A lawyer friend of the family says he knows of three Canadians who’ve been asked at the U.S. border by immigration officers whether they support Donald Trump. I’ve searched my memory, but can’t think of anyone who was queried about any other U.S. president. When I mentioned this to an American friend, she emailed back, “I’ve also heard from two Canadian friends, similar stories about people being questioned at the border about Trump, then having to turn their phones (social media) over, then getting their passport stamped with a 3-5 year ban on travel to the U.S.” 

Hearing this, a couple of people have told me that while they’re not planning to travel to the States, they’ve also decided not to pay attention to stories like this; to the news in general. They can no longer face the hourly barrage of Trump, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine. It makes them too anxious—and one is about to undergo a biopsy, while the other is coping with a family crisis. 

Of course. No blame.

But tuning out the news has become common. According to The Guardian, “Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.”

So what has this got to do with the book I just read? The Trembling Hand by historian Mathelinda Nabugodi is a work of non-fiction about the 19^th century Romantic writers—Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and the Shelleys, Mary and Percy.

Yet despite its gentle title, Nabugodi’s spiky and absorbing work centres on the writers’ complicated relationship with slavery. They were the rock stars of their time, and spoke up publicly and honorably against both the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself, at least when they were young. But Nabugodi’s book shows how the Romantic poets could loudly say one thing and quietly do another, tuning out bad news big time when it suited them. The British empire had grown rich through colonialism and slavery, and even a firebrand poet could sometimes find it convenient to ignore that.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest son of a clergyman who died when Sam was nine years old. His impoverished mother managed to place him in a charitable school in London that had been set up for the sons of needy clerics. He excelled there, and graduated in 1791 at the top of his class. This secured Coleridge a place at Cambridge, where he quickly landed the coveted Rustat Prize, a scholarship that kept him comfortable throughout university. Nabugodi calculates the £29 it brought him annually was the equivalent of almost £50,000 today, or $93,435 Canadian. A second scholarship and part-time position in the college library more than tripled his annual income to £100.

It was during his first year at Cambridge that Coleridge made his name as a poet, winning an annual competition for the best ode written in Greek. That year’s subject, “The unhappy fate of the slaves in the West Indian islands,” was set by the university chancellor. Yet Coleridge worked hard on his entry, and with apparent sincerity. His fellow student Samuel Butler later said his ode was “tinged with a deep feeling of melancholy, and moral pathos.” 

Here’s the irony: The prize that helped fund Coleridge’s studies had been endowed by Tobias Rustat, a 17^th century courtier and one of the founding members of the Royal African Company, which Nabugodi calls “the most prolific slave-trading organization the world has ever seen. 

“Rustat had many income streams due to his privileged position in the court of King Charles II,” she writes, “so it would be inaccurate to say that all his wealth came from the slave trade, but he was investing in the Royal African Company and actively involved in its governance for a period of over thirty years.”

Did Coleridge know who had funded the Rustat prize? Did it cause him any qualms? If it did, the evidence suggests he got over them. Coleridge spent his years at Cambridge both protesting slavery and living off some very dirty money. 

Then there’s the free-spending George Gordon, Lord Byron. To pay off his massive debts, Byron was forced to sell Newstead Abbey, a crumbling medieval pile that had been in his family since 1540. The buyer was his old school friend Thomas Wildman, who paid him £94,500. Adjusted for inflation, that’s £9 million in today’s money, or $16.8 million Canadian. 

Yet taking into account Britain’s GDP, Nabugodi says that £94,500 would have the buying power of about £550 million today. By now we’ve reached about $1 billion Canadian. The sale made Byron filthy rich, a term I used advisedly, since Wildman’s fortune came from owning an immensely profitable sugar plantation in the parish of St. Mary’s, Jamaica, where several hundred people were enslaved.

“I am unacquainted with his means or his property,” Byron wrote rather airily. In fact, Nabugodi demonstrates that Wildman inherited the plantation when he was only nine years old, several years before he went to Harrow with Byron. They were close, as Nabugodi shows with quotes from Byron’s diaries. “Who would like to concede that one’s ancestral home had come to this?” she asks. “Better remain ‘unacquainted.’”

Another word is complicit. Byron’s choice of buyer made him complicit in slavery, just as the Rustad Prize made Coleridge a profiteer. 

Not that I think we can feel smug or superior. Even when we decide to turn off the news, we remain embedded in injustice. Our countries manufacture the bombs that rain down on Gaza. Our systems fail to help the homeless. Do we make sure to spare some change for the woman on the corner with her sign saying she’s hungry? Or do we tune out the bad news there too, and just keep walking?

The Trembling Hand is subtitled Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive. Nabugodi was born in Sweden to a white Belarusian mother and a Black father from Uganda, and as the subtitle says, she identifies as Black. At 18, she set off to study at the University of Edinburgh, which she hoped would prove more diverse than Sweden. She went on to do her PhD in creative critical writing at University College London, where she’s now a lecturer. 

Nabugodi’s material often troubled me, yet The Trembling Hand is the kind of detail-rich book I love to read. Each of its six main chapters centres on a Romantic writer, and each spins around an object she examines in a museum or archive. In the Lake District, she takes a look at William Wordsworth’s favorite teacup. At Oxford University, she strokes mourning jewelry made from Mary Shelley’s hair. She takes a whiff of Byron’s prosthetic boots, holds Percy Shelley’s baby rattle and inspects John Keats’s death mask. All lead to riffs on masks in African and Caribbean cultures, on Byron’s disability and especially on women’s hair, which plays an important role in the book. 

Nabugodi, we learn, has a fraught relationship with her own hair. She disliked it as a child and struggled to control it later on. Touching the bracelet made from Mary Shelley’s hair—now very brittle—reminds her of the time she applied for a lectureship at an unnamed university. She was required to deliver a workshop there as a try-out, and was walked to the classroom by a white woman she’d never met. The woman mentioned Nabugodi’s resemblance to another lecturer (there was none, aside from the fact both were Black) and stopped to talk about braids.

“Then I see her hand coming toward me. It feels as if it is happening in slow motion, as somewhere deep inside a small scream is born, reverberating through my brain as it grows into a shout: No, no, no, she’s not going to do it! But she does…Her fingers dig into my hair.”

I was repelled by the fact anyone would do this, and shocked to read that white strangers touch Nabugodi’s hair all the time. She always finds it distressing, and in this case she rattled her way through the workshop nearly shaking with fury. She says that most of her white friends are surprised to hear the story. Most of her Black friends have faced the same thing. 

I often laid The Trembling Hand on my lap to think about what I’d just read. Now I thought not just, “How can anyone do that?” But, “How could I not know this?” A few days later, I emailed a friend who’s Black to ask if it happens in Canada. 

“Yes,” she wrote back. “I have heard Canadians say this happened to them. Not a lot, I think. Maybe the last time I talked to someone about this, she said she accepted it as guileless curiosity. I think it may have happened to me once. I don’t remember any specifics, so it may not have. People very definitely experience other microaggressions.”

In the end, book in my lap, I thought back to Nabugodi’s main point about the complicity of the Romantics in slavery, and about our own complicity in the injustices of our time, and drew up a list. What we know about injustice—and don’t—can be informed not just by tuning out, glancing aside, remaining “unacquainted;” by growing exhausted at the state of the world and from the trauma in our personal lives; by self-interest, money (that’s a big one), but also by simple ignorance. 

Picking up the book again, I began noting down the details piled up in Nabugodi’s riffs, which are wonderfully researched and deeply evocative. 

Mary and Percy Shelley’s personal physician, William Lawrence, created a taxonomy for children born to white men and enslaved Black women that lays racism starkly bare. He called the child of a white man and a Black woman a mulatto, while tercerons were the children of a European man and a mulatto woman, and quarterons were born to whites and tercerons. 

“Quarterons are not to be distinguished from whites,” he writes, but “there is still a contamination of dark blood, although no longer visible. It is said to display itself sometimes in the relic of a peculiar strong smell of the great-grandmother.” (Italics mine.)

In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that in the east of Libya lived “dog-headed men and the headless that have their eyes in their breasts.” Jump to 1816, when Byron read his friends a poem by Coleridge containing lines about a witch’s breasts. 

“As he got to that point,” writes Nabugodi, “silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. What he was afterwards queried about what caused his fright, Shelley confessed that he had been ‘looking at Mrs. S., and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.” It is not known what Mary thought about being mistaken for one of the nipple-eyed monsters of Africa, but I cannot imagine that she was much amused.”

Then there’s Lord Byron himself. He was born with what was described at the time as a club foot. Since he tried to obscure his disability, no precise description was left, and modern physicians can’t diagnose his condition. However, I was struck by one detail. Nabugodi writes that one of his friends “claimed that, on entering a room, Byron ‘would wheel round from chair to chair, until he reached the one where he proposed sitting.’”  

Disabled people still do that, and these days it’s called chair surfing. It’s surprising how much doesn’t change. 

Also deeply disturbing. 

The Trembling Hand is erudite, discursive and enlightening, and I recommend it highly. Yet I want to close with a bad memory it excavated. 

It happened one morning around 1990 when I lived in Rio de Janeiro. I was walking along the main shopping street in Leblon down the hill from our apartment. It was a prosperous area, and I was heading for my favorite bakery. A pleasant day, not too hot. I think I was about a block from the bakery when I glanced into the street, where cars had stopped for a streetlight. No particular reason to look. But as I watched, a guy on a motorcycle stopped beside the open window of a white car and shot the driver in the head.

I stood there in shock, the image implanting so firmly in my mind that I can still see it. I registered the motorcycle speeding away but couldn’t move. Then a woman I’d never seen before took my arm and urged me along the sidewalk.

“We’re just going to keep walking,” she said. “We’re just going to keep walking and talk normally.”

I can’t remember whether she spoke English or Portuguese. I’m not sure I knew at the time; I merely registered her meaning. She was a coiffed blond woman wearing a white dress, middle-aged and upper middle-class, and she chatted normally as we walked away from the shooting, eventually turning a corner. Once we were out of sight of the main street, Avenida Ataulfo de Paiva, she dropped my arm and told me, “You go home now,” and walked away.

Chatter in my head. But shouldn’t I talk to the cops? Or was the motorcycle guy a cop? An off-duty cop? Part of a drug gang? Both? Cops being notoriously corrupt. Get in trouble if I go back. When the driver is dead. Didn’t he look dead? Never saw the shooter’s face. Wearing a helmet, visor down. Black leather jacket. Couldn’t identify. But, but, but, the right thing to do. It’s complicated. Yet shouldn’t I….?

Meanwhile I kept walking. I was shaking now, scared, going home because I’d been told to. 

Since fear is part of complicity, too. As is obedience.