With the release of Harriet, the true biopic of abolitionist and runaway slave, Harriet Tubman, we are once again confronted with Hollywood’s seeming preoccupation with the slave narrative. How many more feature length pics, documentaries and series can we tolerate before calling the card?
This is perhaps an unfair question to pose, and obviously comes from the discomfort of having to confront one’s self in mind of this history. Yet I’m stressed to ask, are we forever to be defined by the legacy of slavery? Can we allow ourselves to ‘move on’?
This of course does not mean forget. We were all outraged when Morgan Freeman put forward that the way to stop racism was to stop talking about it, and whilst I cannot accept the lack of logic in his words, I nonetheless feel their sentiment.
The continual address to racism or slavery not only works to bring awareness to in a positive educational sense, it also works to reinforce and establish that very narrative to a potentially harmful extent.
So much so, that the very word slavery has now, despite being a historical reality for may groups of people, become intimately tied to the black identity.
The preservation of slavery is not under speculation here. Yet how as modern readers are we to sensitively engage with slave narratives when we’ve seen them regurgitated to no end?
I recently read Andrea Levy’s The Long Song and found it incredibly difficult to digest what has now become the caricatures of the slave story. The docile ‘yes massa, no massa’ field hand; the privileged house nigger; the cruel overseer who can’t resist the urge to rape and impregnate black women; his privileged white woman – curious, fearful, and cold to feeling; not as bad as massa, but bad enough.
Like the entrance of violin strings at the beginning of a sad scene, it was both frustrating and disappointing that many of the scenes in the book were deployed to extract obvious reactions.
The opinions of the white Christian Quakers, for example, obviously makes us tut and shake our heads, and we of course see them as no less racist than the cruellest overseer. What such cliché does is strip the text of any sincerity and empathy that the real life experience deserves.
I think there’s an aversion to looking at slavery, however much Hollywood cares to remind us. But on the flipside there is a part of us that can’t seem to let it go.
Beneath the hoopla, I felt we all understood Kanye’s line about slavery being a choice; that in effect of right now we have a choice of what to do with the narrative we’ve been given as black people. That in our minds we are free to choose.
It’s this consideration that provokes me most when confronting the slave narrative. For better or worse, I don’t want my identity defined in totality by this part of our history.
Margin Page.
Margins Page is a play on its very words. Stories of black people in Britain, both past and present, have often been relegated to the margins of the British canon. This platform attempts to reconfigure this position, serving as a page to help develop, curate and promote black British literature.
Got a point of view or a story to share? Get involved by clicking here
marginspage.com 