thieme stated, on their “multiple genealogies”. This insistence has the effect of resisting the assumption of the (colonial) child as a simple tabula rasa or as “the null function that can carry the symbolic weight of Bildung”, which imperialist forces would mould to their own design (Esty, 2011: 133). For the orphan as orphan still bears, in any subsequent context, the mark of a prior absented relation that is overwritten but not fully erased. Even if only signified in negative form (as a child “without” their parent or parents), the orphan possesses the trace of a previous affiliation that must first have been lost before any new patronage can take hold. ² The orphan, as concept, always hints at a historical difference between itself and the assumed authority.

The orphan in postcolonial literature thus stands symbolically as an unstable hybridity within colonial ideologies of the home and family which the postcolonial subject suffers from and which they and their filiations can potentially exploit. Like the cosmopolitan, another popular figure of postcolonial writing, the orphan’s unrooted nature (being “in but not of” their immediate social situ) could enable the crafting of new affiliations without being indebted to notions of familial inheritance or local origins. Like the exile and migrant, two further mainstays in the postcolonial canon, the orphan embodies a relational identity premised on a central absence — in this case, the absence of parental relations. Yet unlike these other postcolonial figures of non-belonging, the orphan — because of their implicit youth and hence vulnerability— tacitly demands an account of the values of any social system that would claim to intervene on their behalf, or even claim to care for their welfare. It is this notion that we see in the final lines of the extract from Carby’s preface, with its appeal to care.

It is important to note at this juncture, however, that this theorization is neither an essentialization or romanticization of orphans or adoptees, only a recognition of the ideological contradictions their social status can open and amplify within the context of perpetuated colonial frameworks of belonging, becoming, and being. Despite professing to uphold family values, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism unparent children at astonishing rates. For a child to become an orphan is almost exclusively a terrible circumstance, and the process for an unparented child to become adopted is never guaranteed. Furthermore, the adoption procedure is itself a process that is inflected with class, race, ethnic, gender, sexual, and national discriminations (and more) and will require the involvement of national and often international state agencies. Similarly, adoption may not always be a desired outcome for the child’s interests. Critical adoption studies warns against the idealization of orphans and adoptees as social figures of liberatory unrootedness, instead asking us to consider the complex motivations and psychologies of adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth mothers, as well as study how unparenting and reparenting is mediated by state agencies. ³ Still, even with this field’s emphasis on material and social histories, its theorists often maintain the significant insight that unparented subjects and those that interact with and/or study them stand to gain. In Barbara Yngvesson’s terms, an adoptee’s search for biological origins (which is often more of a remaking than a refinding of their past), plunges adoptees into the “eye of the storm” (2003: 23). This existential space — experienced as “a kind of chaos” — is figured as an opening within the “complex web of connections” that facilitated the adoptee from birth to adoptive parent (anticipating, in both form and content, McLeod’s conception of adoptive being). Yngvesson maintains that “while adoption is the focus of this opening up, the questions it raises reminds us that we are all, in one way or another, close to the eye of the storm, which is where life is lived” (2003: 24; emphasis added). Similarly, Homans, reflecting on her own experience as an adoptive parent, also underscores the defamiliarizing potential of thinking with adoption and against the essentialism of the so-called natural family unit. She remarks that “reading queer theory in combination with raising an adopted child […] make[s] me more thoughtful about the political and intellectual positions I adopt” (2002: 272).

This brief sketch of the postcolonial figure of the orphan provides an outline at the most general level, and it is from this premise that I will further analyse the strange status of orphanhood within Imperial Intimacies. Carby’s use of orphanhood, I argue, allows her to express the defamiliarizing force of reading colonial history (and its ongoing effects) against the grain while also defamiliarizing the orphan as metaphor, demonstrating both the violence within the British Empire’s history of unparenting as well as the inadequate ability of the term orphan to describe the various outcasted, propertied, and abandoned progenies of empire. In this light, the orphan is an improper descriptor in Imperial Intimacies that lumps figures of differences and non-belonging together. To take up orphanhood in the way Carby does is to hold fractured, displaced states together, a practice that she may term as a kind of care. Yet Imperial Intimacies is most explicitly concerned with the status and lineages of contemporary Black British identity (an identity that has remained obstinately attached to the dissolution of the British Empire and the arrival of the “Windrush” generation, despite numerous and overwhelming accounts problematizing this association). ⁴ Some further details of the contemporary British historical context are therefore necessary, since such details render the orphan’s problematic status, in this setting, even more troublesome.

In Uncommon Wealth (2022), Kojo Koram makes a counter-intuitive yet insightful claim about the interminable crisis of identity in contemporary Britain. Koram writes that:

The UK’s twentieth-century transition from an empire state to a nation state was not accompanied by a comprehensive review of its constitution and state institutions. This is despite the fact that, for the bulk of its constitutional history, England and then Britain was an imperial realm, not just a national one. By the time of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, itself part coup and part invasion, England had already established legal jurisdiction over Barbados (1627), Jamaica (1670) and the Virginia slave colonies in what would eventually become the USA, as well as having forts in what is today Accra, Ghana and Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, among others. […]

In many ways, Britain’s relationship with colonialism is older than Britain itself. Rather than saying Britain had an empire, it would be more accurate to say that the empire had Britain, as the British political entity was largely born of and sustained by its imperial project. (27–28)

I want to focus on Koram’s final line in which the commonly accepted view of colonial possession and (re)production is reversed: empire is not child but mother of the nation. If empire “had” Britain, then Britain is the child of empire, an offspring and offshoot not dissimilar to those other nations commonly regarded as its former colonies. Seen in this light, the UK is not the parent of the Commonwealth, but — and perhaps more so than the other Commonwealth nations — a child bereft of its guardian.

To be clear, this perspective is only available through a certain turn of dialectical thinking and cannot be said to be the only way of seeing the matter. But foregrounding the recent, retroactive construction of contemporary British national identity helps emphasize, as David Edgerton argues, “the sense of parallel emergence out of empire” for the United Kingdom as it was (re)constituted alongside the newly independent states, such as Jordan, India, and Pakistan (2018: 26; emphasis added). “For the United Kingdom too was in important ideological and constitutional senses a part of empire, not merely the owner of an empire. This was a process invisible in standard historical accounts”, Edgerton explains (2018: 26). This “parallel” dynamic specific to the British context of postcolonialism yet “invisible in standard historical accounts” introduces an additional layer of complexity to the figurative meaning of postcolonial orphans described earlier. It would not only suggest that such an orphan is a metaphoric expression of the colonial other’s sense of non-belonging within the British nation, but, in parallel, it would stand in for the colonizing nation’s displaced sense of its own lost foundations. In other words, because the British nation “was largely born of” empire, as Koram claims, one can read the British nation’s ambivalence (or worse, coldness and cruelty) towards the postcolonial figure of the orphan as a displaced communication of its own orphaned status (2022: 28). By describing contemporary Britain’s status after empire as orphaned, one could identify a further figure and set of symbols active within the British nation’s political unconscious, stuck as it is in a state of “postimperial melancholia” (Gilroy, 2005: 98).

Highlighting the “parallel emergence” of the postwar British nation with the decolonized nations (previously of the British Empire) is one way of further detailing the imperial intimacies that exist among the people, systems, and histories of these contemporary states. It is Carby’s task in Imperial Intimacies, to which the discussion will now return, to track the intimate, intricate, and violent relationship between Jamaica and the United Kingdom through the histories of Carby and her ancestors, who hail from both nations. In doing so, we will track the figurative and material histories of unparenting that the colonial institution of the family produces.

Uncanny parallels: Identification over inheritance in auto-history

Curiously, though the phrase “orphan threads” is made seemingly in passing in Imperial Intimacies’ preface, orphans, and the questions of adoption and inheritance they provoke, populate Carby’s text. These terms appear in their immediate, juridical meanings, but also figuratively, as indicators of the text’s attempt to rethink tradition as sustained through inheritance. Here are some early examples in the text of adoption (emphasis added in each):

This girl [Carby] discovered that the adoption of a posture of timidity with a hint of speech impairment was likely to end the interrogation. Answers were mumbled incoherently, with eyes lowered to feet neatly encased in white cotton socks and brown leather Clarks T-bar sandals. Honesty was best avoided in these circumstances. (2019: 13)

My attempt to adopt a professional exterior had little staying power and my façade crumbled when I stood, as a bereaved daughter, rooted to the spot, outside the house where my father was born in 1921. (2019: 35)

My father adopted the clerical garb and manners of accountancy as a counterweight to the terrible conditions of his life. (2019: 47)

Speaking in the slow and deliberate tone of voice that she adopted when she would brook no opposition, the teacher declared that coloured people were not British but immigrants who arrived on these shores after the war had been fought and won. (2019: 64)

As the girl [Carby] became a young black woman she insisted that she was homegrown, but no hyphenated identity existed that she could adopt, wear or proclaim. When asked “Where are you from?”, she braced herself to be seen as an ungrateful black immigrant, an eternal outsider. (2019: 84)

It’s clear that in these instances adoption does not refer to the taking in of a child, but rather to the putting on of customs. More specifically, adoption here signifies the putting on of British customs that conform to classed, raced, and colonialist logics of what is strictly proper. The implicit paternalism within this usage of the word thus recalls the paternalist attitude of the British Empire towards some of its colonies as previously discussed. These instances signal the yielding of private attachments to the rules of the nebulous yet forceful social order, therefore highlighting the minority subject’s “education of desire” within the majority system (Cheng, 2022). Finally, adoption is mobilized in these instances as an attempt to stave off a tensive social problem that has no clear solution. Clearly, to borrow from W. E. B. Du Bois, that “problem”, for British society, is the problem of blackness and Black people in Britain. Thus, adoption and racialization are subtly linked in these off-hand moments. Orphans and adoptions in the text work as minute expressions of an underlying state of ambivalence in the contemporary term Black Britishness.

Yet the function of adoption works very differently when, later, in the chapters “Brown Babies” and “Half-Caste”, Carby directly considers the lives of historical orphans in Britain who are Black and/or mixed-race (being the child of a white British mother and an African American GI since returned to the US). But this also is not fully true, since these children are not orphans in the first sense of the OED’s definition of the term, that is, “a child, both of whose parents are dead”, but closer to its second, more figurative meaning, that would also apply to a foundling or abandoned child: “A person or thing deprived of protection, advantages, benefits, or happiness previously enjoyed; something which has been abandoned or ignored.” These two chapters of Imperial Intimacies revisit Holnicote House, a manor run by Somerset County Council that operated as a kind of orphanage for Black British children during and shortly after the Second World War, “even though”, as Carby notes, “the children were not orphans” (2019: 91). Rather, as a 1948 Life magazine article that profiled seven of these children put it, “Their fathers have returned to the US. Their mothers have given them up, in most cases reluctantly, because of ostracism by village neighbours.” After quoting this extract from Life, Carby argues that “these British children were not being imagined as citizens but as ‘problems’ that should be exported” (2019: 92). Carby details how Holnicote House, under the direction of the local council, gathered as many of the “brown babies” as it could from first the county and then the entire nation. The council’s scheme was to quietly dispatch these unparented children to Holnicote House before trying to eject them from the British Isles altogether — to have them sent “to America ‘for ultimate adoption by coloured families there’” (2019: 92). ⁵

By drawing on the research of historians Sabine Lee and Pamela Winfield, as well as citing letters, news stories, and speeches concerning the scheme from several archives, Carby’s discussion of the social forces that rendered these children at Holnicote House unparented and available for transnational adoption demonstrates her commitment to studying the particulars of material histories. Here, Carby matches McLeod’s concern that the “iconic potentiality” of adoptees should not be separated from “their experiential reality in situ” (McLeod, 2015: 32). It is only after considerable careful historical work is presented by Carby that the literary dimension of her autotheory grows in stature. Carby firmly sets up her identification with the orphan figure only after having first established the circumstances of the children in Somerset (not far from where Carby herself was born) and visited the manor herself. I contend that Carby does so in this instance in order to testify to the routine denial of personal reflection that standard historical research and writing requires — the routine removal of the historian’s position when writing the historical content. Carby visits Holnicote House some 50 years after its operation as a pseudo-orphanage. She writes:

I am intimately tied to the seven children through the girl that I was. We are joined by what our bodies represented to the British public and the state in 1948; that intimate connection has been cemented at each moment when our right to belong was contested. On the lawn of Holnicote House, I felt the folding of space and time as I became both an adult and a small brown child. When I stared at a photograph of the two-year old girl that bore my name I also saw the girl [pictured at Holnicote House] in the polka-dot dress, with a neat white collar, sandals on her feet, clutching tightly to her books. I not only recognized but also felt her tight grip on to [sic] her books and the worlds within them. (2019: 99)

In this contemplative moment, a confusion of identity occurs and this confusion brings us back to the strangeness of the orphan threads in the text’s opening. The “intimate ties” evoke the text’s title and recall the spider’s web from the preface. This relation between the narrator and the seven children is stated three times — “tied”, “joined”, “connection” — and the premise of their suturing is subtle. It’s not so much the colour of their skin that unites them in this passage as what that skin-colour signifies within a shared social order, within a shared historical period (a period that just precedes the beginning of the “Windrush” generation). It’s the mixedness of brownness — of having one white parent and one Black parent — within an anti-Black, predominantly white society that makes this group stand in for what stands out, and which determines the nature of their bondage and Carby’s feeling of affinity with them. The identification is thus made through the recognition of parallel circumstances.

The dense literary dimension of Carby’s writing here is worth attending to, for it again demonstrates how postcolonial autotheory critiques the colonial and imperial formation of the self through highly inventive and intricate artistic form. Notably, there is a near-Proustian shift that is occasioned in this passage with the involuntary “folding of space and time” and which occurs, at first, with the author situated on the manor’s lawn. A short-circuiting takes place between the subject and object positions here, and it is this leap or fold — what Fred Moten would call being “in the break”, a location that, like being in the wake, is “at once internal and interstitial” — that produces, within Carby, a felt condition of orphancy (2003: 85). Carby moves from “the girl that I was” to being “both an adult and a small brown child” (2019: 99; emphasis added). Almost immediately after this pronouncement of a double occupation, however, the location from which this resurgence of lost time stems is altered. Within the next sentence, some sleight occurs as Carby swiftly transports us to another scene: “When I stared at a photograph of the two-year old girl that bore my name I also saw the girl [pictured at Holnicote House] in the polka-dot dress” (2019: 99; emphasis added). At the very beginning of this sentence, Carby has quietly moved the reader’s attention away from her visit to Holnicote House, or the seven children in the late 1940s, to a scene where she studies a family photograph of herself. Whether this second, more private, scene takes place before or after Carby’s visit to Holnicote House is unclear, but what is transparent is how this personal photograph is now contaminated, entangled, or implicated with Carby’s historical research. As Carby stares at herself — her childhood self in this second scene — she also, at once, sees someone else — another little girl seated on the lawn of Holnicote House, approximately three to five years her senior. (We should note, too, that we lose sight of the seven children in the picture to instead focus on Carby’s affinity with a single figure, the better to represent the presumed alienation of both orphancy and Carby’s personal childhood experience.) Moreover, this uncanny collapse of subject–object or self–other opposites may go both ways, since the phrasing “the two-year old girl that bore my name” is a strikingly distant way to describe a childhood image of yourself. The passage relates, then, an intricate yet confounding relation that differs from the Proustian moment of the madeleine. It is closer to Toni Morrison’s use of “rememory” — that “trope”, as Caroline Rody explains, which “postulates the interconnection of minds, past and present” (2001: 28).

So, in this uncanny scene, a declared intimacy with a group of seven children gives way to incoherency and insensibility as the selves, child and adult, of the “auto” bleed indistinguishably with a single “historical” other, a single girl on the lawn of Holnicote House. The technical psychoanalytic term for this mass confusion is identification. But rather than simply identifying with the image or idea of this young girl at Holnicote House, Carby records a physical sensation of clutching or gripping that, in its conversion into an involuntary physical feeling, sounds faintly hysterical. ⁶ Once more, there is a sly ambiguity in the text’s wording, for when Carby says that she “felt [the girl’s] tight grip on to her books”, it’s unclear whether Carby means that she feels her own hand clasping an object (as if possessed or inhabited by the girl), or, inversely, that the auto-historian feels, somewhere, the pressure of this girl’s hand (as if it were Carby herself that is the book being held tightly by the girl). In other words, the reader can’t know from this utterance if Carby is gripping or gripped by this girl that she sees, holding or held, agent or object of the force. Rather than this being a situation where Carby claims orphancy as her own identity, overriding the material differences between her life and the anonymous girl’s, this moment models what Cheng, remarking on the text in general, calls “a hermeneutics, not of suspicion, but susceptibility” (2020). That is, Carby stages a reflective reading that “radically undermin[es] the divisions between public and private, scholar and woman, as well as a host of binary terms that dog discussions of racial encounters” (Cheng, 2020).

This uncanny tendency to avow susceptibility, along with its similarities to Morrison’s rememory, further positions Carby’s text within a recent strain of Black feminist scholarship and non-fictional writing and the ways, from critical fabulation to listening to images, these authors attempt to “become undisciplined” from anti-Black procedures of thinking Black life (Sharpe, 2016: 13). Indeed, Carby’s recognition of herself in the image of an unknown, vulnerable, young Black girl — and the twinned representational and ethical challenge this image provokes against orthodox scholarship — is another instantiation of a repeated scene in recent Black feminist non-fictional writing. This staging occurs in “A Minor Figure” in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) and is central to Sharpe’s chapter “The Ship” in In the Wake, further linking Carby’s text with Sharpe’s project of care. Sharpe writes of the girl she looks at: “In her I recognize myself, by which I mean, I recognize the common conditions of Black being in the wake” (2016: 45). She later writes: “What happens when we look at and listen to these and other Black girls across time? […] This looking makes ethical demands on the viewer; demands to imagine otherwise” (2016: 51). Carby’s complex writing of her somatic reaction and her articulation of susceptibility register this reckoning, foregrounding its resistance to simple representation.

Furthermore, it is no coincidence that this unparented girl, a not-quite orphan, clutches a “boo[k]” of “worlds” as Carby, the auto-historian, writes this one. The final line of this passage presents the reader with a Möbius strip, where the author authors a book dedicated to limning a historical web that traverses the world and, in that very text, sees herself consumed or held by a girl that reads worlds within books. This image, that twists and inverts its position, epitomizes the paradox of conjoining “auto” and “history”, or the complexity of cultivating a historiographic method that does not, as Fuentes says in her review of the text, “impose [an] analytical distance on our subjects” (2021: 169). To repeat, this is an important moment — in terms of both historical content and literary form — where Imperial Intimacies undisciplines itself. Here, Carby avows her susceptibility to incorporating others’ images over the illusion of possessing a self-reliant independence, just as she tries to recreate, in words, the sensation of being in the break when telling a broken history that resists being written. What arises from pursuing this project is a logical pressure that, like the ephemeral feel of the girl’s hand, places extraordinary stress on the operations of her language, so that the fluttering and proximate positions of subject and object in the text’s study of a colonial and racial order also worry the sense of its sentences. Moreover, Carby’s experience of space and time “folding” at Holnicote House, a moment of subjective dislocation, is also implicitly presented by the text as a vital and transformative encounter that can also be facilitated through the material dimensions of reading this very text as a book-object. In addition to the “folding” of “space and time” echoing the folds of a book, Carby’s later statement on “the encounter between black and white”, while clearly referencing race, may also refer to the black and white of the text’s words and grainy images (2019: 99). Indeed, in the first edition of the book, the image of this girl at Holnicote House and the childhood photograph of Carby are printed on opposite sides of the same page, so that they are imprinted on the same surface without ever facing one another. Nevertheless, their stories are bound together.

In pinpointing how Carby’s identification with the unparented adoptee figure expounds “intimacies as method”, this close reading finds a tendency within Imperial Intimacies to associate the non-belonging of a shared racialized, colonial exclusion with the transportive potential of writing and reading history against the grain (moving against, to recall the text’s preface, the accounts of Carby’s family and those found in the national archives). The considered reflections on the condition of the former operates, among other things, as a metaphor for the latter. In Imperial Intimacies, the unadopted adoptee can potentially defamiliarize the histories of the family and the nation, just as an attendance to the details of documents can free one’s thinking from the possession of the received forms and categories of colonial logic. (These insights are by no means guarantees but more simply possibilities that could be opened up by the experience of reflecting on familial dispossession.) In fact, Carby reflects at one point that:

I came to disbelieve my mother’s stories and considered them self-serving. I orphaned myself to cling to my desk and books. My final act of defiance as my mother’s errant daughter is to rewrite her stories to retrieve a different kind of sense from the remains. (2019: 127; emphasis added)

Since the act of orphaning — here meant as unsticking oneself from familial ties — is attached in this moment, as with the girl at Holnicote House, with the transformative dimensions of a critical reading and writing, orphancy may also be a condition that Carby attempts to pass down to her reader through her careful work of retracing and challenging the history of British colonialism.

However, the general possibility of a reader’s self-orphaning through these means remains an open question since, as the above passage also makes clear, the deliberate act of orphaning oneself in this text is also a way for Carby to remain true to her family in particular, even if as an “errant daughter”. This may seem like a counter-intuitive proposition, but Carby finds the condition of orphancy as a specific form of inheritance she has received. Towards the end of the text, Carby explores the “tangled web of Carbys” that lived on the nineteenth-century plantations of Jamaica “from the enslaved, the manumitted and the free” (2019: 290). It should be clear by now that this “tangled web” echoes the evocation of the “spider’s web” in the text’s preface previously discussed, the metaphoric web of filiations that both Jerng and Yngvesson used to describe transracial adoption, and the “multifarious strands” of McLeod’s formulation of adoptive being (2015: 26). Among the history of Carby’s ancestors and relatives on her father’s side, starting with the white Englishman Lilly Carby, Carby finds his enslaved Black son, Matthew. Upon Lilly Carby’s death, Carby writes:

Matthew Carby did not inherit. He was owned and enslaved by his half-brother and sister, William Ivey Carby and Bridget Ivey Carby. After emancipation his plot of land was too small to be recorded in the Jamaican Almanacs and, other than in Lilly’s will and the baptismal records of his children, the archives are silent about him. His life may be an unfilled space in the imperial inventories but for me Matthew proved to be more than a loose end from Lilly’s will. “Mulatto Matty”, Lilly’s “brown child” from the Elysium estate, ties me to Lilly Carby. William, the eldest child of Matthew and Sarah, was my great, great grandfather. (2019: 308)

Thus, a particular truth of Carby’s family is not only the record of racialized enslavement facilitated through the British Empire, but the disinheritance of the enslaved. As “more than a loose end” that is of but not in the recorded family, Matthew Carby, like the unparented unadopted girl on the lawn on Holnicote House, appears as another one of the “orphan threads” within Imperial Intimacies’ expansive tale (2019: 4). Just as the girl causes/effects an ambiguous excess of energy upon Carby, so Matthew Carby similarly connotes a certain surcharge as “more than a loose end”, despite his “silent” position within “an unfilled space in the imperial inventories” (emphasis added). And like the girl at Holnicote House, Matthew Carby is not in the strictest sense an orphan. Rather, both occupy an underdetermined and under-recorded position of parental and official abandonment because of a racist ordering. Furthermore, both are described in the text, like Carby herself, as a brown child. This suggests that what draws Carby to Matthew is more than just a familial tie, but also their shared fact of having one Black and one white parent. Unlike his great-great-great-granddaughter, however, Matthew is disowned as a descendant and owned as property. He is situated within colonial ledgers as outside of familial and historical recognition, a kind of being without that Carby partially retrieves through her fidelity to finding remains, loose ends, and fragments in official records. Again, this kind of care toward aesthetic and historical fragmentation of Black life should be considered as a practice of wake work.

Just as the earlier section at Holnicote House illustrated the difficulty for Carby, as auto-historian, to distinguish between subject and object positions during a moment of intimate identification through the recognition of a startling personal parallel, so the research into Matthew Carby’s life similarly blurs the lines between subject and object positions. However, this time Imperial Intimacies highlights the common contradiction of a colonial, slave society, a contradiction that was either discretely written in matter-of-fact records or simply not recorded at all: that Matthew was both person and property, relative and enslaved. By reading against the grain of the archives — scrutinizing all its silences and “unfilled space[s]” — Carby recovers the fact of Matthew’s abjected status within her inherited surname, so that “Carby” corresponds as much to Matthew’s exclusion as to his white father/enslaver’s legacy. In this way, Carby locates a history of exclusion within her own family that, while not being a literal instance of orphancy, expresses a similar distance from (yet implication with) colonial British familialism.

Conclusion

Orphancy in Imperial Intimacies is therefore a malleable trope taken up to describe the under-recorded and outcast status of the girl at Holnicote House, Matthew Carby, and Hazel Carby, all of whom point to a troubled history housed within the term Black Britishness, especially as it pertains to Black persons with a white biological parent. Yet, as my analysis has shown, the prevalence of the orphan as a figure in Imperial Intimacies has always been in some sense inappropriate or appropriative since neither Matthew, nor Hazel, nor the girl at Holnicote House are, in the primary definition of the term, orphans. Carby finds use in the trope of orphancy to communicate her growing perception of a clouded, complex social pattern of disarticulations across continents and centuries that has, before she was ever aware, shaped her identity. This is the cause of her recognition of and identification with these unparented historical subjects. In this way, the use of the orphan figure in this text is closer to catachresis than metaphor. That is, the term orphan, as used in the text’s preface, has been borrowed and adapted to describe a thing without its own proper name. It echoes the situation outlined in Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, where the very lack of terminology for the female equivalent of a male child of “bastard status […] provides further insight into the coils and recoils of patriarchal wealth and fortune” (1987: 65). As with Spillers’ argument, the foreclosure of a proper language here (and the need to borrow other terms) is itself a political phenomenon that displaces and disguises a relational problem between persons onto the subjects at the most vulnerable point of that relation. This notion of foreclosure, inadequate language, and disguised histories returns us to the representational concerns that are endemic to postcolonial autotheory and its interest in generic innovation and deformation.

It is worth holding onto the tension between the figurative and material histories of orphancy. While on the one hand, this tension risks defacing the lives of historical and present-day orphans who might not see themselves in the text’s use of this trope, this conflict also speaks to the historical resistance to naming the topics and persons Carby tries to bring into focus. I would argue that reading Imperial Intimacies’ adapted use of orphancy as unethical, however, would miss the larger point of this work of auto-history and critical adoption studies alike. In his theorization of adoptive being, McLeod writes that examining the dynamics of adoption “contains the capacity […] to invite the non-adopted to entertain the extent to which their own personhood, readily legitimated by normative narrative arcs and assumptions, is the product of passages” (2015: 229). That is, “adoptive being [might] expose something of the polyform cultural transactionality upon which personhood depends” (McLeod, 2015: 28). This exposure is precisely what is staged in Carby’s work of auto-history and its interest in the frailties of family inheritance. Imperial Intimacies underscores that it is not simply the experience of unparenting or adoption that can lead one to recognize the polyform nature — or web — of personhood, but that other approaches and positions (that are similarly attentive to material histories, interpersonal relations, and forms of expression) can also critically re-orient our conceptions of social being. Carby therefore approaches McLeod’s notion of adoptive being from a different direction — not by studying the disorienting and fragmentary experience of adoptees, but by defamiliarizing the naturalism of biological familialism (and the edicts of inheritance it implies) from the inside. The book notes the parallels between the inside and outside of the biological family, as a historical construct, without eliminating the differences this boundary produces. It thus builds on an insight from Homans, who declares, “the experience of adoption reveals that all parenthood is fundamentally adoptive, for adoption is not just a poor copy of a sterling original but rather […] the copy that reveals there is no original, no tenable distinction between copy and original” (2002: 265–66). Imperial Intimacies’ careful treatment of “orphan threads” is, in this view, a productive extension of adoptive being that considers the alienation produced by the British Empire’s institution of family.

Even as a daughter dedicated to her parents and to her traceable ancestors, then, Carby finds her home as an auto-historian in the parallels between the postcolonial status of the Black Briton and the orphan figure. She does so as a postcolonial autotheorist who knows that this orphan figure is never fully itself, but is, in this specific history of empire, an avatar for the unrecognized, the racialized, and the out of place. Orphancy, here, describes the misplaced and displaced children of colonial and neocolonial British history and presents itself as an incipient model for elaborating the suppressed and forestalled life and relations from within that sociohistorical framework. It’s probably for this reason that Imperial Intimacies’ “initial title”, as mentioned in a later essay, was “Child of Empire” (2021: 199). It’s also probably why Fuentes, in a remarkable aside in her response to the text, also states that “I, too, am a daughter (an adopted daughter) of postwar Britain’s troubled ghosts” (2021: 174). In both instances, disinheritance or disarticulation is read as a kind of colonial inheritance and one that a certain practice of reading can help reveal, repeating, in another register, the “passages” written in critical adoptions studies (McLeod, 2015: 229).

But Carby also approaches the orphan as a literary life-writer who knows that no individual is ever fully themselves in the words or images that are procured or possessed to tell their own life-story, since to adopt or hold these orphan threads together risks, in turn, being adopted, held, and overtaken by their insecure status and painful histories — what Yngvesson refers to as “the eye of the storm” and what Cheng calls a practice of susceptibility (2003: 23). This openness to exposure, I would suggest, is what separates such postcolonial orphan figures from the orphaned British nation “born of” empire: they possess a viewpoint and motive to wrestle with the historical co-constitution of home and non-belonging (Koram, 2022: 28). This, in turn, could produce a resistance to any formal adoption that disguises a forced adaptation, though not necessarily. While such symbolic orphans — as untimely outsider figures that carry the record of a social existence without programmed guidance or authority — may not directly point to a world without empire’s imperatives, their usage in postcolonial and anticolonial contexts nevertheless chronicles the open struggles within the longstanding concepts of possession, inheritance, and belonging. Such concepts have been reared, as Carby argues, from within the contradictions of colonial authority.