PIRATES, SEX, AND UTOPIA

Madagascar was the center of piracy in the Indian Ocean in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and according to Graeber, pirate ships served as ‘laboratories of democracy’. Pirates have traditionally come from diverse backgrounds, ranging from runaway slaves to men of noble descent, such as the legendary Stede Bonnet, the ‘Gentleman Pirate’. People of different classes and beliefs in the confined space of a ship, for better or worse, established some common norms of governance. While noting that there are different kinds of pirates, including common murderers, Graeber nevertheless sees them as people who ‘did indeed create, however briefly, a kind of rebel culture and civilization that, though surely brutal in many ways, developed its own moral code and democratic institutions’. After all, we remember the peculiar electoral procedures and the deposition of pirates from at least Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

The emergence of pirate settlements in Madagascar led to a series of revolutions, one of which resulted in a king named Ratsimilaho, the son of a pirate and a local woman, founding the Betsimisaraka confederation (‘the many unsundered’) on the eastern coast. Its members did not create a classic nation-state, which was generally difficult in the context of the island’s fragmented tribal structure, where small princes ruled and fought endless wars among themselves. But it is this rejection of the system that Graeber gives them credit for. Instead, the natives, partly with the connivance of the pirates, partly inspired by them, undertook a pioneering historical experiment in creating a decentralized society of universal equality. It was literally the coast of utopia, as Tom Stoppard1¹Tom Stoppard(born 1937) is a famous British playwright. One of his later works (a trilogy of plays) is called The Coast of Utopia and is devoted mainly to the philosophical debates in pre-revolutionary Russia between 1833 and 1866. would have put it.

In this case, Graeber is writing about the Enlightenment as a very specific historical epoch, not about a global model of consciousness still being debated. Whether the Enlightenment will continue to everyone’s delight, along with progress and humanism, as Steven Pinker2²Steven Arthur Pinker(born 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. One of his recent books is titled Enlightenment Now. and other optimists and improvementists argue, or whether it will drag the world into the abyss, as traditionalists and conservatives (and the first to sound the alarm were the romantic Nietzscheans) believe remains to be seen. For example, today’s fear of AI, with its potential ability to abolish humanity, is a classic example of the failure of the Enlightenment as pointed out by Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1947 work Dialectic of Enlightenment, which argued that the rapid march of progress eventually leads the world to concentration camps.

Graeber does not actually question the value of the Enlightenment, nor does he promote the popular rhetoric that where there is Enlightenment, there is oppression and other instances of the white man’s burden. He merely questions its European perspective, arguing that the ideas of freedom and progress hovered not only over Paris, Edinburgh, and Königsberg, but also on more distant and exotic shores. Why not recall, in the light of human emancipation, the Canadian Indian called Kondiaronk who lived in the same era as Montesquieu and Voltaire? One could say that Graeber decolonizes the Enlightenment, but the author himself was not too keen on the term ‘decolonial’, believing it to be little more than a buzzword.

Graeber admits to having had an affair with a Malagasy woman during that 1980s expedition — perhaps that’s why the book’s most vivid pages are devoted to the women’s political agenda in the area. ‘In Madagascar, sexual allure, and conversational skill, were seen as closely intertwined,’ the author notes. The pirates were single men without families, and they didn’t speak the local language, so local girls became not only lovers but also guides and mentors, and their children became the island’s new aristocracy. And in the sphere of ‘magical, commercial, and sexual adventure’, women far surpassed their partners. If visiting sailors and merchants tried to cheat them, their retribution was terrible. In particular, Graeber describes a rao-dia love rite in which a girl roasts a bit of earth that the man has stepped on, and pronounces the following curse: ‘If he shall not be mine, he shall not be anyone’s! May he die! And may his wife and children never know what killed him!’ A milder version, the tsimihoa-bonga, confined the lover within a special perimeter. Whatever the case, women in Madagascar gradually gained more and more political clout. It is no coincidence that the chief Ratsimilaho himself ‘was said to have died of debauchery and drink, setting off a flurry of deadly conflicts between his wives and concubines over which was responsible for poisoning him’.

Pirate Enlightenment reads like an extended afterword to such Graeber bestsellers like Debt (a treatise on why commodity-money relations are based on the amoral category of debt), Bullshit Jobs (the best antidote to going to an office), and, finally, The Dawn of Everything (an attempt to prove that buying and selling, bureaucracy, and social stratification were not originally built into the structure of primitive societies, and that things could have been different).

Graeber has sometimes been accused of being biased, of bending the facts to fit his invariably left-wing ideas. In the case of Pirate Enlightenment, he has certainly stepped on the thinnest of ice, for the subject matter is so exotic and poorly documented that it is difficult to distinguish between folklore and fabrication, between a political declaration and a tribal ritual sealed with ginger and blood. Graeber himself admits that the Malagasy clan chiefs, led by Ratsimilaho, just did some things, that some events we just know must have happened, and that the book itself tells of real and invented pirate kingdoms, the difference between which is difficult to discern.

However, for him, it is not just a symbolic dimension or the myth of the utopian republic of Libertaria (on which this Madagascar story is largely based). Throughout his life, he tried to touch the dawn of humanity, searching for the origins of true, unadulterated justice. The problem with history, according to Graeber, is not that it is eurocentric, but that it is boring and dull, when, in fact, things were much more interesting. Well, his latest book can be accused of being anything but boring. Reading it is like drinking a glass of seawater mixed with gunpowder as a token of friendship according to old pirate customs.

The book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia is kindly provided by Meloman Bookstore.