Letting the slave narrative go

HAD A CHILD WITH HIS SLAVE: The novel Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud is about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the slave girl Sally Hemings, which began when she was a teenager. The book has been read by ‘half the USA’.

SLAVE NARRATIVES: Approximately 6,000 slave narratives were written between the late 18th century and the late 1930s. ‘This is the African-American primal genre through which black people acquire a voice for the first time,’ says Americanist Željka Švrljuga. She is researching new slave narratives. The modern portrayal of slave life is often experimental and engages in critical dialogue with the white portrayal of the slavery issue.

Text: Hilde Kvalvaag

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was based on the story of the slave Josiah Henson. The book made the white author rich, while Henson, who founded a colony in Canada for fugitives from slavery, went bankrupt and died in poverty. This is one of many examples of white writers helping themselves to a black person’s story. The beginning of the new wave of slave literature arrived with the publication of the white author William Styron’s Nat Turner’s Confessions. The book is about the slave icon Nat Turner, who led the biggest slave rebellion in the USA’s history in 1831, though it was presented in a ‘white packaging’. The book was seen as a new form of slave oppression and set off an avalanche of reactions in the form of novels and essays.

New form means freedom

Through these new slave narratives, today’s black writers have taken charge of their own history and of their people’s sufferings under slavery. Associate Professor Željka Švrljuga of the Department of Foreign Languages is writing a book about the modern slave narratives.

‘In the old slave narratives, the master-slave dynamic was repeated in the form. The slaves’ personal stories in the first person demanded a white foreword and a white epilogue in the texts. The narratives told of the misery of slavery, but the structure and language were ‘white’. In response to Styron’s novel about Nat Turner, came books such as Ishmal Read’s parody Flight to Canada, in which the first person narrator searches for the right narrative form to talk about slavery. The search for a narrative involves a search for a form, which in the novel shifts from poem to first-person narrative and, finally, to third-person narrative,' says Professor Švrljuga.

Intellectual slave

But there are also narratives within the new paradigm that have a more traditional narrative structure. One well-known example is Beloved by Toni Morrison. All the novels that Professor Švrljuga writes about are experimental, however. She mentions in particular the novel entitled The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last by Patricia Eakins as an exciting example of new slave literature.

Eakins’ point of departure is the French natural historian and systematist Comte de Buffon’s (1707-1788) Histoire naturelle and its understanding of race. Eakins challenges the 18^th century's knowledge of human beings by creating an intellectual slave character who becomes living proof of Buffon’s lack of knowledge about people with different cultural backgrounds and physical appearance. Eakins makes the slave Pierre Baptist a marine biologist who explores the colourful life of the ocean. This world becomes an analogy for the colourful and exciting slave society that is alien to white people. Out of this is born a new, fantastic androgynous species: the philoso-fish. These creatures, which spout out of the mouth, become Pierre's corrective. That we should learn from and listen to nature seems to be the main message of the novel.

Serves her child for dinner

Like the original slave narratives, the novel about Pierre Baptiste abounds in atrocities of slavery in the form of murder, violence and rape. But the most grotesque incident is not the murder of the child, which in black literature has become an image of female resistance to slavery; it is the raped woman’s revenge for the crime committed against her integrity and body. By serving her master her murdered baby for dinner, she returns the unwanted child to its father, the slave’s owner. But Eakins knows that this terrible act demands further punishment: the once beautiful slave is mutilated both internally and externally and becomes the horror of the plantation. This signifies that violent resistance breeds new violence from the whites. Ultimately, like most slave narratives, the novel focuses on the flight to freedom. The aspect that came to typify the new slave narratives was parody. The parodic aspect of the main character’s motive for escaping is presented: Pierre Baptist is subjected to sexual harassment by his female owner and runs away, although his primary motive is to get to France, where slavery has been abolished. But, in line with Eakins’ fantastic project, the main character wants to portray himself to Buffon as the ‘peculiar’ species of human: the black intellectual who challenges Buffon’s understanding of race.

As a parallel to the 19^th century invention of the concept of race, which made European expansion and colonialism possible, the novel revitalises the language in an attempt to do away with polarised thinking The message conveyed twice over by the slave narratives is: ‘This is not a story to pass on.’

The article is published in Hubro 4/2008