On the innovative and impressive lengths to which writers will go to capture one of our most horrific histories.
I know this is a
strange way to start a post, but I can still remember how impressed I was when
Alex Haley stripped down to his underwear. Toward the end of Haley’s Roots
(1976), the author details his painstakingly thorough research into the life of
his slave ancestors, and particularly into the book’s main protagonist, Kunta Kinte, who was
kidnapped into slavery in Africa and brought to the Americas as part of the
Middle Passage. In an effort to get slightly closer to the experience of that
horrific journey, Haley
stripped down and climbed into the crowded hold of a freight ship,
imagining himself in his tiny space surrounded by a sea of enchained,
enfeebled, sick and death-ridden and terrified fellow slaves, not knowing
whether he would survive nor where he was headed if he did. As Haley freely
admits, the act might seem silly, both literally and in its distance from the
Middle Passage itself—but it also symbolizes nicely Haley’s willingness to do
whatever he could to imagine himself back into his family’s, people’s, and our
national past; a willingness that certainly resulted in a highly detailed and
hugely compelling work of autobiographical and historical fiction.
It’s difficult
to imagine getting any closer to the details and specifics of the Middle
Passage than did Haley, in his own action and in the resulting section of the book.
But details and specifics are only part of a historical event, of course, and
not necessarily the most evocative or significant part. And other American
authors have made equally interesting stylistic choices in an attempt to
capture other, more ephemeral but no less meaningful sides to the Middle
Passage. Robert Hayden’s
dense and demanding poem “Middle Passage” (1962), for example, utilizes
numerous and varied formal elements to capture the passage’s many voices and
identities: direct quotes from journals and letters (written by not only slaves
but also slavers, other sailors, and more); the Biblical names of slave ships
juxtaposed with passages from Scripture; an extended quote from Shakespeare
that echoes many of the passage’s themes; Hayden’s own highly poetic and
evocative language and descriptions. The poem does not, to my mind, capture
much at all (nor does Hayden intend to) the experience or emotions for any one
slave—but it portrays the whole communal experience with deep and real power,
and contextualizes it in a longer literary, cultural, and human history at the
same time. Certainly both of those effects are likewise key to remembering the
Middle Passage.
Yet so too is
that individual side, and while Haley’s book does a great job conveying all the
details of what an individual slave might have experienced, I don’t know that
his journalistic style is quite able to capture the emotions and effects of
those experiences. For that, I’d highlight a brief but crucial section of one
of the most prominent American historical novels: Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Beloved is about the whole of slavery,
among many other weighty American themes, but in one particularly complex,
dazzling, and important passage Morrison makes it very specifically about the
Middle Passage; the passage, which represents the only section in which
Morrison uses her stream of consciousness style to portray the perspective of
the ghostly title character during her experiences after being killed and
before coming back to life (spoilers, sorry!), locates that character on the
Middle Passage, even though neither she nor any of the novel’s other characters
actually experienced the journey. There are thematic and historical effects to
that choice, making clear how much the passage served as a formative and foundational
experience for—a ghost that haunted, if you will—all that followed in slavery,
for African Americans, for America, and so on. Yet Morrison’s hugely compelling
stream of consciousness style also simply captures
the passage, the feel and emotions and moments of it, in a way that neither of
those other talented authors quite accomplishes for me.
Next
representations tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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