The Middle Passage in fiction

• Ralph A. Austen
  • Sender: "The history of slavery, the slave trade, abolition and emancipation" <SLAVERY@LISTSERV.UH.EDU> From: "Steven Mintz, U. Houston" <SMintz@UH.EDU>
    Subject: Middle Passage: Memory, History, Metaphor
    
    From:   IN%"wwb3@midway.uchicago.edu"  "Ralph Austen" 11-DEC-1998 11:30:25.46
    
    I have just finished teaching a quarter course on the Atlantic slave trade and am struck again by the apparent self-imposed limitations of the Middle Passage experience in major African-American literary works.  I know that Charles Johnson won a National Book Award for a novel with this title, but if you read the work it is hard to consider it a serious reflection on the subject of its title, particularly from the viewpoint of the enslaved African passengers.  Other writers, such as the poet Robert Haydon and (in part), the novelist Caryl Phillips (CROSSING THE RIVER) write about this experience from the perspective of the European perpetrators.  Phillips, in this same (and, I think, very fine) book, uses all sorts of metaphorical or parallel events to represent the primal voyage across the Atlantic. Perhaps I am missing some major works (I have discussed this with my colleague in African-American literature, Kenneth Warren) but if not, this is something worth reflecting upon and even considering in the forthcoming exhibit which prompts this comment.  In either case, I would be interested in seeing what other participants in H-slavery have to say.
    
    Ralph A. Austen
    Professor of African History
    Chair, Committee on International Relations
    University of Chicago

   

• Bronwyn Mills

  • From:   IN%"ZonaSur@aol.com" 12-DEC-1998 08:37:35.15
    
    A friend recommends--not African-American, unfortunately, Barry Unsworth's SACRED HUNGER. It has just arrived on my bookshelf, so I protest total ignorance as yet.
    
    My personal, and probably not very academic, opinion is  that the experience was so traumatic and the long journey to manumission so fraught with the pressures of stark survival, psychologically as much as literally, that it wasn't exactly a story one sat around the campfire retelling.  In the US, anyhow, don't forget that the international trade was illegal after 1808--mind you the illegal trade still went on, as did trade along the coasts. The famous AMISTAD, as I'm sure you are aware, was an ILLEGAL slaver.  I guess what I'm saying is that, without literacy for so long--in Frederick Douglass's AUTOBIOGRAPHY, he refers to the laws prohibiting the education of slaves as being kept in darkness--you might not expect more immediate written, let alone fictionalized responses to the African holocaust, as one might, say, in the case of the Jews of Europe.  I am also thinking of how strongly linked to the oral traditions of language and telling much of African American literature is in this country--which doubles back to my remark about "sitting around the campfire."  Only recently, is it a subject in the public discourse, don't forget, since the Civil Rights era--and despite the endurance of racism and its fellow-travelers in this country.  (I have white students who say such charming things in their essays as, why don't 'they' just get over it?)  I myself am attempting some work on it--it seems a rather long haul at the moment--and I'm not sure I can say anything much at this point.
    
    I could go on about the other stuff, but that may not be all that helpful.
    
    B. Mills

   

• Dave Nathanson
  • From:   IN%"dave_nathanson@hotmail.com"  "David Nathanson" 12-DEC-1998 15:58:45.29
    
    I am not sure this is entirely responsive to Ralph's query but here goes anyway. In any event, the following non-historical sources on the Middle Passage might prove to be useful teaching tools for some of you.
    
    Amiri Baraka (formerly Leroi Jones) has an incredibly powerful poem about the Middle Passage titled, "So the King Sold the Farmer, #39" which can be found in his collection _Transbluesency_ (Marsilio, 1995). I was present when Baraka read this poem at this year's Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, New Jersey before several thousand people. Although the text version is powerful, Baraka's dramatic reading drove some of the people around me to tears. Bill Moyers and PBS often tape the Dodge Festival. Hopefully, that particular reading will be available on videotape sometime in the next few years.
    
    Lucille Clifton also has a tremendous poem on the topic which I believe is currently available on the "Language of Life" video produced by Moyers and PBS and can also be found in the book, _Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945_ (Little, Brown, and Company, 1994).
    
    the text of the poem can be found here:
    http://dept.english.upenn.edu/~hbeavers/281/clifton-slaveship.html

   

• Manu Herbstein
  • From:   IN%"manuherb@africaonline.com.gh"  "Manu Herbstein" 12-DEC-1998 19:43:21.45
    
    Ralph Austen is "struck . . . by the apparent self-imposed limitations of the Middle Passage experience in major African-American literary works."
    
    I'm not sure that I understand this.  If Prof. Austen is simply asking why so few African American novelists have written stories of the Middle Passage, why does he restrict himself to African American writers?  Is this subject off-limits to other Americans?
    
    Those who made the crossing were, of course, Africans, not African Americans. To recreate successfully the experience of the Middle Passage in fiction, requires an African perspective and a more than superficial understanding of African history and culture.
    
    Does the American educational system offer American children, including African Americans, any encounter at all with African history and culture or the history of the Slave Trade?  If these subjects remain largely taboo, or at least unconsidered, doesn't that suggest the answer to Prof. Austen's question?
    
    Incidentally, the Americans who have written some of the best novels dealing with the Slave Trade were not African Americans. I'm thinking of Harold Courlander's The African and Judith Gleason's Agotime, her legend, though that remarkable book is really about religious experience, and only indirectly about the slave trade.
    
    Caryl Phillips, whom Prof. Austen mentions, was born in St. Kitts and grew up in England.  He hardly qualifies as an African American.
    
    Fred D'Aguiar, who writes of the Middle Passage in Feeding the Ghosts, is from Guyana.
    
    The perspective in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, is European. (Incidentally, what does B. Mills mean when he describes Unsworth as 'not African-American, unfortunately?')
    
    One might pose Prof. Austen's question about African writers, too.  The answer would be similar.  One Ghanaian writer told me that she grew up virtually in the shadow of one of the slave castles, but that no one ever explained their significance to her.
    
    I have written a novel of the trans-Atlantic slave trade told entirely from an African point of view. In spite of my American agent's enthusiasm and vigorous marketing, he has failed to find it a publisher in the U.S. My impression is that publishers' editors do not think that this subject, treated from an African point of view, would be of interest to American readers. Do subscribers to this list believe otherwise? My story ends in Brazil. It was suggested to me that I might have a better chance of publication if I were to shift the ending to North America.
    
    Amazon, by the way, advises the forthcoming publication of Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (W.E.B. Du Bois Institute (Series).) Maria Diedrich(Editor). This might shed some further light on these issues.
    
    Manu Herbstein, Accra, Ghana

   

• Jon-Christian Suggs

  • From:   IN%"jcsjj@sprintmail.com"  "jon-christian suggs" 12-DEC-1998 21:36:43.03
    
    I would just point out  a) Martin Delany's _Blake; or the Huts of America_, serialized between 1859 and 1861 erratically. Delany represents a slaving voyage from Cuba to West Africa and back in the mid '50s and b) the stream-of-consciousness sections recreating the Middle Passage via the sensibilities of Beloved in the novel of that name.
    
    If you will take film as a kind of African-American narrative, then Julie Dash's _Daughters of the Dust_ has a meditation on the Middle Passage.
    
    Jon-Christian Suggs
    Professor, English
    John Jay College/CUNY
    jcsjj@sprintmail.com

   

• Bronwyn Mills

  • From:   IN%"ZonaSur@aol.com" 13-DEC-1998 11:28:04.37
    
    <<The perspective in Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, is European. (Incidentally, what does B. Mills mean when he describes Unsworth as 'not African-American, unfortunately?')>>
    
    You presume I am a male person, interestingly.
    
    What I meant was in response to the query for an African American writer that Unsworth did not fit the request and in that sense, it was "unfortunate".  I think the original query was quite specific--what about African American writers' response to the experience in their writing, not whether anyone else was qualified to /should  or should not write about it as well - was there something unique about its under- representation in African American literature?
    
    I do, however, think that you bring up an important issue:  market driven arts are being pressured to fit the ideas of the publishers/producers about salability--certainly in the US they are--not about art or historical accuracy.  Certainly Brazil, its long history or slavery, and the continued communication among slaves and Africa is a logical possibility for a book about the MP.
    
    In addition to explaining some things about skewed topics, the marketing--ugh!--issue may also help to explain why certain works are chosen/not chosen for public airing.
    
    B. Mills

   

• Catherine Clinton
  • From:   IN%"redhead2@IDT.NET" 14-DEC-1998 07:13:36.00
    
    In response to the B. Mills comment about someone's remark that Barry Unsworth is "unfortunately" not African American---concerning teaching this book in an undergraduate course.
    
    I understand that this person is responding to the ironies and concerns that we daily face teaching and writing African American history--
    
    Regardless of our personal preferences, in political terms race matters and dictates decisions.
    
    I have been criticized publicly in a class for assigning Melton McLaurin's Celia, A Slave because it was written by a white man--setting aside that it is one of the best interpretive books, full of rich historical resources and insights on the sexual exploitation of African American women--a topic too long ignored in traditional historical research.
    
    I continue to teach this book, and try to teach my students that sensitivity to historical subjects is not limited to those of a specific gender or skin color--but this casual remark brings up the quagmire, the quicksand surrounding these subjects, and that we rarely are willing to speak openly about this topic, something which I think continues to hobble the field.
    
    I have written an essay called "Contents Under Pressure: White Woman/Black History" which appears in Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Writing on Race (ed. by Marita Golden and Susan Shreve)--but I find few in the field are willing to tackle the dynamics of this vast array of hot buttons--and that panels I have tried to organize on this topic for programs at historical meetings have been turned down.
    
    So perhaps we will continue to grapple on without open discussion, which remains "unfortunate."
    
    Catherine Clinton