American slave narratıve

AMERICAN SLAVE NARRATIVE : 

AMERICAN SLAVE NARRATIVE

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The slave narrative is a litarery form which emerges from the experience of enslaved Africans in Britain and its colonies. It includes the memories of six thousand former slaves from North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, with about 150 published as separate books or pamphlets. . In addition, there are also written documents of white Americans or Europeans captured and enslaved in North Africa, usually by pirates.

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Although Slave narratives were first produced in England in the 18th century, they soon became a mainstay of African American literature. Novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin represented the abolitionist view of evil of slavery; however white southern-writers responded by writing so-called anti-Tom novels in an attempt to represent pro-slavery viewpoint. Furthermore, narratives of slavery recounted the personal experience of African-Americans who had escaped from slavery to arrive at North.

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Most studies of black American culture have concentrated on its oral aspects, folk tale, music religion because they have seemed most distinctive. In addition, the slave narrator was much more than passive assimilator of another culture’s literary tradition. It is crucial that throughout the 18th century American slave narratives were free of outside influence; the pressures and strategies came later. The first slave narrative Adam’s Negro Tryall, was published in 1703.

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The narratives suggest the traditional picaresque in a number of ways, but the resemblance resulted from “a natural fit of the picaresque mode with the slaves’ own experience than from a need the narrators felt to shape the description of their lives for a literary purpose.” ( Hedin,633)

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To present the reality of slavery, a number of former slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass published accounts of their enslavement. “These can be categorized into three distinct forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. The tales written to inspire the abolitionist struggle are the most famous because they tend to have a strong autobiographical motif, such as in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.”(Wikipedia)

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In the “Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”, the protagonist asserts that “…of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.” (Ferguson, 297) In these quotations Christian violence and abuse are much more prevalent when compared with the other religions. While the religion is supposed to have a purifying effect upon the character of man, it reverses all general opinions.

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Rather than emphasize the material result of slavery, as most scholars tend to do, the slave writers focuses on its human causes in an attempt to understand why white people chose to victimize them.”Their representation of religious violence identify deep and psychological forces that drive the slaveowner to try imposing upon colored people in an absolute power and control rivalling that of the Maker Itself .” ( Ferguson, 298)

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All the members of human family are born physically unchained in a world of diverse sexes, cultures and skin colours. But the slave owners sought to steal from dark people the liberty that the original Maker endowed to all humans.

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The slave owners, in addition to their tortures, rape black women to satisfy their sexual desires. Although their sex leaves women vulnerable to rape, they usually remain spiritually vulnerable to slaveholders. Because only females can bear children, white oppressors seeking to reinvent Africans and get rich in the process must gain dominion over their bodies. In a letter a slaveholder Thomas Jefferson declared that “ I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of farm. What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.” “ As a slave, black woman was in entirely different relation (from the slave man) to the plantation patriarch. Her reproductive system…gave birth to property…and all slaves inherited their status from their mothers.”(Ferguson, 311)

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